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NUCLEAR
French nuclear reactor shut down following fire
Radioactive material leaked on highway
£470m nuclear plant does not work, admits BNFL
'Military breached nuclear no-fly zones 27 times'
Atrocities in Iraq:
Fire Shuts Down Nuclear Plant in France
Pakistan-US discuss peaceful use of nuclear technology
Russia Wants Faster Aid for 'Rotting' Nuclear Subs
Proposal for Nuclear Waste Train Splits a Tiny Nevada Town
MILITARY
From Rogue State to Pariah State
The Next Casualty of the Iraq War Could Be Blair
Britain fears US fighter jets too heavy for take-off: report
Peace call poignant on D-Day anniversary
Divided Iraqi South Posing New Obstacles
Bush Says U.S. Moving to Defeat Iraqi Insurgents
U.S. and British Forces Battle Shiite Rebels in 4 Iraqi Cities
Chalabi: Iraqis Must Control Security
Sadr Goes From Fringe Figure to Rebel Hero
Statistics on Israeli Army Demolition
Community Razed Along With Its Homes in Gaza
Israeli Missiles Cut Power for 40,000 Gazans
Afghan's Allegation of Abuse Echoes Accounts From Iraq
Report: Rumsfeld Authorized Secret Program
U.S. holds huge network of secret terror prisons
U.S. Realigns War Assignments
Accused G.I.'s Try to Shift Blame in Prison Abuse
Report: U.S. to Shift 4, 000 Troops from S.Korea to Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Rejection Of Prison Abuse Was Sought
Improvements to U.S. Prisons Sought
Morocco Connection Is Emerging as Sleeper Threat in Terror War
Rumsfeld and Aide Backed Harsh Tactics, Article Says
A DANGEROUS CALCULUS
POLITICS
Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher
Abuse Scandal Focuses on Bush Foundation
New Abuse Accusations Emerge
New Afghan Abuse Inquiry
Congress Members Told of Abuse Months Ago
Prison Abuse Investigators Question Hiring
Oregon Primary May Be Last Stand for Kucinich
OTHER
Nearly 1 in 5 US Counties Have Unhealthy Air - EPA
Bush's Stem Cell Policy Reiterated, but Some See Shift
Bush Letter Sees Promise of Stem Cells
ACTIVISTS
Over 150,000 attend rally calling for Gaza withdrawal
Ashcroft Fishes Out 1872 Law in a Bid to Scuttle Protester Rights
Nigerian Police Arrest Writer During Protest
Thousands of Israelis Urge Gaza Pullout
Israeli Crowd Supports Pullout From Gaza
Police Break Up Rally for Reform in Zimbabwe
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
French nuclear reactor shut down following fire
May 16, 2004
STRASBOURG, France (AFP)
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040516173319.8m40eebt.html
Authorities shut down a reactor at one of France's largest nuclear power plants on Sunday following a fire in a non-nuclear portion of the plant, officials said.
Managers at the atomic energy plant in Cattenom in the Moselle region of northeastern France said a fire had broken out in the electrical cables in the conventional part of the factory.
"According to procedure, the reactor (number two) was shut down," they said, adding that the incident led to the declaration of an internal emergency for the plant operator Electricite de France.
The fire at the plant some 280 kilometers (175 miles) east of Paris, was put out by mid-afternoon, fire and regional government officials said. The reactor, one of four at Cattenom, is to remain shut pending the outcome of an investigation.
The fire was classified as a level one incident on an international scale of nuclear accidents that goes up to seven for the most serious, authorities said.
The campaign group Sortir du nucleaire (Out with the nuclear), denounced the Cattenom plant as one of the most worrisome nationwide and said Sunday's fire could have had "catastrophic consequences."
"Even though today's fire didn't have any serious consequences, a fire in a non-nuclear zone can still have catastrophic consequences," said spokesman Stephane Lhomme. "You could have a domino effect and the fire could spread to the nuclear installation."
He said nuclear plants in France, which derives well over 80 percent of its electricity needs from atomic power, were outdated and deteriorating, which could explain Sunday's fire.
Lhomme recalled two recent incidents at the plant, one on February 20 in which a leak in a hose led to slightly radioactive water spilling out into the Moselle river, and one a few days earlier in which maintainance workers had been slightly contaminated while working on one of the plant's four reactors.
The Cattenom plant's spokeswoman Catherine Heich said Sunday's fire was probably due to a cable that overheated inside a wall.
The 30 or so firefighters who rushed to the plant had to break down the wall in order to put out the blaze, she added.
----
Radioactive material leaked on highway
Sunday, 05/16/04
Associated Press
http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/04/05/51405322.shtml?Element_ID=51405322
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. - Federal and state health officials say they may have to tear up about a third of a mile of road on the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation and repave it after radioactive strontium 90 leaked out of a truck onto the road surface.
The road - Highway 95 - was closed Friday night.
Authorities from the U.S. Department of Energy said a truck carrying waste byproducts leaked several drops of strontium 90 over a 25-foot area of the highway. Strontium 90 is a byproduct of the fission of uranium or plutonium, the materials that fuel atomic bombs.
Officials said there was a possibility some vehicles may have driven over the contamination, and they encouraged anyone who may have done so to contact their local health department.
-------- britain
£470m nuclear plant does not work, admits BNFL
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
16 May 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=521756
Britain's newest and most controversial nuclear plant does not work and has yet to produce a single finished product, senior sources at the company that runs it, BNFL, admitted yesterday.
Their admission casts a blight over a visit to Japan by the Energy minister, Stephen Timms, which starts today. Mr Timms is attempting to rescue the plant, built at Sellafield at a cost to the taxpayer of hundreds of millions of pounds.
The plant, designed to produce nuclear fuel made of mixed uranium and plutonium, is central to the viability of the controversial Cumbrian nuclear complex. Environ-mentalists have long attacked it as a waste of money and a terrorist target, since it will cause plutonium - which could be intercepted and used to make nuclear bombs - to be shipped around the world. Japan was meant to be the plant's main customer, hence Mr Timms' visit.
A top BNFL source said yesterday: "Despite everyone's best efforts, the bloody thing does not work." He said its design was so complex that it kept breaking down.
Tony Blair personally pushed through the go-ahead for the plant in 2001, against entrenched opposition from Michael Meacher, his then Environment minister. In an attempt to make it viable, the Government wrote off the entire £470m cost to the taxpayer of building the plant before giving it the green light. However, it still looks like being a financial catastrophe.
Martin Forwood, of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment, said: "The kindest thing would be to put the plant out of its misery and close it."
In a statement, BNFL admitted progress had been "disappointing" but said that delays were to be expected when commissioning a complex plant, and customers were being kept "informed".
----
'Military breached nuclear no-fly zones 27 times'
MoD admits power stations reported close encounters but denies safety limits infringed
By Rob Edwards, Environmental Editor
Sunday Herald
16 May 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/print42061
Military aircraft have been accused of breaching the no-fly safety zones around Scotland's nuclear facilities 27 times over the last three years, according to internal investigations by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
By far the most alleged breaches - 15 - occurred around the Torness nuclear power station in East Lothian, including one that set off perimeter alarms. There were six incidents at the Dounreay complex in Caithness, with others at the aged Chapelcross nuclear station in Dumfries and Galloway, at Hunterston nuclear station in North Ayrshire and at Faslane nuclear submarine base on the Clyde.
More than 50 declassified MoD documents passed to the Sunday Herald on Friday reveal that infringements of the nuclear safety zones are far more serious and widespread than previously admitted. The news has alarmed Labour and Green politicians, who plan to challenge the government in Westminster and Holyrood.
Scotland's former environment minister, Labour MSP Sarah Boyack, described the documents as "very concerning". She said: "I would call on defence ministers to look at this urgently to see whether procedures need to be tightened up or revised."
In the wake of September 11, 2001, aircraft were banned from flying within 2.3 miles (3.7km) of a nuclear site to reduce the risk of a potentially catastrophic crash. They were also obliged to fly higher than 2000-2400ft, depending on the site.
But the MoD documents show that since then nuclear operators have frequently complained that the rules have been broken. Three dozen military jets and helicopters were spotted too close to Scotland's five nuclear sites on 27 occasions between 2001 and 2003, prompting officials to make formal complaints to the MoD.
Staff at Torness nuclear station saw a military jet fly so close on April 24, 2002, that it set off three antipersonnel alarms on the perimeter fence. On July 12, 2002, staff watched a jet "conducting aerobatics directly over the site" for 10 minutes.
On April 10, 2001, two staff saw a military helicopter fly over Torness's cooling water outlet. And on October 4, 2002, a yellow Canadian helicopter was spotted flying along the coast and over the station.
In most cases, investigators from the MoD's Defence Flying Complaints Investigation Team at RAF Henlow in Bedfordshire concluded that there was not enough evidence to prove that a breach had occurred. But often this relied on believing accused RAF pilots in preference to eyewitness accounts.
In one incident involving four RAF Tornadoes at Torness on June 29, 2000, eyewitnesses and two pilots agreed that the no-fly zone had been breached. But, bizarrely, MoD investigators still managed to conclude that "a breach of flying regulations has not been established".
One problem highlighted by the MoD documents is that radar cover around Torness is "extremely poor", so there are no radar records of flights.
The site, run by the troubled nuclear company British Energy, is within one of the MoD's designated low-flying training areas. Torness is also the only nuclear site where a military jet is known to have crashed in recent years. In November 1999 a burning RAF Tornado plunged into the sea near the plant after its two pilots had safely ejected.
The Sunday Herald disclosed last week that a scientific report for the UK parliament concluded that a large plane crashing into a nuclear reactor or a radioactive waste store could cause a massive release of radioactivity. The disaster could be as bad as that at the Chernobyl reactor in the Ukraine 18 years ago, which spread a cloud of toxic contamination across Europe.
MoD documents describe six investigations into complaints about low-flying from the Dounreay nuclear complex. In the most recent, on April 28 last year, three witnesses said they saw a military jet fly too low over the site, but this was denied by an RAF pilot.
Three incidents at the 45-year-old Chapelcross nuclear plant were investigated by the MoD in 2001 and 2002. Two weeks ago, the Sunday Herald revealed that a fourth incident involving an RAF Hercules transport plane on December 19, 2003, was under investigation.
Two alleged breaches of the no-fly zone around Hunterston nuclear station were investigated in 2001. And on January 9, 2003, two military aircraft were reported flying through the exclusion zone at the Faslane nuclear submarine base on the Clyde.
The MoD documents, all marked "restricted" and with names of individuals blanked out, were placed in the House of Commons library by the MoD in response to a request from the Labour MP for Blaenau Gwent in Wales, Llew Smith. "It is disturbing that the MoD investigators give their own pilots the benefit of the doubt," he said.
Green MSPs in the Scottish parliament called for an independent analysis of the alleged breaches and promised to quiz the First Minister, Jack McConnell, on the issue this week. "The safety of nuclear facilities must be based on more than arguments between the nuclear industry and the MoD," said the Green environment spokesman, Mark Ruskell.
The MoD pointed out there were problems proving that no-fly zones had been breached. "It is extremely difficult for even experienced observers to accurately judge the height of an aircraft," said a spokesman. "We can only confirm that a breach has occurred when we have proof. If proven, disciplinary action will be taken."
According to environmental groups, however, the number of alleged breaches was frightening. "The no-fly zones were set up after September 11 for a purpose, but over-enthusiastic pilots are making a mockery of them," said Pete Roche, a consultant with Greenpeace.
-------- depleted uranium
Atrocities in Iraq:
'I Killed Innocent People for Our Government'
By Paul Rockwell
Sacramento Bee (California)
Sunday 16 May 2004
http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/story/9316830p-10241546c.html
"We forget what war is about, what it does to those who wage it and those who suffer from it. Those who hate war the most, I have often found, are veterans who know it."
- Chris Hedges, New York Times reporter and author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" For nearly 12 years, Staff Sgt. Jimmy Massey was a hard-core, some say gung-ho, Marine. For three years he trained fellow Marines in one of the most grueling indoctrination rituals in military life - Marine boot camp.
The Iraq war changed Massey. The brutality, the sheer carnage of the U.S. invasion, touched his conscience and transformed him forever. He was honorably discharged with full severance last Dec. 31 and is now back in his hometown, Waynsville, N.C.
When I talked with Massey last week, he expressed his remorse at the civilian loss of life in incidents in which he himself was involved.
Q: You spent 12 years in the Marines. When were you sent to Iraq?
A: I went to Kuwait around Jan. 17. I was in Iraq from the get-go. And I was involved in the initial invasion.
Q: What does the public need to know about your experiences as a Marine?
A: The cause of the Iraqi revolt against the American occupation. What they need to know is we killed a lot of innocent people. I think at first the Iraqis had the understanding that casualties are a part of war. But over the course of time, the occupation hurt the Iraqis. And I didn't see any humanitarian support.
Q: What experiences turned you against the war and made you leave the Marines?
A: I was in charge of a platoon that consists of machine gunners and missile men. Our job was to go into certain areas of the towns and secure the roadways. There was this one particular incident - and there's many more - the one that really pushed me over the edge. It involved a car with Iraqi civilians. From all the intelligence reports we were getting, the cars were loaded down with suicide bombs or material. That's the rhetoric we received from intelligence. They came upon our checkpoint. We fired some warning shots. They didn't slow down. So we lit them up.
Q: Lit up? You mean you fired machine guns?
A: Right. Every car that we lit up we were expecting ammunition to go off. But we never heard any. Well, this particular vehicle we didn't destroy completely, and one gentleman looked up at me and said: "Why did you kill my brother? We didn't do anything wrong." That hit me like a ton of bricks.
Q: He spoke English?
A: Oh, yeah.
Q: Baghdad was being bombed. The civilians were trying to get out, right?
A: Yes. They received pamphlets, propaganda we dropped on them. It said, "Just throw up your hands, lay down weapons." That's what they were doing, but we were still lighting them up. They weren't in uniform. We never found any weapons.
Q: You got to see the bodies and casualties?
A: Yeah, firsthand. I helped throw them in a ditch.
Q: Over what period did all this take place?
A: During the invasion of Baghdad.
'We lit him up pretty good' Q: How many times were you involved in checkpoint "light-ups"?
A: Five times. There was [the city of] Rekha. The gentleman was driving a stolen work utility van. He didn't stop. With us being trigger happy, we didn't really give this guy much of a chance. We lit him up pretty good. Then we inspected the back of the van. We found nothing. No explosives.
Q: The reports said the cars were loaded with explosives. In all the incidents did you find that to be the case?
A: Never. Not once. There were no secondary explosions. As a matter of fact, we lit up a rally after we heard a stray gunshot.
Q: A demonstration? Where?
A: On the outskirts of Baghdad. Near a military compound. There were demonstrators at the end of the street. They were young and they had no weapons. And when we rolled onto the scene, there was already a tank that was parked on the side of the road. If the Iraqis wanted to do something, they could have blown up the tank. But they didn't. They were only holding a demonstration. Down at the end of the road, we saw some RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) lined up against the wall. That put us at ease because we thought: "Wow, if they were going to blow us up, they would have done it."
Q: Were the protest signs in English or Arabic?
A: Both.
Q: Who gave the order to wipe the demonstrators out?
A: Higher command. We were told to be on the lookout for the civilians because a lot of the Fedayeen and the Republican Guards had tossed away uniforms and put on civilian clothes and were mounting terrorist attacks on American soldiers. The intelligence reports that were given to us were basically known by every member of the chain of command. The rank structure that was implemented in Iraq by the chain of command was evident to every Marine in Iraq. The order to shoot the demonstrators, I believe, came from senior government officials, including intelligence communities within the military and the U.S. government.
Q: What kind of firepower was employed?
A: M-16s, 50-cal. machine guns.
Q: You fired into six or ten kids? Were they all taken out?
A: Oh, yeah. Well, I had a "mercy" on one guy. When we rolled up, he was hiding behind a concrete pillar. I saw him and raised my weapon up, and he put up his hands. He ran off. I told everybody, "Don't shoot." Half of his foot was trailing behind him. So he was running with half of his foot cut off.
Q: After you lit up the demonstration, how long before the next incident?
A: Probably about one or two hours. This is another thing, too. I am so glad I am talking with you, because I suppressed all of this.
Q: Well, I appreciate you giving me the information, as hard as it must be to recall the painful details.
A: That's all right. It's kind of therapy for me. Because it's something that I had repressed for a long time.
Q: And the incident?
A: There was an incident with one of the cars. We shot an individual with his hands up. He got out of the car. He was badly shot. We lit him up. I don't know who started shooting first. One of the Marines came running over to where we were and said: "You all just shot a guy with his hands up." Man, I forgot about this.
Depleted uranium and cluster bombs Q: You mention machine guns. What can you tell me about cluster bombs, or depleted uranium?
A: Depleted uranium. I know what it does. It's basically like leaving plutonium rods around. I'm 32 years old. I have 80 percent of my lung capacity. I ache all the time. I don't feel like a healthy 32-year-old.
Q: Were you in the vicinity of of depleted uranium?
A: Oh, yeah. It's everywhere. DU is everywhere on the battlefield. If you hit a tank, there's dust.
Q: Did you breath any dust?
A: Yeah.
Q: And if DU is affecting you or our troops, it's impacting Iraqi civilians.
A: Oh, yeah. They got a big wasteland problem.
Q: Do Marines have any precautions about dealing with DU?
A: Not that I know of. Well, if a tank gets hit, crews are detained for a little while to make sure there are no signs or symptoms. American tanks have depleted uranium on the sides, and the projectiles have DU in them. If an enemy vehicle gets hit, the area gets contaminated. Dead rounds are in the ground. The civilian populace is just now starting to learn about it. Hell, I didn't even know about DU until two years ago. You know how I found out about it? I read an article in Rolling Stone magazine. I just started inquiring about it, and I said "Holy s---!"
Q: Cluster bombs are also controversial. U.N. commissions have called for a ban. Were you acquainted with cluster bombs?
A: I had one of my Marines in my battalion who lost his leg from an ICBM.
Q: What's an ICBM?
A: A multi-purpose cluster bomb.
Q: What happened?
A: He stepped on it. We didn't get to training about clusters until about a month before I left.
Q: What kind of training?
A: They told us what they looked like, and not to step on them.
Q: Were you in any areas where they were dropped?
A: Oh, yeah. They were everywhere.
Q: Dropped from the air?
A: From the air as well as artillery.
Q: Are they dropped far away from cities, or inside the cities?
A: They are used everywhere. Now if you talked to a Marine artillery officer, he would give you the runaround, the politically correct answer. But for an average grunt, they're everywhere.
Q: Including inside the towns and cities?
A: Yes, if you were going into a city, you knew there were going to be ICBMs.
Q: Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons. They are not precise. They don't injure buildings, or hurt tanks. Only people and living things. There are a lot of undetonated duds and they go off after the battles are over.
A: Once the round leaves the tube, the cluster bomb has a mind of its own. There's always human error. I'm going to tell you: The armed forces are in a tight spot over there. It's starting to leak out about the civilian casualties that are taking place. The Iraqis know. I keep hearing reports from my Marine buddies inside that there were 200-something civilians killed in Fallujah. The military is scrambling right now to keep the raps on that. My understanding is Fallujah is just littered with civilian bodies.
Embedded reporters Q: How are the embedded reporters responding?
A: I had embedded reporters in my unit, not my platoon. One we had was a South African reporter. He was scared s---less. We had an incident where one of them wanted to go home.
Q: Why?
A: It was when we started going into Baghdad. When he started seeing the civilian casualties, he started wigging out a little bit. It didn't start until we got on the outskirts of Baghdad and started taking civilian casualties.
Q: I would like to go back to the first incident, when the survivor asked why did you kill his brother. Was that the incident that pushed you over the edge, as you put it?
A: Oh, yeah. Later on I found out that was a typical day. I talked with my commanding officer after the incident. He came up to me and says: "Are you OK?" I said: "No, today is not a good day. We killed a bunch of civilians." He goes: "No, today was a good day." And when he said that, I said "Oh, my goodness, what the hell am I into?"
Q: Your feelings changed during the invasion. What was your state of mind before the invasion?
A: I was like every other troop. My president told me they got weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam threatened the free world, that he had all this might and could reach us anywhere. I just bought into the whole thing.
Q: What changed you?
A: The civilian casualties taking place. That was what made the difference. That was when I changed.
Q: Did the revelations that the government fabricated the evidence for war affect the troops?
A: Yes. I killed innocent people for our government. For what? What did I do? Where is the good coming out of it? I feel like I've had a hand in some sort of evil lie at the hands of our government. I just feel embarrassed, ashamed about it.
Showdown with superiors Q: I understand that all the incidents - killing civilians at checkpoints, itchy fingers at the rally - weigh on you. What happened with your commanding officers? How did you deal with them?
A: There was an incident. It was right after the fall of Baghdad, when we went back down south. On the outskirts of Karbala, we had a morning meeting on the battle plan. I was not in a good mindset. All these things were going through my head - about what we were doing over there. About some of the things my troops were asking. I was holding it all inside. My lieutenant and I got into a conversation. The conversation was striking me wrong. And I lashed out. I looked at him and told him: "You know, I honestly feel that what we're doing is wrong over here. We're committing genocide."
He asked me something and I said that with the killing of civilians and the depleted uranium we're leaving over here, we're not going to have to worry about terrorists. He didn't like that. He got up and stormed off. And I knew right then and there that my career was over. I was talking to my commanding officer.
Q: What happened then?
A: After I talked to the top commander, I was kind of scurried away. I was basically put on house arrest. I didn't talk to other troops. I didn't want to hurt them. I didn't want to jeopardize them.
I want to help people. I felt strongly about it. I had to say something. When I was sent back to stateside, I went in front of the sergeant major. He's in charge of 3,500-plus Marines. "Sir," I told him, "I don't want your money. I don't want your benefits. What you did was wrong."
It was just a personal conviction with me. I've had an impeccable career. I chose to get out. And you know who I blame? I blame the president of the U.S. It's not the grunt. I blame the president because he said they had weapons of mass destruction. It was a lie.
About the Writer
Paul Rockwell ( rockyspad@hotmail.com) is a writer who lives in Oakland.
-------- europe
Fire Shuts Down Nuclear Plant in France
May 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-France-Nuclear-Fire.html
METZ, France (AP) -- A nuclear power plant reactor in eastern France was shut down Sunday after a fire started in a thicket of electrical cables, plant officials said.
The blaze erupted just after noon at the Cattenom plant in the Moselle region, and the second of the plant's four reactors was shut down, officials said.
The fire was away from the nuclear reactors and did not threaten them, officials said. No one was injured and there was no environmental damage.
The No. 2 reactor remained shut down Sunday afternoon, and an investigation was being conducted.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan-US discuss peaceful use of nuclear technology
ISLAMABAD (AFP)
May 16, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040516182424.g386m7ta.html
US Under Secretary of State Kenneth I. Juster on Sunday held talks with Pakistani officials on the peaceful use of nuclear civilian technology and export controls, the foreign ministry said.
It comes after the Pakistani cabinet approved Wednesday a draft bill to tighten controls on the export of nuclear weapons technology.
The draft bill, due to go before parliament, provides for imprisonment of up to 14 years, a maximum fine of five million rupees (285,000 dollars) or both for offenders.
"Juster appreciated Pakistan's efforts to streamline and strengthen its export control regime and welcomed approval of the new export control legislation by the cabinet," it said.
Senior foreign ministry official Tariq Osman Hyder, who led the Pakistani team, underlined the need to explore cooperation between the two countries in civilian space technology, a foreign ministry statement said.
"Both sides agreed that the issues of industry and security were inter-related and required concerted and sustained bilateral efforts to create a salutary and enabling environment for the growth of international trade," the statement said.
The move followed a UN Security Council resolution last week aimed at keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists and black market traders.
Nuclear-armed Pakistan was hit by a proliferation scandal recently when the architect of its atomic weapons programme, Abdul Qadeer Khan, publicly confessed to leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Khan was given a conditional pardon by President Pervez Musharraf but he remains under virtual house arrest in the capital Islamabad.
The government has said a probe into the leaks has not been completed.
-------- russia
Russia Wants Faster Aid for 'Rotting' Nuclear Subs
May 16, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-russia.html
BERLIN (Reuters) - Russia faces grave environmental and terrorist threats unless donors accelerate a slow trickle of international aid for dismantling its rusting nuclear submarines, a senior official said.
Deputy Atomic Energy Minister Sergei Antipov said Russia would raise its concerns next month at a meeting of the Group of Eight (G8) leading nations in the United States.
He said Moscow was very worried at the slow rate of funding, despite a much-trumpeted G8 initiative at a 2002 summit in Canada to spend $20 billion over 10 years to secure stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological materials.
``The longer a submarine remains without being scrapped and without the nuclear fuel being removed... the more danger for the environment, the greater the risk of these materials falling into the hands of terrorists or other groups for malicious purposes,'' Antipov said in an interview.
``Any of the submarines -- and we have 96 waiting to be scrapped -- could sink. Any of them could rust through or break up. Anything could happen,'' he told Reuters in Berlin, where he attended a 14-nation meeting on the issue last week.
The submarines are decommissioned vessels of the former Soviet fleet, some of which ``have been rotting at their piers for several decades,'' Antipov told parliament last November.
Dismantling them involves removing the highly radioactive reactor compartment, hermetically sealing it to prevent leakage, and eventually transferring it to be stored for decades at a special site which Russia is building, with German help, in the northern region of Murmansk.
DILUTING THE AID
Antipov said Moscow was concerned about some talk among G8 members of extending the $20 billion program to cover more countries, diluting the funds available in Russia itself.
``It's reasonable to ask the question: if we can't help just one country effectively, is there any point in extending efforts to others? The lion's share of all the dangers, as far as nuclear materials are concerned, is situated in Russia.
``We (also) have a huge problem with stocks of chemical weapons, on which this money is also to be spent. If the money isn't spent here but in Iraq or Nigeria or Ukraine, then solving the security problems in Russia will be put back.''
Antipov said a large proportion of the promised aid money was being spent ineffectively by donors in their own countries on ``various experts, trips and discussions.''
``It's a well known problem, it always arises with international aid. We understand they can't help spending some of this money at home because this work has to be organized. But the question is what proportion -- 10, 20 or 60 percent?
``Ten to 20 should probably be the upper limit but there are actual facts today to show our partners are spending up to 60 percent at home,'' he said.
As a result, only about $100 million had been spent directly in Russia in the first two years of the 10-year, $20 billion plan, he said -- about half on the submarine program and the rest on securing stocks of chemical weapons.
The United States is due to host the next G8 summit next month. The group also includes Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Russia.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Proposal for Nuclear Waste Train Splits a Tiny Nevada Town
By CHARLIE LeDUFF
May 16, 2004
New York Times
CALIENTE, Nev. - This used to be a railroad town with a dozen tracks and a dozen bars and a lot of jobs.
But then the railroad company decided it did not need Caliente anymore. Now, instead of stopping, the freight trains barrel through the middle of town.
Most of the bars are closed, and storefronts on the main street are boarded up, but Mayor Kevin Phillips has figured out a way to lift the fortunes of his struggling hamlet tucked in the mountains about 130 miles north of Las Vegas. Nuclear waste.
Mr. Phillips, 53, who owns a local hardware store, has volunteered Caliente, population 1,200, to be the transfer station for the nation's spent nuclear fuel that is supposed to be stored in the Yucca Mountain repository beginning in 2010. Though the repository plan has run into stiff opposition in Nevada, Mr. Phillips's idea has supporters, including the federal government, which announced in April that it wanted to run a train through here to carry the waste to its final resting place.
"It would be absolutely safe, with the proper training, and it would bring jobs that we sorely need," said Mr. Phillips, who walks around town with a tape measure on his belt. "We rural people don't get all watery-eyed about this kind of thing."
Mr. Phillips, who earns $190.40 a month as mayor, has become a political lightning rod in the national nuclear waste disposal debate. Not one major politician in Nevada supports the Yucca Mountain plan, and the "Glow Train" plan, as it is called around here, has split this tiny town down the middle.
Marge Detraz is the mayor's archnemesis, and the person responsible for the "No Nukes" signs on trees and fences around town. Mrs. Detraz, a 77-year-old widow who offers strangers brownies with nuts, figures she has spent $125,000 of her own money battling the mayor and the federal government over the train. She and her husband earned that money working at the nuclear test site where the waste is to be stored.
She is a fixture in the local Mormon church, which Mr. Phillips also attends. She considers him a good, spiritual man and compliments him on his skin-tingling oratory. But when it comes to the train, her invective for her neighbor is stinging, referring to him as corrupt, tyrannical and an unwitting tool of forces more powerful than himself.
"If they bring that train in with that nuclear waste, it has the potential to kill all of us," Mrs. Detraz said. "I mean, the tracks run straight through the middle of town. And the mayor thinks he's going to save Lincoln County with that thing? He's crazy."
Mr. Phillips is philosophical about the criticism. "This is no launch pad into senatorial politics, I'll tell you that," he said.
Nukes mean jobs - maybe 100, maybe 300 - and Mr. Phillips, father of 10, is tired of seeing Caliente children graduate from high school and move down the hill to Las Vegas to find a living. Handled correctly, nuclear waste can be as safe to handle as household garbage, he said.
"What's the picking difference?" asked Mr. Phillips. "The government is going to put a rail system in anyway, so why shouldn't we benefit?"
Caliente is on a main line of the Union Pacific Railroad. Dozens of hazardous material shipments come through every day, the mayor said, and there has never been a major accident.
"It's just 50 yards out my front door," he said. "It could take out the whole town, but no one ever complains about that."
The Department of Energy announced in April that it would prefer to ship nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain by a rail line that would begin in Caliente and wind 319 miles around the border of the test site and end at the mouth of the repository, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The repository would accommodate 77,000 tons of radioactive waste from 39 states, none of it from Nevada.
The railroad would cost $880 million to build, the department estimates, and two loads of nuclear waste stored in casks would run through Caliente each day.
The Energy Department's announcement is the first significant movement in the debate since President Bush designated Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste storage site in 2002, over the objections of Gov. Kenny Guinn. Scientists have questioned whether Yucca Mountain has the structural integrity to hold up for 10,000 years.
Rural Nevadans, libertarian to their marrow, do not trust the federal government, which controls nearly 90 percent of Nevada's territory. It was the government, Mrs. Detraz pointed out, that said nuclear testing was safe, and so the whole town would come out onto the ridge in the 1950's to watch the above-ground detonations at the Nevada test site with their naked eyes.
People died from mysterious illnesses. Dogs limped around with open sores.
"People back East make the garbage and we got to take it," said Michael Budreau, 38, preparing himself for an afternoon beer since he cannot find work here anyhow.
"Nuclear waste will bring money and jobs, that's for sure," Mr. Budreau said. And then almost in a whisper, he revealed what he thought the real problem was.
"Jobs will also bring new people, and if anybody around here's talking truthful, they will tell you they don't want them."
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
From Rogue State to Pariah State
May 16, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/weekinreview/16lace.html
GENEINA, Sudan - It is sometimes hard to figure out what Sudan's current status is in the war on terror. The Bush administration would love to enlist its Arab-led government as an ally in a critical part of Africa. But the more the dictatorship wages wars on its own citizens, the more impossible such an alliance becomes.
Though they once harbored Osama bin Laden, the country's Islamic leaders rooted out the Al Qaeda leadership in the late 1990's and reached out to the United States after Sept. 11. The administration then encouraged Sudan to negotiate an end to decades of civil war with black Christians in the south whose suffering had captured the sympathies of American churchgoers.
Peace talks drew close to an agreement last winter, raising hopes in Washington - to the point where administration officials began planning to invite some Sudanese officials to the White House and to the president's State of the Union address in January. But those plans were quietly dropped when it became clear that the Islamic dictatorship in Khartoum was stepping up a new war - this one in western Sudan, on rebellious black Muslims.
Over the past year, even as the talks to end the siege against the Christians in the south have proceeded, perhaps a million Muslims have been uprooted in the west, amid massacres that are drawing comparisons to the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans a decade ago.
So, with Congress and religious and human rights groups repeatedly calling for tough American action to stem the onslaught in the west, relations with Sudan seemed to worsen again this spring. In March, when Sudan was selected to lead the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the American delegate walked out in protest and the Sudanese delegate mocked American treatment of detainees in Iraq.
True, the administration keeps talking to the Sudanese government, fearful that a total break would doom the peace effort and Christians in the south, as well as any chance of working with Sudan in the future.
But nobody talks much anymore about a strategic alliance against terrorism, even though Sudan's potential importance has only grown. The largest country in Africa, it is part of a region between the Arab deserts of North Africa and black Africa to the south - turf the administration has identified as crucial to stemming the spread of terrorist cells throughout the continent.
The current war in the south dates to 1983, when the Muslim government began applying Islamic law to non-Muslims. Sudanese in the south rebelled, and the government's brutal treatment of the predominantly Christian population stirred outrage in American churches. When he took office, President Bush vowed to end the religious war.
Meanwhile, after Sept. 11, Sudan began moving to dampen American anger about its previous support for terrorists. Five years ago, after Al Qaeda bombed two American embassies in nearby countries in Africa, the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at Khartoum in response. American sanctions have been in place against Sudan since 1997, the last American ambassador was pulled out in 1998, and the State Department has included Sudan on the list of state sponsors of terrorism for the last 11 years.
In spite of this, Sudan has provided intelligence about Al Qaeda to American officials, and that cooperation opened the way for the peace talks on the southern front. American officials have played a key role in the talks, in which they have frequently intervened to break the many impasses that have developed. So far, the two sides have agreed to hold a referendum in the south that will allow the southerners to decide whether they want to remain part of a united Sudan or attain self-rule. To encourage them to keep Sudan unified, the government has agreed to merge its military with rebel fighters, share oil revenue with the south and divide up political positions.
But even as peace seemed to come within reach in the south, another part of Sudan deteriorated into war. In the western region known as Darfur, rebellious black Muslims looked at the concessions granted to the Christians and began demanding the same.
Furious at that turn of events, Sudan's army moved to crush any dissent. It also unleashed militias, known as Janjaweed, to take control of the countryside. Over the past year, more than a million black Africans from Darfur have been driven from their villages by the Janjaweed, backed by government troops, and many thousands of refugees sit on the verge of starvation at the border with Chad. The militias routinely kill men and rape women.
The growing conflict in the west now even threatens the still-fragile prospect of peace in the south - particularly with human rights and religious groups clamoring for the administration to put more pressure on the Sudanese government to stop the new slaughter.
"This administration has invested enormously in peace in southern Sudan," said Ted Dagne, an Africa expert at the Congressional Research Service in Washington. "They wanted a diplomatic success badly. Unfortunately, this is becoming a distant dream that we may not see."
Even if a deal is reached, can it be implemented? The residents of Darfur now huddled in camps, afraid to return home, say they do not trust the officials in Khartoum, who claim that they have restored stability to Darfur. Diplomats trying to resolve the situation in Darfur, as well, find it hard to put much stock in the words of a government that is denying and playing down the atrocities unfolding there.
Religious groups, too, are pessimistic.
"What makes the Christians in the south trust the government when it is going to turn around and treat fellow Muslims the way they are in Darfur," asked Diane L. Knippers, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Christian group in Washington.
Charles Colson, the Watergate figure and Christian activist, agreed. "Three months ago, I met with the president and I congratulated him on all his work on Sudan," Mr. Colson said. "It looked very hopeful. It's disappointing that it's coming unglued."
-------- britain
WEEK IN REVIEW
The Next Casualty of the Iraq War Could Be Blair
May 16, 2004
By ROGER COHEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/weekinreview/16cohe.html
LONDON - A rough rule of the Iraqi war has been this: events that are damaging to President Bush prove close to devastating for Tony Blair, the British prime minister. The outcry over weapons of mass destruction that could not be found was more intense in Britain than America, and now the gruesome photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison have prompted new talk of Mr. Blair's possible departure.
The reasons for Mr. Blair's particular vulnerability are threefold. Britain, unlike America, was not attacked by terrorists before it went to war in Iraq, so scrutiny of the motives for war is more searching. Mr. Blair works in a European environment, where skepticism over Iraq is de rigueur. And while the Bush administration came late to human rights as a justification for the war, Mr. Blair embraced it early on, so the prisoner abuse has embarrassed him acutely.
The future of Iraq and that of Mr. Blair have become inseparable. Mr. Blair needs to demonstrate quick progress there to quiet the clamor within his Labor Party and rebuff the taunt of the Conservative Party leader, Michael Howard, that he has "lost his grip." Gordon Brown, Mr. Blair's adroit chancellor of the exchequer, is waiting in the wings.
The British strategy, as outlined by two officials close to Mr. Blair, is vigorous. The government wants a new United Nations Security Council resolution by early June that will give power to Iraqis, set out the country's political future and define the role of the American-led international military force there.
A genuine transfer of power, a strong United Nations presence in Iraq and a formal end to the period of occupation are the core British aims and the sooner the better. Mr. Blair does not want discussions of the final outcome going down to the wire before the planned June 30 handover to an Iraqi interim government, the makeup of which has yet to be decided. Uncertainty would only feed instability.
"The photos from Abu Ghraib were as bad as you can get in terms of making those who defended America uneasy and those who hate America feel they were right," said one of the two officials close to Mr. Blair, both of whom spoke on condition that they not be named. "What is imperative now is that Iraqi sovereignty be real and not a shell."
This objective may provoke tensions with the United States. Several Iraqi ministries have already seen their powers curtailed by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority. A circumscribed role for the new Iraqi government, including limits on passing laws, has been outlined in Washington, although that position seems to be evolving.
So can Mr. Blair secure the sweeping Iraqi transition he wants in exchange for his loyalty to President Bush? The next few weeks will be a critical test of his influence.
Every week, it seems, Mr. Blair, tries to fend off the charge that his unwavering support for President Bush has made Britain look servile without advancing its interests. "I have to accept responsibility for the situation I am in," Mr. Blair said last week. That situation is the most difficult he has faced in seven years as prime minister. As he knows, the quick fix might be to put some distance between himself and Mr. Bush.
That, however, will not happen. "It would be absolute madness to disassociate ourselves from Bush," said the official who discussed the prison photos. "The whole point about an alliance is that you support people in difficult times as well as easy. We are committed to the political process in Iraq."
Those who have watched Mr. Blair during visits to the White House or in weekly phone conversations with Mr. Bush insist that the charge that he is too pliant is baseless. If American forces stepped back from a fight to the finish against insurgents in Falluja, Mr. Blair's advice played a role, they say. If there is a "road map" toward peace in the Middle East, however murky and bumpy, thank Mr. Blair. If the United Nations and its envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, are at the center of efforts to salvage Iraq, be mindful of Mr. Blair's hand.
Of course, the problem with the argument that Mr. Blair's influence has been real is that its upshot often looks paltry. Iraq is in disarray, Arab hostility to the West at a high pitch, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as far from resolution as ever.
For a politician who embarked on his leadership with a radical idea that Britain could remake the European Union in its image and at the same time preserve its special relationship with the United States, this state of affairs is troubling. For his embrace of trans-Atlantic ties at the expense of European ones has cost him support within the European Union while appearing to deliver few benefits. "Mr. Blair has been frustrated," said Jonathan Eyal, a strategic analyst.
Mr. Blair's most difficult task now may lie in sorting out what authority, if any, Iraq's new interim government should have over the mainly American and British troops in Iraq. If sovereignty is to be real, as Mr. Blair insists it should be, operations undertaken by the forces must have the government's consent. On the other hand, the ability to maneuver quickly and freely is essential to the troops' effectiveness.
With an election looming in the United States, some European powers are not particularly inclined to do Mr. Bush any favors in the Security Council negotiations. One or two may even view Mr. Blair's current difficulties with a certain relish and be reluctant to offer any gifts.
But the prime minister has a powerful incentive to steer Iraq through its treacherous transition: his own political survival. His strong relationship with Mr. Brown, built over more than two decades, is well known. But so, too, is Mr. Brown's determination to become prime minister one day.
Mr. Brown established one strong credential in recent years: Britain's successful economy, which, along with the absence of a strong opposition, had shored up Mr. Blair and the Labor Party. The chancellor has now added another credential: He is relatively untainted by Iraq. Could there be a change at the top? "There are bound to be tensions between them," the first official said. "But this has been a long marriage."
-------- business
Britain fears US fighter jets too heavy for take-off: report
LONDON (AFP)
May 16, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040515221440.hf3v4wcs.html
Britain's defence chiefs have admitted to "concern" over a five-billion-pound (7.4-billion euro, 8.6-billion dollar) order for US fighter jets too heavy to take off from ships, British newspapers said Sunday.
Britain has agreed to buy 150 of the new Joint Strike Fighters to replace the Royal Navy's Harrier Jump Jets, but the 35-million-pound Lockheed Martin planes are 3,300 pounds (1,500 kilogrammes) overweight, Sunday newspapers said.
"The weight problem is a concern but problems like this occur in the early stages of complex programmes," a Ministry of Defence (MOD) spokeswoman said.
If true the planes would be unable to stage the dramatic vertical take-offs that are the Harriers' trade-mark, and the runways on two aircraft carriers being built for the Royal Navy are too short for the US jets, newspapers said.
The projects are being carefully co-ordinated and the problem will be solved in time for the jets to come into service in 2012 as planned, the MOD said.
"From our perspective, these problems do not undermine the programme or our choice of aircraft," the spokeswoman said.
-------- europe
Peace call poignant on D-Day anniversary
May 16, 2004
By John Leicester
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040515-111510-7892r.htm
PARIS - Against the backdrop of war in Iraq, world leaders will issue "a message of peace" when they gather in France next month to mark the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, the French minister of war veterans said in an interview last week.
Driving the commemorations is a realization that the anniversary likely will be the last major opportunity to mark the epic invasion that led to Nazi Germany's defeat with those who lived through it.
"There will be far fewer for the 70th anniversary, alas, human beings being what they are," Hamlaoui Mekachera said. "The 60th anniversary is a very important point of reference, and people are aware of that."
Seventeen heads of state and government - "on whom peace, and the world's conflicts, depend" - are expected in Normandy on June 6, the minister said. They include President Bush, who will join with his strongest European critics of the Iraq war - Jacques Chirac of France, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Gerhard Schroeder of Germany.
"There's a desire to gather on that day to say, even without saying it aloud: 'Never again. We are here so that there is a space on a global scale for peace,' " Mr. Mekachera said. "Otherwise, it would make no sense. Why do all this if it is not a message of peace?"
Two world wars on its soil in the 20th century taught France there are no winners in armed conflict, he said.
"We paid a heavy price. The Americans, perhaps, had no war on their territory. Americans who did not fight the war, who did not come to Europe to fight, cannot perceive as much as we do the disastrous consequences of war," the minister said. "We became aware that in the end, those who lose the war and those who win it are all losers."
To mark the June 6, 1944, Allied assault on Adolf Hitler's defenses in occupied France, Mr. Chirac wants "both a festival, with moments of gravity, too, and a signal that finally we can live in peace. It's so easy to say but so difficult to turn into reality."
However, France also is bracing for the possibility of a terrorist attack during the festivities. The Defense Ministry said it will mobilize at least 15,000 soldiers and police officers to provide security during the ceremonies.
Military forces will be backed by AWACS surveillance aircraft, fighter jets, naval minesweepers and dozens of helicopters, the ministry said.
Mr. Schroeder, who was born the year of the Allied invasion, will be the first German chancellor to take part in D-Day commemorations, an invitation criticized by some. The critics include one of Mr. Mekachera's predecessors, former veterans minister Louis Mexandeau, who said Germany should pay reparations and apologize for wartime actions.
However, Mr. Mekachera said it is time to turn the page.
"We want to use the past for the future, and the future for us is the building of lasting peace," he said. "When the past serves this lasting peace, why not? It's not the politics of politicians."
Germany and France, "after tearing at each other for decades, they want now, clearly, to like each other," he said.
Mr. Schroeder, in Paris on Thursday for a joint meeting of the French and German cabinets, thanked Mr. Chirac, calling him "dear Jacques," for his "big-hearted gesture."
"To take part in [the anniversary of] the day on which the liberation of Europe began is a great honor for me but, more than that, an important signal to the people of our country whose historical significance really cannot be estimated highly enough," he said.
France plans to bestow its prestigious Legion of Honor award on 300 veterans to mark the anniversary, Mr. Mekachera said. They include almost 100 Americans to be honored at a June 5 ceremony in Paris.
On June 6, Mr. Chirac will decorate 14 veterans, each representing a country involved in the landings, Mr. Mekachera said. Mr. Chirac also has decided to decorate a dozen survivors of a 177-member French contingent that fought for the Normandy port town of Ouistreham during the invasion, he said.
The people of France, he added, must mark the landings to transmit their memories and the lessons of war to the young.
"We complain, for example, that in the suburbs, we have a youth that is left to its own devices, without points of reference," he said. "By God, we can pass things of value onto them, things that can help in life."
-------- iraq
Divided Iraqi South Posing New Obstacles
Shiite Foes of Militia Fail to Stem Uprising
By Scott Wilson Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30004-2004May15?language=printer
BAGHDAD, May 15 -- The battle for Iraq's Shiite-populated south that engaged U.S. forces again Saturday is presenting U.S. officials with a more serious political challenge than the insurgency's still potent strongholds farther north, U.S. officials and Iraqi political leaders say.
In heavy fighting over the past week, U.S. forces have inflicted substantial casualties on the Shiite Muslim militia loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a breakaway cleric wanted by U.S. forces on murder charges. U.S. and British troops battled Sadr's forces Saturday in four southern cities, including new fighting in Amarah near the Iranian border. Firefights between U.S. forces and insurgents in the east Baghdad slum named for Sadr's assassinated father left 14 insurgents and two U.S. soldiers dead overnight Friday.
The fighting reflects the U.S. strategy of squeezing Sadr militarily while allowing a group of local Shiite leaders to broker a deal, much as Sunni Muslim leaders did this month in the western city of Fallujah. The Americans contend that Sadr is deeply unpopular among many Shiites in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, where his men are ruining the local economy and have spurred many residents to flee the growing violence.
But the same divisions among Shiites that U.S. officials had hoped would help persuade Sadr to end his insurrection are among the principal reasons that a negotiated solution has not emerged. The deal reached in Fallujah, U.S. officials and Iraqi political leaders say, has little application in the south.
Fallujah has a homogeneous population of Sunnis with strong tribal ties. Sunni clerics who benefited under ousted president Saddam Hussein's rule have united with former officials from Hussein's Baath Party in support of the insurrection. By contrast, the Shiite south is divided by rival religious loyalties.
The pudgy, bearded son of a revered cleric, Sadr has used his thousands-strong militia, known as the Mahdi Army, for political leverage within a Shiite hierarchy that has long considered him a brash upstart.
Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, deputy commander of the 1st Armored Division responsible for Karbala and Najaf, said Sadr "is attempting to gain a power base and disrupt the momentum that is leading Iraq toward a representative government."
"He believes that he needed to form a following -- a militia, in this case -- that is geared toward intimidating those who are moderate," Hertling said. "We see those joining the Moqtada militia are mostly disenfranchised, mostly unemployed younger people who are looking for leadership, looking for money and looking to fight."
Sadr was a vocal opponent of the U.S.-led occupation from the outset, and his message erupted into an armed uprising in March after U.S. officials closed his newspaper, al-Hawza, for printing articles that they said incited violence. Soon afterward, U.S. officials announced a warrant for Sadr's arrest in connection with the April 2003 killing of Abdel-Majid Khoei, a moderate cleric and potential rival who had returned from exile in Britain.
As the target of a murder charge by the occupation and the leader of a militia battling occupation forces, Sadr has become, for many, a symbol of Islamic resistance to the occupation. The insurgency he has inspired has spread to new cities and gained momentum in parts of Baghdad.
"The occupation is my enemy, and they are occupying my holy city," Sadr said in an interview Saturday with the al-Arabiya satellite channel. "There is no other alternative but for us to defend the city."
Shiite leaders say Sadr's growing stature and the divisions it is causing among Shiites could turn him into a political power broker in Iraq's next government.
During a meeting of mainstream Shiite tribal, political and religious leaders this month, several participants suggested that Sadr be given a role in the interim government scheduled to assume limited political authority from the Americans on June 30. Even the idea represents a sharp shift in Sadr's political standing among the Shiite establishment.
"If we had this situation in other parts of Iraq, it would be a kind of civil war," said Adel Abdel-Mehdi, a senior leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a prominent Shiite political party. "We are in a large discussion right now about the new government and who might be a part of it."
Since late March, Sadr has been in Najaf and the nearby city of Kufa, taking refuge among the holiest shrines in Shiite Islam. His Mahdi Army has fired on U.S. forces from inside shrines and mosques there and in Karbala, according to military spokesmen.
The fighting has spurred many residents of those cities to flee in increasing numbers. Many who have stayed are angry not only at the effect the violence has had on the local economy but by the peril it places on the Shiite shrines. Anti-Sadr demonstrations have sprung up -- and been broken up by the Mahdi Army.
The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq also has a presence in Najaf and an armed wing, known as the Badr Brigades. Sadr has warned the council's militia not to be drawn into a fight against him and said Saturday that forming a local brigade including his men was a requirement for any political settlement.
"The Mahdi Army is composed of Iraqis, so it's normal that some of its men will join the new brigade, as long as the force is independent and the occupation forces don't interfere in forming it," said Qays Khazali, Sadr's spokesman in Najaf. "I think people will accept this idea. I talk to people here and I see they like the idea. It's a lot better to solve the problem in this way."
U.S. military officials have suggested publicly that once the Mahdi Army has disbanded, its members could join such a force, even though they are avowed enemies of the occupation. But Khazali said the United States has rejected the idea, and negotiations over whether it could be formed have stopped for the moment.
"Najaf has political stakeholders, tribal sheiks and a very organized moderate religious element," Hertling said in downplaying the possibility of forming the brigade. He said sending in a battalion of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, one of several security forces being assembled and trained by the Americans, would "better address the requirements needed in this situation."
The improvised agreement that ended the Marines' month-long siege of Fallujah established a local militia to patrol the city, led by Iraqi generals who served under Hussein. But while bringing a measure of peace to the city, the Fallujah Brigade also embittered many Iraqis and some inside the U.S. occupation authority for the message it seemed to send. Shiites, in particular, were stunned by the sight of Hussein's former generals in olive-green uniforms wielding power a year after U.S. officials dissolved the army.
There are also signs that it may not be providing the security its leaders promised. At least two Marines were killed last week near Fallujah in roadside ambushes.
Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this article.
--------
Bush Says U.S. Moving to Defeat Iraqi Insurgents
By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30215-2004May15.html
President Bush sought yesterday to assure the nation that the U.S. military is moving aggressively to defeat insurgents in Iraq, including the hooded men who decapitated American civilian Nicholas Berg, saying, "their barbarism cannot be appeased, and their hatred cannot be satisfied."
The message of Bush's weekly radio address was countered by Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who said pointedly that U.S. troops sent into danger require "the right leadership" and "a clear idea of what they are -- and are not -- expected to do."
The dueling messages from the rivals for the White House in the November elections concluded a week in which news was dominated by video of Berg's gruesome death and ongoing furor in Washington over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military guards. Meanwhile, fresh polls suggest that public support for Bush has eroded to the lowest level of his presidency, with a majority now saying they oppose his handling of Iraq.
Against that tumultuous backdrop, Bush tried to use the death of Berg, a young businessman from Pennsylvania, as a rallying point for his policies in Iraq. "The savage execution of this innocent man reminds us of the true nature of our terrorist enemy, and the stakes in this struggle."
The president also elaborated on comments Friday by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who said that an interim Iraqi government, scheduled to assume power in six weeks, would possess the authority to ask U.S. troops to leave the country. U.S. officials said, however, they expected that the new government would want to retain the help of the nearly 170,000 troops while the climate there remains volatile.
Bush's radio speech emphasized that intention, saying that "the vital mission of our military in helping to provide security will continue on July 1st and beyond."
In Kerry's radio speech, on behalf of the Democratic Party, the senator and decorated Vietnam War veteran noted that yesterday was a holiday, Armed Forces Day. He did not mention Bush by name. But as he did earlier in the week, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee suggested that the administration was at fault for the abuse of Iraqis detained at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad -- not a few wayward military guards, as Bush and his aides have said.
"We have a duty to guarantee that, when mistakes are made, those responsible are held accountable whether they are at the bottom of the chain of command or at the top," Kerry said.
Without saying that the Iraq war, for which he voted, was a mistake, Kerry reiterated his belief that the Bush administration has failed to obtain adequate help from other countries, develop strategies for a durable peace -- or create military norms to prevent the abuse of prisoners.
"[W]e have a duty to ensure that if our troops are sent into harm's way, they will have the right leadership, the right training, a clear sense of mission, a clear idea of what they are -- and are not -- expected to do," Kerry said
--------
U.S. and British Forces Battle Shiite Rebels in 4 Iraqi Cities
May 16, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/international/middleeast/16IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 15 - American-led occupation forces battled with insurgents and militias loyal to a rebel Shiite cleric in at least four cities in Iraq over a 24-hour period ending Saturday, killing at least 38 Iraqis in what one American official said was part of a "minor uprising."
Brig Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the deputy director for occupation forces, said that in the 24-hour period, 14 Iraqi militiamen had been killed in the poor Shiite Baghdad neighborhood of Sadr City after American forces were attacked with rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and small arms fire in at least four or five operations.
"There was no one large battle," said General Kimmitt.
The American military spokesman's office in Baghdad said two American soldiers died after separate mortar and sniper attacks. A third was killed in a road accident, it said. Military officials said that one soldier who was wounded two days ago in fighting in Karbala has died of his injuries.
In the southern city of Nasiriya, militia forces loyal to the rebel cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, attacked a building used by the occupation authorities, firing rifles and rocket-propelled grenades and trapping foreign staff inside.
General Kimmitt said that 40 militiamen had attacked the building, but by early Saturday the occupation forces had re-established control.
"It was a minor disturbance, a minor uprising," he said.
General Kimmitt said that he thought that the militia had used the fighting on Friday in Najaf as an opportunity to provoke attacks in Al Amara, Nasiriya and Sadr City. The fighting in Najaf, a holy Shiite city south of Baghdad, broke out on Friday. American tank units and soldiers battled Mr. Sadr's militiamen in a centuries-old cemetery near the Shrine of Imam Ali.
"Things seem to be much quieter today," General Kimmitt said.
Further south, in the Al Amara area, at least 20 Iraqis were killed after British occupation forces came under attack during the night, said a spokesman, Dominic D'Angelo.
"My understanding is that this was a patrol," said Mr. D'Angelo by telephone. He said the attackers might also have used rocket-propelled grenades.
American forces and Iraqi defense units fought militiamen loyal to Mr. Sadr Saturday in Karbala, another Shiite Muslim holy city. Three militia fighters were killed and seven wounded in the clashes, said a hospital official, Ali Moussa, in the city, south of Baghdad. Military officials in Karbala reported five militiamen were killed.
General Kimmitt said that the militia used mortars and grenades overnight and on Saturday. He said one soldier was injured.
Fighting between the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and the militiamen took place near the shrine of Imam Abbas, Iraqi witnesses said. Militiamen loyal to Mr. Sadr have taken cover near the shrines in Karbala, the site of fighting for much of the past two weeks.
In Karbala and in nearby Najaf, where American tank troops fought Mr. Sadr's militia on Friday, the political consequences are high because of the presence of the shrines held sacred by Shiites.
On Saturday, a senior Shiite cleric in Karbala, Ayatollah Muhammad al-Mudarasi called on citizens in Karbala to hold a demonstration on Sunday to call for the occupation forces to leave.
Other Shiite leaders have asked for both American forces and the militia to leave Najaf. General Kimmitt said that the American forces would stay as far out of the city as practical but they had a responsibility to maintain law and order.
In Karbala, Iraqi witnesses said that the clashes took place near the shrine and the sound of gunfire echoed through the narrow streets. Residents stayed inside their house. There was heavy shelling and sniper fire on Saturday on the Mukhaiyam mosque, which the Americans occupied on Wednesday after a fierce battle.
The Mahdi Army, as Mr. Sadr's forces are known, attacked at least one police headquarters and seized it. Hamza al-Taei, a commander of the militia, issued a warning to Iraqi policemen that they would also be targets.
The Iraqi police have frequently been attacked by insurgents who see them as collaborators with the occupation forces.
On Saturday in the northern city of Mosul, as many as four people were killed and 17 wounded in a mortar attack on Iraqi civilians waiting in line to join the new Iraqi Army, Reuters quoted hospital staff members as saying.
A rocket was fired into the Green Zone, the fortified compound that houses the American occupation authorities, injuring a soldier and civilian.
Ian Fisher reported from Baghdad and Edward Wong from Karbala for this article .
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Chalabi: Iraqis Must Control Security
May 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Power-Transfer.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A member of the U.S-appointed Iraqi Governing Council said Sunday that Iraqis must control development money and security after the United States transfers sovereignty June 30.
Ahmad Chalabi also said an agreement governing the operations of American and other foreign troops in this country must be negotiated by a sovereign Iraqi government.
Recent developments, including the prisoner abuse scandal, makes such ``a status of forces agreement important,'' said Chalabi, a former exile who has enjoyed backing from the Pentagon.
Iraqi officials have said revelations that American guards mistreated and sexually humiliated Iraqi prisoners make it necessary for Iraqis to have a say in the running of detention facilities administrated by the U.S.-run occupation authority.
``Control of the armed forces and of the security services has to be under the Iraqis -- in terms of recruitment, training, equipment, deployment and operational deployment,'' Chalabi told reporters. ``We have to define what we mean by transfer of sovereignty.''
Chalabi's comments point to tensions between the United States and its Iraqi allies as the date for the power transfer nears.
Although the United States plans to hand over power on schedule, the Americans intend to maintain large military forces in this country and wield considerable influence over Iraqi affairs.
Iraqi security forces, for example, will be under U.S. control, and the Americans will oversee training of the new Iraqi army and police.
John Negroponte, who will take over as U.S. ambassador after June 30, has said the Americans will manage billions of dollars of reconstruction money in consultation with the Iraqis.
The relationship between the new caretaker government and the U.S.-run multinational force is the most difficult issue that U.N. Security Council members must resolve as they put together a new resolution dealing with the handover of power.
In New York, U.N. diplomats told reporters that France, which opposed the Iraq war, wants the new Iraqi government to control the police and the national army and have the right to decide whether Iraqi soldiers go into combat.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week that Iraqi military and paramilitary forces would be commanded by Iraqi officers but ``will report to the single commander of the overall force'' -- an American.
In London, a senior British official said last week U.S. and British forces normally sign a ``status of forces'' agreement with the host government, but in this case there won't be a government until June 30 and the coalition wants to ensure its continued presence.
U.S. Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman said last week that the status of forces agreement would be negotiated with the Iraqis only after national elections expected in January.
At his press conference, Chalabi also said control of the Development Fund for Iraq, which is administered by the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, should be transferred to Iraqi control on June 30.
The Fund, set up in a U.N. Security Council resolution last year, is funded by revenues from Iraqi oil exports. Chalabi has said that after June 30, all of Iraq's oil revenues should be under the control of the new interim government.
Chalabi, whose Iraqi National Congress receives substantial Pentagon funds, also said Iraqis want a ``clear understanding for the missions that will be present in Iraq -- in terms of numbers, in terms of what they can do.''
He criticized the U.S. plan to use Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace as its embassy in Baghdad.
He said advisers who were appointed by the coalition authority should leave Iraq following the transfer of power.
``An Iraqi government will employ and contract any advisers it deems necessary for this operation as a government,'' he said. These include advisers who work for security, finance, the military, judiciary, education, health and other government departments.
``We welcome international participation and assistance for Iraq, but this has to be done at the request of the sovereign Iraqi government. These are our understandings for what sovereignty means,'' Chalabi said.
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Sadr Goes From Fringe Figure to Rebel Hero
May 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Shiite-Uprising.html
NAJAF, Iraq (AP) -- Not long ago, U.S. officials and senior Shiite clergy viewed radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a fringe figure with a narrow base of support. Times have changed.
In the six weeks since al-Sadr launched an anti-coalition uprising in Baghdad and across central and southern Iraq, the young cleric has been elevated to heroic status, his movement re-energized. His militiamen now control Najaf, Kufa and Karbala.
The uprising has raised fears of eroding support for the U.S.-led coalition among the mainstream of Iraq's Shiite majority, a community emerging from decades of oppression and hoping for political domination when elections are held next year.
Al-Sadr, whose savvy street politics compensate for his lack of scholarly pedigree and oratorical skills, has bolstered his position by bringing the fight to the three holy cities -- giving his al-Mahdi Army the image of defenders of the faith against an army of ``nonbelievers.''
His aides quickly blamed the Americans for the slight damage caused to the dome of Imam Ali shrine during fighting Friday in Najaf, about 100 miles south of Baghdad. The U.S. military suggested that al-Sadr's militia may have been responsible.
The prominence acquired by al-Sadr and his movement in recent weeks has tapped into growing Iraqi frustration with the U.S.-led occupation at the expense of older, more established clerics, whose cooperation with the Americans is seen by many Shiites as giving too much to an enemy.
Many of Iraq's 25 million people are frustrated with the American occupiers amid an Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, civilian deaths from fighting between insurgents and U.S. forces and long-standing complaints by Iraqis -- including house raids, perceived cultural insensitivity and heavy handedness of U.S. troops.
Some Shiites see Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, as powerless to stop the Americans from fighting around shrines and mosques or even to persuade al-Sadr to withdraw his militia.
``Where is al-Marjaiyah?'' lamented Najaf firefighter Turki Hameed after Friday's fighting, using an Arabic word that refers to the collective Shiite religious leadership. Popularly, al-Marjaiyah refers to al-Sistani alone. ``How can they be silent at a time like this?''
Al-Sadr is flexing his muscle in Najaf. Though he was not especially popular here before, the recorded call for prayers from the Imam Ali mosque now ends with a prayer calling for the divine protection of al-Sadr and his militiamen stage noisy parades late at night.
The young cleric also has expanded the scope of his Islamic court to try cases besides the traditional family and inheritance feuds. Men with hands tied behind their backs can be seen led by militiamen to the court to face charges such as cooperation with the Americans, theft or espionage.
Those close to Najaf's top clerics dispute the notion that they have lost power. But they acknowledge that things may not be going their way.
``We are in an unenviable situation,'' said Mohammed Hussein al-Hakim, who speaks for his father, Mohammed Said al-Hakim, one of the four most senior clerics in Najaf.
``We cannot allow the loss of one drop of blood when we can obtain what we want without any bloodshed,'' he said in an interview at his Najaf home. ``Martyrdom and killings are not an objective,'' he said, implicitly criticizing al-Mahdi's decision to fight occupation forces.
Al-Sistani's old age and ailing health -- he is thought to be 73 or 75 and has a heart condition -- together with fears for his life prevent him from leaving his Najaf home. The Iranian-born cleric gives no media interviews and answers religious questions from his followers on his Web site or through written edicts.
Najaf's three other top clerics -- al-Hakim, Afghan-born Mohammed Ishaq al-Fayad and Pakistani-born Basheer al-Najafi -- enjoy limited popular support and treat al-Sistani as senior among equals. Like al-Sistani, the three rarely make public appearances for security concerns.
Unfortunately for the four ayatollahs, al-Sadr's revolt is winning a measure of support because it comes at a time when anti-U.S. sentiment is at its highest level since Saddam Hussein's ouster 13 months ago.
Some remain confident the senior clerics will prevail at the end. One person with close links to al-Sistani's office said the ayatollah has concluded that speaking out now would only turn Shiite against Shiite.
``Powerful tribal leaders and supporters come to his office daily asking him to permit action against Muqtada, but he is refusing,'' said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Al-Sadr also pays lip service to the senior clerics.
``The al-Mahdi Army belongs to the `al-Marjaiyah,''' he told reporters Wednesday. ``If they decide to disband it, then so be it ... My late father is my spiritual guide but I also follow any marjaiyah who's honorable.''
-------- israel / palestine
Statistics on Israeli Army Demolition
May 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Gaza-Demolitions-Glance.html
The Israeli military has demolished dozens of homes in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rafah over the weekend, following attacks that killed seven Israeli soldiers there. The army says it may raze hundreds more homes in the Gaza Strip shantytown to widen a military patrol road.
Following are statistics on demolitions since the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian fighting in September 2000, provided by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which administers Palestinian refugee camps:
-- Since Oct.1, 2000, 2,018 houses were destroyed or damaged beyond repair in the Gaza Strip, making 18,382 people homeless. Of those, more than half were in the Rafah camp, where 1,309 houses were razed or irreparably damaged, and 12,600 people made homeless.
-- Eighty-eight homes were destroyed in Rafah over the weekend.
-- The overall figures include non-refugees, who make up about 15 percent of the total who have lost their homes.
-- While most demolitions are carried out by bulldozer, the U.N. figures also include damage from Israeli airstrikes.
-- The army says it does not keep a general record of demolitions but it believes the U.N. figures are exaggerated.
-- The Israeli Committee Against House Demolition said it does not keep an independent tally, but regards the U.N. figures as the most reliable.
-- The U.N. agency does not keep a formal tally in the West Bank in general, although it says 432 homes were destroyed during a 2002 military incursion into Jenin refugee camp. Aid workers estimate 500-800 houses have been demolished in the West Bank since the start of the uprising.
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Community Razed Along With Its Homes in Gaza
Palestinian Camp Is in Crossfire Between Gunmen, Israeli Army
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29924-2004May15?language=printer
RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip -- Azizah Abu Anzah was watching an Arab soap opera on television when a 56-ton armored bulldozer ate its way to her house in this Palestinian refugee camp on the Gaza Strip's southern edge.
The 30-year-old woman recalls grabbing her children and hiding behind a house in the next alley. She stole peeks around the corner as a blade taller than a man began scraping away her three-room home.
"All the neighbors came and ran inside to collect my furniture -- the bed, TV, my new washing machine, some blankets -- and the bulldozer didn't stop," Abu Anzah said. "We were all crying. It was a day I will never forget."
She and her husband, Musa, moved their family deeper into the refugee camp -- farther from the encroaching bulldozers, spasms of gunfire and thunderous tank rounds. But the bulldozers kept coming, flattening the neighborhood, house by house. Last week, 16 months after their first house was demolished, the Abu Anzahs' second home was demolished by Israeli forces during a new outbreak of battles between the Israeli military and Palestinian fighters.
This is the front line of the most perilous combat zone in the Palestinian territories. In the past week, 14 Palestinians and seven Israeli soldiers have been killed in the intense gun battles in the refugee camps and surrounding neighborhoods of Rafah. Since the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, 257 Palestinians -- including at least 58 children and teenagers -- have died in clashes here, according to local medical officials and human rights organizations. The Israeli military said 10 of its soldiers have been killed here.
During the same 31/2-year period, Israeli military bulldozers have crushed 1,218 houses along the northern edge of the border between Gaza and Egypt, pushing back the city of Rafah and the adjacent refugee camp. A mile-long swath of broken concrete, splintered wood and twisted metal is all that remains of what Azizah Abu Anzah and others say was a close-knit community built by families and neighbors who gathered here a half-century ago in a cluster of U.N. tents.
"They've separated us," Abu Anzah said a few weeks ago in the house that has since been demolished. "All my neighbors were my relatives. Now they are scattered everywhere."
After Israel demolished between 80 and 120 homes in the Rafah camp this week, Israel's Supreme Court on Saturday granted a temporary injunction against demolition of homes here. The ban had been sought by a Palestinian rights group.
Israeli military commanders say Palestinian guerrillas launch more attacks against Israeli forces along this small stretch of the border than anywhere else in the Palestinian territories. Last year, the military recorded nearly 2,000 attacks against its soldiers along the border from antitank missiles, grenades, guns and bombs -- double the number of such incidents in the entire West Bank. Inside the border, the military has erected a 26-foot-high steel wall topped by bulletproof observation towers that house high-tech surveillance gear and soldiers armed with remote-controlled machine guns.
The houses along the border, the Israelis say, harbor Palestinian gunmen who shoot at soldiers, and many houses sit over the entrances to tunnels that smugglers use to bring weapons and contraband from Egypt. Bulldozing houses here, commanders maintain, is crucial to the fight against gunmen and smugglers. So while incursions by Israeli armor have become less frequent in the West Bank and other parts of the Gaza Strip, the pace has intensified in Rafah. Last year, the Israeli army demolished three times as many homes here as the year before, according to local Palestinian monitoring groups.
Abu Anzah and her neighbors say they are caught in the middle between the Israeli military and Palestinian guerrillas and criminal gangs. And they mourn not only the loss of lives and the destruction of houses, but also the street-by-street dismemberment of their community.
The neighborhoods within the Rafah refugee camp -- such as Abu Anzah's Block O -- retain the bureaucratic designations assigned by the United Nations in the early 1950s when the facility was created for Palestinians who either fled or were evicted from the new Jewish state. But they have evolved into intimate enclaves of one- and two-story cement homes and multistory apartments where three generations often share the same dwellings and neighbors marry neighbors, drawing communal bonds even tighter.
Now, more than 11,000 people -- about one of every 10 residents in the sprawling camp of nearly 100,000 people -- have been uprooted, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, which administers refugee communities in the Gaza Strip. In Block O, one of the most ravaged neighborhoods in the camp, at least 570 houses -- nearly half of the community -- have been razed or so badly damaged that they are unsafe for habitation, according to records kept by a local association of owners of destroyed houses.
Under Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposal to withdraw Jewish settlers and Israeli soldiers from the Gaza Strip, Israeli officials say, even more houses in Block O and adjoining neighborhoods may be bulldozed to expand security zones along the border access road called the Philadephi Road. Control of the southern Gaza border with Egypt is one of the most controversial issues to be resolved before any withdrawal plan could be implemented. This is because of the complex negotiations that would be required to shift authority from Israel to Egypt.
Abu Anzah, whose eyes are the dark brown of bittersweet chocolate, moved to Rafah with her brother from Algeria in 1994 in the political and economic afterglow of the Oslo peace accords. In those hopeful years, the refugee camp did not imply transience, but rather a community where she could spread familial roots.
"My father said, 'We have someone ready to take your hand,' " she reminisced. "It was a time of peace. Arab girls came here from all over to get married."
At summer's end, by family arrangement, she wed Musa Abu Anzah, a lifelong resident of the camp. Both were 20 years old. Within a year, their first daughter, Jehan, was born. Azizah Abu Anzah was surrounded by in-laws and embraced by a neighborhood of extended families in the camp's Block O.
When she delivered her babies -- Jehan, now 9, Jamallah, 5, and Mohammed, 3 -- "I would find all my family members around me," Azizah Abu Anzah said.
At the birth of baby Ola this year, she said, "No one was beside me."
She and her husband, who works in the customs office at the nearby international border crossing, were the last of their family to leave Block O. After the Israeli bulldozers flattened their home, which was in the center of the neighborhood, the family moved into a once elegant, butter-colored house abandoned by its Saudi owners.
In March, after the first suicide bombing carried out in Israel by Palestinians from fenced-in Gaza, the bulldozers rolled into Block O once more. Abu Anzah and her family fled with whatever they could carry, joining the swelling exodus from Block O.
Last week, the butter-colored house was pulverized by Israeli military forces.
'We Lost All of Our Lives'
Haneyyeh Ghoul, a grandmother of 26, didn't wait for the bulldozers to arrive.
"Bullets were coming inside our house," said Ghoul, 54, a stout woman draped in a billowing black burqa that exposed only a pudgy face and sandpaper hands. "We were always running in the middle of the night, carrying our children. They were panicked, wetting the bed, throwing up. It was a horror."
Two years ago, she moved part of her family out of the two-story house in Block O that she had spent half a lifetime scrimping to build. It was the house where Ghoul raised her five children and in which she was helping bring up a third generation.
Over the following months, all of her children and their families fled Block O. One son, Ayman, 27, was killed when shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell sliced through his body while he was helping his sister move.
The family house was bulldozed last October, Ghoul said.
"All we saved, we put into our house," said Ghoul's son, Ismail, 35. He figured the comfortable two-level house cost about $5,000 to build.
"We lost all of our lives," corrected his mother. "Not just our possessions -- the place where you lived with relatives and friends. You left a lot of feelings there."
"We ate every meal together," nodded Ismail.
Now Ghoul lives with two sons, a daughter-in-law and three grandchildren in the only affordable shelter she could find to rent in a city overrun by new refugees: a two-stall concrete shack previously used to house livestock. Other sons, daughters, in-laws and grandchildren are strewn across the Gaza Strip. When the Israeli military shuts down the checkpoints that cut Gaza into three sections, relatives who once lived within a few dozen feet of each other might as well live in different countries, Ghoul said.
The Ghouls, like hundreds of other Gaza families, are on a waiting list to receive a new house from the United Nations. Families that lost homes in 2001 are still waiting, and the Israeli military is bulldozing houses far faster than the United Nations can fund the building of new ones, according to U.N. records. About 100 houses have been finished in the past year, and another 300 are under construction on a former garbage dump at the eastern end of the Rafah border.
"Even if you have a new house, you can't forget about your old house," said Ghoul, sitting on a stool in the dust of the chicken run that is now her yard. "We've lost all our memories. Our life was in Block O."
Israeli military commanders said that in the course of their demolitions, they have discovered just more than 100 smuggling tunnels.
The devastation of Block O and surrounding neighborhoods and the frequent shooting are the results of "nearly four years of constant fighting and smuggling," said Maj. Gen. Yisrael Ziv, the Israeli military operations chief who was a former Gaza field commander. "Their philosophy is to try to create a war of attrition against our forces.
"The people there were suffering," he added. "Could we have prevented some damage there? Probably, yes. It's not a surgical thing. It's a terror war."
Local residents, especially the matriarchs such as Ghoul, say they are increasingly torn between their hostility toward the Israeli army and their anger at the local criminal mafias that build and control the tunnels.
"We'd tell the resistance, 'If they shoot, don't shoot back,' " Ghoul said. " 'If you shoot back, they'll harm us.' "
Fist-Size Bullet Marks
At 11:15 a.m. on a spring day in Block O, Jehan Abu Anzah sat on a stoop in her rumpled blue-and-white-striped school uniform, waiting for her mother, Azizah, to come downstairs and unlock the front door. A few feet away, Hallah Hamad, a 21/2-year-old, kicked at cigarette butts in the sand of the narrow alley. A team of three U.N.-sponsored psychological counselors stood nearby, advising Hallah's parents how to react when they hear shooting: Remain calm so as not to alarm the children.
Without warning, machine-gun fire crackled through the alley from the direction of the Israeli watchtower.
The adults -- parents, counselors and a reporter -- all flinched in the same instant, eyes searching instinctively for the nearest cover. Hallah, dark eyes wide with terror, clutched her father's worn pants leg with chubby fingers, whimpering like a puppy. Nine-year-old Jehan flung her books to the ground and slammed her palms against the metal door of her house, screaming in the frantic, high pitch of terror -- "Yama! Yama!" -- Mama! Mama!
"All of us feel scared," confessed Bushra Ayyash, one of the counselors, nervously tugging at the black burqa that shrouded her body. "What do you think this child feels, grabbing her father's leg?
"The people who still live in front of the Israeli troops feel more anger than those who ran way," Ayyash added. "They have the fear both of losing the house and of dying from the shooting. They feel their whole society is destroyed."
A few weeks ago, the two-story cinderblock house that Shadia and Abdulkarim Hamad shared with their seven children was peppered with bullet marks -- fist-size circles, jagged gouges big enough to fit an arm through, dozens of openings demonstrating the range of Israeli firepower.
Israeli military commanders said Palestinians frequently use the front rows of houses to shoot at soldiers in the guard towers and that troops shoot back in self-defense or to prevent suspected attacks.
Now Shadia Hamad, 42, whose soft round face and brown eyes reflect the weariness of permanent fatigue, clambered up the stairs to the second floor, offering a narrated tour of her house and her fears.
On a recent day, Israeli soldiers in a watchtower opened fire when her 12-year-old son Alaa went to the roof to feed the pigeons. At 11 a.m. on another day, two bullets smashed into the mirror on the bedroom vanity, inches from 16-year-old daughter Moha, who was brushing her thick black hair. Another day a projectile whizzed over Moha's shoulder as she bent to serve her father a glass of tea in the sitting room. Fourteen-year-old Walaa stumbled and broke her front teeth in the scramble down the dark, rail-less concrete stairwell to the first floor of the house.
At a neighbor's house, out of earshot of his parents, Alaa, brown eyes downcast, admitted, "I feel afraid."
When asked about his ambitions, he said, "I hope to be a doctor."
He hesitated a few seconds, then mumbled, "If I'm still alive."
Last week, as firefights erupted between Palestinian guerrillas armed with crude rocket-propelled grenade launchers and Israeli soldiers in armored personnel carriers and tanks, Alaa and his family evacuated their house, clutching the suitcases they kept packed for such emergencies. By Friday, their bullet-scarred house with its first-floor safe room was just another a heap of crumbled concrete.
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Israeli Missiles Cut Power for 40,000 Gazans
May 16, 2004
By MARIA NEWMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/international/middleeast/16CND-MIDE.html?hp
Israeli helicopters fired missiles at targets in Gaza City early today, knocking out power for about 40,000 people and causing widespread panic, a day after more than 100,000 Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv to call on Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to implement his plan to withdraw from Gaza and four West Bank settlements and to resume peace talks.
The demonstration, one of the largest by the Israeli Peace camp in years, came after a week of bloodshed in Gaza, where 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in three separate incidents. The soldiers' deaths have caused a public outcry in Israel.
Mr. Sharon's hard-line Likud Party - a tiny fraction of the overall population - rejected the Gaza pullout plan in a referendum on May 2.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the United States opposed the destruction of homes in Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border.
"We know Israel has a right for self-defense, but the kind of actions that they're taking in Rafah with the destruction of Palestinian homes we oppose," he said today in Jordon, where he was attending the World Economic Forum held at an isolated Dead Sea resort.
Mr. Powell also rebuked the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat for urging Palestinians, in a speech on Saturday, to "find whatever strength you have to terrorize your enemy."
"Mr. Arafat continues to take actions and make statements to make it exceptionally difficult to move forward," Mr. Powell said. He complained that the Palestinian leader "refuses to allow consolidation of security forces."
The air strikes in Gaza City early today targeted a Hamas office and the office of a group affiliated with Mr. Arafat's Fatah faction. Power was restored hours later.
Israeli officials said today they would step up military operations in the Gaza Strip, including a more intensive air campaign and the possible demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes.
At the first cabinet meeting since the violence in Gaza last week, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the military chief, pledged to crack down on militant groups, according to The Associated Press.
"We started continuous air strikes," Mr. Mofaz said, meeting participants told The A.P. "We will deepen the fighting."
Mr. Yaalon said the army had identified hundreds of Palestinian homes along the Gaza-Egypt border, where seven soldiers were killed last week, for demolition if violence continues, the meeting participants said.
Last week, the army demolished 88 homes, leaving more than 1,000 Palestinians homeless, after Palestinian snipers killed two Israeli soldiers, according to the United Nations. Israel said gunmen had used the homes for cover.
Israel's Supreme Court appeared today to clear the way for more demolitions in the area, rejecting a petition to prevent the razing of 13 houses there. The three judges ruled the army had a "real, imminent need" that justified the demolitions.
The ruling said more homes could be destroyed in the future if they are part of a military operation and gunmen are using the buildings as cover to shoot at soldiers.
Top United Nations and European Union officials last week condemned the demolitions. Mr. Powell today voiced opposition to the practice.
Organizers of Saturday night's rally said the demonstration was in response to the Likud vote, noting that a solid majority of the public favors Mr. Sharon's plan.
Mr. Sharon, suddenly at odds with members of his own party, has pledged to revise the plan.
Officials in his office, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The A.P. today that the rally could help his efforts. They said the prime minister plans to ask his cabinet in two weeks to approve a virtually unchanged "disengagement plan."
Also today, King Abdullah II of Jordan on the ABC News program "This Week," avoided a direct answer when asked whether Mr. Arafat was an obstacle to peace, but said: "There is this unfortunate competition between Palestinian political society, and that is weakening the Palestinian position. Until they can unify and come up with strategy that allows the international community to help them, then they will be in a very weak position. Arafat will have to decide how he is going to sort of implement himself in the future of Palestine."
Alan Cowell contributed reporting for this article from Shuneh, Jordan.
-------- prisoners of war
Afghan's Allegation of Abuse Echoes Accounts From Iraq
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29923-2004May15?language=printer
SHEIKO, Afghanistan -- The stern police officer doffed his peaked uniform cap and placed it carefully on his parlor carpet. He drew his asthma inhaler from his pocket and set aside his teacup. Then he knelt and twisted his gaunt frame into a series of contorted positions, grimacing in pain and panting for breath.
Col. Syed Nabi Siddiqui, 47, was acting out the humiliating treatment he said he received during 40 days as a detainee in three U.S. military prisons last year. He said his captors made barnyard jokes about his manhood, bent him into painful postures, photographed him naked, prevented him from sleeping, beat and stoned him, and taunted him while he relieved himself in a bucket.
"I kept begging them for water and they would spray something on my face, so I had to lick the drops," Siddiqui recounted at home in his village in Paktia province, as four of his young sons listened silently. "They asked me stupid questions like did I know Fidel Castro. . . . They covered my face and told me they put a snake and a scorpion on my neck. I thought I was going to die, but they were always laughing, like it was all a joke."
Siddiqui's story is the one of the first and most detailed allegations of abuse by U.S. military forces and other American security agents who operate detention centers throughout Afghanistan. Hundreds of prisoners have passed through these centers in the past two years, and at least three are reported to have died. U.S. officials have repeatedly refused to discuss detention conditions and have allowed Red Cross delegates to visit only one of the facilities.
Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, charged this week that mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody in Afghanistan was a "systemic problem." The group reported that detainees had been beaten, stripped, exposed to extreme temperatures and photographed while naked. It said some of the abuses were similar to those recently exposed and photographed in Abu Ghraib, a large prison run by the U.S. military in Iraq.
U.S. military officials in Kabul expressed shock and concern last week over Siddiqui's account, and promised to begin investigating immediately. On Saturday, a U.S. military spokesman in Kabul said officials had received a second complaint of prisoner abuse and would also investigate it, but he provided no details. According to press reports, the former detainee said he was hung from a ceiling and force-fed water while held last year in one of the same prisons as Siddiqui.
"The coalition forces are committed to ensuring that all detainees are treated humanely and consistent with international law," Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager said at a news conference in the Afghan capital. "Our investigation is proof that we are concerned about these things."
In the past two years, some Afghans released from U.S. custody in the main detention facility at Bagram air base, north of Kabul, have described being hooded, held in groups in cramped wire cages, made to assume painful positions for hours at a time, deprived of sleep and subjected to other forms of duress.
But Siddiqui's account of abuse that allegedly occurred at U.S. bases in Paktia and Kandahar provinces is the first to emerge from the smaller, rural detention facilities run by various U.S. military and intelligence forces. It is also the first to allege sexual humiliation of the type described and photographed in Iraq. Although his story became public only this week, he complained of mistreatment to an Afghan human rights group after he was released last August.
Siddiqui, a veteran police officer in Paktia, said his ordeal began last July, shortly after he complained to the newly appointed provincial police chief about corruption and abuse by another police official. He said he was called to the chief's office and found several U.S. military officers there who asked for his assistance with some investigations and escorted him to their base outside the city.
There, he said, he was thrown into a locked room and held prisoner for 22 days. He said he was questioned by teams of young Americans who wore "shorts and T-shirts" and were assisted by masked Afghan translators. He said he acknowledged working briefly as a police officer under the Taliban, the repressive Islamic militia that ruled Afghanistan until late 2001. But he said many questions seemed irrelevant or ridiculous, such as whether he had heard of Castro, the Cuban president, or various Afghan militia leaders.
Siddiqui said his captors indulged in frequent sexual taunting and harassment that included poking fingers and objects in his rectum, photographing him while naked, making farm animal sounds and asking which kind of beast he preferred for sex. The worst moment, said the father of nine, was when he was told his wife and daughters had become prostitutes in his absence.
"They were laughing when they said this," Siddiqui recounted with a deep sigh, his eyes reddening. "I told them please, I am a police officer and Muslim. I have asthma and it is hard for me to breathe. I am not al Qaeda or Taliban. I fought against the Russians, and I was happy when the Americans came to Afghanistan. I asked them to please let me go home to my family, but they paid no attention."
After three weeks, Siddiqui said he was hooded, shackled and taken by helicopter with a large group of detainees to another base, which he later learned was near the southern city of Kandahar. There, he said, his captors were all wearing military uniforms. During about one week at that base, he said, he was beaten and forced into various painful positions, but questioned only cursorily and not about any serious matters.
As in Paktia, he said, the hardest thing to bear was physical humiliation. He said groups of detainees were kept together in large wire cages, where they were forbidden to speak to one another but had to share a common bucket as a toilet. They were constantly watched and denied the privacy that is extremely important in Muslim societies. All wore zippered jumpsuits, which they had to lower completely when they used the bucket.
"We begged them to let us use a real toilet, because it was so shameful, but they just laughed at us," Siddiqui said. He also said U.S. soldiers threw stones at the caged detainees and forced them to roll naked in mud. He was constantly thirsty and short of breath, he said, and once lost consciousness and woke up in a military clinic, but was returned to the cage.
After 12 days, the policeman was flown with a group of prisoners to Bagram, where he said the treatment changed. He was given a copy of the Koran and a prayer rug, and he said several U.S. military officers apologized for his suffering. After one week, he was given a release document saying he posed "no threat" to U.S. forces or interests in Afghanistan. It said he had been in U.S. military custody for only seven days.
Siddiqui's story cannot be corroborated, but U.S. military officials in Kabul have said that if it is true, it would include "potentially criminal behavior" on the part of U.S. personnel. They also said they had no knowledge of his case until it was reported by the New York Times this week, but officials of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said they had brought Siddiqui's complaint and others to the attention of U.S. military officials last year.
Siddiqui's boss, Gen. Gul Hai Sulaimankhel of the Paktia police, confirmed the colonel's account of his arrest. Sulaimankhel said he shared Siddiqui's suspicions that he had been denounced as a Taliban supporter by the police officer he criticized, a controversial figure who vanished from the province months ago.
In an interview in Gardez, Paktia's provincial capital, Sulaimankhel said that he was "astonished" by Siddiqui's account and that the colonel had not told him about any abusive treatment when he returned to work last August, more than a month after being taken to the U.S. military base.
"I am still spinning from this news," the general said. "I have seen other prisoners come back from Bagram, but I never heard such a complaint."
Sulaimankhel has worked closely with U.S. military officials, whose base near the city is also a center for regional assistance and security programs. "They have helped me a lot, but I know nothing about their jails," he said. "We hate to have the Americans get a bad image, but incidents like this make everyone disappointed."
Siddiqui, who said he still wakes up shaking from nightmares, insisted that he bears no ill will toward U.S. forces in Afghanistan and believes his abusers were "a few bad people." After his release, he participated in a U.S.-run training program for law enforcement officers. During a lengthy interview Friday, he proudly displayed his graduation certificate.
Siddiqui lodged a complaint at the Gardez office of the Afghan human rights commission last year, and officials of the organization said they considered him credible.
The solemn, bearded officer said he had not previously revealed the full details of the abuse because they were too shameful and he feared reprisals. Then several weeks ago, he said, he was amazed to see the photos from the Iraqi prison on television.
"My children were watching and they asked me, 'Father, did the Americans do those things to you, too?' " Siddiqui said. "I told them, 'No, my sons,' but they did. They did everything but put me on a leash."
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Report: Rumsfeld Authorized Secret Program
May 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Prison-Abuse-Rumsfeld.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld authorized the expansion of a secret program that encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners to obtain intelligence about the growing insurgency in Iraq, The New Yorker reported Saturday.
The Defense Department strongly denied the claims made in the report, which cited unnamed current and former intelligence officials and was published on the magazine's Web site. Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita issued a statement calling the claims ``outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture.''
The story, written by reporter Seymour Hersh, said Rumsfeld decided to expand the program last year, broadening a Pentagon operation from the hunt for al-Qaida in Afghanistan to interrogation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.
Seven soldiers are facing military charges related to the abuse and humiliation of prisoners captured by the now-infamous photographs at the prison. Some of the soldiers and their lawyers have said military intelligence officials told military police assigned as guards to abuse the prisoners to make interrogations easier.
According to the story, which hits newsstands Monday, the initial operation Rumsfeld authorized gave blanket approval to kill or capture and interrogate ``high value'' targets in the war on terrorism. The program stemmed from frustrating efforts to capture high-level terrorists in the weeks after the start of U.S. bombings in Afghanistan.
The program got approval from President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush was informed of its existence, the officials told Hersh.
Under the program, Hersh wrote, commandos carried out instant interrogations -- using force if necessary -- at secret CIA detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the commanders at the Pentagon.
Last year, Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone, his undersecretary for intelligence, expanded the scope of the Pentagon's program and brought its methods to Abu Ghraib, Hersh wrote.
Critics say the interrogation rules, first laid out in September after a visit to Iraq by the then-commander of the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, amounted to a green light for abuse.
Defense Department officials deny that, saying prisoners always are treated under guidelines of the Geneva Conventions.
``No responsible official of the Department of Defense approved any program that could conceivably have been intended to result in such abuses as witnessed in the recent photos and videos,'' Di Rita said in his statement. ``This story seems to reflect the fevered insights of those with little, if any, connection to the activities in the Department of Defense.''
Di Rita also said Cambone has never had any responsibility for any detainee or interrogation programs.
The intelligence sources told the magazine photos of the sexual abuse were used to intimidate prisoners and detainees into providing information on the insurgency. 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.
One intelligence official said the CIA ended its involvement with the program at Abu Ghraib prison by last fall.
``They said, 'No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan -- pre-approved for operations against the high-value terrorist targets -- and now you want to use it for cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets,''' the source said.
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U.S. holds huge network of secret terror prisons
Suspects hidden from public, courts
Washington Post
By Dana Priest, and Joe Stephens
May 16, 2004
http://www.detnews.com/2004/nation/0405/16/a04-154385.htm
WASHINGTON - In Afghanistan, the CIA's secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as "The Pit," named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert.
The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers - many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny.
These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safe-keeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.
"The number of people who have been detained in the Arab world for the sake of America is much more than in Guantanamo Bay. Really, thousands," said Najeeb Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who is representing the families of dozens of prisoners.
The largely hidden array includes three systems that only rarely overlap: the Pentagon-run network of prisons, jails and holding facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere; small and secret CIA-run facilities where top al-Qaida and other figures are kept; and interrogation rooms of foreign intelligence services - some with documented records of torture - to which the U.S. government delivers or "renders" mid- or low-level terrorism suspects for questioning.
All told, more than 9,000 people are held overseas by U.S. authorities with the vast majority under military control, according to Pentagon figures and estimates by intelligence experts.
Although some of those held by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo have had visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, some of the CIA's detainees have, in effect, disappeared, according to interviews with former and current national security officials and to the Army's report of abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The CIA's "ghost detainees," as they were called by members of the 800th MP Brigade, were routinely held by the soldier-guards at Abu Ghraib "without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention," the report says.
Process has protocol
None of the arrangements that permit U.S. personnel to kidnap, transport, interrogate and hold foreigners is ad hoc or unauthorized, including the so-called renderings.
"People tend to regard it as an extra-judicial kidnapping; it's not," said former CIA officer Peter Probst. "There is a long history of this. It has been done for decades. It's absolutely legal."
In fact, every aspect of this new universe - including maintenance of covert airlines to fly prisoners from place to place, interrogation rules and the legal justification for holding foreigners without due process afforded most U.S. citizens - has been developed by military or CIA lawyers, vetted by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and, depending on the particular issue, approved by White House General Counsel's Office or the president himself.
-------- us
U.S. Realigns War Assignments
Top Military Leader Will Focus on Developing Iraqi Forces
By Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30100-2004May15.html
BAGHDAD, May 15 -- The U.S. military force in Iraq formally completed a realignment Saturday that is intended to allow the top commander to focus on developing Iraq's security forces while shifting responsibility for battling insurgents to his top deputy.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez will remain the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, the post he has held since last June. Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz will take the lead role in analyzing intelligence and improving tactics to combat attacks by guerrillas and militiamen opposed to the U.S.-led occupation.
The shift takes place just six weeks before the scheduled transfer of limited political power to an interim Iraqi government. A key goal of the Bush administration before the June 30 handover is to develop Iraqi army, paramilitary and police forces capable of quelling violent unrest and defending a new democratic government.
Defections, poor leadership and supply shortages have repeatedly set back that goal over the past year. Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former commander of the 101st Airborne Division, was reassigned to Iraq last month to oversee the training of the security forces. He reports directly to Sanchez.
After a ceremony Saturday marking the shift, Sanchez said he would focus on "issues at the strategic level, working with the senior leadership of the military and the government, and General Metz will now be in charge of the tactical battle and ensuring that we succeed out on the battlefield across the whole country."
Metz said the shift will take him away from the logistics, financial and personnel responsibilities he had as Sanchez's deputy. "As a commander, I will be much more involved in the operational and intelligence part of the battle," he said.
The ceremony marking the shift was held at the al-Faw Palace, which was built by former president Saddam Hussein as a leisure home and now serves as the headquarters of the U.S. military command. Before a crowd of Iraqi and foreign dignitaries that included the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, Sanchez recalled that "hundreds of Iraqi patriots of the Iraqi security forces have fallen alongside of the coalition warriors as they too answered Iraq's call to arms."
He added, "With so many willing to sacrifice so much, there is no doubt democracy will succeed in Iraq."
Under the reorganization, which officials said had been planned for six months, the U.S.-led military force in Iraq -- formally known as Combined Joint Task Force 7 -- has been replaced with a new body called Multinational Force Iraq, commanded by Sanchez, and a subordinate entity, Multinational Corps Iraq, led by Metz.
The shift occurs as the military is wrestling with a continuing Shiite insurrection in southern Iraq and the massive blow inflicted by revelations of abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi detainees at the Army-run Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad. Seven soldiers face criminal charges in the scandal, and four courts-martial have been announced.
An investigation conducted by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, while not explicitly criticizing Sanchez, faulted an order he signed Nov. 19 that placed authority at Abu Ghraib with the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Several of the charged soldiers, who are all reservists from a military police unit, have asserted that military intelligence operatives urged them to use rough tactics against prisoners.
Sanchez said the abuse scandal has prompted reflection within the ranks.
"There's all sorts of 20-20 hindsight when you look back," he said, adding: "Our institution is a training and learning organization. Every mission that we execute, we assess in its aftermath and we learn and we critique ourselves very, very thoroughly so that we can get better. We do that whether we're in peacetime or in wartime. This is another case where we're looking at ourselves very, very critically."
Sanchez declined to discuss the Nov. 19 order but said he did not feel he erred in his decisions on the command structure at Abu Ghraib. "The intent was right, the directives were proper, and I don't have any regrets at this point where I'd say 'This was wrong,' " he said.
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Accused G.I.'s Try to Shift Blame in Prison Abuse
May 16, 2004
By ADAM LIPTAK, MICHAEL MOSS and KATE ZERNIKE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/international/middleeast/16DETA.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Six of the defendants in the Abu Ghraib abuse case once all bunked together in a tent in Baghdad. But as the most important military prosecutions since Vietnam unfold, each soldier is struggling alone to explain away seemingly irrefutable evidence captured in frame after frame of disturbing images, and they are pointing fingers at one another, minimizing their roles and blaming the government.
One defendant, Specialist Megan M. Ambuhl, says she was merely a bystander who treated the Iraqi detainees kindly, giving them copies of the Koran and making sure their meals contained no pork.
Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits, in a statement to investigators, described brutal conduct by Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II and Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., who, in turn, call him a liar.
Then there is Sgt. Javal S. Davis. His lawyer, Paul Bergrin, accuses the government of abusing him by interrogating him for 20 sleepless hours right after he worked a 60-hour shift at Abu Ghraib.
The defendants' challenge is to convince military courts that the pictures of abusive treatment of Iraqi detainees, which have generated a storm of criticism, do not begin to tell the whole story. Each has a personal version of events but one theme unites them: they contend they were following orders.
As that defense is presented at their courts-martial, the central question of Abu Ghraib - whether what happened there was aberration or policy - will become crucial.
"We intend to put the military on trial for their breakdown in leadership, structure, guidance, policy," Mr. Bergrin said. The proceedings will begin this week, when Specialist Sivits is expected to plead guilty in exchange for leniency, and then testify against other defendants.
But the most immediate task for the other accused soldiers is proving that they were doing what their superiors wanted. "Our defense says he was following orders and that he believed the orders were lawful," said Guy L. Womack, a lawyer for Specialist Graner.
Last week, some of the defendants said that even the most shocking conduct shown in images were the result of direct orders. "I was instructed by persons in higher ranks to stand there and hold this leash," one defendant, Pfc. Lynndie R. England, said in an interview with a Denver television station. Private England is shown in one photo leading a naked prisoner on a tether.
The lawyers say they will rely on findings of the military's own investigation, by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba of the Army, which found that military commanders, eager to extract more information from detainees, used guards to set conditions for "successful interrogations."
In practice, the lawyers said, that policy translated into instructions that the guards "soften up" detainees before questioning.
But Mr. Womack conceded that the orders Specialist Graner would cite in his defense were often general. "Most are not specific," he said. "Some are pretty clear. The exact wording, it's hard to say."
In a statement to investigators 10 days ago, Private England was also hazy about who told her what tactics to use. "Did anyone ever give specific orders on how to `break' the detainees?" she was asked, according to a copy of her sworn statement obtained by The New York Times. "No," she replied, but added that military intelligence "would tell us to keep it up, that we were doing a good job." She pointed out four military intelligence soldiers in photographs of detainees held on leashes in a prison corridor.
Rose Mary Zapor, who represents Private England, said the very fact that two women, Private England and Specialist Ambuhl, were present suggested that the abuse was ordered as part of an interrogation strategy. "We have been informed that these pictures were being used by military intelligence and were to be used because these are Muslim men, and the ultimate humiliation was to be naked in the presence of women," she said.
But even proof that they were operating under direct orders might not be enough to clear them.
On the one hand, the military's manual for courts-martial says orders requiring the performance of "a military duty or act" are lawful and are "disobeyed at the peril of the subordinate." On the other, it says this "does not apply to a patently illegal order, such as one that directs the commission of a crime." A lawful order must "be a specific mandate to do or not do a specific act." Rather than a regulation or policy, such an order "must be directed specifically to the subordinate."
Neal A. Puckett, a lawyer for Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was the brigade commander of the military police at Abu Ghraib, said the defendants would not easily prove they were ordered to engage in some of the abuse. "I think they are going to have a hard time demonstrating that they were instructed that they were specifically to strip these guys naked and pile them up on the floor," Mr. Puckett said.
But Harvey J. Volzer, a lawyer for Specialist Ambuhl, said the "following orders" defense should work in this case. "It's not like we're using the Holocaust excuse: we followed orders," he said. "This isn't that bad."
Prosecutors have already presented evidence contending the defendants acted on their own.
According to court records, several witnesses have testified in pretrial hearings that military intelligence officers might have authorized or ordered some harsh behavior, like depriving detainees of sleep or food, intimidating them with dogs or pouring water over them.
But, the witnesses continued, the officers would never have called for the things the soldiers are charged with: hitting detainees, piling their naked bodies in human pyramids, photographing them, having them pose as if performing oral sex and forcing them to masturbate.
"If I were ordered to do these acts, I would not carry them out," Warrant Officer Edward J. Rivas, who worked in the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib, testified at the preliminary hearing for Specialist Ambuhl. She is charged with conspiracy and dereliction of duty but has not been implicated in the most serious abuse.
Special Agent Tyler Pieron, a Army investigator who also testified at the hearing, concluded: "There was absolutely no evidence that the military intelligence or military police chain of command authorized any of this kind of maltreatment. These individuals wanted to do this for fun."
While prosecutors are likely to argue that the guards were out of control, the defendants will say that the entire prison was chaos. "Keep in mind," said Mr. Womack, "these were the baddest of the bad in this area of the prison. They were criminals. Some were suspected terrorists. There was violence against the guards."
Defense lawyers said they would try to show that their clients were honorable people struggling to do their jobs under dire conditions and ill-defined boundaries. Sergeant Davis, for instance, had received no schooling whatsoever in prison work, his lawyer, Mr. Bergrin, said. He volunteered for duty in Iraq. His first task at the prison was to help kill the rabid dogs that attacked the soldiers and chewed on body parts the dogs dug up. Mr. Bergrin said Sergeant Davis worked 13 months without a day off and often could not sleep because of the rocket-propelled grenade attacks on the prison. He went four months without being able to contact his family.
The cases against the soldiers - there are now seven charged - are each quite different, and that has caused some of the defendants to turn on one another. The women say they were little more than bystanders. Specialist Sivits, who is expected to plead guilty, is charged with taking a picture of the scene. Sergeant Davis is accused of jumping onto a pile of naked detainees, of stomping "on the hands and feet of several detainees with his shod foot," but not of conduct involving sexual humiliation, according to court papers.
The two remaining defendants, Specialist Graner and Sergeant Frederick, are charged with the worst conduct, including placing naked detainees in a human pyramid and photographing them, ordering them to masturbate, placing them in sexual positions and ordering them to strike each other. They are also accused of hitting detainees so hard they required medical attention.
In sworn statements provided to investigators, Specialist Sivits attributes the most serious abuse to others.
"He says he was an onlooker and didn't participate in anything that raised moral issues," said Mr. Bergrin, Sergeant Davis's lawyer, "and we know for a fact that he was participating in numerous such incidents."
Two weeks ago, Specialist Sivits abruptly left the tent in Baghdad he had shared with five other defendants, scrawling a farewell note that said he was moving "to benefit everyone." But he was moving mainly for his own benefit, going from bunkmate to witness against his compatriots in exchange for leniency, according to lawyers in the case. It is unclear how many of the defendants are still sharing the tent.
Specialist Sivits's lawyer, Stanley L. Martin, did not respond to several requests for comment.
Juries in courts-martial are made up of military personnel selected by the commanding officer, and defense lawyers disagree about whether juries in Baghdad or the United States are likely to be more sympathetic to their clients.
"We want the trial in Iraq," Mr. Womack said. "We want Army officers who are combat veterans who work with the intel community every day and know the tactics and pressures involved."
Mr. Bergrin disagreed. "We will shoot for change of venue," he said. "We don't believe we can get a fair trial in Iraq. We want to bring this to the American people."
Wherever the trials are held, defense lawyers say they will argue that their clients' conduct was not extreme. For this they will rely on the military's standard approval of interrogation techniques for detainees, which are codified in Army manuals.
With approval from top commanders, for example, interrogators were allowed to deprive detainees of sleep and food. (Most of these coercive measures were banned Friday by the military command in Iraq.)
"We will have an expert witness testify about interrogation techniques," Mr. Womack said, "and these are not techniques that exceed the norm, having people stand around naked."
In a sworn statement, Specialist Sivits described seeing Specialist Graner strike a naked detainee who had an empty sandbag over his head. "Graner punched the detainee with a closed fist so hard in the temple that it knocked the detainee unconscious," Specialist Sivits said.
Mr. Womack, Specialist Graner's lawyer, said he doubted the incident took place and questioned Specialist Sivits's veracity. If it happened, he said, his client had been ordered to strike the detainee. And, in any event, a certain amount of violence was to be expected, Mr. Womack said.
"Striking doesn't mean a lot," he added. "Breaking a rib or a bone, that would be excessive."
Mr. Volzer, the lawyer for Specialist Ambuhl, said what took place at Abu Ghraib was intimidation, not torture. "I wouldn't term it abuse," he said.
In defending against the charge that Sergeant Davis stomped on a detainee's feet, his lawyer, Mr. Bergrin, said he would make the case that the prisoner was not hurt.
"He may have stepped on the hands," Mr. Bergrin said, "but there was no stomping, no broken bones."
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Report: U.S. to Shift 4, 000 Troops from S.Korea to Iraq
May 16, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-arms-korea-usa.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - The United States plans to withdraw an army brigade based in South Korea and deploy the 4,000 troops in Iraq, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported on Monday.
Washington had recently notified Seoul of the plan, which left open the possibility that the brigade would not return to South Korea after its mission in Iraq, the paper quoted a South Korean government official as saying.
``The United States did not specify the date but only sent word that the deployment would be within weeks,'' the official said.
``It is not certain whether the 2nd Infantry Division brigade will be redeployed in Korea or elsewhere after its mission in Iraq,'' the official added
The 2nd Infantry Division is based south of the heavily militarized border with communist North Korea.
A foreign ministry official confirmed that Washington had raised the issue of moving some troops to Iraq and the two governments were discussing the plan. He did not elaborate.
The U.S. administration has been reviewing a cut in the U.S. military presence in Korea.
South Korea has delayed the deployment of 3,000 of its troops to Iraq, which was approved three months ago, amid concerns over security and where they will be stationed.
A diplomatic source in Seoul said the U.S. plan to pull 4,000 of its troops out of Korea for deployment in Iraq was not intended to put additional pressure on South Korea.
The United States has 37,000 troops stationed in South Korea to deter aggression from the communist north and the 2nd Infantry Division with its 14,000 soldiers is the most forward deployed.
South Korea and the United States are in ongoing negotiations over reorienting the U.S. military presence in Korea and have agreed to move most of the troops based in Seoul and those north of the capital to south of the capital.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- human rights
Rejection Of Prison Abuse Was Sought
Administration Was Reluctant, Groups Say
By Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30214-2004May15?language=printer
After reports emerged in 2002 of abuses in military detention facilities, human rights groups repeatedly pressed the White House and the Pentagon to issue a presidential-level statement renouncing the cruel and unusual treatment of prisoners and detainees. Administration officials initially balked, issuing letters from low-level officials that drew the line at condemning torture.
Finally, after intense internal debate, the White House released on June 26, 2003, a statement by President Bush that not only condemned torture but also said the United States would "prevent other cruel and unusual punishment." The administration, however, never followed up with a plan to enforce the statement. The Pentagon, in fact, approved interrogation procedures that human rights groups say directly contradict the statement issued in Bush's name.
The handling of the 2003 torture statement spotlights what until recently had been the Bush administration's reluctance to forcefully reject the kind of abusive tactics that have been at the heart of the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to human rights groups, congressional officials and former administration officials.
Despite pressure from human rights groups and European allies, the administration has been unwilling to tie the hands of the CIA and the military in interrogating detainees, a key tool in its effort to break al Qaeda and quell the insurgency in Iraq, these officials said. While willing to acknowledge the relevance of the Geneva Conventions to traditional wars between nations, the administration showed little interest in weakening tactics that officials saw as necessary for dealing with dangerous thugs.
Those familiar with the internal debate say it was unclear whether senior officials were driven by a disdain for international law or a fear that such a statement might someday come back to haunt the administration. For months, a former U.S. official said, the administration had "stiffed" human rights groups. "There was always great reluctance from the Pentagon and the White House counsel's offices, from people who were opposed to issuing a statement," the official said.
Human rights advocates say the failure to enforce a strong anti-torture position suggests that the White House and Pentagon officials were not serious about dealing with allegations of prisoner abuse in the first place.
"Personally, I feel burned," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director of Human Rights Watch. "I feel they were being disingenuous. They put out a statement that gave us everything we wanted. But it was not translated into changes in interrogation policy, and the United States is paying a tragic price for that."
Administration officials reject that conclusion, though officials at the Pentagon and the White House declined to discuss how or why the presidential statement was drafted. "Our policy is to comply with all U.S. laws, including the Constitution, federal statutes and U.S. treaty obligations with respect to all detainees," said Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council.
At issue are U.S. interrogation tactics, which gained attention after the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan led to the arrest of thousands of suspected al Qaeda and Taliban fighters -- and the first reports of abuses, according to human rights groups. The same tactics, from forced nudity and painful stress positions to prolonged sleeplessness, are today the focus of investigations into the treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib.
With hundreds of foreign citizens held at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- and repeated assertions by administration officials that the rules of the Geneva Conventions may have outlived their usefulness -- the administration's position on torture had already received worldwide scrutiny. Human rights officials pressed the administration to issue a declaration renouncing torture, as well as "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment, in accordance with treaties the United States had signed earlier and the Constitution's Fifth, Eighth and 14th Amendments.
The groups wrote President Bush to appeal for "unequivocal statements" renouncing torture and promising the prosecution of any U.S. official found to use or condone torture. Top officials of the groups met with Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz in January 2003 to ask that clear guidelines be issued to U.S. troops that torture would not be tolerated, according to Human Rights Watch.
For his meetings with Pentagon and National Security Council officials, Malinowski brought a two-inch mound of news clippings from around the world on alleged abuse at detention centers in Afghanistan and Guantanamo to illustrate that U.S. credibility as a champion of law and order was under threat. The reports included boasts by U.S. interrogators about tactics bordering on torture.
"We begged them to say that the military and intelligence officials [engaged in these practices] weren't speaking for the president or the administration, and that policy forbad torture and cruel and degrading treatment," Malinowski said.
During a February 2003 meeting, William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel, scolded the human rights officials, saying the United States does not torture and accusing the groups of cheapening the notion of torture, recalled Holly J. Burkhalter, U.S. policy director of Physicians for Human Rights.
In April 2003, Haynes, who is currently up for a federal judgeship, sent a letter to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) saying that U.S. policy "condemns and prohibits torture." But the letter sidestepped the issue of illegal, inhuman and degrading treatment.
The same month, the Pentagon quietly approved about 20 interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay that included what human rights groups charge are outlawed stress-and-duress tactics.
Unaware of that move, human rights groups persisted in their campaign to persuade the administration to take the extra step to formally reiterate longstanding U.S. commitments forswearing the same tactics. On June 2, Leahy wrote national security adviser Condoleezza Rice expressing concern that detainees in U.S. custody were being subjected to cruel and degrading treatment, including beatings and food deprivation. He, too, appealed for a public renunciation of such techniques.
A group of senior human rights officials then met with Rice and other White House officials on June 11 to emphasize their concerns. Rice reiterated that the United States does not condone torture, according to Alexandra Arriago, director of government relations at Amnesty International. But the human rights groups argued that a reference to cruel and unusual punishment was also important.
On June 25, Haynes responded to Leahy's letter to Rice. For the first time, he stated that U.S. policy is to "treat all detainees and conduct all interrogations, wherever they may occur," in a manner consistent with the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment. He specifically mentioned the Eighth Amendment -- which the Senate referenced when it ratified the treaty and which the groups noted had been cited by the Bush administration in a 2002 Supreme Court case in which the handcuffing of an Alabama prison inmate to a "hitching post" for seven hours in the sun had been deemed unconstitutional.
The next day, the U.N. International Day in support of torture victims, the White House issued the Bush statement.
John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a Justice Department official in the first two years of the Bush administration, said Haynes's letter is not remarkable. "All the letter is doing is simply restating the conditions on the treaty placed by the Senate," he said. "If it's the law, it's the law."
At the time, the statement was heralded by the human rights community. But they then found they could pry little information out of the administration about how its statements were being implemented, even after they filed a Freedom of Information Act request.
-------- police
Improvements to U.S. Prisons Sought
May 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Abuse-American-Prisons.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The spotlight on abuse of detainees at a U.S. military prison in Iraq has spurred hopes that some attention will spill over to prisons stateside, where reformers say get-tough policies and public indifference have let longstanding problems fester.
There have been numerous examples over the years of guards misusing their authority over inmates. In the 1990s, Alabama officers used to routinely handcuff state prisoners to a metal post in the sun. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional. In Massachusetts, a jailor in 1993 poured boiling water on a child killer's genitals. There have been convictions for rape and assault, and allegations of worse.
Prison administrators say there have been sweeping improvements in recent decades, with widespread acceptance that abusive behavior is unacceptable and that proper procedures can minimize it.
Advocates for reform and former inmates, however, say a culture of violence persists and is made worse because of tacit acceptance by administrators, politicians and the public.
States' mandatory sentencing laws have helped drive the stunning rise in prison and jail populations in the past two decades -- now at 2.1 million, a number that's nearly quadrupled since 1980.
A 1996 federal law that aimed to cut back so-called frivolous inmate lawsuits has also restricted access to legitimate claims of misconduct and poor prison conditions, advocates say.
``The system is out of control,'' said Elizabeth Alexander, who oversees the American Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project. ``In this sense, it's like Iraq. The more overcrowded you are, the more your budget doesn't match your needs, the more likely abuse is.''
The pressures on prisons are also well-documented. Turnover among corrections officers averaged 15 percent in 2002, and in several states was over 30 percent, the American Correctional Association reports.
States and local governments have been slow to increase funding as the population behind bars rises -- staff rose 24 percent from 1995 to 2000, while inmates in prisons, jails, boot camps and other facilities rose 28 percent, the ACA reported.
But prison administrators maintain that, despite the obstacles, significant improvements have been made.
``Look, there's abuses in school systems, there's abuses in the Catholic church,'' said James Gondles, executive director of the American Correctional Association. ``In the past 20 years, there's been a sea change in American corrections.''
Prison officials recognize the potential for problems, he said. ``You have almost absolute power over other individuals, and that is a system that could easily breed abuse.''
The key steps are proper training, strong communications, opening prisons to scrutiny, full funding of programs, and making sure those that break rules are punished.
His group, along with a dozen more that represent prison and jail guards, teachers and administrators, issued a statement Friday calling the abuses in Iraq abhorrent and in no way reflective of practices in U.S. prisons and jails.
The impetus for the statement came from news that two soldiers charged in the Iraq prison scandal were guards in civilian life.
``If anybody is a professional corrections officer, and they're guilty of that abuse, they're not much of a professional,'' Gondles said. ``I am not proud of the fact that two or three of them worked full-time in corrections in the United States.''
Critics counter that the link makes perfect sense, exactly because the U.S. prison system has failed to curb its problems.
``Most of the violence comes from correctional officers,'' said Michael A. Blain, who served most of a seven-year sentence for robbery in Virginia and now works with the Drug Policy Alliance, a group working for alternatives to prison.
``There are beatings, there are accidents, there are unreported deaths, very much like what we're finding in Iraq,'' he said. He said he was badly beaten by two guards after organizing a protest over food, who falsely portrayed the incident as his fault.
Officer-on-inmate abuse like that alleged in Iraq has long been a worry. But most prison reform advocates say an even bigger problem is inmate-on-inmate assault and rape; prisons are supposed to prevent that, too.
Meanwhile, federal law has made court scrutiny of problems more difficult. The 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act greatly reduced the number of inmate lawsuits in the federal courts, according to a study by Margo Schlanger, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School.
``The statute seems to be making even constitutionally meritorious cases harder both to bring and to win,'' she wrote in her study, published in the Harvard Law Review.
Those effects should raise concerns, given the large role the federal courts have played in mandating constitutional conditions in prisons and jails, Schlanger said. That means providing adequate safety, food, medical care, and general living conditions.
Throughout the past 20 years, roughly one-quarter of the nation's prisons, housing roughly 40 percent of all prison inmates, have been in faciliites that were under oversight by federal judges during any given year, she said.
Besides the presence of civilian correctional officers in the incidents at Iraq, another link between the prison systems here and the military system has raised questions.
O.L. ``Lane'' McCotter, who oversaw prisons in three states before helping set up operations at the Abu Ghraib facility outside Baghdad, had been in charge of state systems in New Mexico and Utah when allegations of abuse were raised.
He resigned as head of Utah's prisons in 1997, two months after a mentally ill inmate died after spending 16 hours strapped to a restraining chair.
In New Mexico in 1988, a court-appointed prison monitor accused New Mexico state prison officials of erasing a portion of a videotape of a prison disturbance to cover up acts of brutality. McCotter accused the prison monitor of ``fabricating atrocities,'' and said he believed the tape erasure was accidental.
McCotter has said he wasn't involved in training any guards in Iraq; he helped oversee the reconstruction of the prison.
AP reporter Katharine Webster in Concord, N.H., contributed to this report.
-------- terrorism
Morocco Connection Is Emerging as Sleeper Threat in Terror War
May 16, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/international/africa/16MORO.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
RABAT, Morocco - They speak in an ever changing code. The word for prison might be hospital. Passport becomes book, or sometimes djellaba, the simple robe worn by men in North Africa. Explosives is honey or sneakers.
And when someone says "the soccer team is ready," an illegal operation is about to start.
The Moroccan branch of militant Islam is not new. But intelligence officials here and in Europe say that until this past year they failed to penetrate its communications and missed its significance. The French worried about Algerians and Tunisians; the Spanish focused on Basques. Belgium, whose Muslim population is largely Moroccan, had fewer than three dozen counterterror specialists in its police force.
Since suicide bombings in Casablanca in May last year that killed dozens, and the devastating train bombings in Madrid this March, Moroccan groups have been seen as central to the terrorist threat in Europe, forcing intelligence and law-enforcement officials to adjust their strategies.
It has been a tortuous undertaking. Morocco has been among the West's closest Arab allies and has long been instrumental in pursuing Arab-Israeli reconciliation. Although Moroccan and European officials now agree that there is a new Moroccan threat, they disagree over its nature and origin - and how to contain it.
One problem is simply identifying major Moroccan terrorists. Two months after the Madrid train bombings, Spanish investigators believe that its mastermind may still be at large.
The French and Belgian police successfully dismantled Moroccan cells in their countries after the Madrid attacks, but they are convinced that other cells may have burrowed further underground.
Moroccan terrorists, intelligence and police experts say, know how to blend in.
"There are cells in which the Moroccans are well integrated into the population," Pierre de Bousquet, the head of the Directorate for Territorial Surveillance, France's counterintelligence service, said in an interview. "So they do not seem suspicious. They work. They have kids. They have fixed addresses. They pay the rent. The networks are dispersed throughout Europe and are very autonomous."
In addition to uneven cooperation among law enforcement and intelligence agencies within Europe, there is the problem of tensions that have surfaced between European and Moroccan officials.
Although the two sides are working together to investigate the Madrid bombings, the Moroccans have complained that their pleas for help after the Casablanca attacks were largely ignored until terrorists struck the heart of Europe.
They also have expressed frustration that laws in many European countries are not tough enough.
In April a court in Hamburg, Germany, allowed a Moroccan who was the only person convicted in connection with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States to leave prison pending a new trial.
Three weeks later a court in Rome acquitted 12 people, including 9 Moroccans, who were arrested in 2002 and accused of being associated with a terrorist organization.
"The Madrid bombings finally have forced the Europeans to make their investigations more serious and their cooperation quicker and more operational," Gen. Hamidou Laanigri, Morocco's chief of security, said in an interview. "But we are victims of laws and guarantees that protect the rights of individuals at the expense of cracking down against organized crime."
Intelligence and law-enforcement officials in Spain, France and Belgium say that their Moroccan colleagues have refused to face the fact that Moroccans have banded into autonomous terror cells that can carry out attacks without outside organization, logistical support or money.
The day after the Madrid bombings, senior Moroccan officials were shown a video made by the bombers in which a masked man explained in Arabic who was responsible for the attack. The Moroccans insisted that the voice was that of a European, while the Spanish authorities said he was Moroccan, according to Moroccan and Spanish officials.
Ángel Acebes, Spain's interior minister at the time, announced publicly the next evening that the man had a Moroccan accent, and the Moroccans backed down.
Many European officials also have expressed frustration with Morocco's tendency to blame Al Qaeda for ordering and organizing every plot, rather than view it as a more widespread ideological inspiration.
"It's easier for the Moroccans to place responsibility outside Morocco and blame Al Qaeda, because it frees them from responsibility," said one senior Belgian intelligence official. "They refuse to see there's an internal component of the problem, one of poverty and despair."
For their part, Moroccan officials, who have issued 44 international arrest warrants for suspected terrorists, have accused European countries of being slow or unwilling to extradite suspects they have captured.
Britain, for example, has refused to extradite Muhammad al-Gerbouzi, whom Morocco has identified as a battle-hardened veteran of Afghanistan and a planner of the Casablanca attacks as well as a founder of the Moroccan Combatant Islamic Group, identified by the United Nations as a terrorist network connected to Al Qaeda.
An international arrest warrant from Morocco showing a blurry photo of a bearded Mr. Gerbouzi states that he is wanted for "criminal association with relation to a terrorist enterprise, preparation of the commission of terrorist acts, collection of funds to finance terrorist acts, an attack on the internal security of the state and complicity in the falsification and use of passports."
According to General Laanigri, Osama bin Laden authorized Mr. Gerbouzi to open a training camp for Moroccans in Afghanistan in the beginning of 2001. Last December, Mr. Gerbouzi was tried in absentia in Morocco for his involvement in the Casablanca attacks and given a 20-year sentence.
"We know for certain from confessions of those we have arrested that the preparations for the Casablanca attack were made at a meeting in Istanbul in January 2003 that al-Gerbouzi attended," General Laanigri said.
But the British government has no extradition treaty with Morocco and has refused to extradite Mr. Gerbouzi, a 44-year-old father of six who lives in a rundown apartment in north London. British officials say there is not enough evidence to arrest him, General Laanigri said.
In an interview with The Guardian last month, Mr. Gerbouzi dismissed charges that he was linked to radical Islamic groups as "complete nonsense," adding that he had never been to Afghanistan, worshiped at an Islamic center in west London and drove his children to school. "I have nothing to hide," he said.
Some senior intelligence officials in Europe said they suspected that Mr. Gerbouzi was being protected by the British authorities because he was an informer, while others said he was no longer dangerous because he was so carefully watched. Another complicating factor is the fact that Morocco still has the death penalty while European Union countries do not.
British officials declined to comment on the case.
European officials also have complained that their Moroccan counterparts reflexively tend to blame the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group for all terrorist activity, while many Europeans intelligence officials are convinced that the group is more an ideological concept than a structured organization. Almost half of the Moroccans wanted on international terrorist arrest warrants issued by Morocco are listed as having links to the group.
The group is the successor to an earlier guerrilla organization that wanted to overthrow Morocco's monarchy. But faced with the improbability of such an ambitious goal, a number of its followers moved to Europe.
In Europe as well as Morocco, they were recruited by Al Qaeda and sent as volunteers to Afghanistan, where Moroccans had set up their own training camp. By the end of the 1990's Moroccans who trained in Afghanistan were calling themselves the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group.
But European intelligence officials said the group has no hierarchy, membership roster or formal manifesto and has never claimed responsibility for a terrorist attack.
"It is reassuring for the Moroccans to give a name to the radicals," said one French intelligence official. "But it's a virtual movement." Another French official described it as "a plant that doesn't need to root in soil that appears suddenly and grows without an apparent structure."
In 2002 the group, known by its initials in French, G.I.C.M., was put on a United Nations list of terrorist organizations linked to Al Qaeda, and in 2003 was added to the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.
Months after the Casablanca attacks, Morocco began to link many of those suspected of involvement with the organization.
"Now we have a situation where Morocco gives you a long list, tells you everyone on the list is a member of G.I.C.M. and asks you to put them all in jail," said one senior Belgian official. "You cannot just issue arrest warrants without proof."
The Moroccans have also altered their claims about evidence. Senior intelligence officials from two European countries said they had been told by their Moroccan counterparts days after the Casablanca attacks that the attacks had been ordered and financed by Al Qaeda, even though the suicide attackers were Moroccans from a slum outside Casablanca.
The proof, the Moroccan officials said at the time, was a bank transfer to the group of between $50,000 and $70,000 from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant. [The C.I.A. has identified Mr. Zarqawi as probably being the hooded terrorist who beheaded Nicholas E. Berg, a young American businessman, in Iraq.]
Moroccan officials now say that there was no bank transfer, only the informal disbursal of several smaller amounts of money as charity payments to the families of Moroccans who had fought in Afghanistan.
Despite the problems, there is a growing realization in Morocco and European countries that they need each other. The Spanish authorities said they were able to identify six of seven bombers who blew themselves up in an apartment after the Madrid bombings thanks to DNA samples of their family members taken by Moroccan authorities.
When Jean-Louis Bruguière, France's most senior antiterrorist investigatory magistrate, visited Morocco in late March he was shown evidence that led directly to arrests outside Paris several days later and the disbanding of a Moroccan cell suspected of involvement in the Casablanca bombings.
"We would have had a hard time finding them," Mr. de Bousquet, the French counterterrorist expert, said. "Morocco helped provide information that led to the arrests."
-------- torture
INTERROGATIONS
Rumsfeld and Aide Backed Harsh Tactics, Article Says
May 16, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTONand TIM GOLDEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/international/middleeast/16ABUS.html
WASHINGTON, May 15 - Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and one of his top aides authorized the expansion of a secret program that permitted harsh interrogations of detained members of Al Qaeda, allowing these methods to be used against prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to an article in The New Yorker.
The article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reported that Mr. Rumsfeld and Stephen A. Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, approved the use of the tougher interrogation techniques in Iraq in 2003 to extract better information from Iraqi prisoners to counter the growing insurgency threat in the country.
Mr. Hersh's account, to be published in the May 24 issue of the magazine, said that the expansion of the "special access program" allowed authorities in charge of Abu Ghraib to engage in degrading and sexually humiliating practices. It was posted on Saturday on The New Yorker's Web site.
"According to interviews with several past and present American intelligence officials," Mr. Hersh wrote, "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."
Mr. Hersh's reporting focuses new attention on an important question in the prisoner abuse scandal - whether senior military or civilian officials ordered the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. Mr. Rumsfeld, who has apologized for the abuses, has said that they were carried out by lower-level forces without the approval of senior commanders.
The article suggested that Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cambone had, in effect, shifted the blame for the abuses away from top civilians at the Pentagon to lower-level military police guards who are facing disciplinary proceedings in military courts.
On Saturday, officials in the Bush administration disputed several of the critical details of Mr. Hersh's article. They said that they were aware of no high-level decision to use highly coercive interrogation techniques on Iraqi prisoners.
A military official who worked in Iraq on detention issues said on Saturday that a covert task force of military and intelligence officers had operated in Iraq, but that it had appeared to limit its contact with the jailers at Abu Ghraib.
The official said that the covert operators worked out of their own highly secret and well-guarded compound in Baghdad, where they held captives incommunicado and questioned them for relatively short periods of time before turning them over to the jailers at Abu Ghraib.
"They had their own mission," the official said. "They picked up their own people. They were operating under their own rules. So we had nothing to do with that. It would have been a huge security violation for anyone else to be in there."
The official said the group was no longer working in Iraq.
The official said the Baghdad compound where the team worked was so closely controlled that other military and intelligence personnel could not enter it without having clearance or the authorization of the commander of American forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez. The official declined to discuss what interrogation techniques the covert team used, but said it generally turned over prisoners to Abu Ghraib after 72 hours.
The official said that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the commander of the military detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, visited the covert compound last September, during a trip to assess the problems with detention and interrogation efforts in Iraq. General Miller was accompanied by a detention expert, who made suggestions about the security of the compound.
Bush administration officials pointed to testimony before Congress in which several administration officials acknowledged that the Geneva Conventions applied to detainees in Iraq and therefore did not permit coercive tactics.
But some officials acknowledged that as the insurgency worsened in Iraq last summer, there was rising concern about how to improve intelligence about future attacks.
One solution to these concerns, Mr. Hersh wrote, "was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents." Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cambone went a step further, the article said, expanding the scope of a secret program by "bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan."
At the Pentagon, the chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, vigorously denied the allegations that Mr. Cambone directed a covert program to encourage the coercion and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners.
"It's pure, unadulterated fantasy," Mr. Di Rita said in a telephone interview. "We don't discuss covert programs, but nothing in any covert program would have led anyone to sanction activity like what was seen on those videos."
"No responsible official in this department, including Secretary Rumsfeld, would or could have been involved in sanctioning the physical coercion or sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners," Mr. Di Rita said.
Some elements of the New Yorker article have been previously reported, including the special interrogation program for Qaeda prisoners captured in Afghanistan. That program, authorized by government legal opinions that said that Qaeda prisoners were "illegal combatants" not protected by the Geneva Conventions, included coercive methods, although it barred the use of torture as defined by federal statutes and international conventions.
--------
A DANGEROUS CALCULUS
What's Wrong With Torturing a Qaeda Higher-Up?
May 16, 2004
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/weekinreview/16slac.html?pagewanted=all&position=
IN 1995, the police in the Philippines tortured Abdul Hakim Murad after finding a bomb-making factory in his apartment in Manila. They broke his ribs, burned him with cigarettes, forced water down his throat, then threatened to turn him over to the Israelis. Finally, from this withered and broken man came secrets of a terror plot to blow up 11 airliners, crash another into the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency and to assassinate the pope.
"It worked," said Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor of law at Harvard who has written about the potential necessity of torture in the post-9/11 world. "It took what is called 'torture lite' and nonlethal torture to break him down and reveal truthful information that may have saved many lives."
Few Americans will say they support torture. But what if, as in the case of Mr. Murad, or if authorities had captured one of those engaged in planning the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there was reason to believe that torture could produce information that would save many lives? Under those circumstance, does torture become necessary, if perhaps regrettable?
The search for an effective way to combat the very real threat of terrorism has forced Americans to confront such uncomfortable questions and the gap that at times exists between the nation's expressed values and its practices.
Federal investigators, for example, have used coercive methods against a select group of high-level terrorist leaders and operatives. They tried to extract information from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-level Al Qaeda prisoner, by strapping him down and pushing him under water until he felt he would drown. Investigators called this "water boarding" and insisted that it stopped short of torture.
In the face of a dangerous, implacable enemy, such methods, and perhaps others still more extreme, may easily come to seem more acceptable. As Richard A. Posner, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, wrote in The New Republic in September 2002, in a review of Mr. Dershowitz's book, "Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge": "If torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be used - and will be used - to obtain the information."
The debate about torture runs along two tracks. The first centers on morality, on the question of whether it can ever be right for a society openly to endorse such practices. But the other aspect of the debate has to do with effectiveness. Does torture work? In many ways, that debate mirrors the death penalty debate; critics say there is no empirical evidence to support the idea that the ultimate sanction deters crime, while supporters often claim that it does.
Darius Rejali, an associate professor of political science and the author of the book "Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran," said his studies show that torture is ineffective as a tool for gathering information. "My position is there is no empirical evidence to suggest that this works, at least in the way that people claim that it does in the war against terrorism," Mr. Rejali said.
Take the case of Mr. Murad, whom Mr. Dershowitz pointed to as proof that torture is a useful tool. Mr. Rejali said that it took more than a month to break Mr. Murad and extract information - a delay that would have made it impossible to head off an imminent threat.
Mr. Rejali said he has studied Algeria's violent struggle in the late 1950's for independence from France. He said he pored through the archives and found no evidence that the French were able to harvest a significant amount of valuable intelligence through their use of torture. He said he came to the same conclusion after studying the Nazis' use of torture throughout Europe.
"The Gestapo wasn't getting a whole hell of a lot when it tortured resistance people," he said.
Indeed, a study by Human Rights Watch found that torture of criminal suspects often produces inaccurate information. In 1999, Diederik Lohman, a senior researcher for the group, issued a report, "Confessions at Any Cost: Police Torture in Russia," which documented widespread use of torture among the Russian police.
The report quoted Boris Botvinnik, a university student in Moscow who confessed in 1996 to a murder and robbery after his vision was severely damaged from repeated bouts of near asphyxiation.
"I wanted to save what was left of me," Mr. Botvinnik said.
Mr. Lohman said, "That is the problem: If you torture me, I am going to tell you whatever you want to get you to stop.
In Iraq, a man named Saddam Saleh Aboud told The New York Times that after being hooded and handcuffed naked, doused with water, threatened with rape and forced to sit in his own urine over 18 days at Abu Ghraib prison, he was ready to confess to anything.
"They asked, 'Do you know the Islamic opposition?' '' Mr. Aboud recalled in an interview in Baghdad. "I said yes." At one point, Mr. Aboud said: "They asked me about Osama bin Laden. I said, 'I am Osama bin Laden. I am disguised.' "
But if torture doesn't work, why is it so widely employed? The answer, Mr. Rijali and others say, is that it does work as a tool of intimidation, if not intelligence gathering. In authoritarian countries around the world, where leaders struggle to assert their authority, the threat of torture is often enough to keep some kind of social order and inspire informers to come to the government with information - as it did in the Iraq of Saddam Hussein.
But that same intimidation effect, experts said, could undermine the efforts of an occupying power, with waning international support, to win the hearts and minds of a people.
"You know if you are strong and if you have a strong logic you can convince people by your ideas," said the Egyptian writer Nawal Sadawi by phone from her home in Cairo. "Torture means your logic is very weak, so you need power to impose it on others."
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Knowledge of Abusive Tactics May Go Higher
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29988-2004May15?language=printer
Army intelligence officers suspected that a Syrian and admitted jihadist who was detained at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad knew about the illegal flow of money, arms and foreign fighters into Iraq. But he was smug, the officers said, and refused to talk. So last November, they devised a special plan for his interrogation, going beyond what Army rules normally allowed.
An Army colonel in charge of intelligence-gathering at the prison, spelling out the plan in a classified cable to the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, said interrogators would use a method known as "fear up harsh," which military documents said meant "significantly increasing the fear level in a security detainee." The aim was to make the 31-year-old Syrian think his only hope in life was to talk, undermining his confidence in what they termed "the Allah factor."
According to the plan, interrogators needed the assistance of military police supervising his detention at the prison, who ordinarily play no role in interrogations under Army regulations. First, the interrogators were to throw chairs and tables in the man's presence at the prison and "invade his personal space."
Then the police were to put a hood on his head and take him to an isolated cell through a gantlet of barking guard dogs; there, the police were to strip-search him and interrupt his sleep for three days with interrogations, barking and loud music, according to Army documents. The plan was sent to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez.
A spokesman for Sanchez declined to comment yesterday, and so it remains uncertain whether the plan was one of 25 requests for unusually tough interrogations that Army officials in Washington have said he approved between October and the present. All involved prolonged isolation of detainees, the officials said on Friday, adding that Sanchez last week issued an order barring requests for approval of particularly severe questioning tactics.
But the fact that a plan for such intense and highly organized pressure was proposed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas -- a senior military intelligence officer in Iraq who took his job at the insistence of a general dispatched from the Pentagon -- suggests a wider circle of involvement in aggressive and potentially abusive interrogations of Iraqi detainees, encompassing officers higher up the chain of command, than the Army has previously detailed.
While the Army has blamed the physical abuses documented in soldiers' photographs on a handful of night-shift soldiers at Abu Ghraib who ignored rules on humane treatment, government officials and humanitarian experts say the order indicates the abuses could instead have been an outgrowth of harsh treatment that had been approved.
They suggest in particular that military intelligence officials may not only have improperly tolerated physical abuses, as stated in the Army's official internal report, but also that they may have deliberately set the stage for them. According to a hypothesis now being explored by members of Congress, this stage was set through a directed collaboration between two units of military police and intelligence officers, virtually unprecedented in recent Army practice.
The interrogation plan for the Syrian "clearly allows for a crossing of the line into abusive behavior," said James Ross, a senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch who reviewed it for The Washington Post.
What makes its wording so troubling, Ross added, is that it allows "wide authority for soldiers conducting interrogations. . . . Were the superior officer to agree to these techniques, it would be opening the door for any soldier or officer to be committing abusive acts and believe they were doing so" with official sanction.
Congressional testimony by Defense Department and Army officials over the past two weeks has highlighted the fact that the abuses in Iraq -- which mostly occurred in the last quarter of 2003 -- came at a time of heightened pressures in Washington for more robust intelligence-gathering, because of proliferating attacks on U.S. forces and the dwindling intelligence on Saddam Hussein's suspected weapons of mass destruction.
Although no direct links have been found between the documented abuses and orders from Washington, Pentagon officials who spoke on the condition that they not be named say that the hunt for data on these two topics was coordinated during this period by Defense Undersecretary Stephen A. Cambone, the top U.S. military intelligence official and long one of the closest aides to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld.
The coincidence in timing has in turn prompted several lawmakers to say they intend to probe more deeply in coming weeks to determine whether the specialists and sergeants handling the prison guard dogs and pulling hoods over prisoners' heads were in fact implementing policy directives instigated by Washington that may have set the stage for abuses.
"We've got no proof that a person in authority told them to do this activity," Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the Army's deputy chief of staff, said on May 11.
But three directives in particular have already begun to attract congressional scrutiny: The first is a classified report by Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller on Sept. 9, 2003, demanding that the military police at Abu Ghraib be dedicated and trained to set "the conditions for the successful interrogation and exploitation of internees/detainees." The report, which Cambone has testified was presented to his deputy William Boykin, contained five recommendations spelling out how this was to occur and reported it had already begun.
The second is an Oct. 12 classified memo signed by Sanchez that demanded a "harmonization" of military policing and intelligence work at Abu Ghraib for the purpose of ensuring "consistency with the interrogation policies . . . and maximiz[ing] the efficiency of the interrogation."
The memo, obtained by The Washington Post, also states "it is imperative that interrogators be provided reasonable latitude to vary their approach," depending on a detainee's background, strengths, resistance and other factors. It also explicitly demands humane treatment and requires that any dogs present during the interrogations be muzzled.
The third is a Nov. 19 memo from Sanchez's office that formally placed the two key Abu Ghraib cellblocks where the abuses occurred under the control of Pappas and his 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. It was 11 days later, after this memo placed the military police responsible for "security of detainees and base protection" in Pappas's hands, that he sought, in his memo to Sanchez, to draw military police explicitly into applying pressure on the Syrian.
The fact that prison interrogations were so directly controlled by these military directives, as well as the apparent cultural sophistication of some of the abuses, has already led some lawmakers to conclude that much more experienced and senior officers were involved than the seven military police now charged by the Army with wrongdoing.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) expressed skepticism during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Tuesday, for example, that a group of military police from rural Maryland and West Virginia "would have chosen bizarre sexual humiliations that were specifically designed to be offensive to Muslim men [as the photos depicted]. . . . It implies too much knowledge. . . . And that is why, even though I do not yet have the evidence, I cannot help but suspect that others were involved."
Alexander did nothing to steer her away from that idea. "Well, ma'am, your logic is correct. I think that the difficult part is to find out who told whom what to do."
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) expressed similar concerns on May 7. "On the surface, you could portray the 800th MP Brigade as a Reserve unit with poor leadership and poor training," he told top Pentagon officials at the hearing that day. "However, the abuse of prisoners is not merely the failure of an MP brigade; it's a failure of the chain of command."
Military Police
At the heart of the unfolding congressional probe into what happened at Abu Ghraib is the conduct there of two units: the 800th Military Police Brigade, an Army reserve unit based in Uniondale, N.Y., and the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, a regular Army unit principally based in Germany and Italy.
Two months after the end of the war, when members of the 800th brigade were preparing to go home, they were abruptly told they were being assigned to take over the Iraqi prison system. Looting in the weeks after the war ended had reduced Abu Ghraib and virtually every other prison to a shambles, producing acute shortages of supplies and eliminating such amenities as water and electricity.
"It's difficult for people who are not on the ground in Iraq to understand how nonexistent the detention infrastructure was when we arrived," said a senior official with the U.S.-led occupation. "There was no reliable labor force to work in the prisons. . . . It was in total disarray."
Almost immediately, the brigade's chain of command was tangled, as was the case with many military units in Iraq. Its work was directly supervised by the U.S. military's deputy commander in Iraq, Army Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski, but Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski said she also "answered to" L. Paul Bremer and to a regional commander in Kuwait.
The brigade, like its specific components assigned to Abu Ghraib, was trained not to oversee the detention of prisoners in jails, but to resettle prisoners of war. "They were assigned there because there was a shortage of specialty units," Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve, testified last week before a House Government Reform subcommittee.
All of the Iraqi prisons were understaffed because promised civilian contractors never appeared, Karpinski said. Unlike the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, which has 800 police guarding 640 detainees, Karpinski had one soldier available to guard every 10 detainees in a prison population that included men and women of varying ages, criminals, terrorists and mentally ill persons.
"It's like being in Dodge City in the 1870's without speaking the same language," said a newsletter home last summer from the 372nd Military Police Company, the Cresaptown, Md., unit assigned in October to guard Abu Ghraib. "The prison 'detainee' climate is becoming more strained as the months drag on," the December newsletter said. "We take each day as it comes, do our jobs, and wait for the day when we all get to go home."
Discipline among the soldiers slumped over time, according to internal Army reports. Military police were permitted to wear civilian clothes to boost morale, but it contributed to sloppiness about other rules, investigators concluded; platoon leaders encouraged some of their soldiers to carry concealed weapons while walking among the detainees, a violation of regulations. Punishments for minor offenses were rare; a climate of leniency developed.
Army investigators have concluded that the brigade's low familiarity with Islamic culture provided a breeding ground for racism and a widespread conviction that Muslims were terrorists. One of its dog handlers insisted that the animals simply disliked Iraqis because of their appearance and smell.
One of the most notorious photos to emerge from the prison -- of naked and cuffed Iraqi men pushed together on the prison floor in a simulation of sex -- originated in a decision by guards to punish two Iraqis for raping a 14-year-old male detainee, the participants said. On another occasion, a guard attacked, beat and hung a handcuffed Iraqi by his wrists -- dislocating his shoulders -- in a fit of anger over the Iraqi's role in smuggling a pistol into the prison.
When Karpinski brought up a Red Cross complaint that intelligence officers had demanded recalcitrant prisoners be escorted back to their cells wearing women's underwear, a deputy to the chief intelligence officer joked about it.
"I told the commander to stop giving them Victoria's Secret catalogs," the deputy said in a roomful of officers, Karpinski recalled. She said she replied that the Red Cross would not appreciate that response.
Military Intelligence
The decision to place the prison's key cellblocks -- 1A and 1B, which held "security detainees" suspected of threatening U.S. forces or knowing about such threats -- under the direct control of the 205th MI Brigade came shortly after Miller visited Iraq in late August and early September at the request of Cambone, according to Cambone's congressional testimony last week.
Miller, a combat officer with no training in prisons or intelligence-gathering, had won accolades inside the Pentagon and attracted controversy outside it earlier in the year, when he oversaw a transformation of the military's long-term detention center at Guantanamo Bay from a disorganized bundle of tents into an efficient prison that routinely produced what officials have called "moderately valuable" intelligence for the war on terrorism.
Miller's signature achievement at the Cuban center was to implement a system of rewards and punishments in detainee housing, food, clothing and other treatment that provided incentives for use as leverage during interrogations. Cambone testified last week that he sent Miller to Iraq to help ensure "there was a flow of intelligence [from the jail] back to the commands and [that it was] done in an efficient and effective way."
Shortly after Miller's return, new rules were written for interrogation sessions involving detainees in cellblocks 1A and 1B, which stressed a collaboration between military police and intelligence officials while also providing safeguards such as legal reviews of the interrogation plans and scrutiny of how they were carried out. The rules were signed by Sanchez, but it remains unclear who -- if anyone -- in Washington may have seen them in draft or final form.
The reality in the field, Army investigators quickly learned, was an absence of any supervision or monitoring. Pappas, for example, told them that no procedures were in place for the independent monitoring of the interrogations and no personnel were available to do it, officials familiar with his testimony said. Moreover, most of the Army soldiers accused of abuse have said they were encouraged to undertake it by military intelligence officials in the prison, who sometimes merely observed and sometimes took part in it themselves.
"MI has . . . instructed us to place prisoners in an isolation cell with little or no clothes, no toilet or running water, no ventilation or window, for as much as three days," Army Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II said in a diary he wrote after being accused of wrongdoing.
One of the soldiers "was known to bang on the table, yell, scream, and maybe assaulted detainees during interrogations in the booth," said Sgt. Samuel Jefferson Provance III, a military intelligence officer who testified during a military court proceeding against one of the military policemen on May 1. "This was not to be discussed. It was kept 'hush-hush.' "
Although at least four Army lawyers were assigned to the military intelligence brigade and its offices at Abu Ghraib, it remains unclear whether they played a meaningful role in trying to block abuses. Maj. Gen. Thomas Romig, the service's judge advocate general, testified last week that the Army is reviewing their "resourcing and training" in the wake of the scandal.
Karpinski said in an interview last week that if the interrogation plan put forward by Pappas had been presented to her, "I would have said, 'Absolutely not. Not on my watch. Take your procedures somewhere else.' " If such a plan can be made, she said, "this whole thing is more offensive than I thought. That does sound like abuse and torture."
Robert K. Goldman, an American University law professor who teaches a course on the law of war, commented about the interrogation plan that, "in my view, a good deal of it crosses the line. . . . They are talking about breaking the detainee, and exercising extreme moral and possibly physical coercion."
Why is the dog there? he asked. "This is very coercive. It cannot be justified by any lawful interrogation technique." The strip searching of someone already being held in detention is clearly "to humiliate him. There is no question. . . . This is violative of the spirit if not the letter of the Geneva Conventions. It's like a B-grade movie."
Foreign correspondents Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Sewell Chan in Baghdad contributed to this report.
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Abuse Scandal Focuses on Bush Foundation
May 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Prisoner-Abuse.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal shifted Sunday to the question of whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment. Within months of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales reportedly wrote President Bush a memo about the terrorism fight and prisoners' rights under the Geneva Conventions.
``In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions,'' Gonzales wrote, according to the report in Newsweek magazine. Secretary of State Colin Powell ``hit the roof'' when he read the memo, according to the account.
Asked about the Gonzales memo, the White House said, ``It is the policy of the United States to comply with all of our laws and our treaty obligations.''
The roots of the scandal lay in a decision, approved last year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a classified operation for aggressive interrogations to Iraqi prisoners, a program that had been focused on the hunt for al-Qaida, The New Yorker magazine reported.
The Pentagon said that story was ``filled with error and anonymous conjecture'' and called it ``outlandish, conspiratorial.'' National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, in a German television interview, said of The New Yorker report, ``As far as we can tell, there's really nothing to the story.''
Powell said Sunday that there were discussions at high levels inside the Bush administration last fall about information from the International Committee of the Red Cross alleging prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the focal point of the scandal.
``We knew that the ICRC had concerns, and in accordance with the matter in which the ICRC does its work, it presented those concerns directly to the command in Baghdad,'' Powell said on ``Fox News Sunday.'' ``And I know that some corrective action was taken with respect to those concerns.''
Powell added, ``All of the reports we received from ICRC having to do with the situation in Guantanamo, the situation in Afghanistan or the situation in Iraq was the subject of discussion within the administration, at our principals' committee meetings'' and at National Security Council meetings.
Congressional critics suggested the administration may have unwisely imported to Iraq techniques from the war on al-Qaida.
``There is a sort of morphing of the rules of treatment,'' said Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del. ``We can treat al-Qaida this way, and we can't treat prisoners captured this way, but where do insurgents fit? This is a dangerous slope.''
The abuse scandal goes ``much higher'' than the young American guards watching over Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Biden said on NBC's ``Meet the Press.''
In early 2002, the White House announced that Taliban and al-Qaida detainees would not be afforded prisoner-of-war status, but that the United States would apply the Geneva Conventions to the war in Afghanistan.
Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said on CBS' ``Face the Nation'' that the reports that Rumsfeld approved a secret program on interrogation for use in Iraq raise ``this issue to a whole new level.''
Asked about the Gonzales memo, Powell said: ``I wouldn't comment on the specific memo without rereading it again. But ... the Geneva Accord is an important standard in international law and we have to comply with it.''
Powell, interviewed from Jordan by NBC, left open the possibility of problems up the line from the prison guards who engaged in abuse. ``I don't see yet any indication that there was a command-climate problem higher up,'' the secretary said.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., expressed concern over the shift in responsibility for the scandal at the prison, where military intelligence personnel were given authority over the military police.
``We need to take this as far up as it goes,'' McCain said on ``Meet the Press.''
Former CIA counterterrorism official Vincent Cannistraro said it was a major miscalculation to apply interrogation methods that were specifically designed to extract information from al-Qaida prisoners to Abu Ghraib and other holding centers inside Iraq.
``It was probably the most counterproductive move that the policy-makers could have made and it showed the complete misunderstanding of the Iraq culture,'' said Cannistraro.
The reasons for importing the techniques, Cannistraro said, were the frustrations at the policy level in Washington that not enough information was being obtained about weapons of mass destruction and the frustration over the lack of information about the resistance in Iraq.
On the Net:
Taguba report: http://wid.ap.org/documents/iraq/taguba.pdf
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New Abuse Accusations Emerge as Senators Vow Tough Inquiry
May 16, 2004
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/international/middleeast/16CND-POLI.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 16 - Leading lawmakers from both parties vowed today to pursue the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal as high as it goes, even as controversy erupted over accusations that top Pentagon officials approved tougher interrogation tactics for Iraq in an urgent effort to gain intelligence to stop surging violence last summer.
The latest controversy surrounded assertions by the journalist Seymour M. Hersh that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had approved a policy decision, pressed by Stephen A. Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, to expand a highly secret operation, originally focused on hunting Al Qaeda militants, to include the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners. This operation was reported to have encouraged physical coercion and sexual humiliation of prisoners.
Mr. Hersh has made several revelations in the abuse scandal, but the Defense Department criticized his new article in The New Yorker in the very toughest of terms. It said assertions in his article were "outlandish, conspiratorial and filled with error and anonymous conjecture."
His accusations nonetheless were the focus of wide debate among senators and others interviewed on Sunday talk shows, who promised the Senate would investigate fully.
These developments came as the Bush administration moved further to redress problems in Iraq detention centers while struggling to overcome the spreading scandal, an apparent factor in the recent decline of President Bush's approval ratings to their lowest point yet.
The senior army general in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, moved late last week to eliminate the most coercive interrogation tactics at Abu Ghraib prison and other detention centers. He told military intelligence chiefs that case-by-case requests for unusually harsh techniques would no longer be approved.
Over the weekend, the focus grew on how high up the chain of command the orders permitting abuse originated, and whether top Pentagon officials either authorized excessive tactics or contributed to an atmosphere of laxity in interpreting and respecting prisoner-treatment standards.
Like Mr. Cambone, senior military officials have insisted that all those interrogation techniques approved for use have been allowable under international law. Mr. Cambone said they were included in the Army manual and followed the Geneva Conventions.
And the Pentagon statement denouncing Mr. Hersh's article said that the abuse at Abu Ghraib depicted in hundreds of photos and videotapes "has no basis in any sanctioned program, training manual, instruction or order in the Department of Defense."
The scandal has met with universal outrage in Washington but mixed views on how high responsibility can be traced.
The president and other administration officials have referred repeatedly to the "few" responsible for abuses.
But many in Congress have said that only by following the chain of command aggressively, and punishing those responsible to the fullest extent proper, can the air be cleared and the severe damage to the United States' image begin to be fixed.
"We need to take this as high up as it goes," said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, "and we need to do it quickly."
"You've got to get everything out as quickly as possible, take remedial action," Mr. McCain said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."
A senior Democrat who has been supportive of the Iraq war, Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, agreed.
"The search for truth should take us wherever it leads," he said on CNN. "That's the only way we're going to restore the honor of the United States."
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the abuse was part of "a process, not just the spontaneous actions of a few M.P.'s," or military police guards.
Mr. Rumsfeld has survived early calls for his resignation. Mr. Bush issued a verbal rebuke to the defense secretary, but followed it with praise a few days later for a "superb" job. Mr. Rumsfeld would likely still be vulnerable if he were connected to orders that led to abuse.
The Army general who led the central investigation of abuses at Abu Ghraib, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, told the Senate last week that "we did not find any evidence of a policy or a direct order given to these soldiers to conduct what they did." He added, "I believe that they did it on their own volition."
Some of the soldiers facing military trial for the abusive practices have blamed incitement or encouragement from their officers. But another, Army Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits, said their officers would have "slammed" them had the practices been known.
But Mr. Hersh writes that amid high frustration last summer over a series of bloody setbacks in Iraq, including the deadly August bombings of the Jordanian Embassy and of United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cambone sought urgently to increase the productive intelligence obtained from Iraqi prisoners.
According to the article, Mr. Rumsfeld approved a decision from Mr. Cambone - the top Pentagon official for intelligence - to give a highly secret operation a role in prisoner interrogation. With their approval, Mr. Hersh writes, "male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation."
Mr. Hersh quotes a former intelligence official as saying that this produced significant new intelligence, which in turn led to more arrests and detentions and fuller prisons.
"The goal was to use a couple of very harsh means - one, sexual humiliation, another, a more physical force," Mr. Hersh said on the CBS News program "Face the Nation."
"That - and I'm not saying Rumsfeld authorized what we saw in the last few weeks, but he did authorize these guys to come into the prison system and jack it up, get better stuff," he said.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said today that the abuse scandal had been "damaging" to the United States' image, but he denied any knowledge of the Hersh accusations.
"It has been damaging, there is no doubt about it," he said.
But he added, "The United States is a moral nation. And the world will now see how we bring people to justice for their misbehavior."
He suggested that he would like to see the same sort of outrage in the Arab world over the decapitation of a civilian American in Iraq, Nicholas Berg, as over the prison abuse.
"To have him murdered on camera, so that his parents could see it, with his throat being slit by one of the worst terrorists on the face of the Earth," Mr. Powell said, was "equal to any other act you've seen with respect to the need to condemn it."
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New Afghan Abuse Inquiry
May 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/international/asia/16afgh.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, May 15 (AP) - The United States military has opened its second investigation in a week into accusations of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, a spokesman said on Saturday.
On Monday, the military opened a criminal investigation into complaints of mistreatment from a former Afghan police officer who said that he was beaten and sexually assaulted during 40 days in custody last summer.
An American military spokesman, Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager, said leaders of the American-led coalition had been notified on Thursday of "another allegation of detainee abuse" and had begun an investigation.
He gave no further details of the allegation, saying only that the information had come from a third party.
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Congress Members Told of Abuse Months Ago
May 16, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Prisoner-Abuse.html
HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) -- Two months before pictures of Iraqi prisoner abuse became public, the family of one accused soldier wrote to 14 members of Congress that ``something went wrong'' involving ``mistreatment of POWs'' at Abu Ghraib prison.
Separately, a suspended Army officer in Iraq wrote to Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania that he was being unfairly punished after ``pictures of naked prisoners'' were discovered. He sent the letter six weeks before the CBS program ``60 Minutes II'' first broadcast photographs of the prisoners on April 28.
The strongest reply any of them got was a note saying what they already knew -- that the Army was investigating, according to documents released last week by Specter's office and the family of Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Ivan L. ``Chip'' Frederick.
Frederick, of the Maryland-based 372nd Military Police Company, faces a general court-martial on charges of conspiracy to maltreat detainees, dereliction of duty, maltreatment of detainees and wrongfully committing an indecent act.
In late February, his family sent letters or e-mails to 11 Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee, plus three of their local congressional members and Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, seeking information on Frederick's status, said Frederick's uncle, William W. Lawson, of Newburg, W.Va.
A Feb. 23 letter from Lawson to Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia said Frederick was relieved of prison-guard duty without explanation Jan. 14, two days before the Army publicly announced a criminal investigation of alleged prisoner mistreatment.
``At some point, something went wrong at the prison related to mistreatment of POWs,'' Lawson wrote.
Rockefeller responded on March 2 that the Army could not act on the request unless it came from Frederick's wife or mother.
Mark Ferrell, a spokesman for Rockefeller, said the letters sent on behalf of Frederick were ``consistent with what had been in the news about a Pentagon inquiry into prisoner abuse but gave no indication that widespread abuse existed.''
Still, he said, several people on Rockefeller's staff have had telephone conversations with Lawson since receiving his letter in February.
``The senator is eager to talk to Mr. Lawson and tried to call him last week but didn't reach him,'' Ferrell said.
Warner's spokeswoman, Ellen Qualls, said Sunday that the governor's office has found no record of a letter written by Frederick's family about the former corrections officer. ``I'm unaware of it,'' Qualls said.
Frederick's mother, Jo Ann Frederick, wrote on Feb. 24 to Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., and Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett, R-Md.
Sarbanes replied on Feb. 27 that he had ``written to the appropriate officials'' and would contact her when he received a reply.
Bartlett forwarded to her a response he received from the Army, saying that ``inquiry into this matter has been initiated.''
On March 18, Lt. Col. Jerry Phillabaum, formerly second-in-command at Abu Ghraib, wrote an e-mail to Specter mentioning ``digital pictures of naked prisoners,'' The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Saturday. At the time, Phillabaum had been suspended as commander of the 320th Military Police Battalion while Army investigators probed the alleged abuse. He has since been reprimanded and relieved of command.
In the letter, Phillabaum sought Specter's help in expediting the investigation so he could return to his family in Lansdale, Pa.
Specter's office released copies of its electronic correspondence with Phillabaum and his family last week. In a statement accompanying the e-mails, Specter's office said it paid little attention to the Abu Ghraib references because ``Phillabaum stated an investigation was underway,'' the Inquirer reported.
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Prison Abuse Investigators Question Hiring of Former Utah Prison Boss
The Associated Press
May. 16, 2004
http://tv.ksl.com/index.php?nid=5&sid=94232
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- U.S. Justice Department officials have come under fire for hiring a former Utah prison boss with a history of human rights complaints to oversee prisons in Iraq.
O. Lane McCotter, 63, was in Baghdad from May to September last year overseeing the reconstruction of Abu Ghraib as part of a team picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft. He was corrections director in Texas from 1985-87, New Mexico from 1987-91 and Utah from 1992-97.
McCotter advocated the use of restraining chairs in Utah prisons, causing the death in 1997 of a mentally ill inmate who spent 16 hours strapped to one. He resigned from his post two months later, and the department subsequently stopped using the chairs.
In October 1988, a court-appointed prison monitor accused New Mexico state prison officials of erasing a portion of a videotape of a prison disturbance to cover up acts of brutality. McCotter accused the prison monitor of "fabricating atrocities," and said he believed the tape erasure was accidental.
McCotter's critics say the pictures of abuse and humiliation at Abu Ghraib are eerily similar to video and written records that detail the plight of bound and naked Utah prisoners in the former isolation chamber at Utah's Point of the Mountain prison.
"If our government had a serious commitment to the humane treatment of prisoners, why would they send somebody to Iraq with a history of hostility to prisoner rights?" Carol Gnade, a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Utah who battled McCotter, told the Salt Lake Tribune. "What it shows is the U.S. government really doesn't take civil rights abuses in our own prison systems seriously."
McCotter has condemned the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, but told the Tribune he's also angry about sweeping condemnations of the U.S. military.
"We worked with military police every day," McCotter said. "We traveled with them, they helped us, and they provided the security so we could get (Abu Ghraib) open and operational ... The military police are literally on the front lines every day in Iraq. They were absolutely essential to everything we were doing."
McCotter has said his primary duty in Iraq was to evaluate the structural status of the prisons, and that he did not train guards.
Congress, meanwhile, is asking questions about how Ashcroft, President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chose the civil contractors who worked with the military intelligence teams at Abu Ghraib.
Lawmakers also want to know how Ashcroft found McCotter, whose selection is reviving outrage about the spotty history of human rights in U.S. prisons.
McCotter insists he can't recall who from the Bush administration asked him to go to Iraq.
"I'm retired military, my name probably surfaced from that," he says. "I got a call from them and they said I'd been recommended. I have no idea who."
-------- us politics
Oregon Primary May Be Last Stand for Kucinich
He acknowledges Kerry's superiority but hopes to leave a liberal mark on Democrats
By Susannah Rosenblatt
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
May 16, 2004
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-kucinich16may16,1,1009815.story?coll=la-headlines-nation
THE DALLES, Ore. - Dennis J. Kucinich doesn't believe in conventional wisdom.
Especially the kind that says with Sen. John F. Kerry as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, it's time for Kucinich to head home.
Kerry's nomination has been a foregone conclusion since early March. But that hasn't stopped Kucinich from spending 16-hour days zipping through the lush river gorges and mountain passes of Oregon to campaign for votes.
The Ohio congressman has been canvassing the state in a monthlong blitz leading up to Oregon's presidential primary on Tuesday. The contest may be Kucinich's best shot to put his liberal imprint on the Democratic Party's platform.
Kucinich said he had acknowledged that "the nomination was basically determined." But as he munched on vegan marshmallows from the backseat of a minivan last week, he added, "I'm staying in it because the direction of the party hasn't been determined."
If Kucinich has his way, that direction will be hard left. The former "boy mayor" of Cleveland favors universal healthcare, gay marriage, more federal money for education, and above all, the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
Oregon, whose Democratic voters often display a strong liberal bent, might be just the place for Kucinich's antiwar message to find a foothold. It is also home to his campaign's only staffed office besides the national headquarters in Ohio. And it is where he has spent $100,000 on television ads promoting his candidacy.
Some are listening.
"To me, he represents a real opportunity for change ... the real voice of the people," said Lloyd Moser, 59 a retired railroad repairman from The Dalles, a small town east of Portland, who came to hear Kucinich speak at the community's civic auditorium. Cheering crowds of 50 to 150 frequently turn out to hear his detailed Iraq exit strategy and plans for publicly funded healthcare, with many Democrats saying they are frustrated by the Bush administration and uninspired by Kerry. But whether such attitudes and Kucinich's efforts can translate into a strong showing by him in Tuesday's vote remains in doubt.
Kucinich has amassed only about three dozen of the more than 4,300 delegates headed for the Democratic National Convention in July. He needs to win 5% of the Oregon primary vote to earn any of the state's 58 Democratic delegates. His strongest support came in March's Hawaii and Alaska caucuses, in which he won roughly 26% of the votes.
Verne Tietjen, 94, a local newspaper columnist, said he was attracted by Kucinich's unabashedly liberal politics. Even so, he is undecided about who he will support in the primary.
Hank Werne, 60, a child welfare worker in Pendleton, Ore., plans to back Kucinich because he thinks his policies are "a lot more concrete."
Like many Kucinich fans, Werne then intends to vote for Kerry in the general election. Kerry, he said, "hasn't been that impressive, [but] this is one year that a protest vote is just not in order."
Indeed, interviews found that many of the Kucinich faithful plan to steer clear of Ralph Nader, the independent presidential candidate who won 5% of Oregon's vote as the Green Party nominee in the 2000 general election.
"I adore Ralph Nader but I want to support the Democratic Party because I don't feel right now ... that a third party is going to be a major challenge to the Bush administration," said Judy Talley, 53, a family therapist and health food store owner from Pendleton
A few have labeled Kucinich, like Nader, a Democratic spoiler. But, said Kucinich, the last thing he wants to do is siphon votes away from Kerry in the general election.
He has said he planned to support Kerry in the fall. In the meantime, his campaign hopes to bring 2,000 supporters to cheer Kucinich on at the national convention in Boston.
Winning delegates is central to why Kucinich and his supporters keep the campaign alive. As Bush and Kerry struggle to capture the narrowing margin of undecided voters, he is striving, he said, to light a fire in Kerry's belly.
Kerry, Kucinich said, "needs help."
"He needs to be encouraged to take stronger and bolder stands," Kucinich said. "It's not like in sports where you can sit on a lead and figure you can wait out the clock. He's going to have to be bold, challenge the [Bush] administration where they are most vulnerable - and that's the war ... politics as usual isn't going to win this election."
A skilled orator, Kucinich can command an audience's attention with extemporaneous policy riffs. His speeches, which he tailors to each audience without notes, tend toward a stew of poetry, references to world religions and occasional mentions of his Croatian grandfather.
He'll interrupt himself during an interview in his campaign van to marvel at the delicate whitecaps breaking on the gray-green Columbia River, whizzing by his window, and call his 22-year-old daughter, Jackie, to tell her how beautiful it all is.
"You know, if we don't get a single vote, you can't beat the scenery," he says with a belly laugh.
Pundits label him a political oddity, when they bother to mention him at all. But neither an indifferent press corps nor his grueling schedule can ruffle Kucinich's Zenlike composure.
"I come from a spiritual perspective on this, seeing the world as one ... I guess you could say when that happens, there's no exertion ... I just have a real sense of joy about what I'm doing."
Kucinich, who also favors withdrawing from the North American Free Trade Agreement and the World Trade Organization, fears that the Democratic Party has diluted its message in its effort to attract moderate voters.
There's a tendency among Democrats to try to "blur the differences on a whole range of issues," said Kucinich, who has cited Kerry's initial support of the Iraq war and the Patriot Act.
"I think it's really important to stake out clear differences."
Actor Sean Penn, one of Kucinich's most high-profile supporters, arrived in Portland last week to campaign for Kucinich, braving the clamoring crowds that clearly make him ill at ease.
Penn said he considered Kerry too much of an establishment figure. The Massachusetts senator "is maintaining a solid inch of difference from his opponent in the Republican Party," Penn said at a Portland house party for campaign volunteers Tuesday.
Kucinich's challenge to conventional politics is what gets him out of bed every morning, eager to explain to anyone who will listen just why they should give peace a chance.
"I've been ready every day to be an overnight success," he said with a laugh.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Nearly 1 in 5 US Counties Have Unhealthy Air - EPA
Story by Chris Baltimore
REUTERS USA:
April 16, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24729/newsDate/16-Apr-2004/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Americans living in nearly one in five counties nationwide are breathing unhealthy air, according to new ozone rules the Bush administration unveiled on Thursday.
The new standards are generally supported by environmental groups, which have bitterly criticized President Bush's White House for relaxing other pollution rules to benefit various industries.
The Environmental Protection Agency said that 474 of the nation's 2,700 counties in 31 states have unacceptable levels of ground-level ozone, a major ingredient in smog, up from 221 under the previous guidelines. About 159 million Americans live in counties that violate the new standards, the agency said.
Ozone is formed when fumes from automobiles, factories and other fossil fuels react with sunlight. It is linked to human respiratory problems including emphysema and bronchitis.
EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt said the agency notified governors of the 31 states about the violations, which require them to submit smog reduction plans in three years.
"This isn't about the air getting dirtier," Leavitt said. "These new rules are about our new understanding of health threats -- about our standards getting tougher and our national resolve to meet them."
The agency set compliance deadlines based on the severity of the smog. Areas with marginal to moderate pollution have until 2007 to 2009, while highly polluted counties in California get more time. EPA gave smog-ridden Los Angeles and surrounding counties until June 2021 to comply.
The new ozone test stems from 1997 EPA rules delayed by numerous court challenges. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the rules in early 2001.
The new rules allow less ozone -- 85 parts per billion down from 120 parts per billion -- and require more frequent tests.
HIGHER COSTS
Violating counties would have to spend more on pollution controls such as requiring cleaner-burning gasoline and power plants and more frequent automobile inspections.
The changes mean that about 100 metropolitan areas are in violation of the standards for the first time. They include San Francisco, Denver and many previously compliant suburban and rural areas, the EPA said.
Large swaths of Southern California around Los Angeles and the Northeast corridor between Washington and New York have long been out of compliance.
Some 19 states pass the test, including large swaths of the West around the Rocky Mountains along with Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Mississippi and Vermont.
Business leaders said the rules could cost states billions of dollars and scare away new industry.
"A non-attainment designation could put a black mark on all of these communities, reducing their business opportunities, investment and competitiveness," said Jeffrey Marks at the National Association of Manufacturers.
Environmental groups applauded the rules, but criticized the flexibility given to some counties.
"It's a positive step that the EPA is going to require stronger anti-smog measures in areas that need them," said Howard Fox, an attorney at Earthjustice. "But they didn't take the next step, which is to set clear firm deadlines for cleaning up those new areas."
-------- genetics
Bush's Stem Cell Policy Reiterated, but Some See Shift
NIH Director's Letter to Lawmakers Acknowledges That Science Could Benefit From Added Cell Lines
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30175-2004May15.html
In a highly anticipated response to members of Congress who support wider research on human embryonic stem cells, the director of the National Institutes of Health late Friday reiterated the Bush administration position against the use of federal funds for research that destroys human embryos.
But the four-page letter from Elias A. Zerhouni to Reps. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) and Michael N. Castle (R-Del.) included a sentence that supporters of the research said offered a hint that the president may be working toward a compromise on the issue -- albeit one that most agreed is unlikely to solidify before the election in November.
The letter from Zerhouni -- written at the request, it said, of President Bush, and which sources said was vetted by the White House -- is in response to a letter sent to Bush late last month by DeGette, Castle and 204 other members of the House calling for a loosening of the current restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research.
Those rules, laid down by Bush almost three years ago, ban the use of taxpayer dollars for research on human embryos destroyed after Aug. 9, 2001. As a result, federally funded researchers do not have access to more recently derived colonies that they say show more potential to be developed into cures.
A similar letter is currently being circulated in the Senate, where Hill watchers said it has about 50 signatures so far. Additional pressure has been mounting from patient groups and even from Nancy Reagan, who last weekend made her most public plea yet for the research. Some scientists believe that the cells could lead to a treatment for Alzheimer's disease, which has afflicted Ronald Reagan for years.
The letter from Zerhouni mostly reiterated past administration statements. But in what some proponents said was a significant shift, the letter included this sentence:
"And although it is fair to say that from a purely scientific perspective more cell lines may well speed some areas of human embryonic stem cell research, the president's position is still predicated on his belief that taxpayer funds should not 'sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life.' "
White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said it would be wrong to read into those words a sense that the president's position has shifted. But several stem cell supporters said this was the first acknowledgement by the administration that the science could benefit from added lines, or colonies, of cells -- a change that leaves the president's opposition now resting purely on ethical grounds. In the past he and other officials have argued that the limited number of eligible colonies were adequate for research purposes.
It is a subtle point. But it may be, some said, that the president, by dropping the scientific argument and relying entirely on his desire not to destroy embryos with the "potential for life," is working toward a solution in which surplus frozen embryos slated for destruction at fertility clinics may someday be made available for research, as proponents hope.
"I can't imagine they didn't parse this thing very carefully, so it's encouraging that it at least leaves the possibility of discussion concerning a possible expansion," Castle said of the letter, copies of which were sent to all 206 House signers.
"Obviously it's a very politically crafted sentence," said Tony Mazzaschi, an associate vice president at the Association of American Medical Colleges. "You can just imagine what it took to get that in. I do see some movement here."
--------
Bush Letter Sees Promise of Stem Cells
May 16, 2004
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/politics/16STEM.html
WASHINGTON, May 15 - The Bush administration has acknowledged that additional lines, or colonies, of embryonic stem cells could speed scientific research, a statement that advocates for patients say could mark the first step toward easing limits on taxpayer financing for the studies.
The acknowledgment was tucked into a carefully worded letter sent on Friday by Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the director of the National Institutes of Health, to 206 members of Congress who are pressing President Bush to alter his stem cell policy.
In the letter, Dr. Zerhouni reiterated the president's stand that tax dollars not be used to "sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos." But he also wrote, "It is also fair to say that from a purely scientific perspective more cell lines may well speed some areas" of research.
"It's certainly not a change in policy," said Representative Michael N. Castle, Republican of Delaware, who is spearheading an effort in the House to change the president's policy. "I look upon it as an invitation to have further discussions."
Researchers say that embryonic stem cells hold great hope for medical treatments. But because the studies involve the destruction of human embryos, they have drawn sharp criticism from many conservatives and opponents of abortion. To balance the two views, Mr. Bush has restricted federal financing to research on colonies of stem cells already in existence in August 2001, when the policy was announced.
Mr. Castle and other lawmakers want the policy changed to permit research on embryos left over from in vitro fertilization attempts, which would be destroyed anyway. But a White House spokeswoman, Claire Buchan, said Saturday that Mr. Bush's position had not changed.
"He believes that we should pursue the promise of stem cell research but not cross fundamental moral lines," Ms. Buchan said.
Even so, Larry Soler, a lobbyist for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, said the letter was "kind of a turning point," because the administration had never before said its policy might be impeding science.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Over 150,000 attend rally calling for Gaza withdrawal
By Lili Galili, Mazal Mualem and Tsahar Rotem,
Haaretz Correspondents and Haaretz Service,
16/05/2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/427546.html
More than 150,000 people attended a left wing demonstration at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv on Saturday evening under the banner 'get out of Gaza and start talking." Event organizers assessed that some 250,000 were present, Army Radio reported.
The rally opened at 8 P.M. with a minute of silence to commemorate the 13 Israel Defense Forces soldiers killed in the Gaza Strip over the past week.
Amid frequent outbreaks of applause and cheering, opposition leader Shimon Peres told the crows that 80 percent of Israeli want peace and just one percent is trying to block it.
"We will not allow them," Peres said. "We must not support a puppet government that follows the delusional ideas of the right."
Yahad Chairman Yossi Beilin said that for the past three years the peace camp has been dormant that today it finally awoke.
One Nation chairman Amir Peretz called for a resumption of peace talks, saying that diplomatic and social affairs could not be seperated. "as a resident of Sderot [near the Gaza Strip] we do not fear disengagement and we fear neither dialogue nor a peace process."
The event took place under heavy security with some 1300 police officers and volunteer security guards patrolling, and the streets around the plaza were closed from 4:30 P.M.
A delegation of 50 Palestinians, supporters of the Geneva Initiative, were also expected to attend the rally.
The Real Religious Zionist Movement, an organization of moderate observant Jewish youths said late on Saturday that they would have participated in the demonstration had it not been held during the Sabbath.
Groups members said the organizers should been more sensitive to the religious public, but in a statement they said they joined the call for a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and an end to the occupation.
A Yesha Council of Settlements statement said on Saturday that the "leftist extremists" who organized the rally were dancing on blood of the Gaza victims. "The heads of the left are responsible for the bloody Oslo Accords which cost in over 1,200 Israeli lives and turned the Gaza Strip into the explosive pit it is."
Speaking at the rally were opposition leader Shimon Peres, Yahad Chairman Yossi Beilin, One Nation Chairman Amir Peretz, Peace Now leader Tzaly Reshef and Yochi Brandes, on behalf of the Geneva Initiative, and former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet for the People's Voice. Former GOC Southern Comman chief Yom Tov Samia was also set to speak at the demonstration.
Singers Danny Sanderson and Dana Berger performed at the rally, along with the band Nikmat Hatraktor.
Ahead of the demonstration, the organizers rejected calls from politicians on the right to postpone the rally in the wake of the recent events in the Gaza Strip.
Likud MK Ehud Yatom argued that the protest would demoralize soldiers serving in the Gaza Strip, Army Radio reported Friday.
MK Gila Finkelstein of the National Religious Party said Friday that holding such a demonstration while the bodies of IDF soldiers were still lying in Rafah dishonors the fallen and their bereaved families.
United Torah Party MK Meir Porush told Army Radio that political discourse should be put aside at a time when the country is mourning the death of its soldiers.
The rally was scheduled by a new forum, Mate Harov (Majority's Coalition), after the Likud referendum rejected the prime minister's plan for a pullout from the Gaza Strip. The forum includes left and center-left groups such as Labor, Yahad, One Nation, Peace Now, the kibbutz movements, the Geneva Initiative organization, youth movements and the Forum of Bereaved Parents.
Minister of Social Affairs Zevulun Orlev (NRP) asked Peres on Thursday to postpone the rally, saying it was not appropriate to hold a political demonstration while fallen soldiers were being buried. The organizers responded that national unity was not an issue considered by the prime minister when he decided to leave the decision on going ahead with his disengagement plan solely in the hands of Likud members.
----
Ashcroft Fishes Out 1872 Law in a Bid to Scuttle Protester Rights
Sailor-mongering act rises from history as the feds try to cripple Greenpeace
By Bill McKibben,
May 16, 2004
LA Times
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/latimes147.htm
Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, is the author of many books on the environment, including "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age" (Times Books, 2003).
May 14, 2004
In April of 2002, a cargo ship, the Jade, was steaming toward Miami carrying a cargo of mahogany illegally cut from the Brazilian Amazon. Two Greenpeace activists tried to clamber aboard the ship and hang a banner that read "President Bush: Stop Illegal Logging." None of which is unusual.
The trees of the Amazon are logged day after day, year after year, despite a host of treaties and laws and despite the fact that scientists agree that an intact rain forest is essential for everything from conserving species to protecting the climate. And Greenpeace, day after day, tries to call attention to such crimes. It pesters rich, powerful interests about toxic dumping and outlaw whaling and a hundred other topics that those interests would rather not be pestered about. The Miami activists were arrested, spent a weekend in jail, pleaded guilty and were sentenced to time served. All in a day's work.
But here's where it starts getting weir
How far did the government have to stretch to make its case? The law it cited against boarding ships about to enter ports was passed in 1872 and aimed at the proprietors of boardinghouses who used liquor and prostitutes to lure crews to their establishments. The last prosecution under the "sailor-mongering" act took place in 1890. The new case could be like something straight out of "Master and Commander."
The matter goes to trial next week in a federal district court in Miami, and if Greenpeace loses, the organization could be fined $20,000 and placed on probation. The money's no big deal; outraged supporters would probably turn such a verdict into a fundraising bonanza. But the probation would be. The group might well be prevented from engaging in any acts of civil disobedience for years to come. If it crossed the line, the group's officers might be jailed and its assets seized. Since civil disobedience is what Greenpeace does best, the Justice Department might in effect be shutting the group down.
That would be too bad, and not just for Greenpeace. The potential precedent here - that the government can choke off protest by shutting down those who organize it - undermines one of the most important safety valves of our political life.
During the civil rights era, Southern sheriffs used every law they could think of to jail protesters - loitering was a favorite charge. Imagine some group being put on probation because it had helped organize sit-ins. But even J. Edgar Hoover didn't try to criminalize the NAACP. As the veteran civil rights campaigner Julian Bond said recently, "If John Ashcroft had done this in the 1960s, black Americans would not be voting today, eating at formerly all-white lunch counters, or sitting on bus front seats."
As is the norm, this attack on political liberties is excused by the need for "port safety" in the wake of 9/11. But I've watched Greenpeace for years, and its members are the furthest thing from terrorists; according to the group, "no Greenpeace activist has ever harmed another individual," despite a record of direct action dating to its founding. in 1971.
If port safety truly were the issue, the federal government would have made far more progress toward inspecting cargo arriving by sea. Confidence in the vigor of governmental scrutiny was not enhanced when it managed not to find the Jade's illegal mahogany and let it sail on from Miami. Two days later it unloaded 70 tons of the wood in Charleston, S.C.
The real threat Greenpeace represents is that its members tell the truth, and do it obnoxiously, out in public, where it can't be missed.
The Bush administration knows its environmental record is poor, and it knows that hanging banners matters. (That's why the White House printed up the "Mission Accomplished" flag for the president's May 1, 2003, aircraft carrier photo op). To spare itself embarrassment, the administration is willing to endanger core political freedoms that go back to the very founding of the republic.
How far back? Dec. 16, 1773, at least, when a crew of patriots disguised as Mohawks illegally boarded three ships in Boston Harbor and dumped overboard all the cargo of tea. As the raiders paraded away from the docks, British Adm. John Montague shouted: "Well, boys, you have had a fine pleasant evening for your Indian caper, haven't you. But mind, you have got to pay the fiddler yet."
Now 230 years later, it's Atty. Gen. Ashcroft playing the part of the British officer, and the words are just as chilling.
----
Nigerian Police Arrest Writer During Protest
Associated Press
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30176-2004May15.html
LAGOS, Nigeria, May 15 -- Police fired tear gas and arrested dozens of protesters, including Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, during an anti-government demonstration Saturday in Nigeria's commercial capital.
Soyinka, a critic of President Olusegun Obasanjo's government, described Nigeria as an anarchic state in which normal government functions have been upended.
The writer was among 500 demonstrators at a protest in central Lagos organized by human rights and other civic groups calling for the government's resignation. After his release from police custody, Soyinka described the police action as a "mindless and unproductive attack."
Soyinka, 69, won the 1986 Nobel Prize for literature for his autobiographical books, poems and plays depicting the brutality and chaos of life under military rule in Nigeria.
He fled Nigeria's then-ruling military in 1994 and currently teaches at Emory University in Atlanta.
--------
Thousands of Israelis Urge Gaza Pullout
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 16, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29979-2004May15.html
TEL AVIV, May 15 -- Tens of thousands of Israelis gathered here Saturday night to press for Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the first major public demonstration by the country's peace camp in two years.
While many of those in the crowd have been bitter opponents of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, they came out to express their support for his proposal to pull troops and Jewish settlers out of Gaza and to protest the rejection of the plan by Sharon's Likud Party.
Israel announced that it had completed military operations and pulled back its units from southern Gaza. Thirteen soldiers and 30 Palestinians were killed in intense clashes throughout Gaza over four days this week. The army also stopped the mass demolition of houses in the combat area, which U.N. officials said had caused more than 1,000 Palestinians to flee their homes.
The Israeli peace movement has been fractured and demoralized in recent years as a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings of passenger buses, cafes and other civilian targets in Israel have caused deep public revulsion and built support for Sharon's hard-edged security stance. But the recent rejection of the withdrawal scheme in a referendum of Likud members, followed by fierce violence this week -- including the public display of a severed head and other body parts of dead soldiers by Palestinian fighters -- inspired activists to return to the streets to try to rally the majority that, according to a series of opinion polls, favors the plan.
The rally brought together longtime activists from Peace Now, the main antiwar citizens' group, along with former prime minister Shimon Peres, leader of the once dominant Labor Party, trade unionists and other activists who have not shared a platform in almost a decade. They gathered in Rabin Square, named after Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister assassinated in 1995 who, along with Peres, championed the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians that have been buried by nearly four years of warfare.
"To leave Gaza, we need the majority to stop its silence," Ami Ayalon, former head of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, told the crowd. "It needs to say, or even scream, what it thinks."
Ayalon, addressing Sharon, declared: "If you make progress, then we're with you, and if not, then you won't remain in power. Gaza is no longer a matter of politics -- it's a matter of life and death."
Sharon's office had no immediate comment on the rally. Leaders of the settlement movement opposed to withdrawal had demanded that the activists postpone the protest out of respect for the dead soldiers.
The crowd was an eclectic mix of young and old, some with small children. "I know I have to work hard now so that my son won't have to go to Gaza when he grows up," said Sharon Amit, 35, a worker at the state-run Voice of Israel radio service, who pushed her 3-year-old son, Rotem, through the crowd in a stroller. She said the events of last week had compelled her to attend the rally. "The feeling is heavy this week," she said. "It caused people to think again, to become more involved."
Galia Golan, an organizer of the rally, said people felt that 60,000 Likud members had in effect wielded a veto over the withdrawal plan -- which was endorsed by President Bush -- in the nonbinding party referendum two weeks ago. Sharon has said he would come up with a revised plan within three weeks. "We feel we're being held hostage by a small minority," Golan said.
Army officials said they cleared out of the Rafah area Saturday after recovering the remains of five soldiers killed there Wednesday. The army's attempt to retrieve the bodies and avoid a repeat of the body-parts spectacle of the previous day had led to a massive military operation and the demolition of dozens of houses that the army said had been used by Palestinian gunmen.
Early Sunday, Israeli helicopters fired missiles at three targets in Gaza City, knocking out electricity in part of the city and slightly wounding at least two Palestinians, the Associated Press reported.
The first strike targeted a building housing a branch office belonging to the Fatah movement of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Two boys, ages 14 and 15, were hurt in the attack, medical workers said.
The second strike hit a residential building. The third strike knocked out power in the northern part of Gaza City. There were no further details on casualties or the targets of the attacks.
--------
Israeli Crowd Supports Pullout From Gaza
May 16, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/16/international/middleeast/16mideast.html
TEL AVIV, May 15 - More than 120,000 dovish Israelis packed a central square in Tel Aviv on Saturday night to urge an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the proposal launched by the country's most prominent hawk, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Mr. Sharon's call for a Gaza pullout has shaken up Israel's already turbulent political scene, and in a surprising twist, is winning him rare applause from liberal Israelis. Meanwhile, many of his traditional right-wing allies are campaigning against the plan.
The huge crowd that filled Rabin Square and spilled into the side streets was essentially the same constituency that gathered here throughout the 1990's to support Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. It was here in 1995 that Yitzhak Rabin, then prime minister, was assassinated by an Israeli extremist after speaking at a peace rally.
"I'm here to tell the prime minister that we have to leave Gaza, but he already knows this," said Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet security service who is now promoting an informal peace plan he has developed with a Palestinian partner. "Gaza is no longer about politics, it's a matter of saving lives," Mr. Ayalon said to the cheering crowd.
The left has been largely sidelined during the past three and a half years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting. The Israeli public has moved to the right, demanding a tough response to Palestinian violence, and Mr. Sharon won landslide electoral victories in 2001 and again last year.
Mr. Sharon's call to unilaterally withdraw Israeli soldiers and settlers from Gaza has broad overall support among Israelis. Two newspaper polls released Friday both showed support for a pullout exceeding 70 percent, figures similar to previous opinion surveys.
But Mr. Sharon has been unable to persuade his own Likud Party, which soundly rejected the plan in a party referendum two weeks ago. A number of Cabinet members either oppose the proposal or have deep reservations about it.
Still, the 60,000 Likud Party members who voted against the proposal represent less than 1 percent of Israel's population, and supporters of the withdrawal plan say it is being threatened by a small minority.
"Eighty percent of Israelis want peace, and just 1 percent are trying to block it," said Shimon Peres, leader of the center-left Labor Party, the main opposition in Parliament. "We will not allow them."
This past week, 13 Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza in some of the most intense fighting in the territory since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000.
These recent events have fueled the heated debate over Mr. Sharon's plan, and contributed to the turnout on Saturday, which the police estimated at more than 120,000.
"We felt an important decision was being made and we were being left out," said Sharon Peled, 26, a marketing manager from Tel Aviv.
"We don't support Sharon, but when he has a good idea, we can support it," said Ms. Peled, who was with her mother, who drove from the northern city of Haifa to attend.
Magen Inon, a 21-year-old soldier at the rally, said the Gaza pullout plan vindicated a difficult decision he made when he began his mandatory military service two years ago.
Mr. Inon, who grew up in a community just outside Gaza, told the military he would not serve in Gaza or the West Bank. He was detained for two days, but was then assigned to an artillery unit that is not deployed in either of the two territories.
Still, he acknowledged these are tough issues for young Israelis, particularly those in the military. He drove to Tel Aviv from his hometown with his best friend, a soldier serving near the West Bank city of Nablus, a hotbed of Palestinian militancy.
The friend, who has different views, did not want to attend the rally and spent the evening elsewhere in Tel Aviv, Mr. Inon said.
In a speech on Saturday, the 56th anniversary of the founding of Israel, Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, called on Palestinians to be "steadfast" in their struggle with Israel. In remarks on Palestinian television, Mr. Arafat quoted a passage from the Koran, the Muslim holy book: "Find what strength you have to terrorize your enemy, and the enemy of God." He followed that with another verse from the Koran: "If they want peace, then let us have peace."
In Gaza, meanwhile, Israeli helicopters carried out three airstrikes on Saturday that damaged buildings and wounded about a dozen Palestinians, according to Palestinian witnesses and hospital workers. But the overall level of violence was down after four days of heavy fighting.
The military said the strikes were directed at two offices in Gaza City linked to Islamic Jihad, and a bomb-making laboratory belonging to the group in the southern town of Rafah. Islamic Jihad has carried out many suicide bombings against Israel and was involved in the deadly attacks this week on Israeli soldiers.
Palestinians said the Israeli helicopters hit two structures linked to Islamic Jihad. The third was an office in Gaza City previously used by a senior leader, Muhammad al-Hindi. But the group gave up the office, and it was rented by a nursing organization, the building's owner said.
[Israeli helicopters fired missiles at three targets in Gaza City early Sunday, including a building that housed a branch of Mr. Arafat's Fatah office, The Associated Press reported. At least two Palestinians were slightly wounded, medical workers said.]
In another development, Israel's High Court of Justice has issued a temporary order barring the military from demolishing more Palestinian homes in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, the Israeli media reported. A hearing was scheduled for Sunday morning.
--------
Police Break Up Rally for Reform in Zimbabwe
May 16, 2004
By REUTERS
HARARE, Zimbabwe, May 15 (Reuters) - The police fired tear gas and beat people who were preparing to hold a meeting on constitutional reform in the central Zimbabwe city of Gweru on Saturday, the coalition organizing the event said.
About 80 people were arrested, including the coalition's chairman, Lovemore Madhuku, said Ernest Mudzengi, spokesman for the group, the National Constitutional Assembly.
The meeting was meant to focus on an economic and political crisis for which many blame President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF government.
Mr. Mugabe was quoted in The East African Standard, a Kenyan newspaper, on Saturday as indicating that he plans to retire when his term ends in 2008 and that he is seeking a successor.
It was the second time this year that Mr. Mugabe, 80, in power since independence from Britain in 1980, had suggested that he would not seek another term.
"I want to retire from politics," Mr. Mugabe was quoted as saying by The Standard. "I have had enough. I am also a writer and would like to concentrate on writing after this term of office is over."
The Constitutional Assembly, a coalition of human rights groups, political parties and student and church organizations, has lobbied for constitutional reforms in Zimbabwe since 1999.
"The police assaulted participants with truncheons," Mr. Mudzengi said in a statement, and, "20 sustained injuries. We condemn this latest act of police brutality, which we view as part of the ZANU-PF regime's increasingly insane strategies of holding on to power."
The chief police spokesman, Senior Assistant Commissioner Wayne Bvudzijena, said he was still getting details on the incident.
The Constitutional Assembly says flaws in the constitution make it impossible to hold free and fair elections and have helped Mr. Mugabe tighten his 24-year grip on power.
The main opposition, Movement for Democratic Change, and some Western countries say Mr. Mugabe's re-election to a six-year term as president in 2002 was fraudulent.
But Mr. Mugabe, who dismisses the opposition movement as a puppet of his Western opponents, says he won fairly.
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