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NUCLEAR
Radioactive Leak Shuts Down Road [in Tennessee]
Niger president to decide on nuclear treaty
President ignored war reality
IAEA Chief Says No Sign Iran Has Weaponized Uranium
Israel urged to attack Iran nuke plant
North Korea lashes out at the US after nuclear talks end
Talks Center On Dismantling Nukes
U.N. Nuclear Chief Seeks Security Overhaul
Nuclear Monitor Sees Treaties Weakening
Los Alamos To Conduct 'Subcritical' Nuke Experiment in Nevada
Flats - dead and buried
Savannah River Site awaits nuclear report
MILITARY
NPS grad lauded for 'smart' weapons
Almost Half British Voters Say Blair Should Go - Poll
US to axe 8,000 jobs on European military bases
2nd Hong Kong Democracy Figure Leaves Hastily
U.S. Forces Attack Iraqi Holy City
Battles in Najaf and Karbala Near Shiites' Religious Sites
Israel hits Gaza militant targets
New Gaza Clashes Fuel Israeli Debate
After a Violent Week, Israel to Step Up Gaza Patrols
Israel Copter Fires at Jihad Leader's Home
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
New Limits On Tactics At Prisons
Top Commander Bars Coercive Tactics in Interrogation of Iraqis
Militarism Leads to Torture
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked
Powell Says U.S. Will Withdraw Troops From Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Court Questions Al Qaeda Contact
Ohio Groups Question Justice's Trip on Utility Jet
EU Agrees to Swap Information On Airline Passengers With U.S.
City Agencies Agree on a Coordinated Response to Disasters
POLITICS
Leak Prosecutor Seeks To Question Reporters
Bipartisan Duo Push Probe of Iraq Abuse
ACTIVISTS
Update on Vanunu's appeal - article from Ha'aretz
Castro Leads Protest Against U.S. Embargo
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Radioactive Leak Shuts Down Road [in Tennessee]
Tests Confirm Contamination of Hwy. 95
5/15/04
WVLT Knoxville
http://www.volunteertv.com/Global/story.asp?S=1869474&nav=4QcHN8zl
Officials of the U.S. Department of Energy, the State of Tennessee and Bechtel Jacobs Company are continuing to respond Saturday to the incident involving the leakage of radioactive contaminated water onto Highway 95 north of Bethel Valley Road and south of Bear Creek Road on Friday.
Surveys of the road's surface were completed around 3:00am Saturday morning. Tests confirm the road's surface is contaminated in several places.
A recovery plan to address the removal of the contamination is being developed and is being coordinated with the State of Tennessee. State and local officials are continuing to monitor the situation at the site and Highway 95 remains closed.
A Citizen Hotline is open and available to the public. If you have concerns or traveled in the area of Highway 95 north of Bethel Valley Road to the intersection of Bear Creek Road on Friday, you should call 362-8600 with any questions.
-------- africa
Niger president to decide on nuclear treaty
Saturday, May 15, 2004
(AP)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/africa/05/15/niger.nuclear.ap/
NIAMEY, Niger -- Lawmakers in the West African nation of Niger, the world's number three producer of yellowcake uranium, voted Saturday to join an international treaty calling on signatories to ensure the protection of their nuclear materials.
Niger's president has 15 days to reject the bill or sign it into law.
The bill calls for adherence to the 1980 Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material. The treaty, adopted in Vienna, set technical standards for protecting plutonium and enriched uranium -- the material used in making nuclear bombs -- during transport.
Niger signed the treaty in 1985, but never adopted it as law at home.
"Niger ... must adhere to this convention," said a report issued by the national assembly's foreign affairs commission in Niamey.
Concerns over Niger's uranium grew last year in the run-up to the U.S.-led war against Iraq when the United States and Britain alleged that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had revived his banned nuclear weapons program.
U.S.President George W. Bush came under heavy criticism last year when he asserted in his State of the Union address that Iraq was shopping in Niger for yellowcake uranium, which can be processed into enriched uranium usable in a nuclear weapon -- intelligence that turned out to be based on forged documents.
The original suspicions apparently came from a British dossier and Britain's Foreign Office continued to maintain Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Niger, although no evidence was offered. Niger has denied the accusations.
Only to Canada and Australia produce more yellowcake uranium than Niger. Uranium sales generate about two-thirds of impoverished Niger's export earnings.
-------- depleted uranium
President ignored war reality
BY JOHN B. QUIGLEY - Quigley.2@osu.edu
May 15, 2004
Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/8672064.htm?1c
According to Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, President Bush did not give much thought to the consequences of going to war in Iraq.
If Woodward is on target, Bush shut his ears when advisors tried to explain that governing Iraq might be more than we could handle. Bush didn't consult, other than to get answers to back his own predilections.
With recent polls showing widespread skepticism over Bush's handling of post-invasion Iraq, Plan of Attack has the potential of hurting the president in November.
By Woodward's account, Bush kept Secretary of State Colin Powell out of the loop as he made the final decision to invade. Powell enjoys as much public respect as any member of the Bush entourage. He has some passing experience with military action in the Persian Gulf. He was skeptical that we could govern Iraq peacefully. Excluding Powell from the decision-making process gains Bush no points with the electorate.
As casualties in Iraq mount, we are living with the consequence both of Bush's decision to invade, and of his decision to invade without sufficient planning for what might follow. Bush listened to Iraqi exiles who gave us phony information, not only about weapons of mass destruction but also about the mood of the people.
What Bush ignored is the distrust Iraqis have of the United States as a result of our prior involvement there and elsewhere in the Middle East. Iraqis have suffered since 1991, as Iraq has been under U.N. economic sanctions. Iraqis know that it has been the United States that promoted the use of these sanctions.
They know that we bombed Iraq, both during the 1991 war and later in the decade, with missiles tipped with highly toxic depleted uranium. Iraqis have been dying of cancer at a high rate since 1991, and many specialists attribute the deaths to depleted uranium. We see the enmity we have generated when Iraqi schoolchildren spontaneously gather to rejoice over the killing of a U.S. soldier. We have even united the Sunni and the Shia by serving as a common enemy.
Iraqis see us as motivated by a desire to ensure access to oil. They know of our prior efforts at manipulating politics in the region.
Seeds of disaster
We engineered the overthrow in 1953 of the government of neighboring Iran, when it threatened to nationalize oil. In Lebanon, we funneled money to pro-Western candidates in parliamentary elections in 1957, leading to civil war, and then to an intervention by U.S. Marines to keep the pro-Western government in power. We championed Israel as a pro-Western force that would help keep anti-U.S. elements in check.
Fundamentalist Islam is a product of our military and political intervention. In Islamic theology, suicide is impermissible. An exception for committing suicide in defense of Islam appeared only in the 1960s, invented in Iran by clerics who opposed our interference.
Woodward's book is not the first hint that President Bush was shooting from the hip. We already had a book by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who said that Bush focused on invading Iraq as soon as he took office. Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinnia warned publicly in the run-up to the invasion that the Iraqis would hold us responsible for bad economic conditions if we took over the country.
Plan of Attack hurts the president precisely because Woodward is no voice in the wilderness. The author provides detail for what was already known: Bush had little idea what governing Iraq would be.
John B. Quigley is a professor of law at Ohio State University.
-------- iran
IAEA Chief Says No Sign Iran Has Weaponized Uranium, But Work Remains
By Robert McMahon
5/15/04
Payvand's Iran News
http://www.payvand.com/news/04/may/1095.html
United Nations, 14 May 2004 (RFE/RL) -- The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said today that Iran possesses the knowledge to produce weapons-grade uranium but it's not clear whether it has done so.
IAEA Director-General Muhammad el-Baradei told the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations today that Iran has been providing proper access to inspectors. But he said that much technical analysis remains to determine the scale of the country's nuclear program.
"We don't have proof so far that they have done any weaponization nor have we seen that they have enriched uranium to the military level, [but] if you ask me whether they have the know how to develop the highly enriched uranium, the answer is yes," el-Baradei said.
Iran has pledged to give a full account of its nuclear activities before a meeting next month of the IAEA board of governors in Vienna. In October, Iran gave the IAEA what it said was a full declaration of its nuclear program. But it failed to list some key research projects such as highly specialized "P2" centrifuges that can make arms-grade uranium.
The IAEA reported the omissions in March, prompting a warning from its board of governors. U.S. officials have said that if Iran continues to fail to comply, the matter should be referred to the UN Security Council as a threat to international peace and security.
El-Baradei told the Council on Foreign Relations, an independent policy institute, that the current approach of steady pressure on Iran was appropriate. "Verification backed by diplomacy continues to be the best option, frankly, and if you are moving forward, if you do not see imminent threats, I think we should stay the course," he said. "It sometimes takes time, people get impatient but this still is the best option because there is no better alternative."
Overall, the IAEA chief also said the current system for dealing with nuclear nonproliferation was inadequate and that the UN Security Council must revise its role.
There are currently 100 facilities in 40 countries that still use highly enriched uranium, according to el-Baradei. He said the agency is in discussion with Washington about a global cleanup program for this material. He recommended a moratorium or ban on the right of every country to develop plutonium and highly enriched uranium. "We act like a fire brigade, we act to try to put the fire off in Iraq, in North Korea, but that's not the solution," he said. "The solution is building a new system of collective security that is not based on reliance on nuclear weapons. That's a lot. It's a tall order but we really need to start."
El-Baradei also called for a better response system in cases in which countries withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). He suggested establishing a system of sanctions that countries are aware of so they can consider the cost of withdrawing from the NPT. This, he said, would be an improvement on the limited response to North Korea's withdrawal last year.
"What I worry about North Korea [is] that it also sends the worst signal to the would-be proliferators. That if you want to protect yourself, [you] accelerate your program because then you are immune in a way, then people will sit around the table with you and if you do not do that fast enough you might be subject to preemption," el-Baradei said.
He said North Korea was the world's top security concern. The regime, he said, used loopholes in a 1994 agreement and the export-control system that is aimed at banning trade in nuclear materials to start a nuclear weapons program. It also developed a second track of highly-enriched-uranium production which the IAEA knows little about.
-------- israel
Israel urged to attack Iran nuke plant
Strategic report calls for second-strike capability
May 15, 2004
WorldNetDaily.com
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38516
A report submitted to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon calls for the Jewish state to plan pre-emptive strikes against Iran's nuclear plant and nuclear second-strike capability as a deterrent against its hostile neighbors in the Middle East.
The report, "Israel's Strategic Future," says Israel must prevent its enemies from developing weapons of mass destruction through strikes against vital facilities.
Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin, a premium, online intelligence newsletter published by WorldNetDaily, first reported Israel has already begun drawing up plans for a strike at Iran's nuclear facilities that could come before the end of the summer.
The report says Israel has been threatened by a biological or nuclear first-strike that seeks to exploit Israel's small space and high population density.
"To meet its ultimate deterrence objectives -- that is, to deter the most overwhelmingly destructive enemy first-strikes -- Israel must seek and achieve a visible second-strike capability to target approximately 15 enemy cities," the report says. "Ranges would be to cities in Libya and Iran, and recognizable nuclear bomb yields would be at a level sufficient to fully compromise the aggressor's viability as a functioning state. All enemy targets should be selected with the view that their destruction would promptly force the enemy to cease all nuclear/biological/chemical exchanges with Israel."
The report also called on Israel to develop a multi-layered ballistic missile defense system.
Iran last month announced plans to begin building a heavy-water reactor that can produce weapons-grade plutonium, Israel began drawing up plans to demolish it - much as it destroyed an Iraqi nuclear facility more than a decade ago.
While Tehran insists the facility is purely for research, the decision heightens concern about Iran's ability to produce nuclear aims.
The 40-megawatt reactor could produce enough plutonium for a nuclear weapon each year, according to sources.
While construction is set to begin in June, Iran already had previously announced plans to build such a reactor last year to the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency.
The reactor site is at Arak, next to an already built heavy-water production plant. It is to replace a reactor using non-weapons grade enriched uranium that the Iranians mothballed because they said it was outmoded and lacked fuel.
Because enrichment can be used both to generate power and make nuclear warheads, Iran has said it has suspended all enrichment activities to prove its peaceful intentions. It also cannot buy enriched fuel on legal markets because of international suspicions about its intentions.
Observers wonder out loud why Iran, a nation with vast oil reserves, is so intent on producing nuclear power.
-------- korea
North Korea lashes out at the US after nuclear talks end
BEIJING (AFP)
May 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040515133052.3daakg17.html
North Korea lashed out the United States Saturday, accusing Washington of wasting time after working-level talks on the simmering 19-month crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear drive ended with few signs of progress.
Working group delegations to six-nation talks on the bitter standoff left Beijing Saturday after the United States and North Korea appeared to harden their positions at the talks, which began on Wednesday.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said the United States was wasting time and this could lead the state to build up his nuclear deterrent, the official KCNA news agency reported.
"If the US persistently seeks to waste time, pressurizing the DPRK (North Korea) to change its political system and disarm itself under the signboard of 'peaceful talks', the DPRK will...use it as a means for building stronger nuclear deterrent force," the spokesman was quoted saying.
The low-level discussions were seeking to set the agenda for a third round of higher, vice ministerial talks agreed to when the delegations from the two Koreas, China, the United States, Japan and Russia last met in February.
China's representative to the meeting, Ning Fukui, said another working-level group meeting would be held before the slated third round of vice ministerial meetings due before the end of June, Xinhua news agency said.
"It is the hope of the Chinese side that all parties would hold consultations in a flexible, practical and patient manner and explore ways to settle the issue," Ning said.
The key sticking point has appeared to be whether North Korea should give up its entire nuclear program, or only the military part, in exchange for economic aid and security guarantees.
Washington wants a clear-cut commitment from the North for a "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" before any compensation can be considered.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said in Washington Friday that the three days of talks produced "no particular breakthroughs," and further urged the international community to increase pressure on Pyongyang to back down from its nuclear weapons ambitions.
In a further development, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi announced Friday that he would meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang next week to discuss the abduction of Japanese citizens and the regime's nuclear arms ambitions.
He said Japan had informed the United States, China and South Korea of his planned visit to the Stalinist state.
Before returning to Pyongyang from Beijing, the North Korean chief delegate Li Kun said his country would continue to participate in the talks, Yonhap news agency said.
"We have had serious discussions at the talks. We confirmed that a common view has been formed that there would be reward for us in return for freezing the nuclear weapons program."
"Another consensus is that the US demand for CVID (complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of nuclear programs) is an obstacle to progress in negotiation."
China's leading People's Daily newspaper said that during the working-level talks both the United States and North Korea hardened their positions with neither side willing to give in.
"Without aid and security guarantees, North Korea cannot consider the US demand for the complete verifiable and irreversible dismantling of its nuclear program," the paper quoted a North Korean official as saying.
----
Talks Center On Dismantling Nukes
Associated Press
May 15, 2004
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_nukes_051504,00.html
BEIJING - The United States' insistence that North Korea commit to dismantling its nuclear program before asking for aid was the "basic hurdle" in three days of low-level talks this week, the North's chief delegate said Saturday.
The U.S. envoy to the six-nation talks, Joseph DeTrani, struck a different tone, calling the discussions that ended Friday a "good meeting." When asked if progress had been made, he answered: "Yes, definitely," but did not elaborate.
North Korea's chief delegate, Ri Gun, said negotiators supported Pyongyang's bid for aid in exchange for freezing the program. Washington says assistance will come after a freeze only if the North already has committed to "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling" - what diplomats call CVID.
"One thing that has been confirmed is that there is a shared view that we must get compensation when we freeze our nuclear weapons development plan," Ri said to reporters at the Beijing airport as he prepared to board a flight home to Pyongyang.
"But the United States kept demanding our promise of CVID, and there has been a shared view that this is the basic hurdle in discussions," he said.
Ri added: "We will, however, continue to participate in the talk process with patience."
The discussions were meant to resolve technical issues and help create an agenda for a third round of high-level negotiations.
China said participants affirmed their plans to hold those talks by the end of June and would hold one more lower-level technical meeting before that.
On Friday, U.S. and North Korean officials held rare one-on-one talks and the North denied U.S. claims that Pakistan had provided it with uranium enrichment technology, according to Pak Myong Kuk, a member of the North's delegation.
The former head of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, said in February that he had transferred sensitive technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.
China's delegate, Ning Fukui, appealed Saturday for participants to push ahead with the talks.
"It is the hope of the Chinese side that all parties could hold consultations in a flexible, practical and patient manner, and explore ways to settle the issues," the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Ning as saying.
Two previous rounds of high-level talks have failed to settle the standoff, which flared in October 2002 when the United States said North Korea admitted operating a secret nuclear program in violation of a 1994 agreement.
A key sticking point is the issue of uranium technology, which the U.S. claims the North uses in a second secret program. Pyongyang has said it has only one nuclear weapons program based on plutonium.
Washington has demanded that Pyongyang commit to giving up both projects as part of a comprehensive settlement - a condition North Korea rejects.
-------- terrorism
U.N. Nuclear Chief Seeks Security Overhaul
May 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Nuclear-ElBaradei.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- The U.N. nuclear chief called for a major overhaul of global measures to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, warning that ``extremist terrorists'' and several insecure countries still want to get their hands on nuclear material.
Mohamed ElBaradei complained that the international community isn't thinking ``outside the box'' about trying to create a globally secure system where people can live peacefully without relying on nuclear weapons.
In the post-Cold War world, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, he said many countries feel that security can only come through nuclear weapons, and ``we have realized there is a new group of people, the so-called extremist terrorists ... who would like to get their hands on some of this (nuclear) material.''
North Korea is the top global security problem, and the way the international community responds to that country's nuclear program will be an important precedent for other would-be proliferators, ElBaradei said.
As far as countries that believe they will be more secure with nuclear weapons, ElBaradei argued that ``if a group of terrorists developed their own weapons right now, no matter how much horrific weaponry you have in your arsenal, it will not protect you.''
``So we need a better system of security ... that does not rely on horrific weapons, which won't protect you or anyone else,'' he said.
During an hour-long question-and-answer session at the Council on Foreign Relations, ElBaradei repeatedly returned to this long-term challenge. But he said there were also short-term measures that should be taken to better protect nuclear material, prevent its export and give additional authority to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he heads.
He criticized the U.N. Security Council for not even expressing concern when North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- the cornerstone of global efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons.
``If a country is walking out of the system, they are saying, `we are getting out to exercise our option to develop nuclear weapons.' If that is not a threat to international peace and security, what is?,'' ElBaradei asked.
He said a truly successful global regime must include all countries, noting that three de facto nuclear weapons states -- India, Pakistan and Israel -- aren't parties to the treaty. He also lamented that seven years after an additional protocol was adopted allowing intrusive inspections, more than 100 countries still haven't signed it.
Still, ElBaradei said he wants to supplement the treaty to make it more effective, and one of his proposals will be a worldwide moratorium or ban on the development of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the building blocks of nuclear weapons.
``In the next couple of months, I'm establishing a group of experts to look into how we can develop a better system of security with regard to enrichment and reprocessing,'' he said.
With 100 facilities in 40 countries using highly enriched uranium, he said it was also time for ``a clean-up'' of this nuclear material.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is planning to go to Vienna, where the IAEA is based, to launch a global clean-up of all the highly enriched uranium from civilian reactors, he said.
``Ideally, I'd like to see the non-proliferation regime treated the way we treat genocide -- that whether you're in or out of the treaty, you are banned from developing nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction,'' ElBaradei said.
``We're far away from that,'' he lamented.
ElBaradei, who is scheduled to present an assessment of Iran's nuclear activities to the IAEA board of governors in June, said his inspectors are getting the access they want but need additional information.
On Libya, ElBaradei said he believes Moammar Gadhafi's decision to stop programs for developing weapons of mass destruction was a result of ``the change of the whole international landscape'' rather than the Iraq war.
``I think he has concluded that it's in their interest to regularize relationships in the West'' partly because years of sanction have hurt Libya's economy, he said.
-------- treaties
Nuclear Monitor Sees Treaties Weakening
May 15, 2004
By JUDITH MILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/international/15nuke.html
The chief international nuclear weapons monitor warned yesterday that the intricate web of treaties and agreements that limit the spread of nuclear weapons was weakening and could be endangered unless sweeping reforms to the system were made in the United Nations Security Council and elsewhere.
Speaking at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he and President Bush had discussed at the White House working jointly toward a package of measures to bolster the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and on other reforms that he called crucial to stopping the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons.
Specifically, he said, he and the Bush administration had discussed a proposal to spend between $50 million and $100 million over the next five years to better guard stockpiles of highly enriched uranium in atomic power reactors and other sources throughout the world. Experts have warned that terrorists who obtained such material could use it to make nuclear or radiological weapons.
He said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham of the United States would travel to the atomic agency's headquarters in Vienna this month to announce details of the program.
Jeanne Lopatto, spokeswoman for the Energy Department, confirmed that the administration was developing a plan to "accelerate and expand efforts to secure and remove high-risk nuclear and radiological materials.''
Dr. ElBaradei said Mr. Bush and he had also agreed on the need to supplement the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the main treaty that seeks to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, and to strengthen both the agency's ability to inspect suspect nuclear facilities and international controls on sales of nuclear technology. Both agreed, he added, on the need to penalize states that opt out of the treaty after acquiring nuclear equipment under the guise of a peaceful program.
He said there was further agreement on the need to find a way to deny countries that refuse to sign the treaty, or those that are suspected of cheating on it, access to technology that enriches uranium or reprocesses fuel that has been used in peaceful nuclear reactors. Such material can also be used in nuclear bombs.
Although he said Mr. Bush and he had disagreed about "some approaches and specific proposals," he said he was struck by the substantial degree of agreement about the need for urgent reform. This assertion by Dr. ElBaradei, an Egyptian citizen who studied law in New York, surprised several who heard the speech, given previous tensions between the atomic agency and the administration over the invasion of Iraq and over charges by some in the administration that the agency has been too tolerant of nuclear cheating and other treaty violations by member nations like Iran.
Dr. ElBaradei said that his agency was not ready to state that Iran was not using its peaceful nuclear program to acquire nuclear weapons, but that Tehran was now cooperating more fully with his agency than it had in the past. In a brief telephone interview after his speech, he said that although he expected to receive a "good deal of information" from Iran in the next two weeks, he did not know whether Iran would clear up questions about its nuclear program in time for his agency's board of governors meeting in June.
He said that while Iran had the technology to enrich uranium, he had no proof that such uranium had been processed to a level adequate to make a nuclear bomb.
"We will close the file when we have dealt with all the issues that require to be investigated," he said.
Iran has been pressing the monitoring agency to state that it does not have a nuclear weapons program, while the Bush administration has been pushing the agency to go to the Security Council with a resolution to punish Tehran for withholding information about its nuclear activities.
Dr. ElBaradei also said North Korea's announcement that it was withdrawing from the nuclear weapons treaty posed one of the most significant challenges to international efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. He expressed disappointment that the United Nations Security Council had failed to act against North Korea in connection with over a decade of the agency's complaints about that country's nuclear activities. The Council's lack of action, he said "has not been optimum."
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Dr. ElBaradei's remarks reflected the growing recognition that the nonproliferation system that had served the world well during the cold war was now unraveling. "There's a consensus that something needs to be done," he said. "But there's not yet consensus on what needs to be done."
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Los Alamos To Conduct 'Subcritical' Nuke Experiment in Nevada
May 15, 2004
The Associated Press
http://www.abqjournal.com/north/apnuke05-15-04.htm
LOS ALAMOS - Los Alamos National Laboratory is planning its eighth subcritical nuclear experiment, dubbed "Armando," at the Nevada Test Site this spring.
Los Alamos researchers, touring the site with reporters this past week, said the experiment - the 21st of a series - will use bomb-grade plutonium but that the configuration of the explosives will prevent a full-fledged nuclear explosion.
The detonation will take place inside a high-strength steel spherical vessel to contain the explosion. The 3-foot vessel, which has ports that allow for X-ray imaging and other diagnostics, rests in a sealed chamber about 1,000 feet beneath the Nevada desert 80 miles north of Las Vegas, Nev.
The United States banned nuclear testing in 1993, so such experiments are as close to a thermonuclear weapon ignition as the nation can get.
The U.S. Department of Energy conducted the last of 1,054 nuclear tests on Sept. 23, 1992, then moved on to what it calls "science-based stockpile stewardship." Los Alamos now uses experimental data to check computer codes that describe the behavior of nuclear weapons, Los Alamos spokesman Jim Danneskiold said.
Los Alamos kicked off its subcritical experiments in 1997.
Raffi Papazian, the lab's director of operations at the Nevada Test Site, said subcritical tests help maintain expertise and equipment in case the United States decides to restart nuclear tests.
The first experiments in the series were designed to answer basic scientific questions about the nature and behavior of plutonium, the radioactive metal at the core of a modern thermonuclear bomb, Papazian said.
Armando is the third, and most advanced, in a series geared toward certifying nuclear pits - plutonium triggers for bombs - now manufactured at Los Alamos, Papazian said.
Ultimately, the experiments should help scientists understand such things as how plutonium holds up under extreme shock, he said.
"It tells you how strong plutonium is, so that when you feed it into a computer, you have the right number," he said.
Pits were made for decades at the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, but it closed in 1989. In 1996, the DOE selected Los Alamos to re-establish the capability, starting with the W-88 warhead carried by Trident submarines. Congress early this year cut funding for a proposed plutonium trigger factory, solidifying Los Alamos as the nation's primary pit manufacturer.
"What we are exploring today is the difference between what we are producing at Los Alamos, which is cast plutonium, and what was produced at Rocky Flats, which was wrought plutonium," Papazian said.
Researchers hope the results "will show that everything is fine, which means a new-built pit functions just like an old pit," he said.
The first pit to meet specifications came out last year, and the lab has produced several more since. The next step is certifying that the pits will work before putting them into the stockpile.
The first fully certified pit is expected to be ready by 2007.
Papazian said he didn't know how much Armando will cost. Past subcritical experiments ranged from $20 million to $30 million.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- colorado
Flats - dead and buried
Disputed plan may bring early demise to weapons plant
By Ann Imse,
Rocky Mountain News
May 15, 2004
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_2887689,00.html
Rocky Flats is on track to close early and $1 billion under its worst-case budget if it goes ahead with controversial plans to blow up two former nuclear buildings and leave two contaminated basements buried in the ground.
Cleanup contractor Kaiser-Hill Co. says the new strategy is safer for its workers and necessary because the buildings were hardened to withstand Soviet attack. The change is not meant to cut costs, it says.
The sprawling nuclear weapons plant 16 miles northwest of Denver is being demolished, decontaminated and restored to prairie grass in a project that began in 1995.
Kaiser-Hill credits its faster-than-expected progress to technological innovations and a near miracle: being able to ship the plutonium and nuclear waste out of state without political interruption.
The company is running $1 billion under its own worst-case estimate of cost and six months ahead of the planned closure date of December 2006. It has run scenarios for finishing even earlier, as soon as October 2005.
Under its contract with the federal government, Kaiser-Hill stands to earn huge bonuses for this performance. As a result, it has doubled its early profit estimates to half a billion dollars, according to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing by one of its parent companies, Kaiser Group Holdings Inc.
Watchdog groups are generally satisfied with the cleanup because most of the site is being completely decontaminated. But some have raised serious questions about plans - already partially approved - to use explosives on a pair of former plutonium and uranium buildings and to leave concrete basement walls coated with low-level nuclear waste as little as 6 feet below the surface.
"I think it's a very bad idea," said Boulder County Commissioner Paul Danish, a member of the watchdog Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments. "A cleanup is a cleanup."
The blasting plan in particular "gives some people real heartburn," said his colleague on the coalition, Arvada City Councilwoman Lorraine Anderson. No one wants radioactive dust floating downwind onto citizens, she said.
Kaiser-Hill says that won't happen because the radioactive basements will be sprayed with glue and covered with dirt. Only then will decontaminated upper sections be collapsed into contaminated lower sections.
The company also says the radioactive basements will be safe when buried because the plutonium will be stuck fast to the concrete and won't move into air or water, where it could harm people.
"This presents zero risk, unless somebody digs down 40 feet and licks the concrete," said Joe Legare, the No. 2 Department of Energy official at Rocky Flats.
Still, Danish looks at the cost-cutting, the bonuses and the changed cleanup plans and comes to this conclusion:
"I think there's a rush to closure going on."
Certainly, the cost of cleanup is dropping, and Kaiser-Hill's profit is rising.
Kaiser-Hill originally estimated the cleanup cost at $7.8 billion, including every dime of overrun money the government allowed, according to the SEC report. The company cut that to $6.75 billion as of Dec. 31, the report said.
Kaiser-Hill now hopes to even beat that estimate, said spokesman John Corsi. It recently signed a contract update providing incentives to cut the cost as low as $6.12 billion.
But Corsi cautions that much still could happen to change the estimates.
Shipments unimpeded
When Kaiser-Hill started the job in 1995, Rocky Flats was in critical condition.
Over 38 years, the factory had churned out 70,000 nuclear bomb cores. After it stopped production in 1989, the Department of Energy, citing the unstable, leaking plutonium left there, decreed five Rocky Flats buildings among the 10 most dangerous in America.
The government gave Kaiser-Hill an unusual contract to fix the mess. The company had wide latitude to invent its own cleanup methods and set its own schedule, said the DOE's Legare.
"Nobody really knew if we were going to succeed," said David Shelton, a Kaiser-Hill vice president.
Speed was paramount in dealing with the unstable plutonium, which could spontaneously combust when exposed to air or flash into a deadly nuclear reaction if too much accumulated in one spot.
"Rocky Flats was considered an imminent danger to the community," said Victor Holm, chairman of the Rocky Flats Citizens Advisory Board. So the company dove into the work without first spending years on planning.
Today, all of the weapons-grade plutonium has been removed and most of the buildings are empty, Shelton said. More than 70 percent of the radioactive waste has been shipped out of state.
Plant officials still can't believe no one delayed the shipment of plutonium and nuclear waste. South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges tried, threatening to lie down in front of the Rocky Flats trucks headed to the Savannah River nuclear weapons complex in 2001. But he lost his fight in court before he could interfere with shipments.
Colorado officials also staved off the Department of Energy's proposal in 1996 to create a nuclear-waste dump at Rocky Flats, so that much of the plant's waste could be buried on-site. That likely would have meant environmental lawsuits and years of legal wrangling.
Kaiser-Hill also got lucky in another way. So far, it's found very little plutonium under the buildings or leaking from six miles of underground pipes.
Even the soil under the "Infinity Room" in Building 771 - so-called because radiation monitors went off the scale - came up clean, said Steve Gunderson, the state health department's regulator on the Rocky Flats cleanup. "Nothing seeped underneath the floor. We were amazed."
Federal funds also flowed without interruption, thanks to a united congressional delegation, Shelton said.
But more than anything, Shelton credited worker innovation for his company's progress. For example, an adhesive was sprayed onto huge pieces of equipment, encasing the contamination. That eliminated the need to cut up the machines and fit the pieces into containers.
One creation - a huge machine to package nuclear waste - saved workers from exposure to radiation, but "it was a nightmare" to keep running, Shelton said.
Trade-off in standards
With most of the equipment now gone, workers are trying to decontaminate the concrete walls and floors of the main nuclear buildings and demolish them. In several cases, it's proving to be a very tough job.
Kaiser-Hill has regulators' permission to use explosives on former uranium Building 881, and to bury the contaminated basement of former plutonium Building 771. It is seeking permission to use both strategies on Building 371/374, where workers made bomb cores and recycled plutonium.
Originally, the basements were to be removed or decontaminated completely before burial.
In Building 771 - once rated the most dangerous in America for its leaking plutonium solutions - workers have scraped through the concrete to metal rebar and still haven't removed all the contamination, said the advisory board's Holm.
"I'm convinced there are areas they can't clean up," he said.
That's why Kaiser-Hill wants to use heavy equipment to demolish Building 771 and leave the still-contaminated deep basement buried where it lies.
Kaiser-Hill's plan to leave behind low-level nuclear waste was made possible by a change in cleanup standards in 2003, said Gunderson of the state health department.
Surrounding communities wanted tighter limits on radioactivity at the surface, where humans could breathe or ingest it.
The Department of Energy agreed, but in return, it asked for weaker standards underground, so the total cleanup cost would not rise.
"We all knew it would have been difficult to get more money" out of Congress, said DOE's John Rampe.
Now, the maximum radioactivity below 6 feet is set on a case-by-case basis. It still must pose almost no risk of cancer for someone working on the site, Rampe said.
Building controversy
Kaiser-Hill has yet to win authority for its most controversial proposal: blowing up Building 371 and leaving its plutonium-tainted basement buried.
That wasn't the original plan. The company proposed complete decontamination and demolition with heavy equipment instead of explosives, records say.
Gunderson says Building 371 is probably the stoutest in the state, likely second only to NORAD's command center carved into Cheyenne Mountain. It has 12-foot-thick beams, and the slab at the bottom of the basement is 3 feet of concrete.
Building 371 also was seriously contaminated, partly because 1,200 gallons of radioactive water spilled there in 1992.
Dismantling it and hoisting out huge concrete pieces would be very dangerous for workers, Rocky Flats officials say. Even Gunderson said that blasting "may be the smartest way to do it."
Kaiser-Hill now plans to decontaminate the upper floor completely, clean the lower floors as much as possible, then blast the top into the basement in sections. The basement will be covered with several feet of dirt before the explosions to prevent the falling concrete from breaking the floor and releasing radioactive particles.
If Kaiser-Hill is forced to cut out the contaminated concrete in Building 371, it will take the equivalent of 108 people working a month, according to its written proposal.
But the issue isn't cost, said Karen Lutz of the Department of Energy. It's the danger of cleaning the concrete and dismantling the building, she said.
Still, leaders of the surrounding towns are worried.
Anderson, the Arvada councilwoman, summed up the dilemma: "Is the exposure to employees grinding it off more dangerous? Or is it more dangerous to leave it in the ground? I think those are the issues that everyone is struggling with. Nobody wants any exposure to their population," she said.
The Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, made up of nearby cities, objected to the amount of contamination Kaiser-Hill wants to leave buried in the basement of Building 371.
"The coalition board remains concerned that, in the rush to beat the 2006 cleanup goal, DOE and Kaiser-Hill are yet again proposing leaving unacceptable levels of residual contamination at closure," the coalition wrote in January.
But Gunderson, of the state health department, disagreed with the coalition's calculation that the basement will be more contaminated than low-level nuclear waste. He also promised he will insist on tight limits.
"A lot of times, we say no" to Kaiser-Hill's requests, he said.
The coalition also is concerned about the possibility of plutonium washing into groundwater. But Shelton said the plutonium is stuck to the concrete and won't dissolve. By sheer chance, Rocky Flats was built over a deep layer of nonporous clay, which protects the aquifer that supplies metro-area drinking water.
There is one building just a few hundred yards from Building 371 that is so badly contaminated that explosives are not even under discussion.
Every cranny of Building 776/777 is radioactive. That's because a 1969 fire nearly melted the roof, which would have contaminated Denver with plutonium ash. Smoke and water sent radioactive material into all parts of the building.
As a result, the entire building will be cut up and the pieces moved to the Nevada nuclear bomb test site, Holm said.
Refuge will emerge
One nagging question remains: Will officials find all the nuclear waste at Rocky Flats?
Over the years, former Rocky Flats workers have insisted that midnight dumping left radioactive waste in unmarked locations across the 6,400-acre site.
Officials have interviewed 2,000 people and pored over decades of records looking for clues on the location of such unmarked contamination. Hundreds of suspect sites are being dug up.
Gunderson said they are still looking, but he's convinced they'll find it all.
In the end, when Kaiser-Hill completes the project, it will leave behind one or two buried basements with low-level radioactive waste stuck to the walls and floors, six miles of filled-in pipelines, and at least three underground water-treatment systems.
The 800 former structures will be gone.
Then, the mesa will become a wildlife refuge. Whether any citizens will be allowed in is still undecided.
Even the 400-acre industrial section in the center will be "perfectly safe to walk on," said DOE's Rampe. But it will be fenced off and closed to the public because "we don't want someone drilling into contaminated groundwater, or deep basements, or waste lines," he said.
For Leroy Moore, a lifelong peace activist and Rocky Flats watchdog, that's not enough.
"Nobody thinks it can be cleaned completely now," he said. But technology will improve and complete decontamination should occur someday, he said.
Plutonium remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years, so Moore worries it may rise to the surface after eons of erosion, and perhaps earthquakes and floods.
That's why he'd like to see that potential billion dollars in savings applied to further cleanup.
But that's not the plan. The Energy Department intends to spend any savings on cleaning up its environmental disasters elsewhere.
Cleanup standards Kaiser-Hill is able to leave low-level nuclear waste in the ground at Rocky Flats because cleanup standards changed in 2003. The community wanted a stricter standard at the surface, where the chances of inhaling or ingesting plutonium would be most likely. To get this, Colorado agreed to lesser standards for the underground cleanup.
• Pre-2003 standard:
651 trillionths of a curie per gram of soil at all levels
• New standard:
Top 3 feet of earth: 50 trillionths of a curie per gram
3 to 6 feet deep: 1,000 trillionths of a curie per gram
Below 6 feet: Case-by-case review
Source: Steve Gunderson, state health department's supervisor of the Rocky Flats cleanup imsea@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5438
-------- south carolina
Savannah River Site awaits nuclear report
Facility could be home to modern $4 billion plant
The Associated Press
Sat, May. 15, 2004
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/local/8673991.htm
AIKEN - The Savannah River Site could soon find out if it's in line for a $4 billion plant.
Linton Brooks, the administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration, says a highly anticipated report about the nation's nuclear stockpile was being reviewed and will be given to Congress within weeks.
Officials had delayed locating the multibillion dollar plutonium trigger production plant until the agency outlined current and future conditions of the country's nuclear arsenal.
Brooks had joined Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham at SRS recently to recognize the Savannah River National Laboratory. Brooks declined to discuss the report or which of five potential sites he favored, The (Augusta) Chronicle said.
Other sites in contention for the modern pit facility are the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas; the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, both in New Mexico; and the Nevada Test Site.
"You can't make intelligent decisions if you don't know what the stockpile is," Brooks said.
The plant would build plutonium pits used to detonate nuclear weapons.
Brooks' agency at first wanted to have a final statement on environmental effects and choose a site by April. But it was announced in January that any decision would wait until Congress could review the country's nuclear weapons and what the United States might need in the future.
"In my view, it is a complete mistake to reopen the nuclear door, so I am pleased that the administration has recognized - in light of congressional concern - that consideration of a modern pit facility is 'premature,' at least," U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a statement she issued in January.
Congressional delegates from South Carolina and Georgia have pushed to have the modern-pit facility at SRS.
U.S. Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C., recently wrote to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld urging that the decision happen sooner rather than later.
A spokeswoman for Barrett's office said the congressman had hoped to have received the report already.
Supporters say SRS' extensive experience with plutonium and its vast infrastructure make it the best selection.
"We have said from the beginning, if [Brooks] makes his recommendation to the secretary based on technical and economical matters, that SRS will win," said Mal McKibben, the executive director of Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness.
"The secretary has to deal with the politics of it."
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
[Nearly 60 years later, we get a dribble of info about fat boy. ed]
NPS grad lauded for 'smart' weapons
By KEVIN HOWE,
Monterey Herald Staff Writer,
Sat, May. 15, 2004
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/local/8674941.htm
Al Christman didn't know it at the time, but the man who saved his life during the Battle of the Bulge was a Navy officer working thousands of miles away.
The lifesaver was a man known as the "atomic admiral" who helped invent a device called the proximity fuse, the first "smart" weapon, Christman said.
The proximity fuse was put in anti-aircraft and artillery shells and comprised a primitive radar that would send out a signal. When the shell got close to a plane in flight or a certain distance from the ground, the device would detonate it.
Christman was sitting in a foxhole watching four German tanks, followed by German infantry, coming toward him. Suddenly a flurry of shells arced over and exploded directly above the oncoming troops, wreaking devastation.
Christman never forgot that day, and after a career in the Army and Air Force, he wrote a biography of the man who was instrumental in the programs that developed three strategic weapons of World War II: radar, the proximity fuse, and the atomic bomb.
Rear Adm. William "Deak" Parsons' early death in 1953 at the age of 52 is probably one reason why he isn't as well known as Gen. Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, or Adm. Hyman Rickover, father of the atomic submarine, Christman said.
But it was Parsons, a 1922 graduate of the Naval Academy and later of the Naval Postgraduate School, who is known within the Navy as its "atomic admiral."
Another reason for Parsons' relative obscurity, Christman told an audience of students and engineers at the Naval Postgraduate School on Friday, was the admiral's own self-effacing shyness.
He started school late -- he was eight years old when he entered first grade -- but graduated from high school two years early.
"He never really sought prominence," Christman said. "He came to first grade with his six-year-old sister Clarissa, and when the teacher asked who they were, she spoke up with their names.
"The teacher asked if William couldn't speak for himself," Christman said. "Clarissa replied that 'He can talk, but he only talks when it's important.'"
Parsons got the sobriquet "Deak" from his Annapolis classmates, who at first called him "Deacon," based on his last name.
After graduation from the Naval Postgraduate School ordnance course, he served as a gunnery officer on a battleship and tested naval cannons at Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground.
Parsons was then assigned to the Naval Research Laboratory, Christman said, where he met Leo Young, a laboratory scientist who had discovered that high-frequency radio waves could detect ships at sea beyond sight.
There, Parsons fought for an unpopular program, bucked a bureaucratic turf war and battled for funding and staffing for the device that would eventually become radar.
That experience forged Parsons into one of the early military technocrats of the last century, a new type of officer who emerged as a necessary link between scientists in the laboratory and soldiers, sailors and airmen at the front.
Radar led to the proximity fuse, which allowed gunners to knock airplanes out of the sky or set off air bursts that would throw shrapnel down into troops dug into foxholes and trenches.
It was Parsons, Christman said, whose organizational and engineering genius brought the atomic bomb from laboratory test to the reliable, dependable and devastating weapon that ended World War II.
Parsons personally armed the "Little Boy" uranium bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and his ordnance experts made possible the implosion trigger for the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb that incinerated Nagasaki and hastened Japan's surrender in September 1945.
He flew with the Enola Gay to arm "Little Boy" in flight, Christman said, because of fears that if the B-29 bomber crashed on takeoff and caught fire, the blaze could set the bomb off on Tinian Island, the first atomic bomb base.
Kevin Howe can be reached at 646-4416 or khowe@montereyherald.com.
-------- britain
Almost Half British Voters Say Blair Should Go - Poll
May 15, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-britain-blair-poll.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Speculation about the future of Prime Minister Tony Blair intensified Sunday, with an opinion poll showing nearly half of British voters think he should step down before the next general election.
Blair's public ratings have plummeted since the Iraq war, and growing numbers of Labor members of parliament are openly wondering whether he has become an electoral liability.
A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times found 46 percent of those surveyed said Blair should quit before the next election, expected in about a year's time.
Another 22 percent want him to go soon after an election, while just 20 percent say he should stay, according to the poll.
Asked whether they trust Blair, 61 percent said ``no'' and 36 percent ``yes.''
Blair has vowed to fight the next election and Friday called speculation about his future ``froth.''
But the following day the Times ran an interview with Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott on its front page under the headline ``Race to seize Blair's crown is under way.''
Prescott's office later issued a statement saying the headline was ``untrue.''
In the interview, Prescott was quoted as saying senior ministers had discussed a future without Blair and were suggesting they were preparing for a seismic shift in government.
``I think it is true that, when plates appear to be moving, everyone positions themselves for it,'' Prescott said.
Asked whether senior ministers were preparing for a new leader or had discussed it, Prescott said: ``Yes, people do talk about it and you get that discussion...every British prime minister goes eventually.''
Sunday's YouGov poll confirmed the widely held view that the favorite to succeed Blair is Chancellor of the Excheckr Gordon Brown.
It surveyed 2,014 voters online between May 13 and May 15.
-------- business
US to axe 8,000 jobs on European military bases
MADRID (AFP)
May 15, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040515162329.368wbddj.html
The United States will axe 8,000 civilian and military jobs across its European bases, the Spanish press reported on Saturday citing an internal circular at the joint US-Spanish naval base in southern Spain.
The captain of the US sector of the base at Rota, John Orem, told those working at the base of the possibility of jobs being cut, the newspapers said.
They said the move was approved by the headquarters of the US marines in Europe with the aim of reducing operational costs and having all staff working at the same site.
The circular gave no details of how much the measure would affect the Spanish employees at the Rota base. But it has sparked concern in Rota where 1,200 civilians are employed, according to the ABC newspaper.
As well as Rota, Spain hosts another joint Spanish-US air naval base at Moron de la Frontera which is also in the south of the country.
Both bases are due to remain until 2012.
In March, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the United States wanted to bring home some troops stationed overseas, but dismissed as "speculation" reports that US plans called for withdrawing up to half its 71,000 troops from Germany and 15,000 from Asia.
-------- china
2nd Hong Kong Democracy Figure Leaves Hastily
May 15, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/international/asia/15hong.html
HONG KONG, May 14 - Raymond Wong, one of two popular, pro-democracy hosts of Hong Kong's best-known radio talk show, took an indefinite leave of absence and promptly left Hong Kong on Thursday, the show's producers said Friday.
Albert Cheng, Mr. Wong's co-host on the Cantonese-language "Teacup in a Storm," has already left. He abruptly flew to Europe on May 2, leaving behind a message that he would remain on leave for the rest of the year. Both men had complained of death threats and vandalism against their personal businesses.
Mr. Wong said in an interview last week that he might resign. He said that he was not afraid but that his family was worried about his safety.
China has been tightening its political control of Hong Kong, and its supporters here have been increasingly critical of democracy advocates.
Describing himself as "an anti-Communist columnist," Mr. Wong said his positions had offended local leftists. "Some of the left wing may be emotional," he said. "They try to scare me not to continue."
Two months ago, Mr. Wong was beaten by a man he described as a stranger. The police have since arrested three people; they are to be tried in August.
According to the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, a nonprofit group, Mr. Wong recently received a fax reminding him of the "extermination by patriotic forces" of Lam Bun, a radio worker who criticized Communist-backed riots in 1967 and subsequently burned to death when protesters set fire to his car.
Before leaving Hong Kong this week, Mr. Wong left a brief statement to be read on the air, saying: "I'm physically and mentally exhausted. I need to rest."
The statement did not make any political points. Mr. Wong and Mr. Cheng could not be reached for comment.
At a lunch on Friday, Dick Lee, the police commissioner here, declined to comment on the specifics of either man's case, but said, "In general, we take all of these cases very seriously, because of the sensitive nature."
Commissioner Lee seemed to hint that some democracy activists might not have sought police help in dealing with threats. Asked about threats against Mr. Wong and Mr. Cheng, he replied in part, "We hope that those who claim to be victims will give us sufficient information."
Cheung Ping-ling, chairwoman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, said veiled threats to journalists were increasingly common but hard to prosecute. "We are very worried about the freedom of speech," she said. "it is narrowing down."
Jackie Hung, the financial secretary and chief spokeswoman for the Civil Human Rights Front, a broad coalition of pro-democracy groups, blamed Beijing for creating a deeply divided political environment here in which outspoken journalists could not feel safe.
"They impose a threatening atmosphere within the society," she said. "We think it is time for Chinese people to speak up for themselves."
-------- iraq
U.S. Forces Attack Iraqi Holy City
In Most Aggressive Tactics Yet, Tanks Fire on Ancient Cemetery
By Scott Wilson and Daniel Williams Washington Post Foreign Service Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26296-2004May14?language=printer
BAGHDAD, May 14 -- U.S. tanks rumbled Friday into a vast cemetery in the southern city of Najaf, one of Shiite Islam's most sacred places, in pursuit of insurgents loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr. The fighting, which coincided with skirmishes in the other major Shiite holy city, Karbala, demonstrated some of the most aggressive tactics yet employed by U.S. forces against Sadr's Shiite militia.
In images broadcast across the Middle East on Arabic satellite channels, U.S. Army OH-58 Kiowa helicopters fluttered above the ocher and tan necropolis on the edge of the city. Abrams tanks from the 1st Armored Division fired into the warren of tombs. Plumes of gray and black smoke puffed up from between the grave markers, where guerrillas bearing rocket-propelled grenade launchers were positioned.
"The cemetery lost its holiness in the early hours of today when the U.S. forces started to attack," said Khalid Farhan, 55, who owns the Thulfiqar Hotel in downtown Najaf. "Many of the graves have been destroyed. But we can say that people are dying and nice buildings are being destroyed also today. Who cares right now about graves?"
The battle in the cemetery also prompted Sadr's associates outside Najaf to call for a wider mobilization against U.S. forces. Sadr militants rose up in at least one other southern city to seize a government building, a police station and some of its cars.
U.S. officials had hoped a group of mainstream Shiite leaders would persuade Sadr to leave Najaf and demobilize his militia in return for a resolution to his legal problems with the United States. U.S. forces have a warrant to arrest Sadr for his alleged role in the April 2003 slaying of Abdel Majid Khoie, a rival Shiite cleric.
But fighting has overtaken negotiations with Sadr, and the Shiite leadership appears largely incapable of corralling the young cleric. U.S. officials said Sadr and the uprising he has inspired are among the most pressing security problems they must resolve before handing over limited authority to an interim Iraqi government on June 30.
For weeks, Shiite religious leaders have expressed fear that Sadr was endangering Najaf's gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali by using the city center as a sanctuary. Those fears were realized Friday morning when, after clashes in the narrow downtown streets, witnesses said, the dome was pocked with three bullet holes. It was unclear which side had caused the damage or when it had occurred.
"Only Americans have such bullets," said Qais Khazali, a Sadr spokesmen in Najaf, as Mahdi Army fighters draped in head scarves and waving rifles shouted: "They are Jews! They are Jews!"
But Najaf residents, many of whom blame Sadr's militia for ruining the city's economy, said the dome was hit in the confusion of combat.
"If it was done by the Americans, I don't think they did it intentionally," said Ali Awad, a 28-year-old Najaf resident, of the bullet holes. "If they wanted to destroy the shrine, they could destroy it. But they don't."
In Baghdad, American officials said it was unlikely that U.S. forces had hit the dome, because they were firing in the opposite direction, toward guerrillas in the cemetery. Believed to be the second-largest cemetery in the world, the Wadi al-Salam is roughly a mile from the Shrine of Imam Ali. The name means Valley of Peace.
U.S. military officers characterized the push into Najaf as a reaction to mortar attacks on two police stations, not as a new offensive to drive out Shiite insurgents who only recently have taken up positions deep in the city.
[On Saturday, the U.S. military announced the deaths of four soldiers in separate incidents Friday, according to an Associated Press report. A soldier died from wounds received during a mortar attack, and another soldier was killed by a sniper. Earlier, a military vehicle overturned during a patrol, killing a soldier. All three soldiers belonged to the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division and all died south of Baghdad, the Associated Press reported.
The fourth soldier died of natural causes in the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition in Baghdad, the report quoted the military as saying.]
Until Friday, U.S. forces had been content to chip away at Sadr's forces on the outskirts of Najaf, fearing that a frontal attack near the holy places would inflame Shiite opinion. Shiites, who account for 60 percent of Iraq's population, have largely accepted the U.S.-led occupation after years of repression under the former government of Saddam Hussein, which was dominated by Sunni Muslims.
U.S. military officials also have been reluctant to move against Sadr personally for fear of angering his followers. The operations on the outskirts of Najaf and other southern cities were meant to press him to accept a negotiated solution.
U.S. military officials said Sadr, whose fighters are mostly from outside Najaf, is widely unpopular inside the city. Najaf's primary industry is catering to Iranian Shiite pilgrims, a trade that blossomed after Hussein's ouster but has dwindled to nothing with the violence.
On Thursday, Sadr's militants broke up public demonstrations against him by firing rifles into the air. Shiite leaders called off an anti-Sadr rally scheduled in Najaf.
U.S. military officials said that while they believe Sadr must be defeated now to prevent his influence from spreading, they are still constrained by concerns about damaging the holy sites.
"We want to do everything we can to avoid widening this problem from Moqtada to something more," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, chief spokesman for the U.S. military in Iraq. "We certainly want to avoid being drawn into an attack that would create an incident that has strategic impact."
The images of U.S. tanks near the Shrine of Imam Ali, one of Shiite Islam's holiest mosques, brought calls for resistance during Friday prayer services at pro-Sadr mosques.
"Where are those people who said Najaf is a red line?" Abdul Hadi Daraji asked several thousand worshippers at the al-Hikma Mosque in Sadr City, an eastern Baghdad slum named for the young cleric's father, who was assassinated in 1999. "I'm asking all the people here, 'If anyone feels he is able to go to Najaf to support your brothers, go!' "
Witnesses said Najaf's Thulfiqar Hotel came under fire Friday morning as U.S. tanks rattled through the streets. Correspondents from the Reuters news agency, Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press, as well as The Washington Post and the U.S.-funded al-Hurra satellite channel, reside at the hotel.
As described by witnesses, tank rounds struck the roof, the lobby and a courtyard behind the building, sending cameras toppling and reporters ducking for cover. Some suffered minor injuries.
"They first made warning shots," said Farhan, the owner. "When the reporters wouldn't move [from the roof] they shot."
In sporadic clashes throughout the day, U.S. forces killed at least four Iraqis, including two Mahdi Army fighters, and wounded 25 others, according to hospital reports. And Ahmed Ali, assistant director of Najaf's Hakim Hospital, said that "the number of killed could increase because we have some critically wounded people." Not all the dead reach hospitals, Najaf residents said; some are immediately buried by their comrades.
Despite the intense fighting, Sadr delivered a scheduled sermon at Friday prayers in the main mosque in Kufa, roughly six miles east of Najaf. He warned that others were trying to divide the Shiite community and advised a rival Shiite militia attached to a political party not to fall for the ploy.
Over the past three days, U.S. forces have also fought pitched gun battles with insurgents near the shrines of Hussein and Abbas in Karbala -- mosques that the insurgents have sought to use as fortresses. U.S. officials estimated that more than two dozen insurgents have been killed in Karbala in recent days.
Combat continued there Friday, and persistent firefights made gathering the dead and wounded Iraqis impossible, witnesses said. Those who fell near houses were quickly pulled inside and later returned to their families.
For the first time, fighting spread to Nasiriyah, a Shiite city southeast of Najaf. Insurgents overran the governor's office, a police station and a hotel. At the police station, the militants briefly held 16 U.S.-trained Iraqi policemen and seized four patrol cars, witnesses there said.
The action followed a call by the Mahdi Army commander in Nasiriyah, which has been largely calm in recent weeks, to rise up. Kimmitt said during his regular afternoon news conference that the situation there was under control. A few hours later, however, Sadr's militiamen attacked the occupation authority offices. One Philippine contractor was wounded.
Special correspondents Omar Fekeiki and Naseer Nouri in Baghdad, and Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this story.
--------
THE FIGHTING
Battles in Najaf and Karbala Near Shiites' Religious Sites
May 15, 2004
By IAN FISHER and EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/international/middleeast/15IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 14 - Fighting erupted Friday in Najaf when American tank troops and soldiers battled militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr in a centuries-old cemetery near the revered Shrine of Imam Ali.
Amid plumes of smoke and explosions that echoed around the narrow streets, the shrine itself was reportedly hit by gunfire, pitting its golden dome with four small holes.
The damage, however slight, marked a moment that the American military has been straining to avoid in its five-week standoff with Mr. Sadr: any violation of the holy sites of Najaf and Karbala, held sacred by Shiites around the world, that could inflame Shiites here into a broader uprising against American forces.
But many moderate Shiites have called for Mr. Sadr and his militia to leave Najaf, and there were no signs of wider unrest on Friday. Despite the damage, the United States military said it was taking extraordinary pains to convince Shiites that it was doing everything to keep the violence away from the shrines. "It's important to understand that we have not attacked the Shrine of Imam Ali," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief spokesman for the American military, told reporters. "We continue to respect the red lines that have been established by the religious clerics."
Mr. Sadr's supporters blamed Americans for the damage, but General Kimmitt presented a large satellite map showing where the fighting took place, perhaps a quarter mile northwest of the shrine. American forces, he said, had only fired northward, away from the shrine.
"Go ask Moktada who put that hole in the shrine," General Kimmitt said. "I suspect he will tell you that it was coalition forces. But I suspect if you look very carefully, the coalition does not yet have ammunition that can shoot to the north and then turn around and head south."
Still, the fighting on Friday appeared to move the confrontation with Mr. Sadr to a more sensitive stage, not only in Najaf but in Karbala, to the north. In both cities, military officials say, Mr. Sadr's forces have been firing from near holy sites in what appears to be a strategy of drawing American troops into fighting on ground that poses grave political consequences.
On Friday in Karbala, the site of fighting for much of the past two weeks, militiamen taking cover near two other Shiite shrines bombarded American soldiers with mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades, as the Americans tried to keep control of a mosque they occupied earlier this week.
At least five insurgents were killed, said an American officer at Camp Lima, the Polish military base five miles east.
Mr. Sadr's forces also attacked in the south, in Nasiriya, which has been largely quiet during the past month. The insurgents attacked the local headquarters of the occupation authorities with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades, trapping foreign staff members inside and prompting a firefight with Italian soldiers and Filipino guards.
Militia members reportedly also took over the local governor's office.
In Najaf, at least four people were killed, according to hospital officials. But even amid the fighting, Mr. Sadr, a 31-year-old whose staunch anti-American oratory has attracted a devoted following among young and jobless Shiites, still made his way from Najaf to nearby Kufa to deliver his weekly sermon at the main mosque there.
In the sermon, he continued to urge his followers to fight off the "oppressors," despite reports of a tentative deal earlier this week in which Mr. Sadr would agree to disband his militia. He called President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the key ally of the United States in Iraq, "the heads of tyranny."
The fighting near the holy sites has ratcheted up the pressure not only on the American troops and Mr. Sadr, but also on more moderate Shiite leaders.
Shiites, who compose about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, stand to gain most from any future democratic government here, and Mr. Sadr represents a divisive danger to that goal for many moderate Shiites.
At the same time, other Shiite leaders have been reluctant to attack Mr. Sadr directly, for fear of being seen as siding with the ever-more-unpopular American occupation.
In recent days, though, Shiite leaders have been issuing stronger demands for Mr. Sadr's forces to leave Najaf, or at least to agree to end his insurgency.
On Friday, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq's national security adviser and a top Shiite leader, condemned Mr. Sadr for allowing the fighting to stray dangerously close to the Shrine of Imam Ali, named after the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and a central figure in Shiite belief.
"Moktada should not allow the fighting to happen in the holy city," he said in a telephone interview. "I believe he should leave the city, so that he will not allow blood to be spilled there."
Mr. Rubaie is close to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most popular Shiite leader in Iraq and a restrained, older rival to Mr. Sadr. Another aide to Ayatollah Sistani, who is also in Najaf, urged both Mr. Sadr's forces and Americans to stop fighting inside Najaf.
"The fighting is getting closer to the house of the Grand Ayatollah," the aide, Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Mohri, told Reuters. "We fear that his life will be in danger."
American officials have expressed frustration that Shiites have themselves been reluctant to deal with Mr. Sadr more directly, and a huge demonstration against Mr. Sadr that was supposed to take place on Friday was canceled. At the same time, there is much speculation that some Shiites have given American forces a veiled green light to continue their military squeeze on Mr. Sadr, whose headquarters are near the Imam Ali shrine.
Despite the closeness of the fighting to the shrine, General Kimmitt said, there had been no change in a strategy that has amounted to keeping Mr. Sadr encircled, and not allowing him to be turned into "a martyr," as the general put it.
"Today has been characterized as something that it really wasn't: somehow this was a strategic shift, that somehow this was the final attack on Najaf," he said. "Nothing could be further from the truth."
Rather, General Kimmitt said, the fighting was only a response to attacks from Mr. Sadr's forces. He said that at 8:40 a.m., four mortar shells hit near the main police building north of the shrine, at the same time as two tanks at a traffic circle came under grenade fire.
In other attacks around the city, General Kimmitt said, American forces identified a mortar position in a sprawling old cemetery where every Shiite with the means has sought to be buried for centuries, within site of the Imam Ali shrine.
Just after 1 p.m., he said, tanks and ground forces entered the cemetery, a warren of blind alleys and hidden spots for snipers, to fight insurgents there.
Witnesses described heavy fighting there and around the city, damaging cars and houses and further frustrating its besieged residents, though it was unclear whether the Americans or Mr. Sadr would take most of the blame.
"We are very angry," said Yousif Rihda Yousif, 30. "Both sides are mistaken for their fighting inside the holy city of Najaf. This city must be kept away from arms."
In Karbala, intense fighting took place in the buildings and alleyways around Mukhaiyam Mosque, which the Americans occupied on Wednesday morning after a fierce 11-hour battle. The mosque is only a quarter of a mile away from the golden-domed Shrine of Hussein and Shrine of Abbas, dedicated to two of the most revered Shiite martyrs.
The Americans raided another mosque, their third in the area this week, and discovered a large weapons cache there. Soldiers detonated the munitions dump with plastic explosives.
Guerrilla fighters had positioned themselves around the two shrines and along a wide pathway between them that is usually thronged with pilgrims, military officials said. From there, they lobbed dozens of mortar rounds at the occupied mosque, clearly hoping to drive the Americans from the building. The mosque had been used as a stronghold by the insurgents.
One American soldier was severely wounded after being shot twice in the hip by a sniper. Five other soldiers were wounded in two waves of mortar attacks before 9:30 a.m.
On Friday, General Kimmitt also announced a general court-marital against one of the seven soldiers suspected in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. The soldier, Specialist Charles A. Graner, of the 372nd Military Police Company, identified as the soldier smiling over a stack of naked Iraqi prisoners in photographs released two weeks ago, faces charges of maltreatment of prisoners, abuse, cruelty and committing indecent acts.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel hits Gaza militant targets
At least 10 people were reported injured in the overnight attacks
Saturday, 15 May, 2004
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3716593.stm
Israeli helicopters have carried out a series of missile attacks in the Gaza Strip against the Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.
The group says it set a recent ambush that killed five Israeli troops.
In the southern Rafah refugee camp, a missile hit the home of senior leader Mohammed Sheikh Khalil.
Earlier, missiles hit buildings used by the group in Gaza City, in what Islamic Jihad says was an attempt to assassinate another of its leaders.
No-one was reported killed in either attack, but Islamic Jihad has threatened what it said would be earthquake-like retaliation.
The latest Israeli strikes come at the end of a week in which 13 Israeli soldiers and about 30 Palestinians were killed in fighting in the Gaza Strip.
Demonstrations
Israeli troops have demolished scores of homes in a move they say is designed to expand a buffer zone along the border with Egypt.
TOLL FROM LATEST VIOLENCE
14 May - Two Israeli soldiers and one Palestinian killed in the Rafah refugee camp
13 May - 12 Palestinians reported dead in Israeli raids on Rafah refugee camp
12 May - Five Israeli soldiers killed by a rocket fired by Palestinian gunmen near Rafah
11-12 May - 14 Palestinians killed during Israeli incursion in Gaza City
11 May - Six Israeli soldiers killed by an anti-tank bomb in Gaza City
The UN agency responsible for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) says more than 1,000 people have already been made homeless by the demolitions.
Spokesman Paul McCann said 88 buildings housing more than 200 families had been destroyed in Rafah.
Israeli officials revealed the plan on Friday, saying it was needed to ensure the protection of troops and prevent the smuggling of weapons.
Meanwhile, Palestinians across the West Bank and Gaza have been preparing to hold demonstrations to mark the Naqba, or catastrophe, their commemoration of the creation of Israel in 1948.
And supporters of Israel's opposition Labour Party will gather in Tel Aviv later in the day to back Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for a withdrawal from all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the West Bank.
Weapons claim
The Israeli army said the missile attacks in Gaza, which came during the night and at noon local time (0900 GMT), were aimed at offices being used to co-ordinate terrorist activity.
Afterwards, the Israeli army said that the building had been used to store weapons and make explosives. Mr Sheikh Khalil, who is known to be a leading figure in the military wing of Islamic Jihad was in his house immediately before the noon attack, but reportedly heard the helicopter and fled.
In Gaza City, the helicopter gunships struck an empty flat on the seafront.
But the BBC's Alan Johnston in Gaza says there is speculation that the intended target was an Islamic study centre linked to Islamic Jihad on a floor below.
The premises are reportedly used by a senior Islamic Jihad leader, Mohammed al-Hindi.
Soon afterwards, the helicopters fired two missiles at offices used to distribute money to the families of suicide bombers. At least 10 people are reported to have been injured.
The attacks followed a day of violence at the opposite end of the Gaza Strip.
In Rafah, the Israeli army said two of its soldiers died from sniper fire as they were helping a Palestinian woman, rejecting militant claims of an attack on their vehicle.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade said it had killed them.
On Saturday, an army official quoted by AFP news agency said Israeli troops had now withdrawn from Rafah.
----
New Gaza Clashes Fuel Israeli Debate
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26817-2004May14.html
JERUSALEM, May 14 -- Two Israeli soldiers and two Palestinians were killed Friday as fierce fighting continued along the border separating the Gaza Strip and Egypt, according to Israeli army and Palestinian security officials.
The fourth straight day of clashes intensified the debate in Israel over whether to withdraw the army and 7,500 Jewish settlers from Gaza. Newspaper headlines and television broadcasts drew parallels between Gaza and Lebanon, where growing disaffection among Israelis with army casualties compelled the government to withdraw its forces four years ago after an occupation of nearly two decades.
[Early Saturday morning Israeli helicopters launched missile attacks against two offices connected to Mohammed Hindi, a senior leader of the Islamic Jihad, one of the main Palestinian militant groups. About 10 people were reported lightly injured, but Hindi himself was not present and escaped harm, according to Palestinian officials.]
Army bulldozers demolished at least nine more houses near the Philadelphi corridor, a military patrol road running between the Rafah refugee camp and the Egyptian border that Palestinian militants use to smuggle arms and other contraband. Five soldiers were killed there Wednesday when their armored personnel carrier was hit by a homemade rocket.
Army officials have announced plans to demolish hundreds of structures near the road to remove potential firing positions in what has become a gutted wasteland where hundreds of refugees once lived.
"We're not talking a shot here or there," Capt. Jacob Dallal, an army spokesman, said. "We are talking very extensive fire where the militants take over a building and shoot to their heart's desire, and that has become a combat threat and the context that today's demolitions came in."
The deaths on Friday raised the toll over the past four days to 13 Israeli soldiers and 29 Palestinians, an unusually high total reflecting the intensity of the fighting. At least 150 Palestinians have been wounded, and witnesses said many residents had been trapped in their homes for three days.
According to an army statement, the incident on Friday occurred when soldiers were attempting to secure the area while other troops worked to recover the remains of the five soldiers, who had been killed Wednesday. A sniper shot and killed a soldier who had taken up a position in a house and was trying to assist an elderly Palestinian seeking to enter with heavy baggage. When fellow troops sought to rescue him, they were also shot at. One was killed and two others wounded.
Gaza officials said one Palestinian was killed during an Israeli missile strike and a second died when he tried to infiltrate a Jewish settlement. Eight others were reported wounded, two of them seriously.
The renewed fighting came as funerals were held for three of the soldiers killed Wednesday. Meanwhile, Israel's two largest newspapers, Yedioth Aharonoth and Maariv, published polls reporting strong public support for withdrawal. Maariv's survey found that 40 percent of those polled wanted to leave Gaza immediately, with or without an agreement with Palestinians, while another 39 percent were prepared to pull out with an agreement. Yedioth's poll found that 71 percent of those surveyed favored leaving unilaterally.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed a pullback from Gaza, but his Likud Party voted down the plan two weeks ago in a nonbonding referendum. Sharon has pledged to bring forth a new plan by the end of the month.
Special correspondent Islam Abdulkarim in Gaza City contributed to this report.
--------
After a Violent Week, Israel to Step Up Gaza Patrols
May 15, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/international/middleeast/15gaza.html
JERUSALEM, Saturday, May 15 - Israel will substantially widen an army-patrolled zone at the southern end of the Gaza Strip near the border with Egypt, a step that will involve demolishing many Palestinian buildings, a senior Israeli official said Friday.
The official called the step necessary to protect Israeli soldiers who hunt for Palestinian smuggling tunnels in that area, where five soldiers were killed Wednesday when militants blew up their armored vehicle.
Fighting raged in that area again on Friday, as soldiers continued trying to retrieve their comrades' remains from the sand.
Palestinian gunmen killed two soldiers and wounded two others as the troops were guarding the searchers, near the Rafah refugee camp. The Israeli Army said one soldier was killed when he left cover to help a Palestinian woman carrying large bags. The others were killed or wounded trying to rescue the first soldier, the army said.
Two Palestinians died in the fighting on Friday. One, a militant, died as a bomb he was planting exploded prematurely. The other, a teacher named Akram Abu Najah, 27, was a bystander killed during an Israeli missile strike, Palestinian hospital officials said. At least 13 Palestinians were wounded, one of them seriously.
Early Saturday, Israeli attack helicopters fired missiles at the headquarters of the militant group Islamic Jihad in Gaza City, wounding at least eight Palestinians, Reuters quoted witnesses as saying. Islamic Jihad officials confirmed the attack, but said the group's leader, Muhammad al-Hindi, was not in the building at the time.
With helicopter gunships overhead escorting dozens of armored vehicles, witnesses said some residents of Rafah were gathering their belongings and fleeing, while others shut themselves in their homes.
"There's continuous shelling," said Naser Barhoom, the head of an Islamic charity in the area, speaking by telephone. "Tonight, I'm going to leave with my family."
Friday's fatalities brought to at least 29 the number of Palestinians who have died in a spike in violence in Gaza this week. Thirteen Israeli soldiers have been killed, 11 of them in the destruction of two armored vehicles on routine missions.
In the fighting on Friday, bulldozers leveled several Palestinian homes near the Israeli zone where the five soldiers were killed earlier in the week. The army said Palestinians were using the buildings to stage attacks. The zone is now about 4.5 miles long and 250 yards wide.
Even before this week's violence, the United Nations agency that oversees Palestinian refugee camps reported that, in the first 10 days of May, 1,100 Palestinians were left homeless in Gaza by the destruction of 131 residential buildings.
In all, the agency says, more than 17,000 Palestinians in Gaza have lost their homes to Israeli demolition since the start of the conflict in September 2000.
Israel says it demolishes Palestinians buildings only to protect soldiers and settlers, or to punish militants. Palestinians call the destruction a form of collective punishment.
Much if not most of the destruction has been in Rafah, a flashpoint where soldiers and militants trade blows nightly. Palestinians dig tunnels from Rafah into Egypt to smuggle weapons, cigarettes, and other contraband. The Army reports uncovering about 80 such tunnels over the course of the conflict.
Israeli officials say they have weighed measures like digging a canal along the zone to flood any tunnels. That idea was abandoned as too costly and as objectionable to Egypt.
Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the chief of staff, told Israel Radio on Friday that buildings facing the Israeli-patrolled strip were routinely abandoned, then used by militants to dig tunnels or stage attacks.
"We've been forced to destroy houses here in the past, and apparently we'll be forced to destroy more houses in the future," he said, adding, "We cannot tolerate the continued firing at our forces, which are like sitting ducks."
Israel Radio reported that the army intended to demolish hundreds of buildings near the Israeli-patrolled zone.
The senior Israeli official said he did not know how many buildings would be destroyed. He said that in some places, the Army would widen its present strip by "a couple of hundred meters."
Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian cabinet minister, urged the United States to block the planned demolition, calling it a catastrophe.
He said any expansion of the Israeli-patrolled zone was a "total contradiction" of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's announced intention to eventually withdraw from Gaza.
--------
Israel Copter Fires at Jihad Leader's Home
May 15, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Airstrike.html
RAFAH, Gaza Strip (AP) -- An Israeli helicopter fired a missile at the home of an Islamic Jihad leader in the southern Gaza strip early Saturday, lightly wounding two bystanders, residents said.
Meanwhile, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat urged his people Saturday to ``terrorize your enemy,'' as he bitterly marked the 56-year anniversary of the establishment of Israel.
The target of the attack was Mohammed Sheik Khalil, a leader of the group's military wing, the witnesses said. He was not home at the time.
The army said Islamic Jihad had used the targeted building as a bomb-making facility and center for planning attacks against Israel.
The attack took place in the southern Gaza town of Rafah, where Israeli troops have been operating in recent days after five soldiers were killed in an attack on their armored personnel vehicle. Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for that attack.
Earlier Saturday, Israeli troops withdrew from the nearby Rafah refugee camp after recovering the remains of the five soldiers, leaving behind at least 100 demolished homes.
Arafat's speech, broadcast live on Palestinian television, repeatedly called for his people to be steadfast in their struggle against Israeli occupation.
He ended the speech with a quote from the Koran. ``Find what strength you have to terrorize your enemy and the enemy of God,'' he said.
The phrase in the Koran refers to Muslims' wars against pagans. It is followed by a phrase saying ``if they want peace, then let's have peace.''
-------- prisoners of war
THE GRAY ZONE
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
New Yorker
Posted 2004-05-15
http://newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040524fa_fact
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror.
According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials, the Pentagon's operation, known inside the intelligence community by several code words, including Copper Green, encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in an effort to generate more intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq. A senior C.I.A. official, in confirming the details of this account last week, said that the operation stemmed from Rumsfeld's long-standing desire to wrest control of America's clandestine and paramilitary operations from the C.I.A.
Rumsfeld, during appearances last week before Congress to testify about Abu Ghraib, was precluded by law from explicitly mentioning highly secret matters in an unclassified session. But he conveyed the message that he was telling the public all that he knew about the story. He said, "Any suggestion that there is not a full, deep awareness of what has happened, and the damage it has done, I think, would be a misunderstanding." The senior C.I.A. official, asked about Rumsfeld's testimony and that of Stephen Cambone, his Under-Secretary for Intelligence, said, "Some people think you can bullshit anyone."
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration's search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors." In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they'd had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate "high value" targets in the Bush Administration's war on terror. A special-access program, or sap-subject to the Defense Department's most stringent level of security-was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps. America's most successful intelligence operations during the Cold War had been saps, including the Navy's submarine penetration of underwater cables used by the Soviet high command and construction of the Air Force's stealth bomber. All the so-called "black" programs had one element in common: the Secretary of Defense, or his deputy, had to conclude that the normal military classification restraints did not provide enough security.
"Rumsfeld's goal was to get a capability in place to take on a high-value target-a standup group to hit quickly," a former high-level intelligence official told me. "He got all the agencies together-the C.I.A. and the N.S.A.-to get pre-approval in place. Just say the code word and go." The operation had across-the-board approval from Rumsfeld and from Condoleezza Rice, the national-security adviser. President Bush was informed of the existence of the program, the former intelligence official said.
The people assigned to the program worked by the book, the former intelligence official told me. They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America's élite forces-Navy seals, the Army's Delta Force, and the C.I.A.'s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: "Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress."
In theory, the operation enabled the Bush Administration to respond immediately to time-sensitive intelligence: commandos crossed borders without visas and could interrogate terrorism suspects deemed too important for transfer to the military's facilities at Guantánamo, Cuba. They carried out instant interrogations-using force if necessary-at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the "white," or overt, world.
Fewer than two hundred operatives and officials, including Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were "completely read into the program," the former intelligence official said. The goal was to keep the operation protected. "We're not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness," he said. "The rules are 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'"
One Pentagon official who was deeply involved in the program was Stephen Cambone, who was named Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in March, 2003. The office was new; it was created as part of Rumsfeld's reorganization of the Pentagon. Cambone was unpopular among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in the Pentagon, essentially because he had little experience in running intelligence programs, though in 1998 he had served as staff director for a committee, headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging ballistic-missile threat to the United States. He was known instead for his closeness to Rumsfeld. "Remember Henry II-'Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?'" the senior C.I.A. official said to me, with a laugh, last week. "Whatever Rumsfeld whimsically says, Cambone will do ten times that much."
Cambone was a strong advocate for war against Iraq. He shared Rumsfeld's disdain for the analysis and assessments proffered by the C.I.A., viewing them as too cautious, and chafed, as did Rumsfeld, at the C.I.A.'s inability, before the Iraq war, to state conclusively that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction. Cambone's military assistant, Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, was also controversial. Last fall, he generated unwanted headlines after it was reported that, in a speech at an Oregon church, he equated the Muslim world with Satan.
Early in his tenure, Cambone provoked a bureaucratic battle within the Pentagon by insisting that he be given control of all special-access programs that were relevant to the war on terror. Those programs, which had been viewed by many in the Pentagon as sacrosanct, were monitored by Kenneth deGraffenreid, who had experience in counter-intelligence programs. Cambone got control, and deGraffenreid subsequently left the Pentagon. Asked for comment on this story, a Pentagon spokesman said, "I will not discuss any covert programs; however, Dr. Cambone did not assume his position as the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence until March 7, 2003, and had no involvement in the decision-making process regarding interrogation procedures in Iraq or anywhere else."
In mid-2003, the special-access program was regarded in the Pentagon as one of the success stories of the war on terror. "It was an active program," the former intelligence official told me. "It's been the most important capability we have for dealing with an imminent threat. If we discover where Osama bin Laden is, we can get him. And we can remove an existing threat with a real capability to hit the United States-and do so without visibility." Some of its methods were troubling and could not bear close scrutiny, however.
By then, the war in Iraq had begun. The sap was involved in some assignments in Iraq, the former official said. C.I.A. and other American Special Forces operatives secretly teamed up to hunt for Saddam Hussein and-without success-for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But they weren't able to stop the evolving insurgency.
In the first months after the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld and his aides still had a limited view of the insurgency, seeing it as little more than the work of Baathist "dead-enders," criminal gangs, and foreign terrorists who were Al Qaeda followers. The Administration measured its success in the war by how many of those on its list of the fifty-five most wanted members of the old regime-reproduced on playing cards-had been captured. Then, in August, 2003, terror bombings in Baghdad hit the Jordanian Embassy, killing nineteen people, and the United Nations headquarters, killing twenty-three people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of the U.N. mission. On August 25th, less than a week after the U.N. bombing, Rumsfeld acknowledged, in a talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, that "the dead-enders are still with us." He went on, "There are some today who are surprised that there are still pockets of resistance in Iraq, and they suggest that this represents some sort of failure on the part of the Coalition. But this is not the case." Rumsfeld compared the insurgents with those true believers who "fought on during and after the defeat of the Nazi regime in Germany." A few weeks later-and five months after the fall of Baghdad-the Defense Secretary declared,"It is, in my view, better to be dealing with terrorists in Iraq than in the United States."
Inside the Pentagon, there was a growing realization that the war was going badly. The increasingly beleaguered and baffled Army leadership was telling reporters that the insurgents consisted of five thousand Baathists loyal to Saddam Hussein. "When you understand that they're organized in a cellular structure," General John Abizaid, the head of the Central Command, declared, "that . . . they have access to a lot of money and a lot of ammunition, you'll understand how dangerous they are."
The American military and intelligence communities were having little success in penetrating the insurgency. One internal report prepared for the U.S. military, made available to me, concluded that the insurgents'"strategic and operational intelligence has proven to be quite good." According to the study:
Their ability to attack convoys, other vulnerable targets and particular individuals has been the result of painstaking surveillance and reconnaissance. Inside information has been passed on to insurgent cells about convoy/troop movements and daily habits of Iraqis working with coalition from within the Iraqi security services, primarily the Iraqi Police force which is rife with sympathy for the insurgents, Iraqi ministries and from within pro-insurgent individuals working with the CPA's so-called Green Zone.
The study concluded, "Politically, the U.S. has failed to date. Insurgencies can be fixed or ameliorated by dealing with what caused them in the first place. The disaster that is the reconstruction of Iraq has been the key cause of the insurgency. There is no legitimate government, and it behooves the Coalition Provisional Authority to absorb the sad but unvarnished fact that most Iraqis do not see the Governing Council"-the Iraqi body appointed by the C.P.A.-"as the legitimate authority. Indeed, they know that the true power is the CPA."
By the fall, a military analyst told me, the extent of the Pentagon's political and military misjudgments was clear. Donald Rumsfeld's "dead-enders" now included not only Baathists but many marginal figures as well-thugs and criminals who were among the tens of thousands of prisoners freed the previous fall by Saddam as part of a prewar general amnesty. Their desperation was not driving the insurgency; it simply made them easy recruits for those who were. The analyst said, "We'd killed and captured guys who had been given two or three hundred dollars to 'pray and spray'"-that is, shoot randomly and hope for the best. "They weren't really insurgents but down-and-outers who were paid by wealthy individuals sympathetic to the insurgency." In many cases, the paymasters were Sunnis who had been members of the Baath Party. The analyst said that the insurgents "spent three or four months figuring out how we operated and developing their own countermeasures. If that meant putting up a hapless guy to go and attack a convoy and see how the American troops responded, they'd do it." Then, the analyst said, "the clever ones began to get in on the action."
By contrast, according to the military report, the American and Coalition forces knew little about the insurgency: "Human intelligence is poor or lacking . . . due to the dearth of competence and expertise. . . . The intelligence effort is not coördinated since either too many groups are involved in gathering intelligence or the final product does not get to the troops in the field in a timely manner." The success of the war was at risk; something had to be done to change the dynamic.
The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents. A key player was Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention and interrogation center at Guantánamo, who had been summoned to Baghdad in late August to review prison interrogation procedures. The internal Army report on the abuse charges, written by Major General Antonio Taguba in February, revealed that Miller urged that the commanders in Baghdad change policy and place military intelligence in charge of the prison. The report quoted Miller as recommending that "detention operations must act as an enabler for interrogation."
Miller's concept, as it emerged in recent Senate hearings, was to "Gitmoize" the prison system in Iraq-to make it more focussed on interrogation. He also briefed military commanders in Iraq on the interrogation methods used in Cuba-methods that could, with special approval, include sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of cold and heat, and placing prisoners in "stress positions" for agonizing lengths of time. (The Bush Administration had unilaterally declared Al Qaeda and other captured members of international terrorist networks to be illegal combatants, and not eligible for the protection of the Geneva Conventions.)
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the sap, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
"They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq," the former intelligence official told me. "No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set up-the black special-access program-and I'm going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff. But we've got more targets"-prisoners in Iraqi jails-"than people who can handle them."
Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap's rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap'sauspices. "So here are fundamentally good soldiers-military-intelligence guys-being told that no rules apply," the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. "And, as far as they're concerned, this is a covert operation, and it's to be kept within Defense Department channels."
The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included "recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland." He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. "How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn't know what it's doing."
Who was in charge of Abu Ghraib-whether military police or military intelligence-was no longer the only question that mattered. Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others-military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program-wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. "I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn't know," Karpinski told me. "I called them the disappearing ghosts. I'd seen them once in a while at Abu Ghraib and then I'd see them months later. They were nice-they'd always call out to me and say, 'Hey, remember me? How are you doing?'" The mysterious civilians, she said, were "always bringing in somebody for interrogation or waiting to collect somebody going out." Karpinski added that she had no idea who was operating in her prison system. (General Taguba found that Karpinski's leadership failures contributed to the abuses.)
By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. "They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan-pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets-and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets'"-the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. "The C.I.A.'s legal people objected," and the agency ended its sap involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
The C.I.A.'s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret sap, and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation. "This was stupidity," a government consultant told me. "You're taking a program that was operating in the chaos of Afghanistan against Al Qaeda, a stateless terror group, and bringing it into a structured, traditional war zone. Sooner or later, the commandos would bump into the legal and moral procedures of a conventional war with an Army of a hundred and thirty-five thousand soldiers."
The former senior intelligence official blamed hubris for the Abu Ghraib disaster. "There's nothing more exhilarating for a pissant Pentagon civilian than dealing with an important national security issue without dealing with military planners, who are always worried about risk," he told me. "What could be more boring than needing the coöperation of logistical planners?" The only difficulty, the former official added, is that, "as soon as you enlarge the secret program beyond the oversight capability of experienced people, you lose control. We've never had a case where a special-access program went sour-and this goes back to the Cold War."
In a separate interview, a Pentagon consultant, who spent much of his career directly involved with special-access programs, spread the blame. "The White House subcontracted this to the Pentagon, and the Pentagon subcontracted it to Cambone," he said. "This is Cambone's deal, but Rumsfeld and Myers approved the program." When it came to the interrogation operation at Abu Ghraib, he said, Rumsfeld left the details to Cambone. Rumsfeld may not be personally culpable, the consultant added, "but he's responsible for the checks and balances. The issue is that, since 9/11, we've changed the rules on how we deal with terrorism, and created conditions where the ends justify the means."
Last week, statements made by one of the seven accused M.P.s, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, were released. In them, he claimed that senior commanders in his unit would have stopped the abuse had they witnessed it. One of the questions that will be explored at any trial, however, is why a group of Army Reserve military policemen, most of them from small towns, tormented their prisoners as they did, in a manner that was especially humiliating for Iraqi men.
The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private." The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged-"one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."
The government consultant said that there may have been a serious goal, in the beginning, behind the sexual humiliation and the posed photographs. It was thought that some prisoners would do anything-including spying on their associates-to avoid dissemination of the shameful photos to family and friends. The government consultant said, "I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population." The idea was that they would be motivated by fear of exposure, and gather information about pending insurgency action, the consultant said. If so, it wasn't effective; the insurgency continued to grow.
"This shit has been brewing for months," the Pentagon consultant who has dealt with saps told me. "You don't keep prisoners naked in their cell and then let them get bitten by dogs. This is sick." The consultant explained that he and his colleagues, all of whom had served for years on active duty in the military, had been appalled by the misuse of Army guard dogs inside Abu Ghraib. "We don't raise kids to do things like that. When you go after Mullah Omar, that's one thing. But when you give the authority to kids who don't know the rules, that's another."
In 2003, Rumsfeld's apparent disregard for the requirements of the Geneva Conventions while carrying out the war on terror had led a group of senior military legal officers from the Judge Advocate General's (jag) Corps to pay two surprise visits within five months to Scott Horton, who was then chairman of the New York City Bar Association's Committee on International Human Rights. "They wanted us to challenge the Bush Administration about its standards for detentions and interrogation," Horton told me. "They were urging us to get involved and speak in a very loud voice. It came pretty much out of the blue. The message was that conditions are ripe for abuse, and it's going to occur." The military officials were most alarmed about the growing use of civilian contractors in the interrogation process, Horton recalled. "They said there was an atmosphere of legal ambiguity being created as a result of a policy decision at the highest levels in the Pentagon. The jag officers were being cut out of the policy formulation process." They told him that, with the war on terror, a fifty-year history of exemplary application of the Geneva Conventions had come to an end.
The abuses at Abu Ghraib were exposed on January 13th, when Joseph Darby, a young military policeman assigned to Abu Ghraib, reported the wrongdoing to the Army's Criminal Investigations Division. He also turned over a CD full of photographs. Within three days, a report made its way to Donald Rumsfeld, who informed President Bush.
The inquiry presented a dilemma for the Pentagon. The C.I.D. had to be allowed to continue, the former intelligence official said. "You can't cover it up. You have to prosecute these guys for being off the reservation. But how do you prosecute them when they were covered by the special-access program? So you hope that maybe it'll go away." The Pentagon's attitude last January, he said, was "Somebody got caught with some photos. What's the big deal? Take care of it." Rumsfeld's explanation to the White House, the official added, was reassuring: "'We've got a glitch in the program. We'll prosecute it.' The cover story was that some kids got out of control."
In their testimony before Congress last week, Rumsfeld and Cambone struggled to convince the legislators that Miller's visit to Baghdad in late August had nothing to do with the subsequent abuse. Cambone sought to assure the Senate Armed Services Committee that the interplay between Miller and Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, had only a casual connection to his office. Miller's recommendations, Cambone said, were made to Sanchez. His own role, he said, was mainly to insure that the "flow of intelligence back to the commands" was "efficient and effective." He added that Miller's goal was "to provide a safe, secure and humane environment that supports the expeditious collection of intelligence."
It was a hard sell. Senator Hillary Clinton, Democrat of New York, posed the essential question facing the senators:
If, indeed, General Miller was sent from Guantánamo to Iraq for the purpose of acquiring more actionable intelligence from detainees, then it is fair to conclude that the actions that are at point here in your report [on abuses at Abu Ghraib] are in some way connected to General Miller's arrival and his specific orders, however they were interpreted, by those MPs and the military intelligence that were involved.. . .Therefore, I for one don't believe I yet have adequate information from Mr. Cambone and the Defense Department as to exactly what General Miller's orders were . . . how he carried out those orders, and the connection between his arrival in the fall of '03 and the intensity of the abuses that occurred afterward.
Sometime before the Abu Ghraib abuses became public, the former intelligence official told me, Miller was "read in"-that is, briefed-on the special-access operation. In April, Miller returned to Baghdad to assume control of the Iraqi prisons; once the scandal hit, with its glaring headlines, General Sanchez presented him to the American and international media as the general who would clean up the Iraqi prison system and instill respect for the Geneva Conventions. "His job is to save what he can," the former official said. "He's there to protect the program while limiting any loss of core capability." As for Antonio Taguba, the former intelligence official added, "He goes into it not knowing shit. And then: 'Holy cow! What's going on?'"
If General Miller had been summoned by Congress to testify, he, like Rumsfeld and Cambone, would not have been able to mention the special-access program. "If you give away the fact that a special-access program exists,"the former intelligence official told me, "you blow the whole quick-reaction program."
One puzzling aspect of Rumsfeld's account of his initial reaction to news of the Abu Ghraib investigation was his lack of alarm and lack of curiosity. One factor may have been recent history: there had been many previous complaints of prisoner abuse from organization like Human Rights Watch and the International Red Cross, and the Pentagon had weathered them with ease. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he had not been provided with details of alleged abuses until late March, when he read the specific charges. "You read it, as I say, it's one thing. You see these photographs and it's just unbelievable. . . . It wasn't three-dimensional. It wasn't video. It wasn't color. It was quite a different thing." The former intelligence official said that, in his view, Rumsfeld and other senior Pentagon officials had not studied the photographs because "they thought what was in there was permitted under the rules of engagement," as applied to the sap. "The photos," he added, "turned out to be the result of the program run amok."
The former intelligence official made it clear that he was not alleging that Rumsfeld or General Myers knew that atrocities were committed. But, he said, "it was their permission granted to do the sap, generically, and there was enough ambiguity, which permitted the abuses."
This official went on, "The black guys"-those in the Pentagon's secret program-"say we've got to accept the prosecution. They're vaccinated from the reality." The sap is still active, and "the United States is picking up guys for interrogation. The question is, how do they protect the quick-reaction force without blowing its cover?" The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. "If you even give a hint that you're aware of a black program that you're not read into, you lose your clearances," the former official said. "Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended-the poor kids at the end of the food chain."
The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. "The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn't know how to do it," the former intelligence official said.
Last week, the government consultant, who has close ties to many conservatives, defended the Administration's continued secrecy about the special-access program in Abu Ghraib. "Why keep it black?" the consultant asked. "Because the process is unpleasant. It's like making sausage-you like the result but you don't want to know how it was made. Also, you don't want the Iraqi public, and the Arab world, to know. Remember, we went to Iraq to democratize the Middle East. The last thing you want to do is let the Arab world know how you treat Arab males in prison."
The former intelligence official told me he feared that one of the disastrous effects of the prison-abuse scandal would be the undermining of legitimate operations in the war on terror, which had already suffered from the draining of resources into Iraq. He portrayed Abu Ghraib as "a tumor" on the war on terror. He said, "As long as it's benign and contained, the Pentagon can deal with the photo crisis without jeopardizing the secret program. As soon as it begins to grow, with nobody to diagnose it-it becomes a malignant tumor."
The Pentagon consultant made a similar point. Cambone and his superiors, the consultant said, "created the conditions that allowed transgressions to take place. And now we're going to end up with another Church Commission"-the 1975 Senate committee on intelligence, headed by Senator Frank Church, of Idaho, which investigated C.I.A. abuses during the previous two decades. Abu Ghraib had sent the message that the Pentagon leadership was unable to handle its discretionary power. "When the shit hits the fan, as it did on 9/11, how do you push the pedal?" the consultant asked. "You do it selectively and with intelligence."
"Congress is going to get to the bottom of this," the Pentagon consultant said. "You have to demonstrate that there are checks and balances in the system." He added, "When you live in a world of gray zones, you have to have very clear red lines."
Senator John McCain, of Arizona, said, "If this is true, it certainly increases the dimension of this issue and deserves significant scrutiny. I will do all possible to get to the bottom of this, and all other allegations."
"In an odd way," Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said, "the sexual abuses at Abu Ghraib have become a diversion for the prisoner abuse and the violation of the Geneva Conventions that is authorized." Since September 11th, Roth added, the military has systematically used third-degree techniques around the world on detainees. "Some jags hate this and are horrified that the tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war," Roth told me. "We're giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar."
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New Limits On Tactics At Prisons
U.S. Commander Bans Some Interrogation Methods
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27894-2004May14.html
The commander of U.S. forces in Iraq has barred military interrogators from using the most coercive techniques potentially available to them in the past, declaring that requests to employ the measures against detainees will no longer even be considered, officials said yesterday.
The directive from Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez comes in the face of a political uproar over disclosure earlier this week that U.S. interrogators had been allowed to request permission from Sanchez to use a range of tough interrogation tactics on a case-by-case basis.
Since October, officials said, Sanchez has approved 25 such requests, all involving prolonged isolation of detainees, the officials said. But interrogators were free under the previous policy to seek authorization for other, more severe measures, including sleep deprivation, diet manipulation, stress positions and the use of dogs to threaten detainees.
Three requests to place detainees in stressful positions to get them to talk were submitted but denied at the brigade level, the officials said without disclosing the reasons for the rejections.
At a Pentagon briefing, the officials repeated arguments that such intensified interrogation measures were entirely consistent with the Geneva Conventions requiring humane treatment of detainees. But that judgment was vigorously challenged this week by lawmakers, human rights experts and others after the Senate Armed Services Committee released an Army document that had been posted on the wall of the Abu Ghraib prison listing nine high-pressure interrogation tactics that could be used if approved by Sanchez.
Under the new order, which was issued Thursday, Sanchez and his staff will no longer consider any extraordinary interrogation methods other than putting prisoners alone in cells or in small groups segregated from the general prison population for more than 30 days. Regular interrogation techniques such as direct questioning of detainees without physical contact will remain allowable without special approval.
"What is said is simply, we will not even entertain a request" for anything more severe than segregation or isolation, "so don't even send it up for a review," said a senior Army official, one of two who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity.
Sanchez issued the directive on the same day that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld met with him on a surprise trip to Iraq. But Rumsfeld's chief spokesman, Larry DiRita, said yesterday that the defense secretary had not instructed the general to revise the policy.
Pressed by reporters on the reason for the change, DiRita acknowledged that "the heightened scrutiny of the last couple of weeks" may have played a role. But he also cited "a rigorous process" of periodic review that began long before the current scandal over the alleged abuse of detainees by U.S. soldiers and private contractors at Abu Ghraib, outside Baghdad.
Yesterday's briefing also provided the first detailed account of the evolution of the U.S. military's interrogation policy in Iraq. Until last autumn, U.S. forces in the country lacked a specific policy for questioning detainees.
"They relied upon the approaches that are contained within the Army field manual on interrogations," one Army official said.
That changed after a visit to Iraq in August and September by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, then the commander of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who came to assess interrogation practices. Among his recommendations was that commanders in Iraq adopt an explicit interrogation policy, the official said, and as a model, Miller left a copy of the policy for the Guantanamo facility.
That policy contained some measures more coercive than U.S. forces in Iraq could use, given orders to strictly abide by the Geneva Conventions, the official said.
"We used part of it and excepted other parts of it," he said. "That was the genesis for the first interrogation policy, which was put out in September."
After further review by the U.S. Central Command, a revised policy was issued Oct. 12. In one section, it listed approaches approved for all detainees, such as repeating questions over and over, staying silent, playing on a detainee's pride and telling detainees they could receive better treatment if they cooperate. Another section specified "safeguards," including a stipulation that all detainees be treated humanely.
The document also stated that use of any technique not explicitly listed required review by the senior intelligence officer and military lawyer on Sanchez's staff and approval by Sanchez.
On or about Oct. 18, the official said, an unidentified soldier in the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which operated at the Abu Ghraib facility, produced a one-page summary of the policy. It was titled "Interrogation Rules of Engagement" and hung on the wall of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center.
That is the page released by the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. On the left it showed the list of generally approved interrogation methods, and on the right were the methods requiring Sanchez's approval. These included "dietary manipulation," "environmental manipulation," "sensory deprivation," "stress positions," disruptions in sleep patterns for up to 72 hours, isolation for longer than 30 days and the use of dogs.
These exceptional tactics had appeared in the September policy but ended up deleted from the October policy. Asked to explain the change, the official suggested it reflected reservations, either at the Central Command or elsewhere in the review process, about the acceptability of the more stressful measures or the advisability of enumerating them.
"There are reasonable people and very intelligent people who can differ on what is authorized, what's permissible, under the Geneva Conventions, particularly in the context of security internees," he said.
Nevertheless, he speculated that because the measures had appeared in the earlier policy and other draft papers, they were included in the now-famous summary sheet posted at the interrogation center.
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Top Commander Bars Coercive Tactics in Interrogation of Iraqis
May 15, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/politics/15MILI.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 14 - Under a barrage of international and domestic criticism, the top American commander in Iraq has barred virtually all coercive interrogation practices, like forcing prisoners to crouch for long periods or depriving them of sleep, the Pentagon said Friday.
The commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, will still consider requests to hold prisoners in isolation for more than 30 days, according to a senior Central Command official who briefed reporters on Friday. The general has approved 25 such requests since October, the official said. But the official said that General Sanchez would deny requests to use other harsh methods.
"Simply, we will not even entertain a request, so don't even send it up for a review," the Central Command official said.
Previously, certain interrogation techniques, including sensory deprivation were supposed to be used only with the general's explicit approval. General Sanchez issued the new guidelines on Thursday, the same day that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made a surprise visit to Baghdad and to Abu Ghraib prison, where the worst abuses occurred, in an effort to quiet the furor over the abuse scandal.
Mr. Rumsfeld has said that the American military in Iraq was abiding by the Geneva Conventions, and that the mistreatment was the work of a terrible few. But at a Senate hearing on Thursday, Mr. Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, acknowledged that hooding prisoners or forcing them to crouch naked for 45 minutes - tactics available to interrogators with General Sanchez's approval under the old policy - was inhumane. The International Red Cross had warned American officials for months that Iraqi prisoners were being abused in American-run prisons.
The senior Central Command official said the coercive practices were dropped because General Sanchez was not receiving requests to use most of them. But the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, acknowledged that it was "likely that the heightened scrutiny of the last couple weeks" had prompted General Sanchez to revise the interrogation rules. He said Mr. Rumsfeld did not order General Sanchez to change the policy.
The changes appear to affect only operations in Iraq, and would not change interrogation methods at the American base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or in Afghanistan. The rules also apply to any civilian contractors.
The Army's top intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, had presented to senators this week a list of techniques, some of which were approved for use on all prisoners and others that required General Sanchez's approval. The chart also listed safeguards, including a warning that "approaches must always be humane and lawful." Senators said at the hearing on Tuesday that General Alexander had characterized the one-page chart as a product of the American military high command in Baghdad. But the Central Command official disclosed Friday that the document was actually produced sometime in October by the Army's 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib. The Central Command official also said that until last fall, commanders did not have an interrogation policy specific to Iraq.
That changed, however, after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the head of detention operations at Guantanamo Bay, visited Iraqi prisons last September and recommended several changes, including the creation of a specific interrogation policy for prisons in Iraq. An interim policy, from Sept. 14 to Oct. 12 last year, spelled out approved interrogation techniques for all prisoners, a separate list of harsher tactics that required General Sanchez's approval, and the list of safeguards.
A revised policy took effect on Oct. 12 that dropped the listing of the approaches needing the general's approval, although the Army intelligence brigade that actually conducted the interrogations produced a chart that kept the old listings, and posted it as a guide.
A senior military official said the American headquarters in Baghdad expected interrogators and their commanders to request exceptional permission for any approach that was not in the pre-approve category.
"There are reasonable people and very intelligent people who can differ on what is authorized, what's permissible under the Geneva Conventions," the official said.
The official said, for instance, that there were harsher approaches, now barred by General Sanchez, that in his view did not violate the Conventions. The official said requiring a prisoner to stand at attention would be an example of what military interrogators call "a stress position" that would be allowable. Military officials said that since October, interrogators in the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade had requested to use stress positions in three cases, but each one was denied at the brigade level.
The official acknowledged that a Red Cross report submitted last November to Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, head of the 800th Military Police Brigade, contained allegations that the official said were "very concerning" and that had been investigated by Army criminal investigators as well as Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who first reported the abuses. But the official did not elaborate.
On Capitol Hill, Senate Democrats who had accused the Pentagon this week of employing practices that violated the Conventions applauded the policy changes. "Pressure works," said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who clashed with Mr. Wolfowitz at Thursday's hearing, said in a telephone interview, "I'm glad they're changing them, but it's like closing the barn door after the herd is out. Why were these regulations promulgated in the first place?"
In Iraq on Friday, criminal charges were brought against Specialist Charles A. Graner, bringing him to a general court-martial. The seven charges against Specialist Graner are conspiracy to maltreat detainees; dereliction of duty for willfully failing to protect detainees from abuse; cruelty and maltreatment; maltreatment of detainees; assaulting detainees; committing indecent acts; and adultery and obstruction of justice.
A military judge will arraign Specialist Graner along with Sgt. Javal Davis on May 20. Sergeant Davis acknowledged on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday that he stomped on prisoners' hands, but said he had been directed to do so by military intelligence officers.
Also on Friday, the military released 293 detainees from the Abu Ghraib prison. American officials have said that at least 60 percent of Iraqis taken into custody by American forces - there are about 3,000 at Abu Ghraib now - were arrested by mistake. Another 475 prisoners will be released in May, the military said.
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Militarism Leads to Torture
By Scott Galindez
truthout | Perspective
Saturday 15 May 2004
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/051504A.shtml
Drill Sergeant: "El Salvador!"
Troops: "Kill!"...
Drill Sergeant: "El Salvador!"
Troops: "Kill!" "When the coffee beans come creeping all around in El Salvador"
On our way to the mess hall morning, noon and night we sang that cadence in 1983. The U.S. military was preparing us to kill Salvadorans. They wanted us to think of them as less than human. One of the goals of military training is to prepare you to kill; another is to prepare you to follow orders. The combination of de-humanizing the enemy and becoming subservient to the chain of command leaves many soldiers capable of torture.
I also remember the stories about the CC, or Correctional Custody facility. The purpose of Correctional Custody is to make one last ditch effort to mold disobedient troops into soldiers. The stories were of hard labor, including carrying large rocks up and down hills, sleep deprivation, and humiliation. I was never sent to one of these facilities, but the Marine Corps Manual describes them as boot camp x 10.
It is in these camps where our military police or correctional officers receive training. While many, including myself, are shocked by the pictures of the torture being conducted by our troops in Iraq, I understand why those soldiers were capable of carrying out these shocking acts. From their first day at boot camp, they were trained to follow orders and to kill. I remember being told that I was a private, I was not paid to think, but to do as I was told.
I remember the first meeting with Drill Sergeant Wyatt. I was overweight with long hair. He immediately pointed to me, and said: "I want that one." He always told us that the reason he came back into the military after Vietnam was to get revenge on any recruits that he thought would run to Canada. He was sure I was one, and paid special attention to me. He was in my face regularly, humiliating me in front of my fellow recruits.
In prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and other places, the army acknowledges the use of sleep deprivation, and other techniques to break detainees in the interrogation process. The reports out of Iraq are much more severe and troubling, but we must ask: Once we sanction certain forms of torture, why should be shocked that some will feel it is OK to go further?
Those responsible should be punished, but we are not talking just about those conducting the acts. The actual participants may not have been directly ordered to carry these acts out, but they were asked to soften the detainees for interrogation. It was years of military training that prepared them to not question their orders, and to not sympathize with their prisoners.
I am not anti-soldier. They joined the military, like I did, to defend their country, get an education, learn a skill, etc. I am against militarism, a system where the enemy is de-humanized to the point where otherwise good people can be trained to be capable of the horrors in the photos from Iraq, and capable of massacres. What happened in those prisons was a symptom of the same mentality that led to the Mai Lai massacre. The victims were less than human to those that acted.
Until we as a people reject militarism as a way to resolve our differences, indiscriminate killing and torture will continue to happen.
Many will be outraged by what I said, especially veterans. I don't think I ever broke and would have been capable of those acts, and many other soldiers don't reach that point. Before you dismiss what I am saying, think back to your unit and count how many you think were capable of carrying out torture, and then think about how many of them re-upped and excelled in the military. Again, it's not the person, but the system.
Senator Ben "Night Horse" Campbell of Colorado, while looking at the latest set of photographs, said, "This is not my Army conducting these acts." Senator, I have to say to you: It was the same United States Army that I joined in 1983.
You can contact TO Political Editor Scott Galindez at scott.galindez@mail.truthout.org.
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Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27950-2004May14.html
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, joined by the foreign ministers of nations making key contributions of military forces in Iraq, emphatically said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after July 1, they would pack up without protest.
"We would leave," Powell said, noting that he was "not ducking the hypothetical, which I usually do," to avoid confusion on the extent of the new government's authority.
His statement, which was echoed by the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan, and by the U.S. administrator in Iraq, came one day after conflicting testimony on Capitol Hill by administration officials on the issue. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on Thursday, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman appeared to say that the interim government could order the departure of foreign troops, only to be contradicted by Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp, sitting at his side, who asserted that only an elected government could do so. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.
U.S. officials emphasized that they could not imagine the new government requesting the departure of almost 170,000 troops when the security situation in the country is so dire. But the new government's ability to assert its authority after the occupation authority dissolves on June 30 has been a central question in the international consultations over the shape of the incoming government, with the United States under pressure to transfer as much political power as possible to the Iraqi people.
"The Iraqi government has to be in a position to govern, and that's why I mean that it has to be a break with the past, " French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier said at a news conference in Washington after a preparatory meeting for next month's Group of Eight summit in Sea Island, Ga.
Barnier had been harshly critical of U.S. actions in Iraq before he arrived in Washington, seeming to equate U.S. and Israeli actions in an interview with Le Monde published on Thursday. "What strikes me is the spiral of horror, of blood, of inhumanity that one is seeing on all fronts, from Fallujah to Gaza and in the terrible images of the assassination of the unfortunate American hostage," he told the newspaper. "It all gives the impression of a total loss of direction."
French, Russian and Italian officials pressed yesterday for the new government to be given the authority to halt military actions by U.S. forces. Powell rejected that, saying the forces will remain under the command of an American who "has to be free to take whatever decisions he believes are appropriate to accomplish his mission."
Powell said the Bush administration will set up "political consultative processes" that will keep the interim government informed about military plans and actions. He said the "various liaison organizations and cells" will also give the Americans "full insight into any sensitivities that might exist within the Iraqi interim government concerning our military operations."
But Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told reporters that an "effective transfer of power" would allow the Iraqis to halt potential military attacks.
"Effective transfer of power means that Iraqi forces should have the right and the power to have a say in decisions about their territory," Frattini said. "If we imagine a unilateral decision by coalition forces after June 30, without listening to the Iraqi people or without giving them the power to say no, there won't be a transfer of power. And, in fact, what we want is that there is such power for the Iraqi people."
The open dispute between representatives of the leading industrialized nations over how to proceed in Iraq was evident despite a plea from President Bush for cooperation.
The foreign ministers met briefly with the president. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush and the ministers talked about the "mission they're working to accomplish in Iraq and about the importance of putting aside past differences and all of us working together."
The French, Russian and Canadian representatives made it clear that they will not supply troops for Iraq but that they are willing to help with reconstruction.
"I have said this already, and I'm saying once again, that there will be no French troops -- not here, not now, not tomorrow," Barnier said.
The foreign ministers' discussions yesterday also focused on narrowing differences over the Bush administration's efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East. European and Arab officials have resisted what they regard as a heavy-handed attempt by the administration to prod autocratic governments in the region to yield political power.
Officials said yesterday that there is an emerging consensus to support a "Middle East forum" that would bring together governments, businesses and nongovernmental groups to discuss reform goals. "This is an idea that is really going forward rather rapidly," a European official said, adding that there is still concern over the tone of the document the Americans want the G-8 to adopt at the summit.
The administration appeared to be inching toward the European position that progress on the Arab-Israeli conflict would assist efforts to promote Arab political reforms.
--------
DIPLOMACY
Powell Says U.S. Will Withdraw Troops From Iraq if New Government Makes Request
May 15, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN and WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/politics/15DIPL.html
WASHINGTON, May 14 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was joined by the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan on Friday in declaring that they would honor any request by Iraq's new government to withdraw foreign troops after June 30, when it is to receive limited sovereignty.
Speaking after a meeting of officials from leading industrial nations, Mr. Powell and his colleagues emphasized that they did not expect such a request to come. It inconceivable, they asserted, for anyone to doubt that a troop pullout would lead to chaos and violence in Iraq.
But the envoys evidently felt compelled to clarify the issue after some testimony in Congress on Thursday left the administration's intentions unclear. "I have no doubt that the interim Iraqi government will welcome the continued presence and operation of coalition military forces," Mr. Powell said, adding that he was "absolutely losing no sleep thinking that they might ask us to leave."
But he said that, in the interest of clearing up any confusion, "were this interim government to say to us, `We really think we can handle this on our own; it would be better if you were to leave,' we would leave."
Although few outside experts say they expect an Iraqi government to ask for a withdrawal of American and other allied forces, the issue has come up this week with the vehement anti-American reaction among Iraqis to the prison abuse scandal.
At the House International Relations Committee hearing on Thursday, a top aide to Mr. Powell, Marc Grossman, was asked repeatedly what would happen if such feelings erupted after sovereignty is transferred. After resisting an answer, he finally said the United States would honor such a request.
Mr. Grossman, under secretary of state for political affairs, was then contradicted by Lt. Gen. L. Walter Sharp, director of strategic plans for the military's joint staff, who said an Iraqi pullout request would not be valid unless it were made by an elected government due to take office next year.
Mr. Powell and his colleagues were evidently ready for the question at their news conference at the State Department after a long day of meetings, including a brief session with President Bush at the White House. The foreign ministers of Italy, Britain and Japan chimed in endorsing Mr. Powell's answer.
Despite the certainty of their responses, the determination of the envoys to set the record straight underscored the disarray and ambiguity right now in their plans for the future governance of Iraq.
Mr. Powell and the other envoys said they were still discussing broad concepts for the wording of a United Nations Security Council resolution defining the new Iraqi government's security powers, as well as its control of oil revenues, the prison system and other matters.
It was obvious from various public comments here and elsewhere that they had some distance to go to bridge their differences, which mainly focus on a demand by France, Russia and some others that the Iraqi government be given wide powers over its own affairs and that a multinational force be given a timetable to leave.
The United States is resisting making such provisions explicit, diplomats involved in the process say.
In New York on Friday, for example, Jean-Marc de la Sablière, the French envoy to the United Nations, said a caretaker government should have the right to object to orders from American officers sending Iraqi soldiers into combat.
"Imagine the Iraqis being asked to go into Karbala or whatever place and not having the right to say no," Mr. de la Sablière told reporters. "It would be absurd to have the Iraqi armed forces engaged without the consent of the Iraqi government."
In Washington, a senior administration official dismissed this demand as unnecessary, saying that it was self-evident that no one could order Iraqi troops to take an action against their will. "Are we going to send them into battle at the point of a gun?" this official said.
Nevertheless, the French comment underscored an emerging theme in the discussions over a future Security Council resolution, with France and Russia once again taking the lead - as they did in the months before the war - in raising a challenge to the American approach.
In this case, diplomats say there is hope of averting a clash.
The Bush administration is planning for an Iraqi government to emerge in the next couple weeks from a selection process led by Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations envoy, who is in Baghdad with the task of bringing such a government full blown "as from the brow of Zeus," as a State Department official commented recently.
The foreign ministers conferring in Washington on Friday were also from Germany, Canada and the European Union. All were in town to prepare for the Group of 8 summit meeting of leading industrial nations on Sea Island, Ga., next month.
As they struggled to narrow their differences on Iraq, the envoys said they were also trying to refine a planned appeal, the Greater Middle East Initiative, calling for democratic reforms in that region. An eight-page draft circulated this week among the envoys, but many were reported on Friday to have found it overly long and cumbersome.
Javier Solana, chief foreign affairs adviser to the European Union, said some progress had been made in shortening a document that, in its longer version, had been viewed by Arab leaders as imperialistic in tone. More important than whatever the Group of 8 does, he said, is what the Arab League decides in another week. "After the declarations are all adopted, the important thing will be the implementation," Mr. Solana said. "That will be the real test."
Steven R. Weisman reported from Washington and Warren Hoge from the United Nations for this article.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Court Questions Al Qaeda Contact
Moussaoui Case Could Stall Again
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28117-2004May14.html
A federal appeals court ordered Justice Department lawyers yesterday to explain at a closed hearing why they provided "arguably inconsistent" information about the interrogation of al Qaeda detainees -- a subject that already has mired the case of terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui.
The order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit comes just after a crucial decision by the same court on the same issue had moved the case forward. Yesterday's request, however, could once again slow the prosecution of the only person charged in the United States in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The order came in response to a letter filed by the Justice Department that sought to clarify the role of prosecution team members in the secretive process of questioning the detainees. The letter says that some Moussaoui prosecutors and FBI agents are involved in broader terrorism investigations and have "shared information." But the public release of the letter is heavily redacted for national security reasons, and it could not be determined what type of information was shared or in what context.
The issue is potentially important because the 4th Circuit, in a recent ruling, said Moussaoui could not question the detainees and ordered that the jury at his trial be instructed that no one involved in the case had been "privy" to the process of gaining information from the captives. Moussaoui had sought to question them because he said they could clear him of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. His attorneys are appealing the ruling.
In its order released yesterday, a three-judge panel said the information in the government letter "is arguably inconsistent with statements previously made to the court." The order also was heavily redacted and it was unclear what the judges will ask prosecutors at the hearing, but they asked why the information in the letter was not shared with them earlier and demanded the "identity and role in the prosecution" of those involved in providing information.
Lawyers said it was hard to assess the significance of the development without knowing whether prosecutors were indeed involved in the interrogations. But if they were, the outside lawyers said the appellate court could view that as a violation of Moussaoui's constitutional rights because his attorneys weren't also allowed to question the detainees.
"It sounds like the judges are very troubled because the information they had been getting through the course of this litigation was not accurate," said Michael Greenberger, a Justice Department official in the Clinton administration who is now a law professor at the University of Maryland. "The entire premise of their ruling, that Moussaoui could get evidence he needs that is free of any prosecution taint, could turn out to be incorrect."
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft yesterday said the Justice Department welcomes the opportunity to address the issue at the closed hearing in Richmond, set for June 3. "We believe that the position of the department is consistent," he said at a news conference.
Other federal law enforcement sources downplayed the significance of the order and said the issue would not affect the case.
But defense attorneys for Moussaoui, in a letter filed with the 4th Circuit, said, "A fundamental factual premise upon which the defense has been operating up until now . . . is incorrect."
Moussaoui, a French citizen, was charged in December 2001 with conspiring with al Qaeda in the Sept. 11 attacks.
The issue of detainees became paramount when U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in Alexandria ruled in January 2003 that defense attorneys could depose a captured al Qaeda operative, Ramzi Binalshibh, the self-described planner of the attacks. Moussaoui's attorneys said he had information vital for the defense; the government strongly objected to the deposition on national security grounds.
The issue escalated in September when Brinkema ordered depositions of two more detainees, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the former al Qaeda operations chief. When prosecutors refused to produce them for questioning, Brinkema punished them by striking the possibility of a death sentence for Moussaoui and eliminating any Sept. 11-related evidence from his trial.
The 4th Circuit panel last month overturned that ruling, restoring the death penalty and the Sept. 11 evidence and ruling that Moussaoui could not question the detainees.
The judges sent the case back to Brinkema to craft a middle ground in which Moussaoui could have access to certain statements made by the detainees and present them as evidence to the jury.
--------
Ohio Groups Question Justice's Trip on Utility Jet
May 15, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/politics/15trip.html
WASHINGTON, May 14 - A power plant company based in Ohio with a dozen cases in federal courts is flying Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to Columbus so he can deliver a speech on Saturday at the dedication of a judicial center.
The cost of using the corporate jet, which belongs to American Electric Power, one of the nation's largest utilities, is being covered by money raised from a $75-a-plate lunch after the speech at the center, the new home of the Ohio Supreme Court. But environmental groups in Ohio are expressing concern over the propriety of a Supreme Court justice's being accorded favors by a company that has so many active cases, including one that goes to trial next year involving accusations that its plant operations in Ohio violated the Clean Air Act. Environmentalists say the case could reach the Supreme Court.
"The idea that A.E.P. is bending over backwards to get the chief justice to Ohio for this speech is offensive," said Sandy Buchanan, executive director of Ohio Citizen Action, the state's largest environmental group. "It could signal a potential conflict of interest, and it's a favor that would not be afforded to the average citizen."
Mike Eckhardt, policy director of the Ohio League of Conservation Voters, said the trip reflected "suspect behavior'' by Chief Justice Rehnquist, adding, "You'd have to consider that it would make him not an impartial justice" in any case involving the power company.
The trip, first reported by The Toledo Blade, is the second in recent months by a Supreme Court justice that has prompted objections by environmental groups over the appearance of a conflict of interest. Late last year, with a case before the court involving the Sierra Club and Vice President Dick Cheney, Justice Antonin Scalia invited Mr. Cheney on a duck-hunting trip to Louisiana, and Mr. Cheney reciprocated by providing the transportation, a government jet, at no cost to Justice Scalia.
Melissa McHenry, a spokeswoman for the power company, which operates about 80 plants in 11 states, said the company was bearing none of the $3,800 cost for the plane to leave Columbus, pick up Chief Justice Rehnquist in Washington, take him back, then return to Columbus.
Commercial airlines routinely fly between the Washington metropolitan area and Columbus, with the most expensive ticket just under $1,100. A spokesman for the Ohio court, Chris Davey, said arrangements were made for a private jet in deference to security concerns and Chief Justice Rehnquist's knee problems. Mr. Davey said a friend of the Ohio chief justice, Thomas Moyer, had connections with the power company and volunteered to make arrangements for its jet to be used.
Mr. Davey, who declined to identify the friend, said it was "silly" for environmental groups to object to the travel arrangements.
"In this case, the Ohio Supreme Court is purchasing a service; it's that simple," he said. "To compare this to a situation of impropriety would be a miscomparison."
Kathy Arberg, a spokeswoman for the Supreme Court, said court rules allowed hosting organizations to pay for the travel and accommodations of justices.
In general, financial arrangements involving justices are determined by the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.
-------- homeland security
EU Agrees to Swap Information On Airline Passengers With U.S.
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28149-2004May14.html
European airlines will soon share information about their passengers with U.S. officials so they can be screened for security reasons, under an agreement approved yesterday by the European Commission.
The agreement also calls for U.S. carriers to share information about their passengers with European Union countries. The data swapping would likely begin in the next several weeks, officials familiar with the talks said yesterday.
Under the terms of the deal, U.S. airlines would pass along information about each passenger such as name, date of birth, address and phone number to the European country of destination. In the United States, each passenger's information would be transferred to Customs and Border Protection agents and compared against various watch lists of known or suspected terrorists before the plane arrives in the United States. The information could also be used for international criminal probes such as drug trafficking.
U.S. Homeland Security officials agreed not to share the information with other agencies unless they can prove it is relevant to a criminal or intelligence investigation. U.S. officials also agreed to keep the data for 31/2 years instead of the initially proposed seven years.
The agreement contains no changes from one that was brokered last December but suffered several setbacks preventing final approval. The European Parliament, a representative body with lawmaking authority, claimed that the deal violated European privacy laws that restrict private companies and government from sharing private information. The parliament, which disapproved of the deal in a non-binding vote in March, referred the agreement to a European court to review the matter, which has yet to make a decision.
Officials on both sides of the Atlantic had argued the agreement was necessary to improve security.
The European Commission in Brussels yesterday found that "adequate protection is being provided by the United States to allow us to provide personal data," spokesman Anthony Gooch said. To become official, the agreement must also be approved by the European Council of Foreign Ministers on Monday and European and U.S. officials must sign the documents.
A U.S. Homeland Security spokesman yesterday declined to comment on the European action, saying that the process still needs to be finished.
Air carriers were pleased with the news yesterday, saying they have felt sandwiched between legal requirements on either side of the Atlantic. They already share passenger data with the U.S. government under an informal but unofficial agreement.
"We certainly support the compromise and are anxious to have it completed," said David O'Connor, director of the U.S. office of the International Air Transport Association.
--------
City Agencies Agree on a Coordinated Response to Disasters
May 15, 2004
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/15/nyregion/15command.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The Bloomberg administration announced yesterday that its emergency agencies had reached a formal agreement that details how they plan to coordinate their responses to major disasters, including everything from building collapses to biological attacks by terrorists.
In the event of a building collapse, for instance, the Fire Department will direct the rescues and response; in a civil disturbance, the Police Department will be responsible.
But in 10 critical situations, including chemical, biological or radiological incidents or a major bomb explosion, the agreement says little more than that the Police and Fire Departments will work together - in some cases with other agencies - and divide their efforts according to their respective areas of expertise, as defined in the agreement.
As a result, and in part due to the longstanding discord between the two departments, the protocols - the first ever actually agreed upon in the city by all its emergency agencies - came under immediate attack, from some Fire Department and fire union officials and several emergency response experts.
They argued that the city had, in effect, failed to resolve the critical command and control issues that were evident at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and that have provoked widespread concern about the city's true preparedness for a similarly large attack.
"This document formalizes the chaos that existed on 9/11; it does nothing to unify command," said Capt. Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association.
At the Police Department, however, officials "were very pleased with the outcome,'' one official said.
The city's announcement of the agreement - in a two-page press release without public comment by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg or his police and fire commissioners - came just days before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is scheduled to hold public hearings in New York. The commission had made clear that it was troubled by the city's failure to formalize an Incident Command System.
Joseph F. Bruno, the new commissioner of the Office of Emergency Management, applauded the development. Since he took office in April, Mr. Bruno has overseen the negotiations on the protocols. He called the agreement a breakthrough of sorts, and promised that the city agencies would overcome any confusion about shared roles in major incidents by training together and carefully reviewing their performances.
"But we haven't just said, 'Put this out in the street and let them battle it out,' '' Mr. Bruno said. "We think that through real serious training, through understanding what we're doing, through recognition in management of the agencies that this is an important program, that it has to work - that they're going to make it work."
For the last two and a half years, the agencies have waged a backstage battle to enlarge, or preserve, their roles in any future disaster. In October 2003, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said such an accord was actually unnecessary, despite a report by a private consultant that criticized their agencies' responses to the World Trade Center attack and that specifically said such a plan was needed to respond to any other large catastrophe. Then last July, they said they would sign such an accord after they learned it was required to qualify for grants from the Department of Homeland Security.
But as recently as April, negotiations on the guidelines seemed mired in interagency rivalry, with an agreement more than six months late and the Police Department arguing that it should control virtually every major emergency.
While the plan described in the news release seems, on its face, to resolve some of those disputes - with, for example, firefighters taking the lead in search and rescue, an arena in which police Emergency Service Unit officers also have worked - the lack of details left questions unanswered. Moreover, one emergency management expert who has worked with both departments said the formal agreement did little to address the broader problems that would face the city's emergency agencies in the event of another catastrophic terrorist attack: They cannot communicate with one another, they do not train together and they use equipment that is not compatible. At the same time, both police officers and firefighters do many of the same jobs, from hazardous materials work to water rescues and extricating victims from cars after auto accidents.
The guidelines allow a criminal investigation to begin along with lifesaving operations, with rescue the priority. After the rescue is completed, the investigation will become the priority, and only after investigative authorities permit, the recovery operation will begin.
The new plan is based on a unified command model in which senior police and fire officials, and in many cases those from other city agencies, will work together in a command center in addressing the 10 major types of disasters. They include aviation incidents, public health emergencies, rail incidents and blackouts, as well as the chemical, biological and radiological incidents that most officials believe might come with a terrorist attack. It gives the authority to direct operations to the agency that has the expertise - called "core competencies" - to handle the situation. For example, because the Fire Department's core competencies include search and rescue, it will oversee the work of the police at a building collapse, with direction being given to police officers at the scene through their commander.
The protocol, in discussing 18 other kinds of less complex incidents, gives the police authority in sniper attacks, civil disturbances, boats in distress and bomb threats and places the Fire Department in charge at fires, stuck elevators, confined space rescues and impalements.
The new protocol in many ways mirrors a set of guidelines from 1996, which set out which emergency agency would be in charge at different types of incidents, yet was never enforced and failed to resolve the longstanding and bitter disputes between the two agencies. The new guidelines, known as a Citywide Incident Management System or CIMS, brings the city into accord with the federal National Incident Management System, or NIMS, a blueprint for emergency response nationwide, which, with its own set of protocols and terminology, is meant to allow agencies from different areas to work together.
The new plan differs from the 1996 guidelines in at least one key respect, an area of significant dispute between the Fire and Police Departments. It makes the police the primary agency at all chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear hazardous materials incidents, with the responsibility to manage the site, conduct an assessment and handle the investigation. It gives the Fire Department responsibility for lifesaving, mitigation and decontamination. The assessment role, several officials said, is extremely important; many fire officials believe it should be their province because of what they say is their department's greater training and expertise.
Under the 1996 guidelines, hazardous materials incidents that were considered criminal acts, such as bomb blasts or intentional chemical releases, would be overseen by the police, while non-criminal incidents such as tanker spills or accidental chemical releases would be handled by the Fire Department. That structure was criticized as it was often difficult to determine if an incident was accidental or criminal until critical time had passed.
Some observers still say that the new protocol for hazardous materials remains flawed. "I don't know if you can divorce assessment from life safety," said Glenn Corbett, an assistant professor of fire science at John Jay College, who added that it was important for the rescuers committing resources inside an affected area to do all assessments.
Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., the head of the Public Safety Committee, criticized the plan, saying that while he and his staff have been dealing with the issue for a year, they could not understand the mayor's press release. "It says anything anyone wants it to say - it raises more questions than it answers," he said. He plans to hold a hearing on the issue in June.
Michelle O'Donnell contributed reporting for this article.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Leak Prosecutor Seeks To Question Reporters
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28138-2004May14.html
A special prosecutor investigating whether administration officials illegally leaked the name of an undercover CIA operative sought yesterday to interview two Washington Post reporters in connection with the probe.
Special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald told Post lawyer Eric Lieberman that he wants to talk to Post reporters Walter Pincus and Glenn Kessler but declined to discuss the information he is seeking, Lieberman said. Lieberman said he told Fitzgerald he would respond to the request next week.
The request to interview reporters may suggest the probe is winding up, because Justice Department guidelines require that prosecutors exhaust all other avenues before taking the step of calling reporters before a grand jury. If that is the case, as some attorneys for witnesses believe, it is not clear whether Fitzgerald is moving toward seeking indictments in the case or whether he is preparing to complete it without bringing criminal charges.
Because the probe involves a possible national security breach, it is being conducted amid extraordinary secrecy. Fitzgerald has interviewed some current and former White House officials repeatedly, people involved in the case have said. Several administration officials have testified before a grand jury in recent weeks, some for the first time.
The investigators are trying to determine who revealed CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to columnist Robert D. Novak last July, a possible crime if it was done with the intention of exposing her undercover status.
At the CIA's request, Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, investigated claims that Iraq sought to purchase uranium and subsequently accused the Bush administration of overstating Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons. He has suggested that his wife was exposed in retaliation for his findings.
---------
Bipartisan Duo Push Probe of Iraq Abuse
Graham, Reed Share Military Experience
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 15, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28035-2004May14?language=printer
Most of the questions had already been asked before Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of the Senate Armed Services Committee's most junior members, got his chance. "Saddam Hussein is in our control. How would you feel if we sicced dogs on him tomorrow?" Graham asked Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, author of the now-famous report documenting abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
"Sir, we still have to follow the tenets of international law," the general responded. Graham agreed and then asked with exasperation: "What are we fighting for . . . to be like Saddam Hussein?"
A few days later, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) had been listening for several hours to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz when he had heard enough. "What I've heard from you is dissembling and avoidance of answers," Reed snapped. Wolfowitz denied the charges, but Reed persisted. "Well, I would suggest, Mr. Secretary, that you're not doing your job," Reed said.
With questions and commentaries like these, the two back-bench senators have moved into the national spotlight as key players in the congressional inquiries into abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.
On the surface, they could not be more different: a southern conservative and a New England liberal who disagree on most major issues that come before Congress. But they share a military background, keen intellect and the discipline to put aside their strongly held political views when it comes to national security matters.
Graham, 48, a former military lawyer, was elected to the Senate in 2002 after four terms in the House, where he took a leading role in the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. He is regarded as a rising star in the GOP, reliably conservative on most issues but with a sharp tongue, quick wit and fiercely independent streak that are beginning to draw attention.
Reed, 54, a West Point graduate with eight years as an infantry officer, moved to the Senate in 1997 after three terms in the House and is about as liberal as Graham is conservative. Earnest, serious and considerably more reserved than Graham, Reed has become an influential voice on military issues, especially among Democrats.
In contrast to many of their more patrician colleagues, both came from blue-collar backgrounds -- Reed's father was a school custodian, and Graham's parents owned what he describes as a "beer joint" -- which helps explain one of their common objectives.
"I'm not going to sit on the sidelines and see a bunch of privates thrown to the wolves," said Graham. "I want to ensure we don't just look down the chain of command but up the chain to the very highest level," said Reed.
Together with some other relatively new members, such as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who is also an aggressive questioner, Graham and Reed have helped give the committee a sharp edge as it moves into one of its highest-profile roles since the end of the Cold War.
"They're independent, they put patriotism above politics, and they're smart," said Michael E. O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who formerly dealt with military issues for the Congressional Budget Office.
At a time when lawmakers are being criticized for haphazard oversight efforts and for failing to probe deeper into early policies on Iraq, the inquiry into prison abuses is earning praise.
"They were very accepting of what was put before them before the invasion of Iraq," said F. William Smullen, who spent 30 years in the Army, served as an aide to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and heads national security studies at Syracuse University's Maxwell School. Now, he said, "they're acquitting themselves well."
To colleagues, Graham and Reed have also brought a helpful level of expertise and commitment, without the sharp partisanship that pervades many Senate operations as the elections approach.
"Both Senators Reed and Graham bring not only experience in the military but also their sense of obligation and duty arising out of that experience . . . a level of expertise and concern that is not partisan," Clinton said. "When I listen to them, I'm always impressed at how they raise the level of debate and discourse."
During hours of hearings over the past week, the two senators asked some of the toughest questions. Reed repeatedly pressed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others about who approved practices aimed at softening prisoners for interrogation. Graham wanted to know why the president, Congress and the secretary of defense were not informed earlier of the photos of prisoner abuse.
The seriousness of the issue "has focused both of us on what we have in common rather than our disagreements," Graham said. "Our blood boils when we see command irresponsibility."
"Jack is very analytic in his questions. He tries to gather information like putting together pieces of the puzzle . . . I try to paint a big picture, paint what the big issues are," Graham added. "So we complement each other."
Reed voted against the 2002 resolution authorizing war in Iraq, while Graham voted for it. Both supported the $87 billion funding bill in 2003 for postwar operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both have indicated impatience with Rumsfeld, but neither has called for his resignation.
Graham and Reed are unusual in today's Senate in that relatively few new senators have military experience, and none as extensive as theirs. As the big World War II generation of veterans has grown older, the number of senators with military experience has declined. Of the 21 senators first elected in the 2000 and 2002 elections, only Graham and four others had military experience.
After receiving his law degree from the University of South Carolina, Graham served as both prosecutor and defense counsel for the Air Force for 61/2 years. In his most celebrated case, he successfully defended an accused officer by exposing flaws in the Air Force's drug-testing program, a story carried on CBS's "60 Minutes." Now a member of the Air Force Reserve, he has served as a judge advocate and was called up for the Persian Gulf War but did not go abroad.
After graduating from West Point, Reed served in the 82nd Airborne, where he commanded paratroopers. He got a master's degree at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and later graduated from Harvard Law School. He taught at West Point and now serves on its governing board. At West Point and the 82nd Airborne, he said, he got to know at least a dozen of the top military officials involved in the Iraq war and its aftermath, including Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command.
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Update on Vanunu's appeal - article from Ha'aretz
Prof. Uzi Even Vetoed as Consultant on Vanunu Case
By Yossi Melman
May 15, 2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/427413.html
Yehiel Horev, the Defense Ministry's director of security, has forbidden Professor Uzi Even to serve as an expert consultant to the legal proceedings against the state that Mordechai Vanunu is now preparing, arguing that Even, despite having formerly worked at the Dimona nuclear reactor, does not have the necessary security classification.
Moreover, Horev said, Even left the reactor in 1968, and is therefore ignorant of developments that took place there after that date.
Vanunu was released from prison last month after serving an 18-year jail sentence for revealing Israel's nuclear secrets to a British newspaper. However, since he is believed to still possess classified information, the security establishment has imposed various restrictions on him - for instance, he is not allowed to travel overseas. With the aid of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), he is therefore preparing a petition to the High Court of Justice against these restrictions.
As part of these preparations, Vanunu has asked Horev's department (known by its Hebrew acronym, Malmab), to return all the material confiscated from him in prison, including some 70 notebooks in which he recorded both his thoughts and notes and drawings relating to the Dimona reactor. ACRI argued that it needs this material to prepare the petition, but Horev and the state prosecution refused. Therefore, a compromise was reached under which two people would be allowed to examine the material: Dan Yakir, ACRI's legal adviser, and an expert agreed to by both Vanunu and the state.
Yakir thus proposed Even, a former Meretz MK and an outspoken critic of both Israel's nuclear policy and the restrictions imposed on Vanunu. However, Horev rejected the proposal.
"Since Vanunu's material relates to a period in which Dr. Even was not a party [to events at the reactor] and to a different line of work, other appropriate experts have been suggested," a Defense Ministry spokeswoman said.
Even responded that he was not surprised by Horev's decision. "Yehiel Horev wants his own associates to give an opinion, not independent experts," he said. "In 1982, my security clearance was taken away when it became known that I am homosexual. Afterward, I waged a public campaign that led to these regulations being changed, including in Malmab, and I have a letter from prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, from 1993, saying that I am fit for any job."
Preparation of the petition has also been delayed by the fact that Yakir himself was only allowed to start examining the material on Wednesday, even though three weeks have passed since Vanunu's release.
==
Write and e-mail to Mordechai Vanunu
Mordechai would love to hear from his friends and supporters. You can write to him at: Mordechai Vanunu c/o Cathedral Church of St. George 20 Nablus Road PO Box 19018 Jerusalem 91190 Israel
He can also receive email now at vanunumvjc@hotmail.com However, he may not be able to reply.
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Castro Leads Protest Against U.S. Embargo
Associated Press Writer
By VANESSA ARRINGTON
May 15, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CUBA_US_MARCH?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
HAVANA (AP) -- Hundreds of thousands of red-clad Cubans marched with Fidel Castro past the U.S. diplomatic mission Friday, chanting support for the Cuban leader while depicting President Bush as Hitler for moving to tighten the 44-year embargo of the communist state.
Castro launched the demonstration with denunciations and ridicule of Bush, saying he was fraudulently elected and trying to impose "world tyranny."
He then led the crowd, dressed in red shirts and shouting "Long live free Cuba! Fascist Bush!" past the mission on the oceanfront Malecon Boulevard.
A broad stream of students, workers, parents toting children on their shoulders and elderly couples filed past the mission singing, chanting, and playing drums.
The government-organized demonstration lasted just over six hours; as it ended, officials announced 1.2 million people had taken part. The number could not be confirmed, but the turnout was well into the hundreds of thousands at least.
While past state-organized demonstrations have compared other world leaders to Adolf Hitler, Friday's march brought the level of hostility toward Bush to a new level.
Scores of printed posters - apparently distributed by the march's organizers - bore swastikas and portrayed Bush in a Nazi uniform with a mustache similar to Hitler's.
There were hand-lettered signs as well: A middle-aged man carried a handwritten sign saying, "Bush, you are crazy, find yourself a psychologist."
The 77-year-old Castro, dressed in his usual green military uniform and field cap, appeared to walk with some difficulty, favoring a leg, as he led the march for about 800 yards, sometimes waving a small Cuban flag made of paper before getting into a waiting car and leaving.
Castro said the march was "an act of indignant protest and a denunciation of the brutal, merciless and cruel measures" aimed at squeezing the island's economy and pushing out the Cuban leader.
The measures, announced last week by Bush, included restrictions on money transfers and family visits, increased efforts to transmit anti-Castro television to Cuba and appointment of a coordinator to plan a transition from socialism to capitalism.
"This country could be exterminated ... erased from the face of the earth," Castro told the crowd. But he said it would never fall into "the humiliating condition of a neo-colony of the United States."
He said that if conflict comes, "I will be in the first line of defense, ready to die in defense of my people."
Castro accused the United States of fighting "wars of conquest to seize the markets and resources of the world" while Cuba, he said, was sending thousands of doctors to other countries.
"Cuba fights for life in the world; you fight for death," he said.
Castro insisted that Bush had "no morality nor any right at all to speak of liberty, democracy and human rights" and he said of Bush's 2000 election victory, "all the world knows it was fraudulent."
In an example of the worldwide fallout of the Iraqi prisoner scandal, organizers distributed signs printed with photos of abused Iraqis and the words: "This would never happen in Cuba."
Castro referred briefly to the scandal, saying the tortures had "stupefied the world" and asserting that Cuba had never practiced such abuse.
Human rights groups accuse Cuba of imprisoning peaceful dissenters and the State Department's human rights report says some have been beaten, and held in filthy cells or in isolation. But there have been no recent allegations of the kind of abuse depicted in Iraq.
Cuba says U.S. laws that call for channeling money to dissidents with the expressed aim of subverting Cuba's government make the dissenters "mercenaries" for a foreign power.
The official count of marchers could not be confirmed but it appeared possible due to the thick river of Cubans that continued to pass the U.S. mission into the afternoon.
Some said they had arrived about six hours before the 8 a.m. march. Many were brought by a vast fleet of buses in an effort led by Communist Party activists at workplaces, schools and neighborhoods.
The Labor Ministry freed most state employees from work for the day.
The government held a somewhat smaller mass march last year to denounce the European Union. In 2002, it brought millions into the streets of cities across the island to support a measure declaring socialism permanent.
On Monday, the government suddenly halted sales of most goods in dollars, saying it was due to new U.S. measures aimed at reducing funding for Cuba.
Officials say prices will be raised when the dollar-only stores reopen.
Cuban officials have warned the measures could be a prelude to stronger U.S. attacks, possibly even an invasion.
The United States has restricted trade and travel to Cuba for most of the time since the early 1960s in an attempt to topple Castro's government.
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