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NUCLEAR
Highway 95 reopens following contamination
Energy Dept. Budget Amendment Puts Savannah River at Risk
Russia Wants Faster Aid for 'Rotting' Nuclear Subs
Ukraine Says It Seized 'Red Mercury'
MILITARY
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack in Afghanistan
Another Afghan Prison Probe Launched
Seoul says some U.S. troops to go
For Blair, Iraq's Future Will Determine His Own
CACI Contract: From Supplies to Interrogation
Contracts Awarded
Federal Contracts Anteon to Assess Systems Stability
Sarin nerve agent bomb explodes in Iraq
Rumsfeld says it wasn't necessarily sarin
WMD Thrill for WarBots
China Delivers Double-Edged Notice to Taiwan
China Warns Taiwan to Drop Independence Move
Iran Denounces Offensive Against Shiite Insurgents
Iraqi Council Leader Is Killed in Blast Near U.S. Headquarters
American Airstrike Hits Insurgents Near Mosque in Karbala
Divided Mission in Iraq Tempers Views of G.I.'s
Transfer Date Is Clear, but Not Much Else Is
Israel Plans To Destroy More Gaza Dwellings
Powell Denounces Israel's Destruction Of Palestinian Homes
Israel Says It Will Proceed With Demolition of Homes
Powell says Arafat blocking U.S. efforts
Powell Faces Mistrust of U.S., by Arabs, on Iraq and Israel
Pentagon: No Special Prison Policy
Some Iraqis Held Outside Control of Top General
Powell Says C.I.A. Was Misled About Weapons
The Secret of Abu Ghraib Exposed!
Pentagon Weighs Transferring 4,000 G.I.'s in Korea to Iraq
Military lawyers advised Pentagon two years ago
U.S. to Move Troops from S. Korea to Iraq This Summer
History project urgent
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Mayor Attacks Critics of His Plan to Coordinate Emergency Response
POLITICS
Bush told Geneva rules 'obsolete'
9/11 Tape Has Late Change on Evacuation
Powell's Interview Is Cut Off
Down but Not Out, Kucinich Keeps Fighting
Across Federal Spectrum
OTHER
THE BUSH MONEY MACHINE : An Industry Gets Its Way
CDC Watching for Next Worrisome Outbreak
ACTIVISTS
Greenpeace in Court for Sailor Mongering
Protesters Wait for GOP Convention Invite
China Sentences U.S.-Based Dissident
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Highway 95 reopens following contamination
RECORD: Friday's incident marks the second time in seven months the contractor has been involved in a contamination-related incident involving a cleanup project.
By: Paul Parson paul.parson@oakridger.com
Oak Ridger Staff
May 17, 2004
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/051704/new_20040517017.shtml
Highway 95 in Roane County is open to motorists after a portion of the roadway had to be repaved due to radioactive contamination.
The project was performed Saturday and Sunday following the completion of extensive radiological surveys. All asphalt removed from the cleanup has been taken to the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility in Oak Ridge.
The contamination on Highway 95 was the result of leaks from a truck carrying radioactive waste material from a cleanup project at the old Hydrofracture Facility to the waste disposal facility located on Bear Creek Road near the Y-12 National Security Complex.
Workers spent this weekend repaving a portion of Highway 95 because of a radioactive contamination. All asphalt removed from the cleanup has been taken to the Environmental Management Waste Management Facility in Oak Ridge. Surveys found small droplets of strontium 90 on Highway 95, according to state and federal officials. Strontium 90 is a byproduct of the fission of uranium and plutonium in nuclear reactors.
Located in the Melton Valley area of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Hydrofracture Facility was built in 1963 to test the concept for deep geologic disposal of liquid radioactive waste. The facility was shut down in 1980.
The truck was on the road for about four to five miles from the cleanup project to the waste disposal facility, according to Dennis Stevenson, safety systems integration manager for Bechtel Jacobs Co. The company is under contract with the Department of Energy to oversee Oak Ridge cleanup efforts.
Safety and Ecology Corp. is responsible for the Hydrofracture Facility cleanup project courtesy of a contract with Bechtel Jacobs. Friday's incident with the leaking truck marks the second time in seven months SEC has been involved in a contamination-related incident involving a cleanup project.
In October 2003, three radiological control workers under the Safety and Ecology Corp. subcontract scanned out of a radiological zone as "clean" and then left for home from another Melton Valley project. However, officials later discovered contamination on some of the workers' clothing as well as in an on-site work trailer, in three company vehicles, in gravel around the vehicles and on a wooden deck at the trailer.
In response to the latest incident, an inspection station was set up this weekend at the Oak Ridge K-25 site to survey cars that traveled in the area of Highway 95 north of Bethel Valley Road to the intersection of Bear Creek Road. More than 70 personal vehicles were checked for radioactivity, and no contamination was found in these surveys.
And, while all of the radioactive contamination from Highway 95 was removed, DOE and Bechtel Jacobs have also been addressing contamination on the western portion of Bethel Valley Road and Bear Creek Road on the Oak Ridge Reservation. According to information from DOE, these roads are not open to the public, but are used for employee access to ORNL and Y-12.
Steven Wyatt, a spokesman for DOE's Oak Ridge Operations office, described the Highway 95 cleanup project as a cooperative effort involving the federal agency and its contractors as well as officials from the state of Tennessee, Roane County and the city of Oak Ridge.
------
Energy Dept. Budget Amendment Puts Savannah River at Risk
MAY 17, 2004
Common Dreams
Institute for Energy and Environmental Research http://www.ieer.org
Arjun Makhijani: (301) 270-5500
Bob Schaeffer: (239) 395-6773
http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0517-15.htm
WASHINGTON - May 17 - A new analysis by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) concludes that a Senate budget amendment allowing the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to abandon highly radioactive wastes in tanks next to the Savannah River poses severe risks for the environment and public health. DOE wants to attempt to grout, or cement, residual wastes in place rather than spend additional funds to pump them out.
[The IEER analysis is below, and is also available online at http://www.ieer.org/reports/srs/hlwanalysis.html.]
According to IEER President, Dr. Arjun Makhijani, "Calculations show that if only ten percent of the strontium-90 presently in the tank farms at the Savannah River Site were left behind and grouted, the grout would have to work nearly perfectly for hundreds of years to prevent the Savannah River from becoming polluted above the present Safe Drinking Water limit. There is no experience with grout that can allow containment projections of this magnitude. On the contrary, experience with grout so far has been unsatisfactory."
Leakage of even a small fraction of the strontium-90 at Savannah River Site (SRS) into the Savannah River could be disastrous, environmentally and economically.
"In 1991, major economic damage occurred when the drinking water standard for the Savannah River was exceeded for only a few days due to a tritium leak," Makhijani noted, "even though the standard is calculated as an annual average and there was no annual violation."
Strontium-90 is just one of the radioactive contaminants DOE hopes to leave in SRS waste tanks. They also contain large amounts of cesium-137, plutonium-238 and americium-241.
"If only ten percent of the plutonium-238 was left behind the tanks and covered with six feet of grout, the residual radioactivity would exceed the limit for low-level wastes by about ten times," Makhijani added. "This plan would convert SRS into a vast high-level radioactive waste dump in the watershed of the Savannah River."
Makhijani concluded that if the grout fails, South Carolina and Georgia would likely have to write off one of their most precious water resources.
"The performance of the grout would have to be such that leakage would remain at one part in 100,000 per year or better for a hundred years or more," stated Makhijani. "If the grout fails to meet this test, the river may have to be written off for drinking water use. This is because once the tanks are grouted, it will be essentially impossible to go back and clean them out."
Makhijani continued: "The resultant health, economic and ecological harm would be incalculablefar greater than any benefit from shortening the cleanup period for SRS or reducing high-level waste management expenditures. Nothing less than the future of the Savannah River is at stake."
A recent IEER report, "Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside," documented environmental threats from radioactive wastes at DOE's Savannah River site. The report concluded that "capping or grouting the wastes in place compounds the risks." The IEER report is available on the web at http://www.ieer.org/reports/srs/. A statement by Dr. Makhijani is attached, along with excerpts from the IEER report on the subject of grout performance.
~
The Savannah River at Grievous Risk
Analysis of the Proposal to Allow the Department of Energy to Leave a Significant Portion of Its High-Level Radioactive Waste at the Savannah River Site in the Savannah River Watershed
Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D.
President, Institute for Energy and Environmental Research 17 May 2004
The U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee has passed a proposal that would allow the DOE to leave virtually any fraction of the high-level waste, now stored in large tanks, at the Savannah River Site in grouted form, if approved by the State of South Carolina. This proposal would convert SRS into a vast high-level radioactive waste dump in the watershed of the Savannah River. The State of South Carolina has already allowed high-level waste to be grouted in two tanks.
I have performed some calculations to illustrate the potential effect on the Savannah River of this proposal. In principle the proposal would allow any fraction of the radioactivity in the tanks to be left there permanently in grouted form in the tanks at SRS. There are currently about 400 million curies of radioactivity in the high-level waste tanks. Strontium-90 and cesium-137 each are about 100 million curies, plus an equal amount of the decay products of each in equilibrium with each of these radionuclides.
If only 10 percent, i.e., about 10 million curies, of the strontium-90 presently in the tank farms were left behind and grouted, the grout would have to work nearly perfectly for hundreds of years to prevent the Savannah River from becoming polluted above the present Safe Drinking Water limit of 8 picocuries per liter. Leakage of even a small fraction of the strontium-90 at SRS into the Savannah River would be disastrous to the river. This threat will persist for centuries.
Strontium-90 has a half-life of 29 years. Even after decaying for 100 years, a leakage of just 1 part in 10,000 per year of strontium-90 into the river would cause the Savannah River to exceed the Safe Drinking Water limit. This estimate is based on median river flow.
In the past (1991) major economic damage has occurred when the drinking water standard was exceeded for only a few days due to a tritium leak, even though the standard is calculated as an annual average and there was no annual violation. Maintaining the river within drinking water limits every month, even in low flow years and months, will likely require containment many times stricter -- on the order of 1 part in 100,000 per year. Even after 200 years a high degree of containment, better than 1 part in 10,000 per year would be needed to meet this goal. Further, containment would have to be ten times better that these figures if essentially all the strontium-90 were left in the tanks.
There is no experience with grout for such periods of time that can allow confident projections of containment of such perfection. On the contrary, experience with grout so far has been unsatisfactory, as we have discussed in the recent IEER report on SRS (Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside, an excerpt of which is reproduced below). For instance, waste cast into cement blocks at Rocky Flats disintegrated in a few years. The tanks themselves were not designed to last for hundreds of years. Grout simply cannot be relied on as a waste form to protect the river even if grout quality is improved. Shallow land burial of waste by grouting in the tanks or by creating grouted vaults onsite is a dangerous idea.
These problems will be exacerbated by the vast amount of cesium-137 now in the tanks. Due to gross mismanagement, the Department of Energy wasted 16 years and $500 million before abandoning as dangerous a process to extract and concentrate the cesium-137. A replacement process is needed. If the DOE simply abandons the Cs-137 in the tanks and leaves behind 10 percent of the strontium-90, then containment roughly twice as stringent as that estimated above for strontium-90 alone would be needed to maintain the usability of Savannah River water.
In addition, there are large amounts of various transuranic isotopes, including plutonium-238, plutonium-239, and americium-241. In Tank 17, for instance, the residual radioactivity of transuranic radionuclides planned to be left in the tank exceeds the low-level waste limit by more than 600 times (before dilution).
There are over 2 million curies of plutonium-238 in the Tank Farms at SRS. If only ten percent of the plutonium-238 were left behind in the tanks and diluted with grout 6 feet deep, the residual radioactivity in both tank farms would exceed the maximum Class C limit allowed for low-level waste by about ten times. Other residual transuranic radionuclides, such as americium-241 and plutonium-239, would add to the extent of the violation.
In sum, the performance of the grout would have to be such that leakage would remain at one part in 100,000 per year or better for a hundred years or more. If the grout fails to meet this test, the river may have to be written off for drinking water use. This is because once the tanks are grouted, it will be essentially impossible to remediate them. In other words, if the grout fails, South Carolina and Georgia will likely have to write off one of their most precious water resources. The resultant health and economic and ecological harm would be incalculable, far greater, in my view, than any benefit to be derived from shortening the cleanup period for SRS or reducing high-level waste management expenditures. Nothing less than the future of the Savannah River is at stake in the current debate over the management of tank wastes at SRS.
Attachment:
Performance of Grout
This is an excerpt from Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside (IEER, 2004), pages 48 to 50. The full report can be downloaded from www.ieer.org/reports/srs, where full details of the footnotes in this excerpt can be found.
There is insufficient understanding of the long-term risks to groundwater and surface water from shallow land burial of grouted wastes. Given past experience with grouting of wastes (discussed below), these contaminants could leach out into the groundwater much faster than anticipated and add to the existing contamination in the groundwater, and eventually to the surface water. Moreover, grouting the tanks in place would put the residual wastes in a form that would be very difficult or impossible to retrieve were they found to be leaking. Grouting would also make remediation of the vadose zone even more difficult. DOE admits that "tank closure is, for all practical purposes, irreversible. DOE would have great difficulty undoing a closure [with grout] if it were later discovered that [a dose] estimate had been improperly developed, or that the performance had been improperly evaluated."1
According to a report on long-term stewardship by the National Academy of Sciences: Predicting performance in resisting water infiltration can be difficult because of uncertainties that include the degree to which the first layers of grout take up the residue, the water pathway effects of the cold joints between successive pours of grout, and the effects of preferential corrosion of the tank metal and penetrating structures (thereby offering a partial bypass path). Moreover, waste tank residue is likely to be highly radioactive and not taken up in the grout, so there is substantial uncertainty associated with the volumetric classification and average concentration of the waste and prediction of the isolation performance of the system.2
While experience at other sites with grout does not correspond in its details with that at SRS, it is indicative of the kinds of problems that have already been experienced with grouting. We examine two such cases here.
DOE sponsored studies on grout durability in the context of a grouting program at Hanford. The durability of grout depends on many factors, such as temperature and moisture, and the composition of the grout. The heat due to radioactive decay, for instance, and/or the heat that is released when the grout sets can raise the temperature above 90 degrees Celsius (194 degrees F). At such temperatures the grout may not set properly, and hence it may subsequently crack. According to a 1992 study of the durability of double-shell tank waste grouts at Hanford: The grouts will remain at elevated temperatures for many years. The high temperatures expected during the first few decades after disposal will increase the driving force for water vapor transport away from the grouts; the loss of water may result in cracking, dehydration of hydrated phases, and precipitation of salts from saturated pore solution. As the grout cools, osmotic pressure caused by the high salt content may draw moisture back into the grout mass. The uptake of moisture may have detrimental impacts on the behavior of the grout.3
The history of grout at Rocky Flats, the nearly decommissioned DOE plant near Denver, Colorado, where plutonium pits for nuclear bombs were made, indicates the risks in the real world, even in the absence of elevated temperatures.
Rocky Flats operations resulted in the generation of liquid and solid wastes containing radioactive and hazardous materials and large quantities of contaminated soil and groundwater. From 1953 to 1986, five ponds lined with asphalt and concrete (called Solar Ponds) were used to store and evaporate low-level waste contaminated with nitrates and radionuclides. Other waste was also dumped in the ponds from time to time.4 The linings were ineffective, as demonstrated by the fact that the shallow groundwater in the area became contaminated with radioactive materials, nitrates, VOCs, and heavy metals.5
Because of the existing contamination and possible further contamination, DOE began phasing out the use of the ponds in early 1980s; it soon began another experiment with cement. In 1985, sludge from the solar evaporation ponds began to be mixed with cement to form large blocks of "pondcrete," which were packaged in fiberglass boxes and shipped to the Nevada Test Site for disposal. Soon after the project began, the waste had to be reclassified from low-level to mixed waste, because it was determined that the waste contained hazardous chemicals, regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Over 16,500 pondcrete blocks of mixed waste were manufactured and stored onsite, outdoors, for nearly two years, while the permitting necessary for offsite shipment was being pursued.6
In 1988, it was discovered that some of the fiberglass boxes on the outdoor pad had deteriorated while exposed to the weather and some of the pondcrete blocks had crumbled and cracked. At least one box had spilled open. It was later determined that the ratio of cement to sludge waste in making the pondcrete was incorrect. The problem apparently arose because the equipment used to introduce cement plugged up intermittently. Over 8,000 pondcrete blocks, that is, about half of the blocks stored outdoors, had to be remixed and repackaged.7
The Nevada Test Site found that 25 of the 28 blocks of pondcrete that had not yet been buried were, contrary to specifications, with surfaces soft enough to be scored by a stick; it was decided to bury them anyway because no liquids were found. The Nevada Test Site determined that the approximately 2,000 blocks that had already been buried posed little threat of contaminant migration, based on its assessment of the 28 blocks, the distribution of the containers throughout the burial ground, and the dryness of the soil. However, in October 1988, the Nevada Test Site changed its acceptance criteria for the pondcrete. It required that the pondcrete be packaged in plywood boxes with a compressive strength of 4,000 pounds per square foot.8
Rocky Flats has been left with some of the legacy of the mess as well, despite the shipment of the pondcrete blocks to Nevada. The quantity of underlying contaminated soil under the Solar Ponds has not been fully determined, but is estimated to be slightly less than 153,000 cubic meters (200,000 cubic yards) in that general vicinity.9
DOE is pursuing a cleanup program under which soil with contaminant concentrations greater than specified radionuclide soil action levels (RSALs) will be removed. However, the proposed RSALs at Rocky Flats are quite high: 50 picocuries per gram of plutonium in the top three feet, and 3000 pCi/g (based upon concentration and area/volume) in the three to six foot depth range.10 These levels are far too lax and represent an unacceptable risk to future generations by traditional radiation protection standards, which aim at protecting future farmers or ranchers who might settle on the site, in case site control and information about the contamination are lost.11
In sum, grouting residual high-level waste in tanks that contains significant quantities of long-lived radionuclides (including cesium-137 and plutonium-238, and plutonium-239/240) is a policy that poses considerable risks to the long-term health of the water resources in the region.
Endnotes
1. DOE-SRS, November 2001
2. NRC-NAS, 2000c, page 40
3. Lokken, Martin, and Shade, December 1992, page 2
4. BEMR, 1996. Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site section
5. GAO, January 1991, page 3
6. GAO, January 1991, pages 1 to 6
7. GAO, January 1991, pages 2 to 4
8. GAO, January 1991, page 5
9. BEMR, 1996. Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site section
10. Rocky Flats, 2003 , General Response, page 1
11. See Makhijani and Gopal, December 2001, for further discussion of setting radionuclide soil action levels for Rocky Flats.
# Also see: Press release regarding this statement (May 17, 2004)
# The report, Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside: Threats to the Savannah River from Radioactive Contamination at the Savannah River Site (SRS), with links to press release and statements (March 11, 2004)
-------- russia
Russia Wants Faster Aid for 'Rotting' Nuclear Subs
Story by Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent
REUTERS GERMANY:
May 17, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25126/story.htm
BERLIN - 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.
-------- terrorism
Ukraine Says It Seized 'Red Mercury'
May 17, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Ukraine-Red-Mercury.html
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Ukrainian security officers have arrested two Middle Eastern men whom they said possessed a substance that has been touted by sellers as an ingredient in nuclear weapons and dismissed by others as a hoax.
Security agents in the southern city of Odessa seized 24 pounds of a substance they said was radioactive and identified as ``red mercury,'' a State Security Service spokesman said Monday on condition of anonymity. He said they arrested two men from a Middle Eastern country,
``Foreign citizens were looking for an opportunity to purchase a quantity of radioactive material in Ukraine and to sell it in the Middle East,'' said the spokesman, who would not say what country the men were from or where the material came from. He said the arrests were made several weeks ago.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, black marketeers have been peddling substances they call red mercury, apparently passing it off to buyers as a highly radioactive compound that purportedly was developed in Soviet nuclear facilities and could be used in powerful weapons.
Samples that have turned up in Europe have proved to be bogus, however, and many scientists and law enforcement officials say the substance does not exist or is far less potentially dangerous than it has been made out to be.
Still, the Ukrainian statement appeared likely to add to concerns that terrorists have been seeking to acquire radioactive substances in the former Soviet Union.
Western governments and the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have repeatedly warned that several former Soviet republics including Ukraine have become a marketplace for radioactive materials.
This month, Ukrainian authorities arrested several people they said were involved in an attempt to purchase cesium-137, a highly radioactive material seen as a likely ingredient in a ``dirty bomb.'' Earlier this year, they arrested a man trying to take one pound of uranium into neighboring Hungary.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack in Afghanistan
Associated Press
Monday, May 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31656-2004May16.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, May 16 -- A U.S. soldier was killed and two others were slightly wounded when their convoy was attacked in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. military said Sunday.
Afghan authorities said they had arrested two Taliban suspects in the attack, which occurred Saturday in Helmand province. They also reported that U.S. forces defused a bomb Saturday at a bridge in the same province.
In neighboring Kandahar province, Afghan police seized 80 assault rifles being smuggled in an oil truck, and hundreds of Afghan forces were deployed to tighten security.
The two U.S. soldiers injured in the attack on the patrol near Girishk in Helmand returned to duty after medical treatment, said Lt. Col. Michele DeWerth, a U.S. military spokeswoman in the Afghan capital, Kabul. She did not identify any of the soldiers.
DeWerth said one "anti-coalition" fighter was detained. However, Dad Mohammed Khan, the intelligence chief for Helmand, said that Afghan officers had arrested two suspected Taliban fighters in the attack, which he said happened about 20 miles northeast of Girishk.
The last reported U.S. fatality in Afghanistan was on May 7, when a Marine was killed in a nighttime attack on a patrol in southern Uruzgan province.
On Saturday evening, U.S. forces defused a bomb over a river in Girishk, said district police chief Bier Jan. "Terrorists wanted to blow up this bridge," he said. "We got information, we found this bomb and told U.S. forces, who came and defused it."
He said that six suspects, whom he did not identify, had been arrested and that an investigation was underway.
On Sunday, Afghan police arrested six suspected Taliban fighters for smuggling weapons in Kandahar.
--------
Another Afghan Prison Probe Launched
Associated Press
By AMIR SHAH
May 17, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/A/AFGHAN_PRISONER_ABUSE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- The U.S. military on Saturday announced its second investigation in a week into allegations of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, amid growing demands from rights groups for secretive U.S.-run jails across the country to be opened for outside scrutiny.
Army spokesman Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager gave few details of the latest allegations, which follow complaints earlier this week from an Afghan police officer who said he was beaten and sexually assaulted during 40 days in custody last summer.
"On Thursday, coalition leaders were notified of another allegation of detainee abuse. Upon notification coalition forces launched an immediate investigation," Mansager said at a press conference in the capital Kabul.
He said the detainee was arrested last year and had since been released. He did not divulge who provided the information that prompted the new probe.
Human Rights groups have long complained of consistent allegations of abuse in American holding facilities across Afghanistan, where hundreds of suspected Taliban and al-Qaida fighters have been held without legal access or charge. The U.S. military classifies some of them "unlawful combatants." Many have been transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The scandal over abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq appears to have spurred the military into a quick response to the recent reports of mistreatment in Afghanistan.
On Monday, the U.S. military opened a criminal investigation into complaints of mistreatment by the Afghan police officer, Sayed Nabi Siddiqui, after his graphic account of his detention was published in the media.
Siddiqui told The Associated Press that he was punched, stripped naked and had objects inserted in his anus in three U.S. holding facilities - before being released without charge.
Human Rights Watch on Thursday said his case fit a pattern and called for U.S. holding facilities in the country here to be opened to outside scrutiny. It claimed prisoners in U.S. custody suffered "systemic" mistreatment.
The U.S.-based rights group also urged the United States to finally clear up the deaths of three Afghans in custody since late 2002.
Military autopsies have ruled two deaths of prisoners at the main coalition base at Bagram in December 2002 were homicides caused by blunt force injuries, but the military has yet to announce the findings into its investigation, which is ongoing.
Nor is much known about the death of a third prisoner in eastern Kunar province in June 2003. A U.S. intelligence official has said that the CIA inspector general is investigating that death because it involved an independent contractor working for the agency.
Lt. Gen. David Barno, the top U.S. general in Afghanistan, said Tuesday that the military made "very significant changes" to its prison regime in early 2003 in the light of alleged abuses, including the prisoner deaths, and was transferring prisoners more quickly from outlying jails to the main one at Bagram, north of Kabul.
"Coalition forces are committed to ensuring all the detainees are treated humanely and consistent with international law," Mansager said Saturday.
Officials from the International Committee of the Red Cross visit the Bagram prison, but their reports are not made public and they have no access to holding facilities elsewhere in Afghanistan.
-------- asia
Seoul says some U.S. troops to go
Washington Times
May 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040517-121709-7655r.htm
SEOUL - Washington wants to move some of the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to Iraq, South Korean officials said today.
"The U.S. government has told us that it needs to select some U.S. troops in South Korea and send them to Iraq to cope with the worsening situation in Iraq," said Kim Sook, head of the South Korean Foreign Ministry's North American Bureau.
"South Korea and the United States are discussing the matter" and working out details, including the number of U.S. troops to be redeployed, Mr. Kim said.
In Washington, a senior defense official confirmed that the Pentagon is in discussions with Seoul about using some Korea-based U.S. forces in Iraq.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the shift would be part of the next rotation of American troops in Iraq, which is scheduled to begin late this summer.
However, a South Korean newspaper said the move could come within weeks.
Tapping into the U.S. military force in South Korea would be a historic move by the Pentagon.
It underscores the degree to which the military is stretched to provide enough forces for Iraq while also meeting its other commitments. The United States has maintained troops in South Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953.
Seoul has feared that a cut in U.S. military presence might weaken the two allies' combined defense readiness against North Korea amid tension over the communist state's nuclear-weapons program. The inter-Korean border remains the world's most heavily armed.
Washington has indicated that it plans to redeploy U.S. troops from South Korea, but would shore up its forces there with newer weapons, including Patriot antimissile systems.
The main U.S. combat force in South Korea is the Army's 2nd Infantry Division. One of its brigades has traditionally been stationed at Fort Lewis, Wash., as a reserve force for South Korea.
That brigade, which was the first in the Army to transition from tanks to the new Stryker wheeled vehicle, is already in Iraq.
In discussions with officials in Seoul, Washington left open the possibility that the brigade would not return to South Korea after its mission in Iraq, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper quoted a South Korean government official as saying.
The newspaper reported that the United States plans to send 4,000 troops from South Korea to Iraq.
"The United States did not specify the date, but only sent word that the deployment would be within weeks," a Foreign Ministry official in Seoul told the newspaper.
South Korea has delayed the deployment of 3,000 of its own troops to Iraq, which was approved three months ago, amid concerns over security and where they will be stationed.
A diplomatic source in Seoul told Reuters news agency the U.S. plan to pull 4,000 of its troops out of South Korea was not intended to pressure South Korea to contribute troops to Iraq.
Of the 37,000 American forces stationed in South Korea, the 2nd Infantry Division with its 14,000 soldiers is the most forward-deployed.
South Korea and the United States are in 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 the south, out of range of North Korean artillery.
-------- britain
GLOBALIST
For Blair, Iraq's Future Will Determine His Own
May 17, 2004
By ROGER COHEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/europe/17GLOBALIST.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The political future of Iraq and that of Prime Minister Tony Blair have become inseparable. Blair made human rights in Iraq a central plank of his case for war, so the photographs of American soldiers engaged in gross abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison have enraged and embarrassed him.
It is no longer sufficient for Blair that the abuses end and that investigations of other lesser cases involving British troops be rapidly concluded. He needs to demonstrate real and rapid progress in Iraq in order to quiet the clamor within his own Labor Party and rebuff the Tory taunt that he has lost his grip. Gordon Brown, his adroit chancellor of the Exchequer, is waiting in the wings.
The British strategy, as outlined by two officials close to Blair, is vigorous. The government wants a new United Nations Security Council resolution by early June that will empower 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. Blair does not want discussions of the resolution going down to the wire before the planned June 30 handover to a still unidentified Iraqi interim government. 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 officials, who spoke on condition he 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 through measures passed by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority. A circumscribed role for the new Iraqi government, including limits on its ability to pass laws, had been outlined in Washington, although that position seems to be evolving.
So can Blair secure the kind of sharp Iraqi transition he wants in exchange for his loyalty to President George W. Bush? The next few weeks will be a critical test of his influence.
For perhaps the most politically damaging charge against Blair has been that his support for Bush has been of an unwavering and open-ended variety that has made Britain look servile without advancing its interests.
Those who have watched Blair at work during visits to the White House or in weekly telephone conversations with Bush insist this charge is baseless.
If American forces stepped back from a fight to the finish against insurgents in Falluja, Blair's advice played a role. If there is a road map for the Middle East, however murky and bumpy, think - and thank - Blair. If the United Nations and its envoy Lakhdar Brahimi are at the center of efforts to salvage Iraq, be mindful of Blair's hand.
What any British prime minister wants in the United States is influence, said the second official. We do not accept that the British government fails to have an impact on the Bush administration.
Indeed, the view has gained some currency at Downing Street that no British prime minister has had the ear of an American president to such an extent for many years, not Margaret Thatcher with Ronald Reagan, perhaps not even Churchill with Roosevelt. Blair was very close to Clinton and will never not be, said the first official. But there is a bond with Bush.
Of course, the problem with the argument that Blair's influence has been real on a president with whom he shares some deep affinity is that its upshot looks unconvincing. Iraq is in disarray, Arab hostility to the West at a high pitch, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as far from resolution as ever.
As Blair said this week, ''I have to accept responsibility for the situation I am in.'' That situation is the most difficult he has faced in his seven years as prime minister. As he knows, the quick fix might be to put some distance between himself and Bush.
That, however, will not happen. ''It would be absolute madness to disassociate ourselves from Bush,'' said the first official. ''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.''
The full definition of that process will be the work of the coming weeks, after Brahimi identifies an Iraqi government in late May. Blair will have to muster as much leverage as he can to ensure that the Iraqi sovereignty inherited on June 30 is one that comes with real authority and that the interim government is no mere puppet of the U.S. military and an American Embassy with an envisaged staff of about 1,000 people.
He will face his most difficult task in sorting out what authority, if any, the new interim government should have over the mainly American and British troops in Iraq. If sovereignty is to be real, as Blair insists it should, operations undertaken by the forces must have the consent of the government.
On the other hand, the ability to maneuver quickly and freely is essential to the security and efficacy of the troops. The Pentagon is jealous of its authority.
Finding language on this issue in a Security Council resolution that everyone can accept will be arduous. With an election looming in America, some European powers are not particularly inclined to do Bush any favors. One or two may even view Blair's current difficulties with a certain relish and be reluctant to offer any gifts.
The prime minister has a powerful incentive to steer Iraq through the treacherous transition that now looms. It amounts to nothing less than his own political survival. His strong relationship with Brown, built over more than two decades, is well known. But so, too, is Brown's determination to become prime minister one day.
Brown had established one strong credential in recent years: Britain's successful economy. He has now added another: He is relatively untainted by Iraq. ''There are bound to be tensions between them,'' said the first official. ''But this has been a long marriage.''
-------- business
CACI Contract: From Supplies to Interrogation
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31611-2004May16?language=printer
The government contract that led interrogators working for CACI International Inc. into Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was awarded in 1998, with the stated purpose of providing inventory control and other routine services to the U.S. Army.
This kind of "blanket-purchase agreement" is becoming increasingly popular with federal agencies because it is supposed to increase efficiency. Large, vaguely worded contracts are designed so the agencies can make quick requests and get fast results, without requiring separate bids and evaluations for each service. Critics say these open-ended contracts allow agencies to skirt public oversight and give big companies an unfair advantage in winning government business.
The CACI contract with the Army is administered by the Interior Department, under an outsourcing agreement with the Army, which has made it even harder to track.
The CACI contract has a $500 million limit, said Frank Quimby, a spokesman for the Interior Department. CACI has received 80 requests, or delivery orders, from the Army under this contract. Most requests are for CACI's meat-and-potatoes offerings, such as information technology services, but 11 of the delivery orders were for projects in Iraq. Three of those dealt with interrogation and intelligence gathering.
One order, issued in August 2003, was worth $19.9 million for a year-long stint of interrogation support, Quimby said. It is under that order that CACI's Steven A. Stefanowicz and other contractors worked as interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. An Army report on abuses at the prison accuses Stefanowicz of encouraging soldiers to "set conditions" for interrogations. The company has not identified Stefanowicz as the employee in question and declined to comment on the details of its contract with the Army.
"If they want to provide information to the media, that's the business of the United States government, that's not the business of CACI," J.P. London, CACI's chairman and chief executive, said in an interview last week. Stefanowicz's lawyer has said that his client did nothing wrong at the prison.
The interrogator request specified that CACI's subsidiary, CACI Premier Technology Inc., provide "intelligence advisors and data base entry-intelligence research clerks." These positions, the delivery order said, "require specific intelligence and technical expertise."
That same month the Army said it would pay CACI $3.2 million to help screen Iraqis for access to U.S. military bases. That year-long project includes "gathering and recording intelligence information electronically, and providing analysts with computer generated intelligence information."
In December 2003, CACI landed a $21.8 million request to help the Army complete "counter intelligence missions at secure and fixed locations." Quimby said all three of the delivery orders were requested by Combined Joint Task Force-7, which is responsible for securing Iraq.
Because CACI had a lock on all of these contracts, none of the requests were announced to the public.
"It's considered this fabulously successful streamlining of the system, but in the process you lose any accountability," said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight. Brian said she described large, open contracts like the one given to CACI as "hunting licenses."
"You've been given a license to do business with the government," Brian said. "You've been allowed into the preserve and once you get in there's no competition necessary."
Small companies looking to bid on specific projects may be cut out of the loop because of these types of contracts, Brian added. The agreement with CACI was already in place, so the Army did not have to put out a request for bids from other contractors that may have wanted to compete for the contract.
And because there is no competition to drive down prices, the government may be paying more than it should for some products and services, according to a report on the Defense Department's management challenges released in January by the General Accounting Office.
Throughout the 1990s, many government agencies tried to change the way they did business with private contractors. Removing some of the red tape would make it cheaper for the government and easier for private industry, proponents said.
But training on acquisition procedures and competition requirements within the Defense Department has not kept up with the military's purchasing reforms. As a result, the Defense Department "missed out on opportunities to generate savings, reduce administrative burdens, and enhance outcomes for its acquisitions," the GAO report found.
Blanket-purchase agreements were originally intended for use by agencies that buy routine products and services from the same companies, said Angela Styles, former administrator for federal procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget. If an agency knows it is going to buy a lot of pencils, for example, it might give a blanket-purchase agreement to Office Depot to lock in a price and expedite billing, she said.
"It's nice to have for simple things. . . . but it's really easy to get out of hand, because the blanket-purchase agreement isn't competed and the work under it isn't competed," Styles said.
Much of the work being done by contractors in Iraq has been parceled out under these large purchasing agreements and "indefinite delivery-indefinite quantity" contracts, said Steve Schooner, co-director of the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University. The Iraq reconstruction contracts awarded to Halliburton Co.'s subsidiary, KBR, fall under a similar type of umbrella contract.
When military buyers are "in a hurry or understaffed or when they just feel like it, agencies go out and use these vehicles. And contractors will do whatever you ask them to do, that's their job," Schooner said.
This may help the Defense Department react quickly to changing needs in its wartime and anti-terrorism efforts, Schooner said, but it leaves government watchdogs with much less insight into how tax dollars are being spent.
"There is no question that these flexible vehicles are less transparent than conventional government procurements," Schooner said.
--------
Contracts Awarded
States News Service
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page E04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31930-2004May16?language=printer
Aspen Systems Corp. of Rockville won a $71 million contract from the Justice Department to continue operation of the National Criminal Justice Reference Service.
Northrop Grumman Defense Mission Systems of Reston won a $17.76 million contract from the Naval Supply Systems Command for analytical and technical support.
Horizons Youth Services of Harrisonburg, Va., won a $17.08 million contract from the Labor Department's Employment Training Administration for operation of the Muhlenberg Job Corps Center.
BAE Systems Applied Technologies Inc. of Rockville won a $10.33 million contract from the Navy for test and evaluation support for Tomahawk Weapon Control Systems.
Padco Inc. of Washington won a contract valued at up to $10 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Emmes Corp. of Rockville won a $7.77 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department's National Cancer Institute for clinical trials and information management support services.
Progeny Systems Corp. of Manassas won a $6.75 million contract from the Navy for production and modernization of active-intercept acoustic-signal processing systems on fast-attack and guided-missile submarines.
SFA Inc. of Frederick won a $4.23 million contract from the Army's Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for water purification equipment.
Phaneuf Associates Inc. of Arlington won a $3.79 million contract from the Transportation Department's Research and Special Programs Administration for aviation safety regulations projects support.
Intelligent Decisions of Chantilly won a contract valued at up to $2.2 million from the General Services Administration for networking infrastructure equipment.
Pragmatics Inc. of McLean won a $2.16 million contract from the Defense Information Systems Agency for programmatic, technical, logistical and administrative support for the Global Command and Control System Family of Systems Integrator.
Exeter Government Services of Rockville won a $2 million contract from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for the Training Institute Online Registration Operations.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $1.74 million contract from the Army's Communications-Electronics Command for enhanced night vision devices.
Morgans Inc. of Washington won a $1.72 million contract from the Homeland Security Department's Secret Service for uniforms.
ICS Technologies Inc. of McLean won a $1.69 million contract from the Coalition Provisional Authority-Iraq for security equipment and security related products.
EnviroControl Inc. of Fort Washington won a $306,220 contract from the Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency for demolition services.
Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. of Newport News, Va., won a $286,000 contract from the Navy for sound-dampening work on 688-class submarines.
Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. of Newport News, Va., won a $250,000 contract from the Navy for labor resources in support of the de-fueling of 688-class submarines.
Avanti Corp. of Annandale won a contract valued at up to $175,000 from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for environmental services.
Abbott General Construction Inc. of Hampton, Va., won a $147,344 contract from the Homeland Security's Coast Guard to paint a hangar.
George W. Allen Co. of Beltsville won a contract valued at up to $125,000 from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for food-service equipment, supplies and services.
Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co. of Newport News, Va., won a $100,000 contract from the Navy for planning and other technical resource services for repairs on an aircraft carrier.
Radian Inc. of Alexandria won a $99,552 contract from the Army's Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for research and development services.
Radian Inc. of Alexandria won a $92,748 contract from the Defense Supply Center for electrical cable.
ANT Co. of Richmond won an $86,350 contract from the Defense Industrial Supply Center for tripod light assemblies.
Direct Dimensions of Owings Mill, Md., won a $70,650 contract from the Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence for general-purpose information-technology equipment.
Progeny Systems Corp. of Manassas won a $69,886 contract from the Navy for expendable array installation system research and development.
These contracts were awarded by the federal government to companies in Maryland, Virginia and the District. For more information, call States News Service at 202-628-3100, ext. 266.
--------
Federal Contracts Anteon to Assess Systems Stability
By Anitha Reddy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page E04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31931-2004May16.html
Anteon International Corp., a government technology contractor in Fairfax, won a five-year U.S. Navy contract worth up to $15.5 million to determine how much damage on-board electronic systems can withstand while continuing to function.
Such testing is crucial because modern ships and submarines are maneuvered and governed entirely by electronic commands, said Roger Bagbey, the vice president of Anteon's applied physics division. There is no backup system to manually submerge a submarine and none to force a sub to resurface.
Anteon workers are to detonate explosive devices near submarines and ships and then measure the physical stress on nautical computer systems. The consultants are not looking for internal software glitches; they are evaluating the durability of the hardware itself.
Anteon said 20 mechanical and structural engineers will conduct the testing in Washington, Bethesda and Mystic, Conn. The evaluations are called "ship-shock" tests and are required for the first ship or submarine produced in a certain class. The engineers will also make recommendations for future ship designs based on the test results. Bagbey said the company's suggestions will be incorporated into the Navy's blueprint for the new DDX destroyer being built by Northrop Grumman Corp.
Anteon's task is not that different from a common middle-school science experiment. Just as students are asked to package an egg in such a way that it can survive a fall from a one- or two-story building, engineers must suggest construction techniques that allow delicate computer systems to jiggle, shake and quiver without breaking.
-------- chemical weapons
Sarin nerve agent bomb explodes in Iraq
May 17, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040517-123341-7791r.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A roadside bomb containing deadly sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said today. It was believed to be the first confirmed finding of any of the banned weapons upon which the United States based its case for the Iraq war.
Two people were treated for "minor exposure," but no serious injuries were reported.
The deadly chemical was inside an artillery shell dating to the Saddam Hussein era that had been rigged as a bomb in Baghdad, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq.
U.S. troops have announced the discovery of other chemical weapons before, only to see them disproved by later tests. A dozen chemical shells were also found by U.N. inspectors before the war; they had been tagged for destruction in the 1990s but somehow were not destroyed.
"The Iraqi Survey Group confirmed today that a 155-millimeter artillery round containing sarin nerve agent had been found," Kimmitt said. "The round had been rigged as an IED (improvised explosive device) which was discovered by a U.S. force convoy.
"A detonation occurred before the IED could be rendered inoperable. This produced a very small dispersal of agent," he said.
The incident occurred "a couple of days ago," he said.
The Iraqi Survey Group is a U.S. organization whose task was to search for weapons of mass destruction after Saddam's ouster.
The round was an old `binary-type' shell in which two chemicals held in separate sections are mixed after firing to produce sarin, Kimmitt said.
He said he believed that insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent, and that the dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device was very limited.
"The former regime had declared all such rounds destroyed before the 1991 Gulf War," Kimmitt said. Two members of a military bomb squad were treated for minor exposure to nerve agent, but none was injured.
It was unclear if the sarin shell was from chemical rounds that the United Nations had tagged and marked for destruction before the U.S. invasion.
----
Rumsfeld says it wasn't necessarily sarin
Associated Press,
May 17, 2004
http://www.wtkr.com/global/story.asp?s=1873574&ClientType=Printable
Washington-AP -- Don't jump to any conclusions just yet. That warning comes from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, after the U-S military in Iraq announced that a roadside bomb containing sarin nerve gas had exploded near a U-S military convoy. Rumsfeld told a Washington, D-C audience that the "field test" showing the presence of sarin may not be accurate. He says more analysis needs to be done -- and that it may take some time to find out just what the chemical was.
In Baghdad, officials said the bomb was apparently left over from the Saddam era. They said two members of a military bomb squad were treated for "minor exposure" -- but that there were no serious injuries.
One official says the shell apparently contained two chemicals that are designed to combine and create sarin -- but that they didn't mix properly.
----
WMD Thrill for WarBots
Antiwar.com
May 17, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P920
"WMDs at last?" asks warbot site The Command Post hopefully. Fox News (surprise! I bet you didn't see that one coming....) is reporting that one entire shell might have had......sarin gas in it! WOO Hoo! See, America was imminently threatened, you anti-war doubters!!
Oh, the shell was rigged as an IED (aka roadside bomb) and exploded releasing "a small amount of agent" according to General "Change the Channel" Kimmitt. No mass destruction occurred, for which we can all be grateful, and apparently the danger of the "agent" floating from Iraq to the US is minimal.
Before all you warfloggers out there get all excited about this "WMD" it might be helpful to know what WMD is:
Chemical weapons, which are not WMD, are blistering, choking, or toxic agents. Mustard gas possessed by Iraq, Libya, Syria, Egypt and other nations is World War I technology. Horrible as they are, these are strictly battlefield weapons, requiring large, clumsy holding tanks, and depend on favourable winds. Winston Churchill authorized using poison gas against "primitive tribesmen" - Kurds in Iraq and Afghans - when he was British home secretary. Benito Mussolini's Italy used mustard gas in Ethiopia and Libya.
Choking gas, like chlorine, is also a tactical battlefield agent. French troops without gas masks defending a 4-km front at Verdun in 1916 were hit by 60,000 chlorine gas shells, yet held their lines. So did Canadian troops in Flanders, also without masks, who heroically fought off superior German forces.
World War II vintage
Nerve gases, like Sarin and VX, are World War II vintage. Though deadly, they, too, are tactical agents designed for area denial and neutralizing high value targets. Using nerve gas requires specialized vehicles or aircraft with highly complex dispensing systems. Gas is dependent on temperature, humidity and wind. The Soviets tried various nerve agents in Afghanistan, but found them ineffective and dangerous to their own troops.
Nerve agents would be extremely lethal if released by terrorists in a large building, mall or airport but, again, they are weapons of localized destruction, not mass destruction. In 1995, a Japanese cult released nerve gas in Tokyo's subway, killing 12 people.
Nerve gas was not used during WW II because of its unreliability and lack of wide area lethality. Many gases are unstable and have limited shelf lives. Iraq and Iran used poison gas during the 1980-88 Gulf War - killing or maiming many soldiers but achieving no strategic breakthroughs.
-------- china
China Delivers Double-Edged Notice to Taiwan
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31323-2004May16.html
BEIJING, May 17 -- The Chinese government warned Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian on Monday to pull back from a "dangerous lurch toward independence" or face "destruction." But it also offered economic, diplomatic and other benefits if Chen acknowledges that Taiwan and the mainland are part of "one China."
The carefully worded statement, released by the official New China News Agency just after midnight, came three days before Chen was scheduled to be sworn in for a second term and appeared to be intended as a warning that he should abandon the pro-independence rhetoric of his campaign when he delivers his inaugural address.
With tensions running high across the Taiwan Strait, the Bush administration has already put pressure on Chen to avoid provoking China's Communist leadership and to map out a realistic plan for improving relations with Beijing in the speech. Senior Taiwanese officials say Chen is prepared to make goodwill gestures, but it is unclear how far he will go.
Chen, who narrowly won reelection in March, says Taiwan is an independent nation. China claims sovereignty over the self-governing island and has threatened to seize it by force if it formally declares independence.
The United States has pledged to help defend Taiwan if necessary, but with troops already deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials are worried about being dragged into a military conflict with China. In recent statements in Washington and Taipei, U.S. officials have warned Taiwan that any unilateral move toward formal independence would recklessly risk a war that could destroy the freedom, prosperity and autonomy it currently enjoys.
Describing relations with Taiwan as "severely tested," the Chinese government warned that if Chen continued to insist there was "one country on each side" of the Taiwan Strait -- one of his most popular campaign slogans -- "hopes for peace, stability, mutual benefit and a win-win scenario in cross-strait relations will evaporate."
"The Taiwan leaders have before them two roads," the statement said. "One is to pull back immediately from their dangerous lurch toward independence, recognizing that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China. . . . The other is to keep following their separatist agenda to cut Taiwan from the rest of China and, in the end, meet their own destruction by playing with fire."
"If Taiwan leaders should move recklessly to provoke major incidents of Taiwan independence, the Chinese people will crush their schemes firmly and thoroughly at any cost," it added.
But the statement also laid out in unusual detail what the Chinese government is willing to offer Taiwan if it agrees it is part of "one China," including a resumption of cross-strait talks and a range of economic benefits, such as direct trade, shipping and air links and increased access to mainland markets.
China also offered to establish "a mechanism of trust in the military field," suggesting it may be willing to ease its buildup of missiles and other forces aimed at Taiwan. And it dangled the prospect of negotiations to resolve "the issue of the international living space of the Taiwan region," implying that it might be willing to allow Taiwan to send its own diplomats abroad and soften policies preventing the island from joining international organizations such as the World Health Organization.
Chen has repeatedly rejected the Chinese government's "one China" principle, arguing that it makes Taiwan a local jurisdiction under Beijing and is unacceptable to the island's 23 million citizens. But he has said he is willing to discuss a "future one China" with Beijing and set aside his policy that there is "one country on each side" of the Taiwan Strait if Beijing sets aside its "one China" principle.
A senior Taiwanese official, who spoke on the condition he not be identified, said last week that Chen would probably address the "one China" dispute in his inaugural speech and adopt language that "moves closer to Chinese demands."
"There's going to be significant goodwill gestures sent to China," the official said. But he warned that if the Chinese government did not respond positively, there would be domestic political pressure on Chen to take a hard line again.
The official also signaled a new flexibility regarding Chen's controversial plan to rewrite Taiwan's constitution. Chen has proposed drafting a new constitution for the island and holding a referendum to approve it in 2006. China has argued that could amount to a formal declaration of independence and prompt a war.
The official said Chen was considering whether to amend the island's current constitution instead, an option that U.S. officials have argued would be less provocative.
The official said Chen still intended to rewrite 80 to 90 percent of the constitution to streamline the government and make it more democratic. But he said the reforms would not touch on sensitive issues of sovereignty, including Taiwan's name, flag and the definition of its territory.
He said the Bush administration has expressed concern about the constitutional reforms and "has been heard loud and clear. We understand the concern and nervousness of the U.S. We're going to be very careful."
--------
China Warns Taiwan to Drop Independence Move
May 17, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/asia/17chin.html
BEIJING, Monday, May 17 - China told President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan to drop his drive for independence or be "consumed in his own flames," a sharply worded warning delivered just days before Mr. Chen begins his second term in office.
But in a statement released Monday, Beijing also offered economic and diplomatic benefits if Mr. Chen embraces the "one China" principle under which China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, and also said it might seek to build "mechanism of trust" to reduce military tensions if Mr. Chen cooperates.
The carrot-and-stick message, China's most detailed statement on the subject since Mr. Chen narrowly won re-election in a hotly disputed election in March, is part of a flurry of diplomacy ahead of Mr. Chen's inaugural on Thursday.
The United States has also been urging Mr. Chen to tone down independence-leaning statements he made during the campaign. American officials have also suggested that China send a positive signal that reconciliation could be possible if Mr. Chen softens his approach to managing relations with the mainland.
China described its ties with Taiwan as "severely tested'' and laid out two alternatives.
Taiwan's leaders "have before them two roads: one is to pull back immediately from their dangerous lurch toward independence, recognizing that both sides of the Taiwan Strait belong to one and the same China,'' said the statement issued by the Taiwan Affairs Office of China's State Council, or cabinet. "The other is to keep following their separatist agenda to cut Taiwan off from the rest of China and, in the end, meet their own destruction.''
China has said repeatedly that it would use military force to prevent Taiwan from formally declaring independence. On the other hand, the statement laid out possible benefits if Mr. Chen were to accept China as Taiwan's sovereign power, which he has not done in the past.
Beijing said it would resume political dialogue, offer economic benefits and allow direct transportation between Taiwan and the mainland. It also dangled the prospect of talks to address "the international living space of the Taiwan region.''
Taiwan has been pressing to join international groups like the World Health Organization, but China has used its clout to block membership.
-------- iran
Iran Denounces Offensive Against Shiite Insurgents
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31825-2004May16?language=printer
BAGHDAD, May 16 -- Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, weighed in on the side of anti-American Shiite Muslim insurgents in Iraq, chastising U.S. actions across the southern part of the country as "stupid" and "shameful."
Khamenei's remarks, made in a speech to theology students and broadcast on Iranian radio, were the first harsh criticism issued by predominantly Shiite Iran about the ongoing U.S. offensive against forces loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a young Shiite cleric wanted by U.S. forces on murder charges.
Shortly after Khamenei spoke, about 100 students threw rocks at the British Embassy in Tehran and burned the British and Israeli flags.
Meanwhile, U.S. officials reported that a U.S. soldier died late Sunday of wounds suffered during a firefight in an unspecified city in southern Iraq.
In Basra, the largest Shiite city in Iraq, insurgents firing at a British camp hit a house instead, British officials said. The blast killed four Iraqi civilians, including 2-year-old twins, news services reported.
A female translator working with U.S. troops was killed and another was critically injured when gunmen broke into their houses in Mahmudiyah, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, said Dawood Taee, director of the city's hospital.
And in Baghdad, gunmen fired at a minibus carrying five female employees of the U.S.-led occupation authority. Two women were killed, and a third lost an eye. As the survivors fled, the insurgents blew up the bus. Its twisted remains stood abandoned in front of the Daura neighborhood police station all day Sunday. "What can we do about this?" said Capt. Ali Omran, who was in charge of the station. "We get shot at ourselves."
In the year since the fall of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Iran's position toward the U.S.-led invasion and occupation has had two sides. The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an Iraqi group that is largely cooperative with the United States, has the support of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. The Supreme Council and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most senior religious authority, have urged U.S. forces as well as Sadr and his militia to withdraw from Najaf.
But Sadr, who has recruited loyalists from among the legion of poor Shiite youths in Iraq, is financed by an ayatollah in the religious city of Qom in Iran. The ayatollah, Kazem Haeri, is backed by officials of the Revolutionary Guards and Iranian intelligence agencies, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.
Khamenei, in his speech Sunday, said, "The Americans' military aggression against holy Shiite sites is a rude, shameful and stupid measure," according to excerpts reported by the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
He accused U.S. troops of firing on and hitting the golden dome of the Ali shrine, which is dedicated to the first Shiite imam. "Muslim people, particularly Shiites, in their own country or in Iraq, in various Iraqi cities or in other parts of the world, will not remain silent at this American encroachment," he said.
Khamenei also criticized the operation of Abu Ghraib prison, where U.S. guards abused Iraqi prisoners. "You have not closed Saddam's torture chambers. You have replaced Saddam," he said.
"The Americans are trapped," he said. "There is nothing they can do. They will fail if they continue on this path, and they will fail if they pull out."
Najaf, where Sadr has taken refuge among hundreds of militiamen, was relatively quiet Sunday, residents said. The day before, U.S. troops pursued Sadr loyalists and used tanks to fire on those who had taken up positions in a huge cemetery in the city. Shiites consider the cemetery the world's most desirable burial place because of its position close to the Ali shrine.
A few dozen demonstrators marched in Najaf on Sunday, demanding the withdrawal of forces on both sides, witnesses said.
In Nasiriyah, south of Najaf, insurgents attacked a convoy transporting Italy's civilian administrator for southern Iraq, Barbara Contini, as it approached the occupation administrative offices. The official was uninjured, but two Italian paramilitary police officers suffered injuries, according to news reports from Rome.
Insurgents also drove Italian troops from their base in Nasiriyah, the Associated Press reported. The Italians evacuated the base Sunday as it came under repeated attack. At least 10 Italians were wounded, one of them critically, according to Lt. Col. Giuseppe Perrone, a spokesman for the Italian force.
Gunmen and rebels bearing rocket-propelled grenade launchers earlier attacked the occupation building in Nasiriyah, where the Italians are deployed. It was the third consecutive day of skirmishes there.
Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, in a rare criticism of the United States, wrote in the Corriere della Sera newspaper: "We have asked the Americans to avoid frontal attacks on Iraqi holy cities and to hand over military control of these cities to Iraqi forces." He did not specify which forces.
The government of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is under pressure from opposition groups to withdraw Italy's 2,500 troops from Iraq. Frattini suggested, however, that Italy has no plans to pull out. "There is one point on which everyone agrees," he wrote. "If there was an immediate pullout by the coalition, Iraq would fall into civil war."
But Gianfranco Fini, who heads the second-largest party in Berlusconi's coalition, said the government was looking for a way out. "An exit strategy is being defined," he told reporters, referring to Italian efforts to get the United Nations involved in pacifying Iraq. Spain withdrew its forces from Iraq last month.
Also Sunday, the Arab satellite television network al-Jazeera broadcast footage of two Russian hostages held in Iraq since Monday and read a statement from a group demanding that foreign troops withdraw from the country, the Associated Press reported.
The brief footage showed the two men, seemingly in good health, sitting against a wall.
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Iraqi Council Leader Is Killed in Blast Near U.S. Headquarters
May 17, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/17CND_IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 17 - A suicide bomber killed the president of the Iraqi Governing Council and at least six other people on Monday at a checkpoint into the main headquarters for the American occupation forces in Iraq.
Two American soldiers and five Iraqi civilians were wounded in the attack, the military said.
It was unclear if the victim, Ezzedine Salim, an Islamist politician and writer who this month held the council's rotating presidency, was the specific target. But the death of the nominal head of the most important body of Iraqis deepened the uncertainty here only 45 days before limited sovereignty is to be handed over to Iraqis, on June 30. American officials hope that step will decrease the violence that has sharply risen in the last month and a half.
"The countdown is there, and then they are escalating," said Mahmoud Othman, who also sits on the 25-member council, referring to anti-American insurgents. "They don't want this political process to succeed. And they want just to have more deterioration of the security situation."
The violence continued on Monday as American warplanes dropped bombs on the positions of insurgent Shiite Muslims in Karbala and troops pushed back attacks in the southern city of Nasiriya. American officials also announced that they had discovered an artillery shell in Baghdad several days ago loaded with the deadly nerve gas sarin. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reacted cautiously to the discovery, saying more extensive tests were necessary. [Page A10.]
The suicide attack, just before 10 a.m., shot a sooty plume of dense smoke into the sky over Baghdad, shattering windows in houses and on cars down the block and sending hot metallic shards for hundreds of yards. As American soldiers pushed back onlookers, fire poured from a battered car tipped over on its side. A mangled body lay near a fire truck.
Iraqi police officers ran from the wreckage gripping a blanket that carried the charred remains of one victim. Qais Jabbar, 23, a taxi driver who saw the explosion, grabbed a corner of the blanket to help drop the remains into the back of a Volkswagen Passat.
"This is our destiny!" he yelled in anger over the violence in Iraq, blaming both the bombers and the inability of American troops to stop attacks. "We are all going be like this. He's only a civilian. He's not an American."
Mr. Salim, 61, from the southern city of Basra, is the second member of the council to be killed since it was installed last summer by American officials. The first, Akila al-Hashimi, was attacked on Sept. 20, when gunmen ambushed her car in Baghdad. She died of her wounds five days later.
After six weeks of unrest and a scandal over abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, Mr. Salim's death stoked tensions at a time of lowered American credibility here over exactly how much sovereignty will be granted to Iraqis on June 30. Some council members suggested that such violence could be prevented only if Iraqi forces were given broad authority over security.
"The Iraqis know their country," Mr. Othman said. "They know a good man and a bad man, and who has been with Saddam. The Americans don't know anything about Iraq."
Negotiations over the transfer of power are going on with a United Nations envoy, but there is still no set plan for the transfer. Dan Senor, the spokesman for the occupation administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, on Monday repeated previous statements that American forces would retain the dominant role over security in Iraq even after the deadline.
"Those leaders who have taken a serious look at the issue have made it clear to us that it is their hope that American security forces continue to play a role here," Mr. Senor said.
The bombing on Monday seemed to be a shift in tactics for the insurgency. For more than nine months, attackers have preferred to remain anonymous.
Responsibility for this attack was claimed, on an Islamic Web site, by the Rashid Brigades of a group calling itself the Arabic Resistance Movement. The announcement claimed that the attack was carried out by two "heroic members" - Ali Khaled al-Jabouri and Muhammad Hassan al-Samarai. The group linked its actions to the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.
"The brigade promises the people of our nation to struggle on until the liberation of glorious Iraq and precious Palestine," the statement said.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, spokesman for the occupation military command, said the claim was being investigated. But he suggested that the attack might be the work of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to Al Qaeda.
Last week, Mr. Zarqawi, accused of planning several suicide bombings in Iraq, claimed responsibility for beheading Nicholas Berg, a 26-year-old American, in retribution for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison.
The attack on Monday was denounced by top leaders in the United States and Britain and inside Iraq. "This is a challenge," said Sheik Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawar, a Sunni Muslim council member chosen to replace Mr. Salim as president through the June 30 transfer. "And we accepted this challenge. We are more determined than yesterday to go along with the process for regaining sovereignty and rebuilding Iraq as a democratic, free Iraq."
In a statement, Mr. Bremer said: "The terrorists who are seeking to destroy Iraq have struck a cruel blow with this vile act today. But they will be defeated."
Mr. Salim was born in Basra, a largely Shiite city. His real name was Abdul Zahra Othman Muhammad. A newspaper editor and the author of 36 books on religion and politics, he was jailed by Saddam Hussein from 1974 to 1978. In 1983, he fled to Iran. In exile, he adopted the name Ezzedine Salim. When he returned to Iraq last year, he established the National Center for Social Studies and History in Basra. Two of his eight children worked as his bodyguards. It was not clear if either died or was injured in the attack.
The attack on Monday was carried out at Checkpoint 12 into the Green Zone, the huge and heavily fortified main headquarters for the American-led occupation forces. Mr. Salim was on his way to a council meeting at 10 a.m., one member said, and his convoy was stopped for a security search at the checkpoint, run by American soldiers.
Jawad Kadhim, 35, said he had just stepped into his car when he saw Mr. Salim's convoy pass by. "All of a sudden I saw the flames and heard an explosion," he said.
As with other such attacks, General Kimmitt said this one appeared to have been carried out with several artillery shells wired together.
Residents nearby were furious at the attack, which like many others, killed more Iraqis than Americans. For some, it was another example of why they said the American occupation should end, though they were no happier with the attackers.
"This is a barbaric, uncivilized way to make the occupation forces leave," Mr. Kadhim said. "Have you heard about any American casualties here? It's all civilians - Iraqis."
General Kimmitt and Mr. Senor deflected criticism from council members that they did not have adequate security, saying that the United States provided equipment and training for bodyguards. Mr. Senor said Mr. Salim relied on family members for protection, none of whom, he said, had received training. General Kimmitt also said that all vehicles were searched before entering the Green Zone, though he acknowledged that American military vehicles were often whisked through more quickly than others.
A second suicide bombing on Monday went almost unnoticed. At about the same time as the attack that killed Mr. Salim, another bomber rammed his car into a truck in a convoy just west of Baghdad.
First Lt. Jacob Day, 27, said the truck was carrying paper plates and plastic cutlery for a military base north of Baghdad. Two soldiers were wounded in the attack, he said, but only the bomber was killed.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting for this article.
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American Airstrike Hits Insurgents Near Mosque in Karbala
May 17, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/middleeast/18KARBAL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
KARBALA, Iraq, May 17 - In its riskiest attack yet against the forces of a rebel Shiite cleric, the American military called in an airstrike today to kill fighters standing about 160 feet away from one of the holiest shrines in Shiite Islam, military officials said.
The strike came after nearly a week in which tenacious insurgents supporting the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, fought daily battles in downtown Karbala against soldiers of the First Armored Division. The insurgents have killed three American soldiers and wounded at least 55, frustrating American commanders who had hoped to break the insurgency by raiding a mosque used as a rebel stronghold last Tuesday.
After hours of debate on Sunday, commanders called in an AC-130 gunship, which began pounding away at insurgent positions with 40-millimeter cannon fire around 12:30 a.m. today.
An American officer on the scene said the insurgents had clustered on a street corner about 160 feet from the golden-domed Shrine of Hussein, dedicated to the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad.
As many as 16 insurgents were killed in the airstrike and at least five were wounded, said Major Mark Grabski, executive officer of the First Battalion, 37th Armor Regiment of the First Armored Division. Thirteen other insurgents were killed in battles in the area, said Dan Senor, an occupation spokesman, citing a count by Polish forces here.
The intense, rhythmic pounding from the cannon fire could be heard as far away as Camp Lima, the military base five miles east of the city center.
Across the south, Mr. Sadr's followers have launched fierce counterattacks against occupation forces. An Italian soldier died today of injuries suffered the previous day in battle in the city of Nasiriya, The Associated Press reported. Militiamen chased Italian soldiers out of a military base and to the outskirts of the city, and civilian workers have abandoned the besieged office of the occupation authority.
Here in Karbala, ever since American soldiers raided and occupied the Mukhaiyam Mosque, the insurgent stronghold, Mr. Sadr's followers have been regrouping around the Shrine of Abbas and Shrine of Hussein, just 600 feet east of the mosque. American commanders had held back from attacking the insurgents there for fear of damaging the shrines and inflaming Shiite Muslims around the world. But insurgents continued firing mortar shells and rocket-propelled grenades at the occupied mosque from the shrine area, and Lt. Col. Garry P. Bishop, the regiment's commander, decided the fighters had to be killed.
Major Grabski and Capt. William Thomas Byrns, the commander of a tank company in the area at the time, said there had been no damage to the Shrine of Hussein. But with insurgents still roaming the area, American soldiers did not closely inspect the shrine after the attack. An Iraqi reporter working for The New York Times in Karbala said it appeared some tiles might have sustained minor damage.
"Things blow up when they engage targets, and they blow up pretty big," Captain Byrns said of the AC-130. But, he added, "those things are extremely accurate."
There did not appear to be any large protests by residents here after the airstrike.
In April, after Mr. Sadr's militia began fighting, Shiite leaders issued dire warnings to American commanders not to enter the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala or mosques. But since then, there have been signs that top Shiites have grown weary of Mr. Sadr. Two weeks ago, they demanded that he withdraw his fighters from Najaf and Karbala and stop using mosques as arsenals. And there has been little outrage from residents, even after American troops began using the mosque here as a base.
Mr. Sadr and his armed supporters have used holy sites as shields during a six-week uprising against the occupation forces. Shortly after he ignited the revolt, Mr. Sadr barricaded himself in the nearby city of Najaf and posted members of his militia, the Mahdi Army, around the Shrine of Ali there, dedicated to the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad. The American military has occupied a former Spanish base on the outskirts of Najaf but has held back from entering the downtown area, despite statements by commanders that they intended to kill or capture Mr. Sadr.
Last Friday, American tanks and insurgents engaged in a battle in a sprawling Shiite cemetery close to the city center. Supporters of Mr. Sadr claimed afterward that American bullets had hit the golden dome of the Shrine of Ali. But a spokesman for the occupation forces denied that American soldiers were responsible.
Capt. Noel Gorospe, a civil affairs officer here, said one Iraqi family had filed a claim for compensation for property loss after the airstrike. The head of the family said his home had been damaged in attack. But the man also said his family was not in the house at the time, Captain Gorospe said, adding that it probably meant the insurgents had taken over the building.
On Sunday afternoon, insurgents with checkered scarves wrapped around their faces and carrying AK-47 assault rifles, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled- grenade launchers wandered around the shrine area. A freelance photographer for The New York Times reported seeing many armed men along a ring road surrounding the Shrine of Hussein. The men had at least a dozen rocket-propelled grenades, and some wore bulletproof vests with camouflage patterns.
Near one corner, fighters sat in a small circle around a small fire brewing tea. Gunfire could be heard nearby. Several men leaned their AK-47's against a wall and prayed, kneeling on the ground.
At one point, a group of about 10 men reloaded their weapons and peered around the corner to where they had set up a heavy machine gun 50 yards away on a median in the road. Insurgents fired the gun every minute or so in long bursts.
There appeared to be about 70 fighters on that corner of the shrine. They looked fairly relaxed, joking and laughing. They seemed confident that the Americans would not attack them if they stayed in the shrine area.
"The situation is under control with the help of Allah and the Imam Mahdi," said one fighter in a blue ski mask who declined to give his name. "We're fighting them with rifles and R.P.G.'s while they're using tanks and helicopters. We want peace. We want the Americans to leave the holy cities."
From 2 a.m. Sunday to 2 a.m. today, three patrols of three to four American tanks each rolled up to within 500 to 600 feet of the Shrine of Hussein, said Captain Byrns. The first two times, the soldiers saw groups of fighters on the steps of the shrine. The fighters then ran into the shrine, and the tanks came under rocket-propelled grenade fire, some from a second-floor window of the shrine, the captain said.
The tanks only fired back when first fired on, he added, and never in the direction of the shrine. "That is an exercise in self-control," Captain Byrns said.
The third patrol of tanks arrived at the shrine today after midnight. No insurgents fired at them, even after the tanks turned on their headlights, Captain Byrns said. Only after a tank blew up a damaged bus did militiamen begin shooting off rocket-propelled grenades, he said.
That was when the AC-130 opened up with its 40-millimeter cannon. The use of the plane had been approved by both senior division officers in Baghdad and by a Polish general in charge of multinational forces in the area, Major Grabski said. The entire battle lasted about 20 minutes.
"This morning it was very quiet, almost strangely quiet," the major said.
But by afternoon, insurgents had begun attacking the Americans again. Soldiers killed at least three militiamen. Gunfire and explosions echoed across the death zone of this holy city.
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THE SOLDIERS
Divided Mission in Iraq Tempers Views of G.I.'s
May 17, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/middleeast/17SOLD.html?pagewanted=all&position=
KARBALA, Iraq, May 16 - Six weeks ago, soldiers of the First Armored Division were renovating schools. Now they are raiding them for hidden munitions.
Children wave to them along the roads, while insurgents with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades make them targets.
"Our mission is to rebuild this country, but the thing is, the bad guys won't let us do it," said Specialist Jennifer Marie Bencze, 20, of Santa Rosa, Calif. "At the same time we've got engineers rebuilding schools, fixing roads, doing all the humanitarian projects, we've got infantry fighting the bad guys. So the mission is really confused."
Here in the Shiite heartland, the division is caught up in the fiercest and deadliest fighting now under way in Iraq. That is a far cry from May 2003, when it rolled into Iraq thinking the war was all but over, ready to plant Western-style institutions in this arid land. Interviews with dozens of soldiers over the last two weeks suggest that their idealism has been tempered.
All agree the war is at a crucial juncture, but few soldiers can say with certainty how to achieve victory - or even what might constitute victory.
"I think Bush is a good man, but over here, it's not as easy as he makes it sound," said Specialist Matthew DeGregorio, 35, a reservist in civil affairs charged with persuading Iraqis to work on projects with the Americans. "Nobody buys the fact that it's so easy."
"To be honest, I'd say there are things that need to be worked out," he added. "I'd say they need even more men in the entire country. I think it goes back to the cuts in the military. I think they're leaning too heavily on the National Guard and the Reserves."
The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib concerns soldiers, too. They ask whether their work has been irrevocably tarnished in the minds of Americans and Iraqis. "Now we wonder what people back home think of us," said First Lt. Erik Iliff, 24, of Columbia, S.C. "Will it be like Vietnam, where everyone who's fought there is labeled a baby killer?"
As for Iraqi opinion, Specialist DeGregorio said the scandal "adds fuel to the fire."
"We're not only seen as an occupier, but we're seen messing with their people and doing sick stuff," he said. "Rumors and stuff you see on TV are huge here. They've already had it driven into their heads by Saddam Hussein that America is the Great Satan."
Many of the soldiers are tired. They were supposed to go home at the end of April, but their tour was extended four months when it became clear that troop numbers were too low. They share a sense of camaraderie though, forged by working together during what is for most of them the toughest year of their lives.
At Camp Lima, a military base on the outskirts of Karbala, they sleep scores to a tent in 100-plus degree heat. They are barred from indulging in sex and alcohol. When they do leave the base, it is often to get shot at or to kill people.
The strength of the insurgency persuades some soldiers here that a strong American military presence must remain in Iraq. "We're just trying to take this big ball of mess and keep it from exploding," said Lt. Josey Sandoval, 24, of Seattle. "If the U.S. Army left right now, this country would tear itself apart."
For others, the mission that began with clear objectives is murkier than ever.
They were assigned in Baghdad to do reconstruction work and patrol the streets. Then came the two-front uprising last month, in Falluja, west of Baghdad, and in Karbala and other southern cities, and with that the division rushed south to fight militiamen loyal to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
Over the year, some ambitious goals fell by the wayside. Lieutenant Iliff recalled the day he had to cancel elections in December for seats on a neighborhood council in Baghdad. First, the men tried to bar women from voting. Then they mobbed the ballot box. The lieutenant ended up hand-picking three people for the seats.
Whatever government does take root, "I think it'll have to be an Iraqi version of it," he said, adding: "Westernized democracy just won't work. They haven't been taught from a young age to think the way we think in the West. They don't have an understanding of the same rights."
Cpl. Jonathan Torres, 20, of Puerto Rico, echoed that sentiment: "It's going to take a lot longer than they thought it would. Here, people are used to another way of living. They thought they could change it in one or two years. It's going to take a lot longer."
Asked to describe his mission, Sgt. Daniel Rigole, 23, a tent-mate of Corporal Torres, said: "It just seems like we're trying to police. In my personal opinion, it's a job for the United Nations." "Our job as combat engineers has nothing to do with driving around, policing people up," he added. In their hot and fetid tent, Sergeant Rigole and several soldiers talked of American casualties suffered in recent fighting around the Mukhaiyam Mosque. Three soldiers have been killed and at least 55 wounded since the First Armored Division opened the offensive against Mr. Sadr's militia two weeks ago. Daily battles rage in downtown Karbala. The division's casualty rate is running higher than at any time in the last year.
Sergeant Rigole said he believed that outside Iraq, "nobody cares anymore, because it's just becoming another part of life."
"When it's somebody of your own, that's somebody who was watching your back and you were watching his back," he said. "It's part of your family, you know. Even when it's someone who's part of another unit, you still care."
Corporal Torres observed: "It builds some type of anger. It makes you angry at the enemy."
A soldier close to an infantryman killed by a sniper stopped by a reporter's room at the base and almost punched the wall. He was on the verge of tears. "I want you to tell people that this is ridiculous," he said. "We know where the enemy is. We could take them out. But we're holding back because of politics."
He was speaking of the balance adopted by American commanders, who have refrained from attacking insurgents holed up around two especially important shrines in downtown Karbala out of fear that they could inflame Shiite Muslims the world over. Most of the mortars and rocket-propelled grenades being fired at Americans are coming from that area. It is a dilemma intrinsic to the kind of urban warfare the Americans have been drawn into - weighing the potential of a public backlash against the need to win a decisive victory with the fewest casualties.
"It does limit some of our options," said Lt. Col. Garry P. Bishop, the commander of American forces in Karbala. "But you can win a battle and lose a war if we turn the will of the people against us."
Many soldiers say the allegiance of the Iraqi people is still up in the air, and whichever way it swings will determine the outcome of the war. At the moment, some say, the insurgents are crushing the Americans in the propaganda campaign.
"They're really working us over," said Capt. Charles Fowler, 37, a reservist in civil affairs from Vidalia, Ga. "We're doing a lot of great, great stuff. We really are. We're just not getting credit for it."
The captain said he was failing to win over noncommittal Iraqis, those he called fence riders. Without criticizing American politicians or civilian officials, he said administrators seemed to be constantly changing their plans for Iraq, sowing uncertainty among Iraqis. That seemed especially true of the muddled proposals for setting up an interim government to take "limited sovereignty" after June 30.
"I think we should have clarified it and told people we had a definite concrete plan, something like, `Look, this is what's going to happen,' " he said. "They're really just waiting to see what's going to happen."
"They ask me what's going to happen," the captain added. "Hell, I don't even know. It makes it very difficult right now. It makes it very difficult for me. One thing I can't do is make promises that we can't keep."
Lieutenant Iliff, the officer who tried organizing elections in Baghdad, said: "People are so easily swayed. That's a source of frustration. One week they're waving at us; the next week they throw rocks at us. Then we build a playground, and they're waving at us again."
Many soldiers also expressed disappointment at the waning support in the United States for the war effort. Some said they feared that support would further erode in light of the disclosures of Abu Ghraib. They condemned the acts of the prison guards, but also said they were not paying much attention to the scandal since they had almost no access to the news.
Specialist Bencze said: "It's hard knowing that the actions of a few people can try to ruin the work we've done for the last year. I felt we'd been making a lot of progress here, and this was a roadblock."
Some soldiers blamed the news media's coverage of the fighting for fanning antiwar sentiments back home.
"For 10 months, it was my position that the American public saw too much of the shooting and the killing and not enough of the humanitarian side of things," Colonel Bishop said. "In my area in Baghdad, there were 80 schools renovated, $1.7 million of aid given out and 29 different sewer renovation projects."
In the end, the soldiers grasped at small signs that told them they were doing some good here. On a recent morning, as a convoy was returning to base after a battle at an amusement park, children ran out of their homes and waved to the soldiers. Specialist Ryan Stewart, 26, a surfer from Santa Paula, Calif., took a hand off his M-240 SAW machine gun and waved back. "That makes things seem a bit better," he said.
He was wounded by shrapnel more than a week later and flown out to Germany for care. His fiancée awaited him there. For him, the war was over.
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DIPLOMATIC MEMO
Transfer Date Is Clear, but Not Much Else Is
May 17, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/middleeast/17DIPL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 16 - For weeks, the American occupation authority in Iraq has been updating the timetable leading to the day it is supposed to go out of business, on June 30, declaring on its Web site on Sunday that there were "46 days until Iraqi sovereignty."
Yet nowhere on the Web site, or anyplace else in official American statements, can be found the identity of the new Iraqi leadership or the precise powers of the new Iraqi government over many important matters, including the full authority over Iraqi armed forces.
Those forces will continue to operate under American command, but the Americans have said they will consult the new government on deployment and other issues.
Other subjects that remain unclear include to what extent Iraq will have a say in the practices of American-run prisons that hold Iraqi suspects, some of whom are not charged with any crimes, and over the Iraqi criminal justice system that might prosecute Americans for crimes against Iraqis.
"I have asked many times who will be in charge of Abu Ghraib prison after Iraq becomes a sovereign country," a European diplomat said, referring to the place where Iraqi detainees were abused. "I cannot get any answers. I can't get answers to a lot these questions."
Nor is it clear to what extent the World Bank and other international agencies will continue to have accounting authority over the spending of huge sums derived from Iraqi assets and oil income. More than $18 billion has accrued to Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein, and only $8 billion has been spent so far.
Much of this money has been distributed by Americans to expedite construction projects and the like at a time when the spending of American funds appropriated by Congress has been delayed. The disbursals are audited by the auditing firm KPMG, but its work is not completed.
Some in the Bush administration and the United Nations expect issues like these to become integral to the drafting of a United Nations Security resolution intended to confer legitimacy on the new government; the resolution is also meant to persuade more countries to send aid and troops. The decision to put off these issues is becoming a source of tension and confusion in the Bush administration. Last week, for example, two top officials from the State Department and one from the Defense Department gave contradictory testimony to a House committee on what would happen if an Iraqi government installed after June 30 were to ask American forces to pull out of Iraq.
It took Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to clear up the confusion and declare that although he viewed such a possibility as remote, the Iraqis would indeed have the right to order American and allied troops out of the country if they so chose.
American officials say all the uncertainties are a necessary byproduct of the plan to let Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy in Iraq, choose the new Iraqi leadership.
The American game plan is to let that "caretaker government," which is to stay in power until elections early next year, negotiate the definition of its own powers, in discussions with the United States and other members of the United Nations Security Council, with the active participation of Arab nations in the region.
American officials have spoken of the post-June 30 Iraqi government as having "limited sovereignty," meaning that American troops will be under American command, and that the new government will be explicitly directed by the United States and the United Nations not to enact major laws or make commitments that would bind the elected government, which is to take office next year.
The justification for letting the new government negotiate its own powers is that it would look bad to the world if the limits on Iraqi sovereignty seemed to be imposed from without.
"Any limitations on Iraqi authority are going to have to come from the Iraqis themselves," a top administration policy maker said. "I don't see how you could do it any other way."
Another issue is the power of Iraq over its armed forces. France and Russia want Iraqi commanders to have the right to refuse to take part in operations ordered by American commanders who embark on disputed military actions, like the ones mounted against Iraqi insurgents in Falluja and Najaf.
Mr. Powell said establishing "consultative processes" could ensure that the United States would have "full insight into any sensitivities that might exist within the Iraqi interim government concerning our military operations." He provided no details.
As for the Iraqi prison and criminal justice systems, it is not clear how much of an issue Europeans and others on the Security Council will make of this matter. But one possible disagreement can be found in American assertions that an order from L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, immunizing Americans from prosecution by Iraqi courts, is to remain in force.
But a United Nations official said recently that after June 30 such an order would not be recognized legally, since it will have come from an occupation authority no longer in existence. The Iraqi government, this official said, will have to issue such an order or negotiate one with the Americans and later have it blessed by the Security Council.
A senior Bush administration official said the new temporary government was likely to adopt all of the "transitional laws" passed by the Iraqi Governing Council, the group handpicked by occupation leaders. Others are not so sure of that, considering that the Governing Council is held in disrepute by many Iraqis.
Indeed, the caretaker government's ability to revise previous laws such as those barring the application of fundamentalist Islamic law to family matters is unclear.
The survival of these provisions after June 30 is in doubt, according to some diplomats involved in the process. One described the entire exercise at the United Nations as "a leap of faith" for all involved.
Rice Pleased With Moscow Talks
MOSCOW, May 16 (Reuters) - Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, said in an interview broadcast Sunday that she was pleased with her talks on Iraq's future with Russian leaders.
"I believe that the United States and Russia have a common understanding of how we should move forward," Ms. Rice said after consulting President Vladimir V. Putin..
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Plans To Destroy More Gaza Dwellings
Palestinians Flee Homes; Powell Voices Criticism
By Robin Shulman and Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31804-2004May16.html
RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip, May 17 -- Dozens of Palestinians fled their homes here Sunday in anticipation of another wave of demolitions that Israeli military officials warned will be carried out soon. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the United States opposes the demolitions and appealed to Israel to halt the destruction in the aftermath of a week of violence.
Israel's Supreme Court on Sunday rejected a petition from a Palestinian rights group seeking to stop the razing of homes in Rafah, which is located on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. The three judges said the army had a "real, imminent need" that justified the demolitions.
A senior Israeli security official said the army was awaiting legal approval from the state attorney general's office before launching a new operation. "If we get a green light, we will move in," said the official, who could not be identified under the ground rules of the government briefing.
The official said the army had asked for permission to widen its security corridor from 100 yards to between 200 and 300 yards in a swath of territory where it says buildings are used by Palestinian gunmen and by smugglers ferrying arms and ammunition from Egypt to Rafah in deep tunnels. He would not estimate the number of buildings that could be destroyed, but Israel Radio reported that the army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, told the Israeli cabinet that hundreds more Palestinian houses could be demolished.
During three days last week, dozens of houses were destroyed in some of the most intense fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in the current conflict, which has continued for almost four years. Seven Israeli soldiers and 19 Palestinians were killed, according to the army, and U.N. relief officials who oversee this refugee camp said more than 1,000 people were made homeless.
Before leaving an economic conference in Jordan for Washington, Powell told reporters, "We oppose the destruction of homes, we don't think that is productive." He added, "We know that Israel has a right for self-defense, but the kind of actions that they are taking in Rafah, the destruction of Palestinian homes, we oppose."
"The United States is anxious to do everything that it can to stop this cycle of strike and counterstrike that has resulted in the loss of so many lives within the last week," he said.
Early Monday, Palestinian witnesses said Israeli helicopter gunships fired rockets at two sites in Gaza City, hitting an office belonging to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and another belonging to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a small militant faction. There were no immediate reports of casualties. On Sunday evening, Israeli troops killed three Palestinians trying to plant a bomb along a border fence between Israel and Gaza, Israel Radio reported, according to news services. The military said soldiers fired at suspicious Palestinians, and explosives they were carrying detonated, killing them.
Earlier Sunday, in the refugee camp here, Palestinian women grabbed undershirts and towels and stuffed them into plastic bags. Men pried off sinks, faucets, door frames and other valuable fixtures from their homes. Outside, trucks loaded with furniture jammed the streets.
Israeli troops had pulled back on Saturday, leaving a concrete moonscape pockmarked with piles of rubble. "That's my friend's house over there," said 12-year-old Ahmed Abu Tiyyur, pointing to a pile of concrete, shattered metal and broken glass. Then he pointed to a higher, nearer pile. "That house was demolished yesterday," he said.
Residents of Block O, one of the most ravaged neighborhoods in the camp, said Israeli soldiers had announced over a loudspeaker in fuzzy, crackling Arabic Sunday afternoon that they had 24 hours to evacuate. They said the warning had come from an Israeli outpost atop a distant mound of dirt at the base of the 26-foot-high steel wall inside the border. An army spokesman, Capt. Jacob Dallal, said there were no soldiers in the area Sunday and denied that warnings had been broadcast.
Some residents of Block O slept elsewhere when the fighting began Wednesday and returned to find their homes demolished. "I don't know where my house is," said Salim Redwan, 67, holding a shower faucet that he said was all he could retrieve.
About 670 newly homeless people took refuge at the Al Khansa school. At night they slept on thin mattresses in classrooms cleared of desks, or on the sand in the courtyard. Local resources for caring for the refugees were overwhelmed, said Rafah's governor, Majid Agha.
"In recent days the intensity of demolitions has seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of lost buildings in Gaza," Peter Hansen, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency's commissioner general, said in a statement. "Now UNRWA has the job of dealing with the human tragedy behind each demolition, the distressed children in its schools, the homeless families in need of basics like blankets, food and water, and the communities shaken by the stress of ceaseless conflict."
But Israeli officials have said the United Nations is exaggerating the number of houses destroyed and families displaced, saying many had left the area months ago when the fighting first intensified.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has proposed unilaterally withdrawing Israeli forces and Jewish settlers from Gaza. But Sharon has insisted that even after a pullback, the army would maintain its grip on the border with Egypt to prevent arms smuggling.
Israeli security officials say they are most concerned about the possibility that militants could bring Katyusha rockets and other medium-range weapons into the strip.
Frankel reported from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
--------
Powell Denounces Israel's Destruction Of Palestinian Homes
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31214-2004May16.html
SHANNON, Ireland, May 16 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell rebuked Israel on Sunday for its policy of destroying Palestinian homes, which he said was counterproductive to U.S. efforts to generate new movement on a stalled plan for Middle East peace.
On the day that Israel's Supreme Court rejected a Palestinian appeal to stop the destruction, Powell used unusually blunt language to convey that the Bush administration wanted the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to halt the practice. Israel's long-standing policy of demolishing Palestinian homes, generally as a punitive measure or for security reasons, has come under scrutiny because of the destruction of dozens of homes this past week in the Rafah refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, along the border with Egypt.
"We oppose the destruction of homes. We don't think that is productive," Powell said in Jordan during a whirlwind 24-hour visit there for a World Economic Forum meeting. "We know that Israel has a right for self-defense, but the kind of actions that they are taking in Rafah, the destruction of Palestinian homes, we oppose."
"The United States is anxious to do everything that it can to stop this cycle of strike and counterstrike that has resulted in the loss of so many lives within the last week," he said at a news conference at a Dead Sea resort.
A senior U.S. official traveling with Powell, speaking on condition of anonymity, said thousands of people had been affected by the Rafah demolitions, an action he said was only nominally for security reasons. Israeli officials had called on the Palestinians to destroy tunnels under Rafah that they say have been used to smuggle weapons. When the Palestinians proved unable or unwilling to act, the Israelis began the demolitions.
Powell later told reporters traveling with him that he questioned whether the destruction would make Israel more secure.
Powell said a large demonstration Saturday in Tel Aviv indicated a "groundswell of support" for Sharon's plan to withdraw settlers and troops from Gaza. The plan, which called for closing 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank, was rejected by Sharon's Likud Party on May 2. Sharon has said he would revise it within weeks.
Powell also had harsh words for the Palestinians and Arab leaders. He said they urgently needed to begin preparing for the handover of the Gaza Strip under Sharon's terms, which the United States formally accepted last month as a means of jump-starting the peace plan, unveiled by President Bush last year and known as the "road map."
"What I've been saying to Arab leaders and to the Palestinians is that while you are unhappy and dissatisfied with certain aspects of this plan, look at the opportunity it presents -- the actual removal of settlements," Powell told reporters traveling with him to Ireland for a refueling stop before returning to the United States. "And while you are expressing your annoyance and dissatisfaction, you also need to get ready for the reality that may be upon you, being able to take over and administer entirely the Gaza Strip and be prepared to put to beneficial use the 21 settlements that will come into your hands."
--------
Israel Says It Will Proceed With Demolition of Homes
May 17, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/middleeast/17MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, May 16 - Despite international criticism, Israeli officials said Sunday that they intended to proceed with a plan to widen an Israeli-patrolled lane along the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt by demolishing as many as hundreds of Palestinian homes.
The Israeli Army defended the proposed demolitions as necessary to foil weapons smugglers and to protect soldiers in the area from Palestinian militants who use the buildings as cover.
The development followed fierce fighting late last week in the area, the Rafah refugee camp, during which Israeli forces destroyed 88 buildings, leaving more than 1,000 people homeless, according to the United Nations refugee agency that oversees the refugee camps.
Peter Hansen, the commissioner general of the agency, said, "With these disproportionate military operations, Israel is in grave breach of international law." He called the demolitions "collective punishment" that would not enhance Israel's security.
At an economic conference in Jordan, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also rebuked Israel for the demolitions.
The army said that any buildings damaged last week were being used for attacks by Palestinian militants, or had been used by them in the past. "It is sad that terrorists make use of the civilian infrastructure with no regard to the well-being of Palestinian civilians in the area," said Major General Dan Harel, the chief of Israel's southern command.
On Sunday, the Israeli Supreme Court cleared the way for Israel to continue with such demolitions, finding that the army had a "real, imminent need" that justified them. It rejected a petition to stop the destruction of 13 houses in Rafah.
Also on Sunday, Israeli forces shot and killed three Palestinians whom soldiers spotted close to Gaza's fenced boundary with Israel, in an area the army has declared off limits to Palestinians, a military official said. The official said soldiers often came under attack in that area. He said that it was not yet known if the Palestinians were armed, but that the gunfire appeared to have detonated an explosive.
Israeli aircraft fired five missiles into a four-story Gaza City building on Sunday. Palestinian security officials said the missiles struck offices rented by the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and by Fatah, Yasir Arafat's movement. No injuries were reported.
The new violence came at the end of a week in which 32 Palestinians and 13 soldiers were killed in Gaza.
On Monday, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, is to meet in Berlin with the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei. Palestinian officials said the rare meeting was scheduled after Arab leaders complained that the Bush administration had tilted toward Israel with its embrace of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for a unilateral withdrawal of settlers and soldiers from Gaza.
A month ago, President Bush provided Israel with sweeping new diplomatic assurances, including that it could hold on to some of the West Bank in any eventual peace deal.
On Sunday, in an interview with German television, Ms. Rice called for "movement" by the Palestinians, including reform of their security services and new "accountable political and economic institutions."
The Bush administration has been pushing the Palestinian leadership to present a plan to manage Gaza in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. But as of late Sunday, the Palestinian leadership was arguing internally over which of about seven competing security plans, if any, Mr. Qurei should present to Ms. Rice, a Palestinian official said.
"He's got nothing to say to her and nothing to offer her," this official said. "The U.S. wants to hear, `What will you do with Gaza?' "
Mr. Qurei planned to give Ms. Rice a stack of documents detailing progress on a "reform action plan" and compiling Israeli actions against Palestinians.
The documents, copies of which were provided to The New York Times, include an eight-page "executive summary" of planning for an Israeli departure from Gaza that critiques Mr. Sharon's plan and calls for third-party assistance but provides few of the details Ms. Rice appears to want.
Rafah has been a flash point of the conflict partly because Palestinian militants dig weapons-smuggling tunnels from the refugee camp under the Israeli patrols and into Egypt.
Along the lane it controls by the border, the army uses a drill to search for the tunnels, which it says are as deep as almost 100 feet underground and as long as 1,000 feet.
Over more than three years of intense fighting in Rafah, the Israeli Army has widened the so-called pink zone - the lane it controls along the border - to about 250 yards in places, destroying Palestinian buildings with bulldozers, tank shells, and other weaponry. The United Nations agency says that, in all, about 11,000 people have lost their homes.
A senior Israeli security official said that, in some areas, the army might now roughly double the lane's width. He said the army was awaiting a recommendation from legal advisers as to whether the action was legitimate, and whether troops could simply tear down buildings or whether they must offer the owners compensation.
--------
Powell says Arafat blocking U.S. efforts
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Barry Schweid
May 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040516-112704-2427r.htm
SOUTHERN SHUNEH, Jordan - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell blamed Yasser Arafat yesterday for blocking U.S. efforts to make Palestinian security forces strong enough to end terror attacks on Israel.
Winding up his latest effort to push peacemaking forward, Mr. Powell also criticized Mr. Arafat for a statement the Palestinian leader made Saturday urging his people to "find whatever strength you have to terrorize your enemy."
In Jerusalem, Israeli officials said they will demolish hundreds more homes in a Palestinian refugee camp if violence and weapons smuggling in the Gaza Strip camp persist. Israel also plans to make wider use of air strikes in Gaza, the defense minister was quoted as telling the Cabinet.
Early today, Israeli helicopters fired five missiles into an office run by Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement in Gaza City, witnesses said. No one was hurt in the attack, which came just after midnight. The Israeli military would say only that the air strike was aimed at two offices in the same building that were "focal points for terrorism."
"Mr. Arafat continues to take actions and make statements to make it exceptionally difficult to move forward" on peacemaking, Mr. Powell said at a press conference before returning to Washington from the World Economic Forum.
He said Mr. Arafat "refuses to allow consolidation of security forces" among the Palestinians, a key U.S. demand intended to curb terror attacks and motivate Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to pursue a settlement with the Palestinians.
"What I need from the Palestinians is for them to get themselves ready to exercise solid political control over Gaza when it's turned back to them and to put into place security forces that can do that," Mr. Powell said later in an interview with ABC's "This Week."
"What they need to do is to wrest control of the security forces from Chairman Arafat. ... The Palestinian leaders can do it and the leaders of the Arab world can do it by saying to Chairman Arafat that 'your policies have not been successful, your leadership has not be successful in moving this process forward.' "
Israel's latest warning to demolish houses came after 13 Israeli soldiers were killed last week during operations to close tunnels and other routes used to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip from Egypt.
Seven of those deaths occurred in the Rafah refugee camp, which abuts the border. In response, army bulldozers demolished 88 houses in Rafah on Friday, according to U.N. refugee workers who said some 1,000 people were left homeless.
Mr. Powell yesterday added his voice to those of international human rights groups who condemn the practice as collective punishment.
"We don't think that is productive," he said. "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."
At the weekly meeting of the Israeli Cabinet, the army chief, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, told ministers the military has marked hundreds of homes along the border for demolition if violence continues, participants said.
The homes would be razed in order to widen the Israeli patrol road between the camp and the border. The road is 6 miles long and was initially 25 yards wide.
Since the outbreak of fighting, Israeli troops have torn down hundreds of Rafah homes abutting the road and widened the buffer zone to about 200 yards in some areas.
A senior Israeli army officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the military wants to widen the entire zone to as much as 250 yards - which could require the destruction of many more houses.
-------- mideast
Powell Faces Mistrust of U.S., by Arabs, on Iraq and Israel
May 17, 2004
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times
SHUNEH, Jordan, May 16 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, at a gathering of the Arab elite, offered a direct apology on Sunday to Iraqi prisoners in Baghdad abused by Americans, and castigated Israel for demolishing Palestinian homes in Gaza.
But, as Mr. Powell ended a brief foray into the Arab world hoping to rebuild American credibility, there was little evidence that the twin gestures had mollified Arabs mistrustful of American policies in both Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In recent weeks, the United States' reputation in the Arab world has been deeply tarnished, both by its acceptance of proposals by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel - yet to be endorsed within that country - for a unilateral disengagement from Gaza and by the spectacle of uniformed Americans abusing naked and hooded Iraqi detainees.
At a joint news conference with Marwan Muasher, his Jordanian counterpart, Mr. Powell went further than in the past to offer American apologies for the abuse.
"The president has expressed an apology on behalf of the nation," he said. "I will reinforce that apology. We are devastated by what happened at Abu Ghraib. We apologize to those who were abused in such an awful manner."
In a speech on Saturday, Mr. Powell promised that those who committed the abuse in Baghdad would be brought to justice. He also pledged that the White House was "starting again" in the effort to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But the sometimes emotional address on Saturday evoked skepticism and hostility among many of the participants, including policy makers and business leaders. The Americans "are not solving the issues concerning the Iraqis or the Israelis," said Omar Othman, 45, a Saudi petroleum company executive. "What they are giving us is only a rosy picture, and we want the reality."
Rami Khouri, editor in chief of the English-language Daily Star in Beirut, called the speech "inappropriate and insensitive because he was telling us the same old stuff and he seems unaware or not caring about the widespread criticism of United States policy in the region, which was conveyed to him."
At his news conference on Sunday, Mr. Powell sought anew to win support. "We are doing everything we can to deal with what you describe as the frustrations within the Arab world," he told a questioner. "Everybody says we should return sovereignty to the Iraqi people so that it no longer looks like an occupation. That's exactly what we are trying to do and what we plan to accomplish by the end of June."
Even as he spoke of a new start to peace efforts between Israelis and Palestinians, though, Arab officials complained that Israel's destruction of Palestinian homes in the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza seemed to undermine an offer by Mr. Sharon to dismantle Jewish settlements in Gaza and pull out Israeli troops.
Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher of Egypt, a delegate at the World Economic Forum, told CNN, "The plan that the Americans are talking about is a plan that didn't float at all." He added that "the way Mr. Sharon is implementing it is to destroy more homes in Gaza - I mean what sort of Gaza does he want to leave?"
At his news conference, Mr. Powell said: "We oppose the destruction of homes. We don't think that is productive."
Mr. Powell was asked at his news conference to comment on remarks attributed to Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, calling on his followers 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."
At a session of the World Economic Forum, however, Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, angrily took issue with what he depicted as a one-sided American attitude on the issue. The United States "must put a full stop on the violence by both sides," he said. "Stop blaming it all on the Palestinians."
-------- prisoners of war
Pentagon: No Special Prison Policy
Defense Dept. Denies Report That Top Officials Authorized Detainee Abuse
By Josh White and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31805-2004May16.html
Defense Department and other government officials yesterday denied that high-ranking Pentagon officials approved a special classified interrogation unit in Iraq or authorized the use of physical coercion and sexual humiliation of prisoners, as asserted by the New Yorker magazine.
In the report, which was posted on the Internet over the weekend, author Seymour M. Hersh alleges that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon officials specifically called for tougher and possibly illegal tactics in Iraqi prisons to get detainees to talk about the insurgency. The report also describes a covert group of operatives who would arrest, detain and interrogate Iraqis out of the bounds of the normal prison system.
In a statement released yesterday, Pentagon officials harshly criticized the report, calling it "outlandish, conspiratorial, and filled with error and anonymous conjecture." The Pentagon would not, however, say flatly whether or not the program exists.
"It is our position, and has been from the very beginning, that we don't address these things because the one time you don't say something, that's the one time you're essentially confirming it," said Lawrence DiRita, a Defense Department spokesman.
Hersh quotes unnamed former intelligence officials describing an under-the-radar "special-access program" that called for harsher interrogation tactics. He alleges that the members of the 372nd Military Police Company now charged with prison abuses became scapegoats for the program.
"The cover story was that some kids got out of control," Hersh wrote, quoting an unnamed official.
DiRita said yesterday in a statement that the soldiers accused of abuse were not taking part in a coordinated intelligence gathering effort. Echoing what top military officials have been saying in the weeks since the scandal broke, DiRita said the abuse was not ordered by the Pentagon.
"The abuse evidenced in the videos and photos, and any similar abuse that may come to light in any of the ongoing half dozen investigations into this matter, has no basis in any sanctioned program, training manual, instruction, or order in the Department of Defense," DiRita said. "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."
In interviews, soldiers who worked at Abu Ghraib prison and their attorneys have said the alleged abuses grew out of direction from military intelligence officials and CIA operatives who were working to interrogate prisoners. One of the MPs who has been charged said military intelligence officers, civilian contractors and CIA officials would bring prisoners -- already hooded and cuffed -- to a wing at Abu Ghraib, with instructions to the MPs "to make it hell so they would talk."
Officials also gathered intelligence at the U.S. military's high-value detention center in Baghdad, where top former officials in Saddam Hussein's government and those deemed to have potentially important information about weapons, the insurgency and other matters were questioned. Intelligence operations there took place in a series of trailers in a secure compound, and some of those prisoners were taken to Abu Ghraib after initial questioning, officers who worked there said.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told ABC's "This Week" that he has seen no evidence that low-level prison guards who abused prisoners were acting on orders from superiors, but internal investigations should answer that question.
"But, even so, young soldiers know that they have a responsibility to take care of people who are entrusted to them, such as prisoners," he said. "And there is no excuse for this kind of action."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," said it was not plausible that soldiers would abuse prisoners without being instructed to do so.
"There's really questions about this 'shift in responsibility,' where military intelligence people were given authority over the guards," McCain said. "There are so many questions that need to be answered."
Meanwhile, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman in Iraq for Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, said yesterday that Sanchez never received or approved an interrogation plan described in an article in The Washington Post. The article described a plan for interrogating a Syrian jihadist using a method called "fear up harsh," which required instilling fear and provoking disorientation. It said the plan was sent to Sanchez and originated with the senior intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas Pappas.
Kimmitt's brief statement did not explain his remark that Sanchez did not receive the Nov. 30 memo about the interrogation plan. According to government sources, it was addressed to him, and also transmitted to Col. Marc Warren, a lawyer advising Sanchez, and Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, Sanchez's senior intelligence adviser.
Correspondent Sewell Chan in Baghdad and staff writers Christopher Lee, Dana Priest and R. Jeffrey Smith in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
PRISONERS
Some Iraqis Held Outside Control of Top General
May 17, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/middleeast/17ABUS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 16 - About 100 high-ranking Iraqi prisoners held for months at a time in spartan conditions on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport are being detained under a special chain of command, under conditions not subject to approval by the top American commander in Iraq, according to military officials.
The unusual lines of authority in the detainees' handling are part of a tangled network of authority over prisoners in Iraq, in which the military police, military intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, various military commanders and the Pentagon itself have all played a role. Congressional investigators who are looking into the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners say those arrangements have made it difficult to determine where the final authority lies.
At least as of February, many of the 100 or so prisoners categorized by American officials as "high value detainees" because of the special intelligence they are believed to possess, had been held since June 2003 for nearly 23 hours a day in strict solitary confinement in small concrete cells without sunlight, according to a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
While not tantamount to the sexual humiliation and other abuses inflicted on Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, the conditions have been described by the Red Cross as a violation of the Geneva Conventions, the international treaty that the Bush administration has said it regards as "fully applicable" to all prisoners held by the United States in Iraq.
Under arrangements in effect since October, military officials said at a Pentagon briefing on Friday, explicit authorization from the American commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, has been required in each of about 25 cases in which prisoners have been subjected to isolation for longer than 30 days. But on Sunday, a senior military officer said that statement did not apply to the prisoners being held at the airport, because "we were not the authority" for the high-value detainees.
The officer referred questions about the high-value Iraqi prisoners to the United States Central Command, in Tampa, Fla., where a spokesman said he could not answer them on Sunday.
Defense Department officials said the principal responsibility for the high-value prisoners and their treatment belonged to the Iraq Survey Group, which is headed by Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The 1,400-person Iraq Survey Group was formed last June, principally to take charge of the hunt for Iraq's illicit weapons, although its mandate has also included gathering information about Iraqi war crimes. The survey group falls under the overall authority of the Central Intelligence Agency, under George J. Tenet, for matters related to the illicit weapons hunt. But on other matters it reports to the Central Command, under Gen. John P. Abizaid.
The so-called high-value Iraqi detainees said by military officials to be held at Camp Cropper on the airport's outskirts do not include Saddam Hussein, who was not captured until December and is being held by the Federal Bureau of Investigation elsewhere in Iraq, American government officials have said. These officials say Mr. Hussein has also been held in isolation.
The group does, however, include Tariq Aziz, a top Hussein aide, and other former senior officials depicted on a deck of cards created by the Pentagon to represent a 55-member most wanted list.
The designation of a "high value detainee" was described by military officials as subjective, assigned to prisoners based on an assessment of the intelligence information they might have about matters like illicit weapons, the anti-American insurgency or the conduct of Mr. Hussein's government.
In the report that it completed in February, the Red Cross committee said it had written to American officials last October recommending an end to the isolation imposed on the high-value prisoners. "The internment of persons in solitary confinement for months at a time in cells devoid of daylight for nearly 23 hours a day is more severe than the forms of internment provided for" under the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross said in the report.
But there has been no indication that the United States has called a halt to the procedure. On Friday, military officials in Washington who announced that harsher forms of treatment would no longer be available to interrogators and guards in Iraq also said that General Sanchez, the commander in Iraq, was leaving open the option of continuing to authorize the isolation of prisoners.
The question of whether harsh treatment of the detainees was authorized by senior Pentagon officials is among the main topics of the Congressional inquiries into prison abuse. An article by Seymour Hersh in the May 24 issue of The New Yorker says the tone for the abuse reflected secret directives from the Pentagon that were initially intended to give Special Operations troops and intelligence operatives a freer hand in pursuing Al Qaeda members.
In a statement on Saturday, the Pentagon described that article as "outlandish" and "filled with error."
"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," it said.
However, Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a commencement address on Sunday that in light of the allegations, his committee would look "up and down and sideways in the chain of command and get to the bottom of this," said a spokesman for the senator.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, appearing on the CBS News program "Face the Nation," said, "The question is: do we have an out-of-control prison or an out-of-control system?"
In response to questions, Senator Graham, Senator Warner and other lawmakers who spoke publicly on Sunday said they had not yet been able to determine whether The New Yorker account was accurate.
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said that if The New Yorker article was accurate, "it raises this issue a whole new level."
"The question," he said, "is whether there was this kind of a secret program, which authorized this additional level of abuse."
A report in this week's Newsweek quotes a memo written Jan. 25, 2002, by Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell saying that "this new paradigm of terrorism renders obsolete" the "strict limitation on questioning of enemy prisoners" spelled out in the Geneva accords.
Asked about it on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," Mr. Powell said he could not recall the specific memo but said he had always argued that the Bush administration should comply with the provisions of the Geneva accords - "either by the letter, if it's appropriate to those individuals in our custody that they are really directly under the Geneva Convention, or if they're illegal noncombatants and not directly under the convention, we should treat them nevertheless in a humane manner in accordance with what is expected of by international law and the Geneva Convention."
To date, military and intelligence officials have declined to describe the conditions under which the senior Iraqi officials have been held in Iraq.
Mr. Hussein had been in the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency in the early weeks after his capture in December, intelligence officials have said, but has been transferred to the F.B.I. in anticipation of his being transferred in turn to the Iraqi authorities to stand trial in Iraq, probably next year.
All of the American-run detention centers in Iraq, including the Abu Ghraib prison and the high-value detention site at Camp Cropper, are run by the military and guarded by the military police, military and Congressional officials said. In general, the military has been assigned the leading role in the questioning of Iraqi detainees, to the extent that military intelligence officials are supposed to sit in even on interrogations conducted by C.I.A. officers, a senior intelligence official said.
But the exact role played by officers from the C.I.A. and D.I.A. is not clear, and neither is the role played by members of the covert task forces run by the military that have taken the lead in the hunt for weapons in Iraq and for Mr. Hussein.
The task forces, which include C.I.A. officers and elite Special Operations troops including members of the Army's Delta Force and Navy Seals, have been given different names over time. But one of them, Task Force 121, played a leading role in the capture of Mr. Hussein, and a successor unit is still operating in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Intelligence officials have acknowledged that the C.I.A. played a role in interrogating about two dozen prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and that one prisoner died there during questioning in November, in a case that is being investigated by the agency's inspector general as a possible criminal homicide.
They also say that C.I.A. interrogators have questioned prisoners held at the site at the airport, and they have acknowledged that agency employees for a time enlisted military guards at Abu Ghraib to try to hide "ghost detainees" from the Red Cross.
That latter practice - intended "to keep the capture of a small number of terrorists quiet for some time" - was discontinued in January, a senior intelligence official said on Sunday.
In practice, however, Bush administration officials have also acknowledged that some of the overall direction has come from senior civilians at the Pentagon, including Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, military officials said.
In testimony last week before Congress, Mr. Cambone acknowledged that it was he, among others, who encouraged Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was then running the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to head a delegation that traveled to Iraq last summer to seek recommendations on improving the interrogation process there.
Mr. Cambone has said that he was never briefed about that trip by General Miller himself, but received only a secondhand briefing from his own top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, the deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence.
Mr. Cambone has said the trip resulted in some important organizational changes, including the establishment under General Sanchez of a new "fusion cell" aimed at integrating intelligence information from a wide variety of sources.
Over breakfast with reporters last November, before the problems at Abu Ghraib had begun to surface, Mr. Cambone referred broadly to a trip made to Iraq last August by a delegation that he said "included people from the C.I.A." that made recommendations for "an increased level of intelligence support."
"They came back with a list of somewhere close to 80 or 90 recommendations on some of the changes and adjustments that needed to be made," Mr. Cambone said of the group. "Some were small: make sure you have the proper software down at a certain level of command and so forth. Others were rather larger."
Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
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Powell Says C.I.A. Was Misled About Weapons
May 17, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/middleeast/17POWE.html
WASHINGTON, May 16 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said for the first time on Sunday that he now believes that the Central Intelligence Agency was deliberately misled about evidence that Saddam Hussein was developing unconventional weapons.
He also said, in his comments on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," that he regrets citing evidence that Iraq had mobile biological laboratories in his presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003.
The assertion about the mobile labs was one of the most dramatic pieces of the presentation, which was intended to make public the Bush administration's best case for invading Iraq. For days before his speech, Mr. Powell sat in a conference room at the C.I.A., examining the sources for each charge he planned to make.
But on Sunday, Mr. Powell argued that the C.I.A. itself was misled, and that in turn he was, too. "Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out not to be accurate," Mr. Powell said, going farther than he did on April 2 when he conceded that the intelligence was not "that solid."
On Sunday, Mr. Powell hinted at widespread reports of fabrications by an engineer who provided much of the most critical information about the labs. Intelligence officials have since found that the engineer was linked to the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that was pressing President Bush to unseat Mr. Hussein.
"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading," Mr. Powell said in the interview, broadcast from Jordan. "And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it."
That was a sharp contrast to comments four months ago by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said the administration still believed that the trailers were part of a program of unconventional weapons, and added that he "would deem that conclusive evidence" that Mr. Hussein in fact had such programs.
Taken with past admissions of error by the administration or its intelligence agencies, Mr. Powell's statement on Sunday leaves little room for the administration to argue that Mr. Hussein's stockpiles of unconventional weapons posed any real and imminent threat.
"Basically, Powell now believes that the Iraqis had chemical weapons, and that was it," said an official close to him. "And he is out there publicly saying this now because he doesn't want a legacy as the man who made up stories to provide the president with cover to go to war."
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The Secret of Abu Ghraib Exposed!
antiwar.com
by Justin Raimondo
May 17, 2000
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2591
Thank the gods for Seymour Hersh, that's all I can say. Without him, the truth about what went on at Abu Ghraib prison - and the dark forces behind it - would probably still be locked away in a safe somewhere deep in the bowels of the Pentagon. His latest piece in the New Yorker follows up on his earlier exposé, and shows how and why the problem wasn't just "a few bad apples" because the top bananas knew about it all along.
Oh, they didn't bother with the specifics: that would be vulgar. But the genesis of the American-run torture chambers at Abu Ghraib, we now learn, was in a "black ops" program personally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and implemented by his subordinates, chiefly undersecretary for intelligence Stephen A. Cambone, who also appeared on Capitol Hill last week and basically said "We didn't know!" As it turns out, they did know:
"The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld's decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America's prospects in the war on terror."
Springing leaks from "several past and present American intelligence officials," Hersh shows that the people who sat in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and swore up and down that they didn't know jack-sh
The neocons who run U.S. foreign policy in this administration have always been philosophical elitists: from Lenin to Leo Strauss is not that far to travel. But with this latest exposure of their ignoble devotion to the "noble lie," and their boundless contempt for the American public, they seem to have surpassed their old teachers.
In the wake of 9/11, a special Pentagon operation was set up by Rumsfeld - code-named "Copper Green" - that was in effect a secret army, complete with its own air force. Rumsfeld commanded into existence an elite unit of "black" operatives who would ostensibly be used to go after Osama bin Laden and the Taliban during the Afghan phase of the war. What is termed a "special-access program" allows officials to get around such cumbersome obstacles as constitutional government and the rule of law, and was a staple of the Cold War era, as Hersh points out. After 9/11, however, the concept took on new meaning and dimensions, providing Rumsfeld and his neocon advisors with a gigantic loophole through which they eagerly leaped - straight into the muck of the Abu Ghraib horror show.
"The rules are 'Grab whom you must. Do what you want.'"
That's how one insider described the methodology of Operation Copper Green to Hersh, and that pretty much sums up the neocons' entire philosophy of government - or, indeed, any variety of state-worship - to a tee.
In any case, a network of torture camps was set up worldwide, run by the progenitors of "Operation Copper Green" - adding an international dimension to the Abu Ghraib scandal that remains to be explored further - initially devoted to snatching and interrogating Al Qaeda operatives. The program was soon diverted, however, from the pursuit of Bin Laden to the prosecution of the Iraq war.
Hersh names Cambone as the de facto commander of the Pentagon's secret army, "deeply involved in the program," and cites a former intelligence officer who relates how Rumsfeld's deputy set the wheels of the torture machine to turning:
"'They weren't getting anything substantive from the detainees in Iraq. No names. Nothing that they could hang their hat on. Cambone says, I've got to crack this thing and I'm tired of working through the normal chain of command. I've got this apparatus set up - the black special-access program - and I'm going in hot. So he pulls the switch, and the electricity begins flowing last summer. And it's working. We're getting a picture of the insurgency in Iraq and the intelligence is flowing into the white world. We're getting good stuff. But we've got more targets' - prisoners in Iraqi jails - 'than people who can handle them.'"
Cambone then brought in intelligence officers from the Army, put them in charge of Abu Ghraib prison, told them all rules had been repealed, and set them loose on the prisoners:
"The military-police prison guards, the former official said, included 'recycled hillbillies from Cumberland, Maryland.' He was referring to members of the 372nd Military Police Company. Seven members of the company are now facing charges for their role in the abuse at Abu Ghraib. 'How are these guys from Cumberland going to know anything? The Army Reserve doesn't know what it's doing.'"
Those "recycled hillbillies" are now being railroaded through the military justice system, taking the rap for Cambone and Rumsfeld. Not a very edifying sight.
Antiwar.com's editorial position has from the beginning been that this was much bigger than seven reservists from Maryland. As I wrote in my May 7 column:
"What is undoubtedly a black mark on the reputation of the American military, and on this administration's ability to know and control what's occurring on the ground in Iraq, looks to me very much like a black propaganda campaign designed to demoralize not only Iraqis but the entire Arab world. One major neoconservative talking point in the run-up to war was that the Arabs only understand the language of power: you can't negotiate or reason with them, you have to conquer them - and, once conquered, they have to be kept down."
Now Hersh reveals that the sexual humiliation angle, a key element of the interrogation program, was ostensibly designed to create "an army of informants." The plan was, supposedly, that by threatening to distribute the photos to family and friends we could get the prisoners to cooperate with us once they were released. How well this worked can be seen in the growth and development of the insurgency, which has now spread to southern Iraq and become even more aggressive. Yet the torture continued, and was based, as Hersh relates, on neocon notions of how to deal with Arabs:
"The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind, a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996. The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. 'The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,' Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, 'or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private.' The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.' In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged - 'one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.'"
Okay, so I was wrong about the academic references: David Leo Gutmann, whom I cited, apparently derives his Arabo-phobic theories from Patai, popularizing and updating the theme of an allegedly Arabic tendency to be easily manipulated by a feeling of shame and awed by displays of power. Other than that, however, the main point remains: the neocons had their fingerprints all over this chamber of horrors from the beginning. You didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that what happened at Abu Ghraib was born of sheer hatred for all things Arabic - an emotion that emanates from neoconservative circles, as it does from the extreme right wing of Israel's ruling Likud party and its far-right coalition allies (some of whom advocate expulsion of all Palestinians into Jordan).
As an intelligence-gathering tool, the mass rape of suspected insurgents - "between 70 percent and 90 percent" of whom were arrested "by mistake" - seemed to have the opposite of its intended effect. But no matter. The main goal wasn't blackmailing the prisoners. The logistics problem alone makes this unlikely: would the blackmailers simply drop the photos in the mail, or would a U.S. soldier show up one day with a special delivery package? Photos are easily faked, and the Arab propensity for conspiracy theories would grant them a skeptical reception: many in the Arab world may have rejected modernity, and prefer to live in the 12th century, but, believe me, they know about Photoshop.
We are brought, in the end, to the core mystery of Abu Ghraib: why oh why did the accused MPs take these obviously staged photographs, recording their crimes for posterity? Amid the shocked silence of the distinguished members of Congress, who sat and watched 1800 slides and a few videos over a course of some three hours, that question must have occurred to even the densest: yes, even to the utterly clueless Senator James Inhofe. For what they were subjected to was a veritable loop of pornoganda - pornography with a political/ideological edge - of the sort that, if it is ever released to the general public, seems calculated to produce two effects rather immediately:
1) A wave of anger directed at the U.S. that would escalate the "clash of civilizations" and, once and for all, drive the entire Arab world - even our ostensible allies - away from Washington, increasing the level of violence not only in Iraq but throughout the Middle East.
2) Looked at from the perspective of someone who believes that Patai and Gutmann are right, then, simultaneously with this spurt of anger, a sense of secret shame would engulf and demoralize the Arab world, with the American will to power evoking, in them, a previously repressed desire to submit, which the theorists associate with homosexuality. The message being beamed at the Arab world is: your men are faggots, and your women are whores. Submit, submit, submit.... I have a question: how is it that so many photographs were taken? I've heard estimates that range between 1600 and 1800 (including videos). Now, I can understand - if this was done as a prank - taking a few photos here and there: perhaps as many as a few dozen. But 1800?
This is an operation that was just waiting to be discovered: they couldn't have been very confident that some of these photos wouldn't fall into the "wrong" hands. So, either we are dealing with people so stupid that not even the prospect of leaving behind such a massive amount of evidence caused them to have second thoughts, or that was the intention all along.
Before anyone dismisses out of hand the possibility that these photos were meant to be made public, consider what their release might accomplish. The upsurge of Arab anger would provoke, in very short order, an American military reaction of the sort the wilder hawks have been pushing for since the insurgency began to rear its head. We need more troops (as John McCain keeps emphasizing), more force, more "will" to smash the "enemy" - and, most of all, we need to escalate the war beyond its present borders, taking the fight to Syria and beyond. Outwardly angry, but secretly demoralized by the sense of shame conjured by the photos, the Arabs would rise, fight - and lose. Rather than face the prospect of conducting a protracted struggle against an indigenous resistance movement - and losing support on the home front - the War Party would provoke a crisis, and the whole process would be radically telescoped, with a (relatively) quick victory achieved by the full mobilization of our vast military resources.
As long as the blame could be contained to the S&M Seven, and the military intelligence officers who took over direct command of the Abu Ghraib prison from Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the real authors of this plan would be safe, along with the entire "black ops" team. A former top official told Hersh:
"'The black guys' - those in the Pentagon's secret program - 'say we've got to accept the prosecution. They're vaccinated from the reality.' ... The program was protected by the fact that no one on the outside was allowed to know of its existence. 'If you even give a hint that you're aware of a black program that you're not read into, you lose your clearances,' the former official said. 'Nobody will talk. So the only people left to prosecute are those who are undefended - the poor kids at the end of the food chain.' The most vulnerable senior official is Cambone. 'The Pentagon is trying now to protect Cambone, and doesn't know how to do it,' the former intelligence official said."
Nobody will talk, and the kids at the bottom of the food chain are to be devoured in the arena of public opprobrium, while the real culprits watch from the wings, waiting for their cue - another outrage committed by Iraqi "terrorists," a border incident with Syria, another 9/11. Whatever. Then the real fun begins....
On the other hand, this could be a case of such monumental asininity that it confirms my Bizarro World thesis: that the 9/11 attacks caused a rip in the space-time continuum, and, as a result, we're living in a Bizarro World in which up is down and we're fighting a war ... in order to lose it.
I might add, here, that the Hersh revelations seem to confirm my thesis in other respects, especially concerning the key role played by Steven Stefanowicz, a "private" interrogator, and the elusive "John Israel," another private contractor at Abu Ghraib whose job description is "interpreter."
"Hard-core special operatives, some of them with aliases, were working in the prison. The military police assigned to guard the prisoners wore uniforms, but many others - military intelligence officers, contract interpreters, C.I.A. officers, and the men from the special-access program - wore civilian clothes. It was not clear who was who, even to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, then the commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, and the officer ostensibly in charge. 'I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians that I didn't know,' Karpinski told me. 'I called them the disappearing ghosts.'"
Mr. Israel has already disappeared to parts unknown, and Stefanowicz is "on leave," and yet to be charged with anything. Yet these two men, along with Colonel. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the military intelligence unit in control of Abu Ghraib prison, in effect constituted key elements of a covert military unit engaged in state-sponsored terrorism.
Another angle on this case remains to be explored, and that is the possibility of other nations being involved. Indications of British involvement are strong, but considerably murked up by the fortuitous publication of fake "abuse" photos by the tabloid Mirror. (Note: Antiwar.com never published any of those photos, and for good reason: they looked fake to us, and just didn't pass the smell test. Just as the phony photos published by the Boston Globe also failed to impress us.)
But there is one country that seems the logical place to go for "expertise" in the "art" of torturing Arabs, and that is Israel. Those hoods the prisoners were made to wear, befouled by excrement (and probably pig fat), are an Israeli innovation, so to speak. Furthermore, tales of sexual humiliation are rife among Palestinians who fall into the hands of the Israeli police authorities. The news that the Israelis have been "advising" the Americans on the ins and outs of managing an occupation surprised no one, and the leaked report of General Antonio Taguba mentioned the presence of "third country nationals" at Abu Ghraib. If this was a program run amok, then wouldn't the hatred of Israeli "interpreters" for their Arab victims figure as a factor in all this?
Another possible foreign connection is the role of our Arab allies. Saudi Arabia has been cooperative, lately, and is well-known as the world capital of torture. Such methods are routine in Saudi prisons, and it makes sense that the "black ops" boys would want to "outsource" this kind of work. Plausible deniability and all that.
The point is that if American soldiers are going to be scapegoated, held up as symbols of pure evil, and made the objects of a massive wave of hatred directed at the U.S. , any other countries that are involved should not be allowed to slither out of their responsibility as collaborators, enablers, and teachers. There's enough blame here so that we can afford to spread it around.
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TROOPS
Pentagon Weighs Transferring 4,000 G.I.'s in Korea to Iraq
By THOM SHANKER
May 17, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/asia/17KORE.html
WASHINGTON, May 16 - The Defense Department has drawn up plans to move a brigade of troops from South Korea to Iraq, a senior Pentagon official said late Sunday.
If the plan goes forward, it would fulfill twin goals of reshaping the American military's deployments on the Korean peninsula and relieving pressure on an Army stretched thin by heavy commitments in Iraq.
The plan under discussion calls for moving about 4,000 troops from the Army's Second Infantry Division from South Korea to Iraq, the senior Pentagon official said. At present, about 37,000 American troops are stationed in South Korea, under a 50-year-old security treaty.
It would be the first movement of American troops from South Korea to the front lines of Iraq.
The Pentagon announced this month that it had scrapped plans to cut American forces in Iraq this year, and would maintain 135,000 to 138,000 troops at least into 2005. Before the most recent spike in Iraq violence, the American troop commitment was to have dropped to 115,000 by the end of this month.
The decision forced Pentagon planners to scramble to prepare fresh forces to meet that larger commitment without breaking a promise to the troops that they would be deployed in Iraq for only 12 months.
At least 20,000 troops from the First Armored Division had their yearlong deployment extended by 90 days to fill the gap until more forces could arrive this summer.
The decision to keep the higher level of troops in Iraq presents another political challenge to the Bush administration in this election year as public concern over the war effort increases, along with casualties.
But any final decision to decrease the number of American troops in South Korea is likely to set off a debate there about whether the United States is undermining an Asian ally - especially as new revelations emerge about North Korea's program to build nuclear weapons.
In South Korea, Lt. Col. Deborah G. Bertrand, a spokeswoman from the Air Force, would not comment about possible troop redeployments, but said, "We remain fully committed to maintaining deterrence on the Korean peninsula."
The assessment of whether to reshape the troop commitment to South Korea began in a review separate from Iraq war planning. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been drawing up new deployments for American forces worldwide, not just in South Korea.
James Brooke in Tokyo contributed reporting for this article.
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Military lawyers advised Pentagon two years ago to protect prisoners
But JAGs say Pentagon political appointees had a harsher agenda
by Tom Regan
csmonitor.com
May 17, 2004
http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2004/0517/dailyUpdate.html
ABC News reports that lawyers from the military's Judge Advocate General's Corps, or JAG, had been advising the Pentagon for two years before the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison to ensure protection for prisoners. But the military lawyers say that political appointees in the Defense Department ignored their warnings, thus setting the stage for the abuse scandal that has undermined the US's standing in the Middle East, and much of the rest of the world.
"If we - 'we' being the uniformed lawyers - had been listened to, and what we said put into practice, then these abuses would not have occurred," said Rear Admiral Don Guter (ret.), the Navy Judge Advocate General from 2000 to 2002.
ABC quotes several JAG sources as saying that the Pentagon had formed a "Tiger Team" of Army JAG officers after 9/11 to help create rules for military tribunals, but it was soon disbanded and taken over by political appointees. The JAG officers attributed the move to their insistence on greater rights and protections for the prisoners than what the Pentagon's political appointees wanted to give. The JAG officers said in particular they have been "marginalized" by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, and William Haynes II, the Pentagon's general counsel, who has been nominated for a judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Mr. Feith, however, told ABC that there were no tensions with the JAG officers.
The military lawyers were so upset, Joe Conason of Salon reported last week, that eight senior JAG officers took the unprecedented step of arranging an off-the-record meeting with Scott Horton, chairman of the New York City bar association's Committee on International Human Rights Law. The meeting, held a little more than a year ago, was not long on details, Mr. Horton told Newsday, but it was soon apparent that the officers were deeply concerned about the movement away from the Geneva Conventions that was being orchestrated inside the Pentagon. The Geneva Conventions are a set of guidelines agreed to by most of the world's nations that sets standards of protections for prisoners of war, and for civilians during times of war.
"They were very specific in saying there is a policy coming from the top creating an atmosphere of legal ambiguity surrounding the interrogation process that serves no legitimate function and carries grave risks," Horton recalls. "They made it very clear they wanted the bar to raise its voice about this."
Fox News reports that with the news about the military lawyers concerns and the allegations in this week's New Yorker about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld giving the approval for new, harsher techniques to be used during interrogations, the story about Abu Ghraib was broadened and shifted to whether or not the new legal foundations created by the Bush administration opened the door for US troops and military intelligence to use physical coercion and sexual humiliation against Iraqi prisoners. Newsweek reports that after 9/11, President George Bush, Mr. Rumsfeld, and US Attorney General John Ashcroft signed off on a "on a secret system of detention and interrogation" designed to prevent another 9/11.
It was an approach that they adopted to sidestep the historical safeguards of the Geneva Conventions, which protect the rights of detainees and prisoners of war. In doing so, they overrode the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell and America's top military lawyers-and they left underlings to sweat the details of what actually happened to prisoners in these lawless places. While no one deliberately authorized outright torture, these techniques entailed a systematic softening up of prisoners through isolation, privations, insults, threats and humiliation-methods that the Red Cross concluded were "tantamount to torture."
The White House has long insisted that Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners are not covered by the Geneva Conventions because they are "enemy combatants," although Mr. Powell and his staff were "horrified" by the suggested changes to prisoners protections and tried without success to negate them. Newsweek reports that the post 9/11 plan signed off on by Mr. Bush gave the CIA permission to set up secret detention facilities outside the US. The White House then negotiated novel "status of forces agreements" with foreign governments for the secret sites. These agreements "gave immunity not merely to US government personnel but also to private contractors."
The situation changed in the summer of 2003, Newsweek reports, when Rumsfeld, desperate to find a way to get more information out of detainees in Iraq, OK'ed the use of the new "interrogation" techniques in Iraq, although the war was clearly covered by the protections of the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld allegedly authorized his deputy Stephen Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence, to send Gen. Geoffrey Miller, then commander of the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Iraq to implement the "system" he had used to get information from detainees at Gitmo. Mr. Cambone used his assistant, Gen. Gen. William (Jerry) Boykin, to arrange the trip with Gen. Miller. Miller's trip seems to have set in motion the conditions that lead to the abuse at the prison, according to the Newsweek report.
What also seems to be emergingis a more detailed timeline of when allegations of the abuse and torture of prisoners were first reported by the media or other organizations.
In December of 2002 the Washington Post wrote about the use of "stress and duress" techniques on prisoners by US forces. "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," one Pentagon official told the Post. Citing eyewitnesses, the paper reported, "captives are often 'softened up' by MPs and US Army Special Forces troops who beat them up." Then in January of 2003, the Economist ran a story that reports had emerged that "American intelligence agents have been torturing terrorist suspects, or engaging in practices pretty close to torture."
If, in their efforts to defeat Al Qaeda, American officials are moving towards a policy of using torture on a systematic basis, or conspiring with other countries to do so by handing over suspects to them for interrogation in the full knowledge that torture will be used, this would be a remarkable and ominous reversal of policy.
Editor and Publisher reports that The Associated Press ran a series of stories in November of 2003 (almost completely ignored by other mainstream media) that quoted several former Iraqi detainees who said they had been tortured while they were in Abu Ghraib. Charles J. Hanley, the AP correspondent who wrote the story, said it didn't have any "traction" with his media colleagues because it didn't come from a government "handout."
He [Hanley] is still amazed that apparently no one else was looking into the allegations, and no major newspaper picked up on his reporting after it appeared. Why? "That's something you'd have to ask editors at major newspapers," he said. "But there does seem to be a very strong prejudice toward investing US official statements with credibility while disregarding statements from almost any other source - and in this current situation, Iraqi sources."
The Associated Press also reported Sunday that some members of Congress were made aware as far back as February that there was a problem at Abu Ghraib. AP says the family of one accused soldier wrote to 14 members of Congress that "something went wrong" involving "mistreatment of POWs" at the prison.
So with all these stories about US interrogations tactics allegedly drifting over into torture, and with specific reports about abuse at Abu Ghraib as far back as November of last year, what was it that made the difference this time? Eric Umansky writes in USA Today that it was the photos.
Maybe not all of the Abu Ghraib photos should be immediately published. There are negative consequences in doing so. But let's not keep fooling ourselves about the positive consequences of disclosure. The photos - not the details about them - are what forced us, finally, to pay attention.
Experts are split on the usefulness of "torturing" prisoners for information. Harvard law professor and author Alan M. Dershowitz, who supports the use of torture in some situations, says that while torture should continue, it should be "leaders, not servicemen and women" who decide when to use it.
"If someone asked me to draft the statute, I would say, 'Try buying them off, then use threats, then truth serum, and then if you came to a last recourse, nonlethal pain, a sterilized needle under the nail to produce excruciating pain,' " he said. "You would need a judge signing off on that. By making it open, we wouldn't be able to hide behind the hypocrisy."
But Darius Rejali, an associate professor of political science at Reed College in Portland, Oregon and author of "Torture and Modernity," says 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 says. And in an article for the Seattle Times he says that the "interrogation techniques" learned by US soliders today will not just be used against enemies in the war on terror.
Torture like this doesn't just happen "over there." Torture like this casts a shadow back here for years afterwards. Soldiers trained in stealth torture take these techniques back into civilian life as policemen and private security personnel. It takes years to uncover the subsequent damage. The American style of electric torture in Vietnam appeared in Arkansas prisons in the 1960s and Chicago squad rooms in the 1970s and 1980s. Likewise, the excruciating water tortures American soldiers used for interrogation during the Spanish American War appeared in American policing in the next two decades. For those who suffered from these tortures, it was small comfort that President Theodore Roosevelt felt it was a "mild torture," or that it was hard to see that anyone "was seriously damaged," or that, on Memorial Day 1902, the president regretted the "few acts of cruelty" American troops had performed.
Finally, Secretary of State Colin Powell apologized to Iraqi prisoners Sunday, the day after he told a group of Arab leaders meeting in Jordan that the US would see that those who had perpetrated the abuses at Abu Ghraib would be brought to justice. But he also chastised Arab leaders at that meeting for not expressing more outrage over the recent videotaped beheading of an American civilian in Iraq.
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U.S. to Move Troops from S. Korea to Iraq This Summer
May 17, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-usa-korea.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will move 3,600 Army soldiers to Iraq this summer from South Korea for a one-year deployment, cutting American forces on the Korean Peninsula by about 10 percent to address the worsening Iraqi security situation, the Pentagon said on Monday.
The move illustrated the stress that the Iraq war is placing on the U.S. military, particularly the Army, with the Pentagon deciding between keeping troops in the potential hot spot of the Korean Peninsula, where North Korea is building its nuclear arsenal, and the current hot spot of Iraq.
U.S. officials said the United States remained committed to defending South Korea and the region from potential North Korean aggression, but acknowledged the move marked the first reduction in the U.S. troop level of roughly 37,000 in South Korea since the end of the Cold War.
A senior military official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said the Pentagon was considering extending the tours of duty for troops serving in Iraq, particularly the Marines.
The United States also wants European allies to assume as much responsibility as possible in the Balkans, where about 4,000 U.S. troops are on duty, to enable the Pentagon to free up more forces.
TWO-YEAR DEPLOYMENTS
Some of the 3,600 troops going from South Korea to Iraq will spend up to two years away from their families because of the back-to-back overseas deployments, the Pentagon said.
The official said the 3,600 troops leaving South Korea for Iraq by ``mid-summer'' -- a brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division -- will not be immediately replaced. No final decision has been made on whether the United States will bring the level back to 37,000. The brigade is equipped with Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
The Pentagon previously announced plans to keep about 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq until at least the end of 2005 amid a worsening security environment and escalating insurgency.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, speaking aboard Air Force One as President Bush headed to Kansas, said Bush spoke by telephone with the leaders of South Korea and Japan and won their support for repositioning the U.S. troops to Iraq.
McClellan said the planned move ``does not in any way diminish our commitment to South Korea and the region.'' The Pentagon said U.S. capability in the region would not be diminished, pointing to additional air power and other assets.
THE WRONG MESSAGE?
The defense of South Korea has been a U.S. commitment for more than a half century. U.S. forces fought to preserve South Korea in the Korean War and have guarded against attacks by North Korea ever since.
Washington and Seoul are engaged in negotiations over reorienting the U.S. military presence on the peninsula and have agreed to move most of the U.S. troops based in Seoul and farther north near the North Korean border to new positions south of the capital.
In Seoul, South Korean officials said they agreed with the plan. ``The United States appears to be in an urgent situation, and it would be very difficult to reject the proposal,'' said a Foreign Ministry official.
Analysts said the drawdown may send the wrong message to North Korea.
``North Korea is in the midst of some of the most provocative steps that any nation has taken in the last several years, by building up its nuclear arsenal,'' said Kurt Campbell of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
``I'm a little worried that steps like this can be misinterpreted that we are preoccupied in the Middle East and perhaps not as vigilant -- at least politically -- to our responsibilities in Asia,'' Campbell said.
--------
History project urgent
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Jon Ward
May 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040516-112705-3749r.htm
The Library of Congress is stepping up its effort to collect oral histories from the World War II generation because an estimated 1,000 veterans are dying every day.
The Veterans History Project started three years ago, but officials at the Library of Congress say there is a new sense of urgency to talk to veterans before memories of the war are lost forever.
"There's a sense of, 'Get the story now before it's too late,' " said Diane Kresh, volunteer coordinator at the project, which in 2001 began collecting audio and video recordings of interviews with veterans conducted by their families and friends, students or historical associations.
The historians and volunteers behind the project plan to take advantage of the Memorial Day dedication of the National World War II Memorial on the Mall, which is expected to attract as many as 800,000 tourists to the District, including 100,000 World War II veterans.
The project is a congressionally mandated national and public effort to catalog personal stories from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the 1991 Gulf war.
War veterans or civilians who served on the home front, friends or relatives of veterans or civilians, or anyone else interested can contribute to the project.
Information on submitting stories is on the project's Web site: www.loc.gov/folklife/vets/.
In the past three years, the project has collected more than 15,000 submissions and more than 80,000 items, but the project now is focused on biographical accounts from World War II.
The Library of Congress will double its history project staff from 12 to 24 in the next year in an effort to collect more stories.
During all four days of the Memorial Day weekend celebration, more than 300 volunteers, about a third of them high school students, will seek out veterans on the Mall to interview and photograph. The history project needs more volunteers to follow up with veterans who give their names but don't have time for interviews during the celebration.
Officials say fewer than 4 million of the estimated 16 million Americans who served in World War II are still living.
The World War II Memorial opened April 29. It will be dedicated on May 29.
"I don't think there was a great deal of awareness until Tom Brokaw and people like that started talking about the greatest generation," said Mrs. Kresh, referring to Mr. Brokaw's 1998 book, "The Greatest Generation," which pays tribute to Americans who grew up during the Great Depression and served during World War II.
Books such as "The Greatest Generation" and movies such as "Saving Private Ryan" and "Band of Brothers" have "opened the door" to appreciating the World War II generation, said Sandy Hart, 58, of Ballard County, Ky., who organized a bus trip for more than 800 veterans and their wives last week.
"But nothing could do justice," she said. "There's no end to this story."
The history project is trying to set up partnerships with more high schools to interview veterans, because the interviews are educational and are a public service.
"It adds to the overall telling of the story and brings it to life, particularly for young people, who until recently did not have an experience of wartime. It adds texture and context to the study of history," Mrs. Kresh said.
The history project also is encouraging partnerships with veterans groups, historical associations and libraries to start or enhance World War II collections of stories.
The history project's long-term role will be to catalog all the data by name, date and battle, and to make the most compelling stories available on the Internet.
It also will serve as a research resource for scholars and authors.
The project accepts video or audio interviews with veterans up to 25 minutes long, up to 20 photographs, and letters, diaries, manuscripts or official documents. The project has designed a "project kit," available on the Web site, with checklists and forms.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Mayor Attacks Critics of His Plan to Coordinate Emergency Response
May 17, 2004
By MIKE McINTIRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/nyregion/17fdny.html
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg yesterday attacked critics who say his new plan to coordinate the city's response to emergencies does not go far enough to prevent squabbling and confusion between the Police and Fire Departments.
"I don't know what they do for a living, but they should probably go back to whatever they do," Mr. Bloomberg said in his first public remarks since the new incident command system was announced Friday.
"It's sort of an insult for the men and women of all the agencies who work together every day," he said. "They know exactly what they're doing; they each have their responsibilities. That's why the public is safer in this city than any place else."
Several academic experts and consultants, the chairman of the City Council's public safety committee and the president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association have called the system flawed. The main concern is that it has not completely resolved critical command and control issues that led to confusion over who was in charge at the World Trade Center on 9/11.
The new system, the first such formal arrangement among the city's emergency response agencies, was announced just days before the national commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is scheduled to hold public hearings in New York. The city's difficulties in developing the system, and the continuing controversy surrounding it, are likely to be raised at the hearings, which are to start tomorrow.
Early yesterday, the mayor attended an emergency response drill in Lower Manhattan that simulated the effects of a terrorist bombing in the Bowling Green subway station. Responding to questions afterward, he played down past problems with coordination between the Police and Fire Departments at real emergencies, saying, "The number of times that there is any dispute is so small that it's very hard to measure."
The new incident command system shifts more responsibility to the police in some areas. Some fire officials have objected to the decision to give the police responsibility for assessing incidents involving biological, radiological and nuclear materials, saying their department is better equipped and trained to handle such incidents.
The mayor said that despite the different roles of the agencies in various types of incidents, the new system requires them to work together to respond to all emergencies, although he insisted that they usually do that already.
"What we want to do is add a component that deals with the new world reality of the potential terrorist attack, which we didn't have really before," he said. "What the protocol basically says is that the ranking officers of every agency that responds will be together, and sometimes in the past they've sort of set up separate command posts."
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Bush told Geneva rules 'obsolete'
ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 17, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040517-121713-4545r.htm
The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal shifted yesterday to the question of whether the Bush administration set up a legal foundation that opened the door for the mistreatment.
Within months of the September 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," Mr. Gonzales wrote, according to a report in Newsweek magazine.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell "hit the roof" when he read the memo, according to the account.
The White House did not comment yesterday.
The roots of the scandal lay in a decision, approved last year by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, to expand a classified operation for aggressive interrogations to Iraqi prisoners, a program that had been focused on the hunt for al Qaeda, the New Yorker magazine reported.
The Pentagon said that article 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."
Mr. Powell said yesterday that there were discussions at high levels inside the Bush administration last fall about information from the International Committee of the Red Cross purporting prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the focal point of the scandal.
"We knew that the ICRC had concerns, and in accordance with the manner in which the ICRC does its work, it presented those concerns directly to the command in Baghdad," Mr. Powell said on "Fox News Sunday." "And I know that some corrective action was taken with respect to those concerns."
Mr. 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 might have unwisely imported to Iraq techniques from the war on al Qaeda.
"There is a sort of morphing of the rules of treatment," said Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat. "We can treat al Qaeda 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, Mr. Biden said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
In early 2002, the White House announced that Taliban and al Qaeda detainees would not be afforded prisoner-of-war status, but that the United States would apply the Geneva Conventions to the war in Afghanistan.
Asked about the Gonzales memo, Mr. 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."
Mr. Powell, interviewed from Jordan by NBC, left open the prospect of problems up the line from the prison guards who engaged in abuse.
--------
9/11 Tape Has Late Change on Evacuation
May 17, 2004
By JIM DWYER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/nyregion/17response.html
As part of its hearings this week in New York, the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks will report on one of the most contentious issues of that morning: the contradictory evacuation instructions given in the World Trade Center, particularly public-address announcements made by an official in the south tower urging tenants to stay in the building even though fire was raging in the other tower.
A voice message tape enhanced over the weekend by an audio expert at the request of The New York Times captures the last of the announcements made in the south tower, revealing that less than a minute before the building was struck, authorities changed their earlier instructions and ordered an evacuation.
The earlier announcements had life and death consequences, according to dozens of people who escaped from the south tower. They said scores of office workers who had started to leave the building turned back when they heard those instructions. Many others never left their offices. About 600 people were trapped and died in the upper floors of the south tower when it was struck, about 16 minutes after the north tower. The commission has not located any tapes of those earlier announcements, according to a New York official who has been briefed on the panel's findings.
The instructions to stay inside the buildings were given not only over the public-address system, but also to individual tenants from both the north and the south towers who telephoned the Port Authority police.
A clear understanding of the evacuation instructions could have wide implications for building design and safety practices. Many fire safety experts have said that the announcements and instructions at the trade center, rather than reflecting mistakes made under extreme pressure, were consistent with widely accepted doctrines of high-rise fire safety. At the time, these called for people to stay in their offices unless they were on or near a burning floor. Experts agree that such policies now carry little weight, given the collapse of the two towers.
Most tall buildings in the United States, including those at the trade center, were not designed for complete evacuation during a crisis because of the belief that built-in systems can contain and suppress fires, and because staircases reduce the amount of rentable floor space.
Even after the 1993 bombing at the trade center, the emergency planning there never anticipated a complete evacuation, according to officials. A federally funded study of the evacuation is being conducted by Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, which recently mailed a survey to 20,000 people who worked in the towers.
On the morning of Sept. 11, the earliest moments of the response were directed by civilian officials, known as deputy fire safety directors, who were stationed in the lobby of each tower. In a radio conversation about two minutes after the first plane struck, the director in the south tower was recorded saying of an evacuation, "I'm not going to do anything until we get orders from the Fire Department or somebody." The remainder of that tape is blank.
At several points during the next 14 minutes, many survivors said, announcements were made in the south tower declaring that the building was secure. Some tenants said they were specifically told to return to their desks; others remember being told they could go to a cafeteria. A tape recording shows that at 8:59, 13 minutes after the north tower was hit, a Port Authority Police captain, Anthony R. Whitaker, called for a complete evacuation of the trade center, though it is not clear how or whether this was communicated to the lobby desks.
At 9:02 a.m., Sean Rooney, who worked for Aon Risk Management Services on the 98th floor of the south tower, called his wife, Beverly Eckert, at her office and left a voice message. Mr. Rooney died in the attack. Ms. Eckert provided a copy of her husband's message to The Times.
As Mr. Rooney speaks, a public-address announcement can be faintly heard in the background. A tape of his call was digitally enhanced by Paul Ginsberg, the president of Professional Audio Labs, who has served as a consultant on sound recordings for the F.B.I., the C.I.A., Congress and the National Archives. In his laboratory, Mr. Ginsberg was able to obtain a clear rendering of the background announcement.
That announcement, by a male voice, says: "May I have your attention, please. Repeating this message: the situation occurred in Building 1."
During this part of the message, Mr. Rooney also is speaking. He says: "Looks like we'll be in this tower for a while. It's, it's secure here."
As the next part of the public announcement begins, Mr. Rooney suddenly stops talking, as if distracted from the phone call by the words he is now hearing.
The announcer says, "If the conditions warrant on your floor, you may wish to start an orderly evacuation."
With that, Mr. Rooney abruptly signs off, saying, "I'll talk to you later. 'Bye."
-------- propaganda wars
Powell's Interview Is Cut Off
May 17, 2004
By COURTNEY C. RADSCH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/international/17TV.html
WASHINGTON, May 16 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was abruptly cut off during an interview on Sunday on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" when one of his aides decided the interview had gone on long enough.
As Tim Russert, the program's host, began to ask his final question, the camera unexpectedly panned away from Mr. Powell, who was being interviewed in Jordan via a satellite link from Washington. In the confusion, Mr. Powell could be heard saying, "He's still asking me questions," to which a woman's voice answered, "No, he's not."
Mr. Powell, still off camera, said, "Tim, I'm sorry, I lost you," and added, "Emily, get out of the way." Mr. Russert, slightly irate, responded: "I think that was one of your staff, Mr. Secretary. I don't think that's appropriate." After a few seconds the camera returned to Mr. Powell and he finished the interview.
Betsy Fischer, the show's executive producer, identified the staff member as Emily Miller, deputy press secretary to Mr. Powell, and said Ms. Miller "pulled the plug" without warning. Although the interview was taped in advance, she said such interviews were usually run without being edited. Mr. Russert called it a case of "press management gone berserk."
"I've been doing this program for 13 years and nothing like that has ever happened," he said in a telephone interview. "I remember sometimes in countries around the world this happens, but not in America. This is a free press, and political figures can always say `I don't want to answer.' " He said he did not know if it was the content of the question that caused Ms. Miller's reaction or simply that the interview had gone over its allotted time.
Julie Reside, a State Department spokeswoman, said the interview had gone on considerably longer than scheduled, and that the personnel there "made every attempt to get NBC to finish up."
-------- us politics
Down but Not Out, Kucinich Keeps Fighting
By RICK LYMAN
May 17, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/17/politics/campaign/17kucinich.html
PORTLAND, Ore., May 16 - Before Americans get too engrossed in a general election contest between President Bush and Senator John Kerry, Dennis J. Kucinich would like to remind them of something: He's still out here, working hard every day, slogging from town to town, the second-to-last person still standing in the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.
"Math is not my major, but I can count," the Ohio congressman said as his car wound along the dripping, piney woods of the central Oregon coast, a glowering sky flecking the windshield with pin-sized raindrops. "I understand that Kerry has enough delegates to be nominated. I can count, but I can also figure."
And this is how Dennis Kucinich - the former boy mayor of Cleveland whose half-forgotten, dead-but-still-twitching presidential campaign is now focusing on Tuesday's Oregon primary - figures it:
"The reason I have not dropped out of the race is that we may have a nominee, but the future direction of the Democratic Party has not yet been determined."
And what he wants Mr. Kerry, and the Democratic Party, to do is to take an unambiguous stand not only against the war in Iraq but against "the very idea that war is inevitable." The nation's whole political mindset must be changed, Mr. Kucinich said.
"We are at the unusual juncture where what is morally right and politically efficacious are in confluence," he said. "My presence in the race provides a persistent reminder of the necessity of taking a new direction, the first step of which is to bring our troops home now."
O.K. But isn't that pretty big talk for a guy who has won exactly zero primaries - in fact, who performed poorly in most of them?
Mr. Kucinich recognizes this, and knows that much of the country has pretty much forgotten that he is still running. "At this point, I am not suffering from the overwhelming burden of high expectations," he said.
However, he said, the war in Iraq is turning out to be just the disaster he had predicted, and if he can just keep accumulating delegates here and there, he might be able to go into the Democratic convention in Boston this summer with enough juice to nudge the party toward his way of thinking.
That's all he wants now.
"I guess you can say I am saving the Democratic Party from itself," Mr. Kucinich said. "And I can possibly prevent some people from jumping into the arms of a third-party candidate. I mean, why is Ralph Nader even an issue this year? What is to stop us from stealing his playbook?"
At the moment, Mr. Kucinich is focusing on Oregon. He has spent 30 days here in the last two months, and he is using some of his precious reserve of campaign funds on last-minute television advertisements.
He takes heart that Mr. Kerry, whose campaign has paid little attention to the primary calendar in recent weeks, feels compelled to come to Portland on Monday, with no less than former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont in tow.
"What's happening," Mr. Kucinich insisted, "is that events are starting to prove that I was right. When all else fails, truth has a way of protecting its own."
At the public library in Florence, on a leafy street between Highway 101 and the sea, more than 100 Kucinich supporters spilled from a small meeting room at 7:30 Saturday morning. He was due any minute for the first of six stops that day.
"I figure we have to have someone for those of us who are against the war," said Don Norton, 71, a retired corrections official wearing a "No War" button. "If it wasn't for Kucinich, there wouldn't be anyone speaking for us."
Howard Shapiro, 70, a retired schoolteacher sporting two buttons ("Dissent Is Patriotic" and "Re-Defeat Bush"), said that like many in the room, he expected to vote for Mr. Kerry in November. But on Tuesday he goes Kucinich, if only to send Mr. Kerry a message.
A microphone was passed through the crowd so people could explain what brought them there.
"I'm just getting tired of being embarrassed to be an American," one woman said.
"I really like to be in a place where my ideas are not superfluous," said another.
The crowd rose and cheered when Mr. Kucinich arrived in a blue blazer over a red shirt and blue jeans.
"How many of us have had that feeling, that we can't believe what this country has become?" Mr. Kucinich asked. "I know that many of us feel a sense of disconnection from our country, and that this produces in us a kind of grief. We grieve for the America that was, the America that cared for civil liberties."
American politics, apparently, have gone completely topsy-turvy: conservatives crank up deficits and get bogged down in foreign wars while progressives pine wistfully for a golden-hued past.
Normally, Mr. Kucinich speaks in a calm, reassuring way, though every now and then his voice rises in a passionate crescendo. The effect is less that of a lonely political crusade than a religious revival, and his language has echoes of the pulpit.
"What is the way out of this?" he asked. "It is reminding us where we came from."
At a rally later in Lincoln City, nearly 200 people packed the Bijou Cinema, where Mr. Kucinich was presented with a quilt bearing the logo "Dept. of Peace." This referred to his proposal to create such a cabinet-level agency to promote harmony and conflict resolution, a notion much ridiculed on conservative talk radio shows as emblematic of the sort of fuzzy-headed thinking common among this particular strain of liberal.
"We can change the whole debate in this country, and we've got to do it," Mr. Kucinich said. "It's about the party standing for something, something other than the next check from the corporate interests."
In an almost hushed voice, he continued: "This is a spiritual matter, not just a practical political matter."
The entire time he spoke, an angelic young woman stood at the side of the auditorium with her arms raised above her head, sometimes shaking them gently, as though sending waves through the air.
The young woman, Eden Sky, 27, said she was "focusing," which she described as a kind of praying, a blessing. And she seemed almost puzzled when asked why she chose to focus on Mr. Kucinich. "Because he is the only one worth focusing on," she said.
If he continues to win a few here and a few there, Mr. Kucinich said, he expects to go to Boston with about 50 delegates, and to bring along an additional 2,000 supporters. "We will help shape the external environment of the convention as well," he said.
What he really must do, he said, is to have a serious conversation with Mr. Kerry, with whom he has a friendly relationship, to try to persuade him that a troops-out-now platform is the way to beat President Bush and unlock the door to the nation's progressive yearnings.
"Up until now, I have been his opponent in the primaries and it wouldn't be appropriate," Mr. Kucinich said. "But the time to have that discussion is probably very close."
He reached into one of his traveling bags and pulled out a thick stack of newspaper pages, each one with articles meticulously underlined, nuggets of information that he found interesting or appalling, more grist for his mill.
"We've been out here campaigning for 15 months," he said. "It's a long time."
But it will be worth it, he said, if he can just inch his party toward justice.
"In a way, I feel like Johnny Appleseed," Mr. Kucinich said. "I'm planting seeds all over this country: seeds of peace, seeds of hope. At some point, maybe years from now, there will be orchards. So in a sense, it's about more than this election. It's about more than politics. It really is about envisioning a new America."
--------
Across Federal Spectrum
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A09
James V. Grimaldi and Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31678-2004May16.html
The Bush Pioneers, who agree to raise a minimum of $100,000 each for the Bush campaign, are well-connected throughout the Bush administration. Here are some examples of the subtle interaction of political fundraising and public policy.
Hunt Oil Co.
Bush Pioneer Jose Fourquet played a pivotal role in the financing of a massive Peruvian natural gas project that benefited Hunt Oil Co., whose chairman, Ray L. Hunt, signed up to be a Pioneer and is a longtime ally of the president.
The Camisea Natural Gas Project is set to extract fossil fuel from one of the world's most pristine tropical rain forests and pipe it over the Andes toward Lima and the coast, where it will end up at a depot near a marine sanctuary. Hunt is one of several participants in the project. His company hired Halliburton's Kellogg Brown & Root to design a $1 billion export terminal on the coast.
Fourquet, the Treasury Department's U.S. representative to the Inter-American Development Bank, rebuffed the official written and oral recommendation from other U.S. officials to vote "no" on the project. Instead, he abstained on $135 million in financing for the project, allowing it to proceed. Opposition from the United States, a primary funder of the IDB bank, would have jeopardized the deal.
In a strongly worded memo sent before the vote, the U.S. Agency for International Development told the Treasury Department that federal law required Fourquet to cast a "no" vote because environmental reviews were deficient. In addition, others on a federal interagency task force urged opposition.
A separate proposal for financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States fell short over environmental concerns. April H. Foley, a Bush appointee and the Ex-Im Bank board member who cast the deciding "no" vote, said the president questioned her about it afterward. She told Friends of the Earth campaign director Jon Sohn, that President Bush brought it up during an overnight stay at Camp David. Bush asked her to explain her vote to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was involved in providing direction to Fourquet in how to vote.
Foley declined to discuss her vote.
The Camisea project also encountered fierce opposition from worldwide environmental groups and some members of Congress, who predicted the massive extraction and pipeline project would destroy the rain forest in the Southeastern Amazon and endanger its indigenous people. Environmental groups issued reports recently saying their worst fears are coming true -- indigenous people coming down with illnesses, a massive fish kill in Paracas Bay.
Media releases from the Bush campaign do not say whether Hunt formally reached Pioneer status, but court documents list Hunt as being given Pioneer Solicitor Tracking No. 1002. The Bush campaign has stopped answering questions about who was in the program.
Hunt has declined repeated requests for information about the bank's vote or his campaign contributions. Federal records show he has given nearly $100,000 to Republican causes in the past four years, including individual donations to the Bush campaign.
There are other significant Bush connections to Hunt. His chief of public affairs, James Curtis Oberwetter, recently became Bush's ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He was replaced at Hunt Oil by Jeanne Johnson Phillips, one of the creators of the Bush Pioneer program, a current campaign adviser and former ambassador under Bush to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.
Bush also appointed Hunt to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and to the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Fourquet, 37, who was an investment banker before he joined the administration, resigned his post last month. He did not return phone calls.
Microsoft Corp.
Among the top priorities for Bush Pioneer and Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.) was an end to the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. Dunn represents Redmond, Wash., where the software giant is based.
In 2000, the Clinton Justice Department won the major parts of its case against Microsoft and proposed breaking the world's largest software company in two. An appeals court threw out the breakup plan the next year and sent the matter back to U.S. District Court. The Bush Justice Department then settled the matter on terms widely seen as favorable to Microsoft. Critics say that the settlement fails to address the harm Microsoft's monopoly power inflicted on other companies. The Justice Department defended the settlement as a fair resolution of the case. A federal judge accepted the terms.
Last week, the Bush administration nominated the lead Justice Department negotiator in the Microsoft case, Deborah P. Majoras, to be chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.
"I just think it is a different atmosphere now," said Dunn, who was one of the first Pioneers, exceeding her $100,000 commitment with the help of Microsoft donors. "In the Clinton administration, the Justice Department brought suit against them. President Bush said 'I'm for innovation -- not regulation.' That was important to Microsoft that he kept his word."
This year, Microsoft has two Pioneers, John Connors and John Kelly. More than 100 people from Microsoft attended an event for Bush, Dunn said. Employees have given more than $160,000 in contributions, placing Microsoft among the top companies donating to Bush, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Chemical Industry
At least half a dozen members of the chemical industry became Bush Pioneers in 2000, among them Frederick L. Webber, then-chairman and chief executive of the American Chemistry Council; J. Roger Hirl, former president of the group and chief executive of Occidental Chemical Corp. in Dallas; and Allan B. Hubbard of E & A Industries Inc., who attended Harvard Business School with Bush.
Before leaving the chemical manufacturers' trade group in 2002, Webber had led a fierce battle over plant security.
After Sept. 11, 2001, chemical and petroleum plants faced the prospect of new inspections to ensure security was sufficient to prevent terrorist attacks. Reports for years had warned of chemical plant vulnerabilities. Federal studies said a properly mounted attack could kill millions. After the terrorist attacks, the Bush administration ordered the reports removed from the Internet.
The Environmental Protection Agency took the lead in formulating a policy to regulate chemical plant security. EPA officials said that under the Clean Air Act these plants had a "general duty" to secure their facilities against terrorist attack. Then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman ordered a policy developed. In 2002, EPA outlined this new enforcement regime, according to internal documents obtained by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Separately, Sen. Jon S. Corzine (D-N.J.) proposed legislation that would mandate that EPA take the lead role in enforcing plant security.
Chemical industry officials argued that the plants were already bolstering security and they appealed to the administration to keep EPA away from the issue.
Webber and Greg Lebedev, who eventually replaced him as chief executive of the American Chemistry Council, took a group of industry executives to the White House, where they met with Bush political adviser Karl Rove and the White House Council on Environmental Quality in September 2002, Lebedev said. The group urged the administration to oppose the Corzine bill.
Afterward, Rove wrote one of the attendees, the president of BP Amoco Chemical Co. "We have a similar set of concerns," Rove stated in a letter that was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Greenpeace.
Webber, who now is president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, declined to comment. Lebedev, the lobbyist, said: "We had a meeting with Karl Rove. We think that's a good thing. We take people to meetings with people in government around town all the time."
In 2003, the White House gave responsibility for chemical plant security to the Department of Homeland Security. The new department, however, does not have authority to enforce security upgrades at the plants, according to environmental groups, members of Congress and the chemical industry. Lebedev said the American Chemical Council is working with Congress on legislation to give the department that authority.
Friends in High Places
Tom Loeffler, a 2000 Pioneer and a 2004 Ranger, has been a Bush family loyalist for more than a quarter century. Now, Loeffler is marketing those ties in the lobby shop he has opened here.
His firm, Loeffler Jonas & Tuggey, notes on its Web site: "Members of the firm's Government Affairs Group have strong ties to the current Administration, having worked directly with the President, the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff, Cabinet Secretaries and their principal deputies and aides."
Those links were forged in President George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign, when Loeffler was Texas co-chairman. In 1994, Loeffler was finance co-chair of George W. Bush's gubernatorial campaign in Texas. In the two Bush campaigns for governor, Loeffler was the largest donor, $141,000.
In the 1998 election cycle, he served as national co-chair of the Republican National Committee's "Team 100" program for donors of $100,000 or more, and then held the same title during George W. Bush's presidential campaign in 1999-2000.
In May 2000, Loeffler left the now-defunct Arter & Hadden, taking the Cleveland-based firm's San Antonio lawyers, to found his own lobby-law firm, Loeffler Jonas & Tuggey, with offices here and in San Antonio.
Since Bush's election, Loeffler's firm has grown fivefold, an impressive feat for a K Street newcomer. In 2001, its first year in Washington, Loeffler Jonas & Tuggey received $1.01 million in lobbying fees.
In the next two years, that total skyrocketed, to $4.09 million and $5.71 million, respectively. Among clients he picked up: Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Lockheed Martin Corp., Motorola Inc., the National Association of Broadcasters, SBC Communications Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co.
Loeffler declined to be interviewed for this article, but in January 2001 he told Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Congress, that he had recently "visited with the president-elect and said that any way that I can be helpful, I will be. I will not be a part of the administration. I'm sure that as times go forward, wherever my strengths can assist, I'll be called upon."
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
THE BUSH MONEY MACHINE : An Industry Gets Its Way
Fundraiser Denies Link Between Money, Access EPA Rule on Hazardous Waste Favored Ohio Businessman Who Is a Big GOP Donor
By James V. Grimaldi and Thomas B. Edsall
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31714-2004May16.html
Second of two articles
MASON, Ohio -- Richard T. Farmer is one of America's richest men and a Bush Pioneer by virtue of having raised at least $100,000 for the 2000 campaign. Over the past 15 years, he and his wife have given $3.1 million to Bush campaigns, the Republican Party and Republican candidates.
Farmer's family controls Cintas Corp., a $2.7 billion company that rents and launders uniforms and industrial shop towels. For years, Farmer's industry has been at odds with the Environmental Protection Agency over increased regulation of shop towels, particularly a Clinton administration proposal that, though not fatal, "would have cost us a lot of money," Farmer said.
In a recent interview at company headquarters here, Farmer said his campaign donations were made with no strings attached. He said he supports Republicans because they believe in "less government, more individual freedom, more individual responsibility."
"If you think I'm giving money to get access to [President Bush], you're crazy," Farmer said. "I'm just trying to get the right guy elected. That's all I care about."
The Clinton proposal would have required that woven shop towels contaminated with chemical solvents be wrung dry for them to be treated as laundry, not hazardous waste. Last November, the EPA changed its position, adopting a more lenient proposal for the woven towels. Farmer and his industry were overjoyed, because the change promised to save them millions and preserve their advantage over the competition -- paper towels. "It would have been a big problem," Farmer said.
After a series of telephone calls, e-mails, letters and meetings with representatives of the laundry industry, the EPA had provided industrial-laundry lobbyists with an advance copy of a portion of the proposed rule, which the lobbyists edited and the agency adopted.
That same opportunity was not given to the rule's opponents -- environmental groups, a labor union, hazardous-waste landfill operators and paper towel manufacturers who argue their product should be treated as environmentally equal to laundered towels. The opponents say industrial laundries send tens of thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals to municipal sewage treatment plants and landfills where toxics can get into groundwater, streams and rivers. Labor unions contend that the towels expose workers to cancer-causing fumes.
Cintas said in a statement that the rewritten rule will prevent pollution because "reusable shop towels are friendlier to the environment" than disposable paper towels.
The proposed shop towel rule is but one example of a policy change by the Bush administration that favors a company controlled by a Bush Pioneer or Ranger, who as a group have helped the president bank a record $200 million for the 2004 election campaign. The shop towel case reflects the subtle interactions between corporations and an administration determined to roll back what it considers to be regulatory overkill. For many big donors, getting "the right guy elected," as Farmer puts it, is an end in itself.
EPA Assistant Administrator Marianne Lamont Horinko said Farmer's campaign contributions had nothing to do with the agency's decision. Although Cintas was represented by the industrial-laundry lobbyists in discussions with the EPA, Farmer said he himself did not directly contact the administration about the proposed rule. He did say that, at the behest of the laundry industry, he called members of the Ohio congressional delegation, who wrote to then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman.
In a summary of the rule, the EPA said it would improve "clarity and consistency" of regulation, "provide regulatory relief, and save affected facilities over $30 million." Whitman -- who resigned from the EPA last year and has since become a Bush Ranger -- declined to be interviewed. But she said through a spokesman that contacts such as those from the Ohio congressional delegation "are helpful because they highlight an interest and a constituent's interest" and "that just feeds into the deliberative process."
Fred Meyer, the former chairman of the Texas Republican Party who in 1998 helped set up the Pioneers for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush, said there is a good reason money will always flow to political campaigns. "There are too many things that are important to too many people," Meyer said. "The existence of businesses and billions of dollars are affected."
Democrats have their own history of rewarding large donors. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed major contributor Joseph P. Kennedy to be ambassador to Britain. Lyndon B. Johnson funneled contracts to Texas firms.
Direct quid pro quos -- specific benefits in exchange for cash -- are illegal. There is nothing illegal, however, about the adoption of broad legislation or regulations benefiting sectors of the business community -- such as laundries disposing of wastewater containing toxic chemicals -- that happen be a source of major fundraisers and donors.
For example, securities and investment banking firms have benefited enormously from reduced capital gains and dividend taxes initiated by the Bush White House. Six produced 17 Pioneers and Rangers this year, and employees in those firms have raised $2.53 million. Altogether, finance industry employees have raised $19.68 million for the 2004 election campaign, according to an analysis produced for The Washington Post by Dwight L. Morris & Associates.
Twenty-four Rangers and Pioneers are either drug industry executives or lobbyists whose companies stand to get more business from the administration's Medicare drug benefit bill passed last year.
Twenty-five energy company executives, along with 15 energy industry lobbyists, are either Pioneers or Rangers. Many have been deeply involved in developing the administration's energy policy. Seven of those Pioneers served on the Bush energy transition team. The administration's energy bill, which remains stalled by a largely Democratic filibuster in the Senate, would provide billions of dollars in benefits to the energy industry.
Industry: $400 Million Cost
The proposed shop towel rule shows how the process can play out to the advantage of a Pioneer.
For more than two decades, the EPA has grappled with how to regulate the cloth towels used to wipe up chemicals in printing plants, factories and industrial shops. Each year, 3 billion of them sop up more than 100,000 tons of hazardous solvents such as benzene, xylene, toluene and methyl ethyl ketone.
"Why should these materials be regulated as a hazardous waste?" the EPA said in a document given to the laundry industry in 2000. "Because they have the potential to cause fires, or to be the source of fugitive air emissions, and ground water contamination."
In 1997, the Clinton administration proposed a clean-water rule requiring industrial laundries to pretreat their wastewater to remove chemical solvents. The Uniform & Textile Service Association (UTSA) and Textile Rental Services Association of America (TRSA) mounted a $1.2 million lobbying campaign against the proposed rule, arguing that toxic pollutants are removed at the laundries or by municipal wastewater treatment plants. The trade groups said the proposal would have cost them more than $400 million.
In 1999, the Clinton EPA withdrew the rule. The next year, with Clinton still in the White House, the EPA floated a new draft rule that proposed to exempt shop towels from hazardous-waste requirements only if factories squeezed the towels "dry" -- defined as containing no more than five grams of solvents -- before placing them in sealed containers and sending them to laundries.
Calling this "an extremist view in the EPA," the laundry industry forcefully opposed the new proposal as overregulation.
But environmental activists, labor groups and paper towel makers said the laundries and local treatment plants frequently exceed their mandated pollution limits. Sixty-five Cintas laundries in 15 states and Canada have exceeded pollution limits on more than 1,100 occasions in the past several years, according to public records gathered by the Sierra Club and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE).
For the EPA and the laundry industry, things changed when Bush took office in 2001. The industry pushed hard to derail the Clinton proposed rule in favor of a more lenient one that gives shop towels a hazardous-waste exemption without the need to wring them dry or store them in special containers.
Laundry trade groups appealed directly to EPA Administrator Whitman in February 2001: "The draft regulation in its current form . . . increases the regulatory burden."
In May, Whitman sent a conciliatory response: "Partnerships with our stakeholders will be an important part of how we will do business at EPA."
To aid in the effort, the industry urged contributions to its Textile Rental Services Association's Political Action Committee. "Will PAC donations open doors, get appointments and allow your message to be delivered? Absolutely," Textile Rental magazine said in its March 2002 edition.
Exemption Sought at EPA
In Richard Farmer, the industry had one of the biggest political givers in the country.
For President George H.W. Bush, Farmer, now 69 , was a member of "Team 100," donors who gave more than $100,000 to Republican Party-building committees. When George W. Bush ran for office in 2000, Farmer's "golfing buddy," Cincinnati financier Mercer Reynolds III, recruited Farmer to be a Pioneer, Farmer said. This year, he earned the more exalted Ranger status by raising a minimum of $200,000 in individual contributions.
Farmer said that his big gifts are not connected to political favors.
In the case of shop towel regulation, Farmer said Cintas itself was unconcerned. "We huddled up and [decided] no matter what happens here, it will have no impact on Cintas," he said.
Later in the interview, when specifically asked about the Clinton-era proposal, he said it would have hurt Cintas by making it difficult for the company to provide the full range of services its customers demand. Shop towels are now about 5 percent of Cintas's business, but they remain an important service to customers who also rent uniforms.
Farmer said he never contacted the administration about the new rule. He said he did complain about the rule to Ohio Republican Sen. George V. Voinovich and Rep. Rob Portman, a fellow Bush Pioneer and chairman of Bush's campaign in Ohio this year.
Farmer said he made the calls in 2002 on behalf of the two laundry trade groups. Cintas is the biggest company in the industry, but Farmer said that complaints from hundreds of small laundries probably had more impact than his calls. "It would have put small guys out of business," he said.
Portman said in a recent interview that he was first contacted by one of the trade groups, which he knew represented Cintas, "one of those big companies in our district." He said he considered it a constituent issue. "I do remember talking to Dick about it at least once," he said.
About the same time in 2002 that Farmer was making his calls and the trade groups were contacting members of Congress, he made a major contribution. On March 19, 2002, Farmer gave $250,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee.
On March 25, Portman and Voinovich co-wrote a letter to Whitman asking her to support a more encompassing waste exemption for shop towels -- this one from solid waste regulation. Gaining a solid-waste exemption would remove a further layer of regulation because some states apply additional taxes, fees and special handling requirements to solid waste.
Whitman spokesman Joe Martyak said such a letter from lawmakers "helps to precipitate a meeting to find out what's the glitch. You help to unglitch it, to move it along."
At this point , EPA attorneys were balking at the solid-waste exemption, Portman and Voinovich said in their letter.
A month later , Whitman wrote Portman and Voinovich that the EPA was considering the solid-waste exemption and assured that it would "incorporate suggested changes where appropriate."
Three weeks later, EPA officials signed off on the exemption, according to the trade group's timeline.
Jim O'Leary, the EPA official who wrote the original language that was rewritten, said there was no political interference from Whitman's office. "That's nonsense," O'Leary said. "We called it the way we saw it. No one interfered."
A Rule That Isn't 'Onerous'
On Aug. 2, EPA's Kathy Blanton, who replaced O'Leary, e-mailed to industry attorney William M. Guerry Jr. the "language we have put together to address the laundries' concerns," according to a copy of the e-mail obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Guerry wrote back on Aug. 15 with proposed changes, documents show. Among them was deletion of a phrase in the preamble stating that shop towels "remain regulated." Instead, the lobbyist wanted the words "regulatory status . . . remains unchanged."
Guerry, in an interview, said the change was important to make sure that states did not misread the rule as a significant change in policy. Otherwise there would have been "chaos" and a "train wreck," he said. EPA officials shared the language with him, he said, because "they recognized that we had the expertise they needed."
Blanton said she sent Guerry just part of the regulatory language. "I can see how, from the outside, that it would look like colluding or something. [But] these were the people who were going to be most affected by the rule and they were the ones with the expertise." She said at this point the EPA had already had sufficient input from the paper towel people and others affected by the rule.
Opponents, including the union, environmentalists and paper towel makers, say they were not given an advance look at the language. Ralph Solarski, a Kimberly-Clark Corp. executive who chairs a task force of paper towel makers, said his group would have been glad to have one.
"Kathy Blanton and Bob Dellinger at EPA were asked on multiple occasions for advance copies and we were consistently denied," Solarski wrote in an e-mail to The Post.
EPA officials attended two industry meetings to discuss the proposed rule, one in Baltimore on Aug. 20 and one in Old Town Alexandria on Sept. 12. On Aug. 30, Farmer donated $250,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
EPA's Office of Solid Waste Director Dellinger spoke at the Alexandria meeting. His comments later appeared in the trade group's magazine: "EPA doesn't want to make this onerous."
Instead of screw-on, sealed containers for transporting contaminated woven towels from factories to laundries, which were proposed in 2000, Dellinger said, a piece of plywood over a barrel would meet the new EPA proposed standard.
Also, the EPA opted not to require the towels to be wrung out. "The point of that is not to make it harder to do than what you would do through your normal course of business," Dellinger said.
However, he told the group, the paper towel industry would have to wring out its towels to make sure they had no more than five grams of solvent on them before being dumped.
The new proposed rule was published in the Federal Register on Nov. 20, 2003.
Paper industry officials say that the EPA is ignoring its own studies showing that laundries create 30 percent more waste than paper towels in the form of sludge -- lint, debris, toxics and other substances extracted from laundry wastewater -- sent to municipal landfills.
"This is a case study," Solarski said, "for how an industry has used the regulatory process to gain a market advantage."
Post database editor Sarah Cohen and researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
-------- health
CDC Watching for Next Worrisome Outbreak
May 17, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-The-Next-Outbreak.html
ATLANTA (AP) -- SARS. West Nile. HIV. Bird flu. Once-obscure and unknown diseases have caused some of the most worrisome outbreaks in recent years, and health officials can only guess what disease will strike next.
Despite having the best medical and science know-how in history, today's health experts are struggling to predict the next outbreak as even the rarest diseases can be easily and quickly spread around the globe because of air travel and international commerce.
Some of last year's outbreaks -- including SARS worldwide and monkeypox's first presence in the United States -- emerged with little warning.
``We know we need to continue to expect the unexpected,'' said Dr. James Hughes, director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based in Atlanta.
While health officials -- including those at the CDC -- say it's impossible to determine exactly what disease will appear next, they are constantly preparing for the world's next outbreak.
``We always say that the most important disease is the next one -- unfortunately there is no crystal ball to look into,'' said Dr. Corrie Brown, a University of Georgia professor and member of the Secretary of Agriculture's advisory committee for animal and poultry diseases.
Health officials say there's no evidence yet of any new outbreaks threatening humans, but they are closely watching a few likely suspects.
At the top of the list is influenza. Up to 50 million people died in the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, the worst flu outbreak in recent history. Because flu strains mutate and swap genes with other flu viruses, health officials fear that another powerful strain could strike at any time.
``Most of us in infectious diseases are waiting for an influenza pandemic,'' said Dr. Mark Smolinski, a former CDC official who helped investigate hantavirus when that disease first appeared in 1993 in the United States.
The avian influenza outbreak earlier this year in Asia scared health officials, as it hit eight Asian countries, killing 24 people in Vietnam and Thailand. About 100 million chickens in Asia either died from the illness or were slaughtered to prevent its spread.
``It's the first time we've ever had an avian flu epidemic in multiple countries at one time of a highly pathogenic strain,'' said Smolinski, now acting vice president of biological programs at the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Institute.
Another concern are diseases transmitted by insects. The mosquito-borne West Nile virus came to the United States in 1999 and has spread across the continental United States.
That experience has made health officials wary of Rift Valley fever, another mosquito-borne disease, but one that is much deadlier than West Nile. Rift Valley fever has a mortality rate of up to 26 percent, compared to West Nile, which kills up to 10 percent of those it infects.
``If we get Rift Valley fever in the United States, it would make West Nile look like a hiccup,'' Brown said. ``It was heavily investigated during the Cold War as a good way to immobilize troops.''
Once confined to Africa, Rift Valley fever entered the Arabian peninsula for the first time four years ago. It's believed to have spread through exported livestock. About 95 people died from it in Saudi Arabia in 2000.
The concern in the United States over the Rift Valley fever is that about 25 different kinds of domestic mosquitoes could carry the virus if it reaches North America.
The pig-borne Nipah virus, discovered in 1998 in Malaysia, ``has surfaced periodically in the swine populations,'' said Dr. Nina Marano, acting associate director for veterinary medicine and public health for the CDC. Nearly 900,000 hogs were killed and 265 people died before the Malaysian outbreak was controlled.
Both of these viruses have manmade dangers: Federal officials warn that terrorists could try to spread them both as bioweapons.
Those new threats come on top of long-standing diseases that have been difficult to contain. About a quarter of the 57 million deaths in the world in 2002 were from infectious diseases. About 2.8 million people died that year from HIV and AIDS, the globe's leading killers, Hughes said.
``Malaria, tuberculosis and HIV still are wiping out large portions of the population,'' Smolinski said. ``We're very concerned about the global pandemic of HIV -- the horse is out of the barn on that -- it's just starting to be seen in some of these very heavily populated countries like India, China, Thailand.''
Avian influenza and SARS have led to unprecedented collaboration between international medical and veterinary experts. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization and the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health have been working on ways to better trade information and expertise on dangerous animal diseases that can harm humans.
In the United States, human and animal health experts are combining their talents to fight emerging diseases. The CDC is working to merge surveillance systems of state diagnostic labs, veterinary labs, wildlife health agencies and zoos. Travel medicine clinics also can provide early warning for U.S. health officials, as doctors spot cases in Americans who travel abroad.
``People have said for a long time 'It's a global village' and it really, very much is,'' said Dr. Phyllis Kozarsky, director of the Travel Clinic of Emory University School of Medicine. ``As people travel, so do microbes.''
On the Net:
CDC info: http://www.cdc.gov
World Health Organization: http://www.who.int/en/
-------- ACTIVISTS
Greenpeace in Court for Sailor Mongering
May 17, 2004
MIAMI, Florida, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/may2004/2004-05-17-093.asp
The bizarre case involving Greenpeace and alleged violations of an 1872 law enacted to prevent "sailor mongering" begins today in U.S. District Court in Miami.
Judge Adalberto Jordan will oversee jury selection as the government begins its prosecution of Greenpeace under a law last prosecuted more than century ago.
The 19th century law was enacted to prevent unscrupulous boarding house proprietors and prostitutes from boarding ships and luring sailors to their establishments.
The U.S. Justice Department is using the sailor mongering law to prosecute the environmental organization for a 2002 protest of the Bush administration's failure to stop illegal logging.
The indictment centers on an April 2002 protest in which two Greenpeace activists climbed aboard a commercial ship several miles off the coast of Florida.
The activists believed the ship carried a shipment of mahogany illegally exported from Brazil's Amazon rainforest and once aboard they unfurled a banner that said "President Bush, Stop Illegal Logging."
This kind of protest has been a signature of Greenpeace for more than three decades and the activists expected to be arrested and charged.
The six individuals involved in the protest settled charges against them last year, but in an unprecedented move the Justice Department filed criminal charges against the entire organization in July 2003 under the 1872 law.
Last month Jordan agreed with Greenpeace's request for a jury trial and expressed doubts about the Justice Department's ability to prevail against Greenpeace's claim that the criminal statute involved is unfairly vague.
Jordan said the indictment is "a rare - and maybe unprecedented - prosecution of an advocacy group" for free speech related conduct.
Possible penalties under the law are unclear - the law has only been used twice and the last time was in 1890.
But Greenpeace fears it could lose its tax exempt status, a potentially crippling blow to the organization's U.S. activities, and says the use of the "sailor mongering" law reflects a political vendetta by the Bush administration.
The indictment is the first time a nongovernmental organization has been charged for free speech activities of its members and civil rights groups and other public interest organizations are worried about the possible implications.
Greenpeace lawyers will hone in on the illegal activities it was protesting and bringing to public attention.
It is illegal to import mahogany into the United States that has been illegally exported under U.S. law and international accord.
Brazil has had a moratorium on exporting mahogany since October 2001, but the demand in the U.S. market has prompted a flood of illegal exports.
In 2000, the United States received more than 70 percent of Brazil's mahogany exports and the federal government has not had much success stemming the tide.
Greenpeace says this is because the Bush administration has little desire to enforce the law - the organization has evidence the ship its activists boarded in April 2002 offloaded 70 tons of mahogany in South Carolina.
"We look forward to proving at trial that we are not guilty of the charges and that we were doing the right thing to protect the Amazon," said John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace USA. "The Justice Department's prosecution of Greenpeace is unwarranted and politically motivated."
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Protesters Wait for GOP Convention Invite
Many Hope to Disrupt Event in New York, but Permits Are Not Easy to Obtain
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 17, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31677-2004May16?language=printer
NEW YORK -- There are moments -- and this could be one -- when the Republicans may wonder why they decided to locate their national convention in Fun City.
So many are working so hard to ensure that the Republicans obtain a cacophonous New York experience. The antiwar, anti-Bush folks at United for Peace and Justice want to obtain a permit to march 250,000 people past Madison Square Garden -- home to the Republican convention -- and up to Central Park for a vast rally on the Sunday before the convention.
City parks officials have so far denied the permit, arguing that too many feet could cause irreparable harm to the grass.
A group known as the "hacktivists" vows to unleash a fury on the Republican convention Web site. Another one, Shadowprotest.org, encourages New Yorkers to volunteer to serve as goodwill ambassadors -- but not show up to work. "I don't need to reach every New Yorker," said David Lynn, the organizer of Shadowprotest.org. "I just need to find a couple thousand malcontents."
Firefighter and police unions will rally to protest their city contract offers. Anarchist bikers plot random street swarms. The Missile Dick Chicks want a permit, as do the Trotskyites and Billionaires for Bush, which wants to hold a benefit for corporate welfare.
The Yippie Party applied for a camping permit for 20,000 people in a Lower East Side park. To sweeten the request, it offered to provide cops and National Guard soldiers -- should they show up -- with free massages, bongo serenades and medical marijuana.
The Yippies leader (a relative term, that) acknowledged that the probability of obtaining such a permit was very low.
"We were denied in four days. We think that's a record," said John Penley, a Yippie elder. "Now we plan to open a welcome center staffed by punksters and anarchists and squatters. We just want to help out."
None of this has much amused Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (R), a billionaire media mogul who converted from Democrat to Republican just in time to run for mayor in 2001. He lobbied hard to persuade the Republicans to come to New York City, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 5 to 1. He billed the convention as a "nonpartisan event" and appointed former mayor Ed Koch, a Democrat, as his goodwill ambassador.
Many soirees are planned, not least a night out at the Broadway theaters. (Every delegation will go to a musical, and not one is viewing "Urinetown.")
"We're a special city with special problems," Koch explained. "I want the Republicans to loove us!"
Still, Bloomberg has grown weary of watching the plans for demonstrations grow and grow. So he is poking back. The firefighters and police can complain to Republicans about their contracts, but that is not "very intelligent," he opined. As for that request for a permit in Central Park?
"You'd ruin the lawn," the mayor replied.
Civil libertarians note that more than 20 groups have applied for march and rally permits, and the city has not approved one. The New York Civil Liberties Union filed more than 300 complaints against the city for its treatment of demonstrators at a march just before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Since then, police have several times denied requests for high-visibility rallies.
"Sure we are in a different world since September 11th, but that doesn't mean our nation has given up its core values," said Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU's executive director. "When you invite the Republicans to town for their convention, you are inviting all of those who oppose them, and we need to welcome both."
New York Parks and Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe talks of Central Park's journey back from its "dustbowl days" of the 1980s. There have been re-soddings and re-landscapings, and it's all so lush and beautiful. It cannot hold a crowd of more than 80,000, he said. If protesters plan something bigger, they should think about going to Flushing Meadow Park, in Queens.
"Central Park is a respite from the city, a place for people to lay out and picnic," Benepe said. "They have a right to protest, but they don't have a right to destroy the Great Lawn."
The refurbished Great Lawn of Central Park has held larger crowds. The New York Philharmonic Web site states that more than 135,000 chardonnay sippers crowd the lawn many summer nights for concerts.
"This is New York's public square, not a lawn museum," said William Dobbs, an organizer with United for Peace and Justice. "We have hundreds of thousands of people coming from all over the nation, and don't tell us to march in Queens."
Dobbs's argument has proved persuasive. For the first time in recent memory, the New York Times and New York Post editorial boards took the same side of an issue -- the local equivalent of Jupiter aligning with Mars.
The New York Post framed its view this way: "A gaggle of lefty agitators wants to convene in Central Park this summer to give President Bush a little grief. But the Parks Department says no, because they might bend the grass. Well, too bad.
" 'Keep Off The Grass' appears nowhere in the First Amendment."
Former mayor Koch advises Bloomberg to let the marchers post a bond and be done with it. New York is all about people yelling at each other.
"Those protesters aren't going to change a single mind, but they certainly have a right to protest," Koch said. "And I'll be there greeting them and saying, 'Thanks for coming!' "
--------
China Sentences U.S.-Based Dissident
Associated Press Writer
By AUDRA ANG
May 17, 2004
http://ap.washingtontimes.com/dynamic/stories/C/CHINA_US_DISSIDENT?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BEIJING (AP) -- A Chinese court sentenced a U.S.-based dissident on Thursday to five years in prison on charges of spying for Taiwan.
Yang Jianli, who lives in suburban Boston, was also convicted of illegal border crossing after a trial in a Beijing court, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
The one-sentence report did not give any other details.
Yang, a Chinese citizen with permanent U.S. residency, was detained on April 26, 2002, while trying to board a flight in the southwestern city of Kunming using a false identity card. He had been in China for meetings with protesting laid-off workers when he was arrested.
Last month, members of the U.S. Congress issued a letter addressed to China's president calling Yang's detention "extraordinarily inhumane."
China has rejected U.S. protests about Yang as an "interference in the judicial process of China."
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing had no immediate comment on his conviction. Yang was tried in August 2002 on charges of spying for Taiwan, apparently stemming from grants to people in China by his Boston-based advocacy group, which calls for political change in the communist-ruled country.
It wasn't clear how Taiwan might be connected to the charges.
China and Taiwan, which split amid civil war in 1949, are believed to actively spy on each other.
The legal deadline for a verdict passed last December with no announcement and Yang's lawyer contends that makes Yang's continued detention illegal.
Yang's supporters and family have appealed to the U.S. and Chinese legislatures for help in gaining his release, saying Yang has been held in solitary confinement and handcuffed.
His wife, Christina Fu, says he has been denied exercise and reading materials. She said his treatment worsened after he started a small protest of his imprisonment in March.
Public and organized political dissent is banned in China as threats to the Communist Party's regime.
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