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NUCLEAR
U.S. Backs China Joining Nuclear Group
Lawmaker: Examine labeling for depleted uranium
Tehran to fulfil nuclear obligations in days: official
Iran sternly warns Israel against attacking its nuclear sites
Iran Warns Israel of Nuke Retaliation
Iran Nuclear Case Moving Toward Solution
Japan nuclear panel to suggest dropping fast breeder reactors
Shikoku reactor set to be 3rd pluthermal plant
North Korea tells US not to waste time at atom talks
Delegates prepare for N Korea nuclear talks
Delicate N.Korea Talks to Start Behind Closed Doors
High-Energy Laser Destroys Large-Caliber Rocket
DOE Bureaucracy Will Fight New Security Plan
GAO: Some U.S. Workers Have Fake Degrees
SRS, others could learn location of new nuke trigger facility soon
Worry over Hanford vapors
Report: Hanford tank data incomplete
Vapor monitoring near Hanford tanks may be inadequate
NRC authorizes nuclear cask testing
MILITARY
UN issues ultimatum to Horn foes
U.S. Training African Forces to Uproot Terrorists
Panama Joins Accord to Stem Ships' Transport of Illicit Arms
Cutting-edge technology vital to the security of small states
Bush's bioterror defence plan could trigger arms race
British Official Says Soldiers May Soon Face Abuse Charges
Blair Newly Rebuked Over Prison Abuses
CACI Worker Did Nothing Wrong, Lawyer Says
Post-War Contractors Ranked
Taiwan appoints admiral new defense minister amid naval build-up
Amnesty report lists 37 'disputed' killings by UK forces
U.K. Soldiers Killed Iraqi Civilians, Amnesty Says (Update3)
Human Shields, Fighting, More Bombs
How to Get Out of Iraq
U.S. Forces Raze Cleric's Office
U.S. Destroys Headquarters of Rebel Cleric in Baghdad
The Marines Enter Falluja, With Peace Their Aim
Israeli link possible in US torture techniques
Palestinians Plan First Municipal Elections for Summer
US to search ships for arms in Panamanian waters
Army boosts prison guard training
Mistreatment Of Detainees Went Beyond Guards' Abuse
Climate at Abu Ghraib distressed former interrogator
Red Cross Found Abuses at Abu Ghraib Last Year
Iraqi abuse follows historic pattern
Chechen Leader's Killing Leaves Putin With Few Options
Secret World of U.S. Interrogation
Focus Shifts From Military Police to Intelligence
Caution and Years of Budget Cuts Are Seen to Limit C.I.A.
Military Spending Raises Questions
The Doctrine of Atrocity
General Cites Command and Training Lapses in Prison Abuse
Pentagon Official Says Asking Army to Help
U.S. to Turn Over Saddam to Iraq by July
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Ex-Official Is Guilty of Misusing Drug Agency's Money and Staff
Rights Groups Demand That US Open All Detention Facilities
Egg industry should not label its product humane, says BBB
Australian soldiers facing dimissal for torturing kittens
The Psychology of Torture
POLITICS
Study Says U.S. Should Reopen Some Web Sites
Thread of Abuse Runs to the Oval Office
News Media Quandary Over Showing Graphic Images of Abuse
The Unconscious Country
What did they know? When did they care?
Bush the torturer must leave office
All Quiet On the House Side
Rumsfeld is the designated fall guy
ENERGY
Nader Letter to Senator Kerry and President Bush concerning energy policy
U.S. Power Grid Expected to Perform Well
OTHER
U.S. Gives Public Lands Away for Pennies
Monsanto Pulls Plan To Commercialize Gene-Altered Wheat
ACTIVISTS
Kidnap crisis poses a new risk
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- china
U.S. Backs China Joining Nuclear Group
May 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-usa-china.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration, after fierce debate, is backing China's membership in an influential group that controls nuclear exports despite Beijing's insistence on providing atomic reactors to Pakistan, a country with a troubling nuclear record.
Washington has sought assurances in recent days from China that power reactors for Pakistan will be subject to international safeguards but so far have not received a satisfactory response, one official told Reuters.
Nevertheless, ``We're supporting their membership,'' a State Department spokesman said.
``They are a significant nuclear supplier, have a good enough non-proliferation record and have made significant improvements in exports controls on nuclear and dual-use items,'' he said. Whether the United States would support China's bid for membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group was heatedly debated. State Department moderates backed the move while hard-liners, including Undersecretary of State John Bolton and the Pentagon, opposed it, officials said.
The decision reflects a broader struggle as Washington tries to balance proliferation concerns with a need to work with Pakistan and China on other problems. Both countries are allies in Washington's ``war on terrorism.''
CONCERNS
The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), established in 1976, controls exports of equipment and materials that can be used to make nuclear weapons.
Guidelines require members to withhold certain nuclear transfers ``when there is an unacceptable risk of diversion to such (nuclear weapons) activity.''
The NSG last year invited China to apply for membership and Beijing did so. Now the group, including France, Britain and Russia, is deciding whether to let the bid be approved by consensus.
China has been the principal supplier of nuclear equipment and services to Pakistan since the late 1970s.
This includes helping Islamabad construct a 300 megawatt nuclear power reactor at Chasma, Pakistan. Last week, China and Pakistan agreed on a second Chinese reactor at Chasma.
Pakistan developed nuclear weapons unencumbered by international arm controls. The father of its program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, ran an international blackmarket that sold nuclear secrets to North Korean, Iran and Libya.
The State Department recently imposed sanctions on 13 companies, including five in China, for trading with Iran, which Washington says has an aggressive nuclear weapons program. Tehran insists its program is peaceful.
HARDER TO COOPERATE
Despite such concerns, some officials said a U.S. decision opposing China's membership would have made it harder for Beijing to cooperate with the administration, which insists U.S.-China ties are better than ever.
``One of the basic concepts of the Nuclear Suppliers Group is that you don't supply reactors to countries that are not members of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty,'' said Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project on Arms Control.
Pakistan refuses to sign the NPT.
``What are the Chinese really giving up if they can supply a proliferant country like Pakistan with nuclear technology? What's the point of having them in the group,'' he said.
But Evan Medeiros of the RAND Corp, said the U.S. decision is ``a well thought through effort to recognize China's real progress (on nuclear issues) and encourage further results in more troublesome areas of proliferation like missile exports,''
Media reports said Pakistan promised the Chinese reactors would be peaceful and the technology would not be transferred to a third party without China's consent.
But a U.S. official said: ``We are still seeking firm assurances on their nuclear deals with Pakistan to insure these reactors will be properly safeguarded and there won't be any risk of diversion.''
``We've approached China about some of our concerns; we're still awaiting a response back,'' he said.
-------- depleted uranium
Lawmaker: Examine labeling for depleted uranium
By Gabriel J. Wasserman
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Poughkeepsie Journal
http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/today/localnews/stories/lo051104s5.shtml
NEW PALTZ -- Ulster County Legislator Susan Zimet, D-New Paltz, wants a team of legislators to study labeling rules for how depleted uranium is transported on the nation's roads.
Zimet's resolution is scheduled for a vote by the county Legislature Thursday. It calls for directing the county's Public Safety Committee and Emergency Management Office to investigate the labeling issue.
When highly radioactive types of uranium are removed for use as nuclear fuel or weapons, depleted uranium is left over. Experts are divided on how harmful this material is to humans.
Zimet said the committee should consider possible dangers posed by a federal transportation exemption for labeling depleted uranium. Emergency responders may be at risk when all they see is a placard that says ''Explosive,'' she said.
A former town supervisor for New Paltz, Zimet joined peace activists last month to protest the use of weapons that could be harming American soldiers. The activists said depleted uranium dust can be inhaled by troops in battle.
-------- iran
Tehran to fulfil nuclear obligations in days: official
TEHRAN (AFP)
May 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040511115803.ye46cbe5.html
Tehran will complete fulfilling its obligations to a suspicious United Nations atomic watchdog within days, Iran's nuclear point-man said Tuesday in an interview with state television.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran has so far met its obligations, and by May 15, almost all the things that were agreed upon will be fulfilled," national security chief Hassan Rowhani said.
Iran must submit a report on its nuclear activities, after signing the additional protocol of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in December, allowing snap inspections to be carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Iran has been frequently accused by the United States that its nuclear program is a cover-up for acquiring nuclear weapons, but has flatly denied the allegations.
Iran's nuclear program must be examined again in June by the IAEA board of governors, which in preceding sessions castigated Iran's shortcomings and hidden activities.
Rowhani repeated Tehran's wish for the IAEA to close the case as soon as possible, while the United States would like it sent to the UN Security Council for possible international sanctions.
"We hope that the report which (IAEA chief Mohammad ElBaradei) present to the IAEA at the June meeting is a fair and accurate one, and that they will reach a fair decision," he said.
"We believe that Iran's nuclear file is heading towards complete resolution," Rowhani added, citing ElBaradei's recent comments that Iran's cooperation "is on the right track."
Iranian officials welcomed the comments, but were less happy about ElBaradei's further statement that "the world will not wait indefinitely."
----
Iran sternly warns Israel against attacking its nuclear sites
TEHRAN (AFP)
May 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040511113740.5tkouu2x.html
Iran Tuesday sternly warned Israel against any military attack on its nuclear sites, in an interview the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Hassan Rowhani, gave to state television.
"Israelis have repeated their threats against the Islamic Republic of Iran for a number of years, but I do not think that they will execute this stupid action," he said.
He was replying to a question about US and Israeli press reports speculating on an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear sites, which the two allies fear are being used to develop atomic weapons.
"Israel knows our reaction, and knows that we would answer with a full hand," he said. "They are aware of our abilities and power, Israel knows that we would not tolerate it, and it will get a very decisive reply."
Israel's air force knocked out an Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981.
The West's concern about Iran's nuclear activities increased last year, when the International Atomic energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors found traces of uranium enriched to a much higher degree than needed for civilian purposes.
At the end of 2003, Tehran agreed to "temporarily and voluntarily" suspend its nuclear enrichment.
The IAEA however, is still waiting for the Islamic Republic to elaborate on the origin of the suspect uranium, which is expected to be a focus of attention at the upcoming IAEA meeting in June.
----
Iran Warns Israel of Nuke Retaliation
May 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Israel.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's top nuclear negotiator warned Israel on Tuesday that his country would retaliate if the Jewish state were to attack Iranian nuclear facilities.
Israel and the United States suspect Iran is secretly building nuclear weapons under cover of a nuclear energy program. In the past, Israel has said it would not allow Iran to build a nuclear bomb.
In 1981, Israeli fighter-bombers destroyed a nuclear reactor that was under construction outside Baghdad because it feared Iraq would acquire a nuclear weapon.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said last month Iran was a threat to Israel, ``maybe the main existential threat.''
In an interview with state television, Iran's chief negotiator on nuclear affairs, Hasan Rowhani, warned that an Israeli attack would have severe consequences.
``Israel knows our hands are well equipped,'' Rowhani said. ``If such an incident happens, it will meet a resolute response from our side.''
Rowhani did not explain what he meant by saying Iran was ``well equipped,'' but Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani said in December that Iran would strike back with long-range missiles if Israel were to attack its nuclear facilities.
Shamkhani said Iran's Shahab-3 missile, which has a range of about 810 miles, would be one of the weapons used. Israel is about 600 miles west of Iran.
Suspicion of Israel and its agents is pervasive in Iran. On Saturday, Iran's armed forces closed the new Imam Khomeini International Airport on its first day of scheduled flights. Citing security concerns, the armed forces spoke of possible links between Israel and a Turkish company that has a contract to operate the airport. The Turkish company rejected the allegation.
Turkey has military links with Israel.
Iran is building its first nuclear reactor, which is expected to come on stream next year. It has been criticized by the International Atomic Energy Agency for failing to disclose certain aspects of its nuclear program. Iran has promised to cooperate fully with IAEA inspectors and insists its program is for peaceful purposes.
--------
Iran Nuclear Case Moving Toward Solution
May 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - International concerns about Iran's nuclear program are close to being resolved due to close cooperation with the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, Iran's top nuclear negotiator said on Tuesday.
``We believe Iran's nuclear file is moving in the direction of being resolved,'' Hassan Rohani, secretary-general of the Supreme National Security Council told state television.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for the peaceful generation of electricity and not, as Washington says, a covert effort to build atomic weapons.
Iran has pledged to give a full account of its nuclear activities ahead of a June meeting of the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
``From our point of view we have cooperated fully on this issue,'' Rohani said. ``We hope (IAEA Chief Mohamed) ElBaradei and the agency provide a fair and exact report for the June meeting and the board of governors reaches a fair and exact decision.''
-------- japan
Japan nuclear panel to suggest dropping fast breeder reactors: report
TOKYO (AFP)
May 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040511054224.ecrkixhy.html
A key Japanese government panel is recommending a major shift in national nuclear energy policy away from developing fast breeder reactors to concentrating on conventional light-water reactors, a news report said Tuesday.
Faced with the deregulation of the power market, the Atomic Energy Commission has decided to reassess the costly fast breeder reactor program, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said without citing sources.
Fast breeder reactors use plutonium extracted from spent uranium fuel and can produce more fissionable material than they consume.
Development of such reactors has been the main thrust of Japan's nuclear power policy for around four decades.
Private power companies, however, have been reluctant to use this type of reactor because of doubts about safety and a lack of certainty about lower costs in future, the Nihon Keizai said.
To ease those fears, the government commission would now promote plutonium-based power generation using conventional light-water reactors, the newspaper said.
The government would continue only basic research for costly fast breeder reactors, it said.
The commission plans to draft a set of proposals by summer 2005 and formally approve the new long-range plan for Japan's nuclear energy development in November next year, the newspaper said.
The Nihon Keizai also said the commission, which comprises academics, energy industry representatives and specialist scientific journalists, would consider building a state-run facility to store spent nuclear fuel over the long term.
Officials providing administrative support for the commission denied the report, however.
"The story was speculation. We regret that. We have made no decision over the long-term direction of Japan's nuclear energy policy," said one official with the Cabinet Office, of which the commission is a part.
"We are in the process of gathering the opinions of experts and the public about the long-term policy plan," he said.
--------
Shikoku reactor set to be 3rd pluthermal plant
The Asahi Shimbun IHT/Asahi:
May 11,2004
http://www.asahi.com/english/nation/TKY200405110152.html
MATSUYAMA-Under plans disclosed Monday, the Ikata No. 3 reactor in Ehime Prefecture is likely to become the third facility in Japan to use pluthermal nuclear-power generation, officials said.
The facility is operated by Shikoku Electric Power Co., which on Monday informed the Ehime prefectural government of its plans to burn MOX nuclear fuel there by fiscal 2010.
Pluthermal power is controversial because it uses plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel, or MOX. Under this method, plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel is burned in reactors originally designed for uranium fuel.
Pluthermal power is key to the nation's nuclear-fuel recycling program.
On Monday, Shikoku Electric Power President Atsushi Onishi submitted a memorandum to Ehime prefectural Governor Moriyuki Kato, seeking approval of the project.
``Please explain your plans to the residents in terms they can understand, and make sure that your safety inspections will be complete,'' Kato responded.
On the same day, Katsumi Ota, vice president of Shikoku Electric Power, conveyed the plan to the municipal government of Ikata.
If both local governments sign off on the plan, the regional utility will seek approval from the central government to change the reactor's specifications, thereby allowing it to burn MOX.
``Our priority is safety, and on that premise we will try to promote residents' understanding for the project,'' Onishi told reporters. ``I hope we will make steady progress.''
Critics warn the pluthermal method carries more health and safety risks to reactors originally designed to burn only uranium fuel.
Shikoku Electric Power's plan follows those of Kansai Electric Power Co. and Kyushu Electric Power Co.
Kansai Electric Power got the green light from the Fukui prefectural governor in March for its plan to burn MOX at its Takahama nuclear power plant. Kyushu Electric Power in late April notified the Saga prefectural government and the town of Genkai that it plans to burn MOX as early as 2009 at one of its reactors there.
Under Shikoku Electric Power's plan, no more than 16 of the 157 uranium-fuel elements in what are called fuel bundles-groups of fuel elements burned in a reactor-will initially be replaced with MOX at the No. 3 reactor in Ikata. The number of MOX elements will eventually be increased to about one-fourth of the bundle, with the maximum set at 40.
The reactor started operation in 1994.
Company officials say they chose the Ikata No. 3 reactor for the pluthermal project because Kansai Electric Power plans to introduce the same type of fuel bundles at its Takahama plant.
-------- korea
North Korea tells US not to waste time at atom talks
REUTERS NORTH KOREA:
May 11, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25065/story.htm
SEOUL - North Korea has told the United States to stop wasting time in the search for an end to a crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons ambitions and to take a "trustworthy step" to move talks forward.
Delegates from the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States are to meet in Beijing on Wednesday for working-level talks on the nuclear standoff.
North Korea wants compensation to give up its nuclear plans, while the United States wants Pyongyang to agree to complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il told Chinese President Hu Jintao last month that Pyongyang was willing to freeze some of its nuclear programmes but would not completely scrap them, a Japanese newspaper said.
That stance is in line with North Korea's existing position and China is concerned it could cause a confrontation at the six-party, working-level talks to start on Wednesday in Beijing on Pyongyang's nuclear programmes, the Yomiuri Shimbun said.
"Success of the six-party talks and progress in the settlement of the nuclear issue will entirely depend on the U.S. attitude," said Rodong Sinmun, the North's main daily newspaper.
"If the U.S. truly stands for a negotiated and diplomatic solution to the issue, it should boldly make a switchover in its stance and take a trustworthy practical action. This is the only shortcut to the settlement of the nuclear issue," it said in an editorial carried by the North's official KCNA news agency.
"Nobody can predict what will happen in the future unless the U.S. changes its present stand and attitude. The U.S. had better bear this in mind and stop wasting time."
North Korea usually cranks up tough rhetoric before nuclear talks. The Rodong Sinmun commentary was followed by a separate statement by KCNA that stressed that North Korea rejected full disaramament but wants rewards for a partial freeze.
"The proposal of reward for freeze should be taken up as the major agenda item at the meeting whatever the cost and only then the meeting would satisfactorily attain its objective," KCNA said in what it described as North Korea's official stand.
"The DPRK is of the view that it would feel no need to sit with the U.S. at the negotiating table if the U.S. persistently insists on its wrong assertion that the DPRK should dismantle its nuclear programme in an irreversible manner," KCNA said. The DPRK stands for the North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
The editorial said the North's nuclear deterrent was not aimed at anyone who did not threaten the communist state.
"The Korean people hate such a tragic fate as the Iraqis' and will never allow anyone to impose it upon them," it said, referring to the U.S.-led war that ousted leader Saddam Hussein.
North Korea agreed to join this week's working level meeting after the reclusive Kim made a rare visit to Beijing in April when he was quoted as telling Chinese leaders that North Korea would be patient, flexible and engaged in six-party talks.
Kim also made it clear that North Korea was seeking a quid pro quo such as energy assistance in exchange for freezing its nuclear development, the Japanese newspaper said.
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials said communist North Korea disclosed it was working on a secret programme to enrich uranium for weapons, in violation of an international agreement.
----
Delegates prepare for N Korea nuclear talks with no sign of gap narrowing
BEIJING (AFP)
May 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040511085555.sy88xpml.html
Negotiators from six countries prepared Tuesday for working-level talks in Beijing on defusing the North Korean nuclear standoff, as Washington and Pyongyang signaled no narrowing of the gap dividing them.
While China called for "reasonable expectations" and moves to strengthen trust, North Korea insisted it be rewarded if it froze its nuclear program, while the United States ruled out any pay-off for such a move.
"We hope that all the parties involved as well as the press will have reasonable expectations for the process of the working group meeting," Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told a regular briefing.
"We hope that the various parties will have an in-depth exchange of views, put forward reasonable solutions so as to promote understanding, enhance trust and reduce doubt," he said.
The US delegation, headed by North Korea envoy Joseph DeTrani, a former CIA officer, was expected to meet Tuesday with counterparts from China, Japan, South Korea and Russia ahead of the formal start of talks the following day.
The inter-agency US delegation, which included representatives from the National Security Council and the Pentagon, had no plans to meet Tuesday with the North Korean delegates, a US embassy official said.
No end date has been set yet for the working group talks, which the Chinese foreign ministry said would be held behind closed doors with no media access.
"As to when the meeting will be concluded, this depends on the opinions of parties concerned...," said Liu. "There has been no pre-set date."
The talks are the first to take place since a second round of high-level six-country meetings ended in Beijing in late February with no visible progress towards solving the 19-month-old issue.
Agreement to hold working group discussions, and to meet for a third round of six-way talks before the end of June, marked the only tangible result of the February meetings.
As the delegations descended on the Chinese capital, North Korea on Monday said the issue of how it should be rewarded for giving up its nuclear program ought to be the top issue in this week's talks.
"Only then the meeting would attain its objective," the state-run North Korean news agency said in a commentary.
It said a US demand for the "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" of North Korea's nuclear programs would "only throw up a hurdle" and could even forestall success in the third round of six-party talks.
The US government, meanwhile, insisted that North Korea abandon its nuclear program without the promise of any immediate quid pro quo.
"We will pursue that objective at the working group talks and the next round of six-party talks expected before the end of June," a US embassy official said.
"It's in North Korea's best interest to embrace the opportunities provided by the six-party talks," the official said.
Liu, the foreign ministry spokesman, Tuesday reiterated that China, along with South Korea and Russia, had agreed to provide North Korea with energy aid "under certain conditions."
--------
Delicate N.Korea Talks to Start Behind Closed Doors
May 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-talks.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - Envoys to six-party negotiations aimed at ending the North Korean nuclear crisis gathered for talks behind closed doors in the Chinese capital on Wednesday but the prospects of any breakthrough appeared slim.
The United States, South Korea and Japan had agreed to discuss energy aid at the talks, which also bring together North Korea, Russia and China, but only if the North pledges to give up its nuclear programs, South Korea's Yonnhap news agency quoted Japanese sources as saying.
Neither North Korea nor the United States, the two protagonists in the standoff, have shown any sign of preparing to budge from their positions during the inaugural working-level talks that are intended to pave the way for higher-level meetings.
North Korea wants compensation to give up its nuclear ambitions, with a deal for a freeze as a first step, while the United States wants Pyongyang to agree to complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement.
Some analysts have said the administration of President Bush has no intention of making compromises before presidential elections in November and North Korea, sensing that, would stick to its guns.
U.S. special envoy Joseph DeTrani consulted with counterparts from South Korea, Japan, China and Russia in Beijing before the talks, which are expected to last for several days, an embassy spokeswoman said.
The six sides were to hold a session from 9.00 a.m. (9 p.m. EDT) and to meet again at 2.00 p.m. (2 a.m. EDT), sources said.
Beijing has given a conservative outlook for the talks, stressing the various parties still differed over what the first step toward the abandonment of the North's nuclear programs should be.
``So we hope all circles, including the media, can maintain reasonable expectations for the working group meeting,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said on Tuesday.
The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials said communist North Korea had disclosed it was working on a secret program to enrich uranium for weapons in violation of an international agreement.
Pyongyang, which denied the disclosure, pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, expelled U.N. inspectors and took a plutonium plant out of mothballs.
-------- missile defense
High-Energy Laser Destroys Large-Caliber Rocket
The existing MTHEL testbed was designed, developed and produced by a Northrop Grumman-led team of U.S. and Israeli contractors for the US Space & Missile Defense Command, Huntsville, Ala., and for ImoD
Redondo Beach
May 11, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/laser-04g.html
As the scope of battlefield threats continues to expand, so does the versatility of a high-energy laser system to defeat them. The U.S. Army's Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser (MTHEL) testbed destroyed a rocket on May 4 that's larger, faster and that flies higher than previous threats destroyed by the laser weapon demonstrator. Northrop Grumman Corporation built the demonstrator for the Army and the Israel Ministry of Defence (IMoD).
Tuesday's successful intercept and destruction of the large-caliber rocket carrying a live warhead took place at 12:45 p.m. MDT during a live-fire test of the MTHEL testbed at the Army's White Sands Missile Range, N.M.
The large-caliber rocket is capable of twice the range, achieves more than three times the altitude, and carries a much larger warhead than previous targets. Many countries already possess large-caliber rockets. The destroyed rocket is representative of threats faced by U.S. and Israeli forces.
"The destruction of a new threat type once again demonstrates the capability of the MTHEL testbed," said Wes Bush, president of Northrop Grumman's Space Technology sector. "We are excited about the historic accomplishments and we are fully prepared to move to the next stage of building the MTHEL prototype."
The rocket shot down is faster and has more mass than Katyusha rockets the MTHEL testbed has destroyed since testing began in 2000.
A more compact, mobile and easily transportable THEL, the MTHEL prototype will give the Army its first deployable laser weapon system. Northrop Grumman began work on the existing testbed in 1996 when it was called the THEL/Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrator (ACTD).
MTHEL will be the first tactical and mobile, directed-energy weapon capable of shooting down rockets and other tactical targets in flight to protect deployed forces and civilians of the U.S. and its friends and allies.
The existing MTHEL testbed was designed, developed and produced by a Northrop Grumman-led team of U.S. and Israeli contractors for the US Space & Missile Defense Command, Huntsville, Ala., and for ImoD. In addition to Northrop Grumman's Space Technology and Mission Systems sectors, US companies involved in testbed development are Ball Aerospace, Boulder, Colo., and Brashear LP, Pittsburgh, Pa. Israeli companies that supported THEL ACTD development are Electro-Optic Industries, Ltd., Rehovat; Israel Aircraft Industries, Ltd., Yehud Industrial Zone; RAFAEL, Haifa; and Tadiran, Holon.
In testing to date, the MTHEL testbed has destroyed 28 Katyusha rockets and five artillery shells in flight.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
DOE Bureaucracy Will Fight New Security Plan
POGO To Testify
MAY 11, 2004
Project On Government Oversight http://www.pogo.org
Danielle Brian or Beth Daley (202)347-1122
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0511-04.htm
WASHINGTON - May 11 - Department of Energy Secretary Abraham will have an uphill battle against the department's bureaucracy on implementing his new visionary plan for improving security in the nation's nuclear weapons complex, POGO will testify today before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
According to Danielle Brian, Executive Director of POGO, who is testifying, "He will need to fight the weapons complex bureaucracy, its contractors, and its handmaiden the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which wants to protect the status quo at all costs. Frankly, the NNSA has repeatedly proven itself eager to place the lab's interests over the nation's security interests. "
A full copy of Ms. Brian's testimony follows. The hearing "DOE Nuclear Security: What Are the Challenges, and What's Next?" will take place in 2322 Rayburn House Office Building at 2:00 p.m. today.
To view the Subcommittee's hearing announcement, go to:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/05112004hearing1267/hearing.htm
POGO investigates, exposes, and seeks to remedy systemic abuses of power, mismanagement, and subservience by the federal government to powerful special interests. Founded in 1981, POGO is a politically-independent, nonprofit watchdog that strives to promote a government that is accountable to the citizenry.
Testimony of Danielle Brian, Executive Director, Project On Government Oversight before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
May 11, 2004
In October, 2001, the Project On Government Oversight (POGO) issued our report, "U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex: Security at Risk." In that report we presented extensive evidence and raised an overall alarm that the Department of Energy (DOE) was not taking security of the nations nuclear weapons facilities seriously. Since beginning our investigation, POGO has worked with over 100 insiders from the nuclear weapons complex, who are concerned at the state of security. During this time, we have been in virtual armed combat with the DOE bureaucracy. In light of the new terrorist threats our nation faces, it is extraordinary how hostile the DOE has been to suggestions that would increase security while significantly reducing costs.
In January 2004 Secretary Abraham, Deputy Secretary McSlarrow and Oversight Director Glenn Podonsky began a dialogue regarding our recommendations for security upgrades. Since then, we have been cautiously optimistic that DOE may be turning the corner. Friday's speech by the Secretary further reassured us. This is the first time a DOE Secretary has recognized and admitted the extent of the change necessary to improve security in the weapons complex.
For example, he announced reevaluating the Design Basis Threat (DBT), the security standards that facilities are required to meet. Increasing the DBT to better reflect the intelligence community's Postulated Threat is essential. This review, along with the April 5, 2004 directive requiring all sites with Improvised Nuclear Device (IND) vulnerabilities to increase their defensive posture to a "denial" strategy, will vastly improve security. An IND is an actual nuclear detonation on site, which can be accomplished within minutes by a terrorist bringing a few additional materials in a rucksack. Recently, former DOE Security Czar General Eugene Habiger stated that such a blast would be comparable to one- twentieth of the size of the Hiroshima detonation. Experts interviewed by POGO believe it would be even more devastating. In the past, the bigger concern had been to thwart the theft of nuclear materials. As a result, it was considered adequate to allow a terrorist to enter the facility but prevent him from being able to leave again. Now, the "denial" requirement means a terrorist must be prevented from entering the facility at all, given the possibility that a suicidal terrorist could detonate an Improvised Nuclear Devise. Concerns about INDs underscore the need to further consolidate Special Nuclear Materials, as a number of sites simply will not be able to meet these higher standards or afford the required upgrades.
Eliminating the burst reactor at Sandia National Laboratory and removing the highly-enriched uranium fuel core will save over $30 million per year in security costs by eliminating the need for extensive physical security. We are disappointed, however, in the timeline for this step. It shouldn't take three years, as this reactor currently is rarely used. For example, in early 2000 when DOE considered moving the reactor from Sandia, its next scheduled mission wasn't until October of 2002, 2 1/2 years later.
In addition, raising the need to blend down 100 tons of HEU is one of the highlights of the Secretary's announcement. It is important to begin looking at step two in the process of improving security in the weapons complex. Step one is to consolidate the materials into fewer and more secure locations. Step two is to blend down the excess HEU and immobilize the excess plutonium so that they no longer present such an attractive target to terrorists.
We are not sanguine that the agenda outlined by Secretary Abraham will become a reality. He will need to fight the weapons complex bureaucracy, its contractors, and its handmaiden the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which wants to protect the status quo at all costs. Frankly, the NNSA has repeatedly proven itself eager to place the lab's interests over the nation's security interests.
Of course the most obvious example of this is Los Alamos National Laboratory's TA-18. In 2000, then- Secretary Bill Richardson ordered the removal of Category I and II Special Nuclear Materials from that site. Since then, the foot-dragging by NNSA and Los Alamos has been award-winning. While POGO was heartened by the April 1 announcement reaffirming the move, our hopes were dampened after meeting with the head of the nuclear weapons complex, Dr. Everet Beckner on April 16. Despite Secretary Abraham's intentions that all Category I and II Special Nuclear Materials be out of TA-18 by 2005, Dr. Beckner informed us that NNSA only intends to move 50% of it. In fact, I would like to submit for the record a document dated April 9 of this year, written by Dr. Beckner. It states, "Beginning in September 2004, NNSA will ship about 50 percent of the entire TA-18 programmatic SNM inventory to the DAF during an 18-month period."
Dr. Beckner also tried to justify the ballooning estimated cost for this move - from $100 million to over $300 million. He told us that this exponential growth was in large part a result of the requirement to produce Authorization Basis documents to move the burst reactors from Los Alamos and to operate the reactors at the Nevada Test Site. He said this paperwork requirement alone would cost $150 million. We checked with the person in the Los Alamos Area Office who is responsible for signing off on such documents: He estimated the cost to be between $1-2 million if done correctly, and as much as $6 million on the outside if it needs to be reworked. An earlier internal email, dated February 23, 2004, actually discusses DOE's intention to keep nuclear materials at TA-18 until 2011, and Los Alamos's proposal to extend the timeline to 2015. I think you get the idea. I believe the bureaucracy knowingly provides completely baseless information to Headquarters as a way of protecting the status quo. According to this email, even the former Director of Los Alamos, John Browne, stated that the lab cannot operate TA-18 "securely beyond 2010." I hope this Committee holds NNSA's feet to the fire until the TA-18 materials are permanently moved to the Nevada Test Site.
The next piece of evidence we can present that NNSA is dragging its feet concerns the building of the Highly-Enriched Uranium(HEU) Materials Facility at Y-12. Some in DOE and the Congress have identified Y-12 as the most serious security concern in the complex. Y-12 stores hundreds of tons of highly-enriched uranium, and is a prime target for terrorists who would want to create an IND within minutes. Given the obsolete infrastructure currently housing the HEU, it should come as no surprise that the Y-12 guard force has been told to cheat in order to pass security performance tests. They simply cannot protect the highly-enriched uranium in the six material access areas given the multiple targets, dilapidated infrastructure, and speed with which terrorists can reach their target.
We were pleased to see the Secretary announcing an expedited schedule for building the new facility, but our worry is - which design? The current contractor operating Y-12, BWXT, inexplicably changed a plan to build a bermed facility covered by earth on three sides and its roof, similar to the Device Assembly Facility at the Nevada Test Site, and is now planning instead to build an above-ground facility. The change in design was approved based on the contractor's estimate that it would both increase security and save money. However, in a March 19, 2004, Inspector General report about Y-12, the IG concluded that the new design for the storage facility will actually decrease security and significantly increase costs. Project costs have skyrocketed, going from an estimated $144 million in 2001 to $253 million in 2004, while security features for the facility have been seriously degraded. All the security experts we have interviewed conclude that a bermed facility would be far more secure. Immediate funding for underground storage at Y-12, and the blending down of the over 100 tons of excess HEU, should be the top priorities of the NNSA budget. Again, this would lead to significant savings in annual security costs, because only one hardened facility would need to be protected, versus the current six aging buildings.
We were pleased to see the Secretary put the de-inventorying of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of its Special Nuclear Materials on the table. We believe these materials pose an unacceptable risk to the surrounding San Francisco Bay area community. The Livermore guard force can not protect the plutonium and highly-enriched uranium the way these materials are protected at other nuclear weapons sites. In light of the facility's vulnerabilities, POGO recommends that all weapons quantities of plutonium and highly-enriched uranium should be de-inventoried from Livermore immediately and sent to the Device Assembly Facility (DAF) at the Nevada Test Site. Any research that requires weapons quantities of SNM can easily be accomplished by flying the Livermore scientists to the DAF, only a one-hour flight away. This move would dramatically increase security while saving about $30 million in annual security costs. We have asked a number of experts on the experiments conducted at Livermore and have concluded that the missions considered critical to Stockpile Stewardship are completely redundant to those being conducted at Los Alamos.
We are concerned, however, that the decision won't be made until early next year. Particularly concerning is that just two weeks ago, before another House Committee, NNSA Administrator Brooks testified a position in direct contradiction to the Secretary's announcement. He stated, "the subcommittee has heard suggestions to eliminate special nuclear material at Lawrence Livermore. In our judgement, that would preclude our carrying out our stockpile stewardship assessments, and that's because while we can move the material someplace else, we can't move the research capabilities and processes that exist at Livermore." We are also already hearing complaints from Livermore that it is necessary for national security to keep the materials at the lab, and that in fact rather than de-inventorying, the lab needs to double the amount of plutonium housed there. This is a sign of things to come. I would suggest that these defenders of the status quo need to balance the value of the science and convenience of the scientists with the homeland security vulnerabilities posed by keeping the plutonium and highly-enriched uranium at the lab. Furthermore, I would suggest that a far more parochial interest is at play. As a former Livermore official suggested, losing the special nuclear materials raises the specter of whether Lawrence Livermore Lab needs to exist as a weapons design laboratory at all anymore. I suspect the Bay area community would be unhappy to hear that the lab is clinging to its plutonium and highly-enriched uranium as an insurance policy to justify its existence.
Still unaddressed are Argonne West and the Idaho National Lab. There is no requirement for these sites to use special nuclear materials to perform their missions. In fact, we have been told that at one of these sites, they spend more money to protect the materials than they do on their programs.
Federalizing the security forces is certainly worth considering, as it would address a number of the problems we have encountered across the complex. In the meantime, the current private security companies employing the security officers around the complex need to do a much better job in keeping their morale up by reducing overtime, increasing training, and providing adequate compensation packages.
We were also pleased to see the Department is finally going to move to a media-less computing system, which will eliminate concerns repeatedly raised by missing hard drives and computer disks.
Finally, the Secretary acknowledged that whistleblowers have been forced outside the system, often suffering retribution for telling the truth, and that there is a need for a change in the management culture. This is the third DOE Secretary I have heard say this. What can we all do to make it happen? Congress needs to pass the whistleblower protection legislation introduced by Rep. Ed Markey as a first step. It is clear that Secretaries with the best intentions can not protect whistleblowers from the wrath of an angry bureaucracy.
POGO is guardedly optimistic that Secretary Abraham and Deputy Secretary McSlarrow are sincerely concerned about the state of security at the nuclear weapons complex. However, these two officials have a limited time in office. The Office of Security and Safety Performance Assurance will be the entity left behind to oversee any improvements. Our concern is that the Office is doing important work, but currently is not given either the necessary independence or power to see this difficult job through. They will have to confront NNSA's insidious efforts to delay, delay, delay any security improvements until they fall off the radar screen. POGO recommended in our 2001 report that the Oversight Office be moved outside the DOE in order to establish real institutional independence. At the very least, Congress needs to formalize its communications with this Office, as it has with the Inspector General.
In the end, it is clear NO change will happen without you, the Congress, providing vigilant oversight. I believe it will be some of the most important work you will do.
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GAO: Some U.S. Workers Have Fake Degrees
May 11, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bogus-Degrees.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- At least 28 high-level federal employees have degrees from bogus colleges or unaccredited schools, only a slice of a problem that ranges from worker quality to national security, congressional investigators say.
The employees with dubious or worthless degrees serve in eight agencies; three are supervisors with security clearances in the office overseeing nuclear weapons safety, the General Accounting Office found.
Some workers were driven by ego to get quick, lofty-sounding degrees; others were duped by schools that choose misleading names and marketing messages to pull in major profits. Either way, diploma mills, which require little if any academic work, are a federal problem, said the report by the investigative arm of Congress.
The GAO review, which covered civil service workers and political appointees, did not name names. But some top officials unwittingly have made news of late when their college degrees came into question.
Two high-ranking Pentagon officials, Charles Abell and Patricia Walker, both list degrees from schools identified as diploma mills. Laura Callahan, deputy chief information officer at the Department of Homeland Security, resigned over a controversy about the doctorate she got from a bogus school.
The names of the 28 senior-level workers have been forwarded to the offices of the inspectors general in their agencies for review, said Robert Cramer, managing director of special investigations at the GAO. It is not clear whether listing a bogus degree is a disciplinary offense, he said, because some jobs don't call for specific degrees, and some workers may not have meant to deceive.
The government has no uniform way to check whether employees' schools or degrees are legitimate, and many employees' education records are incomplete. The matter is complicated because some unaccredited schools are legitimate, while others doctor up fake transcripts and sell degrees for a fee.
Both in terms of wasted tax money and workers with bogus degrees, ``It's a much larger problem than the evidence we have to date shows,'' Cramer said.
An earlier GAO report revealed how easily a degree can be bought from a diploma mill; the one presented Tuesday to the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee showed that the federal government is a customer.
``Clearly, this nationwide problem merits a federal response,'' testified Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., who requested the study with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. ``It is unthinkable that while the government is sending people to jail for other forms of corporate dishonesty, we should allow this practice to fester in our ranks.''
Collins, who chairs the Senate committee, said the damage is vast: workers and employers get deceived; people with real degrees get passed over for promotions; the value of degrees from legitimate but unconventional schools drops; and workers in positions of health and safety stand to be unqualified.
``Do we have people in these jobs who might represent a threat to our national security?'' Collins said.
``Certainly if someone has listed a degree that they have not done the work for and do not have the knowledge -- and they're working in a position where that knowledge might be critical -- I think it would definitely have an impact,'' said Paul DeSaulniers, the special agent who conducted the GAO study.
Three workers with bogus degrees in the review served in emergency operations roles at the National Nuclear Security Administration, part of the Department of Energy. One of those workers paid $5,000 for a master's degree from LaSalle University, an unaccredited school unrelated to La Salle University in Pennsylvania. The worker attended no classes, took no tests and told the GAO his degree was a joke.
Three unaccredited schools investigated -- Pacific Western University, California Coast University and Kennedy-Western University -- reported that 463 current or former students were federal employees. Most of those listed were in the Defense Department. The bill to taxpayers at just two of the schools was $169,471.
Lewis Phelps, a spokesman for Kennedy-Western, said the school is not a diploma mill but rather has qualified faculty and requirements that students show mastery of their work in courses and a final project.
Federal workers are supposed to receive government tuition only toward academic degree training at schools sanctioned by a recognized accrediting body. Some schools go out of their way to get federal money even if they don't offer courses. An undercover GAO investigator found three schools would divide the flat fee they charged by the number of courses a student needed so it appeared a per-course fee was charged.
The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee will hold another hearing on diploma mills Wednesday, as representatives from the Office of Personnel Management and the Education Department explain what they are doing to fix the problem. Changes under way include revised federal job applications and a master list of accredited schools for public review.
On the Net:
General Accounting Office: http://www.gao.gov
-------- south carolina
SRS, others could learn location of new nuke trigger facility soon
(Aiken-AP)
May 11, 2004
http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1856517&nav=0RaPN0nF
The Savannah River Site near Aiken could soon find out soon if it's in line for a $4 billion plant. Linton Brooks with the National Nuclear Security Administration says a report about the nation's nuclear stockpile will be given to Congress within weeks.
Officials delayed locating the plutonium trigger production plant until the agency outlined current and future conditions of the country's nuclear arsenal.
Other sites being considered for the plant are near Amarillo, Texas; the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, both in New Mexico; and the Nevada Test Site.
Brooks says officials must determine how much material they have, before they decided when and where to build a new plant. The plant would build plutonium pits used to detonate nuclear weapons.
-------- washington
Worry over Hanford vapors
State questions whether U.S. agency knows what's emanating from tanks
By LISA STIFFLER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/172787_hanford11.html
Not enough is known about hundreds of chemicals percolating in giant tanks to adequately protect Hanford workers from potentially toxic vapors, according to a state report released yesterday.
That lack of information raises serious questions about whether air-monitoring equipment being used by nuclear-waste cleanup contractors is right for the job, the Department of Ecology found.
As the pace of cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation has stepped up, workers have increasingly complained of being made ill by vapors seeping from underground tanks holding millions of gallons of lethal waste.
Monitoring devices generally have not been able to detect dangerous levels of chemicals, and government officials have maintained that workers are safe.
But the Ecology review found information on the tanks' chemical contents is incomplete and mismanaged, Attorney General Christine Gregoire and Gov. Gary Locke said in a letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
"Due to the lack of understanding of chemical waste constituents, and in some cases the types of monitoring equipment used, the monitoring done for worker protection may not be adequate to detect potential toxic chemical vapor contaminants," the letter said.
"We're vindicated. We feel very good," said Tom Carpenter, Northwest director of the Government Accountability Project, a watchdog group that has documented about 100 chemical-exposure incidents involving workers since January 2002.
"We have a concern about worker safety at Hanford," said Sheryl Hutchison, an Ecology spokeswoman. "Those tanks are pretty wicked to be working around."
Officials with the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the Hanford cleanup, and CH2M Hill, the company responsible for the work, have repeatedly said the contents of the tanks are understood sufficiently and that workers are not at risk.
Citing increased worker concern, the company in recent weeks has been requiring cleanup employees to breathe tank-supplied oxygen.
Previously, workers in the so-called tank "farms" could request respirators, but supervisors would not always give them out.
Ecology officials are requesting that the workers continue to receive supplied air -- delivered through tubes or by tanks akin to what divers use -- until more testing is done to determine worker exposure.
In October, Gregoire asked the Energy Department about allegations of workers sickened by tank farm vapors that were raised by the Government Accountability Project. When the department failed to respond, the Ecology investigation was launched in February.
The state departments of Health and Labor and Industry are continuing investigations into concerns over the mishandling of worker health-care and injury claims.
There are also multiple federal investigations into worker safety under way at the former nuclear bomb-making site.
Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said those investigations, by the department's Inspector General and Office of Oversight, would continue.
"We hope that the attorney general has provided an independent analysis of the tank farms and we will not comment on their report until we have received their information," Davis said.
R. Bryan Kidder, a CH2M Hill spokesman, said company officials had not yet seen the report and could not comment on it.
The 177 tanks, some of which are as large as the Capitol dome in Olympia, hold radioactive and toxic waste generated as a byproduct of plutonium production. The waste is being transferred from leak-prone single-shelled tanks to more stable, double-shelled tanks. Ultimately, it's supposed to be trapped in a hard, glasslike substance.
It's believed that the transferring and stirring up of the waste is causing vapors to be released from the tanks.
Ecology officials have asked the Energy Department to meet and discuss what air sampling is needed to determine what's in the vapors. As a condition of an upcoming permit, Ecology is also requiring the federal agency to figure out ways to control the vapors.
Workers exposed to vapors have complained of metallic tastes and strong odors of ammonia. Some have experienced burning sensations, headaches, recurrent rashes and sore throats.
In recent years, Hanford electrician Tom Young was exposed repeatedly to pungent, ammonia-laced vapors that seeped from the tanks. He suffered nosebleeds and irritated sinuses.
"It's a big Russian Roulette," Young said. "They're gambling our health and our lives."
Young still works at Hanford, but is no longer at the tank farms. He applauded the work of the Ecology investigators and hopes their findings will ensure greater protection for workers. He's also fighting to get his medical costs approved as work-related.
"That's fantastic," he said of the report. "It really is. There are people out there who have integrity."
The Associated Press contributed to this report. P-I reporter Lisa Stiffler can be reached at 206-448-8042 or lisastiffler@seattlepi.com
----
Report: Hanford tank data incomplete
By SHANNON DININNY
Associated Press writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
http://www.casperstartribune.net/articles/2004/05/11/news/regional/a9b0503525190a7b87256e90007e0da8.txt
YAKIMA, Wash. -- Monitoring equipment may not be adequate to detect potential toxic vapors from underground tanks at the Hanford nuclear reservation, in part because information about what the tanks contain is incomplete, according to a state report released Monday.
Federal authorities have been investigating procedures at Hanford's tank farms amid allegations that workers are being endangered to speed cleanup of the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.
Last year, state Attorney General Christine Gregoire launched a probe by several state agencies after a letter she sent to the Energy Department on the matter was not answered.
Based on its review, the state Ecology Department determined that information on the tanks' chemical contents is incomplete. Further, the information is not managed in a way that allows a comprehensive assessment of the tanks' contents, and it lacks recognized quality assurance, Gregoire and Gov. Gary Locke said in a letter to U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.
"Due to the lack of understanding of chemical waste constituents, and in some cases the types of monitoring equipment used, the monitoring done for worker protection may not be adequate to detect potential toxic chemical vapor contaminants," the letter said.
Employees working within the tank farms should be supplied air tanks and other gear to protect against chemical vapor exposure until the Energy Department completes a more thorough review, Ecology Department spokeswoman Sheryl Hutchison said.
Joe Davis, an Energy Department spokesman, said investigations into procedures at the tank farms continue by the department's inspector general and Office of Oversight.
"We hope that the attorney general has provided an independent analysis of the tank farms and we will not comment on their report until we have received their information," Davis said.
For 40 years, the Hanford reservation made plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal. Today, work there centers on a $50 billion to $60 billion cleanup to be finished by 2035 under an accelerated schedule pushed by the Bush administration.
The most deadly waste, about 53 million gallons of radioactive liquid, sludge and other material, sits in 177 underground tanks less than 10 miles from the Columbia River. Plans call for turning much of that waste into glass logs and burying it at a nuclear waste repository.
Experts have identified as many as 1,200 chemicals, including some known cancer-causing agents, in the tanks.
The contractor hired to clean up the tank waste, CH2M Hill, and the Energy Department, which manages the cleanup, have said most of the chemicals are diluted and pose no danger to workers.
More than 800 people work in the tank farms for CH2M Hill. The total work force at Hanford is about 11,000 people.
A spokeswoman for CH2M Hill did not return telephone messages Monday seeking comment.
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Vapor monitoring near Hanford tanks may be inadequate
Tuesday, May 11th, 2004
By Annette Cary
Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5059636p-4987437c.html
Monitoring around Hanford's tanks of highly radioactive wastes may be inadequate to protect workers from potentially toxic chemicals released from the tanks, a state investigation concluded.
Too little is known about what chemicals are in the vapors, and monitoring equipment may be inadequate for some chemicals, according to a letter sent Friday to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. It was signed by Washington Gov. Gary Locke and Attorney General Christine Gregoire.
"Data regarding chemical constituents and vapors within the tanks is incomplete, the data is not managed in a manner that allows a comprehensive assessment of the waste composition and the data lacks recognized quality assurance," the letter said.
The state started an investigation in response to a report released by the Government Accountability Project, or GAP. It showed a significant increase in the number of workers at Hanford reporting exposure to vapors from the tanks as work has progressed to empty nearly all liquid wastes from the tanks.
The massive underground tanks holding wastes from the past production of plutonium at Hanford vent vapors through filters to the atmosphere.
Some workers have reported nosebleeds, sore throats, dizziness and increased heart rates after breathing different mixes of up to 1,200 chemicals in the tanks, according to the watchdog group GAP.
?The attorney general?s review proves what we have been saying: Hanford officials do not know what is in the tank vapors that workers have been breathing,? Tom Carpenter, a GAP attorney, said in a statement. ?They have only assumed that there is no health hazard.?
The state is recommending that workers in the fields, or "farms," where the tanks are buried wear scuba-style, supplied-air systems until more is known. DOE also is investigating.
The state is recommending a thorough analysis by trained industrial hygienists or toxicologists to understand worker exposure issues, said Sheryl Hutchison, spokeswoman for the state Department of Ecology.
CH2M Hill Hanford Group, which operates the tank farm for DOE, began temporarily requiring workers in the older, single-shell tank farms to wear the supplied-air equipment in April. Earlier, it had banned the use of supplied air systems, saying they limited workers' vision and made them more likely to trip.
DOE also should require that data used to analyze chemical vapors is managed better, according to the state. "It's not apples to apples," making it difficult to use to assess worker risk, Hutchison said.
Workplace monitoring and characterization of chemicals in the tanks is based on chemical data that is "sparse or incomplete and of questionable accuracy," said a report accompanying the letter. The report was prepared by the state Department of Ecology.
Data is stored in numerous unconnected databases by various contractor organizations, making a comprehensive assessment of the composition of tank waste difficult, the report said.
A central database is available to contractors, but the data is minimal, lacks adequate quality assurance and is limited to a handful of the chemicals that may be present in the tanks, the report found.
Insufficient data exists regarding the gases trapped within the tank wastes to identify what potentially toxic chemicals might be in the data, according to the report. The state also could not determine whether enough was known about how vapors might disperse when wastes are disturbed as tanks are emptied.
The report was critical of monitoring that measured the total amount of organic vapors from the tanks without determining specific types. Some Hanford tanks may contain organic compounds that are toxic at very low levels, the report concluded.
CH2M Hill has maintained that workers may have had unpleasant symptoms, particularly from ammonia in the vapors, but have not had permanent damage to their health.
Work is stopped in the tank farms when chemicals are detected at levels far below allowable industrial standards, according to CH2M Hill.
Company officials had not seen the letter and report Monday and could not comment, said spokesman Bryan Kidder. DOE's Office of River Protection also had not received the report Monday, said spokesman Eric Olds.
In addition to the Department of Ecology's assessment of chemical vapors, the Washington State Department of Health looked at whether the vapors included radioactive particles from the tanks. It concluded that none of the radiation exposures at the tank farms in 2002 and 2003 were due to vapors.
Twenty-one workers were contaminated with radiation from the tanks. The maximum dose to a worker was 188 millirems to the skin and 28 millirems internally. DOE has a standard of 5,000 millirems per year for workers.
-------- us nuc waste
NRC authorizes nuclear cask testing
State representatives say test plan falls short By STEVE TETREAULT STEPHENS WASHINGTON BUREAU Tuesday, May 11, 2004 Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/May-11-Tue-2004/news/23855885.html
WASHINGTON -- Seeking to boost public confidence in radioactive waste handling, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has authorized new safety testing of a full-sized cask designed to carry spent nuclear fuel to Yucca Mountain.
Agency officials said putting a 150-ton shipping container through a 75 mph crash and a "fully engulfing" fire will confirm their safety requirements for nuclear waste casks that are largely based on scale model testing and computer calculations.
A disaster demonstration involving an 18-foot-long cask might also build public acceptance of a government campaign to transport 77,000 tons of nuclear waste and spent fuel to the proposed Nevada repository, they said.
But the NRC's action, signed by the agency's three commissioners and disclosed in a May 5 staff memo, got a thumbs down from Nevada representatives on Monday. They said the planned testing falls short of what is necessary to measure cask safety.
"The staff requirements memo is completely unacceptable," said Robert Halstead, a Wisconsin-based transportation authority and Nevada nuclear waste consultant.
The tests will highlight an important element of the Yucca Mountain Project. Government and industry officials say the safety of a 24-year Yucca shipping campaign will depend in large part on the durability of the steel casks that will shield highly radioactive fuel assemblies.
Nevada officials had lobbied heavily to get the nuclear safety agency to order more comprehensive tests.
The state advocated full-scale testing of several truck cask designs, as well as casks that will be carried by railroad to a Yucca repository. Officials also pushed for rigorous stress testing to determine a cask's breaking point.
Nuclear Regulatory Com- mission staff rejected the idea of "testing to failure," saying there are no realistic accident scenarios that could cause a cask to rupture or leak.
Halstead said state officials may ask Congress to intervene, saying taxpayers will be shortchanged by testing that will not yield the most useful information. He estimated the cask testing will cost between $35 million and $40 million.
A full-size rail cask could cost the government between $1 million and $3 million, industry officials have said.
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., is drafting a bill that would require the NRC to conduct physical tests on full-scale versions of all designs for casks that would carry nuclear waste to the state by truck and by railroad, aides said Monday, and each design would be required to be tested to determine its failure point.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
UN issues ultimatum to Horn foes
The UN has a tough job on the border
Tuesday, 11 May, 2004,
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3703175.stm
The head of the United Nations force for Ethiopia and Eritrea has challenged both countries to state whether or not they want the force to remain
The ultimatum follows accusations from Eritrea that the UN force was harbouring criminals and endangering the security of the region.
The UN force (Unmee) patrols a 1,000km border between the two countries.
They fought a war between 1998 and 2000 that is thought to have killed more than 70,000 people.
Defacing currency
Major General Robert Gordon said genuine concern was now being expressed about Unmee's viability, given the lack of progress on demarcating the border, and diminishing consent for the mission's operations.
According to an Unmee spokesman, the Eritrean delegation did then express support for the UN mission, albeit rather grudgingly, and said it hadn't intended to harm its work.
The Ethiopian delegation said the UN's mandate was clear and necessary and praised the UN staff for remaining calm and tolerant in what the delegation leader called a tense political environment.
The latest meeting between the two countries and the UN commander, took place in an atmosphere of heightened tension, after a week of bad-tempered exchanges between the peacekeepers and the Eritrean government.
Unmee complained that Eritrea was restricting its movement and harassing and detaining its local staff; the Eritrean government accused members of the UN force of paedophilia, harbouring criminals, using the Eritrean currency as toilet paper and endangering the security of the region. The UN said it was shocked by the accusations.
The peace process has stalled since 2002, when Ethiopia rejected an international boundary commission ruling, demarcating their border.
This had awarded Badme, the symbolic town where the war started, to Eritrea.
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U.S. Training African Forces to Uproot Terrorists
May 11, 2004
New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/international/africa/11AFRI.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
STUTTGART, Germany - The American campaign against terrorism is opening a new front in a region that military officials fear could become the next base for Al Qaeda - the largely ungoverned swath of territory stretching from the Horn of Africa to the Western Sahara's Atlantic coast.
Generals here at the United States European Command, which oversees the area, say the vast, arid region is a new Afghanistan, with well-financed bands of Islamic militants recruiting, training and arming themselves. Terrorist attacks like the one on March 11 in Madrid that killed 191 people seem to have a North African link, investigators say, and may presage others in Europe.
Having learned from missteps in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American officers are pursuing this battle with a new approach. Instead of planning on a heavy American military presence, they are dispatching Special Operations forces to countries like Mali and Mauritania in West Africa to train soldiers and outfit them with pickup trucks, radios and global-positioning equipment.
"We want to be preventative, so that we don't have to put boots on the ground here in North Africa as we did in Afghanistan," said the European Command's chief of counter-terrorism, Lt. Col. Powl Smith, adding that by assisting local governments to do the fighting themselves, "we don't become a lightning rod for popular anger that radicals can capitalize on."
American military officials say that Qaeda-linked militants, pushed out of Afghanistan and blocked by increased surveillance of traditional points of entry along the Mediterranean coast, are turning to overland travel in order to make contact with North African Islamic terror groups.
The officials cite the case of Emad Abdelwahid Ahmed Alwan, also known as Abu Mohamed, a Qaeda militant who traveled across Africa in 2002 to help plan attacks.
Mr. Alwan, a Yemeni and a close associate of Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was linked to the October 2000 attack on the American warship Cole. He is believed to have been helping to plan an attack on the United States Embassy in Mali's capital, Bamako, before he was killed in late 2002 during a raid by Algerian forces in Algeria's northeastern Batna Province.
Mr. Alwan's appearance in the region rattled the American military and added impetus to a strategy that had been taking shape since the Sept. 11 attacks. The United States is working with the countries of the so-called Sahel, the impoverished southern fringe of the Sahara, to shore up border controls and deny sanctuary to suspected terrorists.
The program, called the Pan-Sahel Initiative, was begun with $7 million and focused on Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Chad. It is being expanded to include Senegal and possibly other countries. The European Command has asked for $125 million for the region over five years.
An added catalyst to the program was the kidnapping of Western tourists in the desert of southeastern Algerian early last year. A terrorist leader named Ammari Saifi, also known as Abderrezak al-Para because he was trained as an Algerian Special Forces paratrooper, took 32 European tourists hostage near the Libyan border and transported some of them to northern Mali.
To free the hostages, United States military officials say, Germany paid him a ransom of nearly $6 million - equivalent to a quarter of Niger's defense budget - making him instantly one of the most powerful Islamic militants in North Africa.
He is a leader of the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, or G.S.P.C., which was formed in 1998 and has many links with Al Qaeda.
Earlier this year, Mr. Saifi went on a shopping spree in northern Mali, gathering weapons, vehicles and recruits while American and Algerian intelligence monitored him with growing alarm. In February, Algerian forces intercepted a convoy carrying weapons north from Mali. Algerian officials say the cargo contained mortar launchers, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and surface-to-air missiles.
The United States European Command sent a Navy P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft to sweep the area, relaying Mr. Saifi's position to forces in the region. Mali pushed him out of the country to Niger, which in turn chased him into Chad, where, with United States Special Forces support of an airlift of fuel and other supplies, 43 of his men were killed or captured. Mr. Saifi himself got away, American officials say. With his money and experience and broader network, G.S.P.C. remains the most dangerous group in North Africa, they say.
In the wake of the G.S.P.C. hunt, military chiefs from nine African nations were brought to European Command headquarters in Stuttgart last month. Several of the generals, like the military chiefs of neighboring Mali and Niger, had never met one another before. Others, like the military chiefs of Morocco and Algeria, were more accustomed to competing than cooperating.
All the countries expressed anxiety about the growing threat of Islamic militancy within their borders.
Government officials in Burkina Faso have complained to American officials about "bearded ones" showing up in remote areas preaching the salafist, or fundamentalist, strain of Islam that inspires the world's Islamic militants. The foreign imams distribute cassette tapes and have greater wealth than the local imams with whom they are competing.
"These are not local extremists," one American official said. "These are people from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, who are essentially Islamic missionaries preaching a form of Islam that is very, very different from what these countries want or grew up with."
United States military officials say part of the problem is that Islamists in the region are in touch with one another while the governments of the countries they are in, are not. Mali and Mauritania, for example, do not have the means to talk to each other from their garrisons, which in some cases are only a couple hundred miles apart. "If they see something, they don't have an easy way to pass it on to their counterparts," the official said.
General Charles F. Wald, deputy commander of the European Command, said global-positioning equipment was allowing militants to create virtual garrisons in the sand.
"It's in a form of, maybe, buried weapons in the desert someplace and knowing because of your G.P.S. capability where that might be," he said. "It's knowing, in their case, one of the main logistical needs is water, where the wells are, for example. It's knowing where you can buy fuel."
General Wald said the European Command's next major Special Operations exercises would be held in North Africa with several countries taking part "on a mulitlateral basis, which is an historic thing to do."
-------- arms
Panama Joins Accord to Stem Ships' Transport of Illicit Arms
May 11, 2004
By JUDITH MILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/international/americas/11ship.html
In a major expansion of the American-led international effort to stop the spread of unconventional weapons, Panama has agreed to permit the United States to board and search its flagships on the open seas if they are suspected of transporting nuclear, chemical or biological arms or equipment, administration officials said Monday.
The officials said that the addition later this week of Panama, the world's leading shipping registry, and of Liberia in February, to the Proliferation Security Initiative would subject nearly 15 percent of the world's roughly 50,000 large cargo ships to being boarded and inspected on short notice.
The cargo ships carry roughly 30 percent of the world's commercial shipping tonnage, officials said. The initiative is a loose affiliation of countries organized by the United States to intercept unconventional weapons.
One senior administration official called Panama's decision to join the initiative a "significant expansion" of the American-sponsored effort to stop illicit trafficking in nuclear, chemical and biological arms and related equipment and materials through such interdictions.
"With Panama, we now have the world's largest, and with Liberia, the second largest shipper signed on to this effort," said the official, who monitors nonproliferation closely.
Officials said Panama's minister of government and justice, Arnulfo Escalona, and John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state for arms control and international security, would sign the pact on Wednesday.
The inclusion of Panama in the interdiction effort is the latest example of what has been a rapid, but quiet expansion of the initiative President Bush unveiled almost a year ago in a speech in Krakow, Poland. In his speech, Mr. Bush said the United States and 10 allies had begun working on new agreements to seize illegal weapons and to search planes and ships carrying suspicious cargo.
Since then, more than 60 nations have expressed support for the initiative. About nine joint exercises involving the boarding of planes and ships have been held throughout the world, and the scope of the initiative has been broadened. At the fifth meeting of adherents in Lisbon in March, Canada, Norway and Singapore joined the effort as members of the initiative's core group. Participants also agreed to involve their national military and intelligence services and law enforcement agencies in efforts to "shut down proliferation facilitators and bring them to justice."
Officials said representatives of the Treasury and Justice Departments met last week with interagency counterparts to talk about how to expand cooperation.
They also said Russia was interested in joining the core group.
Mr. Bush has made the initiative a linchpin of his multilateral efforts to stop illicit trafficking in unconventional weapons. The seizure in October of the cargo of a German-owned ship, the BBC China, which was carrying centrifuge components to Libya, has been the initiative's biggest single success to date. But officials said that chemicals bound for North Korea were also seized last August by Taiwan and that there had been roughly a dozen such interdictions. Most of them have not been made public to safeguard the identity of those who provided information about suspicious cargo or the way in which such information was collected, officials said.
Under the agreement initialed by Panama on April 15, an amendment to a maritime cooperation agreement aimed mainly at drug interdiction, Panama and the United States can ask each other to board their respective flagships outside their own territorial waters and seize the cargo if it turns out to be related to unconventional weapons programs. Both parties would have two hours to respond to such requests. The government that makes the request must present information supporting its suspicions if asked to do so. If there is no response, the interdiction may proceed, said one official who has monitored the agreement.
Officials said that although the agreement between the United States and Panama was bilateral, other nations would be able to "piggyback" on it.
"With these agreements with Panama and Liberia and the support of more than 60 other nations, the U.S. will have the ability to seek rapid consent to board ships that represent roughly 46 percent of the world's commercial fleet in dead-weight tons," one official said. "This is a big step forward."
Liberia has some 2,000 large cargo ships, that is, ships of over 500 dead-weight tons, registered under its flag, administration officials said. Panama has some 5,600. "That means that the sun never sets on their ships," one administration official said.
-------- asia
Cutting-edge technology vital to the security of small states: Singapore
SINGAPORE (AFP)
May 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040511062005.c8ct3rzd.html
Tiny nations need to follow the Singapore model and invest "disproportionate" resources into cutting-edge defence technology to counter increasingly sophisticated external threats, a senior government official urged Tuesday.
Technological advances have changed the nature of warfare and most importantly, increased the capabilities of non-state enemies such as terrorists, Defence Science and Technology Agency chief executive Richard Lim said.
"The reach, precision and lethality of modern weapon systems enabled by modern technology have greatly increased the area of influence of combat operations," Lim said in an opening address to a two-day defence technology conference.
"At the same time, the proliferation of modern technologies has enabled non-state actors to acquire the capabilities to wreak catastrophic damage in acts of global terrorism.
"Armed forces equipped to fight conventional wars will now have to deal with asymmetric threats from small but nimble and dangerous players."
Developing a technologically superior defence system will require vast amounts of resources but Lim urged tiny nations not to ignore this aspect of national security.
"Unfortunately small countries with limited resources do not have the means to undertake the full range of technological exploitation to meet their defence and security needs, Lim said.
"But these very same nations with their limited geography and small populations must nevertheless invest disproportionately in defence technology if they wish to secure an adequate level security."
Citing Singapore as an example, Lim said the tiny city-state overcame a lack of resources in many areas such as manpower by putting heavy emphasis on developing defence systems engineering expertise to address its specific security needs.
Additionally, the government also works closely with other countries and non-government agencies to strengthen the city-state's defence technology system, Lim said.
"Our experiences over the years have proved that the operational capabiity of the armed forces must be built upon a foundation of a sound technological base," he said.
"In the war against terrorism and the fight against SARS, the defence technology community demonstrated our capabilities in harnessing science and technology to provide innovative and effective solutions.
"This has enabled Singapore to be better defended, safer and more secure."
The Defence Science and Technology Agency is the Singapore government's national authority on the industry. Singapore is a tiny but prosperous Southeast Asian city-state with a population of just over four million people.
-------- biological weapons
Bush's bioterror defence plan could trigger arms race
By Scott Shane,
May 11, 2004
Gulf News
http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/World2.asp?ArticleID=119679
Washington: As President George W. Bush issued a sweeping order to boost the nation's defences against bioterrorism, arms control advocates charged that research planned for a new Department of Homeland Security laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland would violate the international ban on biological weapons and could touch off a global biological arms race.
The research plan for the $200 million National Biodefence Analysis and Countermeasures Centre (NBACC) includes laboratory studies of genetically engineered germs and methods to disseminate them as an aerosol spray, according to a February presentation by Lt. Col. George Korch, centre's deputy director.
Such work previously has not been conducted at the army's biodefence research centre, partly to avoid any hint of treaty violations.
"If any other country presented this list of tasks, US intelligence would say it's an offensive programme," said Milton Leitenberg, a University of Maryland scholar who has studied biowarfare for more than 30 years. Such programmes are prohibited by the international Biological Weapons Convention, which the US ratified in 1975.
Leitenberg and other critics say there is always a chance newly engineered pathogens could escape from the lab, noting that China is currently trying to contain a SARS outbreak set off by an infected lab worker. They add there would be no way to ensure that a disgruntled worker might not use high-tech germs or techniques developed at the lab to launch an attack.
Homeland Security spokeswoman Michelle Petrovich said everything proposed by NBACC is strictly defensive. The centre will study bioforensics, the emerging science of tracing a germ weapon back to its source, and will build a database on all possible biological weapons threats, she said.
But to be able to counter all biological threats, Petrovich said, the centre must explore how bioterrorists might use genetic engineering to make viruses or bacteria more deadly or contagious. Only then can Homeland Security scientists develop new vaccines, drugs or other measures to avert a potential biological catastrophe.
"The mission is actually to identify threats so we can defend against them and protect the American people," she said.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist at the State University of New York who heads a bioweapons study group for the Federation of American Scientists, said she did not find such assurances persuasive.
"It sounds like they're poised for multiple challenges to the Biological Weapons Convention that could provoke a biological arms race, and for activities that could endanger public health," Rosenberg said, after reviewing Korch's 34-slide presentation.
The research proposed by Homeland Security is just one piece of a huge federal biodefence programme costing roughly $6 billion this year.
On Wednesday, Bush administration officials unveiled Homeland Security Presidential Directive 10, which states the president's view that biological weapons "could cause catastrophic harm" and instructs government agencies to improve defences.
-------- britain
LONDON
British Official Says Soldiers May Soon Face Abuse Charges
May 11, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/international/europe/11BRIT.html
LONDON, May 10 - Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon told Parliament on Monday that the British military had acted swiftly to investigate allegations of mistreatment by its forces in Iraq and that it was close to bringing charges of brutality against British soldiers in two cases.
Mr. Hoon also revealed that in response to complaints raised last summer by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the British Army in September stopped its practice of putting hoods on Iraqi prisoners.
When one lawmaker pointed out that the British Army had forsworn the use of hoods for years and then asked, "When did the policy change?" Mr. Hoon replied, "The policy did not change and it was stopped."
Mr. Hoon spoke the day after Prime Minister Tony Blair issued the first British apology to any Iraqis who suffered mistreatment or degradation during the yearlong military campaign in Iraq. For the first time, Mr. Hoon officially challenged the authenticity of a series of sensational photographs that appeared to show a hooded Iraqi prisoner in the back of a truck being beaten with rifle butts and urinated on. The photos appeared in a tabloid newspaper, The Daily Mirror, on May 1.
The special investigations branch of the Royal Military Police has concluded that "there are strong indications that the vehicle in which the photographs were taken was not in Iraq during the relevant period," Mr. Hoon told the House of Commons.
The editors of The Daily Mirror immediately issued a lengthy statement defending their decision to publish the photos, and pointed out that Mr. Hoon had not denied that such an incident had occurred.
Amnesty International also issued a report on Monday that said that British soldiers had fired on and killed civilians in Iraq, even in cases where there was no serious threat.
Speaking of the 33 criminal cases of civilian deaths in Iraq that have been opened, 12 of which are still continuing, Mr. Hoon said, "I can confirm today that 2 cases have reached an advanced stage with decisions on prosecutions pending." One such case, according to British officials, is said to involve the beating death in September of Bahar Musa, a clerk at the Basra Hotel, who was reported to have been brutalized during an all-night interrogation session by soldiers in the Queen's Lancashire Regiment.
As Mr. Blair and senior members of his government were engaged in another day of damage control in the unfolding political crisis over prisoner abuse in Iraq, senior figures in Parliament questioned why reports that laid out the full scope of brutality that was occurring in the American zone were kept secret by British officials.
With the publication on Monday by The Wall Street Journal of a Red Cross report from February on abuses that were occurring in American- and British-run prisons, British lawmakers demanded to know why the report was withheld for so long and why senior ministers, including Mr. Blair, were not informed of its contents.
Mr. Hoon said that by the time the Red Cross report arrived in London in February, British military commanders were aware of its central concerns about British military conduct and had already moved to remedy those concerns with policy changes or through criminal investigations, which were under way.
"It is fair to say," Mr. Hoon said, that the Red Cross was "generally satisfied with our approach," he added.
Still, Nicholas Soames, the Conservative spokesman on defense matters, said the Red Cross report demonstrated that "this government has lost its grip on its policy in Iraq."
At least four members of Parliament demanded to know why British military officials had not expressed their opposition to American military commanders after learning from the Red Cross of the rampant abuse of prisoners that had been discovered in the Abu Ghraib prison, just west of Baghdad.
Robin Cook, the former foreign secretary, wanted to know "what concerns were expressed to the United States" about whether British commanders could accept acts of brutality by another member of the coalition.
Mr. Hoon steadfastly refused to answer any question that could be construed as criticism of the conduct of American forces.
--------
Blair Newly Rebuked Over Prison Abuses
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13792-2004May10.html
LONDON, May, 10 -- Prime Minister Tony Blair faced a new wave of criticism Monday from opposition and anti-war politicians after conceding that he and members of his cabinet had not seen a Red Cross report earlier in the year on abuses of Iraqi prisoners that included allegations of misconduct by British forces. Speaking at a hostile session of the House of Commons, Defense Secretary Geoffrey Hoon insisted that all accusations against British troops were being thoroughly investigated. He said the three specific allegations in the report from the International Committee of the Red Cross had been dealt with months ago and that military officials had seen no reason to pass them on to him or the prime minister.
Hoon then took the offensive by challenging the authenticity of photographs published 10 days ago in the Daily Mirror that purportedly showed an Iraqi prisoner being abused. He said that the truck model depicted in the photos had not been used in Iraq and later demanded in a television interview that the newspaper explain "why it is they have perpetrated this hoax." The Mirror issued a statement standing by its story.
Hoon's defense did not placate lawmakers, including some from Blair's ruling Labor Party, who said the issue had moved well beyond the newspaper's allegations. They said government officials should have acted sooner in dealing with charges of mistreatment and should have raised with American officials allegations made in the report about torture and abuse by U.S. troops.
Nicholas Soames, the opposition Conservative Party's defense spokesman, accused Hoon of "a persistent and willful failure to give straight answers" and said the government had "lost its grip on its policy in Iraq."
Other lawmakers called for the resignation of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, arguing that American misconduct had reflected badly on Britain and jeopardized the lives of British forces in Iraq.
The sentiments reflected the findings in an opinion poll in the Independent newspaper reporting that 55 percent of those surveyed want Britain's 7,500 troops pulled out of Iraq by June 30, when sovereignty is scheduled to be returned to Iraqis. In previous polls, a narrow majority had favored keeping troops in the country.
In a Sunday night television interview, Blair again apologized to Iraqi prisoners who had been mistreated by British soldiers, calling such abuse "absolutely and totally unacceptable." Still, the allegations dogged him on Monday at several events where he had hoped to turn public attention to other issues.
At a morning launch of Labor's campaign for European Parliament elections next month and again at a news conference with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China, Blair faced a barrage of questions about when he first learned of the Red Cross report and why a minister had told Parliament last week that no such report had crossed his desk.
In both places, Blair pleaded for time to investigate all of the allegations of abuse. "I utterly deplore it, but I think we should wait until we have the facts," he said.
Blair has been President Bush's strongest ally in the Iraqi campaign and has paid a heavy price politically, with another recent poll suggesting Labor would be more popular if the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, took over as prime minister. In recent days, political allies such as filmmaker David Puttnam, a member of the House of Lords, and Neil Kinnock, a former Labor Party leader, have speculated openly about Blair's future.
The Red Cross report, which focused mostly on accusations against American troops, raised three allegations concerning British forces, according to Hoon, including a charge that British soldiers caused the death last September of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi detainee, and that troops routinely placed hoods over prisoners' heads in violation of British military regulations.
Hoon told Parliament that Mousa's death was among 33 cases under investigation, two of which have been handed to prosecutors for possible action. He said the hooding of prisoners had been stopped last September.
But critics focused on the government's continued support for the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Edward Leigh, a senior Conservative Party legislator, said the government had been warned repeatedly that invading Iraq "would make things worse rather than better" and needed to find a way out of the morass.
Blair's supporters seemed dispirited and silent. Even Ann Clywd, whom Blair had appointed as a special human rights monitor on Iraq and who has vociferously defended the invasion, complained that officials had not informed her of the Red Cross report.
A new Amnesty International report cited a number of cases in which British soldiers had opened fire and killed Iraqi civilians even though there was no apparent imminent threat. The report cited 12 cases, including one involving an 8-year-old girl. Officials said they were studying the report.
-------- business
CACI Worker Did Nothing Wrong, Lawyer Says
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15899-2004May10.html
A lawyer representing Steven A. Stefanowicz, an interrogator with CACI International Inc. implicated in an Army report on abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, yesterday denied that his client did anything wrong. "Any meaningful review of the facts will inevitably lead to the conclusion that Mr. Stefanowicz's conduct was both appropriate and authorized," said Henry E. Hockeimer Jr., a partner at Hangley Aronchick Segal & Pudlin in Philadelphia.
Hockeimer declined to elaborate on the status of investigations into Stefanowicz's behavior. An internal Army report said Stefanowicz instructed military personnel to aid interrogators by "setting conditions" and that he "clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse." He is also accused of making false statements to investigators and was named in the report as one of four men who were found to be "either directly or indirectly" responsible for abuses at the prison.
Stefanowicz, 34, enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve in February 1998, according to records from the Navy. He served in Muscat, Oman, for most of 2002, and his rank is listed as intelligence specialist 3rd class. Stefanowicz, who received a number of military awards, including a medal for meritorious service, left his last post, at Willow Grove, Pa., last September.
Arlington-based CACI has declined to confirm Stefanowicz's identity or discuss his employment. CACI has a one-year contract, expiring this August, to provide interrogators at Abu Ghraib, J.P. "Jack" London, CACI's chairman and chief executive, said in an interview yesterday.
London reiterated that none of the company's employees have been removed from their duties and that CACI has not been informed by the government of any charges against its employees. CACI has 27 interrogators stationed throughout Iraq, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command said.
----
Post-War Contractors Ranked by Total Contract Value in Iraq and Afghanistan
May 11, 2004
Center for Public Integrity
http://www.publicintegrity.org/wow/resources.aspx?act=total
From 2002 through March 31, 2004
Archived version of ranking available
Contractor Contract Total
Kellogg, Brown & Root (Halliburton) $3,967,866,240
Bechtel Group Inc. $2,829,833,859
Parsons Corp. $880,000,000
International American Products Inc. $528,421,252
Perini Corporation $525,000,000
Contrack International Inc. $500,000,000
Fluor Corp. $500,000,000
Washington Group International $500,000,000
Research Triangle Institute $466,070,508
BearingPoint Inc. $304,262,668
Louis Berger Group $300,000,000
Creative Associates International Inc. $217,139,368
Chemonics International Inc. $167,759,000
Readiness Management Support LC (Johnson Controls Inc.) $111,964,161
DynCorp (Computer Sciences Corp.) $93,689,421
EOD Technology Inc. $71,900,000
Tetra Tech Inc. $66,947,671
USA Environmental Inc. $66,947,671
Development Alternatives Inc. $49,117,857
Vinnell Corporation (Northrop Grumman) $48,074,442
Abt Associates Inc. $43,818,278
International Resources Group $37,230,000
Management Systems International $29,816,328
SkyLink Air and Logistic Support (USA) Inc. $27,200,000
Science Applications International Corp. $23,486,298
Ronco Consulting Corporation $22,458,290
World Fuel Services Corp. $19,762,792
Stevedoring Services of America $14,318,895
Raytheon Aerospace LLC $7,382,194
Liberty Shipping Group Ltd. $7,300,000
TECO Ocean Shipping Co. $7,200,000
University of Nebraska at Omaha $7,072,468
PAE Government Services Inc. $7,007,158
General Electric Company $6,801,493
Anteon International Corporation $6,800,000
American President Lines Ltd. $5,000,000
Ocean Bulkships Inc. $5,000,000
United Defense Industries, L.P. $4,500,000
Sealift Inc. $4,000,000
Zapata Engineering $3,838,958
Diplomat Freight Services Inc. $2,604,276
Social Impact Inc. $1,875,000
Global Container Lines Ltd. $1,850,000
Camp Dresser & McKee Inc. $1,700,000
J & B Truck Repair Service $1,353,000
MZM Inc. $1,213,632
Dataline Inc. $1,028,851
Red River Computer Company $972,592
Dell Marketing L.P. $513,678
DHS Logistics Company $378,000
Sodexho Inc. $324,120
Force 3 $274,651
Baldino, George F. $263,000
Military Professional Resources Inc. $252,743
Nuttall, James S. $187,000
Unisys Corporation $180,000
Alexander, Deborah Lynn $168,625
Reabold, Miguel (Michael) $136,603
Native American Industrial Distributors Inc. $123,572
EGL Eagle Global Logistics $111,000
Young, Brian $106,150
Paro, Amy K. $94,457
Sampler, Donald L. $81,000
John S. Connor Inc. $34,153
Logenix International L.L.C. $29,000
Landstar Express America Inc. $24,396
Expedited World Cargo Inc. $21,099
Intelligent Enterprise Solutions $19,835
Transfair North America International $19,351
Mediterranean Shipping Company $13,000
Kroll Inc. Unknown Value
-------- china
Taiwan appoints admiral new defense minister amid naval build-up
TAIPEI (AFP)
May 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040511133043.ujs1i59i.html
Taiwan on Tuesday appointed Admiral Li Chieh as defense minister amid a naval build-up in the island against a perceived military threat from rival China.
Li, the chief of general staff, replaced Tang Yao-ming who resigned for health reasons, government spokesman Lin Chia-lung told reporters.
Tang was defense minister under President Chen Shui-bian's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration since 2002. He was a high-ranking military officer under the previous Kuomintang (KMT) government, which lost power in 2000.
Analysts said the appointment of Li, 64, was significant as Taiwan is beefing up its navy, including by acquiring four US-built Kidd class destroyers and planning to build a fleet of eight conventional submarines.
China regards Taiwan was part of its territory, even though they split in 1949 at the end of a civil war.
Beijing has repeatedly threatened to invade Taiwan if it declares independence. It fears that Chen, who was reelected in March although the ballot is being recounted, could make irreversible moves towards independence.
-------- iraq
Amnesty report lists 37 'disputed' killings by UK forces
Hanan Matrud, an eight-year-old girl shot dead by British troops in Basra. She is one of 37 Iraqi civilians killed in disputed circumstances by UK soldiers. Today, an independent report into all these deaths presents new problems for the allies, already reeling from allegations of torture and abuse
By Kim Sengupta and Cahal Milmo
11 May 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=520103
Hanan Matrud was playing with three friends when a British Army Warrior armoured vehicle pulled up near her home in a village in southern Iraq. As they ran forward to see what was going on, a shot rang out.
The girl, eight years old, was hit in the stomach with a rifle round. She was taken to the hospital, and had emergency surgery. She died the next day.
There is little dispute that a British soldier was responsible. To her family and neighbours, it was cold-blooded murder.
The Army says she was probably hit when a warning shot was fired to disperse a stone-throwing mob. An inquiry has proved, the Army says, that the soldiers were not at fault.
Hanan was a "very unfortunate casualty of war". That conclusion is contradicted by a witness, Mizher Yassin, who claims the troops were under no threat. He says Hanan was standing in an alley about 60 to 70 metres from the armoured car when a soldier aimed and fired a shot.
A report issued today by Amnesty International claims the shooting of Hanan, on 21 August 2003 at Karmat Ali, was one of 37 deaths of civilians in incidents involving British forces. It says those who died posed no apparent threat.
The report claims many of these cases have not been properly investigated and inquiries launched by the Royal Military Police have been secretive. Kate Allen, Amnesty's UK director, said: "Killings by UK forces, in situations where they should not be using lethal force, are examined in secrecy.
"Instead of the Army deciding whether to investigate itself when civilians are killed, there must be full, impartial and civilian-led investigations."
The report follows a further round yesterday of heated recriminations and accusations of torture, abuse, and killings of Iraqi civilians by US and British forces. Alleged systematic torture by Allied forces contained in two other reports, delivered to the US and British governments months ago, became public for the first time.
One dossier, by the International Committee of the Red Cross, was passed to the American and British governments in February but kept secret by both. The other, an earlier document prepared by Amnesty, was given to the Ministry of Defence in May last year, and discussed with officials from the MoD and the Foreign Office the following month.
The controversy over the handling of the issue by the British Government further intensified with Tony Blair admitting he had no knowledge of the Red Cross report until it appeared in the media.
"I have not seen this document", said Mr Blair. "But let me make it clear to you, my understanding is the two issues raised by the Red Cross document in respect of abuses of Iraqi prisoners; there is one specific case on that issue and those were actually dealt with."
The new disclosures also left a question mark over the conduct of Adam Ingram, the Armed Forces minister, who declared in the Commons last week that he had received "no adverse or other reports".
MPs reacted with incredulity to claims by ministers that they had not been shown the Red Cross report. Geoff Hoon, the Secretary of State for Defence, said the document had been passed to Britain in confidence by Paul Bremer, the US head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and copies were sent to Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was the Prime Minister's envoy to Iraq, British military officials in the country, and the military's Permanent Joint Headquarters at Northwood in London. Officials decided the allegations against British forces had already been dealt with, and did not need to be referred to ministers.
The Red Cross report also describes how a 28-year-old man, Baha Mousa, was abused while in British custody and later died. Mr Mousa's family have subsequently received an interim payment of £1,875 from the Government.
The military has also paid out a further £72,000 in compensation to 22 Iraqi families to settle abuse claims.
The Government stepped up its pressure on the Daily Mirror last night when Mr Hoon said the photographs published by the paper allegedly showing an Iraqi prisoner being mistreated by British soldiers looked "increasingly like a hoax". But Mr Hoon was earlier forced to admit in the Commons that British troops had acted illegally in "hooding" prisoners in Iraq last year.
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U.K. Soldiers Killed Iraqi Civilians, Amnesty Says (Update3)
(Bloomberg)
May 11, 2004
http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000100&sid=a0sa68Tj40jM&refer=germany
May 11 -- British soldiers in Iraq have killed civilians in situations where they weren't under any threat of attack, the human-rights group Amnesty International said.
``Many cases of civilian killings by U.K. Armed Forces have not even been investigated,'' Amnesty said in a report. A civilian-led body must probe all killings by U.K. armed forces in Iraq and make its findings public, Amnesty said in a statement posted on its Web site.
A Defence Ministry statement said procedures have been changed so decisions on whether to investigate incidents are now made at the brigade level, rather than the lower commanding officer level. The statement said the ministry ``will respond in detail in due time'' to Amnesty concerns.
The report, from research in February and March in U.K.- administered southern Iraq, comes as British and U.S. forces face accusations of abusing prisoners. Prime Minister Tony Blair and President George W. Bush have apologized for the treatment of prisoners and have ordered investigations.
British troops were ordered to Iraq in February 2003 as the U.K. became the leading U.S. partner in the coalition to oust Saddam Hussein as leader of the nation. The soldiers have remained as part of the effort to establish democracy amid continuing violence.
Warning Shot
The Amnesty report cites the killing of an eight-year-old girl in August and a guest shot dead at a wedding reception in January. The Defence Ministry statement said the girl is thought to have been killed by a ricochet from a warning shot fired at an armed crowd.
The report also highlights killings of civilians by armed Iraqi groups operating in the south of the country.
``Armed groups strike with seeming impunity,'' Amnesty said. ``Killings by U.K. armed forces, in situations where they should not be using lethal force, are examined in secrecy. There must be a full, impartial and civilian-led investigation into all allegations of killings by U.K. troops.''
Families of 12 Iraqis, allegedly killed by British soldiers, received permission today for a full hearing of their challenge to the U.K. government's refusal to hold independent inquiries into the deaths.
Case is `Arguable'
Justice Lawrence Collins at the High Court in London said the case is ``arguable.'' He said a panel of judges must consider if the European Convention on Human Rights and Human Rights Act apply to a country under occupation by British troops.
Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon told Parliament yesterday that U.K. troops in Iraq are trying to deal with increasing violence in southern cities ``with the minimum necessary use of force.''
There are signs that photographs published by the U.K.'s Daily Mirror national newspaper, purporting to show British soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, may be fake, Hoon said.
``There are strong indications that the vehicle in which the photographs were taken was not in Iraq during the relevant period,'' Hoon told Parliament.
The British photos are similar to ones showing U.S. guards at the Abu Ghraib detention center outside Baghdad abusing prisoners.
To contact the reporter on this story: Paul Tighe in Sydney at ptighe@bloomberg.net; Robert Hutton in London on 2976 or rhutton1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor of this story: Catherine Hickley on chickley@bloomberg.net
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Human Shields, Fighting, More Bombs
by Dahr Jamail
May 11, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/jamail.php?articleid=2543
With the horrendous security situation limiting movement of the media in Iraq more than ever before, many of the attacks and bombs against the occupiers are going unreported.
Everyday now in Baghdad I hear bombs going off, along with the usual sporadic gunfire in the streets. The majority of the explosions come from inside the so-called "Green Zone."
The U.S. military in Iraq, apparently determined to keep as many fronts open as possible in their war, attacked the office of Muqtada Al-Sadr in Sadr City yesterday afternoon. Of course this was followed by fighting last night, and yet more today.
Fighting continues to spread throughout the south today in Basra, Najaf, Kerbala, Amarra - many people now feel the situation is headed back to where it was a few weeks ago: rampant fighting, and an even further deteriorating security situation for foreigners.
My friend Sheikh Adnan from Baqubah told me that three days ago in his city, the office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) decided to fly the new "flag" of Iraq, which has only one of the four colors of Islam (lacking black, green and red). It was decided upon behind closed doors by the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, with no vote of the people. It bears a light blue crescent, two light blue lines representing the Tigris and Euphrates, and a yellow line between them to represent the Kurdish population.
There is nothing in the flag which represents the Arab population, who comprise the majority of Iraq. The Sheikh has written in his new book that the Kurdish certainly have a right to be represented in the flag, but only if the Arabs are as well.
I have yet to talk with one Iraqi who is happy with the new "flag."
So the flying of the new "flag" in front of the PUK building of Baqubah went over well - within 24 hours a car bomb destroyed much of the building, and of course the "flag."
I have yet to see the new "flag" anywhere, aside from seeing it burned in Fallujah. Anywhere it is flown, it is promptly torn down. Nobody would dare hang one in their car.
The residents of Al-Adhamiya, Baghdad, responded to the new "flag" by hanging countless flags (the real flag) all over their neighborhood. A huge version, over 20 meters long, was hung near Abu Hanifa Mosque. Smaller versions of the flag are fluttering from buildings, homes, and even paper versions are hung inside cars.
The U.S. military responded by coming to the area and tearing down as many of them as possible. One was rolled over by a tank. As usual, dissent in occupied Iraq is dealt with by tanks and guns.
This is the freedom. This is the democracy.
Of course the people of Al-Adhamiya responded by hanging even more flags up. My translator and I decided it was a good time to pick one up for each of us as well.
Another development of note is that recently U.S. patrols and convoys have allowed cars to drive near them, as well as between their Humvees and Bradleys. This was never allowed before - previously, when they were on the streets you could always expect a traffic jam, as they would not let a single car pass, or even get near them.
So now the military is using Iraqis as human shields on the streets and highways in an effort to protect themselves from attacks by the resistance. Everyone I've spoken with about this is aware of the military's tactics.
This is just as they intend to do in Fallujah when U.S. patrols are resumed there: to use the Iraqi Police (IP) and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC) to buffer themselves against the attacks that are sure to come, even worse than before.
I saw them use this method in Samarra last January. A U.S. military patrol creeping down the main street towards the Golden Mosque, with soldiers walking behind Humvees. On the sides of the soldiers, literally walking between them and the people on the sidewalks, were Iraqi Policemen.
Ever wonder why so many IPs have died during the occupation?
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How to Get Out of Iraq
By Peter W. Galbraith
New York Review of Books, Volume 51, Number 8
posted May 11, 2004
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17103
1. In the year since the United States Marines pulled down Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square, things have gone very badly for the United States in Iraq and for its ambition of creating a model democracy that might transform the Middle East. As of today the United States military appears committed to an open-ended stay in a country where, with the exception of the Kurdish north, patience with the foreign occupation is running out, and violent opposition is spreading. Civil war and the breakup of Iraq are more likely outcomes than a successful transition to a pluralistic Western-style democracy.
Much of what went wrong was avoidable. Focused on winning the political battle to start a war, the Bush administration failed to anticipate the postwar chaos in Iraq. Administration strategy seems to have been based on a hope that Iraq's bureaucrats and police would simply transfer their loyalty to the new authorities, and the country's administration would continue to function. All experience in Iraq suggested that the collapse of civil authority was the most likely outcome, but there was no credible planning for this contingency. In fact, the US effort to remake Iraq never recovered from its confused start when it failed to prevent the looting of Baghdad in the early days of the occupation.
Americans like to think that every problem has a solution, but that may no longer be true in Iraq. Before dealing at considerable length with what has gone wrong, I should also say what has gone right.
Iraq is free from Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party. Along with Cambodia's Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein's regime was one of the two most cruel and inhumane regimes in the second half of the twentieth century. Using the definition of genocide specified in the 1948 Genocide Convention, Iraq's Baath regime can be charged with planning and executing two genocides -one against the Kurdish population in the late 1980s and another against the Marsh Arabs in the 1990s. In the 1980s, the Iraqi armed forces and security services systematically destroyed more than four thousand Kurdish villages and several small cities, attacked over two hundred Kurdish villages and towns with chemical weapons in 1987 and 1988, and organized the deportation and execution of up to 182,000 Kurdish civilians.
In the 1990s the Saddam Hussein regime drained the marshes of southern Iraq, displacing 500,000 people, half of whom fled to Iran, and killing some 40,000. In addition to destroying the five-thousand-year-old Marsh Arab civilization, draining the marshes did vast ecological damage to one of the most important wetlands systems on the planet. Genocide is only part of Saddam Hussein's murderous legacy. Tens of thousands perished in purges from 1979 on, and as many as 300,000 Shiites were killed in the six months following the collapse of the March 1991 Shiite uprising. One mass grave near Hilla may contain as many as 30,000 bodies.
In a more lawful world, the United Nations, or a coalition of willing states, would have removed this regime from power long before 2003. However, at precisely the time that some of the most horrendous crimes were being committed, in the late 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations strongly opposed any action to punish Iraq for its genocidal campaign against the Kurds or to deter Iraq from using chemical weapons against the Kurdish civilians.
On August 20, 1988, the Iran-Iraq War ended. Five days later, the Iraqi military initiated a series of chemical weapons attacks on at least forty-nine Kurdish villages in the Dihok Governorate (or province) near the Syrian and Turkish borders. As a staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I (along with Chris Van Hollen, now a Maryland congressman) interviewed hundreds of survivors in the high mountains on the Turkish border. Our report, which established conclusively that Iraq had used nerve and mustard agents on tens of thousands of civilians, coincided with the Senate's passage of the Prevention of Genocide Act of 1988, which imposed comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq for crimes against the Kurds. The Reagan administration opposed the legislation, in a position orchestrated by the then national security adviser, Colin Powell, calling such sanctions "premature."
Except for a relatively small number of Saddam Hussein's fellow Sunni Arabs who worked for his regime, the peoples of Iraq are much better off today than they were under Saddam Hussein. The problems that threaten to tear Iraq apart-Kurdish aspirations for independence, Shiite dreams of dominance, Sunni Arab nostalgia for lost power-are not of America's making (although the failure to act sooner against Saddam made them less solvable). Rather, they are inherent in an artificial state held together for eighty years primarily by brute force.
2. American liberation-and liberation it was-ended the brute force. Iraqis celebrated the dictatorship's overthrow, and in Baghdad last April ordinary citizens thrust flowers into my hands. Since then, however:
• Hostile action has killed twice as many American troops as died in the war itself, while thousands of Iraqis have also died.
• Terrorists have killed the head of the United Nations Mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello; Iraq's most prominent Shiite politician, the Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim; and the deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Sami Abdul Rahman, along with hundreds of others.
• Looting has caused billions of dollars of damage, most of which will have to be repaired at the expense of the US taxpayer.
• $150 billion has already been spent on Iraq, an amount equal to 25 percent of the non-defense discretionary federal budget. (By contrast, the first Gulf War earned a small profit for the US government, owing to the contributions of other nations.)
• Discontent with the US-led occupation boiled over into an uprising in the Shiite areas of Iraq on the first anniversary of liberation and a persistent insurgency in the Sunni Triangle degenerated into a full-scale battle in Fallujah. Many on the US-installed Iraqi Governing Council strongly opposed the US military response, and the US-created security institutions-the new Iraqi police and the paramilitary Iraqi Civil Defense Corps-refused to fight, or in some cases, joined the rebels.
• US credibility abroad has been undermined by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Spain's elections, Tony Blair's sinking poll results, and the prospective defeat of Australia's Howard government underscore the political risk of too close an association with the United States.
• Relations with France and Germany have been badly hurt, in some cases by the gratuitous comments made by senior US officials.
• The United States does not now have the military or diplomatic resources to deal with far more serious threats to our national security. President Bush rightly identified the peril posed by the nexus between weapons of mass destruction and rogue states. The greatest danger comes from rogue states that acquire and disseminate nuclear weapons technology. At the beginning of 2003 Iraq posed no such danger. As a result of the Iraq war the United States has neither the resources nor the international support to cope effectively with the very serious nuclear threats that come from North Korea, Iran, and, most dangerous of all, our newly designated "major non-NATO ally," Pakistan.
With fewer than one hundred days to the handover of power to a sovereign Iraq on June 30, there is no clear plan-and no decision-about how Iraq will be run on July 1, 2004. Earlier this month, the Bush administration praised itself generously for the signing of an interim constitution for Iraq-a constitution with human rights provisions it described as unprecedented for the Middle East. Three weeks later, as I write, the interim constitution is already falling apart.
As is true of so much of the US administration of postwar Iraq, the damage here is self-inflicted. While telling Iraqis it wanted to defer constitutional issues to an elected Iraqi body, the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority could not resist trying to settle fundamental constitutional issues in the interim constitution. The US government lawyers who wrote the interim constitution, known formally as the Transitional Administrative Law, made no effort to disguise their authorship. All deliberations on the law were done in secret and probably fewer than one hundred Iraqis saw a copy of the constitution before it was promulgated. To write a major law in any democracy-much less a constitution-without public discussion should be unthinkable. Now that Iraqis are discovering for the first time the contents of the constitution, it should come as no surprise that many object to provisions they never knew were being considered.
Iraq's Shiite leaders say that the National Assembly due to be elected in January 2005 should not be constrained by a document prepared by US government lawyers, deliberated in secret, and signed by twenty-five Iraqis selected by Ambassador Bremer. In particular, the Shiites object to a provision in the interim constitution that allows three of Iraq's eighteen governorates (or provinces) to veto ratification of a permanent constitution. This, in effect, allows either the Kurds or the Sunni Arabs, each of whom make up between one fifth and one sixth of Iraq's population, to block a constitution they don't like. (It is a wise provision. Imposing a constitution on reluctant Kurds or Sunni Arabs will provoke a new cycle of resistance and conflict.) The Shiite position makes the Kurds, who are well armed, reluctant to surrender powers to a central government that may be Shiite-dominated.
At the moment the Sunni Arabs have few identifiable leaders. The Kurds, however, are well organized. They have an elected parliament and two regional governments, their own court system, and a 100,000 strong military force, known as the Peshmerga. The Peshmerga, whose members were principal American allies in the 2003 war, are better armed, better trained, and more disciplined than the minuscule Iraqi army the United States is now trying to reconstitute.
Early in 2005, Iraq will likely see a clash between an elected Shiite-dominated central government trying to override the interim constitution in order to impose its will on the entire country, and a Kurdistan government insistent on preserving the de facto independent status Kurdistan has enjoyed for thirteen years. Complicating the political struggle is a bitter territorial dispute over the oil-rich province of Kirkuk involving Kurds, Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, Sunni Turkmen, and Shiite Turkmen.
It is a formula for civil war.
3. How did we arrive at this state of affairs?
I arrived in Baghdad on April 13, 2003, as part of an ABC news team. It was apparent to me that things were already going catastrophically wrong. When the United States entered Baghdad on April 9 last year, it found a city largely undamaged by a carefully executed military campaign. However, in the two months following the US takeover, unchecked looting effectively gutted every important public institution in the city with the notable exception of the Oil Ministry. The physical losses include:
• The National Library, which was looted and burned. Equivalent to our Library of Congress, it held every book published in Iraq, all newspapers from the last century, as well as rare manuscripts. The destruction of the library meant the loss of a historical record going back to Ottoman times.
• The Iraqi National Museum, which was also looted. More than 10,000 objects were stolen or destroyed. The Pentagon has deliberately, and repeatedly, tried to minimize the damage by excluding from its estimates objects stolen from storage as well as displayed treasures that were smashed but not stolen.
• Hospitals and other public health institutions, where looters stole medical equipment, medicines, and even patients' beds.
• Baghdad and Mosul Universities, which were stripped of computers, office furniture, and books. Academic research that took decades to carry out went up in smoke or was scattered.
• The National Theater, which was set ablaze by looters a full three weeks after US forces entered Baghdad.
Even more surprising, the United States made no apparent effort to secure sites that had been connected with Iraqi WMD programs or buildings alleged to hold important intelligence. As a result, the United States may well have lost valuable information that related to Iraqi WMD procurement, paramilitary resistance, foreign intelligence activities, and possible links to al-Qaeda.
• On April 16, looters attacked the Iraqi equivalent of the US Centers for Disease Control, stealing live HIV and live black fever bacteria. UNMOVIC and UNSCOM had long considered the building suspicious and had repeatedly conducted inspections there. The looting complicates efforts to understand and account for any Iraqi bioweapons research in the past. A Marine lieutenant watched the looting from next door. He told us, "I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon, but no one told me what was in that building."
• Although US troops moved onto the grounds of Iraq's sprawling Tuwaitha nuclear complex, they did not secure the warehouse that contained yellowcake and other radiological materials. Looters took materials that terrorists could use for a radiological weapon, although much of that material was eventually recovered. The looted nuclear materials were in a known location, and already had been placed under seal by the International Atomic Energy Commission.
• Ten days after the US took over Baghdad, I went through the unguarded Iraqi Foreign Ministry, going from the cooling unit on the roof to the archives in the basement, and rummaging through the office of the foreign minister. The only other people in the building were looters, who were busy opening safes and carrying out furniture. They were unarmed and helped me look for documents. Foreign Ministry files could have shed light on Iraqis' overseas intelligence activities, on attempts to procure WMD, and on any connections that may have existed with al-Qaeda. However, we may never know about these things, since looters scattered and burned files during the ten days, or longer, that this building was left unguarded.
The looting demoralized Iraqi professionals, the very people the US looks to in rebuilding the country. University professors, government technocrats, doctors, and researchers all had connections with the looted institutions. Some saw the work of a lifetime quite literally go up in smoke. The looting also exacerbated other problems: the lack of electricity and potable water, the lack of telephones, and the absence of police or other security.
Most importantly, the looting served to undermine Iraqi confidence in, and respect for, the US occupation authorities.
4. In the parts of Iraq taken over by rebels during the March 1991 uprising, there had been the same kind of looting of public institutions. In 2003, the United States could not have prevented all the looting but it could have prevented much of it. In particular, it could have secured the most important Iraqi government ministries, hospitals, laboratories, and intelligence sites. It could have protected the Iraq National Museum and several other of Iraq's most important cultural and historical sites.
In the spring of 2003, Thomas Warrick of the State Department's Future of Iraq Working Group prepared a list of places in Baghdad to be secured. The Iraq National Museum was number two on the list. At the top of the list were the paper records of the previous regime-the very documents I found scattered throughout the Foreign Ministry and in other locations. What happened next is a mystery. My State Department informants tell me the list was sent to Douglas Feith, an undersecretary in the Department of Defense, and never came out of his office. Feith's partisans insist that uniformed American military failed to take action. In either case, the lack of oversight was culpable.
During the war in Kosovo, the Clinton White House was criticized for insisting on presidential review of proposed targets. President Bush, notorious for his lack of curiosity, seems never to have asked even the most basic question: "What happens when we actually get to Baghdad?"
The failure to answer this question at the start set back US efforts in Iraq in such a way that the US has not recovered and may never do so.
The Bush administration decided that Iraq would be run by a US civilian administrator-initially, Retired General Jay Garner-and American advisers who would serve as the de facto ministers for each of the Iraqi government ministries. All this was based on the expectation that the war would decapitate the top leadership of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the next day everyone else would show up for work.
Predictably, this did not happen. In 1991, all authority disappeared in the areas that fell into rebel hands. But even had things gone as the Bush administration hoped, it was not prepared to run Iraq. As the war began, the Bush administration was still recruiting the American officials who would serve as the de facto Iraqi ministers. The people so recruited had no time to prepare for the assignment, either in learning about Iraq or in mastering the substantive skills needed to run the ministry assigned to them. Many mistakes were made. For example, the US official in charge of prisons decided to work with Ali al-Jabouri, the warden of Abu Ghraib prison, apparently unaware of the prison's fearsome reputation as the place where tens of thousands perished under Saddam Hussein. The coalition rehabilitated Abu Ghraib and today uses it as a prison. The symbolism may be lost on the US administrators but it is not lost on Iraqis.
In late 2002 and early 2003, I attended meetings with senior US government officials on Kirkuk, the multi-ethnic city that is just west of the line marking the border of the self-governing Kurdish region. When Kirkuk, which is claimed by the Kurds, was held by Saddam Hussein, horrific human rights abuses had taken place there. I had been to Kirkuk in the 1980s, and I was concerned that Kurds brutally expelled in the 1980s and 1990s would return to settle scores with Arabs who had been settled in their homes. The week the war began, I asked the US official responsible for Kirkuk how he planned to deal with this problem. We will rely on the local police, he explained. I asked whether the local police were Kurds or Arabs. He did not know. It remains astonishing to me that US plans for dealing with ethnic conflict in the most volatile city inall of Iraq rested on hopes about the behavior of a police force about which they did not have the most basic information.
The Kirkuk police were, in fact, Arabs, and had assisted in the ethnic cleansing of the city's Kurds. They were not around when Kurdish forces entered the city on April 10, 2003. Many other Arabs also fled, although this was largely ignored by the international press.
The United States' political strategies in Iraq have been no less incoherent. General Garner arrived announcing that he would quickly turn power over to a provisional Iraqi government. Within three weeks Ambassador Bremer and a new structure, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), replaced him. US officials indicated that Iraqi participation would be limited to an advisory council and that the United States expected to stay in Iraq for up to three years. The US would write a democratic constitution for the country and then turn power over to an elected government. After a few weeks, Bremer changed course and announced he was sharing power with a representative Iraqi governing council. In November, as Bush's poll numbers plummeted, Bremer was summoned back to Washington to discuss a new strategy. The United States, it was decided, would turn power over on June 30, 2004, to a sovereign Iraqi government that would be chosen in a complicated system of caucuses held in each of Iraq's "governorates (or provinces)." By January this plan was put aside (it was widely described as "election by people selected by people selected by Bremer").
The latest strategy-based on the interim constitution and a takeover of sovereignty on June 30 by an as yet undetermined body-the fifth in a year by my count, is now falling apart in the face of Shiite opposition and mounting violence.
The Bush administration's strategies in Iraq are failing for many reasons. First, they are being made up as the administration goes along, without benefit of planning, adequate knowledge of the country, or the experience of comparable situations. Second, the administration has been unwilling to sustain a commitment to a particular strategy. But third, the strategies are all based on an idea of an Iraq that does not exist.
5. The fundamental problem of Iraq is an absence of Iraqis.
In the north the Kurds prefer almost unanimously not to be part of Iraq, for reasons that are very understandable. Kurdistan's eighty-year association with Iraq has been one of repression and conflict, of which the Saddam Hussein regime was the most brutal phase. Since 1991, Kurdistan has been de facto independent and most Iraqi Kurds see this period as a golden era of democratic self-government and economic progress. In 1992 Kurdistan had the only democratic elections in the history of Iraq, when voters chose members of a newly created Kurdistan National Assembly. During the last twelve years the Kurdistan Regional Government built three thousand schools (as compared to one thousand in the region in 1991), opened two universities, and permitted a free press; there are now scores of Kurdish-language publications, radio stations, and television stations. For the older generation, Iraq is a bad memory, while a younger generation, which largely does not speak Arabic, has no sense of being Iraqi.
The people of Kurdistan almost unanimously prefer independence to being part of Iraq. In just one month, starting on January 25 of this year, Kur- dish nongovernmental organizations collected 1,700,000 signatures on petitions demanding a vote on whether Kurdistan should remain part of Iraq. This is a staggering figure, representing as it does roughly two thirds of Kurdistan's adults.
In the south, Iraq's long-repressed Shiites express themselves primarily through their religious identity. In early March I traveled throughout southern Iraq. I saw no evidence of any support for secular parties. If free elections are held in Iraq, I think it likely that the Shiite religious parties -principally the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa (the Call)-will have among them an absolute majority in the National Assembly.
The wild card is Moqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Shiite uprising. If he is allowed to compete in elections, he will certainly take a share of the Shiite vote. If he is excluded (or imprisoned or killed), his supporters will likely influence the policies of the mainstream Shiite parties, or conceivably disrupt the elections. None of this is good for hopes of creating a stable, democratic Iraq.
The Shiites are not separatists but many of them believe their majority status entitles them to run all of Iraq, and to impose their version of an Islamic state. They also consider connections with Shiites elsewhere as important as their nationalist feelings about Iraq. Iranian Shiites, such as the Ayatollah al-Sistani and, from the grave, Ayatollah Khomeini, have enormous political and spiritual influence in southern Iraq. Their portraits are ubiquitous. Mainstream Iraqi Arab Shiites, such as SCIRI's leader Abdel Azziz al-Hakim, often advocate a very pro-Iranian line.
Sunni Arabs have always been the principal Iraqi nationalists, and a part of the anti-US uprising in the Sunni Triangle is a nationalist one. The Sunni Arabs have long been accustomed to seeing the Iraqi state as a part of a larger Arab nation, and this was a central tenet of the Baath Party. As Sunni Arabs face the end of their historic domination of Iraq, they may seek to compensate for their minor- ity status inside Iraq by further identifying themselves with the greater Arab nation. Connections with other Sunni populations may eventually become even more important among the Sunni Arabs than pan-Arabism. As elsewhere in Arab Iraq, the Sunni religious parties appear to be gain-ing ground in the country's Sunni center at the expense of the secular parties.
Radical Sunni Islamic groups, including those with recent links to al-Qaeda, appear to have an ever more important part in the uprising in the Sunni Triangle (which explains the increasing use of suicide bombers, not a tactic that appeals to the more worldly Baathists). By attacking Shiite religious leaders and celebrations (for example the deadly bombings this March during the as-Shoura religious holiday in Baghdad and Karbala, and the car bomb assassination of SCIRI leader Baqir al-Hakim), Sunni extremists seek to provoke civil war between Iraq's two main religious groups.
6. The United States strategy is to hold Iraq together by establishing a strong central government. So far, all its successes have been on paper. The interim constitution gives the central government a monopoly on military force, control over natural resources, broad fiscal powers, and oversight over the judiciary.
Little of this will come to pass. The Kurdistan National Assembly has put forward a comprehensive proposal to define Kurdistan's relations with the rest of Iraq. In it the Kurdistan National Assembly retains lawmaking power for the region, preserves its fiscal autonomy, and would eventually own the region's natural resources. Kurdistan will retain the Peshmerga (which would be converted into an Iraqi Kurdistan National Guard nominally under the overall authority of the Iraq central government) and other Iraqi armed forces could only enter Kurdistan with the consent of the Kurdistan National Assembly. Iraq would be fully bilingual (Arabic and Kurdish) and Kurdistan would remain secular.
This places the Kurds on a collision course with the Shiites and the Sunni Arabs. The Shiite religious parties insist that Islam must be the principal source of law throughout Iraq. Both Shiites and Sunni Arabs object to downgrading Arabic to one of two official languages. Sunni Arab nationalists and Shiite religious leaders object to Kurdistan retaining even a fraction of the autonomy it has today.
There are also acute conflicts between Shiite Arabs and Sunni Arabs. These have to do with the differing interpretations of Islam held by the two groups' religious parties and conflicts between pro-Iranian Shiites and Arab nationalist Sunnis.
Shiites are now providing moral and material support for the Sunni insurgents in Fallujah. An anti-American alliance of radicals from both confessions will not necessarily lead to political unity, nor will it erase Sunni fears of Shiite domination. That said, the confessional divide between Iraq's Arabs is far less than the ethnic gulf between Arabs and Kurds. Democracy requires tolerance and a willingness to compromise. Except tactically, none of these traits is apparent in a political culture (except for the north) which has been ruled by absolutists.
In my view, Iraq is not salvageable as a unitary state. From my experience in the Balkans, I feel strongly that it is impossible to preserve the unity of a democratic state where people in a geographically defined region almost unanimously do not want to be part of that state. I have never met an Iraqi Kurd who preferred membership in Iraq if independence were a realistic possibility.
But the problem of Iraq is that a breakup of the country is not a realistic possibility for the present. Turkey, Iran, and Syria, all of which have substantial Kurdish populations, fear the precedent that would be set if Iraqi Kurdistan became independent. Both Sunni and Shiite Arabs oppose the separation of Kurdistan. The Sunni Arabs do not have the resources to support an independent state of their own. (Iraq's largest oil fields are in the Shiite south or in the disputed territory of Kirkuk.)
Further, as was true in the Balkans, the unresolved territorial issues in Iraq would likely mean violent conflict. Kirkuk is perhaps the most explosive place. The Kurds claim it as part of historic Kurdistan. They demand that the process of Arabization of the region-which some say goes back to the 1950s-should be reversed. The Kurds who were driven out of Kirkuk by policies of successive Iraqi regimes should, they say, return home, while Arab settlers in the region are repatriated to other parts of Iraq. While many Iraqi Arabs concede that the Kurds suffered an injustice, they also say that the human cost of correcting it is too high. Moreover, backed by Turkey, ethnic Turkmen assert that Kirkuk is a Turkmen city and that they should enjoy the same status as the Kurds.
It will be difficult to resolve the status of Kirkuk within a single Iraq; it will be impossible if the country breaks up into two or three units. And while Kirkuk is the most contentious of the territories in dispute, it is only one of many.
The best hope for holding Iraq together-and thereby avoiding civil war-is to let each of its major constituent communities have, to the extent possible, the system each wants. This, too, suggests the only policy that can get American forces out of Iraq.
In the north this means accepting that Kurdistan will continue to govern its own affairs and retain responsibility for its own security. US officials have portrayed a separate Kurdistan defense force as the first step leading to the breakup of Iraq. The Kurds, however, see such a force not as an attribute of a sovereign state but as insurance in case democracy fails in the rest of Iraq. No one in Kurdistan would trust an Iraqi national army (even one in which the Kurds were well represented) since the Iraqi army has always been an agent of repression, and in the 1980s, of genocide. The Kurds also see clearly how ineffective are the new security institutions created by the Americans. In the face of uprisings in the Sunni Triangle and the south, the new Iraqi police and civil defense corps simply vanished.
Efforts to push the Kurds into a more unitary Iraq will fail because there is no force, aside from the US military, that can coerce them. Trying to do so will certainly inflame popular demands for separation of the Kurdish region in advance of January's elections.
If Kurdistan feels secure, it is in fact more likely to see advantages to cooperation with other parts of Iraq. Iraq's vast resources and the benefits that would accrue to Kurdistan from revenue sharing provide significant incentives for Kurdistan to remain part of Iraq, provided doing so does not open the way to new repression. (Until now, most Iraqi Kurds have seen Iraq's oil wealth as a curse that gave Saddam the financial resources to destroy Kurdistan.)
In the south, Iraq's Shiites want an Islamic state. They are sufficiently confident of public support that they are pushing for early elections. The United States should let them have their elections, and be prepared to accept an Islamic state-but only in the south. In most of the south, Shiite religious leaders already exercise actual power, having established a degree of security, taken over education, and helped to provide municipal services. In the preparation of Iraq's interim constitution, Shiite leaders asked for (and obtained) the right to form one or two Shiite regions with powers comparable to those of Kurdistan. They also strongly support the idea that petroleum should be owned by the respective regions, which is hardly surprising since Iraq's largest oil reserves are in the south.
There is, of course, a logical inconsistency between Shiite demands to control a southern region and the desire to impose Islamic rule on all of Iraq. Meeting the first demand affects only the south; accepting the second is an invitation to civil war and must be resisted.
Federalism-or even confederation -would make Kurdistan and the south governable because there are responsible parties there who can take over government functions. It is much more difficult to devise a strategy for the Sunni Triangle-until recently the location of most violent resistance to the American occupation-because there is no Sunni Arab leadership with discernible political support. While it is difficult to assess popular support for the insurrection within the Sunni Triangle, it is crystal clear that few Sunni Arabs in places like Fallujah are willing to risk their lives in opposing the insurgents.
We can hope that if the Sunni Arabs feel more secure about their place in Iraq with respect to the Shiites and the Kurds, they will be relatively more moderate. Autonomy for the Sunni Arab parts of Iraq is a way to provide such security. There is, however, no way to know if it will work.
Since 1992, the Iraqi opposition has supported federalism as the system of government for a post-Saddam Iraq. Iraq's interim constitution reflects this consensus by defining Iraq as a federal state. There is, however, no agreement among the Iraqi parties on what federalism actually means, and the structures created by the interim constitution seem unlikely to move from paper to reality.
Last November, Les Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, created a stir by proposing, in a New York Times Op-Ed piece, a three-state solution for Iraq, modeled on the constitution of post-Tito Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav model would give each of Iraq's constituent peoples their own republic.[&] These republics would be self-governing, financially self-sustaining, and with their own territorial military and police forces. The central government would have a weak presidency rotating among the republics, with responsibilities limited to foreign affairs, monetary policy, and some coordination of defense policy. While resources would be owned by the republics, some sharing of oil revenues would be essential, since an impoverished Sunni region is in no one's interest.
This model would solve many of the contradictions of modern Iraq. The Shiites could have their Islamic republic, while the Kurds could continue their secular traditions. Alcohol would continue to be a staple of Kurdish picnics while it would be strictly banned in Basra.
The three-state solution would permit the United States to disengage from security duties in most of Iraq. There are today fewer than three hundred coalition troops in Kurdistan, which would, under the proposal being made here, continue to be responsible for its own security. By contrast, introducing an Iraqi army and security institutions into Kurdistan, as the Bush administration says it still wants to do, would require many more coalition troops-because the Iraqi forces are not up to the job and because coalition troops will be needed to reassure a nervous Kurdish population. If the United States wanted to stay militarily in Iraq, Kurdistan is the place; Kurdish leaders have said they would like to see permanent US bases in Kurdistan.
A self-governing Shiite republic could also run its own affairs and provide for its own security. It is not likely to endorse Western values, but if the coalition quickly disengages from the south, this may mean the south would be less overtly anti-American. Staying in the south will play directly into the hands of Moqtada al-Sadr or his successors. Moderate Shiite leaders, including the Ayatollah al-Sistani, counseled patience in response to al-Sadr's uprising, and helped negotiate the withdrawal of al-Sadr's supporters from some police stations and government buildings. The scope of the uprising, however, underscores the coalition's perilous position in the south. The failure of the Iraqi police and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps to respond highlights the impotence of these American-created security institutions. The sooner power in the south is handed over to people who can exercise it, the better. Delay will only benefit anti-American radicals like al-Sadr.
As for the Sunni Triangle, one hope is for elections to produce a set of leaders who can restore order and end the insurrection. Presumably this is an outcome the Sunni rebels do not want to see happen; they will use violence to prevent a meaningful election in large parts of the Sunni Triangle. In these circumstances, the United States may face the choice of turning power over to weak leaders and living with the resulting chaos, or continuing to try to pacify the Sunni Triangle, which may generate ever more support for the insurrection. There may be no good options for the United States in the Sunni Triangle. Nevertheless the three-state approach could limit US military engagement to a finite area.
Baghdad is a city of five million and home to large numbers of all three of Iraq's major constituent peoples. With skilled diplomacy, the United States or the United Nations might be able to arrange for a more liberal regime in Baghdad than would exist in the south. Kurdish and Shiite armed forces and police could provide security in their own sections of the capital, as well as work together in Sunni areas (with whatever local cooperation is possible) and in mixed areas. Such an arrangement in Iraq's capital is far from ideal, but it is better than an open-ended US commitment to being the police force of last resort in Iraq's capital.
Because of what happened to Yugoslavia in the 1990s, many react with horror to the idea of applying its model to Iraq. Yet Yugoslavia's breakup was not inevitable. In the 1980s, Slovenia asked for greater control over its own affairs and Milosevic refused. Had Milosevic accepted a looser federation, there is every reason to think that Yugoslavia-and not just Slovenia- would be joining the European Union this May.
Still, a loose federation will have many drawbacks, especially for those who dreamed of a democratic Iraq that would transform the Middle East. The country would remain whole more in name than in reality. Western- style human rights are likely to take hold only in the Kurdish north (and even there not completely). Women's rights could be set back in the south, and perhaps also in Baghdad.
In administering elections and allowing a federation to emerge, the US would badly need the help of the UN and other international organizations and, if it can get it, of the principal European nations as well. The alternative is an indefinite US occupation of Iraq in which we have fewer and fewer allies. It is an occupation that the US cannot afford. It also prevents the US from addressing more serious threats to its national security. 7.
The American involvement in Iraq will be a defining event for the US role in the world for the coming decades. Will it be seen as validating the Bush administration's doctrines of preventive war and largely unilateral action?
In my view, Iraq demonstrates all too clearly the folly of the preventive war doctrine and of unilateralism. Of course the United States must reserve the right to act alone when the country is under attack or in imminent danger of attack. But these are also precisely the circumstances when the United States does not need to act alone. After September 11 both NATO and the United Nations Security Council gave unqualified support for US action, including military action, to deal with the threat of international terrorists based in Afghanistan. After the Taliban was defeated, other countries contributed troops-and accepted casualties-in order to help stabilize the country; and they have also contributed billions to Afghanistan's reconstruction. Because the US so quickly diverted its attention to Iraq, many acute problems remain in Afghanistan, including warlordism and the deprivation of basic rights. International support for helping Afghanistan remains strong, however, and the effort can be revitalized with a new administration.
In Iraq the United States chose to act without the authorization of the Security Council, without the support of NATO, and with only a handful of allies. Aside from the British and the Kurdish Peshmerga, no other ally made any significant contribution to the war effort. The United States is paying practically all the expenses of the Iraq occupation. Even those who supported the unilateral intervention in Iraq seem by now to realize that it cannot be sustained. The Bush administration, having scorned the United Nations, is now desperate to have it back.
It turns out that there are some things that only the United Nations can do-such as run an election that Iraqis will see as credible or give a stamp of legitimacy to a political transition. But the most urgent reason to want United Nations participation is to share the burden. Internationalization is a key element of John Kerry's program for Iraq. Unfortunately, it is a far from easy policy to achieve. While a less confrontational US administration would certainly be able to win greater international support and contributions, it will be a challenge to persuade the major European countries to have either the United Nations or NATO take over the major responsibilities in Iraq.
The reason is cost. Taking all expenses into account, one year of involvement in Iraq costs between $50 billion and $100 billion. Under the mandatory assessment scale for the United Nations this would cost France and Germany some $5 billion to $10 billion each, and they would face pressure to put their own troops in harm's way. NATO assessments are similarly costly. While our allies may wish a Kerry administration well, they may not be willing to commit resources on this scale to help the United States get out of Iraq. As a European diplomat told me before last year's war, "It will be china shop rules in Iraq: you break it, you pay for it."
I believe United States policy is most successful when it follows international law and works within the United Nations, according to the provisions of the Charter. This is not just a matter of upholding the ideals of the UN; it is also practical. As our war in Iraq demonstrates, we cannot afford any other course.
-April 15, 2004
Notes
[&] I describe here my application of the Yugoslav model to Iraq, not Les Gelb's. We differ in our understanding of the Yugoslav model and of the subsequent history of that country. The differences, however, are not material to the arguments advanced here.
----
U.S. Forces Raze Cleric's Office
16 Iraqis Killed in Heavy Fighting in Baghdad Neighborhood
By Sewell Chan and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15665-2004May10?language=printer
BAGHDAD, May 10 -- U.S. forces destroyed one of two Baghdad offices of radical Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr early Monday during six hours of fighting in which 16 Iraqis were killed.
Tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and two Apache attack helicopters pummeled Sadr's building. Witnesses said the battle was the worst they had seen since three days of heavy clashes in early April.
"There were dead bodies in the streets," said Adel Abdul-Lateef, 37, who owns a bookshop near the demolished building. "I knew three of them. One worked at a bakery that was set on fire by one of the bombs."
Meanwhile in Fallujah, where Sunni Muslim rebels last month fended off several Marine advances, former members of Saddam Hussein's army escorted U.S. troops into the center of the city without incident. It was the first joint patrol of Fallujah since the creation of an Iraqi brigade to take over responsibility for security in the city.
But the situation remained volatile in the Sadr City district of Baghdad. Residents have largely stayed indoors since the fighting began Saturday night, when soldiers raided the Sadr building, detaining two of the cleric's top lieutenants and confiscating ammunition and four duffel bags containing documents and computer disks. On Sunday, schools were closed as young militiamen made a show of force on the streets.
"We are so scared and worried, especially after Moqtada's call giving the green light to attack the coalition forces," said Salim Aziz, 35, who works in a factory that produces leather handbags.
The persistence of the fighting threatens American plans to reduce violence nationwide in advance of the scheduled June 30 handover of sovereignty to a new Iraqi government.
In Sadr City, which is named for Sadr's father, who was killed when Hussein was in power, militiamen loyal to the younger Sadr battled U.S. troops with mortars, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and assault rifles starting at 10:30 p.m. Sunday.
The 1st Cavalry Division, which controls Baghdad, said its soldiers killed 14 militiamen who were firing rocket-propelled grenades, one man who fired a mortar at an Army base and one gunman who attacked a patrol with small-arms fire.
Col. Robert Abrams, who commands the division's 1st Brigade Combat Team, said that five insurgents were wounded in the fighting, but Abed Falih Soudani, a physician at Martyr Sadr Hospital, reported nine injured, all from gunshot wounds.
Several U.S. soldiers were wounded by shrapnel, Abrams said, but none was seriously injured.
Sadr has been holed up around Najaf, a Shiite holy city in the south, for a month. The Reuters news agency quoted Sadr's chief aide, Qays Khazali, as saying from Najaf that "we have now entered a second phase of resistance. There will be volcanic eruptions."
The climax of the nighttime battle came at 2:30 a.m., when Sadr's office was leveled. An earlier office building on the same site had been demolished on April 7 but was rebuilt within three days by Sadr's followers.
Abrams, whose brigade patrols Sadr City, said the raid on the building followed a three-week pursuit of Amr Husseini, whom Abrams described as the leader of Sadr's bureau in Sadr City.
Abrams said the number of militiamen active during the overnight battle was significantly less than the force of insurgents who rose up in early April, and the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division, Maj. Gen. Pete Chiarelli, said weekend reports that Sadr's militia had taken Sadr City were exaggerated.
Chiarelli said fighters loyal to Sadr may have seized some intersections and other positions, but they did so only briefly and were confined to small areas. He said U.S. forces had allowed the militia some leeway to avoid civilian casualties, since the fighters had surrounded themselves with civilians, using them as shields.
Abrams also alleged that the insurgents hid behind civilians.
"There were less than 200 or 300, in small teams, and they were routinely using women and children as human shields," Abrams said. "They would come out of an alleyway, duck behind children, pop up and shoot at one of my vehicles, knowing that return fire would kill innocents."
His account could not be independently confirmed.
While fewer in number, the militiamen have employed increasingly sophisticated tactics, said Lt. Col. Gary Volesky, a battalion commander who oversees combat operations in Sadr City. "They used to be uncoordinated, but now they use cover-and-conceal tactics and attacks from the rear, combined small-arms and RPG attacks and assaults from several sides," he said.
U.S. officials confirmed that a weekend attack on a major oil pipeline in the southern Faw peninsula caused a huge blaze and significantly reduced the flow of oil, the source of almost all of Iraq's foreign revenue. The officials would not disclose specifics for fear of encouraging similar acts of economic sabotage.
In Fallujah, a convoy of Marines and members of the new Fallujah Brigade entered the city from the east, the first joint patrol since the Marines announced a plan late last month to create a force of 1,500 Iraqis who were members of the army under Hussein. With the route into the city secured, the 1st Marine Division commander, Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, met with the mayor of Fallujah and tribal leaders at the municipal building and discussed plans for rebuilding the battle-ravaged city. The Marines had initially demanded that rebels disarm and foreign fighters in the city surrender. None of that has happened.
In other developments, the U.S. officials announced three deaths around Iraq.
A soldier died Monday from gunshot wounds suffered during an earlier attack in the northern city of Mosul. A roadside bomb killed a soldier from the 1st Infantry Division and wounded another near the town of Samarra on Saturday morning. A soldier in the 16th Military Police Brigade was killed Sunday evening in an accidental collision between his Humvee and an American tank southwest of Baghdad.
Two construction workers, from South Africa and New Zealand, along with their Iraqi driver, were killed in a drive-by shooting in the northern city of Kirkuk, according to news service reports.
[On Tuesday, news services in the Netherlands reported that a Dutch soldier was killed and another injured in a grenade attack Monday in the southern town of Samawah, according to Reuters.]
Staff writer Bradley Graham in Washington and special correspondents Naseer Nouri in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
--------
FIREFIGHTS
U.S. Destroys Headquarters of Rebel Cleric in Baghdad
May 11, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/international/middleeast/11IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 10 - The American military said Monday that it had killed as many as 18 supporters of the rebel Shiite Muslim cleric Moktada al-Sadr as it demolished his Baghdad headquarters during a heavy nighttime firefight that echoed around the capital.
In clashes on Sunday, the military said, it killed another 18 of his militiamen, part of a mounting death toll of Mr. Sadr's followers that included some 41 dead in a battle last week in Najaf, south of the capital. The director of a hospital in Sadr City, the poor Shiite neighborhood here where Mr. Sadr's draws most of his support, said it had received nine bodies since Sunday, including that of a woman.
In southern Iraq on Monday, fires continued to rage after a pipeline bombing on Saturday, which has reportedly slowed the flow of Iraqi oil for export by as much as 25 percent. Attacks on the southern pipeline, which accounts for most of Iraq's oil exports, have been rare.
An unidentified body appearing to be that of a Westerner was found in Baghdad, an American military official here said. The official said the body was not that of a soldier and was not believed to be one of the three surviving Italian hostages captured last month. A fourth Italian hostage was killed by militants who had demanded that Italy withdraw its troops from Iraq.
While American troops have battled frequently with Mr. Sadr's supporters since he led an uprising against the occupation last month, clashes are now erupting daily in the southern cities of Najaf, Kufa, Karbala and Basra amid heightened threats to kill and kidnap foreigners in Iraq.
On Monday a top aide to Mr. Sadr, who has retreated to Najaf, called for an intensified push against the American occupation in Iraq.
"We have now entered a second phase of resistance, and our patience is over with the occupation forces," said Qais al-Khazali, Mr. Sadr's main lieutenant, according to Reuters. "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 Karbala and Najaf."
But as fighting with American troops continued, there were increasing signs of growing impatience with Mr. Sadr among moderate Shiites, as well as the possibility of clashes among Shiites themselves.
On Monday evening in Najaf, the most sacred city in Shiite Islam, leaflets were distributed with photographs showing corpses and armed men. The leaflet carried this warning: "To al-Sadr followers: If you continue fighting you will be killed in the end. You must be killed. It is your choice."
On the back it read: "There is a chance for Iraqi people to live in peace. Just put your weapons aside and be happy with what your country has given to you."
The leaflet was not signed, but in the last few weeks a shadowy death squad calling itself the Thulfiqar Army has reportedly killed at least seven of Mr. Sadr's militiamen in Najaf.
The leaflets were distributed a day after Sadr al-Din al-Kubanchi, a top cleric in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a mainstream Islamic political party and a rival to Mr. Sadr's more militant group, called for the people of Najaf to take power back from Mr. Sadr, who has taken over key Shiite shrines there.
With almost daily clashes and some 2,500 American troops in and around Najaf, the city's lucrative business as a destination for Shiite pilgrims has all but dried up.
Many more moderate Shiite leaders see Mr. Sadr - who appeals largely to the young and the jobless - as a dangerous threat to an orderly political transition. Shiites represent some 60 percent of the country's population and so stand to gain the most power in any future democratic government.
The Supreme Council is calling for a huge demonstration to demand that Mr. Sadr leave the city. There are fears that the demonstration may lead to violence, and the possibility seemed strong enough that Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman for the occupation, responded to a question about it on Monday, saying that the "first response" would be to rely on Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
"If they were to call on the coalition for assistance, we'd evaluate that, given the conditions of what's happening on the ground," he added at a news conference here in Baghdad. "But that would be appropriately an Iraqi-led operation, so that they could show the proper cultural sensitivity to that particular engagement."
Though soldiers have slowly moved deeper into Najaf in an effort to choke off Mr. Sadr, military planners have sought to avoid direct fighting inside the city, for fear that damage to holy sites could further stoke anti-American violence here.
Meantime on Monday, the military reported the deaths of three American soldiers. A military statement said one had been killed at an unidentified location in northern Iraq after a convoy attack.
Another soldier was killed on Saturday, the victim of a roadside bomb near the city of Samarra, north of Baghdad and a center for the anti-American insurgency. The third soldier, a military police officer, died when his Humvee hit a tank, the military said.
Also on Monday, two foreign construction workers, one from South Africa and one from New Zealand, and their Iraqi driver were reported to have been killed in the northern city of Kirkuk after gunmen fired on their car, according to The Associated Press.
The most recent unrest in Sadr City began on Saturday when American forces arrested six of Mr. Sadr's followers, including two who were described as key aides. On Sunday, American forces battled with his militiamen, killing what the military later said were 18 of them, as his supporters blocked off streets and reportedly took over several public buildings.
At 2 a.m. on Monday, General Kimmitt said, American troops moved in to destroy Mr. Sadr's main headquarters in Baghdad, a concrete compound housing a small mosque, with fire from tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and "possibly," he said, from helicopters.
Another 17 or 18 fighters were killed during what General Kimmitt said was "the enemy firing rocket-propelled grenades indiscriminately, using civilians as shields."
On Monday morning after the battle, residents gathered to clear the site and try to rebuild it, as streets and shops reopened and traffic returned to the streets. Among Mr. Sadr's supporters the anger was deep.
"It's a criminal act, done by people considered as intruders on the law - whether it's the political law or the heavenly law," complained Sheik Fakher Subhi al-Azawi, head of the Ghurra tribe, who was helping a crowd of young people clear the rubble.
At the Qadissiya Hospital, where the dead and wounded were taken, Muhammad Jasib, 24, a student, lay with a bullet hole in his abdomen.
"I wished I got the bullet during a real fight with them," he said. "I was only standing near my house, that's all. Let them leave our land. Let them leave Iraq."
--------
OCCUPATION
The Marines Enter Falluja, With Peace Their Aim
May 11, 2004
By JOHN KIFNER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/international/middleeast/11FALL.html
FALLUJA, Iraq, May 10 - In a tiny, carefully choreographed convoy, and with not a shot fired, American marines on Monday made their way into the embattled city of Falluja, where a two-star general met for 25 minutes with his anointed local leaders on sullenly quiet streets.
Whether the meeting was a historic breakthrough, as the marines maintained afterward, or just another step in the Americans' effort to bring some sort of order to a country they have conquered but not fully subdued, remained to be seen.
What was clear was that it was another shift in the American effort to get control of the situation - this time, perhaps, by attaching itself to whatever local authority might be seen as legitimate, even if it was a holdover from Saddam Hussein's rule. Similar efforts appeared to be under way with the Shiite tribal leadership in the south in an attempt to undermine the insurgency led by the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
The foray into the city, the product of intensive and frequently revised planning, was in stark contrast to the American approach through the past month.
The rebellious city had been under military siege since April 5, after four American contractors were brutally slain in an ambush and their bodies defiled by a mob. Hundreds of local citizens and dozens of marines have been killed in street fighting.
But on Monday, the tough talk the marines had made over the previous month - that the killers must be turned over, that foreign fighters the marines believe have been holed up in the city must be surrendered and that all heavy weapons must be turned over - was noticeably gone.
Instead, Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis, the commander of the First Marine Division, told 14 sheiks and several other civic leaders about $40 million the marines had set aside for rebuilding the city, chunks of which have been destroyed in the fighting. He talked of "making Falluja a great city once again."
The general's earnestness was also illustrated by some 2,000 wheelbarrows piled up in pieces at their negotiation place for a community cleanup - although, in truth, much of the city consists of dirt.
The plan for the convoy had gone through a number of permutations. At first it was seen by planners as a show of strength, with preparations worthy of a major invasion, including tank support and air cover - a "thunder run," as they called it, into the city.
The operation was revised, scaled down, postponed and, apparently, nearly abandoned.
Then, at a three-hour meeting on Sunday afternoon, the plan was suddenly revived at the request of the city's new American-appointed overseer, Muhammad Latif, a Sunni Muslim and onetime intelligence colonel in the old Iraqi Army who was said to have been fired and jailed by Mr. Hussein after going to staff college in Britain.
Mr. Latif, in his usual European-cut gray suit, had played a behind-the-scenes role in negotiations with the Americans until they appointed the first general to head a new Iraqi security force in Falluja, Maj. Gen. Jasim Muhammad Saleh. The very picture of a Hussein-era officer, complete with thick mustache and old green uniform with swords and eagles on his shoulders, General Saleh was found to have been a commander of the feared Republican Guard and was quickly replaced.
The new version of the foray into the city was evidently intended to reinforce Mr. Latif's grip on power. The streets were lined with his men.
But the shops along the way were closed and deserted, and only a few men were out to watch, clustered in small groups, arms folded over their chests. They stared glumly at the joint convoy of 10 American armored vehicles and Humvees, accompanied by an equal number of white Nissan pickup trucks piled high with Iraqi police officers, the lead truck waving an old-style Iraqi flag.
The convoy went only a short distance into town, stopping at the mayor's office for tea, and did not venture into the tough neighborhoods where the Americans had fought insurgents.
"They don't like us," an American marine observed, looking over his machine gun in the turret of an armored vehicle.
Although the convoy itself was small, the security, under the direction of the Third Battalion, Fourth Marines, regarded as a particularly tough outfit and headed by Lt. Col. B. P. McCoy, was heavy. Two companies were posted as a quick-reaction force in case of trouble, and Predator drones and combat aircraft hovered overhead.
The troops gathered overnight and slept in a stony field, moving out at dawn. General Mattis, a combative commander who is revered by his men as a kind of warrior monk, had earlier laid out a battle plan to conquer the insurgents. Now he found himself in the role of peacemaker.
"My fine young sailors and marines," he said to the men in battle gear gathered around him after the convoy's safe return. "Sometimes history is made in small, dusty places like this. Today was good history because we did not get into a fight. Not a shot was fired. We did not come here to fight these people, we came here to free them."
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli link possible in US torture techniques
In exchange for interrogation training, did Washington award security contracts?
By Ali Abunimah
The Lebanon Daily Star
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=3446
CHICAGO, Illinois: The head of the American defense contracting firm implicated in the torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison has close ties to Israel and visited an Israeli "anti-terror" training camp in the occupied West Bank earlier this year.
Jack London, chairman, president and CEO of CACI International Incorporated, traveled to Israel in January this year as part of a high-level delegation of US Congressmen, defense contractors and pro-Israel lobbyists, sponsored and paid for in part by the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah, a pro-Israel lobbying and fundraising group, and Greenberg Traurig, LLP, a prominent Washington law and lobby firm.
The purpose of the visit, according to a CACI press release, was "to promote opportunities for strategic partnerships and joint ventures between US and Israeli defense and homeland security companies."
As one of the highlights of the visit, London was presented with the Albert Einstein Technology Award by Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz at a gala dinner at Jerusalem city hall, for "achievements in the field of defense and national security."
Delegates also spent several hours in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights with Housing and Construction Minister Effie Eitam, a former Israeli general, who is notorious for his view that Israel should "transfer" - that is, expel - all the Palestinians.
According to the official itinerary for the Jan. 11-17 Defense Aerospace Homeland Security Mission, obtained from the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah, London's trip included a visit to Beit Horon, "the central training camp for the anti-terrorist forces of the Israeli police and the border police," in the occupied West Bank. The visitors were also "briefed by top experts," and were able to "witness exercises related to anti-terror warfare."
Two CACI employees, Steven Stephanowicz and John Israel, were named in the leaked report by US Major General Antonio M. Taguba on the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Taguba wrote that Stephanowicz, a "contract US civilian interrogator," "allowed and/or instructed MPs (military police), who were not trained in interrogation techniques, to facilitate interrogations by 'setting conditions' which were neither authorized or in accordance with applicable regulations/policy. He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse."
John Israel, an interpreter, did not have the appropriate security clearance, according to Taguba.
Although Taguba recommended that Stephanowicz be terminated and his security clearance revoked, a May 5 statement from CACI confirmed, "at present, all CACI employees continue to work on site providing the contracted for services to our clients in that location." It added: "We have not received any information to stop any of our work, to terminate or suspend any of our employees."
Although no evidence has emerged directly linking CACI's involvement in the Abu Ghraib atrocities to Israel, it has long been known that the US military has been interested in "learning" from Israel's experience attempting to suppress the Palestinian uprising. In March 2003, for example, the AP reported that the "the (US) military has been listening closely to Israeli experts and picking up tips from years of Israeli Army operations in Palestinian areas and Lebanese towns."
This cooperation has included briefings of US personnel by Israeli officers, and, according to AP, "In January and February (2003), Israeli and American troops trained together in southern Israel's Negev Desert ... Israel has also hosted senior law enforcement officials from the United States for a seminar on counterterrorism."
Meanwhile, more evidence has emerged undermining the US thesis that the abuses at Abu Ghraib was the work of a "few bad apples." The Guardian reported that the "sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was not an invention of maverick guards, but part of a system of ill-treatment and degradation used by special forces soldiers that is now being disseminated among ordinary troops and contractors."
This system, known to insiders as "R2I," short for resistance to interrogation, also includes such methods as "hooding, sleep deprivation, time disorientation and depriving prisoners not only of dignity, but of fundamental human needs, such as warmth, water and food." These are all techniques long employed by Israel.
The visit of the US delegation that included the CACI head exposes a rarefied web of influence sharing in which US government officials and congressmen, defense contractors and lobbyists parcel out huge contracts, and siphon significant portions off to Israel.
As Batya Feldman of Israel's Globes financial news service put it, the visit provided Israeli companies with "an excellent opportunity to encounter big bucks in homeland security."
To help Israeli companies pry some of these "big bucks" loose, the visit included seminars for Israeli companies given by US pro-Israel lobbyists called "How to Approach the Homeland Security Department," and "How to Sell to the US Defense Department."
Israeli participants would have had a chance to test the helpful tips, since present on the trip were Assistant Secretary for Homeland SecurityRobert Liscouski and many leading US legislators, including top members of the US House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which jointly oversee tens of billions of dollars in military spending.
----
Palestinians Plan First Municipal Elections for Summer
May 11, 2004
New York Times
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/international/middleeast/11mide.html
JERUSALEM, May 10 - The Palestinian Authority said Monday that it would begin holding its first municipal elections late this summer, in a bid to stem public anger over corruption and mismanagement.
Under the plan, elected representatives will replace mayors and municipal council members who were appointed by the Palestinian Authority and who are, in many towns and cities, regarded as incompetent or crooked. The decision, by the Palestinian cabinet, also appeared to be intended to demonstrate to the outside world that the Palestinian leadership was bent on improving its governance. Elections are likely to be held first in the relatively tranquil West Bank city of Jericho in August, to be followed by elections in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere, officials said.
"We cannot talk about reform at a time there are appointments to the municipal councils," said Jamal Shobaki, the Palestinian minister of local government. "We need reform, and we need to respect the desire of the people."
In 1996, the Palestinian Authority held elections for president and legislative posts, as part of the Oslo peace plan. But it postponed municipal elections, fearing that the militant group Hamas would do well in them.
Hamas did not take part in the presidential or legislative elections, regarding them as more connected to Oslo, which the group rejected. Hamas has grown stronger during the current conflict with Israel. Hamas leaders have said in recent interviews that they are interested in competing in municipal elections.
Mr. Shobaki acknowledged that Hamas might fare well in the elections, but said, "Whatever the results are, the elections are an important mechanism." He added, in a reference to Hamas, that winning public office might force "the opposition" to be "more responsible."
Many Palestinian officials blame Israeli military pressure for growing lawlessness in their cities. Israel forbids uniformed Palestinian police officers to operate even in some big cities, like Nablus, saying they present a threat to Israeli soldiers.
In Nablus and elsewhere, gunmen have taken control of the streets, seizing hostages for ransom and extorting payments from businessmen.
Israeli troops raided Gaza City on Tuesday, killing at least three Palestinians in heavy fighting, and several Israelis were killed in an explosion nearby, witnesses told the Reuters news agency. Israeli sources said several Israelis were killed and others wounded in an explosion near Gaza City. Palestinian witnesses reported seeing an armored vehicle ripped apart by a blast.
In Gaza City, Israeli troops, backed by tanks and helicopter gunships, fought gunmen in the Zeitoun neighborhood known as a stronghold of Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the attack on the Israeli vehicle. Three Palestinians, at least two of them gunmen, were killed and more than 20 people were wounded.
Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian prime minister, said Monday that Palestinians would hold presidential and legislative elections only when Israel withdrew its forces from areas that, under Oslo, are supposed to be under Palestinian control.
Mr. Qurei called on the so-called quartet of mediators for the Middle East, particularly the United States, to pick a date for those elections "so that they stop saying there is no partner," a reference to the Israeli claim that the Palestinian leadership is not a credible partner for negotiations.
The quartet - the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia - is the sponsor of the peace plan, known as the road map, for fast-paced negotiations toward peace and a Palestinian state. That plan calls for Palestinian elections "as early as possible."
With the road map initiative stalled, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel is pursuing his own plan to withdraw soldiers and settlers from some occupied territory heavily populated by Palestinians. Though backed by the Bush administration, Mr. Sharon's plan was rejected by his own right-wing party, Likud, on May 2.
The Israeli group Peace Now reported Monday that as Mr. Sharon spoke of evacuating some established settlements, settlers were continuing to develop dozens of outposts that Israel was supposed to have torn down under the road map. Some 80 outposts have been set up on occupied territory during Mr. Sharon's three years in office, and about 24 of these have been taken down, according to Dror Etkes, who monitors settlements for Peace Now. Peace Now's surveys of settlements are regarded as authoritative by many, including American diplomats.
-------- latin america
US to search ships for arms in Panamanian waters
PANAMA CITY (AFP)
May 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040511202033.kxbaem3g.html
Panama will allow the US military to search Panamanian-flagged ships for illegal weapons in Panamanian waters, the government announced Tuesday.
The maritime agreement, to be signed Wednesday, is meant to halt proliferation and trafficking of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, Panama's Ministry of Government and Justice said in a statement.
"Legal authority will be given to both parties to board ships suspected of transporting illegal weapons of mass destruction ... and related materials," the statement said.
Panama's Justice Minister Arnulfo Escalona and US Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton will sign the agreement in Washington, it added.
Although the text has not been released, officials told AFP that under the agreement, the US military will be allowed to intercept and board Panamanian-flagged ships suspected of illegally transporting the banned weapons with Panama's prior consent.
The agreement is an extension of the Salas-Becker agreement, signed in 2001, which allows US forces to board ships flying flags of third countries while in Panamanian waters.
"This agreement sends a clear message to traffickers of these weapons that neither Panama nor the United States of America will allow such ships to be used to transport or illegally transfer items used to proliferate such weapons," the ministry statement said.
"It is a tangible example of cooperation in the field of nonproliferation, behind UN Security Council Resolution 1540, of April 28, 2004," the statement said.
The UN resolution urged member states to adopt effective means to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and vector systems, the statement said.
About 10,490 vessels are registered in Panama. Some 13,000 ships from different countries pass through the canal each year.
The United States invaded Panama in 1989 and captured strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega. In 1991, Panama signed an agreement allowing the United States to board ships suspected of carrying drugs or chemicals used in their manufacture.
-------- prisoners of war
Army boosts prison guard training
May 11, 2004
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040511-121745-7866r.htm
CRESAPTOWN, Md. - The Army is boosting the number of military police trained as prison guards amid complaints that MPs charged in the Iraqi abuse scandal were not prepared for such duty, officials said.
The Army will create a company of about 150 prison guards, plus a 50-member command structure, by Sept. 30, said officials of the Army Military Police Corps at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., who spoke late last week on the condition of anonymity.
An additional 300 soldiers guarding U.S. military prisoners at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., will be made available for duty in the Middle East, the officials said.
Also, two more companies of about 150 soldiers each will be included in fiscal 2006, the Army officials said.
With thousands of U.S.-held prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is running out of MPs trained as prison guards, said Jack Gordon, spokesman for the Army Reserve's 99th Regional Readiness Command, which oversees the unit at the center of the abuse scandal, the 372nd Military Police Company.
About 2 percent of the 5,000 solders trained as MPs each year receive detailed instruction in handling prisoners of war, civilian internees and other detainees, the Army said. During 17 weeks of training, they spend 115 academic hours on the subject, compared with 31 hours for other MPs, Army officials said.
Some of those charged in the scandal, as well as their families, have cited inadequate training in their defense. They say the soldiers, some trained as clerks or mechanics, were overwhelmed by the job of guarding as many as 250 prisoners each with little guidance except to "loosen up" some prisoners for interrogation.
Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, dismissed the contentions when he visited the 372nd's headquarters near Cumberland on May 1.
"I believe that members of this unit had the requisite training to ensure that they were aware of and competent in the task needed to secure enemy prisoners of war, and to ensure that they were aware of the requirement for humane treatment of prisoners," Gen. Helmly said.
The Army also has said that all soldiers, regardless of job assignments, learn about the Geneva Conventions prohibiting mistreatment of prisoners of war and others.
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Mistreatment Of Detainees Went Beyond Guards' Abuse
Ex-Prisoners, Red Cross Cite Flawed Arrests, Denial of Rights
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15492-2004May10?language=printer
BAGHDAD, May 10 -- Problems in the U.S.-run detention system in Iraq extended beyond physical mistreatment in prison cellblocks, involving thousands of arrests without evidence of wrongdoing and abuse of suspects starting from the moment of detention, according to former prisoners, Iraqi lawyers, human rights advocates and the International Committee for the Red Cross.
U.S.-led forces routinely rounded up Iraqis and then denied or restricted their rights under the Geneva Conventions during months of confinement, including rights to legal representation and family visits, the sources said.
In a report in February, the Red Cross stated that some military intelligence officers estimated that 70 percent to 90 percent of "the persons deprived of their liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake." Of the 43,000 Iraqis who have been imprisoned at some point during the occupation, only about 600 have been referred to Iraqi authorities for prosecution, according to U.S. officials.
The Red Cross study, posted Monday on the Wall Street Journal's Web site, concludes that the arrest and detention practices employed by U.S.-led forces in Iraq "are prohibited under International Humanitarian Law."
Now, facing international outcry over photographs of prisoner abuse less than two months before the planned handover of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on June 30, U.S. officials plan to dramatically reduce the number of Iraqis in military custody, from more than 8,000 to fewer than 2,000, according to people with knowledge of the issue. The release will send legions of prisoners, many of them angry and hardened by their incarceration, home to Sunni Muslim-dominated parts of north-central Iraq where resistance to the U.S. occupation has been fiercest.
American detention tactics have turned Iraqis such as Satae Qusay, a kebab chef, against an occupation they once supported. Qusay said he was arrested in June while visiting the house of his brother, a former low-ranking Baath Party official, and did not see an attorney during his subsequent three-month detention in a fog-bound prison camp in the southern city of Umm Qasr. There, he said, he was forced to endure a shower of soldiers' tobacco juice, eat food off a dirty floor and urinate on himself when he was prohibited from using bathrooms.
"They freed us from an oppressor," said Qusay, 40. "But now I think they came to laugh at us."
Prisoners and relatives of detainees interviewed for this article produced prison release papers, Red Cross visitation documents or identification bracelets as evidence of incarceration over the past year. The descriptions of abuse during arrest or imprisonment could not be independently verified.
The focus on abuse inside the Abu Ghraib prison and other U.S.-run detention facilities has obscured broader problems that began well before Iraqis arrived at the facilities, according to lawyers and rights advocates. Excessive Force
The 24-page Red Cross report describes a pattern of excessive force used by U.S. soldiers during raids at homes or businesses, frequently occurring after midnight. The Red Cross wrote that "ill-treatment during capture was frequent" and that it often included "pushing people around, insulting, taking aim with rifles, punching and kicking and striking with rifles."
Such tactics, which "seemed to reflect a usual modus operandi," the Red Cross report says, "appeared to go beyond the reasonable, legitimate and proportional use of force required to apprehend suspects or restrain persons resisting arrest or capture."
Most of the time, according to an assertion contained in the report and corroborated by former prisoners, U.S. soldiers arrested all the men found in a suspect's house. Most of those detained, judging by a sample of prisoners and their descriptions of fellow inmates, have been young to middle-aged men from Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle, the area north and west of the capital that is the heart of the anti-occupation resistance.
Ahmed Moeff Khatab, a 32-year-old plumber, said he was getting a shave in his local barbershop in Baghdad's Adhamiya neighborhood on Nov. 11 when a group of soldiers in U.S. military uniforms entered carrying AK-47s. Red-and-white scarves covered their faces, he said.
"They pulled me from the shop and put me in a Nissan pickup," said Khatab, who said the men spoke English and accused him of being a member of former president Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces. "They threw me face down, then blindfolded me and handcuffed me."
He said he did not know where he was taken because the soldiers did not remove his blindfold. They started beating him with pipes, he said, starting on his legs and back, then moving to his head.
"I was bleeding from my mouth and my ears," he said. "I fainted. When I woke up I was in a dog's cage" set in a courtyard of a local military base.
Naked in a Cage
Khatab said he was left naked in the cage for several days, receiving only scant food and water, until the soldiers hung him from a tree by his cuffed hands. "They told me they would bring my wife and hang her next to me," he said.
According to his release papers, Khatab was taken to Abu Ghraib, where he was held for four months before being released without an explanation. His two brothers are still in the prison, he said.
When U.S. forces rolled into Iraq in March 2003, there were few plans in place for dealing with the long-term detention of Iraqis, according to U.S. officials. Military trucks hauled coils of razor wire, which were used to create makeshift holding pens and jails on American bases.
The following month, after Hussein's government fell and Iraqi security forces effectively dissolved, U.S. troops found themselves responsible for detaining common criminals as well as senior members of Hussein's government. American detention centers, particularly a tent camp at Baghdad's airport, filled with looters, carjackers and thieves.
"The Iraqi system was totally destroyed," said New Jersey Superior Court Judge Donald F. Campbell, who served as the occupation authority's senior adviser to Iraq's Justice Ministry from April to September. "There were virtually no cells to hold Iraqis within their system when we arrived."
As guerrilla assaults on U.S. forces increased last summer, the U.S.-run jails were further swollen by Iraqis suspected of conducting or aiding attacks. By the early fall, there were thousands of these security detainees in U.S. custody.
They were held under the fourth Geneva Convention, which allows an occupying power, "for imperative reasons of security," to intern people deemed a risk to national stability. Unlike ordinary criminals, who are supposed to face trial in an Iraqi court, security detainees have generally not been granted access to attorneys. Instead, their continued detention is subject to the determination of a special panel composed of representatives of the U.S. military command's judge advocate general's office and the CIA, according to a person familiar with the process.
Under the Geneva Convention, detainees have the right to appeal and their detention should be reviewed every six months, but it is not known whether such practices were followed; U.S. military officials have not commented on the decision-making process, which occurs in secret.
"The system is not fair at all," said Malik Dohan, the president of the Iraqi Bar Association. "Aside from the question of torture, people are being held for long periods of time without having their cases reviewed by a court."
Although anguished relatives of security detainees often hire lawyers in the hope of obtaining a release, the lawyers have little recourse. "I have no solution," said Rajaa Shemari, an attorney for 13 security detainees. "Nobody knows the procedure. The lawyer has no role in these cases."
'A Secret Court'
The occupation authority set up a special court, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, in July to try some of the security detainees. But the court has moved slowly, completing only 87 investigations so far, according to a Defense Department report.
The court itself, located in a building that used to be a museum of Hussein's memorabilia, is closed to the public. A reporter who tried to enter was turned away twice by guards. "You cannot go in," one guard said. "Only lawyers and witnesses are permitted."
"This is just like the days of Saddam," said Khalid Saadi Awad, who wanted to enter the building to see whether his cousin was on trial. "The Americans have established a secret court."
Daniel Senor, a spokesman for the occupation authority, said the court is supposed to be open and attributed the closure to "an overzealous Iraqi security team." On most days, he said, "trials are open to the public for full viewing."
Shemari and other lawyers said they also faced difficulties in handling the cases of suspected criminals. Although Iraqi judges are supposed to adjudicate their cases, coordination problems between Iraqi courts and American-run prisons -- the former tracks prisoners by name and the latter by number -- mean that many detainees are never brought before a judge, the lawyers said.
"Where's the justice here?" said Nabil Abadi, an attorney for two non-security detainees. "The simplest right of a prisoner is to have a lawyer and to be brought before a judge. The Americans don't even allow this."
Human rights advocates here said the U.S. military and occupation authority took important steps in November to improve the system by opening neighborhood centers where families could get basic information about detained relatives.
But the idea lost much of its impact because U.S. officials failed to advertise the location of the centers, nine of which are open in Baghdad today. In addition, human rights workers say, U.S. officials faced a number of difficulties arising from language barriers that kept families from finding out the status of detained relatives, many of whom had simply disappeared.
Hania Mufti, an investigator for Human Rights Watch, said U.S. officials posted the names of detainees in English, so few families were able to read them. Furthermore, she said, rendering Arabic names into English led to many spelling inconsistencies that prevented families from locating sons and husbands on lists.
Visitation Rights Denied
The result, according to the Red Cross report, was that many prisoners were denied visitation rights. "The uncaring behavior of the CF [coalition forces] and their inability to quickly provide accurate information on persons deprived of their liberty for the families concerned seriously affects the image of the Occupying Powers among the Iraqi population," the report concludes.
Khulud Abdulwahab, 56, watched last August as U.S. troops hauled away her son and two nephews from their home in the town of Khalis in the Sunni Triangle. A former soldier in the Iraqi army, Harith, her son, was picked up based on information provided by a paid informer who told soldiers he was a member of the resistance.
Convinced of her son's innocence, Abdulwahab quit her job as an elementary school mathematics teacher to devote herself full time to securing his release. In April, she said, she believed she had nearly done so.
After petitioning the local Army base for help, Abdulwahab received a letter from the unit that arrested him stating that the men were wrongly accused. Written on Department of the Army stationery, it says the informer "is currently being tried in Iraqi courts in Khalis for bearing false witness."
"This false witness was the sole information used to detain the prisoner," says the letter, signed by the unit's executive officer. "All these men are innocent of the crimes they are accused of."
Since then, Abdulwahab has made the 400-mile journey by taxi to the Army's bleak prison camp in Umm Qasr five times, at a cost of about $100 per trip. And each time she has been rebuffed by prison guards, many of them Kuwaitis and Egyptians, who she said treat her with contempt.
"They told me this is no good, they won't work with this paper, and that I should just throw it away," Abdulwahab said. "I just want them to release my son from this heat and humiliation."
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Climate at Abu Ghraib distressed former interrogator
Says he was alarmed by the message from military commanders
By Lisa Myers Senior investigative correspondent
NBC News
May 11, 2004
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4946699/
As the investigation into Iraqi prisoner abuses continues, NBC News has obtained the first eyewitness account from an interrogator at the now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Torin Nelson arrived at Abu Ghraib prison last November and found what he calls one of the worst detention facilities he's seen in 12 years as an interrogator. "I was worried about working there from the moment I arrived, actually," he said.
While in the Army, Nelson interrogated prisoners at Bosnia and Guantanamo Bay. But this time, he was one of 27 civilian interrogators hired by a private company, CACI - known as "KHAKI" - to work in Iraq.
In an interview with NBC News, Nelson said he was alarmed, above all by the message from military commanders that they needed intelligence - at any cost.
"Well, 'anything goes,' to me as an interrogator, puts up a red flag," he said, "but with other interrogators that may be a green light, unfortunately." Nelson, who quit in February, was listed as a key witness in the Pentagon investigation and won't discuss whether he saw any abuses.
But he says military commanders did not provide nearly enough oversight nor indicate what line not to cross to sometimes inexperienced interrogators.
"There were a number of people, not just on the CACI side, but on the military side, that I felt needed more experience if they were actually going to be working as interrogators," said Nelson.
He says the quality of interrogators was so uneven it hurt collection and analysis of information and claims the hiring process was extremely lax. Nelson said he was hired by CACI after only a 35-minute telephone interview - far less scrutiny than usual.
He also challenged statements by the company and Pentagon that civilian contractors were always supervised. "Sometimes there were interrogations where I was completely alone if I wanted to be," he said.
On Monday, CACI's Web site lists some interrogator jobs in Baghdad involving "minimal supervision."
The Pentagon investigation blames one CACI interrogator, Steve Stefanowicz, for some of the horrors at Abu Ghraib, stating "he clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse."
CACI did not respond to repeated calls but has said none of its employees has been charged with wrongdoing. The company also says all potential interrogators are carefully screened and qualified.
Lisa Myers is NBC News' senior investigative correspondent.
----
INSPECTORS
Red Cross Found Abuses at Abu Ghraib Last Year
May 11, 2004
New York Times
By NEIL A. LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/politics/11RIGH.html
WASHINGTON, May 10 - In a visit to the Abu Ghraib prison last October, Red Cross inspectors were so unsettled by what they found that they broke off their visit and demanded an immediate explanation from the military prison authorities.
As recounted in a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, prisoners were being held "completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness," apparently for several days.
The inspectors were also able to document the exact sort of behavior that has produced a firestorm over the last two weeks: "acts of humiliation such as being made to stand naked against the wall of the cell with arms raised or with women's underwear over the heads for prolonged periods - while being laughed at by guards, including female guards, and sometimes photographed in this position."
The report also said military intelligence officers had confirmed the inspectors' impression that those "methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information."
The 24-page report, completed in February, appears to contradict several statements by senior Pentagon officials in recent days concerning how and when the military learned of potential abuses in Iraq, how they reacted to reports of abuses and how widespread the practices might have been.
A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva said Monday that the organization's president, Jakob Kellenberger, complained about the prison abuses directly to top Bush administration officials during a two-day visit to Washington in mid-January when he met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.
Antonella Notari, the chief spokeswoman for the international committee in Geneva, suggested that Mr. Kellenberger had raised the issue with senior administration officials because the situation had not improved sufficiently after the prison authorities in Baghdad had been informed of the criticisms.
"If it's a serious problem and it persists, we would make use of our contacts with higher-ranking people," she said.
Ms. Notari said the February report had been based on private interviews with prisoners of war and civilian internees during the 29 visits the committee's staff had conducted in 14 places of detention across Iraq between March 31 and Oct. 24, 2003.
The Red Cross document, which also covers abusive behavior at prisons run by the British armed forces, was first disclosed by The Wall Street Journal.
The report said that as far back as May of last year, the Red Cross reported to the military about 200 allegations of abuse, and that in July it complained about 50 allegations of abuse at a detention site called Camp Cropper. The latter complaint included one case in which a prisoner reported having been deprived of sleep, kicked repeatedly and injured, and had a baseball tied into his mouth. Medical examinations supported the prisoner's account.
The report called some of the abuses "tantamount to torture."
Mr. Powell's spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, said Monday that "when such information came to us, as it did over the course of time, late last year and early this year, we certainly took note of the information."
A spokesman for Ms. Rice said Monday that Mr. Kellenberger did not raise the issue of Iraq prison abuse with her at their meeting on Jan. 15. Sean McCormack, the spokesman, said staff members who had attended said their notes showed that "this issue was not discussed in this meeting." He said the entire session had been about the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
An aide to Mr. Wolfowitz said Mr. Kellenberger had briefly mentioned a coming report about problems at the Iraqi prisons. Charley Cooper, special adviser to Mr. Wolfowitz, said, "No mention was made of any specific allegations of abuse or mistreatment of prisoners at any of the facilities housing detainees inside Iraq."
Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview on Monday that the "timeline is not yet clear in my mind, but it is critical."
"If, in fact, Pentagon and other administration officials were alerted by the International Red Cross to the abuse in the prisons," she said, "it's very troubling to me that those allegations were not followed up and pursued." The Red Cross, she said, has enormous credibility and its observations should be taken very seriously. The International Committee of the Red Cross is typically given access to detention sites like Abu Ghraib to monitor human rights under an agreement in which it does not publicize its concerns but tries to work to resolve problems through the host government.
The February report seems at odds with some of the testimony given before Congress last week by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith and other top officials.
On Friday, General Smith was asked whether there were complaints about Abu Ghraib before a soldier at the prison turned over copies of incriminating pictures to investigators on Jan. 13.
"There were reports that there was trouble in those places, but not of the character we're talking about here," he replied. General Smith, the deputy commander of the Central Command, which supervises operations in Iraq, said the military responded formally on Dec. 24 to the Red Cross's complaints after its October visit, and had made improvements.
"Whether the response was adequate or not, I can't tell you," he said. "But the I.C.R.C. came back and visited 4 through 8 January and they - the indication from there was that there were improvements."
One military official said Monday that the Red Cross complaints appeared to have been handled by camp commanders in Iraq and not handed up the chain of command to someone like General Smith.
Fiona Fleck contributed reporting from Geneva for this article.
----
Iraqi abuse follows historic pattern
THOMAS WALKOM
May 11, 2004.
Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1084227009939&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795
Analytically, the Iraqi prisoner scandal comes as no surprise. Emotionally ... well, let's get into that later.
The United States is an occupying power in Iraq. It is also widely, although not universally, disliked by Iraqis. Its forces are under almost constant attack from small bands of resistance fighters.
In such a situation, occupying powers resort to harsh solutions. They need information on their shadowy enemies. But they have few friends among the locals.
Those of us born just after World War II recognize it as the Nazi problem.
The Nazis occupied much of Europe during that war. They were not always welcome in the countries they invaded. They needed information on local resistance fighters.
And so the Nazis got tough. They beat people up in cellars. They pulled fingernails. They practised collective punishment, jailing or shooting innocents - or destroying their homes - in reprisal for attacks against German forces.
It has become convenient to think of the Nazis as uniquely evil.
The sad fact is they weren't (even their poisonous anti-Semitism was an old story, although one carried out on an unprecedented scale).
Certainly, the tactics the Nazis used as an occupying power were not new. The Romans did much the same. So did the British at the height of their empire.
Indeed, the British invented the concentration camp during their war against South Africa's Boers as a method for dealing with a hostile population. The British also practised collective punishment in places like Palestine and Iraq.
To legalize unsavoury practices in their more troublesome colonies, the British created internal security acts, laws that allowed the occupying power to detain political enemies outside of judicial scrutiny. Ironically, even after the British pulled out, their old foes kept the same laws for use against new political enemies.
None of this is meant to suggest that the British were Nazis. Far from it. However, the point is that imperial powers run into similar situations when they occupy hostile territory. It should come as no surprise when their solutions follow a common pattern.
So, too, in Iraq today. One of the most telling stories to date on this scandal does not involve the well-photographed humiliations visited upon Iraqi prisoners.
Rather it is a New York Times piece written out of Baghdad last week that appeared under the anodyne headline, "General will trim inmate numbers at Iraq prison."
In this story, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the new commander in charge of Iraqi prisons, was quoted as to what he considered acceptable interrogation practices in light of the well-publicized abuse scandal.
His answers were telling. Miller did not cite the Geneva Convention, which bans "acts of violence against prisoners of war" or the U.S. constitution or, indeed, any Iraqi law. Instead, he said there were about 50 coercive techniques his soldiers used against detainees - including sleep deprivation.
Also considered legitimate were what he called "aggressive conversations" and forcing prisoners into "stress positions" until they talked. Exactly what would happen to those who did not comply were unclear since, according to Miller, interrogators are not allowed to physically touch prisoners.
Clearly, Miller - former head of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp - knows what he's talking about. In April, according to the Washington Post, the Pentagon approved a list of about 20 interrogation techniques for Guantanamo - including sleep deprivation, exposing prisoners to heat or cold, "invoking feelings of futility" and disorienting them through the use of bright lights and loud music.
Some officials told the Post that the list of approved techniques also included stripping the clothes from a prisoner under interrogation although others denied that this practice was authorized. The Gestapo would have considered all of this pretty tame stuff.
What is clear, however, is that the U.S. has formally authorized interrogation techniques against detainees held abroad that offend the Geneva Conventions and that would be patently illegal if tried at home.
All of this puts the Iraqi abuse scandal in a slightly different light.
It's alleged that some prisoners were tortured physically. But in many cases, prisoners were not physically harmed - just terrorized and humiliated, presumably to invoke "feelings of futility."
It could be argued that the much photographed Pfc. Lynndie England, seen in one shot leading a naked prisoner around by a leash, was merely doing her best to live up to the spirit of the Pentagon's interrogation guidelines.
Which is to say that the shock expressed by U.S. President George W. Bush and his underlings seems a bit forced.
That brings me to the emotional side of the Iraq scandal. Analytically, I'm not surprised. This is what occupying powers do. At the pit of my stomach, though, I feel sick. Canadians often criticize the U.S. But at the same time, we know the Americans better than anyone else and probably like them more.
To see them falling into this old pattern is very, very depressing.
Thomas Walkom's column appears on Tuesday. twalkom@thestar.ca.
-------- russia / chechnya
Chechen Leader's Killing Leaves Putin With Few Options
May 11, 2004
By SETH MYDANS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/international/europe/11chec.html
MOSCOW, May 10 - The assassination of the Russian-backed president of Chechnya on Sunday has left the Kremlin with few good options in pursuing a brutal and thankless war that has continued on and off for almost a decade.
The president, Akhmad Kadyrov, 52, was buried Monday in his home village in southeastern Chechnya just seven months after being elected in a stage-managed vote that was intended to demonstrate that the war had become a manageable, localized conflict.
As Moscow's surrogate, he had consolidated government functions and armed power, leaving the Kremlin with no obvious alternative. A new election is to be held by Sept. 9.
"The danger is that things could turn chaotic and you might see Chechnya being plunged into a new war or a war of personal feuds and retributions," said Dmitri Trenin, an expert on Chechnya with the Moscow Center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Although major combat had already ended when Mr. Kadyrov was elected in October, terrorist attacks have continued both in Chechnya and in other parts of Russia. Mr. Kadyrov was killed by a bomb that had been planted under the seats of the central stadium, where he was attending a World War II anniversary celebration in the capital, Grozny.
The number of people who were killed with him varies from one official report to another. In telephone interviews on Sunday, two officials said the overall toll was at least 14.
After a decade of war, Chechnya is filled with crosscurrents of feuds and violence, and experts said they could only guess at who might have placed the bomb. As of late Monday, no one had claimed responsibility.
Russian and Chechen officials blamed rebel bands for the killing. The most prominent rebel leader, Aslan Maskhadov, denied any involvement in an interview with a rebel news agency, Chechenpress.
A few days before he was killed, Mr. Kadyrov told the Russian news agency Itar-Tass, "I know the terrorists are trying to hunt me down."
Mr. Kadyrov's credentials as the Kremlin's man in Chechnya included a past as a Muslim religious leader and an anti-Moscow rebel. This background gave him a measure of credibility among some Chechens, but also many enemies.
Since his election, the surface of life in Chechnya had become quieter, and the occupying Russian military had removed some roadblocks in Grozny. But beneath this calm, Mr. Kadyrov's private army of 2,000 to 3,000 fighters was maintaining its grip through a campaign of kidnappings and terror, according to local residents and human rights groups.
Russian troops have also been implicated in kidnappings and killings.
Particularly worrying in the short run, said Tanya Lokshina, a human rights worker who was in Grozny on Sunday, is that Mr. Kadyrov's private army is now leaderless and more dangerous than ever.
The fighters, who include a number of rebel defectors, may now feel at risk and could stage a new wave of violence in an attempt to eliminate rivals, she said.
The fighters, known as Kadyrovtsy, are under the command of Mr. Kadyrov's son, Ramzan. On Monday, the Kremlin appointed him deputy head of the regional government, under a Russian envoy, Sergei Abramov, who is widely seen as a temporary place holder.
But the younger Mr. Kadyrov is not expected to succeed his father. He is only in his 20's, with a reputation for violence and without the political weight to maintain power.
"Kadyrov's death has left a political vacuum in Chechnya," said Ramazan Abdulatipov, a Russian member of Parliament. "It turns out that there is no one to pick up his banner."
Some officials in Moscow called on President Vladimir V. Putin to take direct control of Chechnya, a move that some experts said could provoke more civil war.
Mr. Trenin of the Carnegie Endowment suggested that Mr. Putin might seek to put together a coalition leadership in Chechnya, although that would be difficult given the antagonisms among leading figures there.
There is unlikely to be a solution to the Chechen conflict unless major steps are taken to improve the economy and find jobs for the young men who are now joining one or another of the various armed bands, said Leonid Dobrokhotov, a political expert in Moscow.
"For me, in the current economic and social conditions in Russia, this conflict looks to me to be unresolvable," he said.
Chechnya's vulnerability under the personalized leadership of Mr. Kadyrov echoes the larger political picture in Russia, where Mr. Putin - to a lesser extent - has centralized power as he enters his second term.
The Chechen war is seen as his war, escalated at his initiative in 1999 when he was prime minister under President Boris N. Yeltsin. Mr. Kadyrov's killing came just two days after Mr. Putin was inaugurated as president for a second four-year term, with a declaration that peace had finally returned to Chechnya.
On Monday, two Russian soldiers were killed in an ambush in the town of Shali, the Interfax news agency reported.
-------- spies
Secret World of U.S. Interrogation
Long History of Tactics in Overseas Prisons Is Coming to Light
By Dana Priest and Joe Stephens
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15981-2004May10?language=printer
Last of three articles
In Afghanistan, the CIA's secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as "The Pit," named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport, say U.S. government officials, counterterrorism experts and others. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert.
The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safekeeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.
"The number of people who have been detained in the Arab world for the sake of America is much more than in Guantanamo Bay. Really, thousands," said Najeeb Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who is representing the families of dozens of prisoners.
The largely hidden array includes three systems that only rarely overlap: the Pentagon-run network of prisons, jails and holding facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere; small and secret CIA-run facilities where top al Qaeda and other figures are kept; and interrogation rooms of foreign intelligence services -- some with documented records of torture -- to which the U.S. government delivers or "renders" mid- or low-level terrorism suspects for questioning.
All told, more than 9,000 people are held by U.S. authorities overseas, according to Pentagon figures and estimates by intelligence experts, the vast majority under military control. The detainees have no conventional legal rights: no access to a lawyer; no chance for an impartial hearing; and, at least in the case of prisoners held in cellblock 1A at Abu Ghraib, no apparent guarantee of humane treatment accorded prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions or civilians in U.S. jails.
Although some of those held by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo have had visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, some of the CIA's detainees have, in effect, disappeared, according to interviews with former and current national security officials and to the Army's report of abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The CIA's "ghost detainees," as they were called by members of the 800th MP Brigade, were routinely held by the soldier-guards at Abu Ghraib "without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention," the report says. These phantom captives were "moved around within the facility to hide them" from Red Cross teams, a tactic that was "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine, and in violation of international law."
CIA employees are under investigation by the Justice Department and the CIA inspector general's office in connection with the death of three captives in the past six months, two who died while under interrogation in Iraq, and a third who was being questioned by a CIA contract interrogator in Afghanistan. A CIA spokesman said the hiding of detainees was inappropriate. He declined to comment further.
None of the arrangements that permit U.S. personnel to kidnap, transport, interrogate and hold foreigners are ad hoc or unauthorized, including the so-called renditions. "People tend to regard it as an extra-judicial kidnapping; it's not," former CIA officer Peter Probst said. "There is a long history of this. It has been done for decades. It's absolutely legal."
In fact, every aspect of this new universe -- including maintenance of covert airlines to fly prisoners from place to place, interrogation rules and the legal justification for holding foreigners without due process afforded most U.S. citizens -- has been developed by military or CIA lawyers, vetted by Justice Department's office of legal counsel and, depending on the particular issue, approved by White House general counsel's office or the president himself.
In some cases, such as determining whether a U.S. citizen should be designated an enemy combatant who can be held without charges, the president makes the final decision, said Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to the president, in a Feb. 24 speech to the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.
Critics of this kind of detention and treatment, Gonzales said, "assumed that there was little or no analysis -- legal or otherwise -- behind the decision to detain a particular person as enemy combatant."
On the contrary, the administration has applied the law of war, he said. "Under these rules, captured enemy combatants, whether soldiers or saboteurs, may be detained for the duration of hostilities."
Because most of the directives and guidelines on these issues are classified, former and current military and intelligence officials who described them to The Washington Post would do so only on the condition that they not be identified.
Along with other CIA and military efforts to disrupt terrorist plots and break up al Qaeda's financial networks, administration officials argue that the interrogations are a key component of their global counterterrorism strategy and counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. As the CIA's deputy director, John McLaughlin, recently told the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks: "The country, with all its capabilities, is now much more orchestrated into an offensive mix that is relentless."
Military Jails and Prisons
Abu Ghraib -- where photographs were taken that have enraged the Arab world and rocked U.S. political and military leadership -- held 6,000 to 7,000 detainees at the time of the documented abuse. Today, it and other sites in Iraq hold more than 8,000 prisoners, U.S. and coalition officials said. They range from those believed to have played key roles in the insurgency to some who are held on suspicion of petty crimes.
Until the current scandal cast some hazy light, little has been publicly known about the Iraq detention sites, their locations and who was being held there. That has been a source of continuing frustration for international monitoring groups such as New York-based Human Rights Watch, which has repeatedly sought to visit the facilities. Even the military's investigative report on abuses at Abu Ghraib remains classified, despite having become public through leaks.
Far better known has been the Defense Department's facility at Guantanamo Bay. The open-air camps there house about 600 detainees, flown in from around the world over the past two years. Secrecy there remains tight, with detainees and most of the facilities off-limits to visitors.
The U.S. Supreme Court is deciding whether detainees held there, whom the Pentagon has declared "enemy combatants" in the war against terrorism, should have access to U.S. courts.
Last week, the U.S. military acknowledged that two Guantanamo Bay guards had been disciplined in connection with use of excessive force against detainees. And U.S. defense officials confirmed the existence of a list of approved interrogation techniques, dating to April 2003, that included reversing sleep patterns, exposing prisoners to hot and cold, and "sensory assault," including use of bright lights and loud music.
The treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan has received less public attention.
The U.S. military holds 300 or so people at Bagram, north of the capital of Kabul, and in Kandahar, Jalalabad and Asadabad. Human Rights Watch estimates that at least 700 people had been released from those sites, most of them held a few weeks or less. Special Forces units also have holding centers at their firebases, including at Gardez and Khost.
In December 2002, two Afghans died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan. The U.S. military classified both as homicides. Another Afghan died in June 2003 at a detention site near Asadabad.
"Afghans detained at Bagram airbase in 2002 have described being held in detention for weeks, continuously shackled, intentionally kept awake for extended periods of time, and forced to kneel or stand in painful positions for extended periods," said a report in March by Human Rights Watch. "Some say they were kicked and beaten when arrested, or later as part of efforts to keep them awake. Some say they were doused with freezing water in the winter."
CIA Detention
Before the U.S. military was imprisoning and interrogating people in Afghanistan and Iraq, the CIA was scooping up suspected al Qaeda leaders in such far-off places as Pakistan, Yemen and Sudan. Today, the CIA probably holds two to three dozen captives around the world, according to knowledgeable current and former officials. Among them are al Qaeda leaders Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh in Pakistan and Abu Zubaida. The CIA is also in charge of interrogating Saddam Hussein, who is believed to be in Baghdad.
The location of CIA interrogation centers is so sensitive that even the four leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who are briefed on all covert operations, do not know them, congressional sources said. These members are given periodic reports about the captives, but several members said they do not receive information about conditions under which prisoners are held, and members have not insisted on this information. The CIA has told Congress that it does not engage in torture as a tactic of interrogation.
"There's a black hole on certain information such as location, condition under which they are held," said one congressional official who asked not to be identified. "They are told it's too sensitive."
In Afghanistan, the CIA used to conduct some interrogations in a cluster of metal shipping containers at Bagram air base protected by three layers of concertina wire. It is unclear whether that center is still open, but the CIA's main interrogation center now appears to be in Kabul, at a location nicknamed "The Pit" by agency and Special Forces operators.
"Prisoner abuse is nothing new," said one military officer who has been working closely with CIA interrogators in Afghanistan. A dozen former and current national security officials interviewed by The Washington Post in 2002, including several who had witnessed interrogations, defended the use of stressful interrogation tactics and the use of violence against detainees as just and necessary.
The CIA general counsel's office developed a new set of interrogation rules of engagement after the Sept. 11 attacks. It was vetted by the Justice Department and approved by the National Security Council's general counsel, according to U.S. intelligence officials and other U.S. officials familiar with the process. "There are very specific guidelines that are thoroughly vetted," said one U.S. official who helps oversee the process. "Everyone is on board. It's legal."
The rules call for field operators to seek approval from Washington to use "enhanced measures" -- methods that could cause temporary physical or mental pain.
U.S. intelligence officials say the CIA, contrary to the glamorized view from movies and novels, had no real interrogation specialists on hand to deal with the number of valuable suspects it captured after Sept. 11. The agency relied on analysts, psychologists and profilers. "Two and a half years later," one CIA veteran said, "we have put together a very professional, controlled, deliberate and legally rationalized approach to dealing with the Abu Zubaidas of the world."
U.S. intelligence officials say their strongest suit is not harsh interrogation techniques, but time and patience.
'Renditions'
Much larger than the group of prisoners held by the CIA are those who have been captured and transported around the world by the CIA and other agencies of the U.S. government for interrogation by foreign intelligence services. This transnational transfer of people is a key tactic in U.S. counterterrorism operations on five continents, one that often raises the ire of foreign publics when individual cases come to light.
For example, on Jan. 17, 2002, a few hours before Bosnia's Human Rights Chamber was to order the release of five Algerians and a Yemeni for lack of evidence, Bosnian police handed them over to U.S. authorities, who flew them to Guantanamo Bay.
The Bosnian government, faced with public outcry, said it would compensate the families of the men, who were suspected of making threats to the U.S. and British embassies in Bosnia.
The same month, in Indonesia, Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, suspected of helping Richard C. Reid, the Briton charged with trying to detonate explosives in his shoe on an American Airlines flight, was detained by Indonesian intelligence agents based on information the CIA provided them. On Jan. 11, without a court hearing or a lawyer, he was hustled aboard an unmarked U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet parked at a military airport in Jakarta and flown to Egypt.
It was no coincidence Madni ended up in Egypt. Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are well-known destinations for suspected terrorists.
"A lot of people they [the U.S.] are taking to Jordan, third-country nationals," a senior Saudi official said. "They can do anything they want with them, and the U.S. can say, 'We don't have them.' "
In the past year, an unusual country joined that list of destinations: Syria.
Last year U.S. immigration authorities, with the approval of then-acting Attorney General Larry Thompson, authorized the expedited removal of Maher Arar to Syria, a country the U.S. government has long condemned as a chronic human rights abuser. Maher, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, was detained at JFK International Airport in New York as he was transferring to the final leg of his flight home to Canada.
U.S. authorities say Arar has links to al Qaeda. Not wanting to return him to Canada for fear he would not be adequately followed, immigration officials took him, in chains and shackles, to a New Jersey airfield, where he was "placed on a small private jet, and flown to Washington D.C.," according to a lawsuit filed recently against the U.S. government. He was flown to Jordan, interrogated and beaten by Jordanian authorities who then turned him over to Syria, according to the lawsuit.
Arar said that for the 10 months he was in prison, he was beaten, tortured and kept in a shallow grave. After much pressure from the Canadian government and human rights activists, he was freed and has returned to Canada.
CIA Director George J. Tenet, testifying earlier this year before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, said the agency participated in more than 70 renditions in the years before the attacks. In 1999 and 2000 alone, congressional testimony shows, the CIA and FBI participated in two dozen renditions.
Christopher Kojm, a former State Department intelligence official and a staff member of the commission, explained the rendition procedure at a recent hearing: "If a terrorist suspect is outside of the United States, the CIA helps to catch and send him to the United States or a third country," he testified. "Though the FBI is often part of the process, the CIA is usually the main player, building and defining the relationships with the foreign government intelligence agencies and internal security services."
The Saudis currently are detaining and interrogating about 800 terrorism suspects, said a senior Saudi official. Their fate is largely controlled by Saudi-based joint intelligence task forces, whose members include officers from the CIA, FBI and other U.S. law enforcement agencies.
The Saudi official said his country does not participate in renditions and today holds no more than one or two people at the request of the United States. Yet much can hinge on terminology.
In some interrogations, for example, specialists from the United States and Saudi Arabia develop questions and an interrogation strategy before questioning begins, according to one person knowledgeable about the process. During interrogation, U.S. task force members watch through a two-way mirror, he said.
"Technically, the questioning is done by a Saudi citizen. But, for all practical purposes, it is done live," he said. The United States and Saudis "are not 'cooperating' anymore; we're doing it together."
He said the CIA sometimes prefers Saudi interrogation sites and other places in the Arab world because their interrogators speak a detainee's language and can exploit his religion and customs.
"As hard as it is to believe, you can't physically abuse prisoners in Saudi Arabia," the Saudi official said. "You can't beat them; you can't electrocute them."
Instead, he said, the Saudis bring radical imams to the sessions to build a rapport with detainees, who are later passed on to more moderate imams. Working in tandem with relatives of the detainees, the clerics try to convince the subjects over days or weeks that terrorism violates tenets of the Koran and could bar them from heaven.
"According to our guys, almost all of them turn," the Saudi official said. "It's like deprogramming them. There is absolutely no need to put them through stress. It's more of a therapy."
The Saudis don't want or need to be directed by American intelligence specialists, who have difficulty understanding Arab culture and tribal relations, he said. "We know where they grew up," he said of the detainees. "We know their families. We know the furniture in their home."
Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.
--------
Focus Shifts From Military Police to Intelligence
By Walter Pincus and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15947-2004May10.html
A Senate hearing on the burgeoning Iraq prison abuse scandal will swing the spotlight today from the military police who committed the alleged offenses to the military intelligence community that oversaw them. In making that shift, senators said, they are likely to begin asking about the multiple chains of command that have blurred lines of responsibility in the U.S. effort in Iraq.
Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said he will ask Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, whether he approved the controversial use of Army prison guards to soften up Iraqi detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison when he appears before the panel.
Cambone, the Pentagon's top intelligence official, testified on Friday before the same panel that it was at his "encouragement" that Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was head of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where suspected al Qaeda terrorists have been questioned, was sent in August to survey Abu Ghraib. Cambone also said he was aware of Miller's recommendation that "we could get a better coordination between those who were being held and those who were being interrogated."
A report by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba quotes Miller as deciding that to speed intelligence-gathering in Iraq, "it is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees." A November order, the report said, put the prison effectively under the control of military intelligence. The report criticized that decision, saying it violated Army regulations and procedures. In his first public appearance since his report became worldwide news, Taguba is scheduled to testify at the first of the two sessions the Armed Services Committee has planned for today.
The torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib, photographs of which have outraged the world, took place between October and December 2003, after Miller's recommendations were made to Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, commander of coalition forces in Iraq.
Reed, a former Army officer, said he cannot believe the policy "was thought up by one major general and adopted by a lieutenant general without going higher up" for approval by senior Pentagon civilians at the top of the chain of command. He also said he thinks the policy violates the Geneva Conventions governing prisoners' rights.
The civilian attorney for Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, the commander of the military police personnel who are accused of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, said the general had no idea of what military intelligence interrogators did in certain parts of the prison after the change in authority.
"The main focus of Abu Ghraib, in those days, became intelligence collection and interrogation," Neal Puckett, the lawyer, said in an interview yesterday. "All she knows is there was indeed pressure on [military intelligence officers] to find people who were committing crimes against coalition forces and to get high-value targets. She wasn't briefed on that."
Those changes were made after a summer of angst in the U.S. military intelligence community over its failure to better understand the size and makeup of a foe in Iraq that was proving surprisingly persistent.
In addition, relations between military intelligence and the big CIA station in Baghdad were strained, U.S. officials in Baghdad said in recent interviews. No CIA witnesses have been called for today's hearing, although some prisoners in the custody of agency officers were held and interrogated at Abu Ghraib, said a senior intelligence official who spoke on the condition that he not be named. The practice of moving around the CIA's detainees to hide them from other detainees violated both Army and CIA rules, the official said.
As the committee looks at intelligence and the changes made last fall in lines of responsibility, it also necessarily will get into the entire problem of "chain of command" issues, Senate staff members said. The primary question in that area is who ultimately was responsible for the abuse -- and how high up knowledge, or even encouragement, of abuse went.
Insiders from the U.S. occupation authority say that one of the more puzzling problems of the U.S. effort has been that -- in contrast to post-World War II occupation efforts by the United States -- there is no one official in charge. Rather, they say, there are three parallel command structures -- one each for the military, for the intelligence-gathering effort and for the civilian occupation authority. The lines of those different commands do not meet until they come together at the top of the Bush administration in the Pentagon and the White House.
In the view of some people who have served in the U.S. occupation effort in Iraq, that structure violates the principle of "unity of command" and has made it difficult to coordinate efforts among the three U.S. communities. "Chain of command, of all the problems in Iraq, was the biggest problem," one person who served in a senior position in the U.S. occupation authority said yesterday. He asked not to be named because he still works with the U.S. government.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz emphatically rejected those concerns. He said that the U.S. effort in Iraq should not be compared with the post-World War II occupations. "We're not planning five- and 10-year occupations like we had in Japan and Germany," he said in an interview Saturday.
He also said that the command structure had not been too diffuse, producing divisions between L. Paul Bremer, the head of the civilian occupation authority, and Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, the chief of the U.S. Central Command. Rather, he said, "most of the complaints are that there is too much unity of command, with both Bremer and Abizaid reporting to the same guy" -- that is, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.
--------
Caution and Years of Budget Cuts Are Seen to Limit C.I.A.
May 11, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/politics/11intel.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 10 - Even now, 32 months after the Sept. 11 attacks, America's clandestine intelligence service has fewer than 1,100 case officers posted overseas, fewer than the number of F.B.I. agents assigned to the New York City field office alone, government officials say.
Since George J. Tenet took charge of the Central Intelligence Agency seven years ago, rebuilding that service has been his top priority. This year, more new case officers will graduate from a year-long course at Camp Peary in Virginia than in any year since the Vietnam War. They are the products of aggressive new recruiting aimed in particular at speakers of Arabic and others capable of operating in the Middle East and South Asia.
But it will be an additional five years, Mr. Tenet and others have warned, before the rebuilding is complete and the United States has the network it needs to adequately confront a global threat posed by terrorist groups and hostile foreign governments. In an interview on April 30, James L. Pavitt, who as the C.I.A.'s deputy director for operations oversees the clandestine service, said he still needed 30 to 35 percent more people, including officers based overseas and in the United States, supervisors and support workers.
"I need hundreds and hundreds, thousands," Mr. Pavitt said. At a time when the United States is fighting a war on terrorism and a war in Iraq, he said, "we are running hard to get the resources we need."
On Capitol Hill and among former intelligence officers, most experts agree that the clandestine service needs improvement, but there is some debate about whether the agency is addressing the right problems.
"The question is, should you require better before you get bigger?" said a senior Congressional official, describing a question on Capitol Hill that he said had been prompted by inquiries into intelligence failures involving Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.
The size and scope of the clandestine service, whose overseas officers recruit and supervise spies and work with foreign intelligence services but rarely try to infiltrate foreign targets themselves, has always been among the government's most closely guarded secrets.
But as the dimensions of the intelligence failures on Iraq and Sept. 11 have come to light in recent months, so too has a picture of American spying operations stretched thin through the 1990's and only now recovering.
In numbers, Mr. Pavitt said in the interview, the clandestine service hit a low point in 1999, when its ranks had been trimmed by 20 percent from its highs during the cold war. And in morale and sense of mission, other experts say, the clandestine service suffered through the 1990's because it was slow to shift its sights from cold war targets, and in some ways became more cautious.
"I cannot tell you the amount of information we didn't get, the operations we didn't undertake, the number of good sources we didn't recruit," Representative Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican and former C.I.A. case officer who is chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of the 1990's. "We did hurt ourselves."
From the agency's failure to anticipate India's nuclear test in 1998 to the as yet unsubstantiated reports about Iraq's illicit weapons capabilities, the weakness of the agency's human intelligence operations has been manifest in repeated embarrassments. At critical junctures, intelligence officials have acknowledged in recent testimony and interviews, the C.I.A. has proved unable to recruit agents who could provide reliable information about Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda, and has had to rely extensively on foreign intelligence services whose information is often unreliable.
A year before the invasion of Iraq, a top intelligence target for more than a decade, the C.I.A. had just four human sources of intelligence in the Iraqi government, senior intelligence officials now acknowledge.
"If we had been able to successfully penetrate Al Qaeda, imagine what that would have meant!" said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the agency. "If we had been able to penetrate Saddam Hussein's government, imagine what that would have meant!"
A Program 'in Disarray'
In his own recent public remarks, Mr. Tenet has blended defiance with candor. "To be sure, we had difficulty penetrating the Iraqi regime with human sources, but a blanket indictment of our human intelligence around the world is simply wrong," he said in a speech in February at Georgetown University in which he called attention to the role played by human intelligence in the capture of leading Qaeda figures.
Still, in testimony this month before the independent commission on the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet was scathing in describing the clandestine service he inherited when he took charge in 1997. "The infrastructure to recruit, train and sustain officers for our clandestine services - the nation's human intelligence capability - was in disarray," he said.
In interviews, current and former intelligence officials along with senior Republican and Democratic lawmakers were blunt in acknowledging weaknesses of human intelligence operations stemming from the Clinton administration, even as they insisted that improvements were being made and praised the courage and sacrifices of clandestine officers abroad. The officials and lawmakers said they understood that it would take time to complete the overhaul.
They said the problems were a product in part of inadequate personnel, after a six-year stretch of Congressional budget cutting during the early and mid-1990's in which some C.I.A. stations and bases overseas were closed and the number of officers was slashed.
But they also cited a culture of "risk aversion" that was intensified by a 1995 directive by Mr. Tenet's predecessor, John M. Deutch, amid a scandal over C.I.A. activities in Guatemala. The order was widely interpreted by the agency's officers as a warning against consorting with unsavory individuals.
"I'm not going to succeed against terrorism unless I recruit terrorists," Mr. Pavitt said. "I'm not going to succeed in terms of the tough issues in this business unless I'm right in the middle of it."
The officials also pointed to a lack of nimbleness within what is still a highly bureaucratic organization, whose clandestine officers remain primarily white men posted in embassies overseas. In the large majority of cases they pose as diplomats or other government officials under what is known as official cover, an arrangement that some critics say limits the officers' ability to operate outside diplomatic circles.
"Ideally, within 10 years, 50 percent of case officers should be under nonofficial cover," said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. officer who referred to a more elaborate arrangement in which officers assume identities as bankers, consultants or other professionals. Mr. Gerecht, who served in the Middle East, has criticized the embassy-centered structure for its lack of success in recruiting spies capable of penetrating terrorist groups.
Removing Hurdles
Mr. Smith, who served as the C.I.A.'s general counsel under Mr. Deutch and who drafted the guidelines for him, said the guidelines had been intended as a "hunting license" to establish a formal process for the recruiting of questionable new agents and allow case officers to work with them without worrying about being disciplined. But in retrospect, Mr. Smith said, he regarded the guidelines as a mistake, in part because "many in the field resented the guidelines and some may have used them as an excuse when they were not able to recruit sources in terrorist groups."
"Management tried to address this by encouraging risk," Mr. Smith said, "but were not successful because it became a kind of mantra that the guidelines were a tremendous hindrance to recruiting. My understanding is that post 9/11, that's all in the past."
The directorate of operations "is aggressively recruiting and management is fully supporting their efforts, including encouraging great risk taking,'' he continued. "To my mind, this shows the folly of trying to manage intelligence activities by looking at scandals in the rear view mirror. We tried to fix one problem and created another one. Hopefully, it's now been solved."
Even now, intelligence officials acknowledge, the agency's success in hiring case officers fluent in critical languages and comfortable in foreign cultures has been limited by a system that generally requires that new officers be no older than 35 and that they qualify for a top secret security clearance. That entails a background check that takes at least six months and in which recent drug use, a criminal record or questionable integrity can be disqualifying.
The intelligence officials also said the impact of the aggressive hiring has not been felt immediately because of the time it takes to teach new hires, which includes not only the course at Camp Peary but often extensive language training, sometimes overseas. Some former intelligence officials said that at least some of these rules should be loosened, but in an interview, a senior intelligence official said a decision had been made "not to lower the bar."
Because even the C.I.A.'s overall budget and staffing levels remain classified, agency officials declined in interviews to say how much the agency or the clandestine service had grown in recent years.
By all other accounts, there has been an extraordinary surge in spending and hiring since the Sept. 11 attacks across the vast intelligence community, which spans some 15 agencies and has an overall budget that is nearing $40 billion a year.
"Budgets and recruitment efforts are dramatically improved, but I don't think we are where we need to be," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee.
Producing New Officers
Still, recent public statements by Mr. Tenet and others, along with comments made by Mr. Pavitt in the interview, have described a major turnabout since 1995, when Mr. Tenet came to the agency as deputy director and found that only 25 new officers were emerging from that year's two graduating classes - a rate Mr. Tenet publicly called "unbelievably low." In the last year, more than 300 people have graduated, former intelligence officials say.
The C.I.A. will not confirm that number, or even the existence of the training facility at Camp Peary. But in an interview, officials in charge of recruiting at the agency, including Bob Rebello, the chief human resources officer, said that the number of hires into the clandestine service was still rising, at a rate at least 20 percent a year for the last two years.
The directorate of operations, with an overall staff estimated at 5,000, is only one of the C.I.A.'s three main branches. (The others include the directorate of science and technology, and the directorate of intelligence, which is in charge of analysis.) Along with case officers and others who recruit and supervise agents, the directorate includes professional and support staff and groups responsible for covert and paramilitary operations and other so-called "special activities."
But the role played by its case officers is regarded by intelligence professionals as particularly critical, in that their mission aims to obtain from human sources the kind of information that no spy satellite or listening device can provide.
"Having reliable sources that can get to the plans and intentions information is the core mission; it always has been," Representative Goss said.
A Turnaround
It was Mr. Pavitt, a career spy with bushy white hair who has spent more than 30 years at the C.I.A., who recently provided the clearest indication of how limited the agency's overseas foreign presence remains.
"We cover a terrorist target around this globe using a cadre of case officers that is smaller than the number of F.B.I. officers who work in New York City alone," Mr. Pavitt said in a "written statement for the record" that accompanied his testimony on April 14 to the Sept. 11 commission. It was rare public testimony from a clandestine service chief.
An F.B.I. spokesman said that about 1,100 agents are assigned to the New York field office, which includes the city's five boroughs, Long Island and six counties north of the city. In the interview on April 30, Mr. Pavitt declined to expand on his written statement, but other officials confirmed that fewer than 1,100 officers were assigned overseas.
Today, Mr. Pavitt said, 50 percent of the funding in the directorate of operations and 30 percent of personnel within the clandestine service are focused on terrorism, representing an enormous change from 15 years ago, when the vast bulk of the agency was oriented to the Soviet Union. "Every station in the clandestine service has counterterrorism as its top priority," Mr. Pavitt said in his April 14 testimony.
In the interview, Mr. Pavitt said it would be wrong to regard the agency as risk-averse. But he also described as "unnecessary" the directive that was issued by Mr. Deutch, which was rescinded under Mr. Tenet in 2002. Mr. Pavitt said the C.I.A. was only now "turning around" what he called a mistaken perception among some officers that they could not deal with criminals and other unsavory individuals.
"I worry immensely that there are people who are trying to kill us as we sit here and talk," Mr. Pavitt added. "It is an extraordinary threat."
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Military Spending Raises Questions
Lawmakers: Bush Bypassed Congress
By Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15749-2004May10?language=printer
When Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio) went on an inspection trip to several Persian Gulf countries in the summer of 2002, he was dazzled by the state-of-the-art command centers, airstrips and other facilities being built there for the U.S. military.
But he was also troubled. Some of what he saw or learned from military briefers had not been approved by the House Appropriations Committee panel on military construction, which he then chaired. "I knew I didn't have that kind of money," he quipped recently.
Hobson's inquiries ultimately led to a modest tightening of controls over the Pentagon's ability to move money between military accounts without prior approval from Congress. But the episode has sparked concerns on the part of some lawmakers that the Bush administration largely bypassed Congress as it expanded installations in the Persian Gulf region before the war with Iraq.
President Bush has acknowledged that months before Congress voted an Iraq war resolution in October 2002, he approved about 30 projects in Kuwait that helped set the stage for war, with "no real knowledge or involvement" of Congress, according to "Plan of Attack," a new book by Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post.
A Pentagon briefing paper supplied to Congress after publication of the Woodward book states that by July 2002, "in the course of preparing for a contingency in Iraq, U.S. Central Command [Centcom] developed rough estimates of $750 million in preparatory tasks."
In August and September, the Pentagon said, $178 million was made available for 21 projects, mainly in Kuwait, involving communications equipment, fuel supplies, humanitarian rations and Centcom's forward headquarters.
In Kuwait, the projects included repairs of airfield lighting and upgrades of munitions storage at the Al Jaber and Al Salem air bases; an inland petroleum-distribution system facility; a detention center to supplement the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and preparation of facilities to "support deployment of Army forces." A $15 million allocation was granted to "provide for communications equipment, utilities, equipment and sustainment support for the U.S. base at Arifjan Base Camp in Kuwait."
Also approved was money to build a forward operating headquarters in As Sayliyah in Qatar and upgrade ammunition storage and handling facilities in Oman.
Testifying last month before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has partly disputed Woodward's account, saying that nothing was built in the region before October that had Iraq as the "exclusive purpose."
In a statement to The Post last week, the Defense Department said it had "provided all the notification for war on terrorism efforts required by Congress."
But the extent to which key congressional committees were given details of the prewar buildup is now a matter of contention between the Pentagon and some senior lawmakers, who say that, at the least, the Pentagon failed to follow the spirit of the laws requiring consultation.
In August, Hobson and aides traveled to Turkey, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and saw work underway or learned about projects that had not been approved by the military construction subcommittee.
"I did what any congressman would do," Hobson said in an interview last week. "Our role in appropriations is to find money [for projects] but also to look and see where the funding is going."
Initially, however, Pentagon officials provided few details to Hobson and his aides, he said. They argued that the spending was legal under guidelines that allowed the military to transfer funds appropriated for "operations and maintenance" into a "contingency" construction account when the military needs to build facilities in territory that is not under U.S. control.
An October 2002 classified briefing for congressional committees provided only general information, and Hobson's subcommittee kept pressing for what is known as Form 1391s: descriptions of individual projects that include line-item detail.
Pentagon officials provided congressional staffs with additional briefings on spending in the winter and spring of 2003, but congressional aides, who asked not to be named, said the details were still often spotty, even allowing for the need to safeguard the security of U.S. facilities and avoid political difficulties for Muslim governments providing secret support to the United States.
The wrangle continued into the spring of 2003, when Congress, over the strong objections of the Defense Department, added a provision to a new spending bill signed by Bush on April 16, 2003. It set a $150 million ceiling on the amount of funds that could be transferred to the Pentagon's "contingency" construction account and required seven-day advance notification of the reasons for the transfer.
The provision was backed by Rep. Joe Knollenberg (R-Mich.), who succeeded Hobson as chairman of the military construction panel in early 2002.
"Oversight is always needed," Knollenberg said. "We like to trust, but also verify."
Pentagon officials have continued to insist that the Defense Department adhered carefully to the letter of the law.
In its statement last week, the Pentagon said only one of the projects, with a value of $1.4 million, met the definition of a "military construction project" under the jurisdiction of the House subcommittee. That lone project was not started until Congress was notified of it in October 2002, it said.
The other construction projects, it added, involved "temporary facilities or facility improvements that did not meet the military construction criteria."
But Thomas Gavin, a spokesman for Sen. Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, took issue with that. Gavin said 11 of the 21 projects qualified as military construction activities.
"The first time that the staff of the defense subcommittee saw that list was after the publication of Mr. Woodward's book," he said.
Gavin said an October 2002 classified briefing for congressional defense staffs covered "parts" of three of the 11 projects and a second briefing the following April covered an additional four.
"To the best of our knowledge, the administration failed to follow the law when it came to keeping the people's representatives fully informed on how they were spending these dollars," Gavin said.
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The Doctrine of Atrocity
U.S. against "them"-a tradition of institutionalized brutality
by Nicholas Turse
May 11th, 2004
Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0419/turse.php
The Painful Lessons of Abu Ghraib
"Kill one man, terrorize a thousand," reads a sign on the wall of the U.S. Marines' sniper school at Camp Pendleton in California. While the marines work their mayhem with M-40A3 bolt-action sniper rifles, most recently in Fallujah, a different kind of terror has been doled out in Iraq by the U.S. Army at Abu Ghraib prison, where, according to an army probe first reported by Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker, "sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" were the order of the day between October and December of 2003. One of the many questions arising from the Abu Ghraib scandal is how widespread is the brutality and inhumane treatment of Iraqis.
Just last month, the Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing a series of brutal war crimes committed by American troops during the Vietnam War. It took more than 35 years for the horrors committed by a "Tiger Force" unit to be fully exposed, but the Blade got more ink in the national press and TV for winning the Pulitzer than the stories themselves got when they were published last fall. The paper detailed the army's four-and-a-half-year investigation, starting in 1971, of a seven-month string of atrocities by an elite, volunteer, 45-man Tiger Force unit of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division that included the alleged torture of prisoners, rapes of civilian women, mutilations of bodies, and the killing of anywhere from nine to well over 100 unarmed civilians. The army's inquiry concluded that 18 U.S. soldiers committed crimes including murder and assault. However, not one of the soldiers, even those still on active duty at the time of the investigation, was ever court-martialed. Moreover, as the paper noted, six soldiers were allowed to resign from military service during the criminal investigations specifically to avoid prosecution. The secretary of defense at the time that decision was made, in the mid '70s, was Donald Rumsfeld.
But even the Blade's powerful stories didn't put the Tiger Force atrocities in context; the paper portrayed them largely as an isolated killing spree carried out by rogue troops. The Tiger Force atrocities were not the mere result of rogue G.I.'s but instead stem from what historian Christian Appy has termed a "doctrine of atrocity"-an institutionalized brutality built upon official U.S. dicta relating to body counts, free-fire zones, search-and-destroy tactics, and strategies of attrition, as well as unofficial tenets such as "shoot anything that moves," intoned during the Tiger Force atrocities and in countless other tales of brutality.
While the U.S. military has never been alone in the commission of atrocities, in Iraq or elsewhere, the illegal acts of others serve as no excuse for an American disregard for the laws of war. We are only now, more than three decades after the fact, beginning to grasp the true scope of American war crimes in Vietnam. Will it take us that long to know to what extent the doctrine of atrocity is being applied in Iraq?
In Vietnam, the doctrine of atrocity was built not only on official U.S. policies but also on such macabre principles as the "mere gook rule," which cast all Vietnamese as subhuman, and its attendant dictum: "If it's dead and Vietnamese, it's VC." These standard operating procedures led to many acts of mistreatment and killing of noncombatants by U.S. troops that, while illegal under the laws of war, were tacitly encouraged, unofficially condoned, and rarely punished in a severe manner.
Appy, a former Harvard and MIT professor most recently known for his 2003 book, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides, explained the "doctrine" in his 1993 history of American combat troops in Vietnam, Working-Class War. "American military policy," he wrote, "did not . . . make atrocities by individual soldiers inevitable, but it certainly made it inevitable that American forces as a whole would kill many civilians." Thus, a history of brutal behavior, official and unofficial doctrines that encourage a patent disregard for human life and well-being, as well as a persistent failure to publicly recognize prior misdeeds and effectively deal with them has fostered an environment of tacit approval of atrocities in the military.
The Toledo Blade articles, some of the best reporting on a Vietnam War crime during or since that war, tell only a small part of the story. As a historian writing a dissertation at Columbia University on U.S. war crimes and atrocities during the Vietnam War, I have been immersed in just the sort of archival materials the Blade used to flesh out one series of incidents. My research into U.S. military records has revealed that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of analogous violations of the laws of war.
The Blade said the Tiger Force's seven months of brutality was "the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War." Unfortunately, this was not true. According to formerly classified army documents, for instance, a military investigation disclosed that from at least March 1968 through October 1969, "Vietnamese [civilian] detainees were subjected to maltreatment" by no fewer than 21 separate interrogators of the 172nd Military Intelligence Detachment. The inquiry found that, in addition to using "electrical shock by means of a field telephone," the MI personnel also struck detainees with their fists, sticks, and boards, and employed water torture. The documents indicate that no disciplinary actions were taken against anyone implicated in that long-running series of atrocities.
The declassified documents reveal that the Tiger Force atrocities-and the resulting lack of punishment, which amounted to tacit approval-were merely the tip of the iceberg. In September 1967, for instance, an American sergeant killed two Vietnamese children, executing one at point-blank range with a bullet to the head. Court-martialed in 1970, the sergeant pleaded guilty to, and was found guilty of, unpremeditated murder. According to military documents, "he was sentenced by the court to no punishment." One of the most notorious incidents of the Vietnam War was the My Lai massacre (another story first reported by Seymour Hersh, in 1969). But the now declassified military documents reveal that it was hardly an isolated incident. On February 4, 1968, for example, just over a month before U.S. soldiers tortured and raped My Lai villagers and killed hundreds of them, a soldier in the same province and from the same division (Americal) gunned down three civilians as they worked in a field. He later admitted to his commanding officer, men in his unit, and others that he had done it, and he was charged with premeditated murder. But the soldier requested a discharge, which was granted by Americal's commanding general in lieu of a court-martial.
As the case of the 172nd MI unit demonstrates, U.S. troops in Vietnam not only beat enemy prisoners and civilian detainees but also used a wide variety of brutal methods, including a particular torture in which water was forced down a person's throat until he or she passed out or drowned-what U.S. troops had called the "water cure" during their battle against Filipinos in the early 20th century. One particularly heinous method was known among U.S. soldiers in Vietnam as "The Bell Telephone Hour," in which a hand-cranked military field telephone was used to generate electrical shocks through wires to hands, feet, nipples, and genitals.
In Iraq, only when the stunning photographs, including one of a prisoner who was apparently threatened with electrical torture, surfaced late last month on network TV did the press take notice in a major way, but even then, CBS News, at the behest of General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, held the pictures back for two weeks and only decided to release them when prodded by Hersh's New Yorker article.
The army itself described "wanton criminal abuses" at Abu Ghraib prison, and there have been numerous other reports of brutality since the invasion of Iraq, demonstrating that the doctrine of atrocity is still functioning.
During the Vietnam War, a U.S. officer infamously announced that a town had to be destroyed in order to save it. Today, the same logic is used in Iraq. "With a heavy dose of fear and violence . . . I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," U.S. battalion commander Nathan Sassaman was quoted as saying in a New York Times article in December 2003. The quote was buried deep in the article, but recent reports indicate that Sassaman's tough talk may have been backed up by wanton acts of terror. On April 5, The Washington Post reported that Sassaman, a lieutenant colonel, was recently punished for impeding an army investigation of the alleged killing of an Iraqi detainee, adding that it "marked the second time in recent months that a battalion commander in the Fourth Infantry Division has been disciplined in connection with mistreatment of Iraqis."
Underlying attitudes apparently haven't changed either. Captain Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, told the Times late last year, "You have to understand the Arab mind. The only thing they understand is force. . . . " Nearly 40 years earlier, in Vietnam, another U.S. captain told The New Yorker's Jonathan Schell, "Only the fear of force gets results. It's the Asian mind." That thinking has long been evident in U.S. campaigns against racial and ethnic "others," from the Indian Wars to the Philippine-American War and occupation; the terrorizing of people in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Haiti; on to more conventional wars against the Japanese and Koreans; and perhaps most spectacularly in Vietnam. And now in Iraq-and not only at Abu Ghraib. Late last year, at another detention center, it was reported that Lieutenant Colonel Allen B. West allowed his soldiers to beat an Iraqi prisoner as a method of interrogation. When the illegal thrashing failed to induce the prisoner to talk, West threatened the man with death, forced his head into a sandbox, and conducted a mock execution, firing a shot next to the Iraqi's head. West confessed to the abuse, but he was not court-martialed; instead, he was simply allowed to retire.
Then, as now, U.S. officials defend their soldiers' actions. President Richard Nixon, Rumsfeld's old boss, once pronounced that "throughout the war in Vietnam, the United States has exercised a degree of restraint unprecedented in the annals of war." Similarly, today's U.S. military claims that its recent assault on Fallujah has been marked by a "judicious use of force" by marines "trained to be precise in their firepower" and that "95 percent of those killed were legitimate targets."
According to on-the-ground reports by journalists, aid workers, and medical professionals, writes The Guardian (U.K.), U.S. troops in Fallujah, supported by gunships and fighter-bombers, have opened fire on ambulances, targeted civilians, and blasted homes into rubble. As a result, it has been reported that over 350 women and children of the city have died in the carnage-including an elderly woman found to be clutching a white flag, a six-year-old boy who was crushed under debris after a U.S. missile strike on his home, and the little boy's mother, who was shot to death while hanging laundry out to dry.
Nicholas Turse is a doctoral candidate at the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and a regular contributor to the Nation Institute's tomdispatch.com.
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General Cites Command and Training Lapses in Prison Abuse
May 11, 2004
New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/international/middleeast/11CND-ABUS.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, the Army general who wrote the report detailing abuses of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers, said today that rampant failures of leadership, training and discipline led to the violations at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.
He said leadership failures could be traced as high as the brigade commander; Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which oversaw the prison facilities during the time the abuses were committed.
"Failure in leadership from the brigade commander on down, lack of discipline, no training whatsoever, and no supervision" were at the root of the problems, General Taguba said during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee as part of the continuing congressional inquiry into the scandal.
General Karpinski has said that she knew nothing about the abuse until weeks after it occurred and that the prison cellblock where the mistreatment occurred was under the tight control of Army military intelligence officers who may have encouraged it. She has said that she was excluded from areas of the prison where some of the abuses occurred, a claim that General Taguba said was "hard for me to believe."
But General Taguba said that he did not conduct his investigation any higher in the chain of command than General Karpinski, leaving open the possibility that responsibility for the failure in leadership went higher than General Karpinski.
General Taguba was one of the leadoff witnesses in a day of hearings before the committee and was accompanied by two other Pentagon officials, including Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, and Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, deputy commander of Centcom.
The hearings come a day after President Bush robustly defended Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in comments seemingly intended to dispel speculation that he would seek Mr. Rumsfeld's resignation.
General Taguba said that in his investigation, he never found any evidence that the abusive techniques were part of military policy.
"I think it was a matter of soldiers with their interaction with military intelligence personnel who they perceived or thought to be competent authority," the general said. He added that the soldiers told him that military personnel had ordered or influenced them "to set the conditions for succesful interrogations operations."
As in last Friday's questioning of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, most of the Senators on the committee roundly condemned the prisoner abuse. But one committee member, Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican from Oklahoma, lashed out at the outrage itself.
"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," he said. While saying a few "misguided" and "maybe even perverted" perpetrators of abuse needed to be punished, he suggested that much of the criticism was exaggerated and misplaced.
"These prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents," he said. "Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."
He went on: "I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons, looking for human rights violations while our troops, our heros, are fighting and dying."
In an exchange with Senator Carl Levin, Democrat from Michigan, Mr. Cambone said that he believed there were different guidelines for the interrogation of prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq.
He also said that it had been decided from the beginning that the rules of the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners would be followed in Iraq.
Senator Levin responded: "And yet Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly has made a distinction between whether or not those Geneva Convention rules must be applied to the people - prisoners - will be treated `pursuant to those rules or consistent to those rules,' and he said, and this was a few days ago, that the Geneva Convention did not apply `precisely.' "
He added: "You this morning said again that the Geneva Convention applies to our activities in Iraq. But not precisely?"
Mr. Cambone, pressed by Senator Levin, said the convention guidelines applied in Iraq.
"Precisely?" Senator Levin asked again.
"Precisely," Mr. Cambone said. "They do not apply in the precise way the Secretary was talking about, in Guantánamo and the unlawful combatants there - "
The senator, saying "Let me cut you off," said Mr. Rumsfeld's remarks in a May 5 interview applied to Iraq, not Guantánamo.
Asked if he was saying that Mr. Rumsfeld misspoke, Mr. Cambone said he could not speak for the secretary.
On Monday, in appearing alongside Mr. Rumsfeld and other cabinet and military officials, Mr. Bush sought to convey a sense of unity in the administration as it tries to manage a controversy that has sparked outrage both home and abroad, and has undermined the White House's effort to spread democracy to Iraq.
Also on Monday, the Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan resolution condemning the prisoner abuse and calling for a full investigation and accounting of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.
In General Taguba's report, which was completed in March and publicly revealed about two weeks ago, he cited the "systematic and illegal abuses of detainees," and said that between October and December 2003, "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees."
The White House, the Pentagon and Congress have been grappling with whether and how to release more pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused by American soldiers.
Some of the president's political and communications advisers are advocating the quick release of images to avoid a slow trickle of the images to the news media over a period of weeks or months.
Officials say they are weighing issues including the effect of any release on pending criminal inquiries and the privacy of people shown in the images, some of which, government officials said, show American soldiers having sex with one another.
Separately, the Pentagon and Congressional leaders continued to negotiate ways to allow lawmakers to view the images in the absence of a public release.
The chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John Warner, a Virginia Republican, asked the Pentagon to hold off on delivering the classified material until legal questions are answered on how it could affect criminal investigations, privacy protections and other issues, his spokesman said.
General Taguba, who was born in 1950 in Manila, is deputy commanding general of the Third Army and of the Coalition Forces Land Component Command in Kuwait, a post he took up last July.
The Pentagon announced Friday that he would soon take a new post in Washington as a deputy assistant secretary for reserve affairs, a move that in Army culture is not seen as a major promotion.
General Taguba was appointed on Jan. 31 to conduct what was then described as "an informal investigation" in detention and internment operations by the 800th Military Police Brigade, focusing in particular on "allegations of maltreatment" at Abu Ghraib prison.
General Taguba's team spent about a month gathering evidence and completing its report, and presented its confidential findings on March 3, the report says.
Under the scope set by his superiors, the inquiry was limited to the conduct of a military police brigade. But General Taguba used it to deliver a much broader indictment.
Among the findings laid out in the report was what General Taguba described as his strong suspicion that military intelligence officers and private contractors "were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses."
Terence Neilan contributed reporting for this article.
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THE HEARINGS
Pentagon Official Says Asking Army to Help Iraq Interrogators Did Not Lead to Prison Abuse
May 11, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/politics/11CAMB.html
WASHINGTON, May 10 - The Pentagon's top intelligence official urged last summer that an Army general be sent to Iraq to review how American military interrogators could gain more intelligence from Iraqi prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
But the official, Stephen A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, said he had never advocated a policy of having military guards at the prison soften up prisoners for the interrogators.
Mr. Cambone's role in sending Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller and a team of experts to Abu Ghraib last August and September, and in pushing from the highest levels of the Pentagon for more and better intelligence to help fight insurgents in Iraq, will be a focus of hearings the Senate Armed Services Committee is to hold on Tuesday.
General Miller, the chief of interrogations and detentions in Iraq, has defended his recommendations from that visit to have prison guards prepare detainees for interrogations. He has said those recommendations played no role in the later abuse and humiliation of prisoners by some guards.
In impromptu testimony before the Senate committee on Friday, Mr. Cambone explained why General Miller had been sent to Iraq.
"We had then in Iraq a large body of people who had been captured on the battlefield that we had to gain intelligence from for force-protection purposes," said Mr. Cambone, who had been summoned from a group of aides sitting behind Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to respond to a senator's question. "He was asked to go over, at my encouragement, to take a look at the situation as it existed there."
In an unfolding scandal in which most of the focus has been on soldiers or military commanders, the role of Mr. Cambone, as well as of other senior Pentagon officials, in pushing for improved intelligence in Iraq directly links the Defense Department to policies that may have influenced how prison guards and military interrogators carried out their jobs.
Mr. Cambone said he was aware that General Miller "made the recommendation that we get a better coordination between those who were being held and those who were being interrogated." He acknowledged that American military officials were trying to ensure that prisoners "under confinement were not undermining the interrogation process that was taking place."
But Mr. Cambone denied that he had any role in urging the prison guards to set conditions to help interrogators elicit more information from prisoners.
"Were you encouraging a policy that had military police officers enabling interrogations?" asked Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, who summoned Mr. Cambone from the audience.
"No, sir," Mr. Cambone replied.
In the year-old position of under secretary for intelligence, Mr. Cambone has overseen the sprawling Defense Department intelligence bureaucracy, judging the quality of intelligence and ensuring that the analysis and inquiries are responsive to policy makers' needs.
The precise role Mr. Cambone or his deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, played in setting General Miller's agenda was not clear on Monday. Mr. Cambone's spokesman did not respond to questions.
Since he took on the post as the Pentagon's top intelligence official, Mr. Cambone has been flexing his bureaucratic muscles in what has long been a struggle over intelligence resources between the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency, according to current and former intelligence officials.
As a bureaucratic rival to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, Mr. Cambone's has placed priority on obtaining intelligence for military commanders. That mission is not always shared by the C.I.A., whose priorities tend to be broader and more strategic.
-------- war crimes
U.S. to Turn Over Saddam to Iraq by July
May 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Kuwait-Iraq-Saddam.html
KUWAIT CITY, Kuwait (AP) -- The head of Iraq's war crimes tribunal said Tuesday that the United States pledged to hand Saddam Hussein and about 100 other suspects to Iraqi authorities before June 30.
The United States plans to return sovereignty to a new Iraq government on that date.
Salem Chalabi told reporters that trials would begin early next year, and that judges would receive ``files'' on the suspects at the end of this year.
``We will put 100 people ... including Saddam Hussein, on trial,'' he said.
The suspects, he added, ``will be delivered to us by the coalition before the transfer of power.''
U.S. officials, who are holding Saddam in an undisclosed location, have said they will turn him over to the tribunal, set up to try him and other leaders of the former government. In April, that tribunal appointed judges and prosecutors. No charges have yet been filed.
Chalabi is in Kuwait to collect evidence against the suspects.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- drug war
Ex-Official Is Guilty of Misusing Drug Agency's Money and Staff
May 11, 2004
By SUSAN SAULNY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/nyregion/11dea.html
A former senior official in the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration pleaded guilty yesterday to embezzlement and misuse of the agency's resources in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
The official, Kevin Tamez, admitted that he had used approximately $138,488 from the administration and other resources, including agency employees, to do work for a private investigations firm. Mr. Tamez, 50, was an associate special agent in charge of the New York office until he resigned in October.
As an associate agent in charge, Mr. Tamez was responsible for the office's financial management, among other things. According to federal prosecutors, Mr. Tamez submitted false paperwork to the administration's cashier and used other agents to file claim forms to get money for himself, saying it was for official administration business.
He also had agents conduct surveillance and used them in other investigative activities for the private firm, including searching through garbage, while telling them it was for law enforcement purposes, according to court papers.
In a statement, the United States attorney's office in Manhattan said, "Money orders bought with embezzled money were used to pay a variety of Tamez's personal expenses, including his personal credit card bills, to lease a Chevy Suburban, to buy men's suits and to repair a hot tub at Tamez's residence."
Mr. Tamez did work outside the administration under aliases that included Jim Fox and John DiGravio.
Mr. Tamez, who lives in Mount Laurel, N.J., is to be sentenced on Aug. 23 and could face fines and more than 20 years in prison.
-------- human rights
Rights Groups Demand That US Open All Detention Facilities
by Jim Lobe
Antiwar.com
May 11, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2540
Amid growing evidence of systematic abuse of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Iraq and elsewhere, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) are calling on the Pentagon to open all U.S.-run detention facilities used in the Bush administration's "war on terror" to monitoring by independent rights organizations.
"Torture flourishes in the dark," said Kenneth Roth, HRW's executive director in New York. "If the Bush administration really wants to put a stop to torture in US detention facilities, it has to open them up to outside scrutiny."
The two groups, whose repeated requests to investigate reports of abuse were rejected or ignored by the US administration for the past two years, are also urging the administration to ban "stress and duress" interrogation techniques, such as extended sleep deprivation, forced standing or nakedness, or binding detainees in painful positions.
"Restraining detainees in very painful positions, hooding, threats, and prolonged sleep deprivation violate the prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," London-based Amnesty said in a public letter to Bush.
"Comments this week by Major General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of detainee operations in Iraq, that sleep deprivation and stress positions could be used against detainees show that the US administration still has not learnt that ill-treatment and abuse are a slippery slope to torture and should be totally prohibited," Amnesty said.
The Washington Post reported Sunday that the Pentagon formally approved such techniques, as well as others, such as exposure to heat, cold and "sensory assault," including loud music and bright lights," against "high-value" detainees at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in April, 2003, and that similar guidelines have been issued for use in Iraq. The use of such techniques, according to the Post account, is supposed to be approved by senior authorities in advance.
Shown a list of the techniques approved in the document, Roth told the Post they amounted to cruel and inhumane treatment. "The courts have ruled most of these techniques illegal," he said. "If it's illegal here under the US Constitution, it's illegal abroad."
"By ratcheting up the detainee's pain and discomfort, 'stress and duress' techniques almost invariably lead to far more serious mistreatment," said Roth. "Their use clearly contributed to an environment in which some US military personnel believed even more shocking abuse would be tolerated."
The statements by the two groups coincided with Friday's testimony before Congress of senior Pentagon officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, about the photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib facility outside Baghdad. In his testimony, Rumsfeld warned that there were many more photographs and even videotapes of severe abuse that have not yet been publicly disclosed, but he did not indicate whether they were confined to events that had taken place in Abu Ghraib or involved only the dozens or so soldiers and officers who been either formally reprimanded or charged with crimes.
While Rumsfeld initially insisted that the abuses were an "exception" that was carried out by just a few soldiers and did not constitute "a pattern or practice," the report by Major Gen. Antonio Taguba that helped touch off the scandal found "systematic and illegal abuse of detainees" at Abu Ghraib, including "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuse" that went far beyond the practices depicted in the photos that have been disclosed to date.
That echoes reports by both Amnesty and HRW, as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which, unlike the other two groups, had been permitted to visit Abu Ghraib as well as other U.S.-run detention facilities in both Iraq and Iran, although the Taguba report disclosed that the ICRC was prevented from gaining contact with so-called "ghost detainees" who were held there.
Normally close-mouthed, the ICRC stated publicly last week that it had submitted a series of reports and complaints about the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib to the prison authorities, to top officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad, and other senior Bush administration officials on a number of occasions. One 24-page ICRC report obtained by the Wall Street Journal charged that abuses of prisoners in Iraq was widespread and in some cases were "tantamount to torture." It also documented eight instances in which coalition forces opened fire - in some cases from watchtowers - on unarmed prisoners, killing seven of them and wounding as many as 20 others, the Journal said.
In its letter to Bush, Amnesty said it had documented "a pattern of abuse by US agents against detainees, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, stretching back over the past two years." Last July, it said, the organization raised allegations of torture and ill-treatment of Iraqi detainees in particular in a memorandum to the US government and the CPA in Iraq but received no response nor any indication that an investigation was taking place.
It has also issued reports on specific abuses committed against detainees, some of whom were later sent to Guantanamo, at the US Air bases in Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan. "An individual who worked in Guantanamo told Amnesty International that most if not all detainees he had contacted there claimed to have been physically abused in Kandahar or Bagram. This person expressed no surprise at the evidence from Iraq, and stated that abuse in Afghanistan appeared to be part of softening up the detainees for interrogation or detention," Amnesty said.
"The US administration has shown a consistent disregard for the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of law, human rights and decency," said Irene Khan, Amnesty's secretary general. "This has created a climate in which US soldiers feel they can dehumanize and degrade prisoners with impunity. What we now see in Iraq is the logical consequence of the relentless pursuit of the 'war on terror' regardless of the costs to human rights and the rules of war."
"If the administration has nothing to hide, it should immediately end incommunicado detention and grant access to independent human rights monitors, including Amnesty International and the United Nations, to all detention facilities," she added.
HRW, which also issued several reports on the mistreatment and abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the US practice during the "war on terror" of "rendering" some prisoners to countries whose intelligence agencies are known to practice torture, also called for the administration to open all facilities to outside investigations.
"The United States has lost the ability to ensure that its own investigations will be considered impartial and independent," said Roth. "Independent monitoring organizations report their findings publicly, and that's very important in this climate."
-------- justice
Egg industry should not label its product humane, says BBB
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
By Patrick Condon,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-05-11/s_23671.asp
DES MOINES, Iowa - The egg industry should stop advertising its products as humane as long as it continues such practices as clipping hens' beaks and depriving birds of food and water, according to a ruling issued Monday by the Better Business Bureau. The ruling comes from the bureau's New York-based National Advertising Review Board, its highest authority on advertising issues.
The board recommended that the United Egg Producers either discontinue labeling eggs as "animal care certified" or significantly alter it to stop misleading consumers. "It is unimaginable that consumers would consider treatment they find 'unacceptable' to be humane treatment," the ruling stated. The ruling upheld a November finding by a lower panel of the Better Business Bureau.
Compliance with the recommendations are voluntary, but groups that refuse to do so are often referred to federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration.
The board found that the egg industry's standards have improved treatment of hens but not to a level that most consumers would find humane. Among the practices cited were forced molting, which is intentionally withholding food and water to make birds lose weight; partial beak clipping without anesthesia to prevent birds from pecking each other; and dense crowding of hens in cages that don't allow them to flap their wings.
United Egg Producers has said it awards the logo based on scientific standards developed by a group of independent experts. In its official response to the ruling, the group said it is prepared "to increase the extent to which the substantive significance of the guidelines is communicated to consumers."
The ruling stems from a complaint by Compassion Over Killing, a Washington, D.C.-based animal rights group. Paul Shapiro, the group's campaigns director, said he hoped the ruling would bolster his group's case in complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission and the Food and Drug Administration.
Telephone messages left for United Egg Producers, the U.S. egg industry's trade group, were not immediately returned.
-------- torture
Australian soldiers facing dimissal for torturing kittens
TOWNSVILLE, Australia (AFP)
May 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040511061026.ucfu48c6.html
Six soldiers were facing the likelihood of dismissal here Tuesday after outraging Australia by admitting to a court that they tortured to death a litter of kittens.
Amid continuing shock in Australia over allegations of US and British soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners, colleagues of the six men, local residents and animal welfare groups have all expressed horror at the soldiers' cruelty.
The six, from an army support battalion based at Townsville's Lavarack Barracks, were fined by the local magistrates court Monday after pleading guilty to cruelty to animals charges.
But a spokesman for the Australian Defence Force said their commanding officer has issued them with a notice to show cause why they should not be dismissed.
"This has shocked a lot of people and the army will not condone this type of behaviour," defence spokesman Brian Hickey told AFP.
Police told the hearing the soldiers had tied a rope around one kitten's neck then dragged it behind a motor-bike along a bitumen road.
The kitten survived but was then placed behind the rear wheel of a vehicle and when its handbrake was released, it rolled back and crushed the kitten to death.
Three other kittens were then thrown one by one on to the road, where fuel was poured over them and they were set alight and burnt to death.
Magistrate David Glasgow said the soldiers had brought disgrace and dishonour to the army by their actions, but did not record a conviction against them.
The six, Ben Lightbody, 21, Brett Neville, 26, Casey Parker, 21, Geoffrey Symonds, 20, Darryl Llewellin, 26, and Christopher James Murray, 19, were each fined 2,000 dollars (1,400 US) and ordered to to perform 100 hours of service at the RSPCA.
But Queensland state RSPCA chief executive Mark Townsend said his staff did not want the help of people who would do that to animals.
"I don't think those soldiers would actually be able to turn and help at all with the shelter until they had some other counselling," he said.
"Normal people don't burn cats alive and don't drag them behind motorbikes. There's a lot more serious problem there than just turning up to the RSPCA and doing some work to make them feel better."
The animal protection body also bitterly criticised the 2,000 dollar fines imposed on the soldiers, describing them as "manifestly inadequate" when a maximum penalty of 75,000 dollars was available to magistrates for such offences.
The Returned Services League (RSL) ex-services group also expressed horror, saying the soldiers should be dismissed.
"I'm horrified and appalled to say the least," RSL President Major General Bill Crews told ABC Radio.
"There is no explanation for why a person would reasonably do that. They have disgraced the army through their behaviour, it's as simple as that, and it's not acceptable to the army, I feel sure."
--------
The Psychology of Torture
Past Incidents Show Abusers Think Ends Justify the Means
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15861-2004May10?language=printer
The U.S. troops who abused Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were most likely not pathological sadists but ordinary people who felt they were doing the dirty work needed to win the war, experts in the history and psychology of torture say.
Torturers usually believe they are carrying out the will of their societies -- and feel betrayed when the public professes outrage after the abuses come to light, said a range of historians, activists and psychologists. This mentality has played out in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, in the conflict in Northern Ireland, during the Holocaust and within the Chicago Police Department.
"When torture takes place, people believe they are on the high moral ground, that the nation is under threat and they are the front line protecting the nation, and people will be grateful for what they are doing," said John Conroy, author of "Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People," which examined torture in several settings.
What happened at Abu Ghraib, Conroy and other experts said, probably grew out of a shift in American priorities after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: the subordination of human rights to victory in the war against terrorism.
Large numbers of Americans have asserted since the attacks that the war against terrorism is a new kind of battle that must be fought with new methods, including coercive techniques. Significant portions of the public in opinion polls, military strategists, law experts, and even ethicists and the clergy have endorsed using torture to gain information that could avert terrorist attacks.
Experts have justified torture based on pragmatism, military history and theories of a just war. But coercive measures should be reserved for extreme cases, these experts say, not the situation at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqi detainees were not terrorist leaders.
Human rights activists said such arguments stand on a slippery slope: Once captors are given license to torture, the abuse of large numbers of prisoners usually becomes standard operating procedure.
Post-9/11 Climate
"Since 9/11, the Defense Department has openly adopted stress and duress techniques," said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. "We have learned from the Army that there is a 72-point matrix of stress that the Pentagon has adopted to guide interrogators. It outlines different forms of coercion that can be applied. It includes everything from different amounts of sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation, to sensory overload, stripping, hooding, binding detainees in various positions -- essentially everything we have seen in these pictures short of the sexual humiliation."
The Bush administration has said U.S. forces do not use torture. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called the abusers "un-American" and asserted that the guards were acting on their own. But according to the military investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib, guards said they were told to prepare Iraqis for interrogation, and military intelligence personnel commended the abusers for making detainees compliant.
One witness told a military investigation that interrogators had asked guards to "loosen this guy up for us." Another said the abuse was "to get these people to talk." A third said that male detainees "were made to wear female underwear, which I think was to somehow break them down."
While Americans have been shocked by the reports from Baghdad, one poll in October 2001 found that 45 percent of Americans were willing to use torture "if it were necessary to combat terrorism." Much of this support rested on hypothetical scenarios in which a terrorist had knowledge about an attack planned on the United States, and torture was seen as the only way to extract information that could save thousands of lives.
Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, a self-described pragmatist, said he believes the United States currently employs torture in some circumstances and will continue to do so. A public debate, he said, would ensure that top leaders, not servicemen and women, decide when it is appropriate.
"If someone asked me to draft the statute, I would say, 'Try buying them off, then use threats, then truth serum, and then if you came to a last recourse, nonlethal pain, a sterilized needle under the nail to produce excruciating pain,' " he said. "You would need a judge signing off on that. By making it open, we wouldn't be able to hide behind the hypocrisy."
Dershowitz said the judge might refuse to sign the order, creating a check that does not now exist.
Arthur Caplan, an ethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Rev. John P. Langan, a Jesuit priest and philosopher at Georgetown University, both said they believe torture can be used in some circumstances.
"I can imagine a few situations at the extreme where you might resort to torture," Caplan said. Langan said he began endorsing coercive techniques such as sleep deprivation and lengthy interrogations after the 1983 attack on U.S. Marines in Beirut, which killed 241 people.
Retired Marine Lt. Col. William Cowan, a commentator for Fox News, said in an article in the Atlantic Monthly that during the Vietnam War, he attached alligator clips to a prisoner's genitals and threatened him with electrocution. He said in an interview that torture produced valuable information.
"Three weeks after 9/11, if there had been another [attack] and we had found out Zacarias Moussaoui knew information that we did not get out of him, there would have been an absolute public outcry," he said. "There would have been rage; the government would have been blamed."
Torture should be used only with prisoners known to have crucial information, Cowan said. Depending on the situation, soldiers could use emotional or physical torture. In many cases, he said, fear alone would be sufficient. But for top al Qaeda suspects, such as Abu Zubaida, an al Qaeda leader arrested in Pakistan in 2002, Cowan recommended more.
"If it's Abu Zubaida, you start out being tough -- physical pain and emotional pain," he said. "You're putting him under physical duress outside the bounds of what the United Nations accepts."
Without public debate, he said, torture would still be used, even if top leaders never explicitly call for it. "The Pentagon wants success," Cowan said. "Rumsfeld wants to see numbers. There is a pressure to produce results."
Historical Context
It was a small group of military police who carried out the horrific abuses in a distant country. The torturers were not sadists, but perfectly normal people. The torturers believed their unpleasant work would save lives.
Those statements do not refer to the U.S. guards at Abu Ghraib. The first sentence describes a German battalion that methodically tortured and killed thousands of Jews during World War II. The second describes a Stanford University psychology experiment that carefully screened out abnormal people and found that normal people given extraordinary power quickly turn sadistic. The third describes torturers in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, British officers in Northern Ireland and some police officials in Chicago.
"At the bottom of this behavior is not out-group hate, it's in-group love," said Clark McCauley, a professor of psychology at Bryn Mawr College who studies group dynamics. "It's doing what you think is dirty work, but someone's got to do it for our side."
Blaming individual soldiers only took the system off the hook, said Philip Zimbardo, who conducted the Stanford psychology experiment: "In my study, we put good people into a bad barrel, they came out bad apples," he said.
Christopher Browning, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland," said that although there are obvious differences between the abuses at Abu Ghraib and during the Holocaust, there are similarities.
"Our government from the top has sent innumerable signals that placed combating the 'war on terror' above any concern for the Geneva convention," he said by e-mail, adding that "the chickens have come home to roost."
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were similar to abuses in many other conflicts, said Conroy, author of an examination of torture in the Israeli-Palestinian and Northern Ireland conflicts and in the Chicago Police Department.
After the Israeli government gave permission to use torture in "ticking bomb" scenarios, the technique became widely applied to large numbers of Palestinian prisoners. Conroy said that the problem is that investigators rarely know who has valuable information.
In Chicago's South Side, Conroy said, police used electric shocks to interrogate murder suspects from 1973 to 1991. As in the case of military torturers, he said, the torture was justified in the belief that it would save lives.
But even on its own terms, Conroy said, torture may cost more lives than it saves. After the British used torture against a dozen Irish Republican Army prisoners in 1971, Conroy said, the news caused widespread anger.
"People started walking through the doors of the IRA begging to join," he said. "In the year after the torture was exposed, the number of deaths rose by 268 percent."
-------- POLITICS
Study Says U.S. Should Reopen Some Web Sites
Associated Press
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15750-2004May10.html
Federal officials should consider reopening public access to about three dozen Web sites withdrawn from the Internet after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a government-financed study says, because the sites pose little or no risk to homeland security.
Rand Corp. said the overwhelming majority of federal Web sites that reveal information about airports, power plants, military bases and other potential terrorist targets need not be censored because similar or better information is easily available elsewhere.
Rand identified four Web pages that might merit the restrictions imposed after the attacks.
"It's a good time to take a closer look at the choices that they made at the time," said John Baker, principal author of the study, which was funded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the government's intelligence mapping agency.
Rand's National Defense Research Institute identified 629 Internet-accessible federal databases that contain critical data about specific locations. The study, done between mid-2002 and mid-2003, found no federal sites that contained information a terrorist would need to launch an attack.
It identified four databases where restricting access probably would enhance homeland security. None was available to the public anymore. They included two devoted to pipelines, one to nuclear reactors and one to dams.
Researchers recommended that officials evaluate 66 databases with some useful information, but they did not anticipate restrictions would be needed, because similar or better data probably could be easily obtained elsewhere.
Rand found that 30 federal agencies make public, on paper or online, "geospatial information" about critical or symbolic locations and structures. That kind of data can be as simple as a telephone book or as complex as an Internet database that discloses how many people live near each of the nation's power plants .
-------- propaganda wars
Thread of Abuse Runs to the Oval Office
By Robert Scheer
The Los Angeles Times
Tuesday 11 May 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051304F.shtml
Phony justifications for war led to brutal intelligence-gathering.
Someone's lying - big-time - and neither Congress nor the media have begun to scratch the surface. Clearly we now know enough to stipulate that the several low-ranking alleged sadists charged in the Iraq torture scandal did not control the wing of the prison in which they openly and proudly did the devil's work.
That power was in the hands of high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officers who established abusive conditions that were condemned by the Red Cross in a complaint to U.S. authorities well before the horrid incidents that recently shocked the nation.
The Red Cross complaint - and a follow-up report that was made available to the administration in February and obtained by the Wall Street Journal this week - raises the sobering possibility that these low-level members of the military police in Iraq may be right in claiming that they were just following orders of their superiors.
According to the report, the organization's delegates visited Abu Ghraib in October 2003 and witnessed "the practice of keeping persons deprived of their liberty completely naked in totally empty concrete cells and in total darkness" for days.
"Upon witnessing such cases, the [Red Cross] interrupted its visits and requested an explanation from the authorities. The military intelligence officer in charge of interrogation explained that this practice was 'part of the process.' " The report said that what Red Cross representatives saw "went beyond exceptional cases" and was "in some cases tantamount to torture."
The Red Cross complained directly to the authorities at that time, two months before the now-infamous photographs were taken.
The White House and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have for months stubbornly ignored and kept from the public the conclusions of both the Red Cross report and the even more damning internal report done by Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba for the Pentagon in March.
The Taguba report clearly stated that the MPs had been instructed to "set physical and mental conditions for favorable interrogation of witnesses" and were using sexual humiliation, attack dogs and beatings to break prisoners.
It would appear that the Pentagon still doesn't want to admit the seriousness of the problem, having now assigned Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller to run Abu Ghraib despite the fact that it was Miller who last summer officially reported on conditions in Abu Ghraib and seems to have enabled, if not authorized, the torture that ensued in the autumn.
According to Taguba's report, Miller "stated that detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation" and "it is essential that the guard force be actively engaged in setting the conditions for successful exploitation of the internees."
That would seem to support the contention of the accused MPs that they were just doing their duty. The Washington Post quotes an e-mail from Spc. Sabrina Harman in which she wrote: "If the prisoner was cooperating, then the prisoner was allowed to keep his jumpsuit, mattress, and was allowed cigarettes on request or even hot food. But if the prisoner didn't give what they wanted, it was all taken away until [military intelligence] decided. The job of the MP was to keep them awake, make it hell so they would talk."
On Monday, President Bush reiterated his unyielding support for Rumsfeld, even as the influential Army Times newspaper called for heads to roll "even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war." The abuses of Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad are "a failure that ran straight to the top," argued the newspaper.
And all of this does flow from the top. With the occupation itself built on a web of lies - that invading Iraq was part of the war on terror, that Iraq had threatening weapons of mass destruction, that anybody who resisted the occupation was a "terrorist" or "thug" - it can only be assumed that those interrogators dealing with the nearly 50,000 Iraqi detainees in the last year were under enormous pressure to produce statements that fit these phony "facts."
"I'd like to know who was the one that was giving instructions to the military intelligence personnel to turn up the heat," Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the nominal head of Abu Ghraib during the time in question, said in an interview on NBC. Unfortunately, that question needs to be addressed to the president of the United States.
The big lie that the United States is merely a selfless battler against terrorists, with no other agendas, opens the door for brutality against any who dare resist. Bush has exercised an arrogance unmatched by any U.S. president in a century and brandished God's will as his carte blanche. His unilateral, preemptive "nation-building" - and the settling of old scores in the name of fighting terror - grants license to treat anybody, including U.S. citizens, in a barbaric manner that cavalierly sweeps aside all standards of due process.
Robert Scheer writes a weekly column for The Times and is coauthor of "The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq" (Seven Stories Press/Akashic Books, 2003).
----
News Media Quandary Over Showing Graphic Images of Abuse
May 11, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID CARR
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/11/politics/11PHOT.html
As the images of American soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners inflame public opinion about the war, news organizations increasingly find themselves part of the debate.
The news media are wrestling with how many and how much of the graphic photographs they should show, and their decisions are drawing controversy of their own. Some critics have accused news organizations of serving an antiwar agenda and endangering troops and Americans overseas by showing such shocking images.
Newspapers tend to signal the importance of an article or image by the prominence of its placement, but because of the nudity and humiliation on display in the Iraq photographs, many newspapers have chosen to put articles about them on the front page but the images inside.
The Daily News and The New York Times yesterday ran on their front pages an image, first published in The New Yorker, of a naked Iraqi prisoner being menaced by dogs held by guards. The Washington Post put the same photograph on Page 19 of the first section of the paper.
Most of the broadcast networks and cable news channels have shown many of the images, although the Fox News Channel is using them less and less. And in what they show, many news organizations have cropped out or obscured parts of the images - often nudity - deemed unsuitable for many readers.
"Many people receive the newspaper at home," said Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Washington Post. "What is on the front page is more difficult to avoid than what is inside. The people who follow a story inside are usually more prepared for what they see when they get there."
In its initial coverage last week, The Post placed on the front page a photograph of a female soldier holding an Iraqi prisoner by a leash.
"We decided that the importance of the news was the most important consideration," Mr. Downie said. "By today, we decided that we had published so many shocking photos that it was fine to publish inside rather than on the front page."
Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, said: "The picture that we ran this morning was new and added a dimension to a big story. The earlier pictures showed someone being humiliated. This picture showed a person actually being terrorized."
Bill Shine, the executive producer of Fox News, said his network was not giving much prominence to the latest picture because the public already understood what had happened. "Day by day, we are dialing back on their use and attempting to put them in context," he said.
The New York Post followed a similar logic in deciding to run the photograph of the cowering prisoner inside the newspaper yesterday.
"How many photos of naked Iraqis does one want to see?" said Col Allan, its editor in chief. "I think that the relentless stream of images, the vast number of these things, will wear out public patience. Clearly, the images are serving the political agenda of many newspapers."
Bill O'Reilly, a host on the Fox News Channel, suggested in his syndicated column yesterday that the pictures would be used to "promote violence against America."
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, which has published two stories about the prisoner abuse written by Seymour M. Hersh, defended the use of the images.
"In this instance, I don't think you want to go out of your way to protect the tender sensibilities of the reader," Mr. Remnick said. "You don't aim to be gratuitous, but to weaken the power of these images in a story where the photographs are at the center of things would be an editing mistake in my judgment."
John Banner, executive producer of ABC's "World News Tonight," said he had no trouble deciding to show all the pictures released, including those of dead prisoners.
"This is visual evidence on a major story," Mr. Banner said. "We are certainly going to not let images with nudity or gore or violence go on the air. But we have a responsibility to our audience to inform them of wrongdoing."
The debate goes beyond journalism. Graphic images from the Vietnam War played a role in changing public opinion of the war. And Colin L. Powell, now secretary of state, wrote in his autobiography that television coverage of the so-called "Highway of Death" in the first Persian Gulf War played a role in his decision to recommend that the war be brought to an end.
Bill Carter contributed reporting for this article.
-------- us politics
The Unconscious Country
Righteous Indignation, Nakedly Displayed
By WILLIAM A. COOK
May 11, 2004
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/cook05112004.html
Have we heard from everyone yet? The President blurted out how "disgusted" he was when he saw the photographs; the Secretary of Defense cringed at the "pictures" that had far greater impact than words alone; Senator Warner expressed "shame" that such vivid images of American wrongdoing had been on display for the whole world to see; all of the 24 members of the Armed Services Committee of the Senate offered how displeased, outraged, offended, and nauseated these explicit and un-American photos made them feel; even John Kerry checked in noting that the President should take full responsibility for this shameful display that has humiliated America before the entire world. How courageous to witness this righteous indignation by America's pin-striped warriors as they cringe before the visible, graphic, four-color "pictures" that capture, as words alone cannot because they can be so easily skipped over, the horror of this "war" that they perpetrated on a defenseless people at the instigation of a President committed to the defense of Israel, as Senator Hollings has noted recently, a "just" war wrapped in lies and effectively executed with the latest state of the art (SOA) weapons that suck the living air from the lungs, that pepper a child with pellets tearing the skin in hundreds of places, that cut cars into slices as easily as slicing a loaf of bread, that sear the eyes and the throat with devastating pain as the depleted uranium seeps silently on the wind blown ash of the bombed out home. How courageous these men and women beating their chests before the whole world demonstrating like paid mourners their grief at the outrage even as they display the "openness" of the "Democracy" that they bring to the infidels through their "precision" war that cleanses the evil from their corrupt regime leaving only the good to blossom in the "greater middle east."
Let us put aside the questions that were not asked of the Secretary of War or the Supreme General of our Space Command: (1) When the Pentagon (the talking building in Virginia - no wonder we pay no attention to words) announced "to the whole world," as "Rummy" informed the Committee, that an investigation was underway concerning allegations of prisoner abuse, did it not occur to the Secretary that the President and the Armed Services Committee must be apprised immediately of the allegations since the very thought of Americans committing torture could not be contemplated? (2) Wouldn't the Secretary immediately command one of his trusted assistants to read the entire report and extract from it the most damning items with recommendations on how to respond and when? (3) Wouldn't it have occurred to the Secretary, since it has been his "state of the art" approach to military procedures and policy implementation, that private contractors, employed to "outsource" activities formerly undertaken by government personnel, were involved in these allegations and that he should know in what way they were involved? (4) Wouldn't it have been a matter of concern that such contractors could be Israeli "consultants" like those hired to help American forces employ the tried and true "occupier" strategies employed by the IDF in urban areas, hired here to guide naive Americans in the sensitive area of prisoner interrogation, the "softening up" process used so effectively against Palestinian detainees, consultants who would be anathema to sensitivities in the Arab world and associate America even more closely to the despised state of Israel? (5) Would the use of such consultants have been considered initially precisely because they cannot be held accountable to the Geneva conventions or to Iraqi justice (since it no longer exists when the country is under "occupied" status), thus allowing various methods of torture to be used - sleep deprivation, electric shock techniques, sexual humiliation, forced lewd and lascivious acts, intimidation and fear for wife and children - while protecting American commanders and soldiers from possible prosecution under existing US codes or the Geneva requirements?
It occurred to me as I watched the Committee members interrogate the Secretary, expressing outrage at Americans straddling naked Iraqi men stacked like sacks of grain on a warehouse floor, that their righteousness was misplaced if only because American forces should never have been deployed in Iraq. Where was their righteousness when the President announced in September of 2002 that Iraq had to be invaded, an announcement held until September because you don't sell a product in August? Where was their righteousness when his administration published the National Security Strategy Report that gave America license to invade any nation on earth at the behest of the President, a document imposed on the American people without consultation with their representatives much less the people themselves? Where was their righteousness when this same President declared the United Nations irrelevant, when he mocked the people who took to the streets in every major city around the world, when he brazenly and hypocritically presented the UNSC with an ultimatum that they authorize the US to attack Iraq, when he declared "war" on a word - "terror" - a word that at best describes a method of belligerence against a perceived enemy but in its vagueness, its intended vagueness, allows for unending war? Where was their righteousness when the bombs began to fall on cities that had no air force to defend their residents, when pictures arrived showing fathers cradling in their arms their dying daughters, mothers weeping beside their mutilated children in dingy hospital beds, the graphic horror of little twelve year old Ali Abbas, armless and orphaned by a precision missile, the air pressing down over his skinless body. How righteous can a Senator be if he or she is responsible for placing our soldiers in an illegal war, a war conceived in secrecy by a band of self-serving ideologues, souls sold to Charon, bound in servitude to the state of Israel, a war reveled in by the Zionist evangelical hordes that grovel before ancient myths that make them "Chosen" in the eyes of their imagined God, a war declared and owned by the industrial- military complex that feeds itself on the oil and gas reserves of nation states that it buys and controls with American tax dollars, indeed, a war that keeps the Senators in power through the paid contributions to their re-election chests by these same corporations? How righteous to demand that someone beyond a private or sergeant be chastised for demeaning America before the world!
It occurred to me as I watched the Committee members interrogate the Secretary, as they sat in splendor in the paneled chambers of the Senate office building, a palace as resplendent as that used now by Consul Bremer, a palace built by Saddam himself for himself, that this democracy no longer belonged to the people of America, but rather to a fragment of the one percent who own America. It occurred to me that our President had been appointed to his post by five members of a Supreme Court, self-declared cardinals anointed by the Almighty to elect their infallible Pope. It occurred to me that we now have an opportunity to choose one of two to rule us for the next four years, elevated by virtue of their exalted bank accounts, two who mirror each other in all significant ways: unbridled acceptance of the need to invade Iraq despite world opinion and international law, obsequious adoration of the state of Israel caused, no doubt, by fear of retribution by AIPAC and their donors, committing America to war on behalf of another nation regardless of its impact on the American people, and blind acceptance of extra-judicial execution of opposition leaders, knowing full well the consequences of such action in the world community, most especially in the Arab world, and its devastating destruction of rules of law and basic democratic principles. Kerry and Bush, exalted members of the chosen few allowed to enter the inner sanctum of the Skull and Bones, scions of the patrician class that have bought our democracy.
But what can one expect from those who rise out of the Tomb? What is there about an organization whose members take an oath to absolute silence about fellow members regardless of the actions perpetrated by their fellows? What unlimited power does this permit? What is there about an organization whose nascent members must prostrate themselves before their superiors as they confess their most lascivious desires and acts recognizing the absolute humiliation of their position as they recoil naked before these mocking eyes? What unbridled mentality does this unleash before those less fortunate? What is there about an organization whose members understand their exalted status as scions of the chosen few, who from time immemorial have had license to lord it over the hordes that roam the earth, the privileged who have inherent rights to rule recognizing their superior status in the world? What unshackled power rises in the soul that has accepted its unquestioned right to rule? How curious that our compassionate conservatives have understood what took place in Abu Ghraib as little more than, in the words of the Lord of Conservativism, Rush Limbaugh, "fraternity initiation rights, pranks only." How appropriate that the Skull and Bones sanctuary is called the Tomb. There in its innards reside an exclusive population of maggots that coil about each other in an ugly love ritual of huddling and clinging while feeding on others' deprivation, releasing from time to time one of its membership to rise to the pinnacles of power the better to control the masses and ensure the continuation of their resplendent Tomb in that citadel of idyllic learning walled off from the slums of Hartford.
I would that our Senators represent the people, the people corralled by the military recruiters who place 70% of their recruiting offices in poverty neighborhoods where our minorities reside; I would that they represent the average wage earner who is strapped each month to a pole of bills too great to pay forcing him and her into greater and greater debt day after day; I would that they represent the laborer who receives from our corporations the pittance of a wage that keeps them floundering below the poverty line; I would that they recognize that America is not an island in the world, able to navigate alone and use others to its benefit alone, avoiding the shoals and currents that make all residents of the earth neighbors in a community dependent on each other; I would that they responsibly act against an administration that has lied and deceived the people they represent, that has brought humiliation on America equal in depth and kind to that inflicted on the prisoners in Abu Ghraib, that has destroyed the fabric of American oneness by creating a fissure within our population that decries dissent as unpatriotic, and that has brought shame to the very concept of democracy.
These are the Senators that scream so loudly when pictures are displayed of flag draped coffins bearing the dead soldiers that they had sent off to die. What insensitivity to show such pictures to Americans! These are the Senators who allow this administration to prevent photographers from meeting the planes at Dover air base, to photograph the wounded and maimed in Germany, to let the journalists and their cameramen photograph where the missile lands, that prevent Americans from soiling their eyes with graphic pictures of dead and rotting corpses lying in the streets, or scenes of innocent civilians murdered in their cars at check points, or hit by sniper fire as they helped put a wounded person in an ambulance. These are the Senators who accept without question extra-judicial execution done in our name by CIA operatives, a practice taught us by Sharon as he directed the murder of the paraplegic Sheik Yassin with missiles fired into a crowded street "accidentally" killing innocent bystanders. Why wake Americans to the reality of their complicity in this carnage, the war they, the Senators and Congressmen, have created in our name? Perhaps it is time we heard from America.
William Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. His new book, Psalms for the 21st Century, was just published by Mellen Press. He can be reached at: cookb@ULV.EDU
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What did they know? When did they care?
May 11, 2004
Washington Times
By Wesley Pruden
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040511-123509-6967r.htm
What did our important (just ask them) members of Congress know about the abuses at Abu Ghraib Prison, and when did they know it?
Several congresspersons conceded yesterday that they knew about the abuses months ago, sort of, when the Pentagon first put out the news that the abuses were under investigation. But they didn't get excited until they saw the network television technicians arrive on the Hill and start unpacking their cameras.
"A press release from Central Command isn't good enough," sniffs Lara Battles, a spokeswoman for Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri. "The Pentagon communicates with the Hill ... and that did not occur in this instance."
Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, another Democrat, grumps that he doesn't "want to be on notice every time there's a news release." Anyone else could figure out that if he's getting wet it's probably raining, but not our senators. Learning something important from a news conference, Mr. Nelson says, "is not a substitute for congressional notification."
Teddy Kennedy thinks the Pentagon news about abuses at Abu Ghraib Prison was pretty much a hoot, anyway. The "alleged announcements" in January and March, he says, "were laughable in terms of communicating what was happening to Congress." Don Nickles of Oklahoma, a Republican, recalls that a general mentioned something in a briefing, but the abuses didn't make an impression until he saw the photographs in the newspapers and on television.
This is pretty much what the likes of Lindsey Graham and John Warner and Carl Levin said last week when they opened the Senate ring of the congressional circus. So to get it all straight: Congressmen can't bother with the words in newspapers and magazines, but they understand the pictures in a newspaper or magazine. The abuses aren't important; what's important is how Congress gets the word. Congress is the third branch of government, after all, which makes every one of the 535 members of Congress 1/535th of that important one-third, which works out to, hmmmm, well, someone else can do the math. You wouldn't think such little wheels could make so much noise.
A new Annenberg public-opinion poll, completed Sunday and out yesterday, suggests that a majority of Americans think the Pentagon "covered up" the abuses, but nearly seven out of 10 Americans think Donald Rumsfeld should keep his job. This figure is almost identical to the result of an ABC-Washington Post poll completed earlier (which The Post, leading the media frenzy, relegated to Page 12).
There's certainly no cover-up; the Pentagon first revealed the abuses on Jan. 12, in a press release that Congress couldn't bother to read, and followed it up with a March 20 announcement that criminal charges would be brought against six soldiers for "dereliction of duty, cruelty and maltreatment, assault and indecent acts with another." But the public is so contemptuous of Washington that it assumes that everything wrong will be covered up.
But if there's no cover-up, there's certainly a congressional sleepover. "For many politicians," Kate O'Beirne observes in National Review Online, "the danger posed to our troops by the photos that fuel a murderous hatred pales in comparison to the offense to their self-importance ... . In the future, military press releases and announcements should probably be accompanied by personal phone calls to John Warner and Joe Biden and to Martin Frost and Christopher Shays. Other congressmen likewise concerned about missing a media opportunity could sign up for a special call list. They need not be bothered unless pictures are involved."
President Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld, having run out of people to apologize to, looked over additional photographs yesterday, and the White House said the president reacted with "deep disgust and disbelief" that anyone who wears the uniform would indulge such behavior. Don Rumsfeld should send videos on to the Hill. The congressmen will think they haven't had such fun since the Elks lodge cut out the blue movies on Saturday night.
Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.
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Bush the torturer must leave office
May 11, 2004
Ohio Free Press
by Harvey Wasserman
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2004/887
The torture at Al Ghraib is a direct reflection of George W. Bush's moral character, his political beliefs and his military abilities.
Those images streaming out of Iraq reflect the true face of George W. Bush. Until he resigns or is removed from office, there is no way to begin removing the stain on the American character.
This is not about Donald Rumsfeld or a few "bad" soldiers in the field. Nor is it merely about "softening up" detainees to extract information about terrorism.
At their core, these outrages are gratuitous and psychotic. They stem directly from the morals and character of the man now occupying the Oval Office. The beheading of a young American represents the inevitable beginning of a horrific blowback. The spin that somehow Bush operatives are above such behavior, and had nothing to do with provoking it, is tragic nonsense.
The ultimate statement was made by Bush himself when he was governor of Texas. The Texas prison system has a tragic history of sadism and brutality. But Bush dragged it to new depths.
Bush was a governor in love with the death penalty. He executed 152 prisoners, more than any other governor in US history.
One was Carla Faye Tucker, for whose death Bush became justly infamous. Tucker was convicted of murder, but in prison underwent a dramatic conversion to the kind of fundamentalist Christianity Bush claims to embrace. She became an astute observer of the prison system, and asked Bush for a meeting. He refused.
After Bush had her killed, he sadistically mocked Carla Faye Tucker on a conservative talk show. Asked what she might have said had he met with her, Bush assumed a scornful whine and imitated a woman pleading for her life. Governor Bush apparently found this as funny as his recent presidential search under a table for the Weapons of Mass Destruction that never were found in Iraq.
As governor, Bush also executed an immigrant who was denied access to representatives of his home country, as required by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The US was a party to that convention. But Bush explained that "Texas did not sign the Vienna Convention, so why should we be subject to it?"
In that spirit Bush scorned the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child by joining Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan and Yemen in executing minors. More than 90 percent of the children held on Bush's death row were non-whites.
Because Bush slashed Texas mental health programs, his prisons were full of psychologically impaired victims, whom he also held eligible for execution.
The US military's own Taguba Report has described Bush's Iraqi prisons as being rife with "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses." But they merely reflect conditions in Texas prisons when Bush was governor. According to federal Judge William Wayne Justice, Texas inmates under Bush, like those under him in Iraq, "credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions." A 1996 videotape shows guards attacking prisoners with stun guns and dogs, then dragging them face-down into their cells. One prisoner with an IQ of 56 died of "natural causes" in his uncooled cell during a brutal 1998 heat wave.
With a thousand civilian prisoners in Afghanistan, perhaps 10,000 in Iraq and hundreds more at Guantanamo, Bush is fighting the International Convention Against Torture. Amnesty International cites "a pattern of physical and verbal abuse by some corrections officers" and abuse of "basic human rights" by Bush's military command, including systematic sleep deprivation. The Red Cross reported such problems as much as a year ago. Independent reports also indicate that the vast majority of Iraqis being abused are not terrorists at all, but merely luckless civilians detained in random, disorganized sweeps.
The gruesome photography from Iraq has apparently been a part of Bush's torture process, meant---where it has any purpose at all---to shame the prisoners. At least one shot apparently depicts the forcible rape of a young inmate by a guard. Another prisoner has apparently been photographed while being forced to masturbate, an astonishing demand coming from a regime whose party impeached a President of the United States for concealing private, consensual sex.
A primary source of many of these revelations has been investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Hersh became famous three decades ago for uncovering atrocities at My Lai in Vietnam, which current Secretary of State Colin Powell worked to keep secret.
Powell has since gained new infamy by lying to the world about Weapons of Mass Destruction and Saddam Hussein's alleged attempt to buy uranium for nuclear weapons.
But like My Lai, atrocious behavior in Iraq comes straight from the top. Bush's contempt for international law, including the Geneva Accords, has been legend. His stirring praise for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld must be taken at face value. If Rumsfeld is doing a "superb job," it's because Rumsfeld is doing superbly what George W. Bush wants done.
What Bush did as governor he now does as president. It has nothing to do with stopping terrorism or protecting the United States. It's not the product of a few "bad" or poorly trained soldiers. It's not about a wayward Secretary of Defense and his out-of-control military apparatus. The inevitable reaction that's now come with this first beheading has been provoked by an administration engaged in global drunk driving.
This ghastly spiral of brutality is all about George W. Bush and who he really is. And since he is doing this in the name of the United States, it is ultimately about us, and what we do about him.
Harvey Wasserman is co-author (with Bob Fitrakis) of GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE SUPERPOWER OF PEACE (www.freepress.org). HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is available at www.harveywasserman.com.
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All Quiet On the House Side
Democrats Say GOP Is Evading Debate
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15945-2004May10?language=printer
The week of April 26 was eventful and troubling for the nation, yet curiously brief and serene for the House of Representatives. Thirty-five U.S. servicemen were killed in Iraq. CBS aired shocking photos of Americans abusing prisoners near Baghdad. The federal debt reached an all-time high, more than $7.13 trillion.
In the House, meanwhile, members returned to Washington on Tuesday of that week for three quick, unanimous votes at nightfall. They renamed a post office in Rhode Island, honored the founder of the Lions Clubs, and supported "the goals and ideals of Financial Literacy Month."
The next day, Wednesday, was a bit busier. After naming a Miami courthouse for a dead judge, House members debated how to extend the popular repeal of the tax code's "marriage penalty." The only real issue was whether to pass the Democratic or Republican version. The GOP plan prevailed, 323 to 95.
After two days and one night of desultory activity -- roughly their average workweek this year -- House members packed up and rushed home to their districts. Despite the burgeoning scandal over U.S. treatment of Iraqi prisoners and persistent concerns about the economy and the deficit, the House has been keeping bankers' hours.
The House's lean schedule is no accident. GOP leaders who set the agenda and floor schedule say they achieved most of their top priorities last year -- including enactment of a Medicare prescription drug bill and the third round of President Bush's tax cuts -- and are content to rest on their laurels through the election. While other House priorities are stuck in the Senate, House Republicans believe they have the best of all worlds: They can take credit for the enacted legislation and blame Senate Democrats for bottling up the rest of their agenda.
"Last year we sent a lot of legislation to the Senate, and we don't want to overload them," House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) told reporters last week. "They're already overloaded. . . . We need to be here passing good legislation, doing the people's work and not doing a bunch of make-work."
House Democrats see a more cynical motive. The GOP majority, they say, wants a complacent Congress that will raise few questions about the Bush administration, despite the international uproar over the prison abuse scandal in Iraq and recent damaging revelations about Bush's decision to go to war.
"Given all the issues and problems the country faces, it's scandalous that we're only coming in to work three days a week, and even then most of the time we're renaming post offices," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). "This is a deliberate effort to keep Congress out of town, keep us from asking questions."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) noted that senators held three committee hearings on the prison abuses before House leaders summoned Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the Armed Services Committee last Friday -- a day the Senate was meeting but the House was not. DeLay dismissed the idea of a full-fledged congressional investigation, which he likened to "saying we need an investigation every time there's police brutality on the street."
Pelosi complained: "Americans are out of work. Our troops are in danger in Iraq. Our reputation is in shreds throughout the world. And we're leaving early afternoon on Thursday."
She also said, "The House of Representatives has demonstrated that it is nothing more than a rubber stamp for the administration."
Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, contends that the House's anemic work schedule is symptomatic of the larger problem of political gridlock. He said lawmakers are "probably realistic in saying, 'We're not spending much time here because we know that nothing would get done.' " He added, however, that "if they stuck around and talked to each other, maybe they could figure something out."
Last week's House action was typical in many ways. It featured bitterly partisan arguments over the Iraq war, in the House chamber and in dueling news conferences. But the main bills approved were a resolution condemning the prison abuses and a long-expected one-year extension of a provision to protect millions of Americans from the alternative minimum tax -- a temporary measure that postpones difficult decisions about a major looming problem.
The week of April 19 was similar. The House held three votes Tuesday night, all unanimous and all renaming post offices. On Wednesday, members quickly passed five bills without debate, under "suspension" rules. The one drawing the most opposition -- 14 nay votes -- endorsed research and development into "green chemistry."
Thursday was that week's busiest day, as Republicans and Democrats vigorously debated a "continuity of government" bill, meant to ensure that Congress could function if many lawmakers perished in a terrorist attack. The measure, which passed 306 to 97, would require states to hold special elections within 45 days if at least 100 House members were killed. As usual, members had Monday, Friday and most of Tuesday free of Washington-based duties.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military campaign in Iraq had one of its bloodiest weeks ever. Shells killed 22 Iraqi prisoners near Baghdad one day, and suicide bomb blasts killed 68 people in Basra -- many of them children -- the next. Violence in the besieged city of Fallujah continued, and 14 U.S. servicemen were killed during the week.
The week before that, the House was in recess, as it plans to be the week of May 24, the week of June 28, the six weeks starting July 26, and all of October, November and December.
John Feehery, spokesman for Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), defended the House's accomplishments and pace. "Last year we sent a lot of things over to the Senate, and they're sitting in Tom Daschle's back pocket," he said, referring to the Senate minority leader, from South Dakota. Those bills include tort reform to curb medical malpractice suits, energy legislation, and welfare reauthorization.
This year, Feehery said, "we've passed a lean budget" for fiscal 2005. "We're working very hard to keep the president's tax cuts in place. We're monitoring the situation in Iraq" and will appropriate extra funds as needed. House committees, he said, "have done a lot of oversight on the Iraq war," primarily aimed at seeing that money is well spent.
The House does not need showy inquiries in front of cameras to fulfill its watchdog obligations, Feehery said. "Our oversight is not politically motivated, which probably frustrates the Democrats," he said. "It's motivated by better governance."
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a top adviser in the Clinton White House, is unconvinced.
"We can name post offices," Emanuel said, "or we can ask the hard questions about the direction of our nation."
Staff writer Helen Dewar contributed to this report.
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Rumsfeld is the designated fall guy
HEARST NEWSPAPERS
By HELEN THOMAS
Tuesday, May 11, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/172703_thomas11.html
WASHINGTON -- One of the timeless truisms in the Harry Truman legacy was the presidential credo: "The buck stops here."
While there is plenty of blame to go around for the horrific handling of the Iraqi prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, President Bush bears the ultimate responsibility for what happened on his watch.
Under questioning recently, White House press secretary Scott McClellan refused to say whether the president took responsibility for the disgraceful acts against prisoners in Iraq, though Bush has apologized for the degradation of the Iraqi prisoners, saying their treatment was "a stain on our country's honor and our country's uniform."
Bush apparently had no advance clue about the potential fallout of the Baghdad prison abuse. McClellan says the president didn't even know about the pictures until he saw them on TV, though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld knew about them back in January.
Since it is an election year, Bush obviously does not want to be saddled with an international scandal.
He already has received some digs from Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts -- his apparent Democratic opponent -- in the November election. Kerry said that if he were president he would "not be the last to know."
Meantime, McClellan has been dodging and weaving under the bombardment of Watergate-style questions:
"What did the president know? And when did he know it?"
All we know is that Bush was told last January that an investigation into the Iraqi prisoner abuses had begun. But apparently there was no follow-up until the public revelations last week.
The January inquiry resulted in a devastating Pentagon report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba in early March. The New Yorker Magazine's intrepid Sy Hersh got the report and published it.
The revelations were not new to the International Red Cross, which says it had repeatedly beseeched Pentagon officials for a softer approach to prisoner interrogations but to no avail. The Red Cross has concluded that the abuse was "tantamount to torture."
Since the revelations, the White House has been engaged in frantic damage control against the firestorm that erupted after the atrocities were first shown on CBS-TV's "60 Minutes II" last Wednesday.
Rumsfeld is obviously the designated fall guy in the prison debacle.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee Friday, he expressed his deepest apology to the Iraqi victims of the abuses and suggested that they be compensated.
But mainly he appeared to be trying to get the president off the hook by taking "full responsibility."
"These events occurred on my watch," he said. "As secretary of defense, I am accountable for them."
It's doubtful that Rumsfeld can assuage critics calling for his resignation.
Although Bush said Thursday he stands by Rumsfeld, the secretary is probably expendable if the political fallout gets too hot.
Rumsfeld certainly shares much of the blame for the lack of discipline and control in the military prisons.
But aside from such chain-of-command responsibility, the defense chief should bear a larger blame because of his boisterous proclamations two years ago that U.S. treatment of detainees wouldn't be guided by the Geneva Conventions regarding prisoners of war. Rumsfeld also arbitrarily deemed that Army regulations on the interrogation of prisoners would not be observed.
That conveyed a message down the line that "anything goes" when dealing with detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other places where U.S. interrogators have stashed prisoners. (I wonder where Saddam Hussein is being held.)
Human rights groups have registered frequent complaints about the treatment of more than 600 detainees at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo and have been ignored.
The prisoners are literally in limbo without contact with their families, much less a lawyer. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide how this squares with the Constitution.
History shows the buck has stopped with other presidents who trusted the people enough to admit their mistakes.
Among them was John F. Kennedy who took responsibility for the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.
In 1980, President Carter said "the responsibility is fully my own" for the ill-fated rescue mission to win the freedom of the American hostages in Iran.
President Reagan took the blame when the Marine barracks were blown up in Beirut in 1983.
In 1987, he took responsibility for the Iran-Contra scandal involving the illegal sale of arms to Iran to fund the anti-government Nicaraguan rebels.
To restore America's damaged global image -- where our words about freedom and democracy have been made a mockery -- Bush must take some personal responsibility.
And that takes courage.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Nader Letter to Senator Kerry and President Bush concerning energy policy
May 11, 2004
From: kzeese@votenader.org
President George W. Bush
Bush-Cheney '04, Inc.
P.O. BOX 10648
Arlington, VA 22210
Re: Energy Dear President Bush:
Beyond what is now being done by the federal government, what quantifiable goals over what period of time would you want the share of our energy consumption to come from renewable or solar energy and to be saved by energy efficiency technologies and programs?
Please specify how you intend to achieve these goals through enabling legislation and implementation (for example, using the federal procurement dollar, mandatory engineering standards, models based on federal research and development (e.g. vehicles, lighting, heating and air conditioning, recapturing energy waste and heat, etc.) and public contests for superior technologies, such as household appliances.
For the interest of a wider, more fundamental discussion during this Presidential campaign, I look forward to your response regarding these issues. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
-
May 11, 2004
John Kerry for President, Inc.
901 15th Street, NW,
Suite 700 Washington, DC 20005
Re: Energy Dear Senator Kerry:
Beyond what is now being done by the federal government, what quantifiable goals over what period of time would you want the share of our energy consumption to come from renewable or solar energy and to be saved by energy efficiency technologies and programs?
Please specify how you intend to achieve these goals through enabling legislation and implementation (for example, using the federal procurement dollar, mandatory engineering standards, models based on federal research and development (e.g. vehicles, lighting, heating and air conditioning, recapturing energy waste and heat, etc.) and public contests for superior technologies, such as household appliances.
For the interest of a wider, more fundamental discussion during this Presidential campaign, I look forward to your response regarding these issues. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
-------- energy
[Title should read instead "Uncontrolled blackouts possible if power providers fail"?]
U.S. Power Grid Expected to Perform Well
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 11, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Summer-Power-Outlook.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The industry group that monitors the nation's electric grid expects the system to perform adequately this summer, although it warned that ``uncontrolled blackouts'' were possible if power providers fail -- as they did last August -- to comply with reliability standards.
The North American Electric Reliability Council also warned Tuesday that the increasing volume of power trading that goes on in deregulated markets can cause ``volatile and unpredictable flow patterns (that) can pose significant challenges for transmission system operators.''
The group said it expects peak power demand to rise by 2.5 percent from last year, slightly above the historical average of 2.4 percent, but that there should be enough electric generation capacity in all regions to handle this increased load.
Problems could arise, the group said, in managing the delivery of that power. Significant vulnerabilities remain even though grid operators have upgraded technology and become better coordinated since last Aug. 14, when 50 million people in eight states and parts of Canada were thrust into darkness.
Most distressing, industry experts said, is that nine months after the largest blackout in U.S. history the nation's reliability standards remain voluntary.
Reliability standards deal with everything from tree-trimming around power lines to the protocols by which grid operators dispatch power.
A proposed energy bill that stalled in Congress would make these standards mandatory. In the meantime, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is going ahead with a plan to tie compliance with NERC's reliability standards to utilities' ability to collect transmission tariffs from customers.
NERC alluded to problems with not having a mandate in its annual report.
``If all entities comply with NERC reliability standards, there should be no uncontrolled blackouts,'' the report said.
It added, though, that ``even in areas where resources are expected to be adequate to serve all customer demand, unanticipated equipment problems and extremely hot weather can combine to produce situations in which demands temporarily exceed available generation and transmission capacity.''
NERC's emphasis on reliability standards is consistent with the findings of the joint U.S.-Canadian task force that investigated last summer's blackout. In its final report, the task force concluded that a significant cause of last summer's blackout was the power industry's disregard of rules intended to ensure the reliable flow of electricity.
Hoff Stauffer, an analyst at Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Cambridge, Mass., said another persistent problem is that power generation and transmission capacity has not increased in areas where it is most needed, particularly in the Midwest, where the cascading Aug. 14 blackout began.
As a result, transmission lines in the region will likely be stressed during periods of peak demand and that reduces reliability, Stauffer said.
NERC's summer outlook addressed the issue by saying the Midwest's ``transmission system could become constrained during peak periods as a result of generating unit unavailability, or unplanned transmission outages.''
The recent return to service of an 883-megawatt nuclear power plant should help mitigate the region's constraints, the report said.
The report also emphasized the tight power supply situation in California, whose system has already exhibited signs of stress. On May 3, the California Independent System Operator declared a transmission emergency, forcing industrial and commercial customers to reduce consumption because a key line in Southern California was approaching overload.
The final report of the U.S.-Canadian task force leveled much of the blame for the Aug. 14 blackout on FirstEnergy Corp., which it said failed to adequately recognize or respond to problems on three of its lines in Ohio. Investigators also found inadequate monitoring of events by the regional grid system operator.
FirstEnergy has contended that the grid problems were more widespread.
Analysts have credited the industry with making some needed improvements in the past year, especially areas of software and training.
For example, employees at the Midwest Independent System Operator -- whose missteps were highlighted in the bi-national report -- now have emergency procedures in place that ``are very much improved,'' Stauffer said.
NERC said it has implemented several measures to improve reliability this summer, including remediation plans for FirstEnergy and the Midwest ISO, as well as audits of regional transmission systems.
The group also said it is developing new standards for vegetation management -- an issue that took on greater importance once it was learned that untrimmed trees were partly to blame for the Aug. 14 blackout.
On the Net:
North American Electric Reliability Council: http://www.nerc.com
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
U.S. Gives Public Lands Away for Pennies
May 11, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-11-02.asp
The U.S. federal government has given mining companies millions of acres of federal lands at extraordinarily low prices, a year long investigation of federal data and records on hardrock mining operations has found.
The study, "Who Owns the West?" by the Washington, DC based Environmental Working Group (EWG), was released Monday on the 132nd anniversary of the 1872 Mining Law, which continues to authorize the land transactions investigated by the research organization.
The investigation reveals a "taxpayer rip-off of epic proportions," said EWG analyst Dusty Horwitt.
The first example on a long list occurred in the ski resort town of Crested Butte, Colorado, where land in town can sell for $100,000 for one-tenth of an acre. On April 2, Crested Butte residents discovered that the federal government had sold 155 acres near the town to the Phelps Dodge mining company for $875 despite a Phelps Dodge estimate that the land could produce up to $158 million in after-tax profits over 11 years.
The town of Crested Butte, Colorado (Photo courtesy Crested Butte Mountain) "This sale price may seem unbelievable," EWG commented in the report, "but under the Mining Law of 1872, the major federal law governing hardrock mining in the United States, it's business as usual."
EWG researchers synthesized 125 million federal records into a detailed analysis showing taxpayers - literally - who owns 9.3 million acres of the American West, tract by tract, company by company, and nation by nation.
The analysis reveals that for as little as $0.84 an acre, more than 28,000 companies and individuals have gained control of precious metals and minerals on 5.6 million acres of claimed public land and 3.7 million acres of patented public land across 12 continental Western states.
None of them will pay anything to the federal government for the value of the minerals they extract from public property.
Ninety-four foreign owned corporations from 10 countries have gained control of metals beneath one of every five acres of claimed lands in the United States - an estimated 1.2 million acres of public land altogether.
Six of the top 10 claimants are foreign owned companies, ranked by number of mining claims held.
The Newmount Mining Corporation, based in Denver, tops the list. It has claimed some 347,000 acres of public land.
The number two claimant is Placer Dome Inc. of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, while number three is Rio Tinto, Ltd. of Melbourne, Australia.
The Cortez gold mine is 70 miles south west of Elko, Nevada. The operation is owned 60 percent by Placer Dome Inc and 40 percent by Rio Tinto. In 2001 the Cortez complex produced 1.188 million ounces of gold and is considered one of the lowest cost gold producers in North America. (Photo courtesy Canadian Institute of Mining) Barrick Gold Corporation of Toronto, Ontario, Canada holds the number four place; number six is Kinross, also of Toronto; and number seven is Cameco Corp. of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada.
ASARCO, a subsidiary of Grupo Mexico, based in Colonia Roma Sur, Mexico holds the number eight position. All the rest are held by U.S. entities.
The EWG study finds metal mining accounted for 46 percent of pollution reported by all industries in 2001, but comprised just 0.36 percent of the number of industrial operations.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that mine wastes contaminate 40 percent of western headwaters, and that taxpayers will shoulder a $35 billion cleanup bill to remediate a half million abandoned mines in 32 states.
"The United States has given away millions of acres of its public lands, often for less than a dollar per acre," Horwitt said. "In return, mining interests have left polluted lands and rivers that cost taxpayers billions of dollars to clean up."
The interactive report can be found here.
It allows visitors to use regional, state and local maps to find the location of mining lands as well as their owners.
In California, the report shows that private mining interests control 635,000 acres of public land - an area almost the size of Yosemite National Park.
In Arizona, private mining interests control more than 641,000 acres of public land - an area more than half the size of Grand Canyon National Park.
-------- genetics
Monsanto Pulls Plan To Commercialize Gene-Altered Wheat
By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A15998-2004May10?language=printer
Monsanto Co. yesterday scrapped plans to commercialize genetically engineered wheat, the biggest defeat yet for advocates of agricultural biotechnology -- and a victory for skeptics who said the company was trying to foist on the world a crop it did not want or need.
Monsanto said it would indefinitely delay plans to commercialize Roundup Ready wheat, a product that three years ago seemed headed for quick approval in the United States and Canada. The company said it would cut most of the $5 million it spends annually to develop the crop.
It did not rule out reviving it some day, but said it would do so only as part of a larger package of genetic alterations in the wheat plant that might win broad acceptance in the marketplace. Monsanto said any decision to revive the product would be four to eight years away.
While a few gene-altered crops have won wide acceptance among farmers, none is used primarily as human food and none carries the philosophical significance of wheat, fields of which make up the "amber waves of grain" that symbolize the bounty of North America. Monsanto's efforts to develop gene-altered wheat had been watched around the world as a bellwether for the future of agriculture.
A small but organized band of farmers in Canada and the northern Great Plains, fearing introduction of the wheat would cost them vital markets among skeptical consumers in Europe and Asia, fought for five years to kill the crop, forming a tactical alliance with environmental groups that oppose genetic engineering in principle. Their efforts set off broad debate among farm groups and in state legislatures.
The skeptics celebrated yesterday's announcement.
"We're just thrilled," said Gail Wiley, a farmer near Millarton, N.D., who joined her husband, Tom, in spearheading opposition to Monsanto's plans. "I'm sure Monsanto won't say it was because of us, but we're going to take the win, whether they admit it or not."
Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, called Monsanto's decision "a worldwide victory for consumers." Joseph Mendelson, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, said it was "a watershed event to have a product rejected in North America because of consumer and farmer desires. It will embolden farmers to say when we see a product we don't want on the market, we can stop it."
Roundup Ready wheat was designed to make it easier and less labor-intensive for growers to control weeds. The plant resists the effects of Roundup, an herbicide sold by Monsanto and, under the generic name glyphosate, by other companies. Roundup normally kills crops and can't be used after they're in the ground, but Roundup Ready crops have been tweaked at a genetic level to permit them to survive even heavy applications of the herbicide.
Monsanto said it scrapped the product not because of pressure from activists, but out of hard-nosed business calculations. Spring wheat acreage in North America, the market Monsanto was targeting, has shrunk 25 percent since research on Roundup Ready wheat began in 1997, the company said. With growers divided on whether to accept the crop, Monsanto said it simply saw better opportunities elsewhere.
Monsanto declined to say how much it had spent developing Roundup Ready wheat. The company said it would focus on expanding sales of gene-altered corn, cotton, canola and soybeans, which have been widely accepted in North America and in many foreign countries.
"I wish it were complex, but it's really not," said Carl Casale, executive vice president of Monsanto, based in St. Louis. "It was just a pure economic analysis of this opportunity relative to others that we have."
For two years, Monsanto's biggest political problem in pushing Roundup Ready wheat had been not its enemies but its friends.
The most influential wheat growers' group, the National Association of Wheat Growers, officially supported the crop and wanted it approved. But the group, and other wheat organizations, also pressed Monsanto to commercialize the product only when certain conditions were met, including evidence that it would be accepted among overseas buyers.
Those conditions became nearly impossible to satisfy as foreign opposition hardened in the past two years. Japanese millers went so far as to tour the American and Canadian wheat belts to oppose the crop.
Roundup Ready soybeans and canola have been huge successes with North American farmers, and they have also embraced other Monsanto crops that have been genetically altered to resist insects. But none of the gene-altered crops widely adopted to date is a food crop with the symbolic significance of wheat.
Soybeans and canola are pressed for their oil, most of which is used in small quantities in processed food. Most corn is fed to animals, and cotton is used for clothing. Wheat would have been by far the most important food crop to "go biotech," in the phrase that farmers use.
Daren Coppock, chief executive of the National Association of Wheat Growers, in Washington, emphasized yesterday that efforts to use biotechnology to improve the wheat crop were not dead. But genetic alterations that benefit farmers alone might not be enough to overcome marketplace resistance, he said, adding that companies need to develop genetic alterations that could benefit millers and consumers.
Among farmers, "nobody has a scientific or technical or philosophical objection to using biotechnology in wheat," he said. "The resistance comes if the person at the very end of the food chain says, 'I'm not going to buy the product.' "
Monsanto has already filed for approval of Roundup Ready wheat in some countries, including the United States, and the company said yesterday it would consult with regulators on how to proceed. Monsanto left open the possibility of seeking approval now in some countries, so that commercialization might be easier if it decides to revive the crop in several years. But the company said it would seek to go to market only if farmer sentiment changes, perhaps after other companies have successfully commercialized biotech wheat varieties.
Monsanto's decision to continue pressing for regulatory approval led to some wariness yesterday among opponents of biotech wheat, who fear the company, perhaps under new management in the future, might break its pledges to farmers.
"We do have a hard time trusting Monsanto," said Gail Wiley, the North Dakota farmer. "If that [regulatory] process is still going forward, we'll be watching."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Kidnap crisis poses a new risk
Japan's outrage toward the former hostages in Iraq could result in bad public policy,
By Debito Arudou
The Japan Times:
May 11, 2004
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20040511zg.htm
When five Japanese were taken hostage in Iraq last month, huge public concern for their safe return quickly gave way to hostility and a campaign of vilification. A disastrous public appeal by the families of three of the hostages for the withdrawal of SDF troops from Iraq encouraged the government to take a tough line, and facilitated a media frenzy that sought to paint the hostages as reckless, naive and of dubious political affiliation.
However, a series of measures proposed by officials emboldened by the backlash and designed to prevent a repeat occurrence of the kidnap crisis may only have the effect of snuffing out Japan's nascent volunteer movement.
Public reaction to the repatriation of the hostages was shocking. Airport placards called them "self-centered" and "the shame of Japan." Public officials branded them "irresponsible," "reckless," even "antigovernment." Instead of a welcome, they were labeled troublemakers
Overseas observers searched for reasons why, digging deep into their concepts of Japanese culture. The New York Times unearthed a mysterious sociological artifact called "okami." After centuries of hierarchy, the reporter averred, the hostages' lack of deference to authority triggered an negative reflex in Japanese society. Ignoring a government advisory against traveling to Iraq was a "sin."
America's Nikkei View Web site was more inciteful, bringing up the old chestnut about upstanding nails getting hammered down, the author depicted the "poor brave Japanese, who were just trying to make a difference," as victims of Japan's "deep-rooted cultural need to always put the welfare . . . of the group above the concerns of the individual."
This tendency to "listen absolutely to authority has maybe held back Japanese people in the great world scheme of things."
But this genre of observations -- which assumes something incomprehensible must be something cultural -- is facile and belittling.
Japanese people were hardly prisoners of culture. Street protests calling for the SDF's withdrawal in the first few days of the crisis demonstrate the diversity of public opinion.
So why the negative reaction? Essentially those in the spotlight undermined themselves with their own actions.
The first PR misstep was the families of the hostages immediately demanding SDF withdrawal -- not simply demanding their kin's rescue. Skirted was the issue of what kind of precedent Japan's appeasement might set for other kidnappable Japanese overseas.
Moreover, as their demands grew testier, things appeared more political than tragic. This appeared especially true after Internet jackals uncovered alleged communist ties.
Then the media scrutinized the hostages' motivations for being in Iraq. Reports on how three of them blithely blundered into their capture questioned their common sense. Didn't they know they were driving into a war zone?
What seemed to clinch the critics' side was that one of the hostages is only 18 -- not even an adult under Japanese law. Ostensibly, he went there to research the effects of depleted uranium. But what qualifications could a recent high school graduate possibly have?
Consensus: How could a parent let their child venture into this dangerous place, then howl angrily for his rescue and the SDF's return?
Finally, after the hostages were sprung, the three which attracted the most attention offered no immediate thanks or apologies. In fact, some stated they wanted to go right back to Iraq.
So let's be fair to the outrage. Forget theoretical bunkum about Japanese culture. I doubt public sentiment anywhere would have differed.
But what happened next goes beyond fair. Defenders of the hostages clammed up and the debate turned into a sport, a media frenzy.
Out popped the low blows: How these wealthy-looking lefties were wasting taxes in these economically-troubled times. The frumpiness of the female hostage. A torn-up high school diploma. Cannabis use. People even wondered if a video showing the hostages with knives to their throats was staged to get the SDF out.
Then in crept political opportunism. Diet members trial-ballooned making trips to unstable countries illegal. One politician even said he didn't want public funds used on people harboring "antigovernment" sentiments. And that's when things ventured into more dangerous territory -- public policy.
The public's impulse is understandable. Whenever a society weathers a great shock, people want to stop it happening again. But shocks habitually beget ill-considered legislation, even in societies with healthy debate arenas and checks and balances.
Dubious? Do some Internet searches: Britain's 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act. The Mann Act of 1910. Wilson's Espionage Act of 1917. McCarthyism and the McCarran Act of 1950. America's 2001 PATRIOT Act, passed just 45 days after Sept. 11.
In Japan's case, laws are being proposed to punish those entering designated "danger zones" without an official reason.
Victims -- or their families -- will foot the bill for their rescue, which will amount to airfare, if not more. "This is standard practice for mountain rescues," one line of reasoning goes.
But consider two things: One is that an aid mission to a danger zone is not a forest stroll gone astray. The very comparison indicates a misunderstanding of what aid missions do.
The second is policy overstretch and political abuse. This law would place a degree of government control over aid organizations, something many don't want. Particularly NGOs (by very the nature of their title) eschew government support, especially when they take on problems governments would rather avoid.
Under this law, they would effectively need official permission to work in some places overseas. Those "unsponsored" who get unlucky will face a "rescue fine" -- which could bankrupt the person or the organization. Thus this new system of rents will curtail Japanese volunteerism.
Far-fetched? Hark back to 2002, when ex-LDP kingpin Muneo Suzuki allegedly excluded NGO "Peace Winds Japan" from a Foreign Ministry meeting for personal reasons. If Suzuki could have gone further and withdrawn government sponsorship, PWJ probably could not have continued its work in Afghanistan.
As Colin Powell inferred in his appraisal of this hostage crisis, volunteerism is a positive development for a society. Japan, a country not well-known for its volunteer spirit, is only now understanding that the world's problems need more than just money thrown at them.
They need dedicated people with social consciousness, and we are seeing their works even domestically in the fight for foreigners' rights ( Zeit Gist: March 30, 2004 ).
Above all, a palpable undercurrent of the debate must not hold sway: "If you get into trouble overseas, it is your fault and your responsibility. So stay home in safe Japan and mind your own business. Volunteerism only leads to trouble for you and your family."
So what is to be done? While acknowledging that citizens of a country at home or abroad can and should expect at least a modicum of government representation, I suggest that people destined for "dangerous areas" sign a Foreign Ministry release indicating they go there on their own recognizance. If anything happens, they waive government assistance.
A bit cold-blooded. But it is better than the public blaming someone for getting hurt when trying to help others. Or perpetuating the image that volunteers are reckless and irresponsible, and enacting legislation to rein them in.
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