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NUCLEAR
Sheep still contaminated by Chernobyl
Sellafield - £480m nuclear plant does not deliver
Pakistan, India Postpone Nuclear Talks
Iran nuclear waste
Time to discuss nuclear hazards
Power and the People
Koizumi Faces Criticism After Summit
No real results from Koizumi's Pyongyang trip
North Korea Accused of Supplying Uranium
Evidence Is Cited Linking Koreans to Libya Uranium
Suspected North Korean Sale of Uranium
Is missile defense really needed?
Biting the hand that feeds you
MILITARY
Warriors in West Africa Need Jobs as Well as Peace Treaties
Soldiers to be allowed a year off to go to Iraq to earn £500 a day
Guardsmen say protecting contractors risky
Taiwan President Hopes to Visit Washington
Ordinary Iraqis killed
Transcript: Ahmad Chalabi on 'Fox News Sunday'
Ahmad Chalabi denounces U.S. occupation (Transcript)
U.S. Troops Battle Sadr Forces in Najaf
Iraqi Security Official Survives Bomb Blast
New Rift in Mideast's Great Divide
Military to Investigate Prisons in Afghanistan
Brave Polish spy risked all to help U.S. win Cold War
Suspicion of Chalabi Deception Intensifies
Iran Rejects Chalabi Spying Accusations
Pentagon asks for tax records to trace its missing troops
Translator Questioned By Army in Iraq Abuse
Prison Visits By General Reported In Hearing
Death Total Tops 800
The Marine's tale:
Iraqis lose right to sue troops over war crimes
War Crimes & Double Standards
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Judge Will Decide on Terror Case
U.S. Disputed Protected Status of Iraq Inmates
NBC to fight Russert subpoena in Plame case
POLITICS
Iraq war's costs spiral beyond 1991 Gulf War
In Iraq, the Job Opportunity of a Lifetime
England's Testimony MPs Were Told To 'Rough Them Up'
2 Journalists Subpoenaed Over Source of Disclosure
Feds Subpoena Tim Russert, Time Reporter
Rumsfeld bans cameras
Kucinich - Hunter debate on Iraq
President Plans Drive To Rescue Iraq Policy
OTHER
US isolated as Russia moves to back Kyoto
ACTIVISTS
Poison Dust: A New Look At Radioactive Weapons in the Gulf
Bush team shrugs off Cannes result
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Sheep still contaminated by Chernobyl
Eighteen years after nuclear disaster, ban on Scots farmers selling mutton affected by radiation remains in force
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
UK Sunday Herald
23 May 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/print42225
It happened 2500km away and 18 years ago, but it is still contaminating Scottish sheep with levels of radioactivity considered unsafe to eat.
After the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in the Ukraine exploded and spewed radio activity over most of Europe in April 1986, people were assured by the authorities that its effects would be seen off in a matter of weeks.
But new figures released by the government show just how misguided those assurances were. Today 14 farms covering 16,300 hectares of southwest and central Scotland are still subject to restrictions on the movement and slaughter of radioactive sheep.
The concentrations of radioactive caesium-137 from Chernobyl in the animals' muscles still exceed the safety limit of 1000 becquerels of radioactivity per kilogram. Farmers have to mark con taminated sheep with indelible paint, and must wait until they fall below the limit before they can have them slaughtered for food.
"It is incredible that a small number of Scottish farms are still under restriction 18 years on from an accident that occurred hundreds of miles away," said James Withers, the spokesman for National Farmers' Union Scotland (NFUS).
"The initial advice in 1986 was that the effects would be over in a few weeks. It is obviously extremely frustrating and disappointing for the individuals concerned."
Ten of the farms with sheep restrictions are in East Ayrshire, three are in Stirling and one is in East Renfrewshire. The farmers have not been named. Similar restrictions on the movement and slaughter of sheep still apply down south. In Wales they cover 359 farms totalling 53,000 hectares in Snowdonia and the north, while in England they affect nine farms totalling 12,000 hectares in West Cumbria.
The information was given by ministers in response to recent questions in the Commons from anti-nuclear Labour MP for Blaenau Gwent, Llew Smith. "Chernobyl showed how nuclear accidents are both deadly to those in the area immediately affected, and have an impact thousands of miles away," he said. "I strongly believe that all nuclear power should be scrapped.
"It has turned out to be the most costly and certainly the most dangerous means of generating fuel."
Chernobyl was the world's worst nuclear accident. Errors by control room staff in an old and poorly designed Soviet-era reactor led to a blast which ripped apart the building.
Over several days a massive cloud of radioactivity blew over western Europe, falling to earth wherever it rained. Caesium-137 and other radio active isotopes got into the soil and were then taken up and recycled by grass and plants.
As a result, grazing animals, particularly those in rainy upland areas, became con taminated. As well as sheep, high levels of caesium-137 were detected in deer and grouse.
Chernobyl also triggered an epidemic of thyroid cancers among children in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. According to the World Health Organisation, the accident released 200 times more radioactivity than the US atomic bombs which devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
In the months immediately after the accident, more than 2000 farms in Scotland were subject to sheep restrictions. But by 1991 this had dropped to 60, and by 2001 to 18.
Farmers affected are compensated under the 1986 Sheep Compensation Scheme. The government has paid out £2.8 million to Scottish farmers, including £330,000 over the past five years.
"Our primary concern is to ensure public safety," said a spokesman for the Scottish Executive. "Monitoring of sheep on affected farms will continue until radioactive caesium levels comply with internationally agreed standards."
According to environmentalists, there are lessons to be learned from Chernobyl's legacy. "When nuclear power plants go wrong they tend to go wrong in a big way," said Duncan McLaren, chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland.
"The fact that Scottish farmers today are still feeling the impacts of this accident should be a warning to all those who think that nuclear power deserves a second chance."
He said two of the countries that have just joined the European Union - Lithuania and Slovakia - are still relying on old Soviet-style reactors. And that the Euratom Treaty which underpins the EU obliges them to pursue nuclear power.
"Instead of asking these countries to increase their capacity in dangerous nuclear power we should be assisting them to shut these plants and move towards safer, cleaner forms of energy production," McLaren argued.
He added: "In the run-up to the European elections the public should challenge candidates as to whether they support replacing this outdated treaty with something that will prevent future Chernobyls."
-------- britain
Sellafield - £480m nuclear plant does not deliver
More than two years after it was commissioned, the Sellafield MOX Plant-a hoped-for jewel in the crown of Britain's financially battered British Nuclear Fuels Plc-has yet to produce a single assembly of mixed plutonium and uranium oxide, or MOX, fuel.
Erik Martiniussen,
2004-05-21
Bellona
http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/nuclear/sellafield/34160.html
British Nuclear Fuel Plc, or BNFL blamed the delays on the complexity of commencing operations at such a facility, but the perpetual delays are losing BNFL's customers and may jeopardizing the prestigious new plant's reputation on the international market. Responsible parties at BNFL could not be reached to comment on when the SMP may begin production.
The Sellafield MOX Plant, or SMP, was given the green light to start producing MOX-fuel in December 2001 by none other than British Prime Minister Tony Blair who personally pushed the project through despite vociferous opposition from Michael Meacher, Blair's former Environmental Minister.
Since then, BNFL, the plant's operator, has had serious trouble with the production, and the facility has yet to produce a single MOX fuel assembly.
Important plant MOX-fuel is a nuclear fuel made from the oxides of uranium and reprocessed plutonium. On paper, the £482 million plant is engineered to produce 300 tonnes of MOX fuel per year.
At the moment, some 80 tonnes of reprocessed plutonium is stored at Sellafield. Because the SMP intends to utilise both reprocessed plutonium and uranium for MOX production, the plant has serious environmental and security implications for the future operation of the entire Sellafield complex.
The delays in MOX production at Sellafield are having a measurable impact on the company's reputation and are putting future contracts under a cloud. At the moment, BNFL has secured only about half the number of contracts it needs to run the SMP for its first 10 years. Its biggest contract is with the German Power Company E.ON AG.
According to Greenpeace, the E.ON AG contract entails converting 5.8 tonnes of German plutonium into MOX. BNFL believes that the contract with E.ON AG will engage some 15 percent of the SMP's capacity for the job. There are 13.6 tonnes of plutonium stored by various German companies at Sellafield. But the true cash-cow that BNFL has yet to attain are lucrative contracts with Japan, which are essential if the SMP is to ever generate a profit.
In a statement, BNFL admitted that progress at the SMP had been "disappointing" but said that delays were to be expected when commissioning a complex plant. The statement read that customers were being kept "informed."
BNFL Announces £1 Billion Loss
Atomic energy giant British Nuclear Fuels, or BNFL, announced lasst October a loss of more than £1 billion for the last fiscal year, blaming the high cost of decommissioning nuclear power plants and persistent technical problems at the company's controversial Sellafield reprocessing plant for its financial beating. Read on " First contract a let-down
The MOX-plant has already let down its first customer, Nordostschweizerische Kraftwerke (NOK) of Switzerland by failing to deliver a MOX fuel order for that country's Beznau nuclear power plant in time for Beznau's annual refuelling. Delays in the plutonium commissioning at the SMP have dashed all hopes that the Swiss order will even be manufactured, let alone delivered.
An independent report commissioned by the British government showed that the SMP will, at best, earn only £216 of the £460 million it cost to build the plant. These figures, however, may fluctuate for the better if possible contracts with the Japanese materialise. According to British daily Independent, British Energy Minister Stephen Timms is visiting Japan this week in an attempt to rescue the plant.
But Timms will have a tough sell-Japanese utilities are still smarting from a 1999 scandal in which BNFL-manufactured MOX fuel arrived in Japan with falsified quality assurance data. As such, Tokyo still appears to lack confidence in BNFL's ability to produce MOX fuel. Piling more injury on BNFL's attempts to secure Japanese MOX contracts are reports that Japan's Kansai Electric has announced its intentions to sign MOX fuel contracts with France's nuclear giant-and BNFL's stiffest competition-Cogema.
Yet another setback between BNFL and its Japanese customers occurred during Spring of 2001 when citizens living near Japan's largest nuclear power plant voted against the use of MOX fuel in a referendum.
Martin Forwood, of the environmental group Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE), issued a statement saying: "With its reputation already in tatters, the kindest thing would be to put the[SMP] plant out of its misery and close it down right away."
Dirty bombs A number of experts have expressed concerned that new MOX fuel can easily be utilised by terrorists to construct so-called "dirty bombs," and have consequently recommended against granting the MOX-plant its licence to operate.
The Irish government has also vigorously protested against the SMP and has brought two suits against Great Britain in connection with the opening of the new plant. The first case concerned Great Britain's responsibility under the terms of the OSPAR convention to inform neighbouring countries about its intentions to construct and operate such a potentially hazardous plant. Britain Must Consult Ireland Over Sellafield
Although Irish requests to halt MOX production at Sellafield were denied, The Hague arbitration court mandated that the United Kingdom must improve its discussions about the reprocessing facility's activities with Dublin.
In the suit, Ireland claimed that the British government had withheld information that was crucial for an analysis about the necessity of opening such a plant. Ireland furthermore charged that the plant was in violation of certain provisions in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), pointing out that the increased number of MOX fuel transports by ship that would accompany the opening and operation of the plant constitute an unacceptable risk to the environment.
Both cases have been heard in the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. While the court dismissed the first case in early July 2003, the second case is still under consideration. So far, the arbitration tribunal has criticised Great Britain for its lack of co-operation with Ireland concerning nuclear safety, and has ordered the two countries to work together more closely on nuclear safety.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan, India Postpone Nuclear Talks
By PATRICK McDOWELL
Associated Press Writer
May 23, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PAKISTAN_INDIA_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan and India agreed Sunday to postpone nuclear talks originally set for this week so the new Indian government has time to settle into power, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said.
The ministry said India had requested the delay because Prime Minister Manmohan Singh still hadn't chosen a foreign minister.
The talks, which had been set for Tuesday and Wednesday, are confidence-building measures between the nuclear-armed rivals and coincide with a wide-ranging dialogue on outstanding disputes launched in January by Pakistan and the Indian government then-headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
India has proposed that the nuclear talks be rescheduled to two days before foreign secretaries of the two countries meet in June, the Pakistani statement said.
"Pakistan attaches importance to the continuation of the composite dialogue process and looks forward to an early scheduling of the foreign secretary level talks, as well as talks on nuclear confidence-building measures," the statement said.
Pakistan signaled in a separate statement Saturday that President Gen. Pervez Musharraf is ready to quickly begin dialogue with the new government, especially on the dispute over Kashmir, the divided territory at the heart of decades of tense relations.
Suspected Islamic militants blew up a paramilitary bus Sunday in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, killing at least 26 soldiers and wounding 15 others, Indian officials said. Singh, an Oxford-educated economist, was sworn in Saturday. He has said he seeks "most friendly" relations with Pakistan. The countries have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947 and came to the brink of a fourth in late 2001.
That crisis stemmed from an attack on India's Parliament by Islamic radicals from the Kashmir conflict. New Delhi claimed Pakistan backed them. Islamabad denied it. But Pakistan pledged to crack down on terrorism to secure India's agreement to the peace dialogue in January.
The nuclear talks, to be held in New Delhi, are intended to focus on restraint and risk reduction, crisis management and strategic stability in South Asia.
India and Pakistan carried out nuclear tests in 1998, provoking international concerns about the accidental or non-authorized use of nuclear weapons. A year later they agreed to take measures to reduce risks through confidence-building steps.
These included advance notification of missile tests. Pakistan is expected to test-fire the new Ghauri-III next month. It has a range of 2,000 miles - nearly double that of Pakistan's previous longest-range missile - and could hit any corner of India.
------- iran
Iran nuclear waste
May 23, 2004,
Persian Journal
by Morteza Aminmansour
http://www.iranian.ws/iran_news/publish/article_2378.shtml
Iran nuclear waste:
In 1967 the US government supplied 5-megawatt research reactor, which was started at Tehran University. The US was too happy to provide Iran with nuclear technology. Because Iran was considered a friendly State.
Iran has always insisted its nuclear program is peaceful, ratifying the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1970 and allowing IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities. Back in the 1970, this was enough to give the green light for the nuclear industry to seek business in Iran.
The first contract came in 1974, west Germany Kraftwerk Union won a contract to build two 1200 MW reactors at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. Construction of the two reactors began in 1975 and 1976. France also agreed in 1974 to supply nuclear reactors to Iran, although the deal did not go so smoothly and the formal contract for Framatome to build two 900 MW reactors at Karun was not agreed until 1977. The Shah's nuclear exploits extended beyond reactors. He made a loan of $ 1 billion to France in 1975 in return for a 10% share in the Eurodif Uranium enrichment plant, a share still owned by the Iranian government, despite disputes and international court cases. The most appalling plans were to dump other countries nuclear waste in the Iranian desert. First the Shah offered the desert as a dump for West Germany's nuclear waste. Later Austria negotiated on dumping the waste from its soon to- be- completed ZWENTENDORF nuclear power station. This came to nothing after the Austrian people voted in a referendum against the opening of Zwentendorf.
At the time of the revolution, one of the Bushehr reactors was 80% complete and other 50% and work focused on these two reactors. However, Iran has never joined the additional protocol to the NPT, which would give the IAEA the right to take and analyze samples from around the plants.
The Russians, who were contracted in January 1995 to complete Unit 1 by installing one VVER-1000 reactor in pace of the wrecked Siemens reactor. This required modification of the Containment building, since the Russian steam generators are too large to fit into the German designed containment.
The arrangement with Russia included supplying nuclear fuel for the reactor and taking back the nuclear waste. This means that Iran does not need fuel cycle facilities for Bushehr.
Iran has started mining Uranium near the city of Yazd and is developing the facilities needed to operate a complete Uranium fuel cycle. A yellow-cake facility, a Uranium conversion facility, a Uranium enrichment facility and a fuel fabrication plant. The Uranium enrichment facilities since could be used for a Uranium-based nuclear bomb program. The Natanz plant hosts about 200 operational gas centrifuges.While the plant's construction does not violate Iran's safeguard, Iran is required to notify the IAEA before enrichment begins.If Iran already carried out any Uranium enrichment, this would constitute violation of the safeguards agreement. US Officials claim that Iran may be running a covert military nuclear program parallel to the peaceful one it has opened to international scrutiny in efforts to dispel suspicions it has weapons ambitions.
Iran said it suspended Uranium enrichment last year under international pressure but continued manufacture of Uranium-enriching centrifuge components and also stopped building centrifuges.
Since the initial discovery of the centrifuges traces of weapons grade, highly enriched Uranium, new, more advanced centrifuge prototypes and suspicious covert experiments that can also have military application have increased suspicious. Iran says it was interested only in low-enriched uranium for power generation. The involvement of the military has been for the civilian sector.
Russia had all agreements necessary for the transfer of the nuclear waste. A clause will be added to agreement with IAEA concerning the return of spent nuclear fuel. The environmental group Greenpeace claims that Iran refused to return the spent fuel to Russia. Charging that its only use for Iran was to equip itself with nuclear weapons. The official in Moscow will continue to press for the return of the radioactive material. Russia says that it will not supply nuclear fuel to the Bushehr nuclear power plant until Iran signs an agreement for the return of nuclear waste to Russia. The used nuclear fuel needs to be stored first in a cooling basin on the premises of Bushehr for three years before being transported to Russia. Transportation is impossible without prior storage.
The low-grade spent reactor fuel could in theory be upgraded to make atomic bombs in addition to so called "DIRTY BOMBS". Of lower radioactivity. Nuclear waste poses great health risk to people. It increases disease for al life downwind, pollutes the air and ground water. Cancer and birth defects are often multifactorial. Combination of radiation with sulfur dioxide can likely cause mutation. The more toxins a child is exposed to, the greater the risk of developing cancer. Though it may not be enough to kill us overnight, the gradual worsening of health makes people feel steadily sicker. When a child is born deformed, or with cancer.
Nuclear weapons need to be dismantled globally. The Russian reactor of Chernobyl two decades ago caused a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe. If DIMONA (in ISRAEL) meltdown, it would affect an area 500 aerial kilometer in radius, reaching Cyprus and the entire neighboring region. The Israeli are aware of the possibly of a meltdown in DIMONA reactor, which in turn would affect the whole region. The radioactive substances are leaking from the DIMONA reactor in a way that has increased rates of Cancer diseases among nearby population, particularly those of the Tafila City. Israel is considered the fifth nuclear power in the world. And is in possession of 200 nuclear bombs. Israel also own massive quantities of Uranium and plutonium that enable it of producing an additional 100 bombs. Israeli nuclear reactor consumes 14,00 tons of Uranium a year. The average manifestation of cancer in Tafila (Jordan) is higher than the other Jordanian cities.
-------- israel
Time to discuss nuclear hazards
By Zafrir Rinat
Sun., May 23, 2004
Haaretz (Israel)
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/430573.html
Mordechai Vanunu's release from prison provides an opportunity to discuss more than his personality traits and his criticism of Israel: it could be used to stimulate discussion of the safety and environmental aspects of Israel's nuclear program. Vanunu, however, has vanished from the public arena, and with him the public discussion of nuclear issues. Israel's security establishment is undoubtedly pleased by the fact that it is once again being left alone so that it can conduct its affairs with the same secret routine to which it is accustomed. However, the environmental dangers connected to nuclear activity, and the lack of knowledge and disclosure concerning what happens at facilities run by the Atomic Energy Commission, must spur the public to demand the disclosure of more information.
A major environmental and safety danger posed by the nuclear program is leakage of radioactive materials, or a malfunction in waste disposal systems. In Israel's case, there is apparently just one facility, in Dimona, which receives all radioactive waste materials generated in the country. This includes large amounts of materials produced for civilian use, in spheres such as medicine and industry.
This waste storage facility is thought (according to reports published abroad) to include all toxic radioactive materials that pose considerable safety and health hazards. The most such hazardous material is plutonium, whose half-life is thousands of years.
Members of the Atomic Energy Commission have reiterated that radioactive materials are stored in a safe facility. Last year they even presented a photograph of a radioactive waste storage facility located in the reactor compound at Dimona.
Yet no outside expert knows the precise location of this storage facility in the Dimona reactor compound. There is no information about the way the materials are stored, and about safety measures undertaken to prevent the leakage of hazardous, radioactive materials to land and water sources. The types of geological and ecological tests undertaken to ensure that the present waste storage facility is acceptable remain unclear. Furthermore, the public does not know whether Israel has stored waste materials at other sites, as happened in other countries which have nuclear installations, particularly during the first years in which the installation began operating.
Israel uses nuclear equipment which was purchased in other countries, and relies on safety and environmental standards enforced by other countries, particularly the U.S. and European states. When uncertainty and doubt concerning the care given to nuclear waste disposal in these other countries is taken into consideration, there is cause for worry.
A senior official in Britain who monitors nuclear facilities in his country and who recently visited Israel spoke skeptically about waste disposal methods used around the world: "We are supposed to monitor, but we don't have a clue as to what we are going to do with the waste."
Officials in Britain and the U.S. scratch their heads as they try to figure out what to do with radioactive waste in the long term. These are materials which remain toxic and radioactive for thousands of years and, as things stand today, no procedure has been invented to eliminate the hazard they pose.
The safest system is to put the waste inside steel containers and store them deep underground, in areas which are supposed to be insulated against forms of soil erosion and pollution. The experience in the U.S., however, suggests that finding the ideal site for such long-term underground storage is no mean feat. Some American officials believed that they had found the right such spot in Nevada. But arguments have ensued about whether storage in this site will definitively eliminate hazards over a period of many years.
Citizens in Britain and the U.S., however, have access to information about waste disposal sites and methods of storage, and there is debate in these countries about environmental risks and ways to minimize them. In Israel, such discussions are not conducted in public. The public is not allowed to know what is being done to ensure its safety. Even if one accepts the claim that Israel cannot agree to full disclosure of its nuclear activity because of security concerns, the current situation in which there is no basic information about environmental risks posed by factors such as radioactive waste is still untenable.
The security establishment must find ways to provide access to information about methods used for nuclear waste disposal and steps taken to prevent environmental disasters to experts who represent the public, and not just to a monitoring committee that operates within the establishment itself.
-------- japan
Power and the People
In Japan and the United States, many fear the dangers of nuclear power -- but who in charge cares?
By ROBERT L. CUTTS
The Japan Times:
May 23, 2004
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20040523x1.htm
North Korea is not the only country casting a long nuclear shadow over Japan and America. The citizens of both nations are right now under threat from precarious atomic programs -- ones which are being forced on them by their own governments.
A protest in Tokyo on Sept. 30, 2000 to commemorate the fatal accident at the Tokai nuclear-fuel reprocessing plant in Ibaraki Prefecture exactly one year before. The banners read, "No to the reopening of the plant!" and "Be angry over the criticality accident!"
In Japan, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry -- historically one of the nation's most effective bureaucratic agencies -- insists on advancing a nuclear-energy construction program that many of the affected communities are questioning or flatly opposing.
The program is run by an industry-government nexus -- Cabinet and ministry-level agencies networking with enormous utility companies and subcontractors, and even the suppliers of cheap day-laborers -- that has proven chronically dishonest with the public. The nexus also has the distinction of being responsible for one of only two fatal nuclear-power radiation accidents in world history, that in the village of Tokai, Ibaraki Prefecture, in 1999. The other was Chernobyl in Ukraine in the former Soviet Union in 1986.
Across the Pacific, there is an unremarkable ridge rising from a somber Nevada desert landscape, not far from the sparkle of Las Vegas' lights. It is called Yucca Mountain.
There, the U.S. government, despite strong opposition from the state of Nevada, is bent on completing history's most costly civil works project -- one that will create a gigantic radiation risk that will menace the region for a quarter of a million years.
In both America and Japan, dependent as they are on imported resources for so much of their energy, nuclear power has been sold to the people by their governments as a seeming gift of the gods of science. Japan, with 52 active reactors, already relies on it for 30 percent of its electricity; the United States, with 118 reactors, for 20 percent.
Now people in both countries are afraid of the "peaceful" atom, and some fear for their very lives. How could this have happened?
Nuclear power is not a mystery; it is merely a technology -- albeit one demanding the same careful safeguards and control priorities as nuclear weapons themselves.
But it requires only the errors and fatuities of man to let loose the dangerous genie in the bottle of the nuclear reactor. Just look at Japan's recent record.
In 1995, the experimental, plutonium-powered Monju fast-breeder reactor at Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, had to be shut down when its cooling system leaked more than a ton of volatile liquid sodium. It wasn't the leak itself that shocked the country so much as the government's attempted cover-up of the incident, including falsified reports and altered video evidence.
In March 1997, an explosion and fire at the Tokai plant irradiated 37 workers, none seriously, but released radiation into the open air that registered as far away as Tokyo, 120 km to the southwest.
In September 1999, three improperly instructed workers at another part of the Tokai plant, a fuel-processing facility, set off a nuclear criticality reaction when they took a "short cut" by using a bucket to mix a uranium compound with nitric acid -- and put in almost seven times the proper amount of uranium.
Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which is contentiously slated to store all America's high-level nuclear waste. PHOTO COURTESY OF U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
It was enough to expose them to Hiroshima bomb-level doses of radiation. Two died, 12 other employees were poisoned and 663 local residents were irradiated in the 20-hour chain reaction that followed. More than 300,000 people had to be evacuated.
In August 2002, Japan's largest electric-power provider, Tokyo Electric Power Company, admitted it had been misreporting reactor inspection records to hide flaws for a decade. The company, whose atomic infrastructure provides 40 percent of Tokyo's electricity, was ordered to shut down all its 17 reactors for new, government-mandated safety inspections. This shutdown was completed by mid-April 2003.
Public confidence challenged
Tokyo got through the summer without power outages, only to read in October a Kyoto Sangyo University researcher's calculations that a large-scale, Chernobyl-style leak of a reactor in Japan could, depending on various factors, kill as many as 400,000 and cost nearly 500 trillion yen.
These and other mishaps have given the Japanese people something to think about: Almost a quarter of Japan's 863 reported nuclear-related incidents and failures between 1966 and 1995 were caused by human error.
Public confidence in the safety record was again challenged when the government's White Paper on Nuclear Energy, an "annual" report that had gone unissued for 5 1/2 years -- "due largely," the Cabinet Office's Atomic Energy Commission said, "to serious incidents that fueled safety concerns" -- finally was published in December 2003.
In it, the commission urged the promotion of "broad-based public hearings aimed at deepening mutual understanding" between the public and administrative and industry officials on the subject of nuclear power policies.
Skeptics may have wondered whether such hearings would allow for an "understanding" of Japan's atomic managers as incompetent, or negligent.
So who are these "managers"?
The Cabinet's Atomic Energy Commission creates the nation's nuclear-power policy drafts. There is the Industrial and Nuclear Safety Agency, and there is the former Science and Technology Agency, now reorganized as a part of the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry.
There are the usual electrical and construction industry suppliers who build the facilities; there are the 10 major electric utilities who finance and operate the supply of electric power to the nation (not all have nuclear reactors).
There is the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute, and more prosaically there are suppliers of services and equipment such as Sumitomo Metal Mining Co., whose former subsidiary JCO Co. employed the inadequately trained workers responsible for triggering the Tokai disaster.
There are labor brokers from the big cities, who recruit day-laborers to keep costs down at the reactor plants by getting them to do the dirty and sometimes the dangerous work.
Another question: Who's held responsible when things go wrong?
JCO had spent almost 15 billion yen by midsummer last year compensating local businesses whose sales suffered as a result of the mini-criticality at Tokai.
But responsibility differs, depending upon the results of the mishaps and consequent accident investigations. Human error is indicted far more often then nuclear technology itself.
Now, though, the technology is causing shock waves of its own. In Japan, the Federation of Electric Power Companies has released a report announcing that facilities and operating expenses required to establish the necessary complete nuclear-fuel recycling process in Japan will cost at least another 19 trillion yen (more than $170 billion) in the next 80 years.
That rips away the cloak of back-end expenses that had given the nuclear power industry the guise of cost-effectiveness. With the extra 1 yen to 1.5 yen this will tack onto the cost of every kilowatt-hour the atom generates in Japan, nuclear will be no cheaper than natural-gas-fired or coal-fired power plants, and could end up being more costly.
On top of this, the demand for electricity in Japan has begun to stagnate, due, commentators say, to the aging of the population, the restructuring of Japanese industry and the liberalization of the electric-power markets.
Renewable energy technologies such as wind, solar and hydrogen power could come to the price-competitive fore over the next 80 years. This, while costs to repair and update all the utilities and plants involved in the nuclear fuel cycle will remain, as part of nuclear energy's sunk costs.
Popular resistance in areas where reactors now stand, or will be built, has already meant the government's 2001 plan of adding 10 to 13 new reactors by the year 2010 is likely to be shrunk to just seven.
Yet the Cabinet Office's Atomic Energy Commission, and by extension the government itself, still pushes nuclear power as the central plank of Japan's energy policy for the future.
Japan, we all know, suffered history's hellish lessons of the atom's destructive capability. But Nevada, with no nuclear power plants at all, has learned painful lessons of its own since the press got hold of an unpublished federal survey which estimates that nuclear bombs tested above ground in the ranges of the Nevada desert from 1951 to 1963 (together with other detonations in the Soviet Union and on Pacific islands) caused a probable minimum of 15,000 cancer deaths among Americans from radioactive fallout.
Washington's atomic "program" today is to gather and bury 77,000 tons of high-level nuclear waste now stored at 131 locations in 39 states -- most of it spent reactor fuel from the 118 power plants, as well as material from numerous weapons facilities -- inside Yucca Mountain. It is rousing a fear and loathing that would be familiar to Japanese.
Here too, the problems originate with pernicious political dishonesties and betrayals. Since 1950, the U.S. government has ordered the ever-accumulating quantities of spent fuels to be held in anti-radiation pools or casks at the plant sites while it searched for a permanent answer.
In 1983, Washington promised the power firms it would ready repositories by 1998. By 1987, four years later, it was clear that the residents of the 10 final-candidate states across the country were not about to accept lethal nuclear waste in their own backyards. Dozens of "drop dead" lawsuits opposing the Department of Energy's proposals for even testing candidate sites -- as many as 20 suits on file at a time -- were soon emanating from those states' capitols.
Legal obligations overturned
The DOE, spearheading the search, eventually found itself crumbling under these essentially political pressures. In the end it scrapped search plans for all the candidate sites -- except Nevada. The DOE overturned many of its legal obligations of fairness and due process simply because the Congress was, in 1987, willing to back it by passing the "Screw Nevada Law," as it became colorfully known. Nevada became the sole site targeted for the repository.
As James Flynn and Paul Slovic wrote in their policy-analysis report for Decision Research as long ago as 1995, "How [can] the program be considered a success if a repository were built only at exorbitant cost, after a long and bitter intergovernmental struggle, and in opposition to community, state and public values for a fair and equitable process and outcome?"
Neither the state government nor its 2 million residents -- about 70 percent of whom are flatly opposed to the project -- think the process equitable nor want to cooperate. Nevada immediately began enforcing its own laws and denying permits so as to hinder the testing that got under way at Yucca Mountain.
A long series of lawsuits, demands for further tests, scientific charges and counter-charges ensued. But the DOE, despite the discovery of two ancient volcanoes near the mountain and an earthquake registering 6 on the Richter scale 160 km west of it in 1993, persists in its position. It claims that the repository's site, 305 meters below the crest of the ridge and the same distance above the area's water table, will remain safe for the bureaucratically mandated limit of 10,000 years.
That time limit, incidentally, has no scientific basis. Plutonium, which will be mixed in with the spent uranium, requires almost 250,000 years to burn itself out of dangerous radioactivity.
Other difficulties appeared. Nine years ago, 245 meters below the mountain's crown, a government geologist found traces of chemical by-product from 1950s nuclear-bomb testing in a sample of trickle-down rainwater.
If that could happen in less than 50 years, let alone 10,000, then to qualify as safe, Yucca Mountain obviously had to be turned from a "geologically guaranteed" natural repository to an engineered one.
However, the efficiency of thousands of titanium shields designed to cover the huge metal entombment casks in the 80 km of tunnels and galleries is already being questioned. As the casks will have to withstand constant temperatures of 160 degrees or more generated by their radioactive loads and the natural underground heat, there is concern lest they acquire their own sudden "criticality" that the shields could not contain.
Despite the major testing already done -- an 8-km corridor and branch galleries have been driven into the mountain's heart, and $8 billion of experiments have so far been conducted inside and outside the mountain -- the project is still way behind schedule.
A formal construction permit must be filed within this year, and the DOE says it will begin loading the waste by 2010. It is racing now to complete its testing, but many other experts, ranging from analysts of the U.S. General Accounting Office to a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself, Edward McGaffigan, say that for various technical reasons 2015 is a much likelier date.
It's not clear if the estimated total cost -- $58 billion, some paid by the electrical utilities and possibly some by the taxpayers -- will suffice, because no one knows how much of the 48,000 new tons of waste America's reactors will produce while the repository is filled will be added to the existing 77,000 tons.
And no one knows what will be the ultimate cost of transporting the waste, by truck and train and possibly barge, through 43 states, within 1.5 km of the homes of at least 50 million Americans, to get it there. Some informed commentators are already talking of costs going as high as $308 billion.
All Las Vegas knows is that any mistakes at all -- either due to human error, scientific miscalculation or some kind of natural disaster -- will, to say the least, destroy its vital tourism business, possibly forever. And it knows that the possibility of the city growing westward toward Los Angeles, which would inevitably put homes closer and closer to the mountain, is dying a slow death.
In both Japan and the United States, one could observe that it's all about the money. If Japan does not complete perfectly and on-schedule all the myriad components necessary to support the nuclear fuel cycle, the cost of atomically generated power will skyrocket.
If Washington can't get its way, through the regulatory commissions and the courts, into the heart of Yucca Mountain, then it may face an astronomical $60 billion in penalties from 65 noncompliance lawsuits filed by private power companies citing the federal government's violation of its contract obligations to start taking control of the waste by 1998. If awarded, this sum would be spent expanding the temporary waste-holding sites at each power plant, so that they could continue operating.
And every one of those dollars will come from the taxpayers.
But all the vitriol and illogic ultimately flow from someplace deeper than pocketbooks. These nuclear problems and the way they are handled have become problems that lie at the very heart of the social contract between citizen and government.
Moreover, they are made worse, not better, each year with the ever-growing capabilities, and promises, of the technologies that underlie them.
In the case of almost all major technological advances in modern history, governments in Japan and America -- assuming them to be economically beneficial to the common good -- have spearheaded investment in their application and worked to extend them across society: railroads, telephones, broadcasting, electrification, interstate highways . . . and nuclear energy.
But all these technologies exact social costs of one type or another -- costs once assumed to be outweighed by the benefits. In our generation, however, new technologies do not necessarily deliver more good than bad.
Karel Van Wolferen, Professor of Comparative Political and Economic Institutions at Amsterdam University, points out that "the growth of technocratic forms of government conceals a falsehood.
"It is this: the citizen, who indeed is a citizen only because he is represented within the government, remains in charge. In reality the citizen is ever less represented in a technocracy."
A true technocracy, in the sense of formal government, exists neither in Japan nor in America, as yet.
Both nations, though, because of the paths of their modern economic development, operate on many technocratic principles: There are no problems of government that are not in the end quantifiable, and so ultimately all can be solved using scientific methods -- including the application of our ever-advancing technologies.
This ignores the political nature of society. Atomic power may be just one more technology, but even a technology may disrupt the constitutional rights of a sovereign populace when leaders permit its demands to take precedence over the political choices of the citizen.
It is the demands of such "national technologies" -- those whose adoption is dictated by government -- that then come to rule us. Even government leaders themselves become captive.
Now, as the nuclear crises prove, elected governments in Japan and America will no more take away the tyranny of the atom than they can take away seagoing freighters or banish jet airliners.
We live in an age of international terrorism. We must yield to the demands of still more technologies, which inspect our shoes, our bodies, our belongings. We must allow immigration authorities to photograph us, and thumbprint us, because these technologies preserve us from the danger.
They do little enough of that. What they do that is more important is transfer power over freedoms and privacies from the hands of the individual to the hands of the government agencies who adopt them.
What they do is further legitimize technology as an instrument of rule, while de-legitimizing the political authority we have over it. They subtract steadily, that is, from the sovereign rights of all citizens.
Robert L. Cutts is a college journalism instructor in Nevada who lived in Japan and reported on its social and industrial issues for more than 20 years.
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Koizumi Faces Criticism After Summit
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 23, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-NKorea-Summit.html
TOKYO (AP) -- Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi faced a torrent of criticism Sunday that he had rewarded North Korea with millions of dollars in aid without making any headway on the nuclear weapons dispute or fully resolving the North's abductions of Japanese citizens.
At a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Il Saturday, Koizumi broke a two-year stalemate to win the release of five children of Japanese citizens who were kidnapped by Northern agents decades ago.
But the families' emotional reunions brought little applause for the Japanese leader.
``It is extremely questionable whether Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's latest visit to North Korea made any progress,'' the Yomiuri Shimbun, a major newspaper, said in an editorial Sunday. ``The latest meeting made no headway in resolving the abduction, nuclear, missile or any other issues related to Northeast Asia's peace and security.''
Koizumi acknowledged his trip had fallen short of some expectations: no significant breakthrough was made on North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and no date was set for resuming talks toward establishing formal diplomatic relations.
He insisted his pledge of 250,000 tons of food aid and US$10 million worth of medical supplies to North Korea was made at the request of international organizations and not in exchange for the family members' release.
Some said that was too generous.
``He was unable to get a clear pledge from General Secretary Kim to dismantle his nuclear program,'' said the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun. ``Doubts remain whether it was in fact a reward for the families' return.''
The five children, meanwhile, began a new life in Japan.
Relatives said the children were confused by their new surroundings.
``They asked why they were here when they still have so many friends in North Korea,'' said Toru Hasuike, an uncle of two of the children.
He also said the children -- who wore North Korean pins on their jackets just as their parents did in October 2002 after 24 years in the communist country -- expressed shock at being allowed to drink the same type of juice as the prime minister after meeting Koizumi.
The families prepared Sunday to leave Tokyo to take the children to their new homes, where they will adopt Japanese names and begin learning the language.
Relatives of other abduction victims took to the streets Sunday to protest Koizumi's failure to extract more information on at least 10 other Japanese taken during North Korea's systematic abduction of Japanese in the 1970s and '80s to train Northern spies in the Japanese language and culture.
``Please, I beg you to keep supporting us until all of the abductees have returned to Japan,'' Kayoko Arimoto said at an outdoor rally in Tokyo's Shibuya district where more than a hundred people gathered to listen to the relatives. Arimoto's daughter, Keiko, was abducted in 1983. North Korea claims she died of carbon monoxide poisoning in 1988.
Koizumi was also criticized for not bringing back the family of former abductee Hitomi Soga, whose American husband, Charles Jenkins, and two daughters chose to stay behind in North Korea.
Jenkins -- a former U.S. soldier accused of deserting his Army unit in 1965 -- told Koizumi in a one-hour meeting in Pyongyang that he feared being extradited to the United States. The family accepted Koizumi's plan that they try to meet in a third country, such as China.
Kyodo News Agency citing government sources reported Sunday that Jenkins was willing to come to Japan if he could get a U.S. guarantee that he will not be court-martialed. The information could not immediately be confirmed.
Soga boarded a bus alone for her home in northwestern Sado Island Sunday.
In a statement issued through city officials, she said, ``My wish was not granted this time. But I believe that the day will come soon when my family and I will be able to live together.''
With parliamentary elections looming in July and perceptions that more was left tabled than resolved, some suggested Koizumi's faces a greater battle ahead.
``Our trump card -- another visit by the prime minister -- was played and this is all we got. It is nothing more than a mere start,'' the Mainichi said.
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No real results from Koizumi's Pyongyang trip
The Yomiuri Shimbun,
May 23, 2004
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/newse/20040523wo81.htm
It is extremely questionable whether Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's latest visit to North Korea has made any progress in resolving the dispute over that country's abduction of Japanese.
Five children of repatriated Japanese abductees have been brought to Japan to be united with their parents, who returned home in 2002. Undoubtedly, this reunion provided great joy to both the former abductees and their children after 19 months of separation.
However, the husband and two daughters of Hitomi Soga, another former abductee, have chosen to stay in Pyongyang, leaving the Koizumi government with unfinished business. The government must continue to work to ensure that Soga's family also can come to Japan as soon as possible.
During his summit meeting with Koizumi, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il provided the prime minister with no new information about the fate of 10 other abductees, including Megumi Yokota, who Pyongyang has said committed suicide. Instead, Kim said only that his country would conduct "another investigation" into the fate of the 10.
It is also disturbing to note that Saturday's summit meeting did nothing to help resolve the issue of the many others also believed to have been kidnapped to the reclusive nation. Kim's attitude must be regarded as extremely insincere.
N. Korea must atone
The abductions of Japanese must be seen as crimes committed by North Korea, which infringed upon this country's sovereignty and the fundamental human rights of the Japanese victims. North Korea has an obligation to atone for its sins, and should have allowed all eight family members of the former abductees to come to Japan immediately and unconditionally. Serious questions should be raised about Koizumi's decision to visit Pyongyang with the aim of bringing the family members of the former abductees over to Japan.
Koizumi and Kim agreed that a new probe into the 10 people, who North Korea has said died or never entered the country, would be conducted jointly by North Korea and Japan. However, it is useless to expect the reclusive nation to produce a reliable report on those Japanese if the probe is conducted under a North Korean initiative. The government should take strong action to resolve the whole dispute over the 10 people, including a direct investigation into their fate.
Koizumi and Kim also reiterated the importance of the Japan-North Korea Pyongyang Declaration, which they signed in September 2000, as "the basis of Japan-North Korea relations," while also agreeing to resume diplomatic normalization talks between the two states. The prime minister also urged Kim to scrap its nuclear program in its entirety, and gained assurances from him concerning North Korea's continuing moratorium on test-launching missiles. All this reflected Koizumi's desire to seek a comprehensive solution to the abduction, nuclear and missile problems.
The prime minister may believe that Saturday's summit meeting accomplished at least part of his goal.
No headway made
But the latest meeting made no headway in resolving the abduction, nuclear, missile or any other issues related to Northeast Asia's peace and security. We find it difficult to say that Koizumi's meeting with Kim made any progress in this respect.
In spite of this, the prime minister pledged to provide North Korea with 250,000 tons of food and medical supplies worth 10 million dollars as humanitarian assistance.
Japan has previously provided the reclusive state with humanitarian aid in the form of 1.18 million tons of food, hoping to create "a better environment" for improving the bilateral relationship. All this aid was given to the cash-strapped nation, in effect, for reasons of "political considerations." However, Japan's aid has never improved the situation.
We feel that Koizumi's latest aid promise is tantamount to rewarding North Korea for its decision on the five children.
Questions should also be raised about Koizumi's pledge not to implement sanctions against North Korea, although he told Kim that his government must honor the Pyongyang Declaration if it wanted to avoid such treatment. The prime minister's pledge should be dismissed as it signals a decision not to use pressure as a bargaining chip any more.
All issues must be resolved
North Korea has continued to develop nuclear arms, despite agreeing to the declaration reached between the two countries in 2002 that said, in part, "the two nations confirm that they will abide by all international agreements related to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula to resolve the problem in a comprehensive manner," .
North Korea is an autocratic state, acting solely on the basis of self-interest. Japan must be ready to put punitive measures into action at any moment. It is therefore necessary to pass into law during the current Diet session the bill concerning a ban on the entry into Japanese ports of specific vessels that is primarily aimed at North Korea.
Diplomatic normalization talks are expected to resume next month. North Korea's economy is in a woeful state and it is pegging its hopes on winning sizable economic assistance after diplomatic relations with Japan are normalized.
During past negotiations, North Korea called on Japan to place higher priority talks on normalization and those on providing economic assistance.
But it will be impossible for Japan to normalize diplomatic ties with North Korea until a comprehensive settlement on the issues of Japanese abductees and Pyongyang's nuclear and missile development program can be reached.
The issue of nuclear and missile development is one that directly affects the national security of Japan and the regional security of Northeast Asia.
North Korea is reprocessing nuclear fuel rods and producing plutonium. The country is strongly suspected of having a uranium-enrichment program.
North Korea is also building up its deployment of Rodong missiles, which have a range that covers all of Japan. About 200 units already have been deployed. If North Korea is able to equip Rodong-class missiles with nuclear warheads, a serious threat will be posed to our national safety.
With regard to the nuclear development issue, the theme for the six-nation talks, North Korea sees it as an issue to be discussed bilaterally with the United States, and opposed discussing the issue bilaterally with Japan. But the United States has no strong interest in the Rodong missile issue, as the missiles do not pose a direct threat to the United States.
Press North to end N-program
Japan therefore needs to take up with North Korea the issue of its nuclear and missile development programs, in accordance with the Japan-North Korea declaration, and press the country to abandon the programs completely.
North Korea may think that it saved face by having the Japanese prime minister travel there twice. It is expected that North Korea will hasten progress in diplomatic normalization talks, in a bid to win full-scale economic assistance from Japan soon.
There is also a possibility that Pyongyang might use the normalization talks, through a subsequent softening of Japan's stance toward North Korea, to cause a rift in bilateral cooperation between this nation and the United States.
North Korea will most likely put various forms of pressure on Japan in the days ahead.
The Japanese government must approach the normalization talks with a firm hold on the principle of resolving comprehensively all pending issues, including those of the abduction of Japanese and of nuclear and missile development.
It is important to further strengthen cooperation with the United States and South Korea over the issue so that Japan and North Korea are not isolated. There is absolutely no need for Japan to be in too much of a hurry to realize the normalization of bilateral relations with North Korea.
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North Korea Accused of Supplying Uranium
By GEORGE JAHN
Associated Press
May 23, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY_NORTH_KOREA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Evidence gathered by the U.N. atomic agency suggests North Korea was the source of nearly two tons of uranium to Libya as part of attempts by Moammar Gadhaffi to build nuclear warheads, diplomats said Sunday.
The diplomats, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, cautioned that the investigation was not yet complete and other sources still could not be ruled out.
Still, they said evidence increasingly points to the secretive communist country, leading to fears that it could have supplied other nations with fuel, components and knowledge needed to build nuclear weapons.
The evidence also focuses on the North's secret weapons program using uranium technology. North Korea, initially thought to have only a plutonium-based program, acknowledged developing a parallel program based on uranium enrichment after U.S. disclosures of its existence two years ago, but details remain sketchy.
Pakistan, the key country implicated in a worldwide black market nuclear network, had been thought to be the source of the 1.87 tons of uranium hexafluoride handed over to the Americans in January as part of Libya's voluntary decision to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.
But "now, we believe that it might have been" North Korea who supplied the substance, said one of the diplomats. "It's a definite possibility."
The diplomat said the evidence from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency was based on interviews with members of the clandestine network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist implicated in selling his country's nuclear secrets to Libya, North Korea, Iran, and possibly other countries. In its raw form, uranium hexafluoride cannot be used as nuclear fuel - or in warheads. But it is part of the enrichment cycle, using centrifuges to separate isotopes in the process that can make nuclear fuel - or warheads. Libya had purchased hundreds of centrifuges as part of a multimillion dollar enrichment program, with the Khan network as the main supplier.
One of the diplomats said that despite its size, the shipment thought to have come from North Korea would only have been enough to make one small nuclear weapon. When it came clean on its weapons ambitions in December, Libya was far away from achieving that goal.
The evidence collected by the IAEA sheds more light on the North's program using uranium enrichment to make nuclear arms parallel to its better-known plutonium-based activities. North Korea is demanding U.S. economic aid and other concessions in exchange for scrapping its nuclear weapons programs.
Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, has admitted that he provided North Korea with assistance for development of a uranium bomb, something the North Koreans deny
U.S. officials believe North Korea already has one or two nuclear bombs and could make several more within months.
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Evidence Is Cited Linking Koreans to Libya Uranium
May 23, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER and WILLIAM J. BROAD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/asia/23NUKE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 22 - International inspectors have discovered evidence that North Korea secretly provided Libya with nearly two tons of uranium in early 2001, which if confirmed would be the first known case in which the North Korean government has sold a key ingredient for manufacturing atomic weapons to another country, according to American officials and European diplomats familiar with the intelligence.
A giant cask of uranium hexafluoride was turned over to the United States by the Libyans earlier this year as part of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi's agreement to give up his nuclear program, and the Americans identified Pakistan as the likely source.
But in recent weeks the International Atomic Energy Agency has found strong evidence that the uranium came from North Korea, basing its conclusion on interviews of members of the secret nuclear supplier network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the former head of Pakistan's main nuclear laboratory. Two years ago, the United States charged that North Korea was working to build its own uranium-based nuclear weapons, which would require the same raw materials.
The uranium shipped to Libya could not be used as nuclear fuel unless it was enriched in centrifuges, which the Libyans were constructing as part of a $100 million program to purchase equipment from the Khan network.
If enriched, the fuel Libya obtained could produce a single nuclear weapon, experts say. But the Libyan discovery suggests that North Korea may be capable of producing far larger quantities, especially because the country maintains huge mines that the Federation of American Scientists has described as "four million tons of exploitable high-quality uranium."
At a moment when the Bush administration is focused on Iraq, the fresh intelligence on North Korea poses another challenge to the United States.
The classified evidence - many details of which are still sketchy - has touched off a race among the world's intelligence services to explore whether North Korea has made similar clandestine sales to other nations or perhaps even to terror groups seeking atomic weapons.
"The North Koreans have been selling missiles for years to many countries," one senior Bush administration official said recently, referring to the country's well-known sales to Iran, Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and other nations. "Now, we have to look at their trading network in a very different context, to see if something much worse was happening as well."
Iran has bought centrifuges from the Khan network, investigators believe, but it has denied it is seeking a nuclear weapon.
Last year Bush administration officials were warning that North Korea could make good on its threats to provide nuclear materials or weapons. But until just a few weeks ago, American officials said they had no evidence that the country was selling much beyond the missiles and missile technology that have long been among its chief exports.
Now, only weeks after Vice President Dick Cheney declared that "time is not on our side" in the North Korean nuclear crisis, the International Atomic Energy Agency's discovery suggests that North Korea has done just what many experts have warned: It has turned into a supplier of nuclear technology.
While reluctant to discuss the details, American officials describe the discovery of the North Korean connection as an intelligence success that came indirectly from Libya's decision to dismantle its nuclear program, and the ensuing drive to break up Dr. Khan's network. President Bush has said several times that Libya made its decision after it witnessed the American invasion of Iraq, an argument the Libyans reject.
The sources the agency has developed into the Khan network are considered reliable, a European diplomat familiar with the intelligence said, but the experience of false and deliberately misleading reports about Iraq's weapons programs has made both the international agency and the United States more cautious. The agency hopes to confirm the finding with the North Koreans, but since I.A.E.A. inspectors were evicted on Dec. 31, 2002, there has been virtually no contact with the North Korean government.
At the same time, the emerging story of the North Korean sales also reveals another intelligence lapse: Though American satellites monitor North Korea more carefully than almost any nation, intelligence officials apparently failed to detect the uranium shipments.
As recently as March, when the Bush administration invited reporters to a secure Y-12 nuclear facility in Tennessee to view the nuclear hardware turned over by Libya, a senior administration official said that Libya's uranium had likely come from Pakistan. American officials say they are now backing away from that statement, while they seek to verify the new evidence.
As the I.A.E.A. continues its investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Energy Department and the State Department's intelligence unit are engaged in what one official called "two or three separate reviews" of the American assessment of the size of North Korea's nuclear arsenal.
Their main focus is North Korea's plutonium program, which was restarted after international atomic inspectors were thrown out of the country 17 months ago. Since then, according to North Korea, it has turned into bomb fuel all of the nuclear fuel rods that the international agency had under its supervision. If that boast turns out to be correct, nuclear experts estimate that plutonium fuel could be used to produce six to eight nuclear weapons.
Within the Bush administration there is a heated debate about how far North Korea has progressed. The State Department intelligence agency, which is typically more cautious, says it is unconvinced that North Korea has produced those weapons, while the C.I.A. and D.I.A. are more convinced that the processing of the fuel is probably complete and that the plutonium has been converted into weapons.
Of equal interest to American intelligence officials is a second, uranium-based nuclear program that they believe North Korea built with Dr. Khan's help, but which American intelligence has never located.
A crucial element of that program, officials say, could be the equipment to turn raw uranium into uranium hexafluoride. International atomic inspectors suspect that the Libyan shipment of uranium hexafluoride may have come from such a facility, though it is possible it was processed elsewhere, European diplomats and American officials say.
The two leading suspect sites appear to be in North Korea and in Pakistan, which has produced the material for its own nuclear program.
The European diplomat said the I.A.E.A.'s evidence emerged during investigations of Dr. Khan's network, not during talks with the Libyans. In fact, the atomic agency is investigating whether the Libyans knew that North Korea was the original source of the uranium it obtained on a black market that American officials have said included many middlemen.
"The North Koreans are actively involved in the network," said the European diplomat. "We want to talk to them," he said, adding that right now "our relationship is zero."
The European diplomat declined to reveal the identity of the sources in the Khan network who disclosed the North Korean connection. If the work to convert the raw uranium into uranium hexafluoride turns out to have been done in North Korea, he added, that would throw new light on the nation's secretive efforts to enrich uranium for nuclear arms.
"That's a big thing," the diplomat said. "It means they have a capability they have been hiding from us."
It would also mean that the United States unknowingly has been holding North Korean-made uranium since January, when it flew it out of Libya in a secret flight to the United States. In a report the next month, I.A.E.A. described that uranium, saying it amounted to 1.7 metric tons (or 1.87 American tons) of uranium hexafluoride, a standard raw material for feeding centrifuges.
When heated, this substance turns into a gas that is ideal for processing to recover uranium's rare U-235 isotope, which easily splits in two to produce bursts of atomic energy.
Making uranium hexafluoride is considered one of the key challenges in developing nuclear arms.
The report said agency inspectors found that the uranium had been slightly enriched in the rare U-235 isotope to a level of about 1 percent, which is just above the usual concentration of 0.7 percent found in natural uranium ore. Bomb fuel is typically about 90 percent U-235.
Libya, the agency added in its February report, "has not yet confirmed the origin" of the imported uranium. Private nuclear experts said the 1.7 metric tons of uranium was an ideal quantity for checking to see if thousands of centrifuges, linked up in what is known as a cascade, could successfully process the uranium hexafluoride to concentrate the U-235 isotope. In that sense, they added, Libya's possession of the material was vital to the success of its clandestine nuclear effort.
Dr. Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, a private group that tracks nuclear arms, said that Libyan centrifuges in theory could have processed the 1.7 metric tons to make enough fuel for one small atom bomb.
In March, the Bush administration held a lavish media event at Oak Ridge, Tenn., at which it displayed Libyan centrifuges and a large uranium cylinder representative of the recovered one. More than a dozen guards protected the material with high-powered rifles. The cask itself was not put on display.
In recent months, intelligence agencies in Europe and in the United States have picked up indications that North Korea has nuclear ties not only to Libya but also to Iran, which has embarked on a sprawling nuclear effort that Iran claims is peaceful but was also secretly aided for many years by Dr. Khan and his atomic black market.
Officials said no evidence had been found of North Korea aiding Iran with equipment or raw material but rather signs that scientists were lending nuclear expertise. "North Korean experts have been monitored at Iranian nuclear sites," said a senior arms control expert familiar with the intelligence reports.
David E. Sanger reported from Washington for this article and William J. Broad from New York.
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Suspected North Korean Sale of Uranium
May 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Black-Market.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- North Korea has emerged as a possible supplier in the clandestine nuclear network, with diplomats on Sunday saying the communist country was the likely source of nearly two tons of uranium that Libya bought for its now-scrapped weapons program.
The revelations stoked concern that Iran and other nations also could have benefited from cooperation with the secretive nation to get fuel, components and the knowledge needed to build nuclear weapons.
Previously, Pakistan -- the key country implicated in a worldwide nuclear black market -- had been thought to be the source of 1.87 tons of uranium hexafluoride that Libya handed over to Americans in January as part of its decision to get rid of weapons of mass destruction.
Now, the evidence increasingly points to North Korea, the diplomats said, though they cautioned that the investigation was not yet complete and other sources for Libya's program could not be ruled out. The diplomats spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The new evidence pointing to North Korea came from the International Atomic Energy Agency and was based on interviews with members of the clandestine network headed by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist implicated in selling his country's nuclear secrets to Libya, North Korea, Iran, and possibly other countries, according to one diplomat.
A U.S. official, however, told AP that U.S. intelligence was ``still pursuing'' the alleged North Korean link ``to see how much truth there is to it'' and needed more information to ``disprove'' Pakistan as the source.
One major proliferation concern is Iran, whose nuclear program already is under scrutiny because of fears it might be developing weapons.
Iran's activities are up for review next month when the International Atomic Energy Agency's board meets to discuss the state of investigations into programs that go back nearly two decades and include covert attempts to enrich uranium, reprocessing small amounts of plutonium and other suspect activities with possible weapons applications.
Inspections last year by the Vienna-based IAEA showed that Iran failed to report imports in 1991 of large amounts of uranium hexafluoride -- the same substance shipped to Libya, apparently by North Korea.
While the origin of the Iran shipments was China, other channels of weapons cooperation between the communist North and the Islamic regime appear to exist at least since the early 1980s, when North Korea sold about 100 refitted Soviet Scud B missiles to Tehran, which used them in its war against Iraq.
More recently, Japanese media quoted unidentified military officials as saying North Korea and Iran had agreed on joint production of long-range ballistic missiles. One of the diplomats who spoke to AP on Sunday cited intelligence saying that North Korean officials were believed to have visited Tehran last year, possibly in connection with such a deal.
Pirouz Hosseini, Iran's chief delegate to the IAEA, said he was ``not aware of such cooperation at all,'' between his country and North Korea.
``These are just intelligence reports,'' he told AP.
One of the diplomats said as far as he knew the IAEA report up for review in June would not link North Korea to Iran's nuclear programs.
But another said that with other countries, notably Pakistan, now established as supplying both Libya and Iran with centrifuges for uranium enrichment, further investigations could also well connect North Korea to Tehran, considering the ``interlinkage between suppliers and recipients that runs through the investigations into the (nuclear) black market.''
In its raw form, uranium hexafluoride cannot be used as nuclear fuel -- or in warheads. But it is part of a cycle that uses centrifuges in a process that produces enriched uranium with potential for both of those purposes.
Libya had purchased hundreds of centrifuges as part of a multimillion dollar enrichment program, with the Khan network as the main supplier.
After an exile opposition group revealed its clandestine enrichment program two years ago, Iran acknowledged it had planned to assemble thousands of the devices but said its program was geared strictly to generate nuclear power.
One of the diplomats said that despite its size, the shipment thought to have come from North Korea would only have been enough to make one small nuclear weapon. When it came clean on its weapons ambitions in December, Libya was far away from achieving that goal.
The evidence collected by the IAEA sheds more light on the North's program using uranium enrichment to make nuclear arms parallel to its better-known plutonium-based activities. North Korea is demanding U.S. economic aid and other concessions in exchange for scrapping its nuclear weapons programs.
Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, has admitted that he provided North Korea with assistance for development of a uranium bomb, something the North Koreans deny
U.S. officials believe North Korea already has one or two nuclear bombs and could make several more within months through its plutonium program.
But former nuclear inspector David Albright, who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security, said that if North Korea was the source for Libya, that would mean it ``is a lot closer'' than thought to being able to make nuclear weapons through uranium enrichment as well.
On the Net:
International Atomic Energy Agency, www.iaea.org
Institute for Science and International Security, www.isis-online.org
-------- missile defense
Is missile defense really needed?
Sunday, May 23, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/05/23/EDG2R4SJRK1.DTL
PRESIDENT Ronald Reagan had a dream. Let's build a missile shield that will protect us from our enemy's nuclear missiles. In popular culture, we called it Star Wars and ever since, our country has been spending billions of dollars to try to create an anti-ballistic missile system.
Now, the Bush administration plans to deploy a national missile defense system in California and Alaska that has already cost $130 billion. This year, the Bush budget calls for spending yet another $10.2 billion.
But who is the enemy? If it's North Korea, diplomatic reassurance that we will not invade that country will work better than a still unproven missile system. If it's China, why have we given them "most-favored nation" trade status? If it's Iran, they do not have the nuclear material or the missiles with which to attack the United States. If it's al Qaeda, no missile shield will protect us from a dirty bomb, the dispersion of biological or chemical weapons or suicide bombers who decide to detonate themselves in our shopping malls.
But the real problem with the missile shield is that scientists say there is virtually no proof that we Americans have gotten anything for our billions of dollars. Nevertheless, President Bush is determined to get Star Wars up and running by Sept. 30, before the presidential election. Why? Probably because he wants to prove that, despite the disarray and scandal in Iraq, he is the leader who can protect our national security.
Scientists, however, have voiced great doubt that any part of Star Wars can work. In a May, 76-page, report titled "Technical Realities," the Union of Concerned Scientists found "no basis for believing the system will have any capability to defend against a real attack."
In addition, 49 retired senior military officers, including a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote an "Open Letter to the President" in March, asking Bush to postpone deployment of an untested and unproven ground-based missile shield. Instead, they want the president to use these billions to "accelerate programs to secure the multitude of facilities containing nuclear weapons and materials and to protect our ports and borders against terrorists who may attempt to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States."
They have asked Bush to commit these billions of dollars to fortifying our nation's seaports and trains and other sites vulnerable to terrorists.
In addition to improving homeland security, think what California's share of these billions could buy. Money that's projected for ballistic missile defense in 2005, for example, could pay for 205,234 housing vouchers or health care for 413,584 uninsured adults or 21,569 elementary school teachers, or 6, 079 fire engines, or 163,534 Head Start placements or health care for 949,480 children.
Beyond spending precious taxpayer dollars, Star Wars has voided the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and is likely to ignite an arms race with other countries -- perhaps China.
Nor is the missile shield completely defensive. As many critics have noted, the technology needed to make a ballistic-missile system work perfectly also creates the ability to build offensive space-based weapons, which would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
Late in the fall of 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delivered to Congress a report from a task force he chaired. It was called "Vision 2020" and described how the United States could use space-based weapons to dominate the world. Such military dominance, however, will only intensify fear and resentment of our nation and likely result in even more terrorist attacks. Memo to the President: You can't win an urban battle in Fallujah with space- based weapons.
Star Wars, like the war in Iraq, is a military choice, not a necessity. We don't need more weapons to secure our future. What we need are solutions to the ethnic and religious clashes and political and economic inequities that divide the people on this planet.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Biting the hand that feeds you
Sunday, May 23, 2004
http://www.timesstar.com/Stories/0,1413,125~1511~2167144,00.html
THE recent Livermore City Council discussion about the updated draft environmental statement for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory contained a telling moment.
Family income for four of the five council members came from the lab and its operator, the University of California.
The acting city attorney said there was no conflict of interest because of federal dollars, but it was an interesting case of potentially biting the hand that feeds you -- in the case of current lab employee Tom Reitter and Councilman Lorraine Dietrich, whose husband works there.
Councilmember Marj Leider and her husband are both retired lab employees as is councilman Mark Beeman. Only Mayor Marshall Kamena, who owns his optometry practice, wasn't employed by the lab.
It was a council that was far more reflective of the 1960s and 1970s when Livermore was much more a company town and lab folks dominated its politics. The population has changed significantly and many lab employees now live in San Joaquin County, but the lab influence still dominates the council.
Notably some of the best questions came from Reitter and Beeman as the council discussed information that should be included in the environmental impact statement.
The lab and its federal funders plan a substantial increase in the amount of radioactive plutonium used on the site. The statement also includes the possibility of using lasers to vaporize plutonium.
The Energy Department official's refusal to comment on the question about terrorists stealing a plane from the Livermore Airport and deliberately crashing it into the lab raises some eyebrows. He said it was classified.
In these post 9-11 times, lab leaders face two challenges with public opinion and the traditional naysayers:
- Can they manage and operate the various facilities dealing with the hazardous materials safely? Their track record there has been good in recent years.
- What about the threat of terrorism. Once security was focused on not letting enemies steal plutonium. The new notion is that terrorists would try to penetrate the plutonium building and then fashion and set off a dirty bomb is an entirely different scenario.
The same goes for the classified plane scenario.
Lab and Energy Department leaders owe the community and its decision makers thorough answers to these questions.
The lab is a significant asset to the Valley and the entire Bay Area. It's one of the idea-factories that drive the region's economy. It belongs here, but federal and lab managers must answer these two key questions to maintain the community support the facility and its mission need.
The final day for comment is Friday.
A Planning Commission-
driven effort to shut down any projects in Pleasanton until the General Plan update is finished.
With Mayor Tom Pico and City Councilman Steve Borozsky both disqualifying themselves because of potential economic conflicts, it would have taken a 3-0 vote to establish a moratorium.
Councilman Matt Campbell had it right when it said he could detect no imminent threat to public health or safety if the approval progress continues during the update.
It's a breath of fresh air amid the pre-election posturing -- see councilwomen Kay Ayala and Jennifer Hosterman.
The nonprofit group pushing the two performing arts theaters in Livermore got what it desired last week when the City Council approved pursuing a development agreement with the group.
Once that agreement is complete, then we'll really learn whether the group can raise the $15 million it says it expects to.
The only significant money identified to date has come from an ill-advised garbage tipping fee settlement (the money went for a performing arts center instead of to improving Interstate 580, where the trash-hauling 18-wheelers have a real impact). That's estimated at about $10 million and there's another $1 million in round numbers from the South Livermore Valley Plan's major attraction fee.
That leaves about $34 million to construct both the 500-seat community theater and the 1,500-seat regional performing arts center.
With the improving economy, the fund-raising prospects may have improved, but it's a huge goal.
What was impressive during Monday's meeting was the parade of community arts group representatives and citizens who spoke in favor of moving ahead with the plan.
If that enthusiasm translates into serious dollars, then Livermore may get its performing arts center.
Associate Publisher Tim Hunt's column appears Sundays. He can be contacted at (925) 416-4801, by fax at (925) 416-4754 or by e-mail at thunt@angnewspapers.com .
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
WEEK IN REVIEW
Warriors in West Africa Need Jobs as Well as Peace Treaties
May 23, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/weekinreview/23seng.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BOUAKÉ, Ivory Coast - Here in Ivory Coast, the road between this rebel-held town in the north and the government-held Abidjan in the south is awash with economic opportunities for a wartime entrepreneur.
In rebel territory, skinny young men, toting Kalashnikov rifles and wearing lucky charms around their necks, lean into car windows, blow smoke and demand tolls. They do so from every car, every minivan crammed with commuters and every cargo truck ferrying goods from the interior to the port in Abidjan. Some are in fatigues; one is wearing a Che Guevara shirt. A bottle of water, a couple of cigarettes make them happy.
On the government-held side, Ivoirian soldiers inspect papers and luggage and demand tolls set entirely by whim - the equivalent of $3 at one checkpoint, nearly $30 at another. One soldier posted on the road in the midday sun simply tells a carload of foreign journalists, "Everyone's tired." In response, a few dirty bills are pressed into his palm and the checkpoint opens.
For at least a generation in this part of the world, an aging Kalashnikov has been a meal ticket. A gun has given tens of thousands of bored and hungry young men - and, increasingly, young women - license to pillage homes, extort money, rape, kill and sow havoc across West Africa. They have been the foot soldiers in the conflicts that have plagued the region for the last 15 years. Youth militias have also been the ones blamed for the latest Christian-Muslim carnage in Nigeria.
Today, with war officially over and nearly 24,000 United Nations peacekeepers assigned to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, the challenge facing these fragile states and the international agencies helping them is how to bring the fighters back into the civilian fold.
It is a crucial moment. The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Liberia is in the midst of disarming what it estimates could be up to 50,000 people, offering, as disarmament programs generally do, cash incentives to ex-gunmen and access to education and job training. Another United Nations mission, in Sierra Leone, has just wrapped up its aid programs for 55,000 former fighters. In Ivory Coast, a third mission is trying to coax government and rebel leaders to turn over their arms - so far, in vain.
The enterprise has been riddled with difficulties. According to the United Nations Development Program, donors to the Liberian effort have given barely a third of the $12 million to $20 million needed for the initial phase of the project.
Gunmen have rushed in for their cash handouts, but brought with them far fewer guns than were expected. (The United Nations permits them to collect cash either in exchange for a weapon or if they come in as part of a fighting unit with a collective weapon.) In the northern Liberian city of Gbranga, the disarmament effort produced one weapon for every three self-described ex-fighters. There is widespread speculation that the remaining guns are buried in the bush.
Moreover, what to do with young women who joined the combat has emerged as a new, thorny problem, since the disarmament programs were designed with men in mind. Also, the programs across this porous region are offering such widely varying cash handouts - from $300 in Liberia to three times that much in Ivory Coast - that there is potential for resentment and squabbling.
And what happens after the cash handouts run out, West Africa analysts ask? If young West Africans cannot make a decent living without their guns once the peacekeepers leave, disarmament will fail, predicted James Fennell, a regional conflict specialist with the British government's development arm.
"That there are a large number of young people who have no opportunities but high aspirations is a problem from Nigeria to Senegal," Mr. Fennell said. "That problem underscores conflict in the region as a whole."
In Sierra Leone, where a decade-long war ended two years ago, United Nations peacekeepers are expected to pull out by the end of the year. And yet, regional analysts say, some of the very grievances that led to war remain, chief among them a lack of jobs for young people and widespread frustration about alleged government corruption.
No one even knows how many of the 55,000 disarmed ex-gunmen have found other ways of making a living. Late last year, one child soldier from Sierra Leone recalled how he took the $150 in cash and was trained as a carpenter, only to find himself jobless and hungry a few months later. He wound up seduced by a warlord's cash, picking up a Kalashnikov and going to fight again, next door in Liberia.
That same choice will sooner or later confront the thousands of young people being demobilized in Liberia now. The challenge for the United Nations is to engender a stable and prosperous peace, and not just a breather between wars, aid workers and analysts say.
"Disarming the fighters must be done properly this time round if it's to stand any chance of changing the culture of violence that has devastated Liberia and her neighbors for decades," warned Liz Hughes, senior humanitarian manager in Liberia for Oxfam, the development group.
Until recently, peace was being contemplated in Ivory Coast. Its rebel faction had promised to demobilize its troops and to help reunify the country. But just as disarmament was to begin, the rebels changed their minds. They accused the government of stockpiling weapons and stalling on a peace accord. Then, in late March, came a bloody crackdown on an opposition demonstration in Abidjan.
To disarm now would be tantamount to "killing ourselves," the rebel leader, Guillaume Soro, declared. In a recent interview here in Bouaké, which serves as his group's headquarters, he said, "We are ready for any eventuality."
Bouaké is no longer in the grip of drugged-out teenage soldiers, as it was just a year ago. Only a few checkpoints remain: elaborate sculptures made of hollowed-out refrigerators, tire rims, stones, wood carvings. The bars are no longer bristling with guns, at least not visibly.
But the gunmen are still around, retired to a camp in the woods, a short drive from town. On a Sunday morning, when a rebel commander comes to visit, hundreds of them scramble out of the bush, a motley crew in T-shirts and soccer jerseys, black loafers and plastic flip-flops. They have no guns (they won't say where they've stashed them) and, apparently, nothing to do.
Konate Siratigui contributed to this article from Bouaké.
-------- business
Soldiers to be allowed a year off to go to Iraq to earn £500 a day as guards
telegraph.co.uk
By Sean Rayment
23/05/2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/23/nirq123.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/05/23/ixnewstop.html
The Army is offering soldiers year-long "sabbaticals" in an attempt to staunch the long-term damage being caused by troops leaving to take up highly paid private security work in Iraq.
About 500 soldiers a month are ending their military careers early, with many of them tempted away by the prospect of earning up to £500 a day - 10 times what the average soldier earns - for protecting politicians or businessman in Baghdad
The Army, alarmed at the loss of some of its best men, has told soldiers that their jobs will be kept open for a year in the hope that they might consider returning.
Elite regiments such as the SAS, the Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines have been particularly affected as their troops are most highly prized by security companies.
Those most in demand are senior non-commissioned officers such as sergeants and sergeant majors, who have highly valued operational and organisational skills.
The Parachute Regiment has lost 195 soldiers in the past year - equivalent to 11 per cent of its total strength of 1,795 - under the Army's premature voluntary release scheme. It is understood that most immediately joined private security companies and are working in Iraq.
Gordon Robertson, who until last month was a member of the Parachute Regiment, left the Army to work in Iraq four weeks after he was promoted to colour sergeant and awarded the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for bravery.
Before he quit, he told The Telegraph: "Everyone I know in the Army has thought or is thinking about leaving and working in Iraq. Most probably won't leave but some will. I've got friends out there who email me every week telling me to join them.
"They are making a fortune and it's extremely tempting for any soldier because of the amount of money they can earn in such a short time - and who can blame them."
On the last day of his service, Robertson was told by a senior officer that his job would be kept open for a year.
Estimates suggest that up to 45,000 private security staff are working in Iraq. It is thought that about 2,500 of them are former British servicemen who have left the Armed Forces in the past year.
The United States Defence Department believes that the total number of security personnel will grow to 125,000 by the end of the year.
Pay for a security guard depends on the risks involved, but ranges from £350 to £500 a day. A former soldier working a five-day week could earn £130,000 a year - compared with about £12,000 in the Army.
It is highly dangerous work, however. Five former British servicemen have been killed while working as security guards in Iraq.
One officer, an infantry lieutenant colonel who is due to begin working for a security company in Iraq in the next few weeks, said: "As far as soldiers are concerned, this is the equivalent of the Californian gold rush. It's dangerous work, which isn't going to last for ever, but the financial rewards, providing you don't get killed, are very good.
"There is no point trying to tell a soldier that he is making a career mistake. The best thing to do is to try and entice him back."
Duncan Bullivant, a former Army officer and the managing director of Henderson Risk, a private security company operating in Iraq, said that he supported the idea of offering the sabbaticals, but believed that the Army should proceed with care. He said: "You don't want the British Army tarnishing its reputation by supplying soldiers to take part in nefarious or unregulated operations."
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said: "Soldiers who leave the Army to work in Iraq can rejoin the forces after a year, provided that they are still wanted."
--------
Guardsmen say protecting contractors risky
Associated Press
May 23, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/05/23/guardsmen_say_protecting_contractors_risky/
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Members of a National Guard unit assigned to protect civilian contractors in Iraq says the task puts them at greater risk than when they were hauling military supplies for the Army.
Sgt. Donald Curttright of the 1221st Transportation Company said the 150-member unit doesn't have enough manpower to provide security for defense contractor KBR, formerly known as Kellogg, Brown & Root.
"There might be 30 trucks, and we'll have six or seven of us riding shotgun armed with M-16 (rifles)," he said during a trip home to Excelsior Springs. "If we're attacked, we're expected to protect the whole thing. I don't know how we're supposed to do it."
Gov. Bob Holden wrote a letter this month to President Bush saying the 1221st is a trucking company that has not been trained for security or military police duty.
Maj. Richard Spiegel, a spokesman for the 13th Corps Support Command in Iraq, said soldiers had been assigned just three or four times to ride in the contractor's trucks.
"Our civilian contractors work side by side with us, under the same difficult and dangerous conditions, to accomplish the logistics mission," Spiegel said in an e-mail response to questions from The Kansas City Star.
A spokesman for Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said his office and the joint task force overseeing forces in Iraq were looking into whether the guardsmen's assignment violated any policy.
Civilian contractors have come under fire in Iraq recently. In April, four Americans working for Blackwater Security Consulting were ambushed, and their charred bodies were mutilated and dragged through the streets.
Also last month, Thomas Hamill, a KBR truck driver, was wounded in his right arm and captured when his convoy was ambushed. He escaped May 2 from a farmhouse and ran a half-mile to a patrol of U.S. military vehicles.
-------- china
Taiwan President Hopes to Visit Washington
May 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-taiwan-china.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan (Reuters) - Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian hopes to visit Washington during his second four-year term, a presidential office statement said Sunday, days after he placated the United States by avoiding provocation of China.
Chen made stopovers in New York in 2001 and 2003, but analysts said a visit to the U.S. capital is certain to rile China, which considers the self-ruled island a wayward province that must be returned to the fold, by force if it formally declares statehood.
``I sincerely hope I can have the opportunity to visit Washington over the next four years...and personally witness the sincere friendship between the peoples of Taiwan and the United States,'' the statement quoted Chen as telling a group of pro-independence Taiwanese-American professors in Taipei late Saturday.
When Lee Teng-hui visited New York in 1995 becoming the first Taiwan president to set foot on U.S. soil in almost two decades, China menaced the island with months of war games and missile tests.
George Tsai, a China watcher at National Chengchi University, said a visit by Chen to Washington would antagonize Beijing.
``The United States is going to be very cautious in case they send the wrong signal to mainland China,'' Tsai said.
Washington switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, but remains the island's main arms supplier and trading partner. Beijing and Taipei have been rivals since their split at the end of a civil war in 1949.
The president's office and the U.S. representative office in Taipei could not be reached for comment.
In his inauguration speech last Thursday, Chen did not repeat contentious plans to hold a referendum on a new constitution, assuaging key ally Washington. But Beijing has lingering doubts about his pro-independence dreams.
``Tension and uncertainties between the two sides will remain in the next four years. We should not be too hopeful about future ties,'' said Chang Hsin-yi, assistant professor, Department of International Studies, Nanhua University.
``Misjudgment and misunderstanding could easily lead to conflict,'' Chang added.
A resumption of dialogue, frozen by Beijing since 1999 due to a dispute over the island's political status, appears unlikely.
``Deep distrust between the both sides make any kind of breakthrough impossible. The lack of trust means the chance of opening political dialogue is next to impossible,'' said Andy Chang, a professor at the Institute of China Studies of the private Tamkang University.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed 391-34 a resolution that included an amendment by Jim Ryun, a Republican from Kansas, initiating senior military officer education exchanges with Taiwan, according to the congressman's Web site.
The exchanges would focus on anti-submarine warfare, missile defense and C4ISR -- command, control communications, computers, intelligence Surveillance and reconnaissance -- which are fields identified by the Department of Defense where Taiwan is in most need of assistance.
``This amendment will help make Taiwan more defensively sufficient, while at the same time improving its ability to fight along side the United States in a crisis if necessary,'' Ryun said.
Last week, White House spokesman Scott McClellan welcomed Chen's inaugural speech as ``responsible and constructive'' for avoiding a showdown with China over Taiwan's political status.
-------- iraq
Ordinary Iraqis killed: 11,500 and not counting
By David Randall
23 May 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=523991
America and Britain have the statistical resources to compute with clinical accuracy the number of pollen grains floating in the air. Yet these two states say they cannot tell anyone how many Iraqi civilians have died in the 14 months since the Iraq conflict began in March last year. As the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, conceded in an interview with The Independent last week, this ignorance is "odd".
Senior officers have been unapologetic about the failure, first highlighted by this newspaper, to collect statistics on civilian deaths.
"We don't do body counts," proclaimed General Tommy Franks, the American military commander who led the invasion. When Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the chief spokesman for US forces in Baghdad, was asked what he would say to Iraqis who saw TV footage of civilians killed by coalition troops, he replied, according to The New York Times: "Change the channel."
In Washington yesterday the pollen count was 12 for trees and grass. In Baghdad, no British or American authority - or, for that matter, an Iraqi one - could say how many civilians had died a violent death that day. Our count, based on reports of major incidents from the Associated Press and Reuters, was five: four men and one woman.
This brings to something like 11,500 the number of civilians who have died since March last year. Greater precision is not possible. America and Britain have not only declined to count the number of civilians killed, but have obstructed any attempts to discover the total. The Iraqi Health Ministry tried to collect data on deaths several months ago, but was ordered to stop.
Those seeking to know the human cost of this war have to turn to academic organisations and campaigns such as IraqBodyCount.org, which collates verified reports from mainstream news sources. Their total, not updated for some weeks, stood yesterday at 11,005.
----
Transcript: Ahmad Chalabi on 'Fox News Sunday'
Sunday, May 23, 2004
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,120697,00.html
The following is a transcribed excerpt from 'Fox News Sunday,' May 23, 2004.
CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS: In January, Ahmed Chalabi, a key member of the Iraqi Governing Council, had a featured seat in the first lady's box at the president's State of the Union speech. But this week, Iraqi police, backed by U.S. soldiers, raided Chalabi's home and office, looking for evidence of alleged crimes.
We're going to talk now with the man at the center of the storm, who joins us from Baghdad.
Dr. Chalabi, welcome. Good to have you back with us.
I think it's fair to say that the charge...
AHMED CHALABI, MEMBER, IRAQI GOVERNING COUNCIL: Thank you.
WALLACE: ... that is most disturbing to Americans is that you allegedly passed U.S. secrets on to the Iranians and also may have passed Iranian disinformation on to the U.S.
Question, when was the last time that you or one of your agents had any contact with Iranian intelligence?
CHALABI: I met with Iranian officials about a month and a half ago.
WALLACE: And have you ever passed intelligence either from the U.S...
CHALABI: And we meet people from the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad regularly, as do all members of the Governing Council.
As to the charges you've mentioned, I have never passed any classified information to Iran or have done anything - participated in any scheme of Iranian intelligence against the United States. This charge is false. I have never received a U.S. classified document. And I have never seen - had a U.S. classified briefing.
These charges are being put out by George Tenet. Let him come to Congress. I will come to Congress, and I will lay everything on the table. Let Congress decide. It is time to have church (ph) hearings about that again now.
WALLACE: Dr. Chalabi, are you willing...
CHALABI: Yes, go ahead.
WALLACE: ... to testify under oath before Congress to let Congress see all of your files and talk to any INC operative, including the head of intelligence, Mr. Habib, if they're able to find him?
CHALABI: Yes, absolutely. I am ready to come to Congress, lay all my files, lay all of the facts. We have nothing secret from the U.S. Congress. They were responsible for the liberation of Iraq. They passed that Iraq Liberation Act.
Also any INC official they care to talk to, and I will volunteer Aras Habib to come to Congress and also testify under oath in the United States Congress and let them decide about our role in the past 12 years of confrontation with Saddam and the role of the CIA and also of George Tenet in that process. Let them find out the truth.
Let Senator Kerry, who voted for the war, don't you want to find the truth, Senator Kerry? Let Senator Lieberman, let Senator McCain, let Senator Lott, all of the senators that are friends of the Iraqi people, I'm ready to come in front of them all and tell them about what happened in detail.
WALLACE: This gentleman that we're talking about, Aras Habib, is the intelligence chief for your organization, the Iraqi National Congress. But Mr. Habib is now a fugitive. If he is innocent, why is he running from authorities?
CHALABI: No one is above the law. But, in Iraq, there is no justice. There is Abu Ghraib prison.
Mr. Habib will take legal advice and will estimate what he does. My advice is to obey the law when there is Iraqi law and there is a guarantee of defendant safety. We don't want anybody to be subjected to Abu Ghraib.
Aras Habib is a patriot. He was responsible for the program with the Pentagon. Which is it? General Myers said in Congress that this program saved American lives and it was excellent. And he said the information from the INC was good. Is that the case? Is that the truth? Or is what George Tenet says the truth, that Aras is an Iranian agent? I would like Congress to resolve this issue.
WALLACE: Dr. Chalabi, how close were you to Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, how much did they rely on you, in the run-up to the war?
CHALABI: I met Mr. Rumsfeld less than four times, I believe. No substantial meeting took place between me and Secretary Rumsfeld before the war. And I met the vice president, I believe, twice.
And, again, there was a general discussion. There was no exchange of intelligence. There was a political discussion on Iraq and on the region of a general nature. No information was passed. Nothing was said of any classified nature.
WALLACE: Why would the CIA director, George Tenet, why would he be spreading lies about you?
CHALABI: Because we were right and George Tenet was wrong. He tried to do a coup in Iraq. He failed. We said that these coups will fail, and they did fail. Saddam buked (ph) them several times. In 1996, over 100 officers were executed because of the failure of the CIA to recognize the difficulties they we were in, despite the fact that we warned them. I, myself, warned Director Deutch, at the time, directly, in March, in Washington, in 1996.
WALLACE: But, you know, Dr. Chalabi, it isn't just these allegations, whether they came from George Tenet or not. There are a number of allegations against members of the INC within Iraq. Let's go through some of them, if we can, sir.
A man you picked for the finance ministry, Sabah Nouri (ph), has been arrested after officials found a $22 million shortfall when the country switched to a new currency. A Baghdad doctor says he was kidnapped by INC members, who stole money in his car. And INC members are accused of extorting money from ex-Baathists from the old regime, in exchange for not turning them in.
Dr. Chalabi, this sounds like "The Sopranos." It sounds like you're running an organized crime operation.
CHALABI: These allegations are ridiculous. Sabah Nouri (ph) was appointed as an office manager in the finance ministry. They are responsible for his activities, and they did complain about him. He is not an INC member or an INC employee.
As for the allegations about kidnapping, these are manufactured. And I believe, in a normal Iraqi court, not in a martial court established under occupation, those charges will be defended successfully. There is no - these are charges, and, please, I believe that in the United States people are innocent until proven guilty.
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: But, Dr. Chalabi, 12 years ago, you were convicted in Jordan of embezzling money from a bank that you owned. Why is it that, over the years, across international borders, you are accused again and again of being a crook, of being a con man?
CHALABI: In Jordan, martial law was used against me, and the bank that I owned, as you said, was liquidated, and money was squandered and lost, not by me. This was done at the behest of a conspiracy between the Jordanian government and Saddam. They could not bring the case in a civil suit, they brought it in a military court.
I want to sue Jordan in the United States to recover my good name and the good name of my family. And the truth will come out. This has been used again by my enemies to continue to do this against me.
We are now in liberated Iraq, and we are staying here, and we will defend ourselves and establish a democratic government in Iraq.
WALLACE: Finally, sir, what do you believe that President Bush should do to get the handover of power to the Iraqis, the political handover and the military situation under control?
CHALABI: I believe that President Bush should take responsibility for his policies in Iraq. He is still the most popular politician, bar none, in Iraq. And I believe that he should invite the leaders of Iraq to Camp David to iron out a government that will be representative and effective, to take Iraq into sovereignty, complete sovereignty, and also to elections. Elections will resolve all these issues.
WALLACE: Dr. Chalabi, thank you. Thanks for talking with us.
----
Ahmad Chalabi denounces U.S. occupation (Transcript)
Meet the Press (NBC News)
Sunday, May 23, 2004
(202) 885-4598, Sundays: (202) 885-4200
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5045125/
Guests: Ahmad Chalabi, Iraqi governing council member, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., Chairman, House Armed Services Committee, David Broder, Washington Post, John Harwood, Wall Street Journal, William Safire, New York Times, Robin Wright, Washington Post
Moderator/Panelist: Tim Russert - NBC News
This is a rush transcript provided for the information and convenience of the press. Accuracy is not guaranteed. In case of doubt, please check with:
MR. TIM RUSSERT: Our issues this Sunday: yet more pictures and new videos of prisoner abuse in Iraq. Former Bush administration ally, Ahmad Chalabi, now denounces the U.S. occupation.
(Videotape):
MR. AHMAD CHALABI: Let my people be free.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Iraq, Iraq, Iraq--what do we do?
(Videotape):
REP. DUNCAN HUNTER, (R-CT): This is going to be a long, tough road.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Stay the course says the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Duncan Hunter of California.
(Videotape):
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH, (D-OH): It is time to bring hope the troops.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Get out now says Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. Hunter and Kucinich square off on the war in Iraq.
(Videotape):
Unidentified Soldier: Go, go.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Then how is the war affecting the campaigns of George W. Bush and John F. Kerry? With us, David Broder of The Washington Post, John Harwood of The Wall Street Journal, William Safire of The New York Times and Robin Wright of The Washington Post.
But first, joining us from Baghdad is the man in the center of the storm, Ahmad Chalabi. Mr. Chalabi, these were pictures in January. There you are seated in the Congress right behind the first lady of the United States, and on Thanksgiving when George Bush went to Baghdad, there you are greeting him. And now this. These are scenes Thursday when your compound in Baghdad was raided on allegations of sharing top secret information with the Iranian government which led to this headline in The Washington Post: "U.S. Aids Raid on Home of Chalabi." And now today, this Newsweek cover: "Our Con Man In Iraq." What has happened for you to fall in such a way?
MR. CHALABI: First of all, the charges about giving classified information to Iran by me or by any INC officer are false, non-existent. They are charges put out by George Tenet and his CIA to discredit us, and I want to go to Congress. I'm prepared to go to Congress and testify under oath and expose all the information and the documents in our possession and let George Tenet come himself to Congress to testify and let Congress resolve this issue.
MR. RUSSERT: It seems to be beyond George Tenet. The Wall Street Journal put it this way: "Recent intelligence, including communications intercepts, suggest Mr. Chalabi ... provided contacts in Tehran with details of U.S. security operations and political plans."
And this from Newsday: "The Defense Intelligence Agency"--that's not the CIA, that's the DIA--"has concluded that U.S.-funded arm of Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources. Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein."
There are intercepts...
MR. CHALABI: Anyone who has intercepts who has any information, any documents, I am prepared to go and face all this in the United States Congress. It is no good quoting unnamed sources to say that they have a case. These are allegations that are put forward and directed by the CIA.
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Chalabi, have you not had extensive meetings and contacts with the Iranian government?
MR. CHALABI: Indeed, we have had many meetings with the Iranian government, but we have passed no secret information, no classified documents to them from the United States because principally, we are allies of the United States and we do nothing to harm the United States. Furthermore, we have not had any classified information given to us by the United States, nor have we had any classified briefings, nor have I seen any classified document from the United States. And I believe none in the INC have done that either.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you how some of the papers here have reported this latest incident. The New York Times: "Mr. Chalabi, regarded by many Iraqis as an American stooge, seemed to relish his new role as a martyr ... moving away from the Americans as he has moved closer to the country's Shiite majority."
The Christian Science Monitor said there is rumors all over Baghdad that said this was all part of a constructed charade by you and American officials in order for you to position yourself as independent of America so that you can seek to obtain power in Iraq.
MR. CHALABI: Well, you can see the quality of the information then. Iraq is not Latin America. It's not Honduras. And I would say a piece of advice for Ambassador Negroponte. If he thinks he comes here and provides diplomatic cover for the control of Iraq through covert operations, I think he would be sadly mistaken. Iraq seeks to be a democratic country, and the majority of the people of Iraq will express their views in an election. The process that is going on now in Iraq to select a government, the Brahimi, Bremer, Blackwell process will lead to a failure of the government after June 30. I call on President Bush, who is still the most popular politician in Iraq, to convene a meeting of Iraqi leaders in Camp David to iron out this process and put in place a government for Iraq that is effective, representative, and can lead Iraq to elections next January.
MR. RUSSERT: Won't that be perceived as a puppet government of the United States?
MR. CHALABI: Not at all. Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, Massoud Barzani, Jalal Talabani, Mohammed Bahr Al-Uloum and others are not perceived by anyone as puppets of the United States.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn the U.S. taxpayers. This was a report from Reuters. "The United States paid Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress at least $33 million since March 2000, according to a congressional report made public on Thursday. ... U.S. officials this week said the Pentagon stopped funding the INC - it had been giving roughly $340,000 a month - with the final payment in May."
What did the U.S. taxpayers get for $33 million?
MR. CHALABI: I refer you to the testimony of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Congress a few days ago. General Myers said that the information provided by the INC saved American lives.
MR. RUSSERT: Then why--excuse me.
MR. CHALABI: They saved American lives.
MR. RUSSERT: Then why did the Pentagon take you off the payroll?
MR. CHALABI: We were never on the payroll of the Pentagon. We had a cooperative program with the Pentagon and we contributed to it more than they did. It was a prewartime program designed to fight Saddam Hussein. With the movement toward sovereignty on June 30, it is inappropriate for a political party in Iraq to have relations of this nature with a foreign military organization. This program should move to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. It was terminated by mutual agreement to end on June 30, 2004, with the advent of sovereignty.
MR. RUSSERT: We all remember when Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations and made the case against Saddam Hussein. He was on this program last week and expressed grave concern about the quality of some of that information. Here's an article from the Los Angeles Times. "The Bush administration's prewar claims that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of trucks and railroad cars to produce anthrax and other deadly germs were based chiefly on information from a now-discredited Iraqi defector code-named `Curveball'...
"U.S. officials never had direct access to the defector and didn't even know his real name until after the war. ... U.N. weapons inspectors hypothesized that such trucks might exist. ... They then asked former exile leader Ahmad Chalabi...to help search for intelligence supporting their theory. Soon after, a young chemical engineer emerged in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had been hired out of Baghdad University to design and build biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army. ...
"Only later...did the the CIA learn the defector was the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides, and begin to suspect that he might been coached to provide false information."
MR. CHALABI: We don't know who "Curveball" is. That is part of the charges. Let them bring their files. I'm prepared to go to Congress. I'm prepared to answer all these charges. We are mystified by this information. We are mystified by who this person is and who is he the brother of. We've been looking very actively to find out, but we still have not found out. Let them tell us who it is, and let them put those charges, and I'm prepared to go and answer them in Congress.
MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Chalabi, it's beyond the CIA and just George Tenet, as you suggest. This is Whitley Bruner, who was the CIA agent who first contacted you: "[Chalabi's] primary focus was to drag us into a war...He couldn't be trusted."
David Kay, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector: "[Chalabi's] history is one, as a con man, quite frankly. ... It was a conscious campaign designed to get the U.S. militarily involved in the removal of Saddam. ...Through fabricated information that indicated a weapons program that they did not have."
And this from Pat Lang, who headed up counterterrorism in the Middle East and Southeast Asia for eight years at the Defense Intelligence Agency: "He's a fake, one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated on the American people."
How can all these people be so wrong?
MR. CHALABI: They are all wrong. They are--this is part of the common wisdom that has grown in Washington, but it is baseless. We provided--our focus was not weapons of mass destruction. Our focus was the suffering of the Iraqi people and the liberation of Iraq. It is no secret the Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 under the Clinton administration, and Clinton signed it. It was the object of United States national policy to have regime change in Iraq. And President Bush came. Through his leadership and courage, he implemented this law, and the Iraq Liberation Act was passed long before any of these allegations came out. So they should go and criticize the United States Congress. We did not drive the United States to war in Iraq. We were seeking the liberation of our country, and the United States decided for its own security and strategic purposes to help the Iraqi people liberate themselves, and that is what happened.
MR. RUSSERT: But, Mr. Chalabi, you did say in--and the public documents are very clear, that the United States would only need 30,000 troops in Iraq, that we would be greeted as liberators. Some fellow exiles said we'd be given sweets and flowers on the streets and that you could take U.S. troops to where the weapons of mass destruction actually existed. And when asked about that in February, this is what you told The London Daily Telegraph. "We are heroes in error. ...As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."
What was said before is important because it was information you provided to U.S. officials and to the American people.
MR. CHALABI: What was said before is very important. This interview is false. The reporter did not ask these questions and I did not say "heroes in error." I never gave him an interview. I was sitting in a room chatting. The issue here is this. We believe that the United States came to liberate the Iraqi people, and I think the liberation was successful. Very few American troops were needed to defeat Saddam and the Iraqi people greeted them. If the Iraqi people had fought them, just think what would have happened in Baghdad considering what happened in Fallujah. The resistance was non-existent. They were greeted as liberators. The liberation was successful. The occupation has been a failure.
MR. RUSSERT: You said the other day, "Let my people go free." We here in the United States have paid a very big price for the liberation of Iraq. Seven hundred and ninety-three brave men and women dead, 4,524 injured or wounded. And now you're saying, "Let my people go free, get out." Is that gratitude? MR. CHALABI: I never said get out. The Iraqi people are absolutely grateful to the U.S. soldiers, the brave young men and women, and we are sorry for every single casualty that happened in Iraq. We are very sorry about that. We are grateful and we will continue to so, but what we mean by let my people go is that we want sovereignty as agreed with President Bush. President Bush agreed to give Iraq sovereignty. We are struggling every day to implement this promise in Iraq and we want arrangements to give Iraq control over its armed forces, over its finances. We want advisers appointed by the CPA to go when the CPA is dissolved on June 30. And we want to make it possible for the U.S. troops to go out of Iraq with the thanks of the Iraqi people after having liberated our country, and we also want to have a strategic relationship with the United States, favoring United States' interests in Iraq because we believe that this is also in the interest of Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: If the U.S. troops left Iraq, what would they leave behind?
MR. CHALABI: I hope they would be leaving a democratically elected government in Iraq that is friendly to the United States and that will be a model for future governments in the Arab and Muslim world.
MR. RUSSERT: What if the Iraqi people chose a theocracy, a fundamentalist Islamic extremist country?
MR. CHALABI: I believe the Iraqi people have enough sense to choose a democratically elected government. This is a hypothetical question that is not pertinent here.
MR. RUSSERT: Well, look what's next door in Iran. Do you think that's a democracy?
MR. CHALABI: Iran was not liberated by the U.S. troops. The Iranians overthrew a regime, an oppressive regime that was friendly to the United States and the Iraqi people have learned from the experience of their neighbors very well. They are very careful in what they want. The Islamic parties in Iraq who are in the Governing Council also approved the transitional administrative law which gives freedom of faith to individuals in Iraq. It gives a bill of rights which is far more advanced than any in the Middle East. And that law was approved by the Islamic parties. It is possible under that law for a Muslim to change his religion without being punished. That is not the case in Egypt nor is it in Jordan. It also gives freedom for Iraqis to recover their citizenship regardless of their religion or national origin, and that's a great step forward.
MR. RUSSERT: Finally, will you seek elective office?
MR. CHALABI: No, I'm not a candidate for any government office.
MR. RUSSERT: Ahmad Chalabi, we thank you very much for your views.
----
U.S. Troops Battle Sadr Forces in Najaf
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48494-2004May22.html
BAGHDAD, May 22 -- U.S. troops engaged in sporadic fighting with the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, throughout much of the day on Saturday.
Around midnight, witnesses in Najaf, about 90 miles south of Baghdad, said Sadr militants attacked a U.S. military base outside town with mortar fire and sought refuge near the Imam Ali shrine, among the holiest sites in Shiite Islam.
Witnesses described mortars falling randomly among the houses and shuttered shops. The police station and the provincial governor's offices also came under attack. Just after midnight, U.S. tanks from the 1st Armored Division entered Kufa, a town just east of Najaf where Sadr delivers his regular Friday sermon. Witnesses said U.S. attack helicopters provided air support for the push into the city.
The fighting flared despite fresh attempts by influential tribal leaders to end the weeks-old military standoff between U.S. forces and Sadr, whom U.S. officials want to arrest on murder charges. Sadr, 31, is demanding that U.S. forces leave the holy cities and has called on all Iraqis to rise up against the U.S. occupation. His aides said they met Saturday with several tribal sheiks.
"These are new negotiations to end the crisis everywhere and by both sides," Qays Khazali, a Sadr spokesman, said from Najaf. "There should be a choice to end this crisis."
Karbala, a Shiite holy city farther north, remained calm after days of combat between Mahdi Army fighters and U.S. soldiers.
Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
--------
Iraqi Security Official Survives Bomb Blast
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48493-2004May22?language=printer
BAGHDAD, May 22 -- The white Caprice rolled down an ordinary street on an otherwise ordinary Saturday in an unremarkable manner until it got close to the house of senior Iraqi official Abdul-Jabbar Youssef Sheikhli and began to zigzag.
Ameer Ali, Sheikhli's next-door neighbor, was about to pull his sedan into the street and drive his three nieces to school when he spotted the car. The next few moments were a blur: The flash, the noise as the car exploded beside Sheikhli's house, wounding the official and his wife and killing four civilians.
Sheikhli, a deputy minister in Iraq's Interior Ministry, which is responsible for police and security, appeared to be the target of what officials called a suicide blast, the second in a week aimed at a top Iraqi government official. A suicide car bombing Monday killed the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, Izzedin Salim, outside the fortified headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition. Both Salim and Sheikhli were members of the Shiite Dawa party.
U.S. authorities have warned of a surge in violence as the June 30 deadline approaches to hand over limited governing authority to Iraq. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the senior military spokesman in Iraq, said the attack against Sheikhli was "characteristic of what we've seen."
Overall, 11 people were injured in the bombing, witnesses said, including Ali's nieces, who were in the car with him, and three students at a high school about a quarter of a mile from the blast site.
"I didn't see who was driving, but it was a big explosion, smoke and fire, and body pieces started hitting the walls of my house," said Ali, 38, a government employee.
Kimmitt said no group had claimed responsibility for the attack, which happened at 7:50 a.m. But Iraqi satellite television reported Saturday night that a group linked to al Qaeda and led by Abu Musab Zarqawi had claimed it was behind the bombing.
Meanwhile, Iraqi political leaders who have been working with the U.S. occupation authority expressed anger over raids this week that targeted Ahmed Chalabi, a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council and once favored by the Pentagon to run postwar Iraq.
After a meeting that began Friday and lasted until early Saturday, the council issued a statement supporting Chalabi. This came two days after Iraqi police backed by U.S. soldiers raided his home and the offices of his Iraqi National Congress, a coalition of parties that opposed the government of former president Saddam Hussein. An Iraqi judge said the police were seeking the arrest of at least eight members of the INC on charges of kidnapping, torture, fraud and other "associated matters."
In the hours after the raids, some council members said they were considering suspending their participation on the panel, a step short of resignation, but none has done so.
The statement said the council "failed to find justification for the intrusion which undermines the values that respect man, safeguards his dignity, and bans the violation of homes."
"The Council condemns and denounces this action, calls for respecting the law and the sanctity of political institutions and patriotic figures, and declares its total solidarity with Dr. Chalabi," the statement said.
Also Saturday, Kimmitt said there was no evidence that a group attacked by U.S. forces in western Iraq on Wednesday had attended a wedding, as reported by Iraqi witnesses. He said the dead were mostly young men and none carried identification -- an indication, he said, that the gathering was a meeting of forces opposed to the U.S.-led occupation. Kimmitt confirmed that six women died in the attack but said no children had been killed.
"There may have been some kind of celebration," he said. "Bad people have parties, too."
Kimmitt said U.S. soldiers discovered 300 sets of bedding, 100 sets of packaged clothing consistent with what someone would wear as an Iraqi civilian, a medical examination table, guns, machines for making identification cards, foreign passports and a bag containing a white substance that appeared to be cocaine.
Kimmitt acknowledged that inconsistencies remained between the U.S. account and video coverage from the Associated Press Television Network that contained images of fresh graves and corpses, including several children. He said the investigation would continue.
The force of the suicide bombing Saturday blew out the windows of the Sheikhli house, mangled the front door and fried palm trees in the yard.
In the garden, two vehicles had flipped upside down and were blackened by fire. A pair of children's swings had melted from the heat of the blast. Water had collected in large pools after the bomb burst pipelines.
Three of the people killed were civilian guards employed by Sheikhli. Several of his neighbors said they did not like having such a prominent official and the guards in their neighborhood.
"The guards got the attention of the terrorists and were targeted by those terrorists or criminals," said Ali, the neighbor. "That's why we were not feeling comfortable living here."
Neighbors estimated that Sheikhli employed up to 20 guards at the house, which belonged to his sister.
He had moved to the house three months ago from a neighborhood with a heavier police presence. The police made him feel unsafe, his neighbors recalled Sheikhli as saying.
Correspondent Scott Wilson and special correspondent Naseer Nouri contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
New Rift in Mideast's Great Divide
Israelis, Palestinians Cling to Separate Accounts of Assault on March
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48492-2004May22?language=printer
RAFAH, Gaza Strip -- For nearly a week the bend at the bottom of Bahar Street had been the unofficial demarcation line between this city and the ring of Israeli armor encircling the Tel Sultan neighborhood to the west. But in less than five minutes on Wednesday afternoon it became a battleground and a new legend in the war between Israel and the Palestinians.
Each side has its own detailed account of how it happened that an Israeli helicopter gunship and a tank opened fire as a procession of Palestinian demonstrators passed through here Wednesday afternoon, killing eight people and wounding dozens more.
Two senior Israeli commanders contend that soldiers were in danger of being cut off from the main force and surrounded by a Palestinian mob sprinkled with armed militants. Soldiers fired a series of warning shots and flares that were ignored by the demonstrators, then four tank shells, also meant as warnings, one or more of which may have ricocheted and inadvertently killed protesters, they said.
But a Palestinian leader who helped inspire and plan the march insisted that all of the participants were unarmed civilians who hoped to call world attention to the plight of their beleaguered neighbors in Tel Sultan and were deliberately cut down by soldiers.
Both sides have used their versions to buttress their cause and blame the other for the damage and the deaths during Israel's incursion into Rafah, in which 42 Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded. Residents whose streets and houses have undergone two years of urban warfare between soldiers and militants are convinced Israel is seeking to expel or exterminate them or render them homeless and destitute.
Army officials concede the war has inflicted major damage on civilians but insist Palestinian militants are responsible because they use the city as a base for smuggling weapons over the border from neighboring Egypt and invade civilian homes to use them as staging grounds and sniper's nests for attacks on soldiers. The militants use women and children as human shields and booby-trap roads and houses, the Israelis contend, then wage propaganda war against Israel when it seeks to root out the gunmen.
"In this kind of war there are always two versions and two separate realities," said Yossi Alpher, an Israeli military analyst and co-founder of Bitterlemons.org, a Palestinian-Israeli Internet dialogue site. "And both sides pay a price. The Palestinians are paying in civilian losses, and we're paying in world condemnation."
The march was proposed at an impromptu meeting of the Rafah emergency committee, consisting of various Palestinian political and militant factions, on Wednesday morning, according to Ghazi Hamad, a committee member who represents the militant Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas. The stated goal was to break through the military cordon and deliver food, milk and water to Tel Sultan. But Hamad said the organizers understood from the start that the demonstrators would never make it to Tel Sultan. The real purpose was to draw media attention to the deteriorating situation there.
Hamad said he and other organizers insisted that no armed militants take part. "There were no fighters in the crowd," he said.
When the crowd started gathering at Awdah Square around noon, some of the earliest arrivals were children, who appeared to range in age from 10 to 15, carrying banners from the various factions. They were part of the vanguard at the front of the procession, which proceeded down Bahar, the main road from central Rafah to Tel Sultan.
Israeli army officials say they began to hear reports of the march at around this time from their intelligence sources in Rafah. They say an Israeli liaison officer, Col. Yoav Mordechai, called Palestinian leaders to plead with them to call off the rally. When the march began, Israelis contend that their intelligence sources and observation posts spotted armed men in the crowd.
By the time the front of the march reached the bend in the road, their ranks had swelled to nearly 2,000. Those in front say they could make out an Israeli tank in the distance. Many in the crowd hesitated, but about 50 to 100 -- mostly young men and boys -- slowly moved forward beyond the point where no one had gone in three days.
What they could not see, according to the Israeli military commander in charge of Gaza, Brig. Gen. Shmuel Zakai, was a group of soldiers stationed in a concealed observation and sniper post near the street that was in danger of being cut off from the tanks and surrounded.
To scare off the protesters, Zakai told journalists in a briefing Friday, the Israelis launched a series of warning shots -- first a missile from a helicopter gunship, then flares from the same chopper, then machine gun fire into a wall. None of these deterred the marchers, he said.
As a further warning, Zakai said, the commander of the tank brigade gave the order to the tank to open fire on an abandoned building near the marchers. In accord with standard practice, the tank fired four shells. The tank commander could not see the advancing demonstrators from his vantage point inside the Merkava tank.
The Israelis say they are still not certain why the shells hit the crowd. Col. Pinchas Zoaretz, the senior commander in Rafah, who has reviewed the army's video footage of the incident, said in a telephone interview that he believed one or more of the shells might have ricocheted off the abandoned building.
Soon after the incident, Zoaretz said, he talked to the commander of the tank battalion, a lieutenant colonel, who was devastated by what had happened. "He felt sorry that because of his decision innocent people were killed," recalled Zoaretz, who said he told the commander, "This is a war. Don't agonize over it. It was not done with evil intent."
In the mayhem that ensued, each side quickly sought to define the event. Palestinians at first put the death toll at 22 -- an exaggeration that officials of Najar Hospital later attributed to the fact that before the bodies arrived at the hospital's already overcrowded morgue, workers hauled out corpses from previous incidents, leading to a double count of victims.
Palestinian officials charged the Israelis with deliberately using lethal force. Hamad said soldiers had kept shelling the demonstrators even after the first shell hit. "We never expected that they would do something like this," he said of the Israelis.
The army immediately expressed deep regret for the killings. But Zoaretz said the march was another example of how militants exploit women and children for their cause. While four of the eight people killed were children younger than 15, he said, one of the others was armed and two or three had ties to militant groups.
Nonetheless, the Palestinian account attracted widespread international sympathy. Even the United States, Israel's closest ally, felt compelled to abstain in a 14-to-0 vote in the U.N. Security Council condemning the incident.
Palestinians won less sympathy from Israeli public opinion. Despite an initial wave of dismay from some lawmakers, much of the public seemed unmoved. Even on the streets and in the cafes of Jerusalem's German Colony, a center of pro-peace sentiment, few expressed remorse.
The fact that U.S. forces killed approximately 40 Iraqi civilians that same day in an attack that witnesses say was on a wedding party but that U.S. officials say was on insurgents helped compound the Israeli sense of self-justification. "Look at the Americans in Iraq," said military analyst Alpher. "In an empty desert you managed to hit 40 civilians."
Correspondent Robin Shulman contributed to this report.
-------- prisoners of war
Military to Investigate Prisons in Afghanistan
WORLD IN BRIEF
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A24
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48679-2004May22.html
KABUL, Afghanistan -- The U.S. military on Saturday named a brigadier general to carry out a review of its secretive Afghan prisons, while officials in Washington revealed that they were looking into the deaths of two more Afghans.
Brig. Gen. Charles H. Jacoby, deputy operational commander at the U.S. military's main base at Bagram, north of Kabul, will carry out the "top to bottom" review and deliver a report by mid-June, said a spokesman, Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager.
The commander of the 20,000 U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David Barno, ordered the review this month in response to the growing scandal about prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Jacoby will visit each of about 20 U.S. detention centers, including the main facility at Bagram "to ensure internationally accepted standards of handling detainees are being met," Mansager said.
The United States recently announced two new criminal investigations into allegations of abuse by former prisoners in Afghanistan, where it is also under pressure over the unexplained deaths of prisoners in custody.
Several investigations into the deaths of inmates detained by both the U.S. military and the CIA are underway.
-------- spies
Brave Polish spy risked all to help U.S. win Cold War
A SECRET LIFE: THE POLISH OFFICER, HIS COVERT MISSION AND THE PRICE HE PAID TO SAVE HIS COUNTRY
By Benjamin Weiser
Public Affairs, $27.50, 383 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BYJOSEPH C. GOULDEN
May 23, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/books/20040522-101228-1988r.htm
From his vantage point on the general staff of the Polish army, assigned to high-level Warsaw bloc matters, Col. Ryszard Kuklinski watched with mounting horror Soviet plans for war with the West.
By Soviet estimate, the overriding fear that tormented the U.S. intelligence community from the first days of the Cold War was that of a sudden Red army ground strike into Western Europe. Given the numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact forces, such an invasion would almost surely cause nuclear retaliation.
But lest an attack directly on the USSR trigger all-out nuclear war, Warsaw Pact planning doctrine was that any Western retaliatory strikes would be against the second echelon of Soviet invaders as they moved through Poland.
In sum, "farewell, Warsaw and environs."
Whether such a scenario actually reflected Western planning was irrelevant; it reflected Soviet strategic thinking, and it repulsed Kuklinski. He was already disgusted with Poland's forced subservience to the Soviets. He felt shame when Polish troops helped quell "Prague Spring" in Czechoslovakia in 1968 - "my almost direct participation in the infamous act of aggression . . ."
Thus in the summer of 1972, during the course of his annual leisurely cruise across the northern tier of Europe, Kuklinski decided to act. The story of one of the more remarkable CIA coups ever is told by Benjamin Weiser in "A Secret Life."
Kuklinski made his move by addressing a letter to the U.S. embassy in Bonn, postmarked from the north German port of Bremerhaven. In broken English, the writer identified himself as a "foregen MAF from Communistische Kantry" [sic] and asked for a meeting with a U.S. Army officer at the Belgian port of Ostend the next month.
Two CIA men disguised as military officers met with him and received what seemed an incredible offer of intelligence on the Warsaw Pact military. As a general staff officer, Kuklinski had worked for nine years preparing for a "hot war" with the West, and he had concluded that he was on the wrong side.
He had access to complete Soviet war plans, and indeed he had written many of them. He outlined his fears about Poland being destroyed by proxy in the event of a U.S.-USSR conflict. The CIA men satisfied themselves as to Kuklinski's bona fides, and Operation Gull commenced.
Over the next decade, Kuklinski supplied CIA handlers with 40,265 pages of highly classified Soviet military documents, a take that led an agency analyst to describe him as "the best placed source now available to the American government in the Soviet bloc in terms of collection of priority information."
He gave the United States specific war plans. He gave a constant update on the number and status of Warsaw bloc forces. He gave information on new weapons systems and their efficacy. In short, the intelligence haul was staggering in its scope.
The information from Gull gave Washington an incisive view into the workings of Soviet military thinking - the sort of human intelligence that could never be provided by satellite imagery.
"A Secret Life" has an unusual provenance that adds to its authenticity. Mr. Weiser first interviewed Kuklinski while a reporter for The Washington Post, and had further access when he began this book (he now writes for the New York Times). As a researcher Mr. Weiser recruited Peter Earnest, a retired veteran operations officer in the CIA's clandestine service, who was permitted to delve through uncountable documents concerning how the agency handled Kuklinski.
Mr. Earnest, who now runs the International Spy Museum, ultimately gave Mr. Weiser some 750 pages of notes adding the sort of operational detail that makes "A Secret Life" a veritable textbook on the handling of an agent by essentially remote control.
We read of the various communications devices smuggled to Kuklinski, including the assortment of mini-cameras (some worked, others did not). We see how CIA handlers in Warsaw arranged covert meetings with Kuklinski, and the counter-surveillance techniques employed to ensure that he was not being followed.
Indeed, there are some pages where I feel that authenticity might be carried a step too far - for instance, in discussing how CIA officers go about eluding surveillance when setting up a meeting with an agent.
When I trained as a fledgling spook in the 1950s, such stuff bore a SECRET classification. But Mr. Earnest is confident that "A Secret Life" reveals no sources and methods that are unknown to the former Soviet state. In any event, the operational history of Gull is among the most authentic accounts you are likely to read of a CIA operation.
In due course, Polish security officers became suspicious of leaks from their general staff, and Kuklinski felt under threatening scrutiny. A new crisis engulfed Poland in late 1980 - the Solidarity movement, and the Soviet threats to crush it.
Appalled that the Soviets intended to use the Polish military to help destroy Solidarity, Kuklinski sent a frantic barrage of messages to the CIA. These ended in November 1991, when the CIA decided to spirit Kuklinski and his family out of Poland. (Movie producers note: There is a film here.)
Polish retaliation, once Kuklinski's defection was revealed, was swift. A military court sentenced him to death for "treason to the Fatherland" - a sentence reversed by a subsequent Polish government, in large part due to the work of Zbigniew Brzezinski, who as national security advisor to President Carter benefited greatly from Kuklinski's efforts. And in 1998 Kuklinski returned to Warsaw for a hero's welcome.
Kuklinski died in a U.S. military hospital in Tampa, Fla., on Feb. 10 of this year, about the same time that review copies of this book were being distributed. George Tenet, the director of the CIA, called him "a true hero of the Cold War to whom we owe an everlasting debt of gratitude." We owe an equal debt to the Poles who threw off Soviet control, one of the great fissures that eventually ended the Cold War.
Joseph C. Goulden is writing a book on Cold War intelligence. His e-mail is JosephG894@aol.com.
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Suspicion of Chalabi Deception Intensifies
Former administration favorite is believed to have fed disinformation on Hussein's weapons to intelligence agencies in at least eight nations.
Times Staff Writer
By Bob Drogin
May 23, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/latimes157.htm
WASHINGTON - Ahmad Chalabi, the onetime White House favorite who has been implicated in an alleged Iranian spy operation, sent Iraqi defectors to at least eight Western spy services before the war in an apparent effort to dupe them about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons programs, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.
U.S. investigators are seeking to determine whether the effort - which one U.S. official likened to an attempt to "game the system" - was secretly supported by Iran's intelligence service to help persuade the Bush administration to oust the regime in Baghdad, Tehran's longtime enemy.
Officials said other evidence indicated that Chalabi's intelligence chief had furnished Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security with highly classified information on U.S. troop movements, top-secret communications, plans of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority and other closely guarded material on U.S. operations in Iraq.
The U.S. investigation into the suspected spy operation was a key reason behind Thursday's raids on Chalabi's Baghdad house and the offices of his Iraqi National Congress. Several INC members were accused of kidnapping, robbery and corruption.
Until recently, civilian leaders in the Pentagon touted Chalabi as a potential postwar leader of Iraq. The former exile leader denounced the raids as retaliation for his increasingly sharp criticism of U.S. occupation policies and operations in Iraq. He has not been accused of any crime.
It is not clear whether Iran had any role in the alleged use of the INC to provide disinformation to the West. U.S. officials say the INC may have been acting on its own when it sent out a steady stream of defectors from 1998 to 2003 with apparently coordinated claims about Baghdad's purported weapons of mass destruction.
Because even friendly spy services rarely share the identities of their informants or let outsiders meet or debrief their sources, it has only in recent months become clear that Chalabi's group sent defectors with inaccurate or misleading information to Denmark, England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden, as well as to the United States, the officials said.
As a result, the officials said, U.S. intelligence analysts in some cases used information from now-discredited "foreign intelligence sources" to corroborate their own assessments of Hussein's suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. Few of the CIA's prewar judgments have been proved accurate so far.
"We had a lot of sources, but it was all coming from the same pot," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were all INC guys. And none of them panned out."
A U.S. official confirmed that defectors from Chalabi's organization had provided suspect information to numerous Western intelligence agencies. "It's safe to say he tried to game the system," the official said.
A discredited INC defector to Germany who was code-named "Curveball" was the chief source of information on Iraq's supposed fleet of mobile germ weapons factories. Another INC defector who provided similar information was deemed a liar. So was an INC defector who said he had helped build 20 underground germ weapons laboratories, a now-discredited claim that made headlines when the INC made him available to some reporters in December 2001.
The CIA was unable to interview two other supposedly senior Iraqis who spied for British intelligence in Baghdad before the war and claimed to provide detailed information from within Hussein's inner circle.
Information from both informants has now "fallen apart," one U.S. official said. "Neither had direct knowledge of what they claimed. They were describing what they had heard."
The details further tarnish Chalabi's battered image amid allegations that he shared highly classified information on U.S. operations in Iraq with his intelligence chief, identified as Aras Karim Habib.
The INC, which began as an umbrella group for Iraqi exiles, has long had an office in Tehran. Chalabi has repeatedly visited the Iranian capital, and some critics in Congress have questioned his growing ties to the ruling Shiite Muslim regime there.
A U.S. official said Chalabi "shared [information] with people who provided it" to Tehran. "There's real concern he was passing very sensitive, highly classified information to the Iranians," the official said.
Habib, who was named in an arrest warrant issued during the raid Thursday, is a fugitive. Chalabi was scheduled to appear today on several American TV talk shows.
The INC received covert funding from the CIA and about $33 million from the State Department during the 1990s. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency took over the account in 2002, paying the group $335,000 a month over the last year to gather intelligence. Pentagon officials canceled the contract this month. A DIA spokesman declined to comment Saturday afternoon.
W. Patrick Lang, a former chief of Middle East intelligence for the DIA, said Chalabi and his American-backed organization were a clear target for Iranian intelligence.
"He had complete access to senior people in the Pentagon, and then in the CPA," Lang said. "He was a participant in high-level discussions. He was head of de-Baathification, which put him in place to bar from future office any Sunni Arab he wants. If you're the Iranians, what more could you want?"
Lang said an alleged Iranian spy in Chalabi's high command had "perfect access as an agent in place. You couldn't ask for a better operation from the Iranian point of view."
Hussein's Sunni Muslim-dominated regime invaded Iran's Shiite-led theocracy in 1980, and as many as 1 million people were killed in combat and chemical weapons attacks by the time the war ended in 1988. The two regimes remained bitter enemies.
On Friday, members of the House Armed Services Committee challenged Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to explain the raid on Chalabi after so many years of support.
"This seems to be a substantial development in the war, when one of the most highly paid and trusted advisors may have deliberately misled our nation for months and years and some of our officials may have swallowed it hook, line and sinker," said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.).
Myers defended the intelligence the INC had provided since the Pentagon flew Chalabi and several hundred armed followers into Iraq in April 2003. He said some of the intelligence "saved soldiers' lives."
Rep. Timothy J. Ryan (D-Ohio) demanded: "Have we been duped by a con man?"
Myers responded: "I don't have the information that can allow me to make that judgment. I think that remains to be seen, probably. But I just don't know."
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Iran Rejects Chalabi Spying Accusations
Associated Press
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
May 23, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_IRAQ_CHALABI?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran and an embattled Iraqi politician on Sunday denied accusations that classified U.S. intelligence material had passed between them, though Tehran acknowledged it has a "permanent dialogue" with Ahmad Chalabi.
Iran's Foreign Ministry also said the country had sent a "warning" message to the United States through the Swiss Embassy concerning Washington's actions in Iraq, where U.S. troops have been fighting in holy cities. In the absence of formal diplomatic relations between the two countries, Switzerland looks after American interests in Iran.
On the streets, about 500 angry hard-line students, chanting "Death to America" and "Death to Britain," gathered outside the British Embassy in Tehran to condemn last week's damage to a shrine in Najaf in coalition fighting and the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Chalabi, once thought by the Pentagon to be a possible successor to Saddam Hussein, has fallen out of favor with the United States, which has accused him of giving sensitive information to Iran about the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Iran, which once had close ties with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, rejected the charges.
"We had continuous and permanent dialogue with Chalabi and other members of the Iraqi Governing Council," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said at a press conference. "But spying charges are unfounded and baseless. It's not true at all."
"We didn't receive any confidential information from Chalabi or any other member of the Iraqi Governing Council," Asefi said.
Chalabi denied spying for Iran and accused CIA director George Tenet of being behind the accusations.
"That's a false charge. We never provided any classified information from the U.S. to Iran, and neither I nor anyone in the INC," he told CNN.
Meanwhile, U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said they would ask intelligence agencies for a report on the allegations against Chalabi
"This is a very, very serious charge," Hagel said on CNN's "Late Edition." "There is no way the Senate Intelligence Committee is not going to be in this."
In an interview with ABC's "This Week," Chalabi said that although his group shared information with the United States, "They gave us no classified information at any time."
He said Congress should investigate the charges.
"I am prepared to come there and lay out all the facts and all the documents that we have, and let Congress decide whether this is true or whether they are being misled by George Tenet," he said.
In Washington, an intelligence official said the CIA would welcome Chalabi's offer to testify under oath before Congress. A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment on Chalabi's charges against Tenet.
Chalabi and his network of Iraqi exiles had provided the Bush administration with intelligence about weapons of mass destruction.
He became a liability after no such weapons were found, undercutting the United States' and Britain's primary justification for the war.
Chalabi, who has become a harsh critic of Washington's Iraq policies, has been embroiled in a public battle with the U.S.-run occupation authority since Iraqi police - backed by American soldiers - raided his home and offices Thursday.
Asefi said American allegations against Chalabi were an attempt to shift attention from the scandal surrounding the abuse of Iraqi prisoners and Washington's increasing problems in Iraq.
The Foreign Ministry spokesman, asked whether Iran had sent a message to the United States to protest its policy in neighboring Iraq including damage to Shiite holy shrines there, Asefi said, "The message is one of warning," but he wouldn't provide details.
Recent fighting in the Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala has prompted demonstrations and warnings from clerics and the public in Shiite Muslim Iran. In Tehran, riot police surrounded the protesting students who called on the Iranian government to close down the British Embassy and expel its ambassador. Some protesters threw stones at the building, but caused no damage. Police arrested a number of students who tried to push their way into the embassy's entrance gate.
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Pentagon asks for tax records to trace its missing troops
By Julian Coman in Washington
23/05/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/05/23/wirq123.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/05/23/ixnewstop.html
The pentagon has launched a drive to track down tens of thousands of "missing" military reservists to help to bolster America's forces in Iraq and ease the strain of fighting the global war on terror.
In a move that has provoked fierce controversy the Defence Department is demanding access to tax records to locate reservists who have completed active duty tours but are still eligible for compulsory recall.
Army chiefs are seeking the backing of Congress for the plan, which would force the Internal Revenue Service to supply the Pentagon with the relevant taxpayers' addresses, breaching current rules on confidentiality.
Under United States law, a reservist soldier who has completed a four-year tour of duty can still be recalled for another four years. Since September 11, 7,000 such reservists have been called back for further service.
An estimated 280,000 reservists fall into the recall category, but the current addresses of at least 50,000 are missing. If Congress passes the Pentagon proposal the bill would eventually have to be signed into law by President Bush.
The proposal has instantly become the butt of late-night humour on America's talk shows.
Last week Jay Leno, referring to the President's patchy recollection of his National Guard service in Alabama, joked: "The Pentagon is proposing to use the IRS to help to track down reservists who signed up for military duty, but who they can't find anymore.
"They said troops must provide the military with information as to where they are at all times. President Bush said, 'That must be a new policy, huh?'
"Civil liberties campaigners are less amused. Ari Schwartz, an associate director with the Centre for Democracy and Technology, told a local newspaper in the military town of Fort Worth: "There are other ways to solve the problem they have, without putting the tax information at risk. We hope that members of Congress who only recently strengthened tax-privacy laws will stand up and say this is a bad idea."
Lt Col Bob Stone, a Pentagon spokesman for reserve affairs, said that the IRS proposal has been under discussion for years, long before the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan sharply increased the demands on the US military.
The army is believed to have the largest number of missing reservists, losing track of 40,700 GIs.
"While the military today is comprised of an all-volunteer force, every individual who volunteers for service voluntarily accepts an eight-year military service obligation," said Lt Col Stone.
"The troops are required to keep the services updated on their residences," he said, "but many do not. Thirty-four per cent of former army soldiers cannot be tracked. The unknowns in the other services are in the single digit percentages. One of the difficulties that the military services confront is keeping addresses current."
Many American servicemen and women serving in Iraq have had their "tours" extended beyond their original postings, to the consternation of the soldiers, their families and - in the case of reservists - their civilian employers. Some have had their return date set back more than once.
The strain on the US military, and the danger that conflicts such as Iraq will drag on for years, has provoked speculation about the return of conscription - although the administration insists that there is no need for such a move, and no likelihood.
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Translator Questioned By Army in Iraq Abuse
May 23, 2004
By JOEL BRINKLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/middleeast/23SUSP.html
WASHINGTON, May 22 - Adel L. Nakhla, an Egyptian-American computer technician, found himself at Abu Ghraib prison last fall, working as a translator for the first time in his life. All around him, he witnessed fellow Arabs suffering humiliating abuses.
Interviewed by Army investigators in January, and reported in documents obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Nakhla at first said he was embarrassed for the prisoners, adding, "I tried to help them." But when investigators reinterviewed him a few days later, Mr. Nakhla amended his story and admitted that he had helped. He acknowledged holding down a prisoner who was lying on the floor during one session "so he would not run away."
"I held the detainee's foot," he said. "Not in any powerful way."
One of the Abu Ghraib photos that has been made public shows Mr. Nakhla, a big, beefy man who is 49 years old, standing over several naked prisoners stacked in a pile. He is reaching down, and his hand is shown on or near a prisoner's neck.
Mr. Nahkla is one of several thousand Arabic translators hired in a great rush last year, under a contract the Army awarded to the Titan Corporation, a San Diego company. On Friday, the company said it had fired him.
Officials with the American Translators Association, which represents more than 6,000 translators nationwide, said all of the qualified Arabic translators willing to work in Iraq had been hired long ago.
Fewer than 100 of the association's members speak Arabic. So Titan was left to recruit people who happened to be bilingual, though they may have had no experience as translators. The company conducted no background investigations of these new employees before sending them to Iraq.
Neither did the military.
Charles Abel, a senior Pentagon official, acknowledged last fall that some of the people were being sent to Iraq before the government was able to conduct a full background check, a process that on average takes more than a year.
Mr. Nakhla's résumé, posted on a Web site for the Unification Church, does not show that he held any sort of previous job that would have given him a security clearance, although his job in Iraq was to translate as interrogators tried to extract sensitive information from detainees.
The Army report on the prison abuses said John Israel, another translator implicated in the prisoner abuses, also held no security clearance. He worked for a Titan subcontractor.
Mr. Nakhla lives in a planned community of row houses and small detached homes in Maryland about 20 miles north of Washington. Two American flag banners hang from his front door. Well-tended rose bushes line the front walk. On Friday, his wife, Nadine Nakhla, declined to discuss her husband, saying, "He is working in Iraq."
But neighbors say he is home. "I saw both of them walking out of the house yesterday morning," said Linda Manion, who lives nearby.
His résumé shows that, before Titan hired him, Mr. Nakhla held at least four jobs over the previous seven years, all as a salesman or a computer technician or both. Officers from the last two companies listed declined to discuss him.
The résumé shows that he held his last job, with Abacus Enterprises, a computer networking company, for 17 months, until May 2001. Whether he was unemployed after that or failed to update his online résumé could not be determined.
The Army report lists Mr. Nakhla as a suspect, the same designation it gives to several of the soldiers who have been charged in the case. But the Army has no legal jurisdiction over private contractors.
Mr. Nakhla has hired a lawyer, but he has not been charged with any crime. The lawyer, Francis Q. Hoang, an associate with the Williams & Connolly firm, did not return phone calls.
On Friday, the Justice Department said it had opened a criminal investigation of a contractor who worked at Abu Ghraib, but the department did not say which one. The report makes more direct and critical evaluations of two other contractors - Steven Stefanowicz, an interrogator, and Mr. Israel, a translator.
In the Army documents, which were assembled starting in January, Mr. Nakhla said he recognized that the treatment of prisoners he witnessed was wrong.
"I even apologized to the detainees," he told investigators. "I told them I thought what had happened was very degrading."
Asked why he did not report the mistreatment, he said, "I didn't want to lose my job."
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Prison Visits By General Reported In Hearing
Alleged Presence of Sanchez Cited by Lawyer
By Scott Higham, Joe Stephens and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48229-2004May22.html
A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse," according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post. The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.
"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.
"That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."
Shuck also said a sergeant at the prison, First Sgt. Brian G. Lipinski, was prepared to testify that intelligence officers told him the abuse of detainees on the cellblock was "the right thing to do." Earlier this month, Lipinski declined to comment on the case.
So far, clear evidence has not emerged that high-level officers condoned or promoted the abusive practices. Officers at the prison have blamed the abuse on a few rogue, low-level military police officers from the 372nd, a company of U.S. Army Reservists based in Cresaptown, Md. The general in charge of the prisons in Iraq at the time has said that military intelligence officers took control of Abu Ghraib and gave the MPs "ideas."
A Defense Department spokesman yesterday referred questions about Sanchez to U.S. military officials in the Middle East, warning that statements by defense lawyers or their clients should be treated with "appropriate caution." Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the senior military spokesman in Iraq, said Sanchez was unavailable for comment last night but would "enjoy the opportunity" to respond later.
At the April hearing, Shuck also said Reese would testify that Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, who supervised the military intelligence operation at Abu Ghraib, was "involved in intensive interrogations of detainees, condoned some of the activities and stressed that that was standard procedure." The hearing was held at Camp Victory in Baghdad. The Post obtained a copy of the audiotape this past week, and it was transcribed yesterday.
In the transcript, Shuck said Reese was disturbed by the military intelligence techniques.
"He noted that there were some strange doings by the [military intelligence]," Shuck said. "He said, 'What's all this nudity about, this posturing, positioning, withholding food and water? Where's the Geneva Conventions being followed."
'Not a Secret'
Shuck noted that the abusive tactics used in Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib were not a secret.
"All of that was being questioned by the chain of command and denied, general officer level on down," Shuck said. "Present during some of these happenings, it has come to my knowledge that Lt. Gen. Sanchez was even present at the prison during some of these interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse by those duty [non-commissioned officers]."
Reese, 39, a reservist from Pennsylvania who works as a window-blind salesman in civilian life, did not testify that day because he had invoked the military version of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
Reese, who did not respond to an e-mail sent to him in Iraq yesterday, has not been granted immunity in exchange for his testimony. He did provide a sworn statement to military investigators early in the case, but he did not say that Sanchez was aware of the abuses.
Gary Myers, the civilian attorney for Frederick, said he is asking the military to add investigators to his legal team so he can track down Reese and other witnesses, several of whom have been reassigned to military posts throughout Iraq. Myers said he will also request that immunity be granted to a number of military personnel who he said have firsthand knowledge of what took place in Tier 1A.
"We intend to seek immunity for a myriad of officers who are unwilling to participate in the search for the truth without protecting themselves," Myers said yesterday. "We are definitely interested in talking to Captain Reese."
Attorney Paul Bergrin, who represents another of the charged MPs, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, said the soldiers were simply following the lead of military intelligence officers.
"There are no ifs, ands or buts," Bergrin said. "They did order it. They were told consistently, 'Soften them up; loosen them up. Look what's happening in the field. Soldiers are dying in droves. We need more intelligence . . . '
"Nobody put it in writing; no one's going to be stupid enough for that. My client went to Sergeant Frederick and questioned him: 'Should we be following these orders?' And Sergeant Frederick said, 'Absolutely. We're saving American lives. That's what we wear the uniform for.' "
The hearing at Camp Victory took place several weeks before the story broke into public view with the airing of abuse photographs on April 28 on CBS's "60 Minutes II." Chain-of-command responsibility has now become a key unanswered question in the scandal.
"All we have now is the government reacting after the fact with a bunch of pictures and want to whitewash this and accuse six enlisted soldiers of misconduct and yet hide the fact of what was condoned at the time," Shuck said during the hearing.
Responsibility and Accountability
Sanchez told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that he was "horrified at the abusive behavior" at Abu Ghraib.
"We must fully investigate and fix responsibility, as well as accountability," for the abuses, Sanchez testified. "I am fully committed to thorough and impartial investigations that examine the role, commissions and omissions of the entire chain of command -- and that includes me. As a senior commander in Iraq, I accept responsibility for what happened at Abu Ghraib, and I accept as a solemn obligation the responsibility to ensure that it does not happen again."
Sanchez visited the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade's operation, which encompassed Tier 1A at Abu Ghraib, at least three times in October, according to Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, who was in charge of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq as commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade. That month, the serious abuses documented in published photographs -- naked detainees shackled together, a guard posing with a prisoner on a dog leash -- began.
In an interview yesterday, Karpinski said the number of visits by a commanding general struck her as "unusual," especially because Sanchez had not visited several of the 15 other U.S. detention facilities in Iraq.
Karpinski has said that she is being used as a scapegoat for the command failures at Abu Ghraib.
The general, a reservist from South Carolina, said she was not present during Sanchez's visits because her brigade had surrendered authority over that part of the prison to intelligence officers. She said she was alerted as a courtesy while the three-star general was planning to travel to the prison. Karpinski added that Sanchez might have visited without her knowledge after the intelligence officers were given formal authority over the entire prison on Nov. 19.
"He has divisions all over Iraq, and he has time to visit Abu Ghraib three times in a month?" Karpinski asked yesterday. "Why was he going out there so often? Did he know that something was going on?"
Sgt. Samuel Provance, a military intelligence soldier who worked at Abu Ghraib, told The Post that enormous resources began to pour into the interrogation operation in October and November. Provance said new personnel -- including some from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- came in suddenly to beef up interrogations.
Karpinski said the resources arrived after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then commander of the U.S. military prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, visited Abu Ghraib between Aug. 31 and Sept. 9. She said Miller told her he wanted to "Gitmo-ize" Abu Ghraib's operation because the intelligence gathering there was not producing the desired results. Miller has said he never used that phrase.
"I think General Miller's visit gave them ideas, inspired them, gave them plans, told them what they were succeeding with in Gitmo," Karpinski said. She added that intelligence officers were "under great pressure to get more actionable intelligence from those interrogations."
Karpinski said she believes that intelligence officers were central to the abuses because the MPs arrived in mid-October at the prison, just weeks before serious abuses began. The general also said she believes officers in the military intelligence chain of command knew what was going on, and that Sanchez later tried to shift the blame to her unit, in January, after an MP reported the abuse and provided photos to military investigators.
"I didn't know then what [Sanchez] probably knew, which was that this was something clearly in the MI, maybe that he endorsed, and he was already starting a campaign to stay out of the fray and blame the 800th," Karpinski said. "I think the MI people were in this all the way. I think they were up to their ears in it. . . . I don't believe that the MPs, two weeks onto the job, would have been such willing participants, even with instructions, unless someone had told them it was all okay."
'Rules of Engagement'
On Wednesday, Pentagon officials testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that a female Army officer identified only as "Captain Woods" drafted a set of interrogation "rules of engagement" used in Iraq. Those rules had been posted at Abu Ghraib by October, and became public during hearings into the abuses at the prison.
The list shows two sets of procedures -- those approved for all detainees and those requiring special authorization by Sanchez. Among the items requiring approval from Sanchez were techniques such as "sensory deprivation," "stress positions," "dietary manipulation," forced changes in sleep patterns, isolated confinement and the use of dogs.
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said at a May 12 hearing that some of those techniques went "far beyond the Geneva Conventions." Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld countered that they all had been approved by Pentagon lawyers.
Wood was the head of the military intelligence unit that controlled the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib. On Friday, the New York Times reported that Wood's unit developed aggressive rules and procedures while it was stationed in Afghanistan and imported them to Iraq.
During the hearing on Wednesday, Sanchez noted that the military has initiated seven courts-martial against those involved, and more charges may be brought.
"The Army Criminal Investigation Division investigation is not final, and the investigation of military intelligence procedures by Major General [George D.] Fay is also ongoing," Sanchez testified.
Sanchez said he issued policies in September that required soldiers to conduct all interrogations in a "lawful and humane manner with command oversight." In October, he said he distributed a memo titled "Proper Treatment of Iraqi People During Combat Operations." He said he reissued the memo on Jan. 16 after learning about the abuse allegations, and later issued policies emphasizing the need to treat all Iraqis with dignity.
Correspondent Scott Wilson in Baghdad and staff researcher Margot Williams contributed to this report.
--------
Death Total Tops 800
antiwar.com
May 23, 04
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/comments.php?id=P950_0_1_0
Another grim milestone was reached on Sunday with the deaths of two more American soldiers in Iraq. Despite the recent American pullout, the deaths occurred in the city of Fallujah, bringing the death total above 800. UPI reports:
Two U.S. soldiers were killed and five others were wounded Sunday in a suicide attack near the city of Fallujah, in Western Iraq.
Iraqi sources said a suicide bomber drove a booby-trapped car into an American military column near Fallujah, 30 miles (50 kilometers) west of Baghdad.
They said the attack was immediately followed by mortar fire directed at the same convoy, killing and injuring the soldiers.
As of Monday, the Department of Defense listed 797 American military deaths [pdf] in Iraq. Our count was in line with the military's until a few weeks ago and the discrepency is still undetermined. We are, however, confident in our numbers.
--------
The Marine's tale:
'We killed 30 civilians in six weeks. I felt we were committing genocide'
independent.co.uk
By Natasha Saulnier
23 May 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=523992
During 12 years in the US Marines, including three years putting new recruits through boot camp, Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey hardly questioned his role. But what he saw in Iraq changed that.
"In a month and a half my platoon and I killed more than 30 civilians," Mr Massey said. He saw bodies being desecrated and robbed, and wounded civilians being dumped by the roadside without medical treatment. After he told his commanding officer that he felt "we were committing genocide", he was called a "wimp".
Mr Massey, who was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress and depression, left the Marines in November. Back home in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, he says the cause of the uprising in Iraq is that "we killed a lot of innocent people".
His 7th Marine Weapons Company, armed with machine guns and missiles, was one of the first into the country in March last year. "We would take over villages and control checkpoints," he said. "My men and I would fire warning shots at oncoming vehicles. But, if they didn't stop, we didn't have any qualms about loading them up."
The Marines were told that Iraqis were filling ambulances with explosives, and that soldiers were dressed as civilians, but after pouring fire into vehicles and hearing no explosions, they started to doubt the truth of these claims.
"Iraqi military compounds had nothing in them, except for dismantled tanks, equipment that was barely functioning, and barracks that looked like ghost towns," Mr Massey said.
The incident that haunts him most took place early in April, near an Iraqi military compound five miles from Baghdad's airport. "There were approximately 10 demonstrators near a tank," he said. "We heard a shot in the distance and we started shooting at them. They all died except for one. We left the bodies there.
"We noticed that there were some RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] about 200 metres away from them - they might have come from the military compound. The demonstrators had the ability to fire at us or at the tank, but they didn't. The survivor was hiding behind a column about 150 metres away from us. I pointed at him and waved my weapon to tell him to get away. Half of his foot had been cut off. He went away dragging his foot. We were all laughing and cheering.
"Then an 18-wheeler [truck] came speeding around. We shot at it. One of the guys jumped out. He was on fire. The driver was dead. Then a Toyota Corolla came. We killed the driver, the other guy came out with his hands up. We shot him too.
"A gunny from Lima Company came running and said to us: 'Hey, you just shot that guy, but he had his hands up.' My unit, my commander and me were relieved of our command for the rest of the day. Not more than five minutes later, the Lima Company took up our position and shot a car with one woman and two children. They all died."
The next day the platoon guarded a checkpoint at Baghdad Stadium. "A red Kia Spectra sped toward us at about 45mph. We fired a warning volley above it but the car kept coming. Then we aimed at the car and fired with full force. The Kia came to a stop right in front of me, three of the four men shot dead, the fourth wounded and covered in blood. We called the medics, but he died before they arrived. That day we killed three more civilians in the same circumstances. I talked to my captain afterwards and told him: 'It's a bad day.' He said: 'No, it's a good day.'"
Mr Massey watched as badly injured Iraqis were repeatedly "tossed on the side of the road without calling medics". His reaction to the event that triggered the recent siege of Fallujah - the sight of the blackened, mutilated bodies of four American private security men - was that "we did the same thing to them".
Iraqis, he said, "would see us debase their dead all the time. We would be messing around with charred bodies, kicking them out of the vehicles and sticking cigarettes in their mouths. I also saw vehicles drive over them. It was our job to look into the pockets of dead Iraqis to gather intelligence. However, time and time again, I saw Marines steal gold chains, watches and wallets full of money."
Several members of his platoon expressed concern that so many civilians were being killed, but Mr Massey says he told them: "We've got a job to do." Finally, however, he voiced his own doubts to his commanding officer. "I told him I felt like we were committing genocide in Iraq, that we were doing harm to a culture. He said nothing and walked away. I knew my career was over." Later, he says, his superior poured abuse on him, saying, "You're a poor leader. You're faking it. You're a conscientious objector, you're a wimp."
After being sent back to the US, Mr Massey was offered a desk job. "I had seven years until retirement from the Marine Corps, but I told them I didn't want their money any more," he said. The Marines' slogan - "No better friend, no worse enemy" - now embitters the former sergeant, who says remorse keeps him awake at night.
"One day we would go into a city and set up roadblocks where civilian casualties would take place, and then the next morning we would undertake a humanitarian mission," he said. "How do we expect people who've seen their brothers and mothers killed to turn around and welcome us with open arms?"
-------- war crimes
Iraqis lose right to sue troops over war crimes
Military win immunity pledge in deal on UN vote
Kamal Ahmed, political editor
Sunday May 23, 2004
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1222817,00.html
British and American troops are to be granted immunity from prosecution in Iraq after the crucial 30 June handover, undermining claims that the new Iraqi government will have 'full sovereignty' over the state.
Despite widespread ill-feeling about the abuse of prisoners by American forces and allegations of mistreatment by British troops, coalition forces will be protected from any legal action.
They will only be subject to the domestic law of their home countries. Military sources have told The Observer that the question of immunity was central to obtaining military agreement on a new United Nations resolution on Iraq to be published by the middle of next month.
The new resolution will lift the arms embargo against Iraq, allowing the country to rearm its 80,000-strong army in readiness for taking over the nation's security once coalition forces finally leave.
'The legal situation in Iraq will be very difficult after 30 June, with some confusion over where jurisdiction lies,' said one Whitehall official. 'We wanted to ensure that British troops maintained the immunity they already have under Order 17.'
Order 17 refers to an agreement signed by the Coalition Provisional Authority giving American and British troops protection. That will now be extended to the new multinational force made up of British and American forces which will remain in Iraq at the invitation of the interim government.
Last night MPs demanded that Iraqi citizens should have some form of legal redress following allegations that people had died unnecessarily during gunfights with British forces.
'How is anyone in Iraq expected to bring a case in the British courts?' said Adam Price, the Plaid Cymru MP for Carmarthen East, who has been credited with uncovering many of the claims made against British troops.
'It is taking the idea of diplomatic immunity and applying it to 130,000 troops. There is a danger that you are actually going from immunity to being able to act with impunity.'
Price said that there should be a military ombudsman based in Iraq who could investigate any allegations against coalition troops and call for further action.
The British army was facing fresh embarrassment yesterday when the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, published a statement admitting that allegations against a British soldier now facing possible criminal proceedings over the death of an Iraqi civilian during an arrest were initially dismissed by the forces.
The Crown Prosecution Service is considering pressing criminal charges against the soldier over the same incident. 'The case currently under consideration by the CPS was referred to the Attorney General after charges were dismissed by the soldier's commanding officer,' Goldsmith said.
'In these circumstances, the case cannot be tried by court martial.'
Earlier this month the Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, said all allegations of mistreatment by British troops were thoroughly investigated by the Royal Military Police Special Investigations Branch.
The soldier's case is one of the two which he said had now reached 'an advanced stage with decisions on prosecutions pending'. The first picture of how the new Iraq will look after the handover is now starting to emerge. Senior diplomatic sources told The Observer that the new UN resolution, which will give a legal basis to the Iraqi interim government, will be published in the middle of next month.
It is likely to say that this government should be able to give 'strategic direction' to the multinational force although it will not take over full command, a move that has already been rejected by the American and British armies.
Iraq's new ministers will also take over control of the prisons, including the notorious Abu Ghraib jail where Americans have been photographed and videotaped abusing prisoners.
It will also be allowed to equip its army, run a police force and all of the departments of state.
'We will give full sovereignty back,' said one source closely involved in the negotiations. 'There must be a partnership between the Iraqi government and the multi-national force. There can't be subservience.'
Iraq will be allowed to control its oil revenues, which will raise $48 billion a year within the next three years, although it will have to pay tens of billions of pounds in reparations imposed following the Gulf war. After the invasion and occupation of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's forces in 1990 and the subsequent war, the UN oversaw a reparations programme, mostly payable to the Kuwaiti government. Iraq has so far paid $18bn funded from its oil reserves.
After the new resolution is passed it will still have to use a proportion of its revenues to pay off the outstanding amount.
Diplomatic sources made it clear, however, that after the handover a lot of work would go into debt relief for areas of the country, particularly around Baghdad and in the north, where there are high levels of poverty.
--------
War Crimes & Double Standards
sundayherald
23 May 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/42228
The allies claim to have right on their side yet they stand accused of killing innocent Iraqis, still more photographs show abuse by US soldiers and Israel mows down children in Gaza By Diplomatic Editor Trevor Royle
There is a dreadful symmetry between the two incidents which last week virtually destroyed the allies' moral case for their military operations in the Middle East: the killings at an alleged Iraqi wedding and the decision to open fire on protesters in Rafah, Gaza.
Both took place in border areas considered to be lawless. If the US story is to be believed their forces attacked a legitimate target: a suspected safe house used by foreign fighters close to the Syrian border, and during the operation 22 enemy were killed. In the Israeli version, their soldiers were engaged in an internal security operation against known Palestinian targets following the killing of 13 of their own soldiers in Rafah last week. Both operations involved the use of overwhelming force. In the Iraqi desert the US deployed armoured vehicles and aircraft to attack a target defended by gunmen. The Israelis used tanks and attack helicopters in support of a ground offensive aimed at destroying buildings and tunnels used by Palestinians to smuggle in arms from Egypt. Both accounts have been challenged by eyewitnesses.
The Iraqi account of the attack in Makr al-Deeb, a small town in a desert region near the border with Syria and Jordan could hardly be more different to the American version. Eyewitnesses claimed American missiles were fired at a wedding party, killing more than 40 people, including 15 children and 10 women.
One eyewitnesss said: "At about 3am, we were sleeping and the planes started firing. They fired more than 40 missiles. As soon as they started attacking, firing the first missile, I went away. I was running. There are no fighters. These are lies. There's no resistance. Even the bride and the groom died."
Eyewitnesses outside the Tel Sultan refugee camp in the southern Gaza town of Rafah told a similar story of ruthless violence against unarmed civilians - again including children. The Israeli Defence Forces used missiles and tank shells to break up a demonstration, killing 10 Palestinians and wounding at least 40.
The Israeli military authorities were at pains to point out that the four-day offensive had military aims, in this case the destruction of tunnels used for smuggling arms from Egypt into Gaza. Israeli defence officials insisted that civilians had not been targeted, that warning shots had been fired into a "an open field" and that Palestinian gunmen had infiltrated the demonstration. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who ordered the operation as part of his policy to pull out of Gaza, let it be known that he was "sorry" about the incident.
For the Israelis condemnation was not long in coming. Both the UN and the EU called on Sharon to halt operations in Rafah and, in a rare move, the Bush administration decided not to veto a Security Council resolution condemning Israel's actions. There was also a rebuke from US secretary of state Colin Powell who said the "wholesale bulldozing of houses" was not "productive".
The UN's envoy for human rights in Palestine, Professor John Dugard, went further, describing the actions as "war crimes" and calling on the Security Council "to take appropriate action to stop the violence, if necessary by the imposition of a mandatory arms embargo".
His recommendation was followed by a statement by Amnesty International urging the Israeli government to act quickly and decisively to investigate the incident: " It is imperative that a thorough and independent investigation be promptly carried out . The scope, methods and findings of the investigation must be made public and those responsible for human rights violations must be brought to justice."
Coming on top of the scandal at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, the offensive in Gaza and the Iraqi bombing will do nothing to help the cause of the US-led coalition in Iraq. The Bush administration was praying news coming out of Iraq would not get worse, but there is now a sense in Washington that the crisis is getting out of control. In addition to the drip-feed release of ever-more horrifying images of abuse, the case against the US is assuming such serious proportions that the words "homicide" and "murder" are now being used by military officials investigating the deaths of 37 detainees in Iraq and five in Afghanistan.
While 475 Iraqi detainees were released from Abu Ghraib on Friday, the relentless exposure of torture within its walls is taking its toll on the reputation of US forces in Iraq. A poll undertaken by the Iraqi Centre for Research and Strategic Studies shows that support for the radical Shi'ite leader Moqtada al-Sadr has increased as the popularity of the coalition has slumped. Last week only 7% viewed them as "liberators", down from 40% at the end of 2003. Even Coalition Provisional Authority supporters, such as Kurdish leader Mahmoud Othman, now claims the occupation has been mismanaged: "What is happening is the accumulation of a year of mistakes. The Iraqis expected that when Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled they should be allowed to govern their country."
Tomorrow night in the apt surroundings of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, President Bush will defend his administration's position. According to White House sources he will back the plans for an interim government drawn up by the UN envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, and will provide an up-beat assessment of the way ahead in the run-up to the transfer of sovereignty on June 30. More to the point, Bush will refute allegations that the US cause has been tainted by the charges of brutality from Abu Ghraib.
The latest evidence makes unhappy reading for a country which has always prided itself on helping the underdog. Far from treating the detainees under the terms of the Geneva Convention it is now clear that coercive interrogation techniques led to deaths which could attract murder charges. In one case Major-General Abed Hamed Mowhoush, commander of Saddam Hussein's air defences died of "asphyxia due to smothering and chest compression" while being questioned. Other deaths were caused by "multiple gunshot wounds", "strangulation" or "blunt force injuries" - all evidence of the use of extreme violence.
So far US military reaction to the evidence has been muted. But in the case of the attack on Makr al-Deeb, Major-General James Mattis, commander of the 1st Marine Division, was brutally candid when he was asked about the video evidence showing civilian casualties . "Let's not be naive ... bad things happen in war. I don't have to apologise for the conduct of my men." Mattis, a tough veteran of the Gulf and Afghan wars was simply stating a stark truth. In this new war against terrorism bad things happen, blameless people find themselves in the firing line, one side's planned military strike can be another's mindless atrocity, and all the time the line between operational effectiveness and war crime becomes increasingly blurred.
Bush has always insisted the war against terrorism is not a war against Islam. But the apparent massacre of Iraqis and the relentless tit-for-tat killings in the Palestinian territories seem to many Muslims to be evidence of what the US Middle East expert Edward Walker calls "a clash of civilisations". The former US ambassador to Israel and Egypt now directs the influential Middle East Institution in Washington. He is convinced that "the way we are going is leading us towards the very thing we want to be against", with the result that many Muslims feel that their world is under a savage assault from the West.
Walker's fears came as more evidence of depraved brutality emerged from Abu Ghraib. Iraqi detainees are shown being forced to eat pork and drink alcohol - humiliations which hit at the heart of their religious beliefs. It is also becoming clear that the guards' behaviour was not only sanctioned by senior officers but some of the military intelligence officers had already used similar "softening-up" tactics while dealing with detainees at centres in Afghanistan where the Geneva Convention was not applied. Speaking to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Colonel Marc Warren, a legal officer in the US army's headquarters in Baghdad, admitted that the personnel involved brought to Iraq "their own policies that had been used in other theatres".
By yesterday, most Israeli tanks which rumbled into Rafah had been withdrawn, leaving behind a shattered landscape of torn-up roads and rubble. The scars, physical and emotional, will remain. Earlier in the week Israeli commanders had vowed to raze the area to protect their soldiers ; now they are being more cautious. Israeli deputy prime minister Ehud Olmert has promised that there will be no more demolitions after bowing to pressure from Bush, who has admitted that "the unfolding violence in the Gaza strip is troubling". Nobody was willing to say if the US president will be as forthcoming tomorrow night about recent events in Iraq and the "bad things" which happen there in the war against terrorism.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Judge Will Decide on Terror Case
Testimony U.S. Wants to Call 2 About Web Site
Associated Press
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48381-2004May22.html
A federal judge is scheduled to announce tomorrow whether the jury in the terrorism case against University of Idaho graduate student Sami Omar Hussayen can hear testimony from two American men, one of whom pleaded guilty to training with an alleged Virginia "jihad network."
U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge will rule on prosecutors' contention that the jury should hear from the men because they were persuaded to train as terrorists in 2001 by material posted on Internet sites linked to Hussayen. The government has accused Hussayen of using his computer skills to provide support for terrorism.
"These witnesses can show the jury that these materials really do have that effect," Assistant U.S. Attorney Kim Lindquist said. Defense attorney David Nevin countered that both men were recruited by others to fight in Afghanistan, not by Internet materials about Chechnya and the Middle East.
Hussayen, 34, a Saudi national, is accused of turning the Web site of the Islamic Assembly of North America into the foundation of an Internet network that helped finance and recruit terrorists. He contends he was just a volunteer lending his technical skills to keep the assembly's Web sites running.
Lodge dismissed the jury early Thursday so he could hear the testimony that would be provided by Khwaja Mahmood Hasan of Fairfax and Yahya Goba of Buffalo. Hasan was sentenced to 11 years in prison on a variety of charges after admitting he practiced military tactics while playing paintball in the Virginia countryside, gatherings the government said were part of training for combat overseas. Goba trained at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in May 2001.
Prosecutors contend both men saw videos of Muslim fighting in Bosnia and Chechnya, which played key roles in their decision to train to fight in Afghanistan. But the defense pointed to sworn statements in which each declared he was recruited by specific individuals. The statements made no mention of the Internet or videos obtained from it.
Goba acknowledged that he did not even have access to the Internet before he went to the Afghan camp, and Hasan has said his decision to train for holy war was made four days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks during a meeting in Fairfax with Muslim scholar Ali Timimi, who said Islam required them to defend the Taliban against the imminent U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.
-------- human rights
U.S. Disputed Protected Status of Iraq Inmates
May 23, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/international/middleeast/23IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, May 22 - Presented last fall with a detailed catalog of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the American military responded on Dec. 24 with a confidential letter asserting that many Iraqi prisoners were not entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Conventions.
The letter, drafted by military lawyers and signed by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, emphasized the "military necessity" of isolating some inmates at the prison for interrogation because of their "significant intelligence value," and said that prisoners held as security risks could legally be treated differently from prisoners of war or ordinary criminals.
But the military insisted that there were "clear procedures governing interrogation to ensure approaches do not amount to inhumane treatment."
In recent public statements, Bush administration officials have said that the Geneva Conventions were "fully applicable" in Iraq. That has put American-run prisons in Iraq in a different category from those in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been declared unlawful combatants not eligible for protection. However, the Dec. 24 letter appears to undermine administration assertions of the conventions' broad application in Iraq.
Until now, the only known element of the Dec. 24 letter had been a provision described by a senior Army officer as having asserted that the Red Cross should not seek in the future to conduct no-notice inspections in the cellblock where the worst abuses took place.
The International Committee of the Red Cross had reported in November that its staff, in a series of visits to Abu Ghraib in October, had "documented and witnessed" ill treatment that "included deliberate physical violence" as well as verbal abuse, forced nudity and prolonged handcuffing in uncomfortable positions.
In Congressional testimony last week, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the deputy commander of American forces in the Middle East, asserted that the Dec. 24 response demonstrated that the military had fully addressed the Red Cross complaints.
But the three-page response did not address many of the specific concerns cited by the Red Cross, whose main recommendations included improving the treatment of prisoners held for interrogation.
Instead, much of the military's reply is devoted to presenting a legal justification for the treatment of a broad category of Iraqi prisoners, including hundreds identified by the United States as "security detainees" in a cellblock at Abu Ghraib and in another facility known as Camp Cropper on the outskirts of the Baghdad airport, where the Red Cross had also found abuses.
Prisoners of war are given comprehensive protections under the Third Geneva Convention, while civilian prisoners are granted considerable protection under the Fourth Convention.
But under the argument advanced by the military, Iraqi prisoners who are deemed security risks can be denied the right to communicate with others, and perhaps other rights and privileges, at least until the overall security situation in Iraq improves.
The military's rationale relied on a legal exemption within the Fourth Geneva Convention.
"While the armed conflict continues, and where `absolute military security so requires,' security detainees will not obtain full GC protection as recognized in GCIV/5, although such protection will be afforded as soon as the security situation in Iraq allows it," the letter says, using abbreviations to refer to the Article 5 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
That brief provision opens what is, in effect, a narrow, three-paragraph loophole in the 1949 convention.
The Red Cross's standing commentary on the provision calls it "an important and regrettable concession to State expediency." It was drafted, during intense debate and in inconsistent French and English versions, to address the treatment of spies and saboteurs.
"What is most to be feared is that widespread application of the article may eventually lead to the existence of a category of civilian internees who do not receive the normal treatment laid down by the convention but are detained under conditions which are almost impossible to check," says the Red Cross commentary, which is posted on its Web site. "It must be emphasized most strongly, therefore, that Article 5 can only be applied in individual cases of an exceptional nature."
An authority on the laws of war, Prof. Scott L. Silliman of Duke University, said that the assertions in the military's letter were highly questionable and that the military lawyers who drafted it may have misconstrued the law.
The category in which prisoners may be excluded from the protections of the Geneva Conventions that the letter cites, Professor Silliman said, are for people who can be shown to be a continuing threat to the occupying force, not people who might have valuable intelligence.
"They may be high value assets but that does not necessarily make them security risks," he said. The provision cited in the letter provides that the protections could be suspended for people suspected of "activities hostile to the security" of a warring state or an occupying power.
In testimony last week on Capitol Hill, Col. Marc Warren, a top American military lawyer in Iraq, defended harsh techniques available to American interrogators there as not being in violation of the Geneva Conventions. He said the conventions should be read in light of "various legal treatises and interpretations of coercion as applied to security internees."
Exactly how the treatment of security prisoners would differ from others under the military's approach was not spelled out in detail, but clearly it would allow their segregation into a separate part of the prison for interrogation, where some of them could be held incommunicado.
The military's letter promised to try to improve prisoners' treatment in some respects cited by the Red Cross, promising, for example, to provide shelters against mortar and rocket attacks "in due course" but noting that the shelters are in short supply for American and allied soldiers. It also said "improvement can be made" to provide adequate clothing and water, and promised speedier judgments and discharges of innocent prisoners.
The letter is addressed to Eva Svoboda of the Red Cross committee, who is identified as the agency's "protection coordinator."
It asserts that the prisoners at Camp Cropper "have been assessed to be of significant ongoing intelligence value to current and future military operations in Iraq."
"Their detention condition is in the context of ongoing strategic interrogation," it said, and "under the circumstances, we consider their detention to be humane."
The Red Cross report said that at the time of the October visits to Abu Ghraib, "a total of 601 detainees were held as security detainees."
"Many were unaware of any charges against them or what legal process might be ahead of them," the undated report said.
Professor Silliman, a former Air Force lawyer who heads the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security at Duke, said the response of authorities at Abu Ghraib to the Red Cross appeared to be part of a larger pattern in which the administration and the military devote great energy to find ways to avoid the jurisdiction of the Geneva Conventions.
"If you look at this in connection with other things that are coming out, it doesn't seem like a snap decision but part of an across-the-board pattern of decision-making to create another category outside the conventions."
He cited a memorandum written in January 2002 by Albert R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, recommending that President Bush decree that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners from the war in Afghanistan. In the memorandum, Mr. Gonzales said that getting out from under the restrictions of the Geneva Conventions would preserve the government's flexibility in fighting terrorism.
Bush to Give View of Iraq Future
BATON ROUGE, La., May 21 (Reuters) - President Bush will share a "clear strategy" for guiding the future of Iraq in a speech intended to convince a world television audience that he is in command of the situation there, the White House said Friday.
Mr. Bush, whose job approval ratings have been dragged to new lows by violence and scandal in Iraq, will address an audience at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., at 8 p.m. Monday, said a White House spokesman, Trent Duffy.
"He realizes, as most Americans do, that we have difficult challenges ahead," Mr. Duffy told reporters.
"The president looks forward on Monday evening to discussing with the American people and with a global audience a clear strategy on how we need to move forward," he said. "We hope that Americans will take the opportunity to listen. It's an important speech. It's an important time."
-------- police
NBC to fight Russert subpoena in Plame case
Denies journalist got information; Time reporter also subpoenaed
MSNBC
May 23, 2004
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5033875/
Two journalists, one from NBC News, have received federal subpoenas to face questioning about the alleged leak of an undercover CIA weapons expert's identity, but both news organizations said Sunday they would fight the subpoenas.
The companies said the subpoenas for NBC's Tim Russert and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, came from a special grand jury investigating whether the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of the agent, Valerie Plame, after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson IV, publicly challenged the White House's claim that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa.
Wilson has charged that officials made the disclosure in an effort to discredit him.
Plame was first identified as a CIA specialist on weapons of mass destruction by syndicated columnist and TV commentator Robert Novak last July. Novak said his information came from administration sources, but has declined to name them.
NBC and Time said the subpoenas were aimed at Cooper, and at Russert, the host and moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press." Both have reported on the Plame controversy.
Novak's office has repeatedly declined to say whether he has been subpoenaed or cooperated with investigators.
'Potential chilling effect' NBC News president Neal Shapiro said the Russert subpoena was misdirected because he was "not the recipient of the leak." The subpoena, he said, would have a "potential chilling effect" on the network's ability to report the news.
"The American public will be deprived of important information if the government can freely question journalists about their efforts to gather news," Shapiro said in a statement. "Sources will simply stop speaking to the press if they fear those conversations will become public."
Robin Bierstedt, a Time Inc. vice president and deputy general counsel, said the Time subpoena referred to two articles by Cooper and others, one on the Time.com Web site on July 17, 2003, and the other in the magazine's June 21, 2003 issue.
Magazine to seek to quash subpoena Time planned to file a motion next month asking that the subpoena be quashed, she said.
"It is Time Inc.'s policy to protect its confidential sources," she said. "While we would like all of our reporting to be on the record, a promise of confidentiality is sometimes necessary to get information that would otherwise be unavailable."
Patrick J. Sullivan, a special counsel in the grand jury inquiry, has repeatedly declined to comment on the case.
Justice Department guidelines for criminal prosecutions state that all avenues should be explored before reporters are subpoenaed or approached in an investigation. The issuing of new subpoenas for reporters may indicate that the investigation is nearing an end.
NBC News had said Friday night that it would oppose the subpoena issued to Russert, the first journalist known to have been subpoenaed in the investigation.
Novak has refused to reveal who identified Plame, saying only that the information came from two senior administration officials.
The Washington Post and the New York newspaper Newsday said last week that their reporters were asked to sit for questions in connection with the investigation but that they had not been formally subpoenaed.
Disclosing the identity of an undercover U.S. agent is a felony.
Grand jury casts wide net At the request of the CIA, Wilson investigated allegations that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from an African country and reported that the claim was inaccurate.
After Bush repeated the allegation in his 2003 State of the Union address as one of the justifications for going to war, Wilson wrote an editorial column in The New York Times accusing the president of operating under false pretenses.
The grand jury, which was convened after MSNBC.com and NBC News reported in September that the CIA had requested a criminal investigation of the leak, has also issued subpoenas for records of telephone calls from Air Force One during the week before Novak published Plame's name.
Wilson identified Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Elliott Abrams, a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council, as the possible leakers in a book he published earlier this year. He has also accused Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, of having known about and encouraging the campaign to discredit him.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan has said that his conversations with Rove, Libby and Abrams ruled out their involvement.
NBC News is an arm of the NBC television network. MSNBC.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
Iraq war's costs spiral beyond 1991 Gulf War
AFP
May 23, 2004
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/05/23/1085250859967.html
The price of the bloodier-than-predicted war and occupation of Iraq is nearing twice that of the 1991 Gulf War, and the economic consequences are complex and far-reaching, analysts have said.
And predictions by an Australian economist and his colleague that the current conflict would top $US173 billion ($A248.83 billion) appeared closer to the likely cost than some other estimates.
In the runup to the invasion, the White House's then-Office of Management and Budget director, Mitch Daniels, had said a war would probably cost $US50 billion ($A71.92 billion) to $US60 billion ($A86.3 billion).
Daniels dismissed estimates of costs of $US100-200 billion ($A144-288 billion) made by White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey, also since departed, as "likely very, very high".
But, Congress has already appropriated $US100 billion ($A143.83 billion) just to keep troops in Iraq until the end of September this year, said the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments' military budget analyst, Steven Kosiak. Advertisement Advertisement
President George W. Bush's administration this month asked for another $US25 billion ($A35.96 billion), mostly for Iraq, for the next fiscal year. Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz also warned he would be back for more.
In all, the bill for military operations alone would be likely to amount to $US150 billion ($A215.75 billion) by the end of September 30, 2005 -- far more than the 1990-91 Gulf War's $US61 billion ($A87.74 billion) price, Kosiak said.
Before the current conflict, Australian economics professor Warwick McKibbin co-authored a study on the economic implications with Andrew Stoeckel of the Center for International Economics.
Their study suggested even a short conflict could have a broad economic cost of $US173 billion ($A248.83 billion) in 2003, rising to $US1.04 trillion ($A1.5 trillion) by 2010.
McKibbin and Stoeckel's study predicted that a longer, bogged-down war could cost $US237 billion ($A340.88 billion) in 2003, rising to $US3.57 trillion ($A5.13 trillion) by 2010.
"I think our study is still very relevant," said McKibbin, a fellow of the Washington-based Brookings Institution and a board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
"We considered a long war with higher oil prices around 40 (US) dollars per barrel, and this looks pretty good," he said.
"I think there is still a very long way to go, but our long war scenario now looks most likely and the costs are mounting."
Also before the current conflict, Andrew Natsios, the head of the US Agency for International Development, had said $US1.7 billion ($A2.45 billion) in reconstruction costs would be "the limit".
But, already , $US23 billion ($A33.08 billion)has been set aside to help rebuild Iraq and train its security personnel.
"The administration clearly vastly underestimated what this would cost," Kosiak said. "It is clearly open-ended. It depends more than anything else on how many troops we have over there for how long."
The economic costs are harder to calculate.
New York's crude oil contract hit an all-time high of 41.85 dollars in electronic trading May 17 but fell below 40 dollars Friday after Saudi Arabia suggested OPEC would raise output substantially.
"The fact that the Iraqi situation has yet to be resolved tends to preserve an above-average level of risk regarding the situation in the Middle East, and thus you are paying more for crude oil," said Moody's Investors Service chief US economist John Lonski.
"It is very difficult to try to quantify what the costs might be."
The conflict also produced uncertainty, he said.
"There is always that worry that the problems could spread in a manner that eventually disrupts shipments of crude oil from the Middle East and Persian Gulf. In turn, that could drive energy prices up to levels that materially curb economic activity worldwide."
The military spending also had a positive impact on the US economy, however, said Wachovia global economist Jay Bryson.
"In terms of budgetary numbers, I think it has probably been somewhat stimulative to the US economy. You are pumping more money into the army, and some of that money gets spent here at home," he said.
"But overall when you have parsed out the oil price and you have parsed out any sort of knock-on consumer sentiment, ... it is very difficult to say one way or the other."
The bottom line was that the fallout of the war had failed to interrupt the global recovery.
"World economic output is really starting to pick up," Bryson said.
It was impossible to say for sure that the Iraq war had a detrimental effect on the world economy, he added. "I don't think you can actually say that. Maybe it has slowed growth a little bit, but I think it is more of a secondary-effect order of magnitude."
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In Iraq, the Job Opportunity of a Lifetime
Managing a $13 Billion Budget With No Experience
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48543-2004May22?language=printer
BAGHDAD -- It was after nightfall when they finally found their offices at Saddam Hussein's Republican Palace -- 11 jet-lagged, sweaty, idealistic volunteers who had come to help Iraq along the road to democracy.
When the U.S. government went looking for people to help rebuild Iraq, they had responded to the call. They supported the war effort and President Bush. Many had strong Republican credentials. They were in their twenties or early thirties and had no foreign service experience. On that first day, Oct. 1, they knew so little about how things worked that they waited hours at the airport for a ride that was never coming. They finally discovered the shuttle bus out of the airport but got off at the wrong stop.
Occupied Iraq was just as Simone Ledeen had imagined -- ornate mosques, soldiers in formation, sand blowing everywhere, "just like on TV." The 28-year-old daughter of neoconservative pundit Michael Ledeen and a recently minted MBA, she had arrived on a military transport plane with the others and was eager to get to work.
They had been hired to perform a low-level task: collecting and organizing statistics, surveys and wish lists from the Iraqi ministries for a report that would be presented to potential donors at the end of the month. But as suicide bombs and rocket attacks became almost daily occurrences, more and more senior staffers defected. In short order, six of the new young hires found themselves managing the country's $13 billion budget, making decisions affecting millions of Iraqis.
Viewed from the outside, their experience illustrates many of the problems that have beset the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), a paucity of experienced applicants, a high turnover rate, bureaucracy, partisanship and turf wars. But within their group, inside the "Green Zone," the four-mile strip surrounded by cement blast walls where Iraq's temporary rulers are based, their seven months at the CPA was the experience of a lifetime. It was defined by long hours, patriotism, friendship, sacrifice and loss.
The CPA was designed to be a grand experiment in nation-building, a body of experts who would be Iraq's guide for transforming itself into a model for democracy in the Middle East. Unlike previous reconstruction efforts, it was to be manned by civilians -- advisers on politics, law, medicine, transportation, agronomy and other key areas. They were supposed to be experts, but many of the younger hires who filled the CPA's hallways were longer on enthusiasm than on expertise.
L. Paul Bremer, Iraq's top civil administrator, may have been the public face of the CPA, but it is these rank-and-file workers who defined the occupation at the ground level. This account of the budget team's time in Baghdad is drawn from direct observation and interviews with more than three dozen civilian and military members of the occupation government.
War on Terror
Ledeen's journey to Baghdad began two weeks earlier when she received an e-mail out of the blue from the Pentagon's White House liaison office. The Sept. 16 message informed her that the occupation government in Iraq needed employees to prepare for an international conference. "This is an amazing opportunity to move forward on the global war on terror," the e-mail read.
For Ledeen, the offer seemed like fate. One of her family friends had been killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and it had affected her family deeply. Without hesitation, she responded "Sure" to the e-mail and waited -- for an interview, a background check or some other follow-up. Apparently none was necessary. A week later, she got a second e-mail telling her to look for a packet in the mail regarding her move to Baghdad.
Others from across the District responded affirmatively to the same e-mail, for different reasons. Andrew Burns, 23, a Red Cross volunteer who had taught English in rural China, felt going to Iraq would help him pursue a career in humanitarian aid. Todd Baldwin, 28, a legislative aide for Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), thought the opportunity was too good to pass up. John Hanley, 24, a Web site editor, wanted to break into the world of international relations. Anita Greco, 25, a former teacher, and Casey Wasson, 23, a recent college graduate in government, just needed jobs.
For months they wondered what they had in common, how their names had come to the attention of the Pentagon, until one day they figured it out: They had all posted their resumes at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank.
By the fall, when Ledeen and peers arrived, the CPA had a serious staffing problem. Initial plans called for 3,700 people, but for most of the year it had been operating with 1,300. Moreover, many of those who did come stayed the minimum 90 days. Mark St. Laurent, 36, a D.C. paramedic who was assigned to the economics team, said the short commitments made getting work done difficult: "One month learning the ropes. One month doing actual work. One month lame duck -- you don't want to do anything because you don't want to piss off the guy coming next."
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Joseph Yoswa said the CPA was satisfied with the quality of applicants. Some staffers may have been young and inexperienced, he said, but "we have people right out of college leading troops on the ground."
Yoswa said the recruiting office had to hire quickly for the Madrid donors conference that fall and "turned to the Heritage Foundation, an educational facility, albeit a conservative one, but primarily a place where you can get good, solid people." He said this was a one-time event and that there was no organized effort to hire Republicans. In late October, he said, the Pentagon set up a job site on the Web. Eleven thousand people filled out an application and several hundred of them were hired. "Nowhere did we ask party affiliation," he said.
'The Brat Pack'
When Ledeen's group showed up at the palace -- with their North Face camping gear, Abercrombie & Fitch camouflage and digital cameras -- they were quite the spectacle. For some, they represented everything that was right with the CPA: They were young, energetic and idealistic. For others, they represented everything that was wrong with the CPA: They were young, inexperienced, and regarded as ideologues.
Several had impressive paper credentials, but in the wrong fields. Greco was fluent in English, Italian and Spanish; Burns had been a policy analyst focused on family and health care; and Ledeen had co-founded a cooking school. But none had ever worked in the Middle East, none spoke Arabic, and few could tell a balance sheet from an accounts receivable statement.
Other staffers quickly nicknamed the newcomers "The Brat Pack."
"They had come over because of one reason or another, and they were put in positions of authority that they had no clue about," remembered Army Reserve Sgt. Thomas D. Wirges, 38, who had been working on rehabilitating the Baghdad Stock Exchange.
Some also grumbled about the new staffers' political ties. Retired U.S. Army Col. Charles Krohn said many in the CPA regard the occupation "as a political event," always looking for a way to make the president look good.
Ledeen was determined to prove she could do her job. She and the others worked 100-hour weeks and ended up producing not only their assigned report but a searchable Web site of possible reconstruction projects. At the end of their six-week assignment, their bosses were so impressed that they were rewarded with more permanent postings.
The occupation's economics teams had been especially hard hit by attacks by insurgents. After the United Nations bombing in August, the International Monetary Fund pulled out. And after the rocket attack on the Al-Rashid Hotel in October, one CPA staffer who suffered burns on his feet and lost a testicle was evacuated and another was so spooked he went home. So that's where Ledeen and her colleagues were placed.
High Salaries
Working at the CPA was, as Ledeen described it, a bunch of "high highs" and "low lows."
They would get up at dawn, after a fitful night of sleep in the coed hallways of the palace where alarm clocks started going off at 4 a.m. They would spend the rest of the day shuttling back and forth between the CPA headquarters and the Ministry of Finance. Meals were cafeteria food devoured with plastic utensils.
The pay turned out to be good. Ledeen and her co-workers had agreed to come to Iraq without knowing their salaries. They ended up with standard government base salaries in the range of $30,000 to $75,000 a year, plus a 25 percent foreign differential, another 25 percent for a workplace "in imminent danger," and overtime pay. In the end, almost everyone was making the equivalent of six-figure salaries.
The group's primary responsibility was to hand out money. Each month, it sent out authorizations for the release of several hundred million dollars for government employees' salaries, reconstruction projects and sundry other expenses.
But they were also involved in higher-level policy decisions -- revising the 2004 budget, shifting around money as priorities changed and formulating plans for replacing the food baskets Iraqi families got each month with cash payments.
They also had to deal with teachers in Basra, police in Karbala and others who came to say they were not getting paid at all -- or that they wanted more. A justice official grumbled that the money for prisoners' food had not been released. Security guards at one ministry demanded to know why their friends at another ministry were earning more money than they.
Once, Ledeen remembered, a bank in Baghdad refused to release money to a U.S. military division even though it had the appropriate paperwork. That meant the commander couldn't pay his Iraqi workers, who couldn't feed their families, raising the public's anger at U.S. forces.
So Ledeen raced to the bank to plead with its officials. It didn't work. Then a woman from the Iraqi Ministry of Finance showed up. The bank manager took a look at the paperwork, nodded and released the money.
"It was the same damn letter" the Army captain had given them the week before, Ledeen said with a sigh.
That was one of a limited number of excursions she made into the streets. The budget team, which wielded so much power over Iraq, was isolated from regular Iraqi life. Among the team members' greatest frustrations was how difficult it was to leave the Green Zone. Still, members of the team became close to the three Iraqi translators who worked with the budget team: Nada, an older woman who fretted over everyone's well-being, and Raghad and Hadeel, both twenty-somethings who were best friends and always cracking jokes. The newcomers took comfort in the cross-cultural friendship with women their own age. Later, that would turn to anguish.
Just the Basics
The staffers' good will, hard work and willingness to stay in Iraq impressed CPA representatives from other ministries, but it did little to alter the reality that the budget office had become a bottleneck.
The U.S.-led coalition had come seeking to establish a strong economy with high-paying jobs, functioning factories and a rich consumer market. This was seen as the road to democracy.
Far from such lofty missions, the budget team had its hands full just keeping things running.
Army Reserve Sgt. Glenn Corliss, who worked with the Ministry of Industry and Minerals, said staffers were so inexperienced and rotated out so quickly it was difficult for them to act on anything. In November many state-owned factories had been shut down for want of electricity, a potentially explosive problem because it left thousands jobless. Corliss had found private firms willing to invest in portable generators for the most critical factories. All they wanted was a letter of credit saying that they would be paid for their services. No one in the budget office would make a decision on it for months and Corliss finally gave up in March when he returned to the United States. "I wanted to pull their heads off oftentimes," Corliss said.
Brad Jackson, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve who worked with the CPA, said the budget team regularly asked other ministries at the last minute to produce information that would take hundreds of people half a year to gather.
"There were a lot of people who, being political science majors, didn't know what an income statement was, who were asking the impossible. . . . That was giving us ulcers, quite frankly," he said.
The young budget advisers are the first to admit that they weren't the most qualified to be managing Iraq's finances. "We knew we were overwhelmed. We wanted help," Ledeen said. "We were doing maintenance, trying to make sure there were no riots, that no one went hungry." The budget team reported to Rodney Bent, a former U.S. Office of Management and Budget official, and Tony McDonald from the Australian Treasury. McDonald said it angers him to hear people criticize the budget team. "The people who came were young and keen -- not necessarily the most experienced -- but they were here. They did a great job in working as hard as they could."
The Big Blast
December was the month everything seemed to come together. The staffers were becoming more confident in their work, more intimate in their friendships. Greco celebrated her 26th birthday and Hadeel her 29th -- old for a single Iraqi woman. The translator joked that she would be an old maid. For Hanukah and Christmas, the Americans gave the Iraqi women jewelry, and they gave the Americans miniature silver frames. On New Year's, Hadeel surprised everyone by announcing that she was engaged to marry.
A few weeks later, on Jan. 18, Greco was in the shower and Ledeen was still in bed when they heard a giant boom from the direction of the north gate of CPA headquarters. Colleagues called to check on each other, but no one could locate Raghad and Hadeel, who often traveled together to work by taxi.
Ledeen checked out a car and drove the five minutes to the gate. She saw mangled bodies, flames shooting out of vehicles, families screaming and crying, but no sign of the two women. A few hours later, she learned the news: Raghad was wounded and Hadeel was dead.
The next day, wearing flak jackets and helmets, Ledeen and Greco went to visit Raghad in the hospital. As they moved to embrace Raghad -- who was covered with cuts and bruises and had lost hearing in one ear -- the mother of another injured woman told them to leave, saying they should have never come, that it wasn't safe.
"It's okay," Ledeen told her.
"It's not okay, little girl," the woman snapped back. It was only then that Ledeen understood the mother wasn't worried about her safety. She was concerned about the Iraqi women who, as workers for the CPA, were seen by insurgents as collaborators.
The memorial service was held in the cavernous theater in the convention center with hundreds of seats, far more than needed for the small gathering. It was a mixed Muslim-Christian ceremony. A local mosque leader chanted from the Koran. A group sang a hymn. Bremer made a brief speech, but rather than remembering the victims he focused on the terrorists who had killed their friends.
Ledeen said the service was beautiful, but as she sat near Hadeel's family and fiance, all she could think of was how the victims' names hadn't been read aloud and how empty the room seemed.
"I was ashamed for all of us that there were so few people there," Ledeen remembered. "We should have filled those seats with CPA people to thank them for their sacrifice for us. We should have filled those seats."
Turnover
Reinforcements for the budget team finally began arriving in February, another batch of young, eager faces.
Ledeen was assigned to train Brendan Lund, 26, a Merrill Lynch software developer. She taught him to greet people with "Salam alaykum," how to tighten the straps on his flak jacket, how to read the government employee payment spreadsheets. When he said, "We don't seem to have enough senior-level folks making the decisions in the right place," she responded that he was right and that he should be prepared to take the initiative.
During her last few days in Baghdad, the two met with a woman seeking money for heart surgery and with a former Ministry of Information official under Saddam Hussein.
Ledeen promised to help the woman by making calls to George Washington University and to influential members of Congress. She was equally decisive in her response to the former Baathist official who asked if he could get a raise even though he wasn't working and if his former co-workers could cash the 1 million dinar clothing allowance checks that they had been issued before the invasion.
"I laughed," she said. And then she showed him the door.
It was then that she realized, she said, that "I was all grown up."
Ledeen left Baghdad in late March to be with a sick cousin. The rest of the group departed soon afterward. On the plane ride home on May 15, Baldwin, Greco, Hanley, Wasson and Burns talked about being reunited with family and friends and about vacations plans. But the conversation kept turning back to Iraq -- what they did, what they could have done, what they should have done, what they could still do.
"I support what we're doing, and I absolutely don't think we should pull out and not finish what we started," Greco said. Burns wasn't as confident. He said he was at the same time full of "optimism, pessimism and realism. . . . In some ways we went looking to establish an American system in Iraq, and we can never do that."
Meanwhile, back in Baghdad, weeks before the June 30 handover when the CPA is scheduled to dissolve, staffing levels have finally improved. Twenty people are doing the old jobs of the six.
-------- investigations
England's Testimony MPs Were Told To 'Rough Them Up'
By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48722-2004May22.html
It was just past 10 p.m. late last October and the military police guarding the part of Abu Ghraib prison known as the "hard site" were having a busy night. Two detainees were brought in handcuffed with sandbags over their heads, suspects in a gruesome crime.
"The two prisoners had supposedly raped a 15-year-old boy in the prison the night before," Pfc. Lynndie R. England told military officials investigating the Iraqi prisoner abuse case.
The military police on guard duty that night were going to get to the bottom of things, she said. And they had instructions from military intelligence: "MI had told us to 'rough them up' to get answers," she said.
And so they did, England said.
In nine pages of sworn statements obtained by The Washington Post, England, one of the seven members of the 372nd Military Police Company charged in the prisoner abuse case, detailed how guards working the night shift at the prison meted out punishment to these and other detainees by forcing them to run naked through the prison hallway, handcuffing them to each other and forcing them to strip and form a human pyramid.
The statements, given to investigators over two days in January, provide new insight into events inside the prison last fall and a voice to one of the case's most visible characters. England, 21, a former chicken-processing-plant employee from rural West Virginia, is now recognized around the world as the soldier photographed holding a naked detainee on a leash. She also has been photographed pointing at the genitals of a naked prisoner.
England's attorney, Rose Mary Zapor, has said that England was acting at the direction of superior officers, a defense also voiced by lawyers for other accused soldiers.
England's family has said she processed the prisoners and their paperwork and did not work inside the prison's cellblock area. In her statements England said she would go to the prison wing to visit "friends" after her shift ended at 10 p.m.
Shortly after she arrived there on or about the night of Oct. 24, the prisoners accused of raping the boy were brought in, she said. The guards removed their handcuffs, then the bags that masked their faces. Then they told the detainees to remove their clothes, England said.
"The prisoners were stripped naked so it would embarrass them in front of the other prisoners," she said. While still nude, the two men were ordered to run up and down the prison hallway. The exercise was "to wear them down and get them tired so they would tell us if they really did rape the boy," she said.
Then the prisoners were separated. One was taken to a solitary confinement cell, the other kept out in the hallway. And the guards used an old police trick -- playing one against the other -- until they got results. "We told them that the other was ratting him out," she said. "Then they started to admit that they had raped the boy, but that it was the other one's idea."
After the questioning, the prisoners were put in their cells and left alone. By 4 a.m., it was time for the next shift to come on duty, and the guards left.
On a subsequent visit, the tier was also busy, she said. Again, she stopped by the hard site about 10 p.m. And again the guards had brought in someone they said had participated in the rape. This time they had the prisoner who allegedly had held the boy down while the others raped him, she said. The two other prisoners were roused from their cells, and all three were made to strip, she said.
Someone from military intelligence, whom she did not name, was "present all during this incident," she said.
England and Spec. Megan Ambuhl went up to watch from the prison's top tier, she said, when Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II asked them to throw down some handcuffs. The prisoners "were laying on the floor handcuffed together so all the other prisoners would see them," she said. She snapped some pictures of the detainees sprawled together on the floor, she said, and soon they started to talk: "They all started admitting to do it, and we unhandcuffed them from each other."
They were then put back into solitary confinement, she said.
The next incident England described in her statement occurred about two weeks later on the night of Nov. 8, her birthday. There had been a riot in another part of Abu Ghraib, called Ganci, she said, and guards had brought in seven detainees who had allegedly initiated it. The detainees were forced into a pile on the floor, she said, and she took pictures of soldiers pretending to hit the hooded, handcuffed prisoners.
Word of the riot had spread and was attracting onlookers, she said. "During this whole time, various people had stopped 'cause they'd heard about the riot in Ganci," she said. "I can't remember who all stopped by, but they were only there for a few minutes at a time."
The captives were forced to their feet, England said, made to strip and piled into a human pyramid, while soldiers posed for pictures. Then the guards stood the detainees against the wall. Frederick "walked up to the first prisoner and started to move his left arm in the motion of masturbating," she said. "SSG Frederick thought it was amusing and told Cpl. [Charles A.] Graner and Spec. Ambuhl to come see."
Graner and Frederick motioned for England "to get beside him and pose pointing at him masturbating for a picture," she said. "I really didn't want to get close to him masturbating, but posed for the picture anyway."
In her statement, England said Graner asked her to pose in another photo that has become famous. He told her there was a prisoner named Gus telling guards that he "hated Americans and wanted to kill us," she said. "Cpl. Graner had suggested he take a picture of me with Gus pretending to drag him on a leash-type thing."
Graner put the leash around the neck of the detainee, who was lying naked on the floor, and handed it to her, she said.
"I did not drag or pull on the leash," she said. "I simply stood with the strap in my hand."
Since she gave her statements to investigators in January, England -- who is five months pregnant with Graner's child, according to Zapor -- has been transferred to the Army base at Fort Bragg, N.C., while she waits to learn whether she will be court-martialed. Graner's attorney, Guy Womack, has not returned telephone messages left for him in recent days.
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2 Journalists Subpoenaed Over Source of Disclosure
May 23, 2004
By ADAM LIPTAK and PETER T. KILBORN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/politics/23LEAK.html
federal grand jury has subpoenaed at least two journalists, Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press" and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, to testify about whether the Bush White House leaked the identity of an undercover C.I.A. officer to the news media.
Lawyers for NBC and Time said they would fight the subpoenas. NBC said its subpoena could have a "chilling effect" on its ability to report the news.
In a statement, Neal Shapiro, the network's president, said, "Sources will simply stop speaking with the press if they fear those conversations will become public."
The special counsel investigating the disclosure, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, has repeatedly declined to comment, so so it is unclear whether the subpoenas will lead to indictments.
Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer in New York who is representing Mr. Cooper, was skeptical. "Rounding up the Washington press corps doesn't seem the most likely way to find out about sources," Mr. Abrams said.
Robin Bierstedt, vice president and deputy general counsel of Time Inc., said: "It is Time Inc.'s policy to protect its confidential sources. While we would like all of our reporting to be on the record, a promise of confidentiality is sometimes necessary to get information that would otherwise be unavailable."
The investigation follows the disclosure last summer of the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. officer, by Robert D. Novak, a syndicated columnist who did not name his sources.
Democrats have accused the White House of disclosing Ms. Plame's identity to get back at her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, for criticizing the war in Iraq.
Mr. Wilson had challenged President Bush's assertion in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq might be trying to buy uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa.
On a government mission months before the speech, Mr. Wilson went to Niger to investigate trade in uranium. He said he had found nothing to substantiate the allegations.
Subpoenas to the news media are rare, and many courts have acknowledged significant legal protections for the press. But the leading Supreme Court case, decided in 1972, rejected the argument that the First Amendment protected reporters from grand jury subpoenas seeking information about crimes they have witnessed.
In the Plame investigation, the journalists could be in a similar position. Not all leaks are crimes, but there is a law that specifically prohibits the disclosure of the identities of undercover intelligence operatives.
Last December, the White House agreed to appoint Mr. Fitzgerald, to track down the sources of Mr. Novak's report.
In 2001, the Justice Department disclosed that it had issued 88 subpoenas involving news reporters in the previous decade.
Seventeen of the subpoenas sought information about confidential sources, while others sought notes and other unpublished materials or testimony to verify what reporters had published or broadcast. The department, citing the need for grand jury secrecy, did not reveal whether any confidential sources had been disclosed.
Devereux Chatillon, an expert in First Amendment law at Sonnenschein, Nath & Rosenthal, a New York law firm, said the subpoenas in the Plame matter were surprising and troubling.
"Subpoenas to the press at all, much less for confidential sources, are extremely unusual, certainly from the federal government," Ms. Chatillon said. "Without protection for confidential sources, the press cannot report effectively on things like the Abu Ghraib scandal," she said, in reference to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers.
Peter T. Kilborn reported for this article from Washington.
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Feds Subpoena Tim Russert, Time Reporter
May 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Journalists-Subpoenaed.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Tim Russert from NBC and a journalist from Time Inc. have received federal subpoenas to face questioning about the alleged leak of an undercover CIA weapons expert's identity, but both news organizations said Sunday they would fight the subpoenas.
The companies said the subpoenas came from a special grand jury investigating whether the Bush administration improperly disclosed the identity of the agent, Valerie Plame, after her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson, publicly challenged the White House's claim that Iraq had been trying to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons from Africa.
Wilson has charged that officials made the disclosure in an effort to discredit him.
Plame was first identified as a CIA specialist on weapons of mass destruction by syndicated columnist and TV commentator Robert Novak last July. Novak said his information came from administration sources, but has declined to name them.
NBC and Time said the subpoenas were aimed at Russert, the ``Meet the Press'' host and moderator, and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper, both of whom have reported on the Plame controversy.
Novak's office has declined repeatedly to say whether he has been subpoenaed or cooperated with investigators.
NBC News president Neal Shapiro said the Russert subpoena was misdirected because he was ``not the recipient of the leak.'' The subpoena, he said, would have a ``potential chilling effect'' on the network's ability to report the news.
``The American public will be deprived of important information if the government can freely question journalists about their efforts to gather news,'' Shapiro said in a statement. ``Sources will simply stop speaking to the press if they fear those conversations will become public.''
Robin Bierstedt, a Time Inc. vice president and deputy general counsel, said the Time subpoena referred to two articles by Cooper and others, one on the Time.com Web site on July 17, 2003, and the other in the magazine's June 21, 2003 issue.
Time planned to file a motion next month asking that the subpoena be quashed, she said.
``It is Time Inc.'s policy to protect its confidential sources,'' she said. ``While we would like all of our reporting to be on the record, a promise of confidentiality is sometimes necessary to get information that would otherwise be unavailable.''
Patrick J. Sullivan, a special counsel in the grand jury inquiry, has repeatedly declined to comment on the case.
Justice Department guidelines for criminal prosecutions state that all avenues should be explored before reporters are subpoenaed or approached in an investigation. The issuing of new subpoenas for reporters may indicate that the investigation is nearing an end.
-------- propaganda wars
Rumsfeld bans cameras
Sun May 23, 2004
AFP / Antiwar.com blog
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P946
In keeping with the current neocon/republican argument that the Iraqi prisoner torture problem isn't as bad as the fact that incontrovertible evidence of it in the form of gruesome video and digital images has been made public, Rumsfeld has banned.....not torture, but cameras.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1114150.htm
Mobile phones fitted with digital cameras have been banned in United States Army installations in Iraq on orders from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, The Business newspaper reported on Sunday.
Quoting a Pentagon source, the paper said the US Defence Department believes that some of the damning photos of US soldiers abusing Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad were taken with camera phones.
"Digital cameras, camcorders and mobile phones with cameras have been prohibited in military compounds in Iraq," it said.
A "total ban throughout the US military" is in the works, it added.
-------- us politics
Kucinich - Hunter debate on Iraq
Meet the Press (NBC News)
Sunday, May 23, 2004
(202) 885-4598, Sundays: (202) 885-4200
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5045125/
MR. RUSSERT: Coming next, a debate on the future of U.S. involvement in Iraq with Republican House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter and Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich. They are both right here on MEET THE PRESS.
Congressman Hunter and Kucinich, welcome both.
Congressman Hunter, George Bush, our president, has said stay the course in Iraq. What does that mean?
REP. HUNTER: Well, I think what it means is that what we just saw with Mr. Chalabi and the prison mess are side shows. The real focus here should be on winning the war, we're making this transition, this hand over to the interim government on June 30. I talked to Ambassador Bremer a couple days ago. He's already working with Mr. Brahimi. Brahimi is putting together this interim government that's going to be carrying the ball until the the last of the year when the national assembly is elected.
So, you know, none of these things go forward in neat packages. And it's been tough, it's been rough, we've had 33 attacks on American forces in the last 24 hours. That's what we should be focusing on, and the U.S. Congress should be focusing on getting this defense bill out that the House passed the other day but the Senate, mired in this prison mess, hasn't gotten their bill out. We need to get that out, get it to the president, get the troops the tools that they need to get the job done, and let's hand this thing over.
MR. RUSSERT: When you say "winning the war," how do you define winning the war?
REP. HUNTER: I think you we put together--we're not going to turn Iraq into Republicans and Democrats, and Lord knows, you listen to Mr. Chalabi, there's going to be more stories of intrigue than you can shake a stick at, but what we have a chance to do is to have a nation that has a modicum of freedom for its people, basic freedoms for its people, and is benign with respect to its relationship with the United States. It is not a cohesive force, and in that sense, to some degree, we've won the war in that we've dispelled--we've gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. We don't have an Iraq that's a cohesive force that can be a danger to the United States. Now, we have to see if we can hopefully make Iraq a cohesive force for freedom.
But if we don't, if we have an Iraq that plods forward, and has a modicum of freedom for its people, has a loose-knit coalition of these very disparate factions and groups, we will still have been very successful. And now we're making the hand-off and we've got to make--along with the political hand-off, we've got to make a military hand-off. It's time to put some weight on the shoulders of the Iraqi military, and you can't teach responsibility, you've got to give it. So my recommendation to the administration is to make sure we make a military hand-off and start putting some major responsibility on the Iraqi military forces.
MR. RUSSERT: Congressman Kucinich?
REP. KUCINICH: Well, we're making progress when it's being said that we ought to bring our troops home, and I think that we have to recognize that this president led this country into an unnecessary war. We're in a quagmire right now, and they don't have an exit strategy. It's imperative that we not only have an exit strategy but a peace plan. And that's frankly what I've been talking about for the last six months, Tim, that we have to have a plan which enables the U.N. to get involved on an interim basis to handle the oil assets, to handle the contracts. There should be no privatization. Ask the U.N. to help with elections and a constitution. We should pay to rebuild what we destroyed, pay reparations to the families of innocent civilian non-combatants who lost their lives, help pay for a U.N. peacekeeping mission, bring in the U.N. peacekeepers, bring our troops home.
MR. RUSSERT: I had Kofi Annan, the secretary-general of the U.N., on a few weeks ago and said there is no blue-helmet international peacekeeping force.
REP. KUCINICH: Well, that's true.
MR. RUSSERT: So who is going to come in and replace the United States? Where are these countries knocking on our door, begging to come in?
REP. KUCINICH: Well, I'm speaking, of course, about the U.S. taking a new direction. I have here a list of active-duty personnel by country, which the Security Council alone has 6.2 million. If you subtract the United States, you still have nearly 5 million from the Security Council. From the Middle East, you have a total of 2.8 million troops. I mean, it's clear that the United States would have to take a new direction, away from unilateralism and away from pre-emption and away from away from the failed policies of this administration.
MR. RUSSERT: Security Council, you mean France and Russia, China would send troops to Iraq?
REP. KUCINICH: Tim, I'm absolutely suggesting that if this country takes a new direction, you know, and turns away from the failed policies of this administration that we can engage the world community, but it means that we have to give up control of the oil assets, give up control of contracts, stop trying to privatize Iraq and step up to our responsibility. The American people should know that it is possible to have a peace plan and an exit strategy and that we can bring our troops home and that's what we should be focusing on. Unfortunately, this administration led this country into an unnecessary war it's created a real mess. I mean, look what they've done to our country.
MR. RUSSERT: What does that mean?
REP. KUCINICH: Well, what they've done to our country is that as you said earlier, 793 deaths, almost 5,000 injuries, $200 billion has been spent at the cost of money that should have been going for education, veterans' benefits, health, job creation. And over 10,000 innocent Iraqis have lost their lives.
MR. RUSSERT: Congressman...
REP. KUCINICH: I mean, our international credibility has been undermined, and I think, you know, this alone points out why it's important to take a new direction.
MR. RUSSERT: Two things he raised, Congressman Hunter. One is an unnecessary war...
REP. HUNTER: That's right.
MR. RUSSERT: ...and two, the United Nations could supplement the United States or even replace the United States security.
REP. HUNTER: Well, first, Tim, I keep a picture in the top drawer of my desk which is a picture of the Kurdish mothers killed in midstride with their children by poison gas by Saddam Hussein. And those pictures are every bit as compelling as the death camps of Germany. So the idea that this war is not justified is something that I don't accept. But secondly, let's look at the United Nations and the contribution of the United Nations. Korea was a United Nations war, but Americans carried that war, and we supplied the troops, even in Bosnia, which was arguably the small barbell that the Europeans could lift. You ended up with the Americans doing all the heavy lifting, doing all the air to refueling, all the expensive stuff while the Europeans hung back in what was their operation.
So you have 30 members of this coalition, and sure, when you go down past the Brits and you get down past the British and the Polish militaries, you go down pretty rapidly. But you know what's interesting? There's some Salvadorians there, and remember, we weren't supposed to bring freedom to Salvador. That was supposed to be conceded. There's Poles there. Those were the people that were behind the wall that Mr. Reagan said bring down. So this century has been a rough, tough century in terms of bringing freedom to other nations, but we have a good chance to be able to do that. We've got right now, Mr. Brahimi is working on these choices right now for this hand-off. This thing's going to take place. The first members of this Cabinet are going to be announced in the next seven to 10 days, talking to Ambassador Bremer yesterday, so we're on the verge of making this turnover.
And I would say this. If you had the U.N. stamped all over Iraq, if it's anything like Bosnia, if it's anything like Korea or any other U.N. operations, Uncle Sam will be carrying the brunt anyway. We supply the troops for the simple reason that our allies don't spend much money on defense. They have very small forces, and they can't do a lot.
MR. RUSSERT: Are you...
REP. KUCINICH: If I may, Tim, you know, respectfully, the administration's whole case for this war is totally falling apart. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, with al-Qaeda's role in 9/11, with the anthrax attack. Iraq had neither the intention, nor the capability of attacking the United States, was not trying to get uranium from Niger, did not have weapons of mass destruction. And yet the administration, the president refuses to admit that he made a mistake. I mean, there has to be accountability here. There must be accountability. It appears that the only place that the buck stops in this administration is in Halliburton's bank account.
REP. HUNTER: You know, that's very interesting, Tim. First, General Kimmitt announced that the first round that has been tested positive for sarin, which is a weapon of mass destruction, was discovered last week by two GIs, who were dismantling IEDs. Both the GIs got sick carrying this thing back. I've gotten a picture from Iraq. This has tested positive for weapons of mass destruction--that is for sarin-- with both the American force that's on the ground and the British force and it's now back in the United States for final testing or more testing, more thorough testing.
That is a picture of the 130mm mortar round that was found in Iraq that General Kimmitt talked about. If so, the important aspect of this is we are finding dozens of weapons caches every month. This is one that comes from a cache that obviously we don't know about, and that has...
REP. KUCINICH: Can I see that?
REP. HUNTER: Sure, you can see it. In fact, you can have that, Dennis.
REP. KUCINICH: Thank you.
REP. HUNTER: And let me give you one...
REP. KUCINICH: Duncan, are you saying this is why we went to war? Come on.
REP. HUNTER: No, you watch...
REP. KUCINICH: This is incredible.
REP. HUNTER: You watch the women and children laid out across that hillside dead, Dennis; that's one reason we went to war, and not on the statements of Mr. Chalabi, but on Hans Blix, who talked about the 8,500 liters of anthrax that Saddam Hussein put together, that he had according to his own records, all of which would fit, Tim, in one pickup truck with good sideboards.
MR. RUSSERT: But, Congressman, you would acknowledge that the amount of weapons of mass destruction that the administration had talked about, and the potential nuclear threat, has not been realized at the levels that had been suggested.
REP. HUNTER: Listen, the facts are the facts. This is what we've found so far. On the other hand, this is the first weapon of mass destruction, and these first two tests by the Iraqi survey group and the British survey group are borne out by more tests, but their tests are pretty accurate. This will be the first one that's been found in Iraq. And the point is, it comes from a location that we obviously didn't know about, and we are finding dozens of these things every month.
But I would just say you don't have--this is not a game where Saddam Hussein wins if we don't find these weapons. I said a long time ago that when we had that first intercept from the Iraqi general to his colonels--he said, "I'm coming to see you in the morning." That was the day before November 26, when a U.N. survey team was going to get to their location. He said, and I quote, "I'm coming to see you in the morning. I'm worried that you have something left." His colonel answered back, "There's nothing left. We've evacuated everything." Now, what part of "evacuated" don't we understand?
MR. RUSSERT: Congressman Kucinich, are you concerned if the United States withdraws its military troops that Iraq could break down into total chaos, total instability and become a haven for terrorism like Afghanistan was?
REP. KUCINICH: Well, first of all, I'm speaking of U.N. peacekeepers coming in on an interim basis and rotating U.S. troops out. I mean, so there would be a presence of international peacekeeping. What we have to be concerned about here is that a long-term United States commitment will only mean a deepening war, more casualties, greater costs to this country, destruction of our budget. I mean, you know, this administration has not yet taken accountability, Tim, and that's got to be a real concern to all of us because they won't admit they made a mistake. You know, they won't admit to that.
And, you know, even now, this idea that somehow they're finding weapons of mass destruction--I don't think even the White House is really willing to try to stand very strong on that shaky ground. It was wrong to go in and it's wrong to stay in. But what we must do is have a plausible exit strategy, which this administration doesn't have, and a peace plan. Tim, I've had this peace plan on my Web site at kucinich.us for the last four months. I mean, it's--you know, it's not as though no one's thought of a way out, that the administration wants to tell us they're going to hand over sovereignty, but you know what? They're not talking about bringing our troops home.
MR. RUSSERT: The Democratic candidate for president, John Kerry, voted to authorize the war. Do you believe he's held George Bush accountable?
REP. KUCINICH: Well, you know, I support John Kerry, but I want to say that I think that this is George Bush's war, and George Bush has to be accountable.
REP. HUNTER: Very simply, Tim, we're on the verge of making this handoff. Within seven to 10 days, you're going to have the first Cabinet officials named by Mr. Brahimi for this interim government. In December, at the end of the year, you're going to have a national assembly elected, and this will be the first time from the dawn of time when Iraqis were able to vote for their own government. Now, I think that we're going to see stars arising, people--leadership percolating up, just as they do in any country where people get to go to the polls and vote and cast ballots and not bullets.
So we're moving ahead. It's a tough process. It's not wrapped in neat packages. The bad guys are doing everything they can in this upswell of violence to keep this from happening, but it's going forward. And when we get the so-called--if we have--and we are using--incidentally, the U.N. is helping to put these elections on. We're using their blueprint to put elections on. But anytime you have an U.N. force, the idea that somehow it's this great force, that all these nations spring up and the United States becomes a very small part of the force is nonsense. In all of our major U.N. operations, it's been Uncle Sam that carried the ball, spent all the money and provided most of the troops. And you're going to see in this coalition of 30 nations, which is in country right now--you're not going to see a lot of difference. If you have a U.N. force, you're going to have the Brits, the Americans, the Aussies, the Poles and right down the line.
MR. RUSSERT: I gave Congressman Hunter the first word. I'll give you the last word.
REP. KUCINICH: Well, I think it's very obvious that this country's been dragged into a war that was unjustified, unnecessary. Now, we have to get out. We have to have an exit strategy and a peace plan. I think the American people are waiting to see if the White House will produce that. I know that it's imperative that we recognize that this whole thing was a blunder and that it's costing the United States dearly in terms of the lives of our brave men and women, our tax dollars, innocent people being killed in Iraq. It's time to take a new direction where we're not mired in this situation in Iraq, and I say we have to bring our troops home. And that means the United States should not even be part of any U.N. peacekeeping mission. Our presence there keeps our troops in jeopardy. We have to bring them home.
MR. RUSSERT: To be continued. Congressman Hunter and Congressman Kucinich, thanks very much.
REP. KUCINICH: Thank you.
REP. HUNTER: Good to be with you.
MR. RUSSERT: And our Roundtable is next: the impact of the war on the John Kerry-George Bush presidential race.
--------
President Plans Drive To Rescue Iraq Policy
Speeches, U.N. Action Will Focus on Future
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48487-2004May22.html
President Bush will launch an ambitious campaign tomorrow night to shift attention from recent setbacks that have eroded domestic and international support for U.S. policy in Iraq, particularly the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the escalating violence, and focus instead on the future of post-occupation Iraq.
The president will open a tightly orchestrated public relations effort in a speech at the Army War College outlining U.S. plans for the critical five weeks before the limited transfer of political power June 30. The White House then intends to circulate this week a draft U.N. resolution on post-occupation Iraq, wrap up negotiations with Iraqis on an interim government and begin shoring up the coalition to ensure that other foreign forces also stay after June 30, U.S. officials said.
"There's a sense that this week is our chance to create some movement in a different direction. We'll start talking about the future, not the past, by focusing on the U.N. resolution and [U.N. envoy Lakhdar] Brahimi's transition process. Sure there'll still be plenty of arguments, but it will be about the future, and that's a healthy change," said a senior State Department official who would speak only on condition of anonymity.
The diplomatic campaign is a response to serious reversals over the past two months and to growing turmoil. Last week alone, the U.S.-appointed president of the Iraqi Governing Council was assassinated and a cabinet official was almost killed in a suicide bombing; in a disputed episode, more than 40 people were killed by U.S. troops at what Iraqis said was a wedding party; and 16 arrest warrants were issued for aides or associates of Ahmed Chalabi, a longtime Pentagon favorite to help lead postwar Iraq, on charges related to financial issues, leading him to sever ties with the U.S.-led coalition.
The road ahead could get bumpier. France and Germany are urging that any new U.N. resolution stipulate a cutoff date for U.S. and foreign forces in Iraq. And negotiations by the U.N. and U.S. envoys in charge of identifying a new president, prime minister, two vice presidents and more than two dozen cabinet ministers have been complicated by a Kurdish threat not to participate unless a Kurd gets one of the two top positions.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) criticized Bush's plans for Iraq's future as imprecise. "I am very hopeful that the president and his administration will articulate precisely what is going to happen as much as they can, day by day, as opposed to a generalization," the Associated Press quoted Lugar as saying yesterday at Tufts University.
In the first of at least six presidential speeches on Iraq before June 30, Bush will particularly try to counter growing criticism that Washington has lowered the goal posts for its year-long occupation, U.S. officials said. Critics and Iraq experts have charged that the administration has backed down from its original pledge to create a strong new democracy that would be a catalyst for a broad political transformation in the Middle East and is instead settling on an exit strategy that will leave a fragile government unable to protect itself.
"He will talk about the importance of not lowering our sights and sticking to our goals of a free, peaceful, democratic Iraq, of adhering to our commitment to the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, and of an election in a January time frame," said a White House official who insisted on anonymity.
Bush will also explain the U.S. security and political roles after June 30 until Iraq winds up the second of the three phases -- with the first democratic elections next January -- in the transition to a permanent government by the end of 2005, U.S. officials said. "He'll talk about the importance of Iraqis taking more and more responsibility for security in their own country and about our efforts to train up a professional army and security force," said the White House official.
After the Bush speech, the administration will circulate the text of a new U.N. resolution pledging to transfer "full sovereignty" to Iraq, compromise language addressing Iraqi and European requests that the United States not retain any powers after June 30, U.S. officials said. To get around French and German demands, the United States may offer to give Iraq the authority to decide whether it wants foreign forces to continue to provide security, the officials said.
The general U.S. hope is that both Iraqis and key U.N. members will view the language on the top political and security issues as a signal of Washington's commitment to cede control as soon as possible. The draft resolution, which is not expected to be put up for a vote until after the new Iraqi government is announced, will also underscore that the use of Iraq's resources, most notably oil, will be determined by Iraqis, U.S. officials said.
Before the Memorial Day weekend, the White House hopes Brahimi and U.S. presidential envoy to Iraq Robert D. Blackwill will put the most critical final piece in play by announcing the new interim government, although this will depend on wrapping up complicated negotiations among Iraq's ethnic and religious factions. The joint U.N.-U.S. team thought it had a tentative slate for the top four jobs until Kurdish leaders balked at settling for the vice presidency, forcing further talks, U.S. officials said.
To turn the tide, the Bush administration also hopes to generate movement on the two other most pressing issues in the volatile Middle East -- the Palestinian-Israeli crisis and the U.S. democracy initiative for the greater Middle East.
"The only way out of this hole is to keep our promises: to punish the people responsible for Abu Ghraib, to really turn over authority and full sovereignty to Iraqis, and to help the Palestinians take advantage of the opportunity offered by Israel [to turn over the Gaza strip] and to support reform," said the senior State Department official.
To shore up the coalition, Bush will also begin hosting leaders of countries that have troops in Iraq. The United States is intent on stopping contributing nations from pulling out after the June 30 handover, because some nations have mandates to stay in Iraq only until the U.S.-led occupation ends. Spain and Honduras have withdrawn troops, partly in response to the escalating violence.
Bush will host Salvadoran President Francisco Flores on Thursday and Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen on Friday, the White House announced last week. Among European nations, Denmark has been stalwart in its support for the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq -- a stark contrast to France, Germany and Russia, which opposed the war to topple Saddam Hussein.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
US isolated as Russia moves to back Kyoto
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
23 May 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=523978&host=3&dir=507
President George Bush's bid to stop international action to combat global warming faces failure this weekend, as he is left more isolated than ever before both at home and abroad.
Russia's President Vladimir Putin - who will effectively decide whether the Kyoto Protocol stands or falls - announced on Friday that his country would "rapidly move towards ratification" in the wake of a complex deal with the European Union.
One British source close to negotiating the deal said yesterday that the announcement was "more than I had dared to hope". Another said he thought it increased the likelihood of the treaty coming into effect "from less that 50 per cent to about 90 per cent".
Mr Bush is also coming under increasing pressure at home from industry, Congress and Republican governors. The Senate, unanimously opposed to the Kyoto Protocol seven years ago, is expected to pass a resolution backing strong action on global warming next year, whoever wins the US presidential election.
Mr Putin's announcement, by far the strongest statement of support for the treaty that he has yet made, immediately followed the EU's agreement, at a Moscow summit, to drop objections to Russia joining the World Trade Organisation.
Under the protocol's complex terms, Russia's support is all that is needed to bring it into effect. But over recent months, President Putin has been predicted to reject it, dooming it to failure.
Mr Putin's economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, has been increasingly strident in his condemnations; he described it last month as an "economic Auschwitz".
Last week, a report by experts from the Russian Academy of Sciences, led by Professor Yuri Israel, another prominent critic, told the President that ratifying the treaty would damage the country's economy. And on the eve of the summit senior Russian government sources were insisting that Kyoto would not be on the agenda.
Yet, almost unnoticed, Mr Putin has been inching in the opposite direction. In a meeting with Romano Prodi, the President of the European Commission, last month, he privately distanced himself from Mr Illarionov. In another, with the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, he discreetly intimated that Russia might soon endorse the treaty.
Concern about the US's policies in Iraq has played a part in the shift, as has a desire for warmer relations with the EU, now Russia's neighbour following the accession of Eastern European countries this month. But the crucial factor has been gas prices. Russians pay only a fifth as much for the fuel as its overseas customers; until now the EU has insisted that prices must be equalised, at the risk of severe damage to the economy, if Russia is to be allowed to join the WTO.
Friday's deal, brokered by the EU trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy, will let Russia join the organisation so long as it doubles the domestic price. Mr Putin, who has been using Kyoto as a bargaining counter, can present this at home as an important political victory. It will also provide a boost to the growing support in the US for action on global warming. Opinion polls show that 70-80 per cent of Americans want their government to take the lead on combating climate change.
Surprisingly, Mr Bush is under pressure from the industry responsible for much of the pollution: electric power companies owning nearly two-fifths of US generating capacity have endorsed legislation that would compulsorily limit their emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global-warming gas. There are even indications that ExxonMobil, the main industry cheerleader for the President's position, is beginning to change its stance.
Three key Republican-governed states - California, New York and Massachusetts - have parted company with the President and moved to take aggressive measures to reduce emissions. Both houses of Congress have called on the Bush administration to return to the negotiating table.
The US will not join Kyoto as it stands. But a deal looks more possible this weekend than at any time since Mr Bush took office.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Poison Dust: A New Look At Radioactive Weapons in the Gulf
Forum at the UN Church Center
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
http://www.iacenter.org/du_forum052504.htm
PDF Flyer http://www.iacenter.org/images/poisondust.pdf
As the brutal occupation of Iraq continues, new revelations of U.S. war crimes emerge every day. One such crime is the use of Depleted Uranium weapons. Depleted Uranium is both chemically toxic and radioactive, and is linked to the symptoms known as Gulf War Syndrome.
Today, half of the 697,000 veterans of the First Gulf War suffer serious medical problems and a significant increase in birth defects. The effects on the Iraqi people have been much greater. This crime against humanity must be exposed.
The Depleted Uranium Project was formed to expose the impact of this illegal weapon and to put an end to its use. Over the past 6 years, we have produced a great deal of educational material, including a widely-read book and companion video, Medal of Dishonor. To that end, we are currently working on several projects, which include:
The production of a new, updated documentary exposing the use and effects of depleted uranium. This film, Poison Dust, will be available to educators, activists, military personnel, and others. This film, which will graphically document the horrifying damage caused by depleted uranium weapons, will be an important tool in building a movement to stop this crime.
A national tour to screen the DU film Poison Dust near military bases. The documentary, along with presentations by veterans and health care professionals, will bring this important information directly to military personnel and their families, who are directly affected by depleted uranium.
"Poison Dust," a forum to be held at the UN Church Center on Tuesday, May 25, to launch this new project before the media and the international community and to demand: full testing, full health care and compensation, decontamination, and reparations to all victims of depleted uranium. Speakers will include: former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark; physicist Dr. Michio Kaku; Juan Gonzalez, Daily News reporter and host of Democracy Now; and GIs and Veterans affected by DU weapons.
The publication of new educational literature to expose the use of these deadly and illegal weapons of mass destruction by the U.S. military.
Please join us in building a movement to stop this war crime. This is an ambitious but urgently needed educational program. A great deal of work has been done already, but much more remains to be done. We need your help to finish the video and educational resources. Please consider sending a tax-deductible donation to the People's Rights Fund /DU Project to help us with this important work. (All Donors will be listed in the film credits)
Yours in the struggle,
Dustin Langley, SNAFU Sue Harris, Peoples Video Network Billy Martin, Movement in Motion Sara Flounders, International Action Center
Tuesday, May 25, from 6:30 to 9:30 pm at the U.N. Church Center, 777 UN Plaza, 44th St. and !st Ave
----
Bush team shrugs off Cannes result
May 23, 2004
Australian
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9640894%5E1702,00.html
THE White House refused to be riled today by a decision to award the Cannes film festival's top prize to a documentary harshly critical of US President George W. Bush and his decision to invade Iraq.
"It's a free country. It's what makes America great. Everyone has the right to say what they want. And beyond that, we're not going to comment," White House spokeswoman Suzy DeFrancis said.
Fahrenheit 9/11, by provocative left-wing US writer and director Michael Moore, became the first documentary to win the festival's coveted Palme d'Or, boosting its chances of becoming a global box-office hit.
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------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
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Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.