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NUCLEAR
Cancer patients hit by nuclear reactor shutdown
The Wounded, the Sick, the Forgotten
Health report on Superfund site delayed
Indo-Pak Tension May Land Nuke Arms In Wrong Hands: Kerry
Tough US rhetoric as Iran's nuclear intent remains unclear
U.S. says Tehran is hiding nuclear plans
West's spies missed Libya nuke shipment from Turkey
Battling proliferation - Win some, lose some
Administration Plans Significant Reduction in Nuclear Weapons Stockpile
Oppenheimer's security chief recalls famous scientist
Nuclear Dangers Proliferate in Georgia
Hanford contractor is criticized over safety issues
Three Mile Island a million times over
U.S. Finds Flaws, Not Crimes, at Nuclear Site in Washington State
Energy IG Finds No Misconduct at Hanford
Hanford vapor studies vary
Shortcut on Nuclear Waste
MILITARY
Aid Agency Halts Operations in Afghanistan
Relief Agency Suspends Afghan Operations
Ukraine military officials fired over arms depot blasts
Turkey discovers contraband missile, missile heads bound for Egypt
BAE rolls over General Dynamics with winning bid for tank maker Alvis
China Dissidents Missing on Eve of Tiananmen Anniversary
OPEC aims to put limit on 'boiling' price of oil
Powell: Iraq Will Have No Veto on U.S.-Led Force
To Many, Mission Not Accomplished
Fighting in Kufa Signals End of Truce
Iraqi Ayatollah Cautiously Acknowledges New Government
Egypt Eager to Help Israel Out of Gaza
'Special methods' at Guantanamo
Private spaceship set for launch in US
CIA venture arm funds Mass. firm
Spooked?
'Time Is Right to Move On,' C.I.A. Director Tells Employees
An Unusually Close Relationship Comes to an End
Polygraph Testing Starts at Pentagon in Chalabi Inquiry
U.S. Faces Payback On Iraq Resolution
U.N. Envoy Wants New Iraq Government to Court Foes of Occupation
Army Extending Service for G.I.'s Due in War Zones
Soldiers Facing Extended Tours
Sexual Assaults In Army On Rise
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
You Have Rights -- if Bush Says You Do
US frantic to soften harsh language in UN rights report on Iraq
Ohio Prisons Go Gladly to the Dogs
Did al-Qaida trainee warn FBI before 9/11?
POLITICS
With Some Strings Attached, Senate Approves War Money
Republicans Ponder Not Adopting a Budget This Year
Media Vows to Pry Open Closed Doors in Washington
Plan to Allow Appointed Successors Is Defeated
Clinton's team aids Kerry on military
Kerry Condemns White House Support for Chalabi
Kerry to call for 40,000 new troops for overextended US Army
Bush Knew About Leak of CIA Operative's Name
Bush Consults Lawyer About CIA Name Leak
Bush Finds Lawyer to Use if Called in Leak Case
Bush Real Target of Chalabi Smear
ENERGY
China can use wind power to 'leapfrog' over polluting energy
OTHER
Cancer death rates drop across the U.S.
ACTIVISTS
Tiananmen Protesters Wish for New System
Boston Protester Faces Felony Charges
Midwest city feels conflict in the Mideast close to home
Soldiers, Families Speak Out on War
Vanunu lawyers urge Israeli supreme court to ease restrictions
Anti-War Group Enlists Father of Beheaded American
Anti-war camp rallies for Bush arrival
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- canada
Cancer patients hit by nuclear reactor shutdown
By Aban Contractor
June 3, 2004
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/02/1086058923663.html
Up to 8000 cancer patients missed out on treatment or had treatment put on hold after the nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights was shut down for 40 days this year.
The reactor produces enough medical radioisotopes in a month for about 40,000 doses to be distributed to hospital patients - including those with secondary cancers, thyroid disorders and severe bone pain from cancer.
The director of government and public affairs at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, Ron Cameron, estimated that between 10 and 20 per cent of patients could have been affected by the shutdown.
Nuclear physicians inject radio-pharmaceuticals for diagnostic and treatment purposes.
About 550,000 people rely on the High Flux Australian Reactor for diagnosis and radiotherapy treatment in Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia.
"Some got no treatment, some [treatment] was postponed. Operations were rescheduled," Dr Cameron said yesterday.
"If doctors are given enough notice they can reschedule so patients are not upset by radioisotopes not being available." Advertisement Advertisement
Earlier, organisation officials told the Senate employment, workplace relations and education committee in Canberra that the reactor had been shut down in March for an overhaul which occurs every four years.
When the reactor was shut down for three to four days radioisotopes were usually able to be transported on international flights or produced in advance.
Labor's science and industry spokesman, Senator Kim Carr, said ANSTO officers had told the committee that the old reactor would have to shut in 2006 because it had run out of fuel.
"What we need to know is what contingency plans are in place to ensure that sick and dying people will not be denied necessary treatment," Senator Carr said.
The Australian Medical Association's spokesman on radiation cancer treatment, Dr Allan Zimet, was not aware of the shutdown and said it did not seem to have had any effect on cancer services.
The committee was later told by the Australian Research Council that the annual report for the National Stem Cell Centre would not be made public.
-------- depleted uranium
The Wounded, the Sick, the Forgotten
Memorial Day is Not Just for the Dead
By DIANE REJMAN
June 3, 2004
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/rejman06032004.html
Memorial Day is traditionally a day to honor those soldiers who have given their lives in protecting our country. This year, we need to expand the list of those we honor.
First of all, women, children, the elderly, and the sick are included in the 150 million souls who were killed in wars in the 20th century.
And then there are the wounded, whose lives are permanently damaged. In Iraq, the great new technology used in body armor means less soldiers are being killed, but more are returning with missing arms, legs, and faces. Not all physical wounds are obvious. After decades, the government finally acknowledged the damage Agent Orange did to soldiers in Vietnam, only after long, difficult battles by damaged veterans.
The new agent orange is depleted uranium. Contrary to popular belief, depleted uranium is still radioactive. We used 300 tons of it in Gulf I, and over 2,000 tons in the current war. When used, DU becomes aerosalized. These minute particles have ended up in the sand, air, water and food supplies throughout Iraq. Its damage to the human body includes kidney and vision problems, cancers, and an increased rate of birth defects and stillborns. As with agent orange, our government is denying these claims by our veterans.
There is also serious psychological and emotional damage done to a large number of those involved in war. Images of fellow soldiers' body parts splayed on the ground or in the front seat of a jeep will stay with the person forever. As will memories of the infant blown to pieces by the soldier's rifle. War is not noble or pretty.
The toll grows. Each injured soldier and civilian has families and friends who will be affected, either as a lifetime caregiver, or as someone who may realize they do not have the power to help their psychologically damaged loved ones. The estimated 500,000 Vietnam veterans living in the streets of America are testimony to these kinds of victims.
There are simply too many people for us to have to memorialize. And it is criminal to increase those numbers because of the lies of a small group of power hungry individuals.
Veterans for Peace is a non-profit educational and humanitarian organization dedicated to abolishing war. One of our goals is to increase awareness of the costs of war. The damage to individuals and families is a big part of these costs, but other significant costs include damage to the environment, and all of the social good that is sacrificed because of war's huge financial costs. Another great cost from our current war involves the loss of many of our rights, such as our right to privacy and free speech. The soul of our country and our world is damaged with every new act of violence.
In order to bring awareness to these costs, and to promote the other parts of VFP's mission, a group of us will be spending 23 days on a cross-country Stop the War bus trip. We are planning a series of media events along the way. We encourage your participation, vicariously through our website. (http://homepage.mac.com/gordonsoderberg/roadtrip/index3.html)
We realize we cannot change the world, but the world can be changed one person at a time. This is who we are reaching out to, every individual who can make any kind of difference in their own lives.
I'd like to end with a quote by Martin Luther King: "Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love". I believe there are few things in this world which stand against love more harshly than war.
The best way to honor our soldiers on this memorial day is to bring them home now.
Diane Rejman is a member of Veterans for Peace. She is listed in Who's Who in America, and holds an MBA from Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management. She gave this talk as a guest speaker at the First Presbytarian Church in Palo Alto, CA. She can be contacted at yespeaceispossible@yahoo.com
----
Health report on Superfund site delayed
By Davis Bushnell,
Boston Globe Correspondent,
June 3, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/06/03/health_report_on_superfund_site_delayed/
A public health report on W.R. Grace & Co.'s 260-acre Superfund site in South Acton has been delayed at least two months due to additional, routine surface, ground water, and sediment analyses, according to US Environmental Protection Agency officials.
The risk-assessment report, covering potential human and environmental risks, had been slated to be released last month. But now, a draft of the report is likely to be available ''at the end of July or early August," said Sarah White, a community involvement coordinator for the federal agency.
A Winchester environmental consulting firm, Menzie Cura & Associates Inc., is preparing the report for Grace, whose South Acton property went on the Superfund list in 1983. Five years earlier, chemicals from Grace's battery-separator facility had seeped into two town wells, which were subsequently closed.
Since 1984, the company has been cleaning up ground water, noted Derrick Golden, the EPA's remedial project manager for the Grace property. ''The majority of this cleanup work has been done," he said.
Acton public health director Douglas Halley and the head of a local activist group, Mary Michelman, said the risk-assessment report delay is not a major slippage in the overall process.
''We're still treading water," in terms of finding out about specific risks, if there are any, ''but I think things generally have been going very smoothly," Halley said.
Grace project manager Maryellen Johns said she also believes that matters concerning the site are proceeding smoothly. ''Grace is continuing to cooperate with the EPA, the state Department of Environmental Protection, and the town of Acton to conclude the risk-assessment plan and the site-feasibility study" she said.
Michelman, president of the Acton Citizens for Environmental Safety group, said, ''Everything always takes longer to accomplish, but this is now an open process with lots of people giving their input. Obviously, we're always seeking more information because we want this site to be maximally protective of public health."
If risks are identified in the report unveiled this summer, then there will be a feasibility study this fall, exploring techniques for reducing or eliminating these risks, Golden said, adding that the penultimate step would be a proposed cleanup plan.
Meantime, Halley's department and the EPA are continuing to study a plume of vinylidene chloride, or VDC, a likely carcinogen, in an area northeast of the Grace site.
''We're still hearing about the plume affecting irrigation wells," used for watering lawns, said Halley, who has been holding hearings on the matter. He has said there is ''no discernible health risk" from the VDC presence.
A monitoring report issued on May 4 revealed that ''the level of contaminants in the plume is decreasing," said the EPA's White.
As the exploration of the site continues, Halley said he expects Grace officials will still be cooperative in sharing all the information they have.
The Grace property off Independence Road is a short distance from the Starmet Corp. Superfund site off Route 62 in West Concord. A contractor is expected to be retained soon to remove more than 3,700 barrels of depleted uranium from the 46-acre site, which was placed on the EPA's list in June 2001. .
Davis Bushnell can be reached at bushnell@globe.com.
-------- india / pakistan
Indo-Pak Tension May Land Nuke Arms In Wrong Hands: Kerry
June 3, 2004
(NNN)
http://www.indolink.com/printArticleS.php?id=060204100819
New York: Senator John Kerry, the Democratic Party's presidential hopeful, sees the tension between India and Pakistan as having the potential of letting nuclear weapons fall into "terrorist hands."
John Kerry has promised to "lock up" the world's unsecured stockpiles of enriched uranium and plutonium by the end of 2008 to prevent Al-Qaeda terror network and other terrorist networks from obtaining the material to build a nuclear weapon.
Kerry, in the second of a cross-country series of speeches linking national security concerns to the latest mantra of his presidential campaign, "a stronger America," said he would emphasise speed and farsightedness in dealing with nuclear terrorism, which he said was the greatest threat to Americans since the end of the Cold War.
Within four years, he said, his administration would locate and secure nuclear material in Russia, the former Soviet States, Pakistan, and other countries, as well as remove highly enriched uranium from more than 130 research reactors in more than 40 countries that could be used to make nuclear bombs. Under current administration timetables, Kerry said, it would take 13 and 10 years, respectively, to accomplish both goals.
"The nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States may have ended, but the possibility of terrorists using nuclear weapons is very real indeed," Kerry told 300 invited guests on the docks of the Port of Palm Beach in Florida. "The question before us now, is what shadowy figures may someday have their finger on the nuclear button if we don't act."
As a 19-year member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the author of the book "The New War," which was hailed by some foreign policy specialists for its assessment about future security threats, Kerry has chosen to underscore nuclear terrorism not only because of the danger given Al-Qaeda's stated interest in acquiring the bomb but also to appear in command of a range of current and potential threats while portraying Bush as bogged down in Iraq.
Kerry took President Bush to task, accusing him of not facing up to such growing threats as unchecked nuclear programs in North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan, while remaining "fixated on Iraq."
"We must work with every country to tighten export controls, stiffen penalties, and beef up law enforcement and intelligence sharing, to make absolutely sure that a disaster like the A.Q. Khan black market network, which grew out of Pakistan's nuclear programme, can never happen again. We must also take steps to reduce tension between India and Pakistan and guard against the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands there."
Setting up a potential confrontation with the Russians, Kerry also said that at his first summit with the Russian President he would seek a pact on securing the former Soviet stockpiles a highly controversial process for Russian officials wary of such intrusive US actions, and one that has been mired by bureaucracy.
Kerry also pledged to appoint a national coordinator on nuclear terrorism and counter-proliferation, who would work in the White House and immediately ask United Nations Security Council members to stop producing nuclear material and join negotiations on a Kerry-led global ban on weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.
While Kerry did not mention budget estimates for his plans yesterday, senior adviser Graham Allison a Harvard University professor who is a likely choice for the proposed counter-proliferation coordinator job said it would cost between $30 billion and $50 billion over the four years to secure nuclear materials and achieve Kerry's other aims.
While chemical and biological weapons can be created in any number of legal and relatively easy ways, Kerry and his national security team described halting nuclear terrorism as "a doable task," in the words of one senior adviser, because fissile material is difficult to produce and nations can be prodded to stop generating it. "No material, no bomb," Kerry remarked at two different points in his speech.
Kerry blasted the Bush administration for "under-funding" the Nunn-Lugar federal program to secure loose nuclear weapons and material, and said the president's efforts had resulted in the United States securing "less bomb making material in the two years after 9/11 than we had in the two years before."
"We actually tried to get more money for [Nunn-Lugar], and they said no," Kerry said. "For a fraction of what we have already spent in Iraq, we can ensure that every nuclear weapon, and every pound of potential bomb material will be secured and accounted for." Bush's re-election campaign responded to the Kerry speech with unusual aggressiveness, marshalling three Republican security specialists for a conference call with reporters and supplying documents in defence of the administration's record on fighting proliferation such as Libya's voluntary decision to give up weapons programmes and targeting terrorists.
-------- iran
Tough US rhetoric as Iran's nuclear intent remains unclear
By Scott Peterson
June 03, 2004
Christian Science Monitor
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0603/p05s01-wome.html
MOSCOW - Questions remain about the intent of Iran's nuclear programs, according to a critical new report by UN inspectors that details misleading claims and contradictory declarations from Tehran.
Iran said that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will soon be able to confirm Iran has no nuclear-weapon plans. Its report "shows Iran's nuclear case is approaching the end," though Iran expects to keep a uranium-enrichment capability, Hassan Rohani, head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council and top nuclear negotiator, said Wednesday.
But the results are likely to provide ammunition for critics - especially Washington, which charges that Iran has been pursuing nuclear weapons under the guise of a peaceful atomic-energy program. The report presents a challenge to Iran, which has made clear it expects the IAEA to close a two-year inquiry into Iran's once-secret nuclear programs at a meeting June 14.
"I'm not terribly optimistic right now," says Michael Donovan, an Iran specialist at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. "The last 10 months, we've seen clear signs the Iranians are trying to pull every rabbit out of the hat to avoid a thorough reckoning with the IAEA."
The confidential report, released to IAEA members Tuesday, and obtained by the Monitor, cited "good progress" in some cases, along with "changing or contradictory information." Inconsistencies include:
• Iran's acknowledgment that 4.19 lbs. of uranium hexafluoride, once declared lost, was in fact used for research.
• Key centrifuge parts for enriching uranium have been imported from another country - known to be Pakistan - despite Iranian denials.
• Some nuclear work has been carried out at military sites, contrary to Iran's declarations. IAEA access has been difficult.
• The source of trace amounts of 36 percent enriched uranium is unknown.
• Despite Iran's promise to the IAEA in February that it would cease all uranium-enrichment activities, inspectors found that, since then, 285 new rotors for P-1 centrifuges have been assembled.
"The jury is out on whether the program has been dedicated exclusively for peaceful purposes or if it has some military dimension," IAEA chief Mohamed El- Baradei said Tuesday. "We haven't seen concrete proof of a military program so it's premature to make a judgment on that."
President Mohamed Khatami warned Thursday about US "political pressure" on the IAEA. "We are sure that even if we respond to all the agency's demands, the US will still look for excuses," he said. "We will resume enrichment if necessary."
In a watershed decision supported by all of Iran's power centers, Iran last December signed the Additional Protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which permits intrusive snap inspections. Tehran expects help in return for its atomic-energy program - a right codified in the NPT.
But tough US rhetoric hasn't eased. One result, analysts say, is that Iran may be deliberately slowing its cooperation. "The Americans have politicized this process so much," says Mohamed Hadi Semati, a political scientist at Tehran University who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Some say Iran should keep its programs and "accept the pressure and the cost,'" says Mr. Semati. "The conservatives have pulled back a step, in terms of their agreement with the IAEA."
Iran handed over a 1,000-page dossier Friday that it said gives "all the information" the IAEA needs to clear up questions.
"What we're seeing now is ... skirmishing before the big showdown, which will come when Iran begins to enrich uranium with the centrifuges," says Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington. "Right now the Iran strategy is to give the IAEA the minimum necessary to keep it from condemning Iran as noncomplying."
"The US is trying to figure out how to get a united front against the Iranians," Milhollin adds.
Despite calls from some hard-liners to pull out of the NPT altogether, Tehran last October promised European leaders that Iran would work with the IAEA and sign the additional protocol. That deal was made with a "good cop, bad cop" routine, since the US ratcheted up rhetoric against Tehran soon after toppling Hussein.
"It was a credit to the Bush administration that they allowed it to work without trying to strong-arm the bureaucracy into a censure," says CDI's Donovan.
But tough US talk - including branding Iran part of an "axis of evil" - is taking a toll. Iran wants nuclear weapons "because of national prestige, and the fact that they are now surrounded by US military forces," says Donovan. "The Bush administration has played no small role in perpetuating the Iranian desire for a nuclear weapon with that kind of rhetoric."
Also, scant benefits of its deal with the West have been felt in Tehran, where the nuclear debate into a political hot potato.
Many ordinary Iranians say they want nuclear weapons, and would see giving up the nuclear fuel cycle as a sellout.
Semati says Iran's powerful conservatives aren't "interested in nuclear weapons right now.... [They want] to have the capability, to give them the chance to go nuclear if they have a threat to deter.... This is the ultimate aim of the government."
----
U.S. says Tehran is hiding nuclear plans
June 03, 2004
By Michael Adler
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040602-100748-5221r.htm
VIENNA, Austria - The United States accused Iran yesterday of using deceit and denial to hide its clandestine development of nuclear weapons, after damning revelations from the U.N. nuclear watchdog on the Islamic republic's atomic energy program.
Kenneth Brill, the U.S. ambassador to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told reporters that Iran's refusal to fully cooperate with the agency "fits a long-term pattern of denial and deception that can only be designed to mask Iran's military nuclear program."
An IAEA report released on Tuesday said agency inspectors had found more traces in Iran of highly enriched uranium that could be weapons-grade.
The IAEA also reported that Iran, which insists its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian purposes, has admitted to importing parts for sophisticated P-2 centrifuges for enriching uranium, going back on claims that it had made the parts domestically.
"Almost two years after the IAEA became aware of Iran's covert nuclear program, and fully one year after the discovery of Iran's attempts to conceal their work at the Kalaye Electric Company [in Tehran], delayed access, inconsistent stories and unanswered questions continue to be the hallmark of Iranian cooperation with the agency," Mr. Brill said.
"Even a disinterested observer must now ask, what is it that the Iranians are so intent on hiding?" Mr. Brill asked.
The IAEA report is to be submitted to the agency's 35-nation board of governors on June 14.
The United States has called for the IAEA, which has been investigating the Iranian program since February 2003, to refer the Islamic republic to the U.N. Security Council for possible international sanctions.
In Tehran, top nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani said yesterday that Iran had "no secret nuclear activities."
Mr. Rowhani said: "Iran's nuclear dossier is on the way to being sorted out and there is nothing very important that is pending."
But Mr. Brill said: "Iran is still stalling, providing last-minute declarations and contradicting earlier definitive statements. The IAEA continues to find new, incriminating evidence of undeclared activity. ...
"The question is how long the [IAEA] board of governors and the international community will tolerate this," he said.
Diplomats and experts said they expected nothing to happen in the short term because Washington does not have a "smoking gun" to prove Iran is making nuclear weapons.
"The United States is stymied unless the IAEA can come up with some devastating revelation that Iran is lying or hiding something," said Gary Samore, a London-based nonproliferation expert.
He said the Iranians may even be emboldened with their success in putting off the IAEA to resume the enrichment of uranium, something they voluntarily suspended in order to build confidence with the international community.
A Western diplomat close to the IAEA said such a move by Iran "would spark a crisis with [Britain, France and Germany] and others and I don't think that's a price Tehran wants to pay."
Highly enriched uranium can be used for fuel in reactors but also the explosive in atomic bombs.
Another diplomat said nothing less than the international non-proliferation regime was at stake in Iran.
The diplomat said getting to the bottom of the Iranian program was "difficult but crucial for nonproliferation and for the IAEA."
"If progress is slow, there will come a time when the Europeans will have to reflect on their policy," the diplomat said.
-------- mideast
West's spies missed Libya nuke shipment from Turkey
Story by Louis Charbonneau
REUTERS AUSTRIA:
June 3, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25373/story.htm
VIENNA - Four months after U.N. weapons inspections began in Libya, a shipment of arms-related nuclear machinery from Turkey slipped past Western intelligence agencies and reached Libya, an atomic expert said.
Libya, which swiftly disclosed the shipment, has also denied purchasing nuclear materials from North Korea, casting doubt on news reports Pyongyang secretly provided Tripoli with uranium, diplomats close to the United Nations said.
In a report issued on Friday and obtained by Reuters, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said:
"One shipment of (centrifuge) components actually arrived in Libya in March 2004, having escaped the attention of the (Western) state authorities that had seized the cargo ship BBC China in October 2003."
"These components that arrived in March were assembled in Turkey and sent to Libya via Dubai," the atomic energy expert, who is familiar with the IAEA investigation and its new Libya report, told Reuters.
There was no suggestion that Libya, which has been cooperating with U.N. inspectors, tried to hide the shipment. The IAEA said: "Libya notified the agency of the arrival of this container and it has since been shipped out of the country."
David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and president of a U.S.-based security think-tank, told Reuters this was a shining example of the "failure of export controls" that enabled the creation of an illicit nuclear market.
A diplomat from an IAEA board member country said there may be more such outstanding orders made before Libya renounced its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programmes in December. Some of these may have yet to reach Libya.
U.S. and British intelligence officials arranged the seizure in Italy of the BBC China, carrying centrifuge components made in Malaysia to Tripoli via the Arab emirate Dubai, but they somehow failed to detect the surprise March shipment.
Turkey was first named as a player in a nuclear black market linked to the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, Abdul Qadeer Khan, in a Malaysian police report based on testimony of Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan businessman.
There were two Turkish men named in the police report. One had worked for the German engineering firm Siemens (SIEGn.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) .
Malaysian authorities said on Friday they had arrested Tahir. Washington said this was a key step in shutting down Khan's network which stretched from Europe to Africa and across the Middle East to Asia.
NO TRADE WITH NORTH KOREA
Separately, Western diplomats close to the IAEA said Libya denied purchasing 1.6 tonnes of uranium hexafluoride (UF6) from North Korea, which would have indicated the communist state was selling nuclear material directly to states hungry for a bomb.
UF6, a solid at room temperature, becomes a gas when heated and can then be fed into gas centrifuges that enrich uranium for use as fuel for atomic power plants or in weapons.
"Libya has denied buying anything directly from North Korea," one of the diplomats told Reuters.
News reports about Libya's alleged direct trade with North Korea said the IAEA had "strong evidence" for this claim based on interviews with members of Khan's black market.
But diplomats said the IAEA has no strong evidence, only second-hand testimony of persons interviewed by Pakistani authorities given to the U.N. by Pakistan. The IAEA is taking this information seriously but has no way of confirming it.
The diplomats said that the Libyans have generally been cooperative and are considered trustworthy.
But these diplomats and the atomic expert said that even if North Korea did not sell it directly to Libya, this did not mean the uranium did not originate in North Korea.
They said it was possible the Pakistanis acted as middlemen, buying the uranium from Pyongyang and reselling it to Libya.
The Malaysian police report, released in February, said the UF6 "was sent by air from Pakistan to Libya".
The nuclear expert said that if the uranium sold to Libya by Pakistan originated in North Korea, it may indicate that Pakistan's well-known nuclear trade ties with Pyongyang go much more deeply than was originally thought to be the case.
-------- terrorism
Battling proliferation - Win some, lose some
Jun 3rd 2004
The Economist
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2728192
Is the messenger mangling the message?
"WE WILL not permit the world's most dangerous regimes and terrorists to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." Thus George Bush after the September 11th attacks, promising to face down the threat from the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In the coming flurry of American-European meetings, Mr Bush will be pressing hard for curbs on proliferation to be treated as an epoch-shaping issue, alongside stability in Iraq and the spread of democracy in the Middle East.
The message is filtering through in surprising places. It helped convince Libya last December to speed its exit out of the illicit mass-destruction business. The alarming tales that have since emerged of the wholesale auctioning off of Pakistan's nuclear technologies, not just to Libya, but to North Korea, Iran and possibly others, led the UN Security Council to pass a resolution obliging all governments to criminalise illicit weapons and technology transfers. This was done at Mr Bush's urging. Yet despite these diplomatic successes, and the money being spent on securing "loose nukes" (see article), the Bush strategy still has plenty of critics.
George Bush outlines new steps to combat the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace posts information on proliferation. See also the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Take the determination to invade Iraq. Contrary to intelligence reports, Iraq turned out not to have stocks of banned weapons, though it did have several covert missile programmes. But while America was focused there, North Korea went on building more bombs and Iran thumbed its nose at inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Far from providing an object lesson, argue the critics, toppling Iraq's regime encouraged others to redouble their bomb-building.
To charges of misplaced belligerency, add those of inconsistency and double standards. Even granted that Iraq, Iran and North Korea were tapping similar supply networks for missiles, why lump all three into an "axis of evil", as Mr Bush did, while calling arch-proliferator Pakistan (needed against al-Qaeda) a valued "non-NATO ally"? And why court India, which, like Pakistan and Israel, never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?
Such charges are neither partisan (some Republicans, too, are worried) nor misplaced. Hardline heel-dragging at the State Department has complicated policy towards North Korea, the first country ever to leave the NPT. Yet the hardliners are unabashed. A 1994 agreement to freeze the North's plutonium-making in return for energy assistance fell apart in 2002, not because of Mr Bush's hostility but because the regime had been caught cheating with a second, uranium-enrichment route to a bomb. This was under way long before the president was even in office. Similarly, Iran now admits that it has been secretly dabbling in uranium for 18 years.
Former Clinton adminstration people, with hands-on experience of the issues, still argue that America should be negotiating harder with both regimes. But, given the revelations, they do not necessarily expect a happy outcome. They just want America to be able to show that all other options have been exhausted, should sanctions or even sterner measures be called for.
But hasn't Iraq at least made Mr Bush reluctant to grapple more toughly with either North Korea or Iran while American forces are so heavily committed in the Middle East? Very probably. Yet, in either case, the president had no good military options. And opting for multilateral diplomacy-working with South Korea, Japan, China and Russia over North Korea, and with the Europeans and others on the board of the IAEA over Iran-should not be taken for wimpishness, insists one senior Bush official. If diplomatic pressure fails to work, other sorts will be tried.
No place for the meek
Stricter enforcement of the anti-proliferation rules has been a hallmark of this administration. Not that previous ones, Democratic or Republican, ignored the problem. But al-Qaeda's audacious attacks, combined with Osama bin Laden's call to acquire nuclear weapons as a "religious duty", cast the problem of treaty-breaking by rogue governments with terrorist links in an alarming new light.
Keeping the spotlight on the miscreants has meant the unapologetically undiplomatic naming and shaming of treaty breakers and benders; enforcing UN resolutions in Iraq; leaning hard on North Korea to disarm, this time "completely, verifiably and irreversibly"; and pressing for Iran's repeated safeguards violations to be reported to the UN Security Council. The relentless pressure has yet to persuade either North Korea or Iran to trade in their weapons options. But even Democratic critics acknowledge that the strategy has had some success.
Whatever others may have felt about Mr Bush's Iraq policy, there is also broad recognition that the Security Council fell down on the job in the 1990s. A UN panel is looking at how it might do better in future. For all its divisions over Iraq, the European Union now includes an anti-proliferation clause in all trade agreements (a sticking point with both Iran and Syria). Dozens of governments-including Russia's, the latest convert-are co-operating in the president's proliferation security initiative, now backed by the UN's new anti-trafficking resolution, using national laws more effectively to disrupt illicit trading among the world's proliferators.
Although Mr Bush is supposedly hostile to international treaties-his early scrapping of the anti-ballistic-missile treaty with Russia and his opposition to ratification of the comprehensive test-ban treaty still rankle with other anti-proliferation warriors-he has also won credit recently for his efforts to shore up the NPT. Last year he helped get the IAEA, which upholds treaty safeguards, its first real budget increases in 16 years. And like the agency's director, Mohamed ElBaradei, Mr Bush wants to see greater restrictions on dangerous uranium-enrichment and plutonium-reprocessing technologies. These have legitimate civilian uses in nuclear-power programmes but, as Iran has shown, they can also bring a determined proliferator dangerously close to a bomb.
Tempting fall-out
All this goes to the heart of the bargain struck more than 30 years ago under the NPT: that those who gave up nuclear weapons should still enjoy all the benefits of nuclear energy. Rejigging that will take deft diplomacy. If Mr Bush wins in November, will he find the right touch?
His plans for America's own nuclear stockpile could prove the biggest difficulty. The Bush team says it wants to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons in a crisis; instead, it seeks a better mix of nuclear and conventional strike forces, missile defences and a weapons infrastructure that can more readily counter any unwelcome event. Yet even Congress, which first approved this strategy, has been growing queasy at plans to keep America's test-site a bit readier for use, to explore possible bunker-buster bombs for use against hardened underground targets and to research (though not develop or test) new sorts of nuclear weapons.
Administration officials argue that their plans have been misunderstood. Apart from keeping America's swiftly shrinking arsenal of bigger bombs safe and reliable, much of this work is intended simply to retain and pass on nuclear skills, for there will soon be no one left among America's weaponeers with practical test experience. There are no plans, officials insist, to resume testing, and no military requirements for new nuclear weapons. But that, they admit, could change.
In any event, Mr Bush's problem is not just one of poor salesmanship, argues the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank, in a forthcoming report entitled "Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security". The authors argue that a non-proliferation regime based on haves and have-nots will always be unstable. All nuclear powers should explore more seriously what it would take to turn their disarmament promise (also enshrined in the NPT as a long-term goal) into more than a slogan. At a minimum for now, the authors want America to reaffirm the test ban and abandon all pursuit of new weapons.
Many a non-disarmer would agree. If America, with the most powerful nuclear forces in the world, still claims it needs to tinker with new sorts of weapons for its security, how is Mr Bush to persuade others to give up their nuclear ambitions?
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Administration Plans Significant Reduction in Nuclear Weapons Stockpile
6/3/2004
U.S. Newswire
http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=158-06032004
To: National Desk, Energy and Defense Reporters
Contact: Bryan Wilkes of the National Nuclear Security Administration, 202-586-7371
WASHINGTON -- National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Linton F. Brooks, on behalf of the Secretaries of Energy and Defense, has submitted a classified report to Congress showing a significant reduction in the nation's total nuclear weapons stockpile by 2012.
The stockpile contains reserve warheads that back up the operationally deployed nuclear weapons. In 2001, President Bush announced that the operationally deployed force would be reduced to 1,700 - 2,200 nuclear weapons by 2012. His decision was later codified in the Moscow Treaty.
The following is the unclassified cover letter:
Dear Mr. Chairman:
On behalf of the Secretary of Energy and the Secretary of Defense, I am pleased to submit a report on a revised nuclear weapons stockpile plan as requested in the conference report to accompany the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act, 2004.
The President on 13 November 2001 announced his decision to reduce to 1700-2200 operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads by the end of 2012 -- a two-thirds reduction from then- current levels. This dramatic reduction in nuclear forces-the most significant in the nuclear age-was codified in the Moscow Treaty.
Historically, deployed nuclear forces have been supported by a stockpile reserve that ensures that America's military readiness is not compromised. As the number of operationally deployed warheads declines, stockpile reserves take on even greater importance. The Nuclear Posture Review calls for a nuclear stockpile that supports the operationally deployed force and includes a reserve of warheads that could be used to augment the operationally deployed force or to provide replacements for warheads that experience safety or reliability problems.
The President's decision to reduce the number of operationally deployed weapons has laid the groundwork for a major reduction in the size of the total nuclear stockpile. The size and composition of this stockpile has been the focus of a great deal of analysis in the Administration. Recently, the President approved a stockpile plan that would substantially reduce the current stockpile. Detailed information about this plan is included in the enclosed report.
By 2012, the United States' nuclear stockpile will be the smallest it has been in several decades. In recommending this stockpile plan to the President, we recognize that maintaining the nation's nuclear deterrence with a much smaller stockpile means that we must continue Administration efforts to restore the nuclear weapons infrastructure. The Nuclear Posture Review calls for a "responsive infrastructure" to ensure that we retain the ability and expertise to respond to geopolitical changes that may challenge American security in the future or to address potential problems that affect the safety or reliability of weapons in the current stockpile.
The Administration's work to restore a modern infrastructure includes, among other things, three ongoing initiatives: (1) planning for a Modern Pit Facility to restore the nation's ability to manufacture plutonium parts for nuclear warheads; (2) an advanced concepts program to enable scientists and engineers at the national nuclear weapons laboratories to retain critical skills and to provide the United States with means to respond to new, unexpected, or emerging threats in a timely manner; and (3) enhanced test readiness. Completion of these programs and the realization of a responsive infrastructure will offer opportunities for the United States to reduce further the nuclear stockpile secure in the knowledge that the nation has enhanced its capabilities to respond to possible future challenges to its security.
Sincerely, //s// Linton F. Brooks Administrator
Enclosure
----
Oppenheimer's security chief recalls famous scientist
By JAMES W. BROSNAN
June 3, 2004
Redding News
http://www.redding.com/redd/nw_national/article/0,2232,REDD_17534_2935291,00.html
The chief of security for the Manhattan Project gave Capt. Thomas O. Jones a mission: "Calm down Oppenheimer!"
A friendly secretary and a presidential death helped Jones in that task in the spring of 1945.
Plus, Jones realized that forcing Robert Oppenheimer to leave Los Alamos over his ties to communists would have raised such a stink that the secret of the A-bomb would have been revealed.
Oppenheimer, a brilliant scientist from the University of California-Berkeley, had been put in charge of the Los Alamos bomb factory because of his ability to organize his fellow scientists. He was often caught between the scientists' demands for a free exchange of information and the demands of the Army for security.
"In my opinion he was close to resigning, which would have been calamitous," said Jones, 87, the last chief of security at Los Alamos during the war and the only living witness to the turmoil within the Manhattan Project over Oppenheimer.
Jones will be one of the presenters, via videotape, at a June 26 symposium on the life of Oppenheimer at the Smith Civic Auditorium in Los Alamos. The day before, officials will dedicate Oppenheimer's old house to the Los Alamos Historical Society.
Oppenheimer is getting extra attention this year because April 22 was the 100th anniversary of his birth. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., has authored a resolution, now awaiting Senate action, honoring Oppenheimer's "loyal service" to the United States and his scientific contributions to physics, nuclear energy and "the common defense and security of the United States."
The resolution makes no mention of the security controversy that dogged Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.
Jones, who now lives four blocks from the White House, recalled his time at Los Alamos.
It was a draft selection board that decided that Jones, an English literature major from Harvard, should be assigned to counter-intelligence. Jones spent most of the war in plain clothes working out of a false-front office in the Chicago Loop, not far from his parent's house in Highland Park, Ill.
One day he was the only junior officer around when Lt. Col. John Lansdale came out from the Manhattan Project office in Washington looking for a security liaison in the Midwest. To the security chief's surprise, Jones already knew a prominent University of Chicago physicist, Arthur Compton, having befriended Compton's son at summer camp.
The event that triggered Jones' departure for Los Alamos in the spring of 1945 was a letter from his predecessor there, Peer De Silva, to Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project.
The letter detailed De Silva's argument that Oppenheimer's ties with communists made him too great a security risk to remain at Los Alamos.
For Groves, De Silva's letter was the last straw. Groves had already decided that Oppenheimer was too vital to the project to be dismissed and wanted to ease his stress by transferring De Silva, said Jones.
When Lansdale told Jones he had 30 days to move to Los Alamos, "I started trembling in my boots," he said. "We knew so little about Los Alamos we considered that it must be very awesome."
Lansdale told Jones that much of the project was practically done but it "it was imperative to calm down Oppenheimer."
There was no doubt Oppenheimer had many associates who "ranged from pinkish to communist party members," said Jones. But if Oppenheimer had resigned it would have been known by scientists nationwide and could have led to the disclosure of the project.
On arriving in Los Alamos, Jones was pleasantly surprised to find an ally in Oppenheimer's secretary. Anne Wilson had worked in the Manhattan Project's Washington office and the two had often chatted over the phone while Jones waited to speak to Lansdale.
He was sure it was Wilson who told "Oppie" that Jones was called, "Thomas O."
Within days after Jones' arrival at Los Alamos on April 12, 1945, Lansdale called him with the news that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had died.
Jones raced out of his office and met Oppenheimer on a footbridge.
"He said, 'Thomas O, is it true?' And I said, 'Yes, Oppie.' "
The two retreated to a hallway outside Oppenheimer's office where the scientist recalled meeting Roosevelt in the White House.
"It had been a very moving experience for him," said Jones. "They were immediately intimate friends. It was instant rapport. It brought us a rapport at a slightly lower place."
Jones' chief job at Los Alamos was supervising security for the July 16, 1945, test of the plutonium device.
Some large pieces moved by truck, but most went by car to the test site more than 200 miles from Los Alamos.
"Our policy was not to call attention to the thing, not to have a parade with tanks and planes overhead and all that stuff. Just a couple of cars taking a ride down that way, that's how it worked," said Jones.
The day of the test found Jones in a room at the La Posada de Albuquerque hotel. Security agents were stationed around the state to prepare for an evacuation if the blast led to a "not necessarily wrong, but unexpected result."
He recalled, "I was drowsy at the moment, having been up for three days. And we had no close estimate of the zero hour. I was exhausted and lay back on the bed. And all of a sudden it was as if somebody put off 500 flashbulbs in the room - wham, and no noise of course."
Jones jumped to the window and saw the whole sky turn red and then fade. The Army put out a cover story about a huge munitions accident and the news media swallowed it.
Jones stayed at Los Alamos through the Bikini Atoll bomb testing in 1946. He spent most of his later career with the Atomic Energy Commission, although not in security.
Oppenheimer left Los Alamos in 1947 after World War II ended, refusing to work on the hydrogen bomb. He headed the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N.J. In 1953 the government took away his security clearance. De Silva's charges had caught up with him. And Oppenheimer was accused of not being truthful with officials about his conversations with a suspected spy.
Jones was relieved not to be asked to testify.
"I never have made up my mind on whether he should have been cleared or not. I never had to do that," said Jones.
But he still treasures a photograph of Oppenheimer that the scientist gave him before he left Los Alamos.
Above his signature, Oppenheimer wrote, "In memory of common woes."
(E-mail James W. Brosnan at BrosnanJ(at)shns.com.)
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- south carolina
Nuclear Dangers Proliferate in Georgia
June 3, 2004
SAVANNAH, Georgia, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-03-03.asp
The state of Georgia relies on nuclear energy for 27 percent of its electricity and is the location of four nuclear power reactors with seven more within 15 miles of its borders. Three environmental advocacy groups and a state senator said Wednesday that the plans by several regional utilities to add new nuclear plants puts the state and the region at greater risk of terrorism, nuclear accidents and water pollution.
"It is reckless to revitalize a dying industry on the shoulders of U.S. taxpayers, yet again," said Sara Barczak, safe energy director with the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy and co-author of a new report for policy makers to address the security, economic and environmental impacts of nuclear power reactors.
"Our report explains why nuclear power is no bargain for Georgia, no matter how it is evaluated - the environment, public health and national security all suffer because of this ill-advised technology."
At a press conference on the Savannah River, a resource threatened by activities at the sprawling Savannah River nuclear weapons facility, coastal leaders and organizations including State Senator Regina Thomas, Citizens for Environmental Justice, Center for a Sustainable Coast, and the Savannah Riverkeeper expressed their concerns.
Georgia State Senator Regina Thomas (Photo courtesy Ron Webber) "As an elected official deeply concerned about the impacts from these nuclear facilities, I urge everyone to do more to protect our citizens." Thomas said. "It is our responsibility to help ensure a safe future for us all."
"Understanding and reducing the negative consequences of nuclear power and nuclear weapons on our region should be a top public health and environmental priority. This report helps move us in that direction," said Charlie Belin with the Savannah Riverkeeper.
"Radioactive contamination both on and off-site at the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons facility near Augusta is also a major concern for us including existing operations as well as proposals such as plutonium bomb fuel for commercial reactors," said Dr. Mildred McClain, executive director of Citizens for Environmental Justice.
The "plutonium bomb fuel" is the central feature of a plan by the the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and a private consortium, Duke COGEMA Stone & Webster, to dispose of surplus plutonium from nuclear weapons by converting the material into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel and using that fuel in commercial nuclear power reactors.
Most commercial nuclear fuel used in the United States contains uranium as the primary material used during the fission process. MOX fuel contains a mixture of plutonium and uranium oxides, with plutonium providing the primary fissile material.
Although 18 European reactors use MOX fuel, it is made from commercial grade plutonium, not weapons grade. Weapons grade plutonium MOX has never before been used in a reactor.
The Duke COGEMA Stone & Webster team is completing the final design of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility to be constructed at the DOE's Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina and Augusta, Georgia. Construction is scheduled to begin in December 2004.
The fuel fabricated at the Savannah River Site would be transported regionally and used in four nuclear power reactors operated by Duke Power in the area of Charlotte, North Carolina.
The reactors - Catawba 1 and 2 and McGuire 1 and 2 - were relicensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December 2003.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, several environmental groups have petitioned the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to deny a license to Duke COGEMA Stone & Webster for the MOX fabrication and use.
The Nuclear Information and Resource Service, the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League, and Georgians Against Nuclear Energy, among others, claim the presence of weapons grade plutonium would create a terrorist target.
They contend that the MOX fabrication, transport and use in reactors not originally designed for MOX fuel is not safe.
So far, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has denied all of these petitions.
The Commission points out that MOX fuel fabrication and use is part of the ongoing U.S.-Russian Federation plutonium disposition program, a nuclear nonproliferation program.
The Savannah River Site Citizens Advisory Board has expressed additional concerns about the radioactive waste streams that are expected to be generated by the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility.
In a formal recommendation on January 20, 2004, the Citizens Advisory Board warned of a "total lack of coordination" between two agencies within the Department of Energy on the issue of treating and disposing of the radioactive waste generated by the MOX fuel program at Savannah River.
The two agencies at odds are DOE's Environmental Management (EM) and DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The Citizens Advisory Board cites two letters to illustrate the confusion.
The Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management states in her letter of May 15, 2003 that "NNSA is responsible for managing and disposing of the radioactive waste generated by its programs."
DOE-NNSA states in its letter dated June 18, 2003 that "the DOE order assigns responsibility for ultimate disposal of waste to the Assistant Secretary for EM not NNSA."
Describing its attitude as "quite apprehensive," the Citizens Advisory Board says, "Such lack of responsibility assignment appears to represent inefficient and ineffective control of its program by DOE-HQ."
Waste streams from the Plutonium Disassembly and Conversion Facility and the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at Savannah River Site will be treated in a facility called the Waste Solidification Facility. This facility is expected to cost about $58 million.
The Inspector General conducted an audit to determine whether DOE has a complete plan to dispose of waste generated from the Plutonium Disposition Program, which is managed by DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration. The audit report states that a complete disposal path for waste generated by the Waste Solidification Facility has not yet been developed.
The Inspector General's report identifies three waste streams being produced at WSB over the 13 year life of the facility - 819,000 gallons of liquid low-level waste, 5,200 drums of solid low-level waste, and 17,000 drums of solid transuranic waste.
The audit report further states that, beginning in 2007, DOE-NNSA proposes the three waste streams be transferred to DOE's Environmental Management, which will subsequently treat or dispose of the waste.
The Inspector General report "gives credulity" to the Citizens Advisory Board's belief that DOE-NNSA "needs to be more open to and communicative with public stakeholders. In that respect, DOE-NNSA needs to amplify its efforts to have "give-and-take" communication with stakeholders where classification issues allow," the citizens group said.
On June 15, members of the public will have an opportunity to make their concerns about MOX known to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. An Atomic Safety and Licensing Board will hear brief oral public statements in Charlotte, North Carolina on Duke Energy's request to the Commission to amend the operating license of the Catawba Nuclear Station to allow the use of four mixed oxide, or MOX, test assemblies.
Catawba Nuclear Power Plant (Photo courtesy NRC) The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board will hear the statements on June 15 in two sessions, from 3:30 to 5:30 pm and from 7:00 to 9:00 pm, in the Grand Ballroom of the Omni Charlotte Hotel at 132 Trade Street.
Any person who is not a party to the proceeding will be permitted to make an oral statement setting forth his or her position on matters of concern related to the proceeding. These statements do not constitute testimony or evidence, but may help the Board and/or the parties in their deliberations in connection with the issues.
An evidentiary hearing previously scheduled to commence on June 15 in Charlotte has been rescheduled for July 14 at the NRC Offices in Rockville, Maryland. At that hearing, the Board will receive testimony and exhibits and allow the cross-examination of witnesses on certain matters at issue in this proceeding.
People who have submitted a written request to make an oral limited appearance statement in Charlotte by 4:30 pm EDT on Monday June 7 will be given priority over those who have not. Requests to make an oral statement must be mailed, faxed or sent by e-mail to: Office of Secretary, Rulemakings and Adjudications Staff, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555-0001. Fax: 301-415-1101, verification 301-415-1966; Email: hearingdocket@nrc.gov
A copy of the written request to make a statement should also be sent to the Chairman of the licensing board at: Administrative Judge Ann Marshall Young, Atomic Safety & Licensing Board Panel, Mail Stop T-3F23, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Washington, D.C. 20555 - 0001. Fax: 301-415-5599, verification 301-415-7550; Email: AMY@nrc.gov
-------- washington
Hanford contractor is criticized over safety issues
By LISA STIFFLER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
Thursday, June 3, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/176179_hanford03.html
A Hanford contractor was sharply criticized yesterday by federal investigators for failing to protect workers from toxic and radioactive chemicals at the nuclear-waste cleanup site, concluding that aging underground tanks are at risk of collapsing and aren't being properly monitored.
A separate Energy Department investigation, however, found no evidence of criminal misconduct by contractors accused of trying to cover up worker illnesses and injuries.
Investigators looking into the tank cleanup cited dangerous practices by contractor CH2M Hill that "could seriously damage" some of the 177 massive tanks holding highly radioactive waste.
"It's not just worker health and safety," said Tom Carpenter, a Seattle attorney with the Government Accountability Project, a watchdog group. "It's all of our health and safety."
Most of the tanks are years past their design life, but hold radioactive material measured at about 200 million curies -- roughly four times the level released in the Chernobyl reactor meltdown.
Some of the tanks are maintained under vacuum conditions to prevent dangerous vapors from escaping, but investigators discovered that in most cases there were no pressure-relief valves.
The 89-page report agreed on many points with a recent state study that concluded that not enough is known about the lethal mix of waste in the tanks to adequately shield workers. It also found that monitoring of gases released from the tanks was insufficient, the analysis of potential threats to workers was inadequate and the federal government was not providing enough oversight of CH2M Hill.
The investigation was ordered in February by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and conducted by the Energy Department's Office of Independent Oversight and Performance Assurance. The department is in charge of the cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, located near Richland.
It was one of many investigations spurred by GAP, which claimed workers lacked protection and were being sickened from exposure to vapors seeping out of the tanks. The group also charged that illnesses were not being properly reported and that the site's health provider had altered medical records.
While the oversight report supported many of GAP's allegations, findings released yesterday by the Energy Department's inspector general absolved contractors of criminal wrongdoing.
Abraham focused on the results favorable to his department in a prepared statement, noting that there were "no known cases" of tank workers being exposed to dangerous levels of chemicals.
While highly critical, the oversight report credited CH2M Hill and the Energy Department for at least trying to improve worker safety and get a handle on chemical exposures.
"While these reports show worker protection is at a high level, I believe we can continue to improve," Spencer said. The department will "implement recommendations from each of the reports to further enhance worker protections at the Hanford site."
A spokeswoman for CH2M Hill would not comment on the reports but said the company was hiring more safety workers, was reviewing its monitoring program and had hired an ombudsman to help workers with injury claims.
Hanford, considered the nation's most contaminated nuclear waste site, is undergoing a $2 billion-a-year cleanup. The desert site was established during World War II for the production of plutonium used in atomic bombs.
The tanks hold 53 million gallons of waste generated in plutonium production. In recent years, workers have been transferring waste from leak-prone tanks to more stable tanks where it will be held until the material is "vitrified," or trapped in a glasslike substance, for long-term burial.
The surge in activity around the tanks has resulted in some 100 reports of exposures to chemical vapors that can trigger nosebleeds, headaches, rashes and sore throats.
The independent report said that investigators measuring chemicals in the air space in the tanks discovered levels above those considered safe. It also said that data were insufficient to conclude workers had not been exposed to dangerous levels.
"These are not new problems," Carpenter said. "These are old problems that are persisting. Who's protecting the workers' health and safety out there?"
Carpenter's group had charged that the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, which provides health care to workers, had altered and destroyed medical records and conspired with other contractors to reduce the reported number of accidents and illnesses.
The motive, GAP maintained, could be financial. The amount of money paid to some contractors can be affected by the number of work-related health problems.
In his report to Abraham, Inspector General Gregory Friedman said he found no criminal misconduct associated with either allegation. An investigation by the same office released last week concluded that the rate of accidents and illnesses had been underreported, but it did not claim the miscount was intentional.
The report "totally vindicates Hanford Environment Health Foundation as an organization and its medical staff," said Lee Ashjian, the foundation's president.
KEY FINDINGS
Among the findings of federal investigators examining safety concerns at Hanford:
# Hanford contractor CH2M Hill lacks enough information about what's in the 177 underground waste tanks to protect workers.
# CH2M Hill hasn't done enough to provide workers with respirators.
# Toxic waste tanks were maintained under conditions that could structurally damage them.
# Contractors haven't properly reported some injuries and illnesses suffered by workers.
# There was no "criminal misconduct" in the reporting of injuries and illnesses, or alterations of medical records by contractors.
P-I reporter Lisa Stiffler can be reached at 206-448-8042 or lisastiffler@seattlepi.com
----
Three Mile Island a million times over
Thursday, June 03, 2004
Oregon Live
by Brian Barry
http://www.oregonlive.com/commentary/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/editorial/1086264700212870.xml
People were alarmed when radiation was ejected into the environment from the Three Mile Island nuclear facility some 25 years ago -- about 20 curies of radionuclides were released from the failed reactor's nuclear core. The Bush administration is now pushing for disposal of about 30 million curies of nuclear waste at the Hanford site, near the Columbia River, under a scheme to "reclassify" high-level radioactive waste. Unfortunately, arsenic reclassified as a sweetener does not alter its toxic effects.
[Uh, TMI released about 2.5 million Curies of radionuclides; he's only off by a factor of 100,000 - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/tmi.html . Guess he should retitle it "10 times as many dead as from TMI." Commentary page editor contacted; author not found. - jim_hoerner@h... ]
High-level radioactive waste is likely the most toxic material in existence; it remains lethal to humans and the environment for tens of thousands of years. At Hanford, reactor spent fuel was dissolved to obtain plutonium for atomic bombs. The waste left over from plutonium extraction is defined as high-level waste under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act.
This waste is a witches' brew of liquids and sludge so radioactive that workers must be shielded from it by several feet of steel-reinforced concrete. About 53 million gallons of high-level waste are stored in leaking tanks at Hanford. For decades, U.S. law has required permanent disposal of this waste deep underground in a national geologic repository, far from the Columbia River and the Northwest's farming region.
A recent federal court decision found that reclassification is illegal, so the administration is seeking to circumvent the law. Reclassifying this material as "incidental" waste would allow surface abandonment, freeing billions of dollars for other purposes.
The problem with reclassification is that nuclear waste is just as lethal, for just as long, regardless of what it is called. Scientists have concluded that deep geologic burial, a half mile below the earth's surface, is the only feasible way to permanently isolate this poisonous material from humans and the environment. This brings us back to Hanford.
In the mid-1980s, the federal government studied Hanford for permanent deep disposal of high-level waste and reactor spent fuel. Scientific studies showed that groundwater a half mile below Hanford would transport deeply buried nuclear waste to the Columbia River within a few thousand years -- long before radioactive decay rendered it harmless. Legislation now before Congress, where the issue is heating up this week, would rename this lethal waste and leave it in surface trenches, threatening Northwest citizens, their agricultural base and water supplies.
The Bush administration recently persuaded the Senate to place a rider on the defense bill (without hearings or public review) to allow reclassification of high-level waste for quick and cheap disposal at the surface. The bill targets Hanford's sister site in South Carolina, but Hanford is next on the list. The administration has stated that it will withhold cleanup funds for Hanford until surface disposal is agreed upon.
High-level radioactive waste may soon be abandoned near the surface at Hanford. If this happens, the health and economy of Northwest residents will be affected for centuries.
Brian Barry is a Bend scientist with 17 years of experience analyzing Hanford nuclear waste cleanup and disposal issues.
----
U.S. Finds Flaws, Not Crimes, at Nuclear Site in Washington State
By MATTHEW L. WALD
June 3, 2004
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/politics/03nuke.html
WASHINGTON, June 2 - The way that government contractors manage worker safety at the Hanford nuclear reservation, in Washington State, is not criminal but has important weaknesses, according to two reports issued Wednesday by the Energy Department.
An investigation by the department's inspector general found no evidence of criminal conduct at Hanford. The inspector general said he could not substantiate workers' accusations about contractors' tampering with medical records and hiding information about dangerous vapors from nuclear waste tanks.
A related investigation, by the department's Office of Independent Oversight and Performance Assurance, found that the contractor that manages the tanks where the waste is stored did not sample the air enough to conclude that workers were safe. It also said problems in the industrial hygiene program "will, until corrected, continue to raise uncertainties in determining whether some workers are being overexposed to some chemical vapors."
The tanks hold wastes that are so radioactive that they break down chemicals to produce hydrogen, ammonia and other hazardous gases and vapors. Many of the tanks have leaked, and the Energy Department is trying to empty them and solidify their contents.
The department's report, released late Wednesday, revealed a new hazard: the tanks lack valves that would protect against a vacuum inside and could crack or break as a result. Workers halted many activities around the tanks when this was discovered, the report said.
The report is a partial vindication for a nonprofit group, the Government Accountability Project, which said in a report last year that the tanks were mismanaged and that contractors were endangering workers and intentionally underreporting the damage to workers' health.
But the other report released Wednesday said there was no criminal activity. The inspector general, Gregory H. Friedman, said in a four-page summary of his report that witnesses gave conflicting testimony on some of the accusations and that there was no way to resolve the conflicts. He said he had briefed the United States attorney's office for the Eastern District of Washington, which was declining to prosecute, and thus the case would be closed.
But the Washington State attorney general's office is still investigating the adequacy of medical care at the site, a spokeswoman there said.
The Government Accountability Project said Mr. Friedman's report was incomplete because his investigators had declined to talk to some witnesses and view some documents.
The inspector general "did not seek to interview a worker who suffered a broken leg at work that was not reported as a job injury," even though the group gave the investigators the worker's name and phone number, the group said in a statement. Tom Carpenter, director of the group's Nuclear Oversight Campaign, said he would push for a Congressional investigation of operations at the site, where plutonium for bombs was manufactured for decades, leaving it highly polluted.
Mr. Friedman's summary, though, said there was less evidence than promised. On the question of whether a contractor covered up high readings of ammonia vapor at the places where nuclear waste is stored, the report said that two witnesses identified as having valuable information "did not provide such corroborating information."
He also looked into an allegation that a clinic hired by the Energy Department misdiagnosed patients to avoid attributing their illnesses to their work around the site's radioactive and chemical hazards. Mr. Friedman said that the investigation "did verify a single instance where a former Hanford site subcontractor in 1999 encouraged an injured employee to report to work following a work-related injury, yet the subcontractor had the employee perform no duties for five days." The employee was on limited duty for the next 24 days, the report said.
The report said the incident was reported, although it described the subcontractor's actions as troubling.
The inspector general also found that technicians failed to measure the level of hazardous vapors at one location until about two hours after workers were reportedly exposed.
The summary said that investigators interviewed more than 70 people and found extensive concerns about health care. "The number, scope and continuing nature of the employees' and citizens' concerns we heard during our investigation suggest that management needs to intensify its efforts to improve employee confidence in the occupational health and safety program," the summary said.
----
Energy IG Finds No Misconduct at Hanford
Separate Report Finds Fault With Contractor
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 3, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11086-2004Jun2.html
SEATTLE, June 2 -- An investigation of contractors accused of altering medical records and covering up worker exposure to toxic vapors at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation has found no evidence of criminal misconduct, the Energy Department's inspector general said Wednesday.
But a separate report on Hanford by the department's office of independent oversight has found "significant vulnerabilities" in efforts by CH2M Hill, a major contractor on the site, to protect workers from exposure to dangerous chemical vapors.
Taken together, the federal investigations amount to a mixed report card on the behavior of contractors at Hanford, where the state Department of Health is continuing its investigation of alleged irregularities by doctors who cared for injured workers.
Hanford, located beside the Columbia River in eastern Washington, is the nation's largest and most costly cleanup site. Radioactive waste left over from the Cold War production of plutonium is stored there in 177 underground tanks, many of which leak.
It will take three more decades to finish the cleanup there, at a cost of about $2 billion a year.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, who requested both federal investigations in February after worker complaints were reported by a watchdog group and in the media, said he was "pleased" with the findings.
The Government Accountability Project (GAP), the group that first raised questions about the Hanford cleanup in a report last fall, said it was "dismayed" by the inspector general's report and "vindicated" by the office of independent oversight.
The group also expressed concern about the timing of the release of the two reports.
The more positive inspector general's report was released early Wednesday and Abraham's public comments focus on its findings of "no criminal wrongdoing." The much more critical report, which was completed in April but not released until Wednesday, was posted on the department's Web site late in the day.
"The fact that the department is playing games with the release of these reports makes me worry that there is no commitment at the secretary's level for reforming health and safety at Hanford," said Tom Carpenter, director of GAP's Nuclear Oversight Campaign.
Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman said in his report that investigators interviewed more than 70 current and former workers at Hanford, but that "the facts developed during the investigation did not substantiate criminal misconduct."
Perhaps the strongest allegations of misconduct in the GAP report were made against the private health clinic at Hanford, called Hanford Environmental Health Foundation. It alleged that doctors and staff at the clinic altered patient records to misrepresent and minimize vapor injuries to workers who clean up underground tanks.
The inspector general's report did not find evidence supporting these charges.
A number of current and former employees of the clinic, who said they had either falsified medical records themselves or were eyewitnesses to such conduct, gave sworn statements to GAP.
Two former clinic employees told The Washington Post in February that they had been ordered by the medical director at HEHF, Larry Smick, to alter patient records to show that injuries were not related to work on the tank cleanup. Smick, who at the time denied altering any records, was not mentioned in the reports released Wednesday.
The president of HEHF, Lee T. Ashjian, described the inspector general's report as "a vindication" against false charges brought by groups and individuals.
"One can only hope that they will apologize to HEHF now as publicly as they have spoken out against HEHF in the past," Ashjian said.
Under a decision announced before the Energy Department investigations began, HEHF is being replaced this month as the health care provider at Hanford.
The inspector general also cleared CH2M Hill, the contractor in charge of tank cleanup, of allegations of covering up worker exposure to vapors around the tanks.
But the office of oversight report singled out CH2M Hill for "too limited" testing of vapor dangers around the tanks and for work planning and safety controls that are "not sufficiently vigorous."
CH2M Hill did respond to a request for comment on the reports.
----
Hanford vapor studies vary
Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
By Annette Cary,
Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5150725p-5082925c.html
Too little is known about chemicals in huge underground tanks of radioactive waste at Hanford to conclude that workers have not been exposed to harmful chemicals above legal limits, according to one of two federal reports released Wednesday.
It also questioned whether an engineering problem could threaten the integrity of the 177 tanks holding 53 million gallons of radioactive waste.
The second report found no criminal conduct in an investigation into allegations involving Hanford medical services and tank vapor exposures.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham requested the reports in February after the Government Accountability Program (GAP) and some Hanford workers raised safety and reporting issues.
Some workers said their health had been damaged by breathing fumes venting into the air from the tanks. Hanford contractors also were accused of underreporting accidents and illnesses to maintain safety records that would allow them to collect higher fees.
"We are pleased these investigations found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing on the part of DOE managers or contractors," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in a prepared statement. "And we remain committed to the highest safety standards to ensure the protection of our workers' safety and health."
But Tom Carpenter of the watchdog group GAP said the report critical of tank farm operations showed "Hanford workers have been knowingly exposed to uncharacterized vapors and the DOE and its contractor has done little to correct these systemic hazards faced by workers."
The Office of Independent Oversight and Assessment, author of one of the reports, concluded there was no known case of exposure to chemical vapors from tanks above regulatory standards, but that too little was known to make sure no worker had been exposed.
"Even low concentrations of certain chemicals may cause symptoms, and improvements are needed to reduce the residual risk and develop a long-term solution to recurring vapor exposures," according to a memorandum sent to Abraham.
The waste, left from producing plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program, generates hydrogen, ammonia and various volatile organic compounds.
Measurements by the 23 experts assigned to the investigation found concentrations of some chemicals in the head spaces of the tanks too high to be safely breathed.
Weaknesses in the industrial hygiene program of tank farm contractor CH2M Hill Hanford Group raised uncertainties about what workers have been exposed to, the report said.
It found a laundry list of problems: Insufficient sampling and characterization of tank vapors, insufficient vapor exposure data, inadequate direct-reading instruments, limitations of instruments to detect some vapors, lack of industrial hygiene technician procedures, insufficient training and shortcomings in the respiratory protection program.
Implementing work planning and safety controls is not sufficiently rigorous, the report also found. Hazard identification and analysis is not always sufficiently detailed, and in some cases, the predominant hazards of the work were not adequately covered.
Investigators reviewed more than 60 incidents in which workers were exposed to tank vapors but found only two resulted in formal field investigations.
In fact, issues identified long before CH2M Hill held the contract in a 1992 investigation of persistent recurring worker exposures have yet to be addressed, the report found.
The report also found engineering concerns. Most worrisome were "potential threats to tank integrity from excessive vacuum." Specific conditions could cause excessive vacuum in any of the tanks, it said.
Inspectors also criticized DOE's Office of River Protection. It has not devoted sufficient attention and resources to oversight of the industrial hygiene program and matters needing correction at the tank farms, they said.
CH2M Hill officials did not return calls late Wednesday afternoon after the report was posted on the Internet.
The second report released Wednesday was prepared by an independent arm of DOE, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) and looked at allegations of false claims, false statements or conspiracy that might be considered criminal conduct.
The investigation cleared CH2M Hill Hanford Group, which manages the tank farms, and the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation, the outgoing occupational medicine provider, of major wrongdoing.
But it did find what it called "health and safety protocols" that it said needed to be addressed.
In one incident involving an unnamed Hanford subcontractor five years ago, an injured worker was encouraged to show up at work but perform no duties.
In another incident a worker was not given an immediate work restriction following a diagnosis for sensitivity to the metal beryllium, which is used in nuclear work. Continued exposure to beryllium in sensitive people can lead to chronic lung disease.
The memorandum also questioned why an unnamed industrial hygiene technician waited two hours after a worker was exposed to tank vapors to measure chemicals in the air and then record the reading in a log book rather than a survey form required by policy.
Investigators interviewed more than 70 current and former DOE and contractor employees and analyzed volumes of documents, according to the report. The OIG also hired an independent medical and federal regulations specialist to review medical files and safety records.
Investigators looked into allegations that HEHF personnel made inappropriate changes to patients' medical files to make their injuries look unrelated to Hanford or less serious.
The specialist retained for the investigation instead found that medical files were detailed, well organized and consistent with standard medical practices. Changes appeared to be reasonable and proper, according to the report. No evidence was found that HEHF destroyed records.
HEHF recently has lost the contract to provide occupational medicine services at Hanford to AdvanceMed for reasons unrelated to the investigation.
Some workers also believed that HEHF was being pressured by contractors. They accused HEHF and contractors of conspiring to improve contractor safety records by not documenting worker injuries.
Investigators could find no facts to support a variety of allegations, such as a claim it maintained two sets of medical records.
The final allegation accused CH2M Hill on two occasions of covering up excessively high vapor readings at underground tanks.
In the first case, witnesses had different versions of the event and no evidence was found to support either version. In the second case, no corroborating information was available.
The report recommended that Hanford leaders should focus on restoring employee faith in health and safety measures.
The results of the investigation were turned over to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Washington, which declined to prosecute.
"The Inspector General has done a poor job of executing its mission as watchdog for the public," said Tom Carpenter, an attorney for GAP. "GAP has collected the sworn statements and documentary evidence from many workers, but the OIG has apparently ignored much of this information."
HEHF President Lee Ashjian called for an apology from those who had accused his organization of misdeeds.
"(The) report vindicates the hundreds of dedicated staff of the Hanford Environmental Health Foundation," he said in a prepared statement.
Abraham said he will be directing managers to implement recommendations from each of the reports.
The Office of Inspector General's report can be read at www.ig.doe.gov/igreports.htm#cal2004 on the Internet. The other report is at www.oa.doe.gov/Hanford_worker_vapor.pdf.
-------- us nuc waste
Shortcut on Nuclear Waste
June 3, 2004
NY Times Opinion
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/opinion/03THU2.html?pagewanted=print&position=
The Senate may consider today whether to allow the Energy Department to reclassify certain nuclear wastes at a weapons plant in South Carolina so they can be disposed of faster and cheaper than if the department complied with current law. Although many senators may be tempted to skim over this issue as a matter of parochial concern to South Carolina, they need to consider this matter carefully lest they set a terrible precedent. The Energy Department has a notoriously poor record in handling environmental issues. It should not be granted such unbridled power to define its waste problems away with the stroke of a pen.
The Savannah River site in South Carolina has accumulated a huge inventory of radioactive wastes left over from weapons production, some 37 million gallons held in 51 underground tanks. Under the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act, virtually all of this material is deemed high-level waste, which must be disposed of in a deep repository like the one being built at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
For some years now, the Energy Department has been hoping to separate its wastes into two streams, reserving deep burial for only the part with high radioactivity. In the case of the South Carolina site, the department is prepared to pump most of the waste out of the tanks for disposal through deep burial. But it wants to leave a hard-to-remove residue of sludge in the tanks and bury it under grout.
Officials estimate that this approach could save $16 billion and trim 23 years from the lengthy cleanup process. But those plans were stymied when a federal judge in Idaho concluded that the scheme violated the waste-policy act.
Now Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has inserted language in a defense authorization bill that would achieve the same end. It would allow the department to reclassify the wastes in South Carolina in a way that would allow the disposal of some material on the site. Mr. Graham notes that the state's governor and its health and environmental regulators have signed off on the plan, and he says the decisions on how to handle each tank will be made collaboratively by federal and state officials.
Senator Graham's language is potentially a highly significant change in nuclear waste policy, yet it was inserted into a broad military authorization bill behind closed doors, without the benefit of hearings or open discussion. This is unacceptable, given that few areas could have more potential impact on public health for thousands of years into the future.
The Energy Department is largely empowered to set its own waste disposal policies, with only minimal oversight from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Before allowing the department to reclassify its waste products, the Senate should follow the lead of the House and call for an in-depth study of the approach by the National Academy of Sciences. The decision should not be left to an agency that is desperate to get past a staggeringly difficult waste disposal problem.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Aid Agency Halts Operations in Afghanistan
June 3, 2004
New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/international/asia/03CND-AFGH.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, June 3 - Doctors Without Borders suspended operations in Afghanistan today, a day after five of its workers were ambushed and killed, officials said.
The suspension will affect the organization's staff of 80 foreign employees and 1,400 Afghan employees, Nelke Manders, director of the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders, said at a news conference today.
The five aid workers were from the organization's Dutch branch. They were attacked on Wednesday in northwest Afghanistan as they were returning to their regional office, officials said.
The killings were another blow to the embattled aid workers in Afghanistan, who have seen 32 of their colleagues, and at least 5 other foreigners, killed since March 2003, often by Taliban and other militants intent on stalling aid and reconstruction efforts.
Abdul Hakim Latifi, a spokesman for the Taliban, who were driven from power in the American-led invasion in 2001, claimed responsibility for the attack in telephone calls to news agencies. "We killed them because they worked for the Americans against us using the cover of aid work," Mr. Latifi told Reuters. "We will kill more foreign aid workers," he said.
Three foreigners - a Belgian woman, a Dutch man and a Norwegian man - and two Afghan men, all working for the Dutch branch of the medical aid organization Doctors Without Borders, were killed when gunmen fired on their vehicle east of Qala-i-Nau, the capital of the Badghis Province.
Local officials said the killings occurred just before dusk as the five aid workers were returning to Qala-i-Nau from a village clinic.
Officials said they could not be sure if the attack was banditry or a terrorist assault on a foreign aid organization. "In the past, we have not seen such attacks - this is the first," the governor of Badghis Province, Azizullah Afzali, said by telephone.
But he said the aid workers were not carrying money, and he did not rule out a Taliban-inspired attack.
The provincial police chief, Amir Shah Nayebzada, said he thought Taliban supporters staged the attack. "They have increased their attempts in the area recently," he said.
The latest shootings bring to at least 10 the number of foreign civilians who have been killed while working in Afghanistan in slightly more than a year, and seem to confirm warnings from the United States military and Afghan officials that the Taliban would increase attacks before elections in September.
Last month, two British security specialists working on the United Nations election program were killed in an ambush in northeastern Afghanistan, and two Europeans were found bludgeoned to death in a Kabul park. Three foreigners were killed last year in attacks by people suspected of being Taliban members.
----
Relief Agency Suspends Afghan Operations
Thursday June 3, 2004
By STEPHEN GRAHAM
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4163365,00.html
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - The Nobel Peace Prize-winning relief agency Medecins Sans Frontieres suspended operations in Afghanistan on Thursday, a day after five of its aid workers were killed in an ambush claimed by the former Taliban regime.
The assault in northern Afghanistan was the deadliest since the radical Islamic militia was ousted in late 2001.
Two Dutch aid workers, a Norwegian doctor and their Afghan driver and translator were killed when attackers on a motorcycle shredded a four-wheel-drive painted with the organization's red logo with assault rifles and grenades.
``For the time being, our activities will be suspended nationwide,'' MSF spokeswoman Vicky Hawkins told a news conference. ``In the coming weeks we will analyze this event in-depth, but for the moment our priority is to take care of those most affected by this tragedy.''
MSF, known in English as Doctors Without Borders, employs 80 expatriates and 1,400 local people in its nationwide operations, and the suspension reflected an immediate increase in fear that an insurgency that has already severely limited operations by relief agencies in the south and east of the country could be spreading.
The organization plans to pull some expatriates back to Kabul and move some other staff to safer locations for the time being.
The implications of the suspension could be grave. MSF is one of the most professional international relief agencies and often sets the trend for others. It has decades of experience in Afghanistan. The organization won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.
``We'd adjusted ourselves to a particular level of criminal risk,'' said Gorm Pedersen, head of Danish aid group DACAAR, one of the main agencies providing wells and water across rural Afghanistan. ``That we could handle, but now it may be becoming political. It's most worrying.''
President Hamid Karzai expressed sorrow about the attack before leaving Thursday for the United States. But despite daily assaults against soldiers and election workers, Karzai claimed poverty worried ordinary Afghans more.
``I think we are quite all right with security,'' Karzai said. ``We have incidents, sure, we must reduce them. But this is not an alarming thing.''
The United Nations took a more alarmed view, saying in a statement it was ``deeply shocked and outraged by ... yet another tragic and unacceptable act,'' which confirmed that security had ``evolved negatively'' in recent months.
The U.N. called for more foreign troops to help Afghans provide security.
The slain foreigners were identified as Egil Tynaes, a 63-year-old doctor from Norway, Willem Kwint, a 40-year-old Dutch man, and Helene de Beir, 30, from the Netherlands.
Police investigating the incident said a farmer saw gunmen ambush the group Wednesday afternoon in a desert area near Khair Khana, a village 340 miles west of Kabul.
``Two men on a motorbike stopped the car and opened fire with Kalashnikovs,'' Badghis police chief Amir Shah Naibzada said. ``He gave a detailed description of the attackers. We're following that up.''
In Kabul, MSF officials choked back emotion as they told reporters of how colleagues found the white Toyota some 25 minutes' drive outside Khair Khana after the victims missed a radio check.
Shots hit the car's windows on three sides and shrapnel from a grenade was lodged in one side. The attackers disconnected the radio, but stole nothing.
The group said it had experienced no problems or received any threats in Badghis, an area close to the border with Turkmenistan considered among the safest for aid workers.
Mullah Abdul Hakim Latifi, a purported spokesman for the Taliban, called The Associated Press on Wednesday and said the militia staged the attack. He threatened more attacks and claimed that ``international aid workers were working for the policy of America.''
Taliban rebels and their al-Qaida allies have killed at least 33 aid workers since March last year, most of them Afghans.
Last November, gunmen killed Bettina Goislard, a 29-year old worker for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, in the eastern city of Ghazni, the first foreign U.N. staff member slain since the fall of the Taliban.
-------- arms
Ukraine military officials fired over arms depot blasts
KIEV (AFP)
Jun 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040603171243.ijrcslzi.html
Ukranian President Leonid Kuchma Thursday fired his armed forces chief of staff and chief infantry commander over a series of devastating explosions at a weapons depot that killed five people in early May.
In addition to the firing of Oleksandr Zatynayko and Petro Shulyak, Kuchma also reprimanded his Defense Minister Evhen Marchuk responsible for the incident, the president's press service said.
A government committee had recommended the measures last week.
The explosions occurred on May 6 after a fire erupted at a military base near the southeastern town of Melitopol.
Six Ukrainian soldiers, including the commander of the military base, have been charged over the explosions, which lasted nearly a week and forced 7,000 people to flee their homes.
Two are accused of starting the fire that triggered the blasts.
The equivalent of 900 wagon-loads of ammunition were destroyed by the flames, causing losses to the state of 2.25 billion hryvnas (353 million euros, 422 million dollars).
----
Turkey discovers contraband missile, missile heads bound for Egypt
ISTANBUL (AFP)
Jun 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040603130252.4mlh8t8y.html
Turkish authorities have found a radio-controlled missile and missile heads among contraband military equipment in containers shipped from Ukraine and bound for Egypt, a Turkish minister said Thursday.
The weapons were discovered late Wednesday when customs officials grew suspicious and, with help from paramilitary troops, opened two of an unspecified number of containers unloaded at the Ambarli customs area in Istanbul.
"So far we have found a radio-controlled missile, along with its launchers, and missile heads. We are continuing the investigation," Turkish State Minister Kursad Tuzmen told reporters here.
Tuzmen, who holds the foreign trade portfolio, refused to elaborate on what was exactly in the containers, but said they included "weapons which can be described as sophisticated".
He explained that the captain of the ship which brought in the containers had declared their content as spare parts.
"The captain's declarations and what is in the containers are different. Furthermore, Turkey was not informed of the passage of these weapons in line with international agreements," said Tuzmen, who holds the foreign trade portfolio.
"Using the most subtle description, this is trafficking. Naturally, when the trafficking of war weapons is concerned, the scale of the incident becomes bigger," he added.
The minister said the serial numbers of the containers had also been tampered with, but added officials were also trying to establish whether the declared origin and destination of the goods were correct.
"The containers, as transit cargo, were brought to Istanbul by one ship, unloaded at Ambarli and were waiting to be picked up by another ship to be taken to Egypt," Tuzmen explained.
"This is the general picture, but we are looking into it," he said.
According to press reports, a Portuguese-registered ship had dropped the containers in Istanbul.
Last month, Turkish police seized a cargo of about 500 Kalashnikov assault rifles from a Bulgarian-registered ship when it docked at Ambarli on its way to Paraguay.
The weapons had been described in the ship's manifest as hunting rifles.
-------- business
BAE rolls over General Dynamics with winning bid for tank maker Alvis
LONDON (AFP)
Jun 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040603185808.g4kvtt0u.html
BAE Systems announced Thursday an agreed bid for Alvis worth 320 pence a share in cash, trumping General Dynamics Corp's 280 pence offer for the British tank manufacturer.
Alvis has withdrawn its earlier recommendation of the offer from General Dynamics.
BAE's bid values Alvis at 355 million pounds (534.3 million euros, 652.9 million dollars).
Because the British defence and aerospace giant paid 230 pence per share for its existing holding in Alvis, full acceptance of the offer would result in the defence group having paid an average price of 294 pence per Alvis share.
Alvis chief executive and chairman Nicholas Prest said the board recommends the BAE offer in view of its significant premium compared to the offer from General Dynamics.
Alvis shares closed down 0.18 percent at 276.5 pence in London Thursday.
BAE already owns 28.7 percent of Alvis and said it had received commitments to accept its offer for a further 16.2 percent of the shares.
General Dynamics said Wednesday it had received acceptances representing 21.55 percent of Alvis' shares.
BAE said it expects the acquisition of Alvis to generate cost-saving opportunities, boost earnings and deliver returns above BAE's cost of capital in the first full year following completion of the takeover.
Commenting on the offer, BAE chief executive Mike Turner said: "Alvis is a highly successful business with a major presence in the European land sector.
"We believe the acquisition of Alvis offers substantial opportunities to build on BAE Systems' support services strategy in the land sector where the very large equipment base presents opportunities for business growth and cost reduction to the benefit of customer, industry and shareholders alike."
BAE also gave an update on current trading, saying the outlook for 2004 remains consistent with previous statements and that the underlying performance of its defence businesses is expected to be slightly ahead of 2003.
The group said it continues to experience cash flows ahead of expectations.
It anticipates good sustained underlying growth across its operations in North America and in International Partnerships, with some recovery in the Avionics business.
General Dynamics earlier Thursday received clearance for its bid from the British competition authorities on condition the parties gave undertakings to remedy public security concerns. The US company said it was prepared to meet the undertakings.
-------- china
China Dissidents Missing on Eve of Tiananmen Anniversary
June 3, 2004
By JIM YARDLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/international/asia/03CND-CHINA.html?hp
BEIJING, June 3 - Human rights groups and family members said today that several Beijing dissidents had disappeared or been placed under house arrest as part of a government clampdown to prevent any protests on the politically sensitive 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Among them is Dr. Jiang Yanyong, who in March wrote a letter calling on the government to admit it was wrong in ordering the military assault against demonstrators in Tiananmen Square that killed hundreds and wounded thousands on June 4, 1989. The letter was widely circulated on the Internet.
Dr. Jiang and his wife, their daughter says, have been missing since Wednesday morning, when they left their Beijing apartment with officials from the government hospital where he works.
Dr. Jiang, 72, a semiretired military surgeon, became a national hero last year after he helped expose the government's initial cover-up of the SARS outbreak in Beijing. In a statement released today, his daughter, Jiang Rui, said hospital officials had been evasive when asked about her parents' whereabouts and had cautioned against publicizing their disappearance.
"They are safe," officials told the family, according to the statement. "You should not go beyond the authority to whom you report."
A Foreign Ministry spokesman, asked about Dr. Jiang during a regular briefing, said he had no information. Today, the telephone to Dr. Jiang's apartment had been cut off.
Other dissidents have also reportedly been placed under house arrest or taken to locations outside Beijing until the anniversary of the crackdown has passed, according to human rights groups.
Today, the vast expanse of Tiananmen Square was quiet as vendors sold bottled water or postcards to tourists enduring the afternoon heat. The number of police officers, military guards and undercover security officers was noticeable but not extraordinary.
At the center of the square, two young businessmen from southern China, ages 20 and 18, posed for tourist photographs. They were in Beijing trying to sell gems. Asked about the events of 1989, both men were quizzical. The news media rarely discuss the crackdown, and the men said they had never heard of it.
But June 4, as it is widely known here, remains a pivotal moment in contemporary Chinese history that analysts say is the equivalent of the political elephant in the room, ever present if not publicly discussed.
While Beijing is expected to remain quiet on Friday, protesters in Hong Kong have already held one march this week to protest the central government's recent restrictions on democratic aspirations in the former British colony. Thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong are also expected to hold a vigil on Friday to commemorate the Tiananmen anniversary.
China bans any public commemoration of the June 4 crackdown, except in Hong Kong and Macao, which enjoy relatively autonomous status.
The Chinese government has long defended its use of force in 1989 as a necessary measure to end a "counterrevolutionary rebellion" and prevent the country from collapsing into chaos. But after 15 years of extensive economic and social change, many intellectuals continue to invoke June 4 to push for political reforms the government has been reluctant to make.
In recent weeks several intellectuals have signed a petition calling for an official reassessment of the 1989 protests that would acknowledge the merit of the student-led demonstrators' complaints against official corruption and calls for greater government accountability. Other longtime protesters, like parents of students slain in 1989, have also continued to push for a public apology.
Such a move is unlikely to happen anytime soon. "China's conclusion on the political turmoil on June 4, 1989, has been very clear," Liu Jianchao, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Tuesday. "The Chinese government made a resolute decision to stabilize the situation."
He added, "Thanks to the stable situation, the Chinese government and people are able to concentrate on development and make due efforts to promote world peace and development."
Experts say a public re-examination of the events of 1989 would place enormous pressure on the Communist leadership, focusing unwelcome attention on senior officials whose careers profited from the crackdown as well as raising basic questions of political legitimacy. "It's because of the fear that political instability might be caused by a reassessment," said Liu Junning, a liberal scholar. "This kind of reassessment would legitimize a democratic transition."
Mr. Liu noted that June 4 remained a delicate issue even within the government. Indeed, Reuters reported today that younger officials were being required to watch a new four-hour government documentary to convince them that the crackdown could not have been avoided.
-------- iraq
OPEC aims to put limit on 'boiling' price of oil
Katrin Bennhold/IHT
Thursday, June 3, 2004
International Herald Tribune
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5326500
See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
Statements in Beruit backing Saudis help cool recent surge
Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries made a renewed bid Wednesday to ease surging oil prices, signaling their support of Saudi efforts to raise the global supply of oil and announcing steps to augment security at major oil installations throughout the Gulf region.
But even as the pledges pushed oil prices off of record highs, dipping below $40 a barrel on Wednesday, analysts sounded increasingly concerned that OPEC's present moves to step up production capacity could mute the cartel's future power to react to oil price shocks.
At a gathering in Beirut ahead of a formal OPEC meeting Thursday, the United Arab Emirates said it would stretch its oil production to near its full capacity, increasing output by 400,000 barrels a day as of this month. "This aims to put a limit on the boiling prices," Obaid ibn Saif al-Nasseri, oil minister of the Emirates, said on arrival in Beirut, Reuters reported.
The move comes on top of Saudi Arabia's promise to increase production by 700,000 barrels a day. The kingdom, the only other OPEC member with any significant spare capacity, can augment its daily supply of oil by 1 million to 1.5 million barrels daily.
"What we need is a volume that can give a really significant impact to oil prices," said OPEC's president, Purnomo Yusgiantoro of Indonesia.
The announcements helped cool the price of oil, which breached a record $42 per barrel on Tuesday in New York following the deaths of 22 foreign workers in an attack in Saudi Arabia over the weekend.
Crude oil for July delivery dropped $2.37 on Wednesday, or 5.6 percent, to $39.96 a barrel, on the New York Mercantile Exchange. On the International Petroleum Exchange in London, Brent oil fell $2.22, or 5.7 percent, to $36.86.
But analysts questioned how effective OPEC would be in breaking the psychological effect of the terrorist attacks. "Right now the price is determined by demand, but also by security concerns, especially with a U.S. market that is extremely tight in fuel," said Yasser Elguindi, managing director of Medley Advisors, a New York-based consultancy. "So OPEC's ability to reduce the price is very diminished."
The Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, who has promised to increase production in June no matter what OPEC decides, is backing an increase in the cartel's official output limits of 2.5 million barrels a day, or 11 percent. But even as he sought to reassure markets about the safety of the oil supply, he acknowledged that pumping more oil would not guarantee sustainable lower oil prices.
"Contrary to what some believe, OPEC cannot always control prices," Naimi said, The Associated Press reported. "Prices are controlled by the market and are affected by many factors."
Perhaps more worrisome over the medium term, analysts said, is how much spare capacity the major OPEC producers would have if they opened their spigots to near maximum levels for now in a bid to calm oil prices.
"We're entering a situation where there is practically zero margin for error," Elguindi said. "You can't have any problems with terrorism, OPEC or other oil-producing countries, because there won't be room to compensate."
What's more, the world's thirst for oil appears to be rising, as demand from the United States remains stable and is surging from China. Geopolitical risks are pushing countries to build reserves, adding further to demand.
"We're getting closer to a very tight supply-situation," said Michael Lewis, a commodities expert at Deutsche Bank in London. Analysts say significant investments must be made all along the production chain - in tankers and refineries - to deal with the situation.
In the meantime, some OPEC members said they were enhancing the security of their oil operations.
Kuwait said it was stepping up security at its oil installations and was coordinating with Gulf producers to protect against attacks, the AP reported.
Naimi insisted that Saudi Arabia was taking appropriate steps to ensure the safety of its most important facilities. "The illusion that terrorism threatens petroleum facilities in the world is not true," he said in a speech at the Beirut offices of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, the AP reported. "I assure you that installations in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia are secure because they are under intensive protection to prevent such acts."
The attack at Khobar, Saudi Arabia, that killed 22 people, most of them foreigners, raised alarm about the reliability of oil supplies from Gulf producers.
----
Powell: Iraq Will Have No Veto on U.S.-Led Force
Jun 3, 2004
(Reuters)
http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/82731|top|06-03-2004::05:47|reuters.html
DUBAI - Iraq's new interim government will have no veto over future military operations by American-led forces after the U.S.-British occupation formally ends on June 30, Secretary of State Colin Powell said.
The U.N. Security Council, divided over how much authority Baghdad will have over U.S.-led troops, focuses on the issue on Thursday, when Iraq's foreign minister addresses the 15-nation body in an effort to shape a new U.N. resolution.
Powell said the interim government would be fully sovereign and able to reach agreements with Washington on how Iraqi and U.S.-led forces would operate after the handover.
"There could be a situation where we have to act and there may be a disagreement, and we have to act to protect ourselves or to accomplish a mission," Powell told Dubai-based Middle East Broadcasting Center in an interview aired late on Wednesday.
His remarks again appeared at odds with British Prime Minister Tony Blair's contention last week that the Iraqi government would be able to veto operations such as the U.S. assault on insurgents in Falluja in April.
Powell, describing the Falluja example as a "small hypothetical," said he expected consent, coordination and cooperation with the Iraqi side to be the general rule.
"The understanding we will enter into with this new government is that there will be mechanisms at a political level and at a military level where both sides will be familiar with the plans of the other," he said.
"The plans will be integrated into a single operational plan," he said, citing Germany and Korea as sovereign countries where such arrangements with U.S. troops had worked in the past.
NO IRAQI VETO
Powell made clear there were no plans to spell out the terms under which U.S. forces would work with their Iraqi "partners" in the U.N. resolution on Iraq's future.
"The resolution does not talk about a veto over any military operations," he said of an amended U.S.-British draft.
"You can't use the word 'veto'," Powell said. "The Iraqi government is sovereign and... it has said that we consent to the presence of coalition forces, we want coalition forces there, we are going to coordinate and cooperate with each other."
France, Russia and China, who have the power to block resolutions in the Security Council, say the latest draft is still too vague over what sovereignty means after the U.S.-led occupation officially ends.
Russia, in particular, wants to see the reaction of Iraqis to the new government before a vote on the measure.
"This is a very important resolution for us. And definitely we need to have our own input," Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshiyar Zebari told reporters after arriving in New York on Wednesday.
----
To Many, Mission Not Accomplished
Residents Say Occupation's Unkept Promises, Military Tactics Fuel Resistance
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10960-2004Jun2?language=printer
BAQUBAH, Iraq, June 2 -- Stately in the black turban and flowing robes that marked him as a senior Shiite Muslim cleric, Ali Abdul Kareem Madani received petitioners sitting cross-legged on a fine carpet. One after the other, they streamed in all day to tell him their woes and their needs.
Two factotums, standing on either flank of the soft-spoken dignitary, waved straw fans to keep him cool in the oppressive heat. The electric ceiling fan just above his head was motionless, as the power was out again in this fruit-growing farming hub 30 miles northeast of Baghdad.
"We blame the coalition forces for the lack of electricity," Madani said solemnly, as if handing down a religious interpretation. "After one year of occupation, a great country like the United States is not able to set up a big generator to give this city electricity?"
For many Iraqis, the 13-month-old U.S. occupation has failed to live up to its billing as an exercise in reconstruction and democracy-building. Like Madani, they are glad that former president Saddam Hussein has been overthrown and a new interim government has been installed in Baghdad. But most of Baqubah's approximately 250,000 people -- and most Iraqis around the country -- have experienced the U.S. presence here mainly at the wrong end of a gun. It is that, and not the news from Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, that informs their views.
"We don't see any civilians," Madani complained. "All we see are soldiers."
A relentless campaign of bombings and ambushes by insurgents determined to drive out the U.S. occupation has forced the military to continue a battle that soldiers thought was finished more than a year ago, when President Bush announced the end of major combat operations. The result has been persistent clashes, nighttime raids, armored patrols and detentions -- the blunt instruments of war -- that have led many Iraqis of different political and religious persuasions to resent the occupation they once welcomed.
Insurgents have organized into coherent guerrilla groups and forced U.S. authorities to deal with them as such in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, and around Najaf, 90 miles south of the capital. In countless other locations, including Baghdad and around Baqubah, they have remained underground. But in either case, the struggle has pushed U.S. soldiers into an aggressive military role that is the face of the occupation for most Iraqis.
"If you want to give us freedom, a sort of democracy, then you don't kill people, you don't destroy houses, you don't run over cars with your tanks," said Saad Abdul-Jabbar, a journalist in Baqubah who writes for the independent Zaman newspaper in Baghdad. "This only creates hatred."
Madani has his own reasons for disliking the U.S. occupation. He returned to Baqubah on May 25 after nearly 10 months in seven different Army detention centers, where he was taken after being accused of promoting anti-U.S. violence early in the occupation.
The charges against him have not been dropped, U.S. officials said. But Army Col. Dana J.H. Pittard, who recently took command here and realized Madani's position of influence, helicoptered to Umm Qasr -- about 325 miles to the southeast, at the head of the Persian Gulf -- to secure his release from prison and escort him home, according to Iraqi and U.S. sources.
Pittard has shown himself to be a gentleman, Madani said, but the gesture did not change his views on the U.S. occupation.
U.S. authorities in Baghdad have mainly blamed the violent insurgency for delays in rebuilding. Civilian contractors have retreated from the field, and often from the country, they note, and civilian U.S. officials have been hobbled by stringent security restrictions.
But for Madani, the converse is true: The delays in rebuilding have been a big reason for the violence. Thousands of young men, having been told their country would be swiftly rebuilt, have not found jobs, he said. And Baqubah's merchants, having heard of millions of dollars in reconstruction contracts, still have not seen the money flow or the return of municipal services.
"Services?" asked a Baqubah merchant known as Abu Ziad as he gestured toward the open sewage running in front of his sundries shop. "Look at that. Look at that. They say they have spent millions. Where are they? I tell you, it was better before."
Saad Abbas, who runs a small butcher shop on the edge of town, said his business has suffered because the Baath Party functionaries, security agents and soldiers who formed a large part of Iraq's economy before the war have run out of money and cannot find work. The economy around Baqubah seems frozen, he said, and until it gets moving again, nobody will be able to pay for his freshly slaughtered lamb.
"The most important thing is the electricity," said Abbas, 38. "Because when the electricity stops, everything stops." List of Grievances
Khabair Sulman Hussein Dureimi, 65, was picked up late one evening by U.S. soldiers who came to his house in Ragat Haj al-Sheil, the date-growing village he heads on the edge of Baqubah city. He was taken to the nearby Farnas airstrip that serves as a U.S. base, he recalled. There he was interrogated once, he said, and released without explanation a month later.
Because of this and other reasons, the 4,800 people of Ragat Haj al-Sheil have little good to say about the U.S. occupation.
For them, according to a conversation with several Iraqis at Dureimi's spacious home, the occupation has meant being forced off the road by U.S. armored personnel carriers that insist on driving down the middle. It has meant being unable to get water from a nearby stream because it runs too close to the Farnas base. It has meant getting shot at when they move about the reeds and underbrush of their palm groves. And for Dureimi's 35-year-old son, Labib, it has meant trying to leave at 5 a.m. to get a good spot in a gasoline line and having his car damaged by machine-gun fire from an armored personnel carrier crew that was startled in the darkness.
Encounters with soldiers have so soured the villagers' view of the U.S. military that even a public works project funded by the Army has become a source of contention.
Civil affairs officers from the Farnas base donated money to spruce up the village school, which villagers said had not been maintained since it was built in 1954. Workers have begun replastering the walls and pouring concrete for a playground. But the new roof, villages complained, is made from mud that will disintegrate at the first winter rain.
"The work should be done right," said Mohammed Aly, an unemployed former soldier whose six children attend the school.
Villagers complained to U.S. soldiers that the Iraqi contractor was doing shoddy work, but got no result, Aly said. A Dialogue in Bughros
Lt. Col. Steve Bullimore, 43, of St. Joseph, Mo., the commander of Task Force 16 with responsibility for Baqubah, was well into the third hour of his meeting with local sheiks and dignitaries. I have $625,000 to fund reconstruction projects, he told them, so come forward with what you need.
"What will it take to change the minds of some of these people in Bughros?" he asked, referring to a violence-prone village on the edge of Baqubah. "Is it jobs? Is it money? Be honest with me."
Bughros has been a thorn in the side of U.S. commanders here for months. For most of the last year, U.S. forces have sought to avoid the village because they were consistently ambushed there. Bullimore -- tall, smiling and confident -- told his visitors that deal was over.
From now on, he said, U.S. forces will continually visit Bughros. They will come to help, he added, but if they are fired on, they will fire back.
"My understanding is that every time they went into Bughros, they got shot at, so they just left it alone," Bullimore said of his predecessors. "Is that right? What I'm telling you is that I cannot do that."
"Nobody is against the government," protested Aouf Khasheri, an engineer and village leader.
"My information is different," responded Bullimore, smiling.
Rocket-propelled grenades have been fired at his unit's tanks patrolling in Bughros, he noted, and his men have been fired upon from rooftops by gunmen wearing the black clothes that are a sign of insurgents loyal to the former Baath Party government.
"Why do they do that?" asked a white-turbaned sheik, pointing out that the village contains many former Iraqi soldiers who have come home with nothing to do. "Because they don't have jobs. That's why they attack you."
Khasheri, dressed in Western clothes and speaking passable English, urged Bullimore to pay his respects to the sheiks before venturing into the village. When he wants to go somewhere around Bughros, Khasheri said, he goes to the sheik who controls the territory and asks authorization to proceed. Then the sheik gives him gunmen to escort him and all goes well.
That is the way the U.S. Army should do things, he suggested.
"Look at this man," he added, gesturing to a sheik dressed in traditional Arab headdress and robes. "He is 81. He is a big sheik. In Saddam Hussein's days, people used to come to him. They did not ask him to come to their office for a meeting. No, they went to him. Now the coalition forces have killed his son."
The suggestion seemed to have little appeal for Bullimore, who pointed out that occupation rules allow only one gun per household. For those who wanted a permit to legalize their weapons, he said, a form was available with his aides that could be taken to the town hall. 'We Meet With Everybody'
Since November, Edward Peter Messmer has been trying to build Baqubah into a democratic, economically flourishing city. The going has been rough, he acknowledged in an interview, but progress is visible. It will be even more visible, he said, when the $18 billion recently approved for Iraq's civilian and police reconstruction starts flowing through the economy.
"That right now is kicking into gear," said Messmer, a diplomat who was detached from the U.S. Consulate in Bombay to come to Baqubah.
Provincial officials said bids must be received by noon Saturday for the first of the big contracts that will be let here, primarily for sewer, irrigation and electricity-generating projects. But already, Messmer said, the amount of electricity available in Baqubah is increasing and merchants have more money in their pockets.
Baqubah residents have displayed great enthusiasm for the new organs of government he has helped them organize, Messmer said, and for the first time, Iraqi police in the past two weeks have dared to patrol Baqubah's streets at night.
The complaints that only U.S. soldiers are visible around Baqubah are unfounded, he said, since he and his civilian colleagues from the Coalition Provisional Authority sit down regularly with local residents. "We meet with sheiks, we meet with imams, we meet with students, we meet with everybody," he said.
The rebuilding efforts will hit a high moment June 30, Messmer said, when the U.S. occupation formally ends, sovereignty returns to Iraqi authorities and Coalition Provisional Authority officials go home. To celebrate, Baqubah will hold "Sovereignty Day" festivities.
"We're going to have a great time," he said.
--------
Fighting in Kufa Signals End of Truce
U.S. Troops Kill at Least Seven in Skirmishes With Forces Loyal to Rebel Cleric
By Saad Sarhan and Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 3, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10955-2004Jun2.html
KUFA, Iraq, June 2 -- The shaky week-old cease-fire in southern Iraq broke down completely Wednesday with heavy fighting on the streets of Kufa, where U.S. troops pursued Shiite Muslim insurgents, killed at least seven Iraqis and wounded 37 others.
After calm on the first day of the truce, almost all the conditions of the deal worked out last Thursday have failed to hold. Fighters from the anti-occupation militia of rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr continue to roam the streets of Kufa, about 90 miles south of Baghdad, as well as the nearby city of Najaf instead of disappearing as promised. Talks between Sadr and mainstream Shiite leaders over charges that he was involved in the murder of a moderate cleric last year have yet to get underway. Nor have negotiations begun on disbanding his militia, the Mahdi Army, and converting it into a political organization.
Instead, Iraqi mediators are awaiting Sadr's response to a new request that his forces abandon mosques and police stations and surrender their weapons within 72 hours.
U.S. commanders had responded to Sadr's promises with a pledge to halt offensive operations and pull their forces into a pair of bases near Kufa and Najaf, except for guards at police stations and government offices. U.S. officials also said that they would continue to patrol the two towns to avoid a "security vacuum" and that soldiers would fire on Sadr's fighters in self-defense.
But almost from the outset, there have been numerous shootouts, especially in Kufa. Two U.S. soldiers were killed during the week.
U.S. officials initially attributed the problems to Sadr's fighters not getting word about the truce, and they characterized the fighting as small in scope. On Wednesday, a military spokesman in Baghdad said flatly, "There never was a cease-fire."
Shiite mediators accused the Americans of breaking the truce by attacking two mosques and an industrial area while negotiations for the 72-hour withdrawal were underway. In a letter to the provincial governor in Najaf, Adnan Zurufi, mediators from the Shiite House, a group of politicians that worked out the original deal, wrote: "What is happening now is a violation of the cease-fire agreement and efforts to reach a peaceful solution."
The fighting threatens chances of the two-month-old Shiite rebellion ending before the formal transfer of authority to a new Iraqi government June 30. The new government took shape Tuesday, and administration officials characterized its formation as a turning point in the tumultuous 13-month-long occupation of Iraq.
But tumult continues, and not just in the south. For the third day in a row, a car bomb exploded on a Baghdad street. The explosion in the busy Adhamiyah district killed four bystanders. The blast was aimed at a passing convoy of SUVs of the sort frequently used by Iraqi officials and foreigners working for the U.S.-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority, witnesses said.
The convoy escaped with dents and a few flat tires.
There were two explosions, a smaller one and a deadly blast a few minutes later. "The second explosion happened when young men and children started to gather around. Then people got hurt," said Falah Kadhim, a laborer. At least 13 Iraqis have died in Baghdad car bombings this week.
"It's enough that we've had so many wars in the past," said Taher Kadhim, an appliance store owner. "Now we have the war of the car bombs." His son, who was in the shop, was hit in the eye with glass. Police on the scene said the bomb detonated by remote control.
The kidnapping threat to foreigners has also persisted. A videotape provided to Arabic-language satellite television networks showed two truck drivers -- one Turkish, the other Egyptian -- being held by a group of masked men brandishing rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles. One of the abductors read a statement saying that the captives "were providing the American army with supplies and goods." The narrator went on to say they would be treated according to Islamic law and warned "everyone who is assisting the Americans that they will meet the same fate."
The hostages held documents that indicated they worked for ESS, a division of a British company that is providing food to U.S. forces.
On Tuesday, kidnappers seized two employees of a Polish construction company from its Baghdad offices. One of the Poles escaped, but the other remains in captivity. Two Kurdish security guards and two Iraqi workers were also abducted. Kidnappers currently hold at least nine foreigners from a two-month wave of abductions.
Fighting in Kufa began in the morning when U.S. troops advanced into the center of town, where Mahdi Army militiamen were in the process of taking over a police station. Fighting broke out as U.S. armored vehicles approached the city's main Kufa mosque, which Sadr's fighters have used as a fortress.
Militiamen scrambled to battle the Americans and civilians shuttered themselves in their homes and shops. The skirmishes lasted for about an hour. At sunset, more shooting and explosions echoed through Kufa's deserted streets.
A spokesman for Sadr, Fuad Turfi, accused the Americans of "deliberately breaking the cease-fire because it is not in their favor."
Another spokesman, Ahmed Shaibani, said Sadr would speak about the 72-hour peace proposal at Friday prayers in the city.
Williams reported from Baghdad.
--------
Iraqi Ayatollah Cautiously Acknowledges New Government
June 3, 2004
By EDWARD WONG and KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/international/middleeast/03CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 3 - Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite leader, acknowledged the new Iraqi government in a cautious statement today in which he said he hoped it would prove its "competence and decency" but noted that the body had not been formed through legitimate elections.
Ayatollah Sistani also urged the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution that granted Iraqis full sovereignty and did not compromise the government's power in political, military and security matters.
In addition, he insisted that the new government "seek the elimination of traces of occupation completely."
In comments on Wednesday, the United Nations special envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, said he had "kept in touch with" the ayatollah through the process of selecting the new Iraqi government but said he did not seek his approval for the new government.
One of the country's Shiite parties, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, released a statement on Wednesday in which party leaders expressed "reservations" about the way in which it said the selection process for the new government had ended with the "marginalization and exclusion" of what it called popular Islamic leaders.
The American-led occupation authority plans to transfer sovereignty on June 30 to the Iraqi interim government, which took shape earlier this week. American officials have warned that violence in Iraq may well increase with the approach of the transfer.
Today, fighting erupted in the holy city of Najaf as American soldiers battled militia members loyal to a radical Shiite cleric, news services reported. The clashes occurred as the cleric, Moktada al-Sadr, met with Shiite politicians, including former Governing Council member Ahmad Chalabi, about ending violence in the city.
The fighting came in spite of a bilateral cease-fire in Najaf and the nearby holy city of Kufa announced by Mr. Sadr and American authorities a week ago.
Fighting also erupted today in Kufa. Five Iraqis were killed in the clashes there, and 11 were injured, hospital officials said.
Soldiers of the First Armored Division in Kufa have been fighting members of the Mahdi Army, the militia backing Mr. Sadr. Kufa is where Mr. Sadr preaches every Friday, and his men there have refused to honor the cease-fire.
The American military issued a statement saying today's clash began when soldiers approached a school suspected of being the source of mortar attacks. As they drew near the building, insurgents opened fire. Three soldiers were wounded, the military said, and American troops killed "a significant number" of insurgents. The soldiers found a large cache of weapons inside the school, the statement said.
Also today, mortar rounds landed near the Italian embassy in Baghdad. Reuters reported that one Iraqi was killed and several others were wounded, though none of the embassy staff was hurt.
Haitham al-Fadel, a guard at the Italian embassy, told the news service that six people, including three children, were wounded when the rounds fell on a nearby restaurant and a house.
The building was not damaged in the attack, but officials said that most embassy personnel were being transferred to the coalition headquarters, known as the Green Zone.
The embassy, like many other government and diplomatic buildings here, has been targeted by insurgents on other occasions. Last month, mortar shells exploded near the embassy, but the building was not hit. In November, a projectile damaged the building but caused no injuries.
Italy has been a supporter of the American-led campaign in Iraq. The administration of Premier Silvio Berlusconi has deployed about 3,000 personnel to help rebuild the country, though it has not sent combat troops. Today's events came a day after a car bomb in the Adhamiya neighborhood here killed at least 5 Iraqis and wounded 38, according to a hospital director.
Also on Wednesday, a shell fired into an arms depot at an American military base near the northern city of Kirkuk touched off an enormous explosion that sent a black cloud of smoke over the skyline. According to an initial report, no one was injured, a military spokesman said.
The car bombing on Wednesday in the mostly Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya, where two bombs went off in close succession, was the third such attack in Baghdad in three days.
Shihab Salim heard the first explosion on Wednesday morning as he was sitting with his children in his home in Adhamiya.
The children started running for the door to check out the blast. Mr. Salim wanted to stop them, to tell them there might be a second explosion. But it seemed that all the children of the neighborhood were already racing down the street, as if the ice cream truck had come around.
Then the second bomb went off.
"I wasn't even able to get myself away," said Mr. Salim, a construction worker, as he lay in a bed in Numan Hospital with blood covering his white robe. He was gouged in the thigh by flying glass or shrapnel. One of his children was also injured.
Mr. Salim said he had seen the car parked on one side of Omar bin Abdul Aziz Street as he walked in the morning to the bakery. It was a dark-red Chevrolet sedan. He did not mention seeing anyone inside.
Whether a suicide bomber was responsible did not matter to him, or to the woman wailing at the entrance of the hospital because a family member had been killed, or to the bloodied victims lying on stretchers in the cramped hospital hallway waiting to be taken to air-conditioned rooms.
A crowd pressed against the reception desk, asking about friends and family.
"I think whoever did this was trying to create disruptions in the country after the announcement of the new government," Mr. Salim said. "They don't want the situation to settle down. They're terrorists."
By 1:15 p.m. most of the bodies and body parts had been carted away from the scene. What remained were charred bits of metal, pieces of glass and the burned hulk of the car. Iraqi policemen blocked off the area.
Dozens of men carried a coffin draped with an Iraqi flag from the doorway of a nearby mosque. A body washer had performed the proper Islamic ritual. The corpse was ready for burial.
The fighting on Wednesday left at least 4 Iraqis dead and 35 wounded, a hospital official said. On Tuesday, 5 Iraqis were killed and 11 injured in clashes. There were no reports of Americans killed either today or in the last two days of fighting.
The battle in Kufa on Wednesday began at 10 p.m. when a large American patrol rolled into town and took up a position between two mosques, witnesses said. It lasted about an hour. Most of the injured were not wounded directly in the battle, but by stray mortar rounds fired by the Mahdi Army that landed in residential areas, officials at two hospitals said.
"We don't want anything more than just to be safe," said Fadhil Jasim, whose 3-year-old son, Muhammad, was one of seven people wounded by a single mortar shell. "Others are fooling around with people's lives, and we are the ones paying for it."
Ali Hussein, a 25-year-old militiaman, said the Mahdi Army would start attacking American tanks and Humvees with suicide bombers equipped with explosive belts next week if a peaceful solution was not reached. Mr. Sadr made a similar threat nearly two months ago, but it has yet to be carried out.
Around 8 p.m. in Baghdad, the sun slipped toward the horizon as boys dived into the Tigris along the east bank and kicked around soccer balls in a dusty field. A full moon rose above palm trees. So ended a quiet day in Iraq.
Kirk Semple contributed reporting from New York for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Egypt Eager to Help Israel Out of Gaza
by Cam McGrath
(Inter Press Service)
June 3, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/mcgrath.php?articleid=2730
CAIRO (IPS) - Egypt has presented a security initiative to support an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, but wants to avoid being drawn into a "security trap."
The initiative calls for a bilateral ceasefire agreement between the Palestinians and Israelis, and the resumption of negotiations aimed at implementing the stalled roadmap peace plan. Egypt would also train and equip Palestinian security forces, and send its own observers to help monitor compliance with the ceasefire.
Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority have reportedly endorsed the initiative.
"Egypt is trying to provide stability and order in the event of any Israeli pullout," political analyst Gamal Abdel Gawad from the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPSS) told IPS.
The initiative comes in response to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposed plan to evacuate all Israeli troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip. The four-stage pullout would dismantle 21 settlements that are home to 7,500 Jewish settlers living amongst 1.3 million Palestinians. The enclaves incur enormous security expenses and are frequently attacked by Palestinian militants.
"The plan will enable us to preserve national and security interests and extract Israel from the dangerous diplomatic deadlock," Sharon said in remarks broadcast on Israeli television.
The Israeli cabinet has twice voted down the pullout plan. Sharon has threatened to sack uncooperative cabinet ministers in order to ensure its approval.
He has also turned to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for support.
While the two leaders rarely see eye to eye, Mubarak has said he would welcome any withdrawal from Gaza provided it does not interfere with the implementation of the roadmap.
The Bush administration's roadmap peace plan envisions the establishment of an autonomous Palestinian state by 2005. Many Arabs fear Israel will withdraw from Gaza only to solidify its position in the West Bank.
"Egypt is committed to take any role to facilitate the implementation of the roadmap, but not to facilitate Sharon's plan, which it believes is aimed at killing the roadmap," says Hassan Nafaa, chairman of the political science department at Cairo University.
Palestinian militant organizations could try to fill the power vacuum once Israeli forces withdraw, he said. Egypt's security plan aims at boosting the effectiveness of the Palestinian Authority's security apparatus to ensure a smooth transition.
"If Sharon decides to withdraw there might be a civil war between the Palestinian factions and if this should take place, Israel would have the pretext it needs to intervene again militarily," Nafaa told IPS.
The state-run Middle East News Agency (MENA) quoted official sources as saying that as part of the Egyptian initiative, 150 to 200 Egyptian security officials will spend six months in Gaza training a 30,000 strong Palestinian security force.
Under the plan the officers will remain after the Israeli pullout to support international experts and observers in a peacekeeping role.
Egypt will also help rebuild police stations and jails in Gaza, as well as provide the Palestinian security forces with communications equipment, police vehicles and light weapons, the agency said.
No Egyptian troops will be deployed in Gaza, which Egypt administered before the territory was seized by Israel during the war in 1967.
"Egypt wants to avoid the risk of having its own troops shooting at Palestinians or be shot at by Palestinians as this is politically unacceptable," said Abdel Gawad.
-------- prisoners of war
'Special methods' at Guantanamo
About 600 people are being held at Guantanamo Bay
By Nick Childs
BBC Pentagon correspondent
Thursday, 3 June, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3775329.stm
A senior US general says a set of four special interrogation techniques have been used on two key detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
But he insisted the techniques conform to the Geneva Conventions and that all the prisoners are treated humanely.
The Pentagon previously acknowledged it approved interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay which go beyond the US military's normal practice.
It has insisted all the techniques conform to the Geneva Conventions.
This was a point underlined by the head of US Southern Command, General James Hill, whose responsibilities include Guantanamo Bay.
Veto
But Gen Hill has now said that four of the techniques require US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld be notified, and that he can veto them.
The general said the techniques have been used against two key individuals held at Guantanamo Bay.
One prisoner is linked to the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, and another is described by General Hill as an al-Qaeda operative of high intelligence value.
Gen Hill insists that all prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are treated humanely and that he would not even call the additional techniques harsh.
However, the Pentagon refuses to say what the techniques are.
Against the background of the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal, the general's remarks are likely to raise new questions.
-------- space
Private spaceship set for launch in US
SpaceShipOne is set to soar 100km into sub-orbital space
Thursday 03 June 2004,
Reuters
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FDF7B301-1747-4001-8DF1-70D2AA39C45F.htm
Travelling into space is a viable commercial business, says one company planning to shoot past Earth later this month.
The SpaceShipOne project, backed by Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, and led by aviation expert Burt Rutan, plans to send a rocket plane 100 kilometres into the air and back down again in California's Mojave Desert, organisers said on Wednesday.
If successful, it will be the world's first privately funded rocket plane
"Every time SpaceShipOne flies, we demonstrate that relatively modest amounts of private funding can significantly increase the boundaries of commercial space technology," Allen, a well-known technology and science fiction fan, said in a statement.
The rocket plane, which will be carried to an altitude of 15,240 metres by a larger carrier aircraft called the White Knight, will spend about three and a half minutes at its peak altitude, during which the test pilot will experience weightlessness.
First major step
During the latest test flight in May, test pilot Mike Melvill reached an altitude of about 65km, about two-thirds of the goal for the next flight, scheduled for 21 June.
"Every time SpaceShipOne flies, we demonstrate that relatively modest amounts of private funding can significantly increase the boundaries of commercial space technology"
Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder
That was already the highest altitude ever achieved by a non-government aerospace programme, and SpaceShipOne's organisers are calling the forthcoming flight the first major step towards space flight for civilians.
To promote private space flight, the X Prize Foundation is offering $10 million to the first team that launches a piloted, privately funded spaceship with three people on board to 100 kilometres, brings it back to earth, and repeats the flight again within the three weeks.
Although SpaceShipOne's inaugural launch later this month will not qualify for that prize, it is equipped with three seats and will later compete for the prize, organisers said.
Unique design
At least 26 other teams are also competing for the prize, reportedly involving backers such as Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos as well as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
SpaceShipOne doesn't look like a typical rocket, except for its bullet-shaped fuselage.
Built with delta-style wings, which can be tilted 90 degrees to slow the vehicle during re-entry, SpaceShipOne will nestle underneath the White Night, a specially designed carrier airplane with its own unique, triple-fuselage design.
At its peak altitude, SpaceShipOne's pilot will be able to see the black sky of space and the curvature of the earth.
SpaceShipOne was designed and built by Burt Rutan and his aerospace company Scaled Composites LLC in California, for an estimated $25 million.
Rutan developed the Voyager, the only aircraft ever to fly non-stop around the world without refuelling.
-------- spies
CIA venture arm funds Mass. firm
Security agency hoping to profit in many ways from Spotfire
By Hiawatha Bray, Boston Globe Staff
June 3, 2004
http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2004/06/03/cia_venture_arm_funds_mass_firm/
A Somerville data analysis firm is getting an injection of venture capital from an extraordinary source -- the Central Intelligence Agency.
Spotfire Inc. creates software that transforms vast amounts of complex data into images that reveal the relationships between pieces of information. The company, founded in 1996, has about 700 clients in a variety of information-hungry industries ranging from oil and gas exploration to pharmaceuticals.
Now the CIA plans to tap Spotfire's expertise -- and possibly make a little money in the process. The agency has signed an agreement to work with Spotfire on the development of data-visualization tools specially tailored to the needs of the intelligence community.
''In the intelligence community, most of what they look at is chaff," said Spotfire president Rock Gnatovich. With Spotfire software, the CIA hopes to be able to see at a glance the data that might prevent a future terrorist attack.
But the CIA isn't just shopping for software. It's also taking a small equity stake in the company, through In-Q-Tel, a venture capital company operated by the CIA.
In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999, when agency technologists realized that the most powerful new technologies were being developed not in government laboratories but in the private sector. The CIA tapped Gilman Louie, former chief creative officer for toymaker Hasbro of Pawtucket, R.I., to run In-Q-Tel.
''The question in my mind was: Why would you choose a gamer?" Louie wondered. ''They said, 'We're looking for new blood to come in, and we're looking for someone who can talk to the entrepreneurs, who knows how to build young companies.' "
In-Q-Tel doesn't want to develop rarefied gadgets for use only by spies. It funds no top-secret projects. The In-Q-Tel companies are expected to deliver products that can be sold to the public. This ensures that the research and development costs are shared by the private sector. By contrast, if the CIA obtained the same technology through an exclusive deal with a defense contractor, the taxpayers would have to pick up the entire cost of inventing the product.
''They want us to develop standard commercial product that we can be successful with," said Spotfire chief executive Christopher Ahlberg. ''We're encouraged by this contract . . . to take this technology into the private sector."
Besides, such exclusive contracts take too long. In-Q-Tel tries to ensure that the CIA gets the newest technology while it's still new. Technology, Louie said, ''is like fish in the refrigerator. It's good for a couple of days and then it stinks up the place."
And like any other venture capitalist, the CIA expects its money's worth.
''We're not a charity," said Louie. Of the 40 deals done by In-Q-Tel so far, nearly every company is still in business, and some have delivered a profit.
''You can count our failures on one hand," said Louie.
Louie won't say how much money In-Q-Tel has invested in each company, but on its website the firm says it ''generally invests between $1 million to $3 million" in the companies it backs. Spotfire's Ahlberg said that the CIA will end up owning far less than 5 percent of the company. Spotfire will also collect a significant chunk of revenue from the CIA's purchase of its visualization software.
Spotfire is one of four Massachusetts firms that have attracted venture funding from In-Q-Tel. The other three are in Cambridge, and all of them, like Spotfire, make products to help analyze vast amounts of information.
One of them, MetaCarta, makes geographic analysis software that automatically creates maps of locations mentioned in documents. In-Q-Tel has also invested money in Endeca Technologies Inc., which provides search tools that generate orderly databases from heaps of unstructured data; and in Basis Technologies Inc., which makes software that analyzes documents written in multiple languages.
In-Q-Tel is always on the lookout for more promising tech firms. Louie wants companies that have already found customers in the private sector, which reduces the likelihood that the CIA will be stuck with a product nobody else uses.
''We don't want orphan technologies," said Louie. More important, he said, ''The technology has to solve a problem that we see in the national security apparatus. . . . If I can't put it against a mission need, we're not going to do it."
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
----
Spooked?
CIA director George Tenet's sudden resignation comes on the eve of two reports on the agency's pre-war intelligence
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
June 03, 2004
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5130488/site/newsweek/
June 3 - CIA Director George Tenet's sudden resignation caps a turbulent tenure in which some of the spy agency's greatest triumphs-notably, its aggressive response to the September 11 terror attacks-were on the verge of being overshadowed by a series of new disclosures about the intelligence community's faulty warnings about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
CIA officials insisted today that Tenet had been planning to step down for some time and deliberately chose his departure date-July 11-to coincide with the seventh anniversary of his inauguration as CIA chief. The CIA director was resigning "for personal reasons" and to spend more time with his family, officials said. But even Tenet's friends and colleagues were caught off guard by the move. One said today that, until recently, Tenet had given consistent signals that he was planning to wait until after the November election before stepping down.
But congressional sources said the timing seemed to be influenced by the impending release of a massive Senate Intelligence Committee report that one official described as a "devastating indictment" of the agency's handling of pre-war intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Another report expected next month from the national commission investigating the September 11 attacks is expected to roundly criticize the agency's failure to develop sources inside Al Qaeda and piece together evidence-including information in its files on two of the hijackers-that might have helped uncover the plot.
"This seems to have as much to do with the president's re-election as anything else," says one veteran intelligence community official who has long been close to Tenet. "George is a fighter and it's not in his character to walk away like this. I think he read the tea leaves" that the White House wanted him to leave, the official said.
Bush today praised Tenet, saying "he's done a superb job on behalf of the American people." But the intelligence community official said "the point is the president didn't stop him" from resigning by asking him to stay on.
The CIA had at first bitterly challenged some of the findings in the still-secret Senate report on Iraqi WMD and insisted that the committee hadn't heard the full story. But in recent days, sources tell NEWSWEEK, agency officials told congressional investigators that they were resigned to the report's findings and would no longer contest them. Tenet-who according to Bob Woodward's recent book, "Plan of Attack," once called the agency's case for Saddam's WMD a "slam dunk"-knew that his leadership of the CIA was about to be strongly criticized. "He didn't want to go through this," said one congressional source familiar with the panel's findings. "There was nowhere for [agency officials] to go and [Tenet] was in charge of the whole mess."
Tenet will be succeeded temporarily by his deputy, John McLaughlin, a 32-year veteran of the agency who specialized in European and Russian affairs. Ironically, some intelligence community insiders say that McLaughlin shares much of the responsibility with Tenet for the Iraqi intelligence failures. According to one intelligence official, McLaughlin strongly supported controversial CIA findings alleging that Saddam Hussein had built a fleet of mobile biological-weapons labs and that Saddam was acquiring large quantities of special aluminum tubes to be used for nuclear weapons-two conclusions that have since been widely discredited.
Tenet has been pressed in recent weeks by Secretary of State Colin Powell to explain how the agency reached its pre-war conclusions. Before his presentation to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003, laying out the Bush administration's case against Saddam, Powell had spent days at the CIA reviewing its intelligence and insisted he only wanted to use evidence that was airtight and backed up by multiple sources. To bolster the credibility of the administration's case, Tenet conspicuously sat directly behind Powell during the presentation.
TERROR WATCH
But the Senate report will document how major portions of the Powell's speech-vetted line by line with Tenet and other top CIA officials-turned out to be wrong and much more thinly sourced than the secretary of State had been led to believe, sources said. In the case of the mobile biological-weapons labs-one of the most graphic examples cited by Powell-investigators have found that the story most likely was fabricated by Iraqi defectors who were never adequately vetted by the CIA. The most important source cited by Powell, who was given the codename Curveball, was never even interviewed by the CIA before the speech; investigators only learned later that Curveball was a relative of a top associate of Ahmad Chalabi, controversial leader of the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi's group also supplied a second informant cited by Powell; unbeknownst to CIA analysts, the Defense Intelligence Agency had already concluded this informant was a "fabricator."
A former congressional and White House aide, Tenet was widely popular on Capitol Hill for years and known for his consummate political skills and his lucid briefings. A Clinton appointee, he quickly ingratiated himself with George W. Bush by presiding over a fall 2000 ceremony renaming CIA headquarters after the president's father, a former CIA director during the Ford administration. The new president quickly bonded with the CIA director-both shared a passion for baseball and muscular talk-and Tenet became the only Clinton appointee who survived as a member of the new Republican president's inner circle.
Why the embattled CIA director quit. A Web-exclusive video report by Michael Hirsh
Although he had been warning for months about an impending Al Qaeda attack, Tenet was at first criticized for failing to uncover the 9/11 plot. But the agency's aggressive response to the attacks-including its pivotal role in the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan-won him widespread praise and made him even more a favorite inside the White House.
Some intelligence community officials insisted today that Tenet has had some recent successes in the internal warfare of Washington. The agency had long supported an Iraqi dissident group called the Iraqi National Accord whose leader, Ayad Alawi, was last week appointed as Iraq's new interim prime minister. Meanwhile, Chalabi-whom the agency had been warring with for years-has found himself under investigation for allegedly supplying highly classified U.S. codebreaking secrets to the Iranian government.
FACT FILE
Secure lapses under Tenet's watch Critics have seized on a number of incidents related to intelligence failures that occurred on George Tenet's watch. They include: 1998 May 11 - India begins a series of nuclear warhead detonations that stun the world and catch the CIA completely off-guard. Within days, Pakistan, India's neighbor and historic rival, follows suit. It later emerges that information on how the CIA monitors potential nuclear proliferators was passed to India inadvertently as part of a burgeoning U.S.-India military relationship in the mid-1990s. 1999 May 7 - U.S. warplanes bomb Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia during NATO Kosovo campaign, killing three Chinese journalists. NATO and the United States say the bombing was caused by shoddy CIA targeting. The agency later fires one employee and disciplines several others.
----
'Time Is Right to Move On,' C.I.A. Director Tells Employees
June 3, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/international/middleeast/02CND-TENE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 3 - George J. Tenet, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, has resigned after months in which the C.I.A. has been criticized for failing to head off the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and for apparently overestimating the threat posed by deadly weapons in Iraq.
"Today, George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A., submitted a letter of resignation," President Bush said on the South Lawn of the White House in a midmorning announcement that stunned Washington by its timing. "I met with George last night in the White House. I had a good visit with him. He told me he was resigning for personal reasons."
Later, the C.I.A. released a videotape of an emotional Mr. Tenet telling C.I.A. employees that he was leaving for one reason, "the well-being of my wonderful family, nothing more and nothing less."
"I've decided to step down as director of Central Intelligence, effective July 11, the seventh anniversary of my being sworn in as D.C.I.," Mr. Tenet said. "I did not make this decision quickly or easily, but I know in my heart that the time is right to move on to the next phase of our lives."
Despite Mr. Tenet's words, and notwithstanding Mr. Bush's remarks that Mr. Tenet had done "a superb job on behalf of the American people" and he was sorry to see him go, there was immediate speculation that there was much more behind the departure than Mr. Tenet's wish to leave the demands of the post he has held since 1997.
Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. have come under intense criticism since Sept. 11. The critics, in the government and outside it, have assailed the C.I.A., along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies, for failing to "connect the dots," or put together what in retrospect seemed to be a cornucopia of clues that attacks on the United States were imminent.
More recently, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has reportedly been pressing the C.I.A. to explain why he was apparently misinformed about Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of deadly chemical and biological weapons. Those weapons, which Mr. Powell told the United Nations were already in Iraq's arsenal and which were a key rationale for the American-led war to topple the Baghdad dictator, have so far not been found.
Washington is awaiting the release of a Senate Intelligence Commitee report on the Iraqi weapons program, as well as the report by the independent commission that has been studying the Sept. 11 attacks and the response to them.
Mr. Bush announced the resignation of the 51-year-old Mr. Tenet in a way that was almost bizarre. He had just addressed reporters and photographers in a fairly innocuous Rose Garden session with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. Then the session was adjourned, as Mr. Bush apparently prepared to depart for nearby Andrews Air Force Base and his flight to Europe, where he is to take part in ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion and meet European leaders - some of whom have been sharply critical of the campaign in Iraq.
But minutes later, Mr. Bush reappeared on the sun-drenched White House lawn, surprising listeners with the news of Mr. Tenet's resignation. After Mr. Tenet leaves, the C.I.A.'s deputy director, John McLaughlin, will be acting director, Mr. Bush said..
Mr. McLaughlin may well be a candidate to succeed Mr. Tenet as director of central intelligence, overseeing a dozen intelligence-gathering agencies as well as the C.I.A. itself. Another obvious candidate is Representative Porter Goss, the Florida Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee and is a former C.I.A. agent. The position is subject to Senate confirmation.
The president praised Mr. Tenet's qualities as a public servant, saying: "He's strong. He's resolute. He's served his nation as the director for seven years. He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He's been a, he's been a strong leader in the war on terror, and I will miss him."
Then Mr. Bush walked away, declining to take questions or elaborate on Mr. Tenet's reasons for stepping down.
The official announcement was unconvincing to a former C.I.A. chief, Stansfield Turner, who held the post under President Jimmy Carter and is now an adviser to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Mr. Bush's all but certain opponent this fall.
Mr. Turner said the resignation is "too significant a move at too important a time" to be inspired by nothing more than personal considerations.
"I think he's being pushed out," Mr. Turner said in an interview on CNN. "The president feels he has to have someone to blame."
Mr. Turner went on, "I don't think he would pull the plug on President Bush in the midst of an election cycle without being asked by President Bush to do that."
Although Mr. Turner did not say so, it is not unheard of for a person close to a president, rather than the president himself, to give someone a discreet signal that it is time to go. But Mr. Bush told his senior staff this morning that he did not want anyone speculating that Mr. Tenet's resignation was for anything other than personal reasons, according to The Associated Press.
And Mr. Tenet himself, in his appearance before C.I.A. employees at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., did not act like a man hiding bitterness at being forced out.
"I did not make this decision easily," he told his employees. "I know in my heart that the time is right to move on."
Mr. Tenet said President Bush was "a great champion" of the C.I.A. and had been "a constant source of support to him."
The political ramifications of Mr. Tenet's departure were hard to gauge immediately. Senator Kerry issued a statement in which he thanked Mr. Tenet for his hard work and wished him the best.
"There is no question, however, that there have been significant intelligence failures, and the administration has to accept responsibility for those failures," Mr. Kerry said.
Other political reaction was varied, and by no means entirely along party lines.
Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader, said: "Although I appreciate the fact that Director Tenet served for nearly seven years in one of the most difficult and important positions in our government, I think the intelligence community and our country will benefit from new leadership. I am hopeful that the Administration chooses a successor who is committed to fully understanding why mistakes were made in the past and implementing long-overdue reforms of our intelligence community."
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said Mr. Tenet's resignation should not be "the only response" to recent intelligence failures. And Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The A.P. that Mr. Tenet deserved credit because he had "restored morale and provided stability and continuity at a crucial time."
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Mr. Tenet was "an honorable and decent man who has served his country well in difficult times, and no one should make him a fall guy for anything."
Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi and a veteran member of the Intelligence Committee, called Mr. Tenent's decision "a positive move, for him personally and for the agency. His resignation also will give the president the opportunity to implement other needed reforms in the intelligence community to improve its operation."
But Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the intelligence community had to be held accountable for its failings.
"Simply put, I think the community is somewhat in denial," Mr. Roberts said at a breakfast meeting. "We need fresh thinking within the community, especially within the Congress, to enable the intelligence community to change and adapt to the dangerous world in which we live," Mr. Roberts said, according to The A.P. It was not immediately clear if Mr. Roberts knew by then that Mr. Tenet was stepping down.
Another Republican, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, also said he was glad to see Mr. Tenet go. "There were more failures of intelligence on his watch as director of the C.I.A. than any other D.C.I. in our history," Mr. Shelby told The A.P. "I have long felt that, while an honorable man, he lacked the critical leadership necessary for our intelligence community to effectively operate, particularly in the post 9/11 world."
Named to the C.I.A. post by President Bill Clinton, Mr. Tenet proved himself to be a survivor by lasting as long as he did under Mr. Clinton's Republican successor. The director is also known for his gregarious, down-to-earth personality, in contrast to the more starchy figures who have led the C.I.A. in years past.
People close to Mr. Bush say he developed a close relationship with Mr. Tenet, and did so on the advice of his father, who is the only president who was previously head of the C.I.A.
Mr. Tenet acknowledged on Feb. 5 that American spy agencies may have overestimated Iraq's illicit weapons capabilities, in part because of a failure to penetrate the inner workings of the Iraqi government.
"When the facts on Iraq are all in, we will be neither completely right nor completely wrong," Mr. Tenet said in an address at Georgetown University, his alma mater.
He insisted that intelligence agencies had acted independently of policy makers, and he noted that intelligence analysts had never portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States.
"No one told us what to say or how to say it," he said.
Addressing C.I.A. employees today, Mr. Tenet conceded that "our record is not without flaws."
In addition to the uproars over the Sept. 11 attacks and Iraq's weapons capabilities, the C.I.A. is involved in a controversy over a reported leak of sensitive code-breaking information to Iran. Federal investigators suspect the involvement of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader, now out of favor, who had been a prewar conduit for information indicating that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Chalabi and his supporters maintain that the accusations against him are part of a new C.I.A.-inspired campaign to discredit him. His backers have been dismayed that the Bush administration recently divorced itself from Mr. Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress. They contend that the move was instigated by the C.I.A., which they say is now wielding intercepted Iranian communications as a weapon against Mr. Chalabi.
Mr. Tenet alluded to the C.I.A.'s problems today, asserting that the agency was making enormous strides to better itself, not because it is under bureaucratic pressure but because the agency is "a community of patriots" dedicated to protecting the United States. Many of the agency's triumphs, he said, are "unknown and uncounted," but real nonetheless.
His voice full of emotion, Mr. Tenet said the Central Intelligence Agency was ready to meet the challenges and dangers of "a new century, and a new world."
"This is not my legacy," he said. "It is yours."
--------
An Unusually Close Relationship Comes to an End
June 3, 2004
By MARIA NEWMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/politics/03CND-DIRE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Even among top administration officials in Washington, the relationship between President Bush and George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was unusually close.
The only holdover from the Clinton administration, Mr. Tenet has had half-hour meetings with Mr. Bush almost daily, usually starting at 8 a.m. The president has seen Mr. Tenet more often than he does Secretary of State Colin L. Powell or even Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
``I wanted Tenet in the Oval Office all the time,'' Mr. Bush said at a news conference in April, talking about his concern for keeping up with the threat of terror.
And even as criticism continued to mount almost daily about intelligence failures that preceded the 9/11 attacks on Mr. Tenet's watch, the president stuck by his C.I.A. chief.
But no more. Today, President Bush announced that Mr. Tenet would be leaving his post by the middle of next month, for ``personal reasons.''
``I told him I'm sorry he's leaving,'' the president, appearing grim, said today on the South Lawn of the White House, before leaving for Italy. ``He's done a superb job on behalf of the American people.''
In remarks to C.I.A. workers later, Mr. Tenet said, ``I know in my heart that the time is right to move on.''
But without providing any details, Mr. Tenet said his resignation was ``a personal decision and had only one basis in fact, the well-being of my wonderful family, nothing more, and nothing less.''
In a videotape of his remarks that was made by the C.I.A. and later broadcast on numerous news programs, Mr. Tenet grew teary-eyed when he mentioned his son, John Michael, who will be a high school senior this fall, and his wife, Stephanie Glakas-Tenet. He did not mention the heart problems he experienced 10 years ago.
His resignation will bring to an end the second-longest tenure of C.I.A. chiefs in the country's history. Mr. Tenet, 51, will have been on the job seven years in July, a term surpassed only by that of Allen W. Dulles, who served as director of central intelligence from 1953 to 1961.
It might seem surprising that a warm and close relationship would develop between Mr. Bush, the Texas-bred, Yale-educated son of prominent New England political family, and Mr. Tenet, the voluble and barrel-chested Clinton appointee who as a youth worked in his father's Greek diner in Queens. But those who know them say they have had a chemistry born out of both men's penchant for bluntness and straight talk.
``The most important factor in determining the director of central intelligence's success is his relationship with the president of the United States,'' John M. Deutch, Mr. Tenet's immediate predecessor as C.I.A. chief, told the New York Times in 2002. ``And George Tenet has that as well as anybody ever has.''
Sen. Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida, also told The Times that same year, ``They're pragmatists, they talk sort of `male talk.'''
``George is a very smart person, but his rhetoric isn't theoretical,'' Mr. Graham added. ``It's blunt. It's straightforward.''
Some in Washington expressed surprise today that Mr. Tenet was leaving, while others said he should not be blamed for the administration's growing public problems with the continuing conflict in Iraq.
Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, called Mr. Tenet ``an honorable and decent man who has served his country well in difficult times, and no one should make him a fall guy for anything.''
And while he was well-liked personally, some in Washington hold Mr. Tenet partly responsible for leading the Bush administration down a wayward path to war in Iraq.
``Director Tenet's resignation is long overdue,'' said Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who over seven years went from a strong supporter of Mr. Tenet to one of his biggest critics.
``There were more failures of intelligence on his watch as director of the C.I.A. than any other D.C.I. in our history,'' Mr. Shelby said. ``I have long felt that, while an honorable man, he lacked the critical leadership necessary for our intelligence community to effectively operate, particularly in the post-9/11 world.''
Mr. Tenet's leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency has been under fire since 9/11, and he has faced repeated criticism for overstating the case for Iraq's possession of unconventional weapons. In a now much-quoted passage from a new book by Bob Woodward, ``Plan of Attack,'' he is said to have told the president that evidence about Iraq's illicit weapons added up to a ``slam dunk.''
When he faced questioning in April by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet offered an aggressive defense and often seemed combative with his answers. He insisted that his agency had provided ``clear and direct'' intelligence about the larger danger posed by Al Qaeda before Sept. 11.
``Warning was well understood, even if the timing and method of attacks was not,'' he said.
While several commission members praised Mr. Tenet, calling him energetic, entrepreneurial and smart, they minced no words in condemning the lack of preparedness at the agency, and warned that changes would have to be made.
A Republican member of the panel, John F. Lehman, who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration, called Mr. Tenet a ``gutsy guy who has worked very, very hard,'' but he nonetheless accused the spy agency of ``smugness and even arrogance towards deep reform.''
``There are going to be some very real changes,'' Mr. Lehman warned Mr. Tenet.
Mr. Tenet was born in Queens on Jan. 5, 1953. His parents were immigrants from Greece, and his father, John, operated the 20th Century Diner in Little Neck, now the Scobee Grill.
Mr. Tenet attended Benjamin Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens, and earned his bachelor's degree in 1976 from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He received a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University.
At age 29, Mr. Tenet joined the staff of Senator John Heinz, a Republican from Pennsylvania, who was killed in a plane crash in 1991. Mr. Heinz's widow, Teresa, is now married to Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee.
From 1988 to 1993, Mr. Tenet was director of the 40-member staff of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, which oversees federal intelligence agencies.
In 1993, when the Clinton administration came to power, Mr. Tenet became senior director for intelligence programs at the National Security Council, an executive agency working out of a suite of offices adjacent to the White House. In 1995, he became the deputy C.I.A. director, and two years later was named to the top spot.
That he was reappointed in 2001 by a newly elected Republican president, even though he was originally appointed by a Democrat did not seem to stand in Mr. Tenet's way. President Bush's own father, former President George Bush, served as C.I.A. director in the Ford administration and has long said that the job should be kept separate from politics.
When President Bush made his brief remarks about Mr. Tenet before boarding Air Force today, Mr. Bush seemed genuinely sad about the news of the intelligence chief's departure.
``George Tenet is the, is the kind of public service you like, servant you like to work with. He's strong. He's resolute,'' Mr. Bush said. ``He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He's been a, he's been a strong leader in the war on terror, and I will miss him.''
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Polygraph Testing Starts at Pentagon in Chalabi Inquiry
June 3, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/politics/03CHAL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 2 - Federal investigators have begun administering polygraph examinations to civilian employees at the Pentagon to determine who may have disclosed highly classified intelligence to Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi who authorities suspect turned the information over to Iran, government officials said Wednesday.
The polygraph examinations, which are being conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are focused initially on a small number of Pentagon employees who had access to the information that was compromised. American intelligence officials have said that Mr. Chalabi informed Iran that the United States had broken the secret codes used by Iranian intelligence to transmit confidential messages to posts around the world.
Mr. Chalabi has denied the charge. On Wednesday, his lawyers made public a letter they said they had sent to Attorney General John Ashcroft and F.B.I. Director Robert S. Mueller III repeating Mr. Chalabi's denials and demanding that the Justice Department investigate the disclosure of the accusations against Mr. Chalabi.
The lawyers, John J. E. Markham II and Collette C. Goodman, said in the letter, "The charges made against Dr. Chalabi - both the general and the specific ones are false."
They also said, "We ask that you undertake an immediate investigation to find and hold accountable those who are responsible for these false leaks."
Officials would not identify who has taken polygraph examinations or even who has been interviewed by F.B.I. counterespionage agents. It could not be determined whether anyone has declined to submit to a polygraph test.
No one has been charged with any wrongdoing or identified as a suspect, but officials familiar with the investigation say that they are working through a list of people and are likely to interview senior Pentagon officials.
The F.B.I. is looking at officials who both knew of the code-breaking operation and had dealings with Mr. Chalabi, either in Washington or Baghdad, the government officials said. Information about code-breaking work is considered among the most confidential material in the government and is handled under tight security and with very limited access.
But a wider circle of officials could have inferred from intelligence reports about Iran that the United States had access to the internal communications of Iran's spy service, intelligence officials said. That may make it difficult to identify the source of any leak.
Government officials say they started the investigation of Pentagon officials after learning that Mr. Chalabi had told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's intelligence service that the United States was reading their communications. Mr. Chalabi, American officials say, gave the information to the Iranians about six weeks ago, apparently because he wanted to ensure that his secret conversations with the Iranians were not revealed to the Americans.
But the Iranian official apparently did not immediately believe Mr. Chalabi, because he sent a cable back to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, American officials said. That cable was intercepted and read by the United States, the officials said.
Mr. Chalabi and his supporters argue that the accusations against him are part of a C.I.A.-inspired campaign to discredit him. His backers have been dismayed that the Bush administration recently divorced itself from Mr. Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress. They contend that the move was instigated by the C.I.A., which they say is now wielding intercepted Iranian communications as a weapon against Mr. Chalabi.
Richard N. Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board and an influential Chalabi supporter, said Wednesday that the notion that Mr. Chalabi would compromise the American code-breaking operation "doesn't pass the laugh test." Mr. Perle said it was more plausible that the Iranians, knowing already that the United States was reading its communications, planted the damning information about Mr. Chalabi to persuade Washington to distance itself from Mr. Chalabi.
"The whole thing hinges on the idea that the Baghdad station chief of the MOIS commits one of the most amazing trade craft errors I've ever heard of," Mr. Perle said, referring to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. He said it defied belief that a seasoned intelligence operative would disclose a conversation with Mr. Chalabi using the same communications channel that he had just been warned was compromised.
"You have to believe that the station chief blew a gift from the gods because of rank incompetence," Mr. Perle said. "I don't believe it, and I don't think any other serious intelligence professional would either."
Mr. Chalabi is not a focus of the inquiry, but senior law enforcement officials said he could be investigated in the future. They said a decision on that could be left to the new Iraqi government.
In the 1990's, the Iraqi National Congress was part of a C.I.A. covert action program designed to undermine Saddam Hussein's rule. But Mr. Chalabi had a falling out with the C.I.A., and agency officials concluded that he was untrustworthy. He subsequently forged an alliance with major conservative Republicans in Washington. When President Bush took office, Mr. Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress were embraced by senior policy makers at the Pentagon, which became his main point of contact in the American government.
In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Markham, one of Mr. Chalabi's lawyers, said that Mr. Chalabi had been subjected to increasing "adverse comments" by American officials as his disagreements with the Bush administration over the future of Iraq had intensified. Nevertheless, Mr. Markham said, Mr. Chalabi "is very happy to come to the United States to appear before Congress or be interviewed by legitimate investigative agents in this matter."
The lawyers' letter said that "Dr. Chalabi would never endanger the national security of the U.S."
"Those responsible for such leaks, however, we submit are the same individuals within the U.S. government who have undermined the President's policies in Iraq and efforts to bring democracy and stability to that country, and are using Dr. Chalabi as a scapegoat for their own failures that have cost this country dearly in the past year in Iraq," the letter said.
Last month, American and Iraqi forces raided Mr. Chalabi's Baghdad compound and carted away computers, overturned furniture and ransacked his offices. The raid was said to be part of an investigation into charges that Mr. Chalabi's aides, including a leading lieutenant, had been involved in kidnapping, torture, embezzlement and corruption in Iraq. It is still unclear what the connection might be between that raid and the continuing counterintelligence investigation of the possible leaks of secrets to Iran.
Richard A. Oppel Jr. contributed reporting for this article.
-------- un
U.S. Faces Payback On Iraq Resolution
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 3, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11055-2004Jun2.html
As the United States struggles to win world support for its transfer of authority in Iraq, the Bush administration is running into diplomatic payback at the United Nations, senior U.N. diplomats said yesterday.
France, Russia, China -- three of the five nations with vetoes -- and Germany, Chile and Algeria are all urging changes or considering amendments to a new draft resolution that the United States and Britain circulated Tuesday, envoys said. The resolution is designed to confer legitimacy on Iraq's new interim government and the continued presence of U.S.-led foreign forces after the occupation ends June 30.
Several Security Council countries want more specifics in the resolution on the U.S.-led multinational force to ensure Iraq has the right to determine the length of its deployment and its mandate. They also want to spell out what the "return of full sovereignty" means to ensure that the U.S.-led occupation ends, U.N. sources say.
"We think that the co-sponsors made steps forward, but still we have problems," Alexander Konuzin, Russia's U.N. envoy, told reporters in New York. "There are a number of issues which should be discussed and positions are not that close yet."
Demands for further changes, the U.N. envoys said, reflect the diplomatic cost the United States incurred when it intervened in Iraq without U.N. approval: Security Council members want to help Iraq, but they are now wary of the Bush administration and do not want to let the United States easily get its way on this resolution without more detailed pledges of long-term intent.
"With this draft, the Americans have come a long way, but there is no pool of trust," said a senior U.N. diplomat familiar with the discussions who requested anonymity because of ongoing discussions.
Some countries are "not saddened" to see the United States squirming to get international backing for its plan to hand over political power June 30. Although the Security Council wants concessions, some also want to see the Bush administration "suffer," the official said.
"The Americans are wounded. They're desperate to get a resolution and a number of Security Council members are not trying to make anything easy for them," the official added.
The United States insisted yesterday that it expects to win the required support for the resolution. "We believe that we are able to . . . accommodate the requests and the views of most of the 15 members of the Security Council," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels. "We expect relatively smooth sailing at the U.N. Security Council deliberations on this resolution."
Others suggested the challenges are positive signs that the United States will get its resolution. "So what's new -- it's the U.N. Some countries still have questions, but there's no smell of a veto and everyone recognizes that we have gone a long way in dealing with the issues they care about," said a senior State Department official familiar with negotiations.
Yet objections have already stalled the timing, U.N. envoys say. Britain, the resolution's co-sponsor, has been pressing for a vote by Sunday, but U.N. envoys say that is highly unlikely. Most Security Council countries also want to hear from the Iraqis before a vote to get clarification. Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari is to brief the council today, but Russia's deputy U.N. ambassador told wire services that the new interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, should also meet with the council before a vote.
Algeria, backed by Islamic countries, is urging revisions to ensure that the multinational force fully respects international humanitarian law, a stipulation produced because of recent evidence of U.S. abuse of Iraqi detainees, U.N. envoys said.
The timing of a withdrawal of U.S.-led foreign forces remains an issue, despite a revised proposal stipulating that the multinational force would leave after completion of a constitution and elections for a permanent government, due by the end of 2005. But China has suggested that the new mandate expire after Iraq's first elections for an interim national assembly, tentatively scheduled for within seven months.
France has also asked for "automaticity" in the resolution to ensure that any Iraqi demand for a permanent withdrawal of foreign troops before the mandate is up would have to be accepted by the Security Council and all its members, U.N. envoys said.
"The general mood is that [the latest draft] moved in the right direction but it's too weak and too vague," said the French diplomat. "We need more precise language in terms of the nature of sovereignty and the mandate of the multinational force and its relations with Iraqi government and forces."
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POLITICS
U.N. Envoy Wants New Iraq Government to Court Foes of Occupation
June 3, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/international/middleeast/03IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 2 - The United Nations special envoy called on the new Iraqi government on Wednesday to broaden discussions to include Iraqis who oppose the American occupation, and he suggested that his own authority in shaping the new government had been sharply limited by American officials.
Lakhdar Brahimi, at a news conference wrapping up a nearly monthlong visit here, suggested that the Americans were pursuing a strategy in Iraq that relied too heavily on force and not enough on subtlety and persuasion.
Mr. Brahimi, who called L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator here, a "dictator," seemed to stop just short of calling on the United States to open talks with the insurgents.
"Why is there what is, I think, to use a neutral term, there is this insurgency?" Mr. Brahimi said, addressing reporters in both Arabic and English. "I think it's a little bit too easy to call everybody a terrorist. And I think if you find out that there are people who are not terrorists who are respectable, genuine Iraqi patriots you must find a way of talking to them."
Mr. Brahimi suggested he might have done things differently if he had been given a freer hand in setting up the new government that was unveiled on Tuesday. Asked about the selection of the prime minister, which became a divisive affair, he alluded to the role of Mr. Bremer.
"The government of Iraq, I sometimes say - I'm sure he doesn't mind my saying it - Mr. Bremer is the dictator of Iraq," Mr. Brahimi said. "He has the money. He has the signature. Nothing happens without his agreement in this country."
Mr. Brahimi did not get into details, although people close to him suggested last week that he had reluctantly agreed to the selection of Iyad Allawi as prime minister only after American officials had pressured him.
Mr. Brahimi was said to be worried that Dr. Allawi's close relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency might undermine his credibility in the eyes of the Iraqi people. "The Americans were governing this country, so their view was certainly taken into consideration," Mr. Brahimi said. "Whether Dr. Allawi was their choice, whether they maneuvered to get him, you know, in position - that, I think, you better ask them."
American officials have offered few details about their precise role in choosing the new Iraqi government, which is supposed to take over when Iraqi sovereignty is restored on June 30 and guide the country until democratic elections are held, most likely in January 2005.
"We were expressing views and we were coming up with names, but it was collaborative," was how a senior American official characterized the negotiations in a meeting with reporters on Tuesday.
Mr. Brahimi's remarks suggested some disagreement with American officials, not just on the individual selections for the new government but on broader issues as well.
In a statement yesterday, Mr. Brahimi alluded to the suffering of the Iraqi people as a result of the American invasion and its chaotic aftermath.
As for Mr. Brahimi's suggestion that the new government talk to more Iraqis opposed to the occupation, the Americans appear to have already begun moving in that direction, albeit in ad hoc fashion. In Falluja, the scene of heavy fighting in April, American commanders set up a security force consisting almost entirely of former Republican Guard soldiers and anti-American insurgents.
The city has been mostly peaceful since then, although it is not clear how much control the Americans now exercise there.
In southern Iraq, American commanders said recently that they would consider inviting some members of the Mahdi Army, with whom they have been fighting pitched battles, into Iraqi security forces.
With violence continuing around the country, Mr. Brahimi said he was concerned about the ability of the Iraqi government and the United Nations to set up a workable election system if the fighting did not subside.
"If security does not improve significantly over the next few months, there will be a problem," he said. "What I have been told is that there is every reason to believe and hope that security will improve significantly by the end of the summer."
Mr. Brahimi did not elaborate on the basis for his prediction. American officials here have said repeatedly that they expect the insurgency to intensify in the weeks leading up to the transfer of sovereignty, and possibly to continue at a high level for some time after that.
Mr. Brahimi said he had met with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite leader, and that he had "kept in touch with him throughout" the process of selecting the new Iraqi government. Yet Mr. Brahimi said he did not seek Ayatollah Sistani's approval for the new government.
"I think he made it very clear that it was not his role to participate in selecting the government in one way or another," he said. "What he was worried about were a number of things that had to do with the overall image that the government would have."
As it happened, one of the country's Shiite parties, the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, released a statement on Wednesday in which party leaders expressed "reservations" about the way in which the selection process for the new government had ended with the "marginalization and exclusion" of what it called popular Islamic leaders.
The statement did not provide details, but it appeared to allude to reports of heavy-handed efforts to ensure that the new government was sympathetic with American interests.
Later in the day, Dr. Allawi held his first cabinet meeting, inside the American-controlled Green Zone. Much of the discussion focused on how much authority the Iraqi government would have over American military forces. That issue is currently being discussed at the United Nations, where a resolution authorizing the presence of America troops is expected to be voted on soon.
One of the new members of the government made it clear where the new government stood.
"Of course we asked for full sovereignty," said Adel Abdul Mahdi, the government's finance minister and a member of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. "Iraqis insist on handling security by themselves."
-------- us
THE SOLDIERS
Army Extending Service for G.I.'s Due in War Zones
June 3, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/politics/03SOLD.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 2 - The Army announced Wednesday that it would require all soldiers bound for Iraq and Afghanistan to extend their active duty at least until their units have returned home from duty there, a move that could keep thousands of troops in the service for months longer than they expected over the next several years.
The announcement, which expands an existing program that applies to many troops already in the two countries, means that soldiers who had planned to retire, move to other Army jobs or leave the military when their enlistments expired will be required to stay for the length of their units' deployment in either of the two combat zones. That could range from a few extra weeks to more than a year. Commanders will be allowed to make exceptions in special circumstances.
The move will affect active-duty and Reserve units that are within 90 days of deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, in what are now typically one-year assignments, and will last up to 90 days after the unit returns home, Army officials said. The officials did not give a precise time frame for how long the policy would remain in force or exactly how many troops it would affect, saying it depended on the pace of an ambitious Army reorganization and how operations go in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A senior general said the move would allow the Army to keep units together as they deploy for duty in Afghanistan or Iraq instead of incorporating new recruits or recent transfers who would not perform as well.
"The rationale is to have cohesive, trained units going to war together," the officer, Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the deputy chief of staff for personnel, told reporters Wednesday at a breakfast meeting.
But military analysts and some lawmakers say the widening of the so-called stop-loss policy is the latest indication that the Army is stretched dangerously thin as it struggles to maintain more than 115,000 soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as smaller deployments elsewhere. The new policy does not apply to the Marine Corps, which has more than 25,000 marines deployed in the two countries, or to the Navy or the Air Force.
Without the new program, an average Army division would have to replace more than 4,000 soldiers, roughly one-quarter to one-fifth of its total force, before or during a deployment, the Army said in a statement. There are the equivalent of roughly five divisions deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Army has already been scrambling to keep up its troop strength in the two countries. The tours of about 20,000 soldiers were extended by 90 days this spring to fill the gap. In recent weeks, the Army announced that it will send 3,600 troops from South Korea to Iraq to relieve pressure on Army troops there. And for the first time ever, the Army is looking to deploy to Iraq an elite unit that serves in desert training exercises, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment at Fort Irwin, Calif.
Also, for the first time in more than a decade, the Army is combing through the Individual Ready Reserve, the nation's pool of former soldiers, looking for specialists with critically needed skills. So far, 618 soldiers have been called back to duty under the program.
"The Army is just running out of creative ideas for coping with the level of commitment that Iraq requires," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "It's clear there was a fundamental miscalculation about how protracted and how intense the ground commitment in Iraq would be."
The new move standardizes what had been a piecemeal program that had affected specific units, including those now in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Army has extended the tours of 45,000 soldiers, using the policy on an ad hoc basis depending on its needs. But now, any unit designated to go to Iraq or Afghanistan will automatically fall under the new, widened policy.
The Army's move is expected to draw criticism from some soldiers, their families and possibly employers. "It's playing havoc with people's plans," said Joyce Raezer, director of government relations for the National Military Family Association, an advocacy group in Alexandria, Va. "It affects people who made plans that didn't involve the Army."
Other critics of the policy, while stopping short of comparing it to the draft, say it has elements of forced conscription that violate the spirit of the all-volunteer armed forces.
In an Op-Ed article in Wednesday's New York Times, Andrew Exum, a former Army captain who served in Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division, called the stop-loss policy "a gross breach of contract."
"Many if not most of the soldiers in this latest Iraq-bound wave are already veterans of several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan," Mr. Exum wrote. "They have honorably completed their active-duty obligations. But like draftees, they have been conscripted to meet the additional needs in Iraq."
General Hagenbeck, who commanded the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan, challenged that characterization, and described the policy as an interim measure until a major restructuring intended to increase the Army's combat power is completed in the next several years.
"I don't regard that as a breach of trust," he said. "I regard that as being a soldier in the United States Army. This is what we do."
Since World War II, the Army has wrestled with how best to rotate fresh troops into a combat zone: whether to bring in individual replacement soldiers over the course of a conflict or swap out entire units.
The Army today, under Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the chief of staff, is placing more emphasis on keeping units together longer, both as a way to give soldiers and their families more predictability in their lives and to provide the benefit of having troops that train together over long periods fight together on the battlefield.
But there is also a practical consideration. With virtually all of the Army's 10 active-duty divisions either serving in, preparing for or returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, there are fewer pools of active-duty troops from which to fill out deploying units.
"They realized they cannot mix and match from other units," said Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who is executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments here. "At the same time, they don't want to lose the best people they have going into a dangerous situation. This is a consequence of an Army structured to run sprints that is now running a marathon."
Advocates of permanently enlarging the Army's active-duty ranks seized on the announcement Wednesday to bolster their cause. "The Army is too small as it exists today to conduct worldwide operations without resorting to techniques like stop-loss," said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. He said he planned to offer an amendment to the Pentagon's budget bill now on the Senate floor to increase the size of the active-duty Army by 20,000 soldiers.
At the breakfast meeting, General Hagenbeck acknowledged that the Army's active and Reserve components were "stretched," but he insisted that the Army did not need a permanent increase in troop size. He said that despite all the pressures on its forces, the service was still meeting its recruiting and retention goals.
In the aftermath of the prisoner-abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, General Hagenbeck said, the Army recently conducted focus groups at three Army divisions to see if the misconduct had affected recruiting and retention. So far, he said, it had not.
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Soldiers Facing Extended Tours
Critics of Army Policy Liken It to a Draft
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10961-2004Jun2.html
Army officials announced yesterday that thousands of active-duty and reserve soldiers who are nearing the end of their volunteer service commitments could be forced to serve an entire tour overseas if their units are chosen for deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.
The order applies to all Army soldiers who are deployed in the future and means that many troops could face extended terms in the military after their formal contracts expire. The Army had previously issued such orders on a unit-by-unit basis, as troops deployed. Now, all soldiers are on notice that if their units are called into the fight, they will go -- and stay.
Soldiers will be notified 90 days before their units are to deploy, and by policy, all soldiers must then serve with their units until 90 days after they return. If a soldier's scheduled service end date falls within that window, he or she will be forced to serve the entire tour.
Army officials said the move promotes cohesion by preventing Army divisions from being depleted shortly before they go into battle. But military experts and lawmakers said the decision indicates that the Army is being stretched thin by multiple operations, with some calling the program a draft in disguise.
"It's a blanket imposition of extended service, and it has to raise questions about how adequately manned the Army is," said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.
The "stop-loss" policy prevents the normal attrition of troops and ensures that divisions will not have to seek additional troops when they go to Iraq or Afghanistan, said Lt. Gen. Franklin L. Hagenbeck, the Army's deputy chief of staff in charge of human resources and personnel. Congress authorized such measures after the Vietnam War, and they were first used during preparations for the Persian Gulf War in 1990. They have been used since to bolster divisions heading to Iraq and Afghanistan.
"If we don't do that, a division would change 4,000 people out just before deployment, and that's nonsensical," Hagenbeck said yesterday. He said it "puts soldiers' lives at risk" to have soldiers meeting for the first time on the battlefield.
All 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and Qatar are serving under the same stop-loss conditions, but Army officials decided to announce a policy that alerts all troops for the future. Though Hagenbeck said the Army does not need more troops, he acknowledged that it is "stretched."
Because the U.S. military intends to keep about 140,000 troops in Iraq through 2005 to fend off an insurgency -- instead of scaling down significantly, as originally planned -- officials have extended the tours of 20,000 troops and recently announced that they will draw more than 3,500 troops from South Korea to support the mission. A few units are scheduled to deploy this summer to relieve the extended troops, and a full-scale rotation of troops is scheduled for this fall.
John Tillson, an expert with the Institute for Defense Analysis, said he thinks the stop-loss policy is essential to maintaining a presence around the globe. "We're in a war, so the question is, who pays the burden?" he said. "The people who pay the burden are those who volunteered to join the military."
Some, however, do not see that as fair. One Army brigade commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: "A soldier just said to me, 'What happened to the volunteer force? This is a draft.' "
Members of Congress have been calling for a permanent increase in the Army's size to deal with the war on terrorism, but the Pentagon has resisted that amid a call for a lighter, more mobile military. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, yesterday renewed his call to permanently enlarge the Army by 20,000 soldiers.
For Jessica Salamon of Ravenna, Ohio, the stop-loss policy has already affected her and her husband, Chad, a National Guardsman who is serving in Iraq with the 118th Medical Battalion as a mechanic. Chad Salamon's six-year commitment should end in March, but he is almost certain not to return by then.
"This is supposed to be an all-volunteer military," said Jessica Salamon, who has been to therapy and has seen her dream of starting a family deferred. "They're not volunteering when they're told they can't leave."
In a presidential campaign speech in Tampa, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) said the military should not force soldiers to fight.
"You have what is a backdoor draft that has been put into effect," Kerry said. "People serving beyond the time of their voluntary service are no longer volunteers."
Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
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Sexual Assaults In Army On Rise
Report Blames Poor Oversight And Training
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10959-2004Jun2.html
Allegations of sexual assault in the U.S. Army have climbed steadily over the past five years, and the problem has been abetted by weak prevention efforts, slow investigations, inadequate field reporting and poor managerial oversight, according to internal Army data and a new report from an Army task force.
The May 27 report, sparked by complaints from women's groups and female lawmakers about an apparent increase in reported assaults against U.S. servicewomen in Iraq and Afghanistan, states that the Army lacks "an overarching policy" for dealing with the problem, and that as a result it "does not have a clear picture of the sexual assault issue."
The report also states that the Army lacks a "comprehensive, progressive . . . program to train solders and leaders in the prevention of and response to sexual assault." It said commanders within the region covered by the military's Central Command have not always reported sexual offenses to Army investigators, even when they took action against those involved.
The Army's internal report echoes conclusions drawn in earlier, military-wide assessments. Data released separately by the Army Criminal Investigative Division made it clear that the number of sexual assault cases reported to the division increased each year from 1999 to 2003.
The numbers, released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by The Washington Post, are the first year-to-year servicewide tallies on sexual assault cases provided to the public since 1998. They indicate that Army efforts to ameliorate the problem over the past five years have had little to no impact.
According to the data, the total number of reported cases of sexual assault involving Army personnel increased by 19 percent from 1999 to 2002 -- from 658 to 783, with annual increases ranging from 2 percent to 13 percent. During the same period, the number of reported rapes increased by 25 percent -- from 356 to 445, according to the data. The number of Army personnel on active duty, including reservists, rose during this period by less than 6 percent.
Between 2002 and 2003, according to the data, the number of reported sexual assault cases increased by an additional 5 percent and the number of rapes by 5 percent, but because of the war in Iraq, the number of Army personnel on active duty increased by 20 percent.
The Army acknowledges that these tallies probably understate the magnitude of the problem. Advocacy groups say that sexual assaults are routinely underreported, and that military victims are further inhibited by rules that bar confidentiality. A Defense Department report on the problem in May, based on visits to 21 military locations, provided data indicating rising sexual assaults from 2002 to 2003, which a Defense official said probably represented a fraction of the total in those years.
Army officials noted that the five-year tally included reports of abuse that proved to be "unfounded" after investigation, a number said to have tripled from 48 to 157 between 1999 and 2003. Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Diane Battaglia said she could not explain why the number of cases deemed false had risen so much.
"The Criminal Investigation Division takes all reports of criminal behavior very seriously," she said.
Battaglia also noted that during the period covered by the data, the number of women on active duty in the Army increased. With more women in the Army Reserve than in the regular Army, and with more reservists on active duty, she said, "the raw number of sexual assaults being reported remains extremely low as a percentage."
The task force's report, to be released today at a hearing by a House Armed Services subcommittee looking into military sexual abuse, is the latest in a series of studies to find shortcomings in the military's policies and oversight. In its report last month, the Defense Department acknowledged that victims are inadequately supported and that investigations are often hampered by delays and manpower shortages.
That conclusion came after complaints in 2003 by female cadets at the Air Force Academy in Colorado that assault allegations had often been ignored and a report by the Defense Department's inspector general that one-fifth of the academy's women had reported experiencing at least an attempted sexual assault.
The Air Force and the Navy said they are still processing an April 8 request by The Post for data on the incidence of assault allegations across those services since 1999.
Although the Pentagon said it has initiated reforms, House Democrats led by Rep. Loretta Sanchez (Calif.) have been pushing for an update of sexual assault provisions in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, enacted by Congress in 1950. Their aim is to bring the code in line with a law adopted at the federal level and by 38 states, which expands the definition of sexual abuse and gives added protection for victims' rights.
After the Defense Department expressed its opposition, the Armed Services Committee rejected Sanchez's proposal in a straight party-line vote during its consideration in May of the annual defense authorization bill. "There are some basic flaws that haven't been addressed," Sanchez said in an interview.
Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), who requested today's oversight hearing, said "we're in this study phase," but without sufficient commitment to concrete reforms.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
You Have Rights -- if Bush Says You Do
Los Angeles Times
Jonathan Turley
June 3, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/latimes175.htm
This week, the U.S. Justice Department held an extraordinary news conference. After insisting for two years that details of the case of Jose Padilla, an American citizen accused of being an "enemy combatant," had to be kept secret even from the federal courts, the Justice Department suddenly released detailed information on his interrogations and their results. What made this press conference particularly notable was its intended audience: the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court is currently reviewing the Padilla case, with a decision expected in the next few weeks, and there is a growing question of whether a majority can be found to support President Bush's claims of absolute authority to hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely without filing charges.
It is, of course, considered highly improper to stage such a news conference while a case is pending. Indeed, such a stunt is likely to outrage some members of the court. But the administration appeared to be playing for the one swing justice: Sandra Day O'Connor, who, during the arguments in April, was openly struggling to find any plausible rationale for giving a president absolute power over citizens. With the record now closed, the only realistic chance of getting such information to O'Connor was her morning newspaper.
Padilla has been held for two years without access to the courts or even a lawyer. The high court is also working on opinions in two other terrorism-related cases, which involve another enemy-combatant suspect, Yaser Esam Hamdi, and the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. These cases have become a game of three-card monte, with Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft barring any public view while occasionally revealing a card in order to keep up the public's interest or faith in the game.
The government disclosures this week were not compelled by any court, statute or deadline. It was purely a political decision that the president would benefit by selectively releasing incriminating statements allegedly made by a citizen held incommunicado.
In alleging that Padilla had planned to target apartment buildings and hotels, Deputy U.S. Atty. Gen. James Comey Jr. said the administration wanted to show that there were benefits to stripping citizens like Padilla of their rights. (This is, of course, a far cry from the charge made at the press conference held by Ashcroft after Padilla's arrest in which the attorney general claimed that he had thwarted a conspiracy to explode a "dirty" radioactive bomb in New York or Washington - a claim later publicly retracted by the White House.)
When asked about the suspicious timing of the news conference after two years of claiming absolute secrecy, Comey denied that the Justice Department was trying to influence the Supreme Court, instead saying it was merely trying to influence "the court of public opinion."
In a moment of extraordinary and chilling honesty, Comey explained that Padilla had to be stripped of his civil liberties because, if he used them (including his right to remain silent or his right to a lawyer), he might have been able to win his freedom. Thus, the government had to keep him away from lawyers and judges at all costs. Gone was the pretense of legality or principle. The Justice Department had finally found its natural moral resting point: Civil liberties are tolerated only to the extent that they will not interfere with the government's actions. Meanwhile, Zacarias Moussaoui, a foreign citizen accused of terrorism, was presumably given his rights in federal court because, given the case against him, the government thought those rights would do him little good.
The administration seems to believe that the public and O'Connor will not worry about others' rights when they are contemplating their own demise from terrorist attacks. It might be right. When Comey described Padilla in absentia as some terrorist barking out confessions, no one seemed to mind that the Justice Department had turned a U.S. citizen into a presidential plaything to be manipulated for short-term political gain. The message was clear: If we don't strip some citizens of their rights, your apartment building might collapse.
There is something far more unsettling in this scene than an administration openly playing to the Supreme Court. It was a reminder that we are morally adrift, abandoning legal principle for the proceeds of arbitrary power.
We have lost that moral distinction between ourselves and our enemies if we believe that our success is measured by the confessions that we coerce rather than the civil liberties that we defend. We are left with the one question not asked at the press conference: Once the president declares victory over our enemies, what will we be other than victorious?
Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University.
-------- human rights
US frantic to soften harsh language in UN rights report on Iraq
Thursday June 3, 2004
(AFP)
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040602/1/3ksdw.html
The United States is scrambling to soften allegedly harsh and inflammatory criticism of the US-led coalition in Iraq that is expected to be contained in a UN human rights report to be released this week, US officials said.
The officials said US diplomats are lobbying for language in a report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to be toned down in a bid to prevent a new firestorm of controversy over the mistreatment of Iraqi detainees by US troops at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.
The final version of the report is to be released Friday at UN human rights headquarters in Geneva and Washington fears that, without changes, its publication could complicate efforts to secure passage of a new UN Security Council resolution on Iraq, the officials told AFP on condition of anonymity.
That resolution is critical to securing support for the interim Iraqi government taking power June 30 and for further detailing the mandate of the US-led multinational force to remain in the country after that date.
"What we're looking at in the draft is strong anti-US and inflammatory language that was written before we even got a chance to submit our own information," one official said. "What we're looking for is a more balanced approach."
A UN spokesman announced Tuesday that the release of the report, originally due Monday, had been delayed until Friday because the Pentagon and the US-occupation administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority, had asked for more time to contribute their sides of the story.
The CPA had submitted its information Saturday to the UN rights agency on and the Pentagon had delivered its report Tuesday, according to the US officials.
In announcing the delay in the release of the report, the UN spokesman denied its content had been altered at the demand of the United States but allowed that the new information would be incorporated into the final version.
However, it was not immediately clear if mere inclusion of the information would satisfy the US objections.
"We're hoping that the draft will be revised to reflect what we had to say," a second US official said, taking specific issue issue with several portions of the draft that Washington deems offensive.
One of those refers directly to the prison abuses, which have already been well-documented in widely published graphic photographs and a highly critical report from the International Committee for the Red Cross which became public last month, the official said.
The offending sentence in the draft says: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions -- and some Iraqis have experienced hell inside prisons run by coalition forces," according to the official.
The draft report also charges US and coalition forces with "systematic gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law" in prisons and elsewhere in Iraq, something Washington disputes, according to the officials.
"Some of these accusations seem to be based on limited and unsubstantiated evidence," the first official said.
Both officials said Washington might consider asking for another delay in the release of the report if its concerns about the language were not addressed.
The UN report was called for during an annual meeting of the UN's Commission on Human Rights in April, just before the prisoner abuse scandal erupted.
At the time, advocacy groups criticised the absence of a specific resolution for Iraq by the UN human rights watchdog for the first time in a decade.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Ohio Prisons Go Gladly to the Dogs
Inmates Care for Throwaways And Help Themselves as Well
By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 3, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10935-2004Jun2?language=printer
MANSFIELD, Ohio -- Edie spent her days as a homeless scavenger roaming the streets in search of food until a property owner, tired of the salt-and-pepper mixed breed's traipsing over his lawn, blasted the dog with a muzzleloader. After the dog's emergency care, humane society workers handed Edie over to Aaron Gray, who spent sleepless nights cleaning her wounds and administering medicine.
But then, Gray has plenty of time on his hands. He's an inmate at Mansfield Correctional Institution, serving a 6 1/2-year sentence for aggravated vehicular assault. For the past six months, he has worked inside the prison walls as a dog trainer responsible for helping to turn wild-eyed strays into family pets.
Edie "had been shot by a 12-gauge," said Gray, 28, of Cleveland. "She had 40 stitches, and her rear end was basically in two pieces. Now, she's playing with the other dogs."
For castaways such as Edie -- known as "death row dogs" because they have been saved from the gas chamber -- the prison represents a new lease on life. And working with dogs has given a new lease on life to many of Ohio's prison inmates.
Ohio is so enamored with the Tender Loving Care program, pairing strays with inmates, that the program now operates in 30 of the state's 33 prisons. Prison officials contend that the introduction of warm and cuddly creatures reduces jailhouse violence.
"The dogs have had a quieting effect on the inmate population," said Robert Riddle, Mansfield's deputy warden for special services, who acknowledges that he initially scoffed at the idea. "I thought the dogs were going to come in and bite people. But the guys have done a great job. The dogs allow them to be more human."
The dog training program has stoked a love of animals Gray gained as a child, when he constantly brought home strays he found on the street. Several of the dogs he has trained in prison have gone to other owners, but he got so attached to Edie that his family has decided to care for her until he is released.
"It's brought me closer to my family," he said. "We have something to talk about."
And it keeps him out of trouble. "This isn't a place to meet friends," he said. "This is a place to do time. [The dogs] are my friends; they won't betray me."
The town of Mansfield, about halfway between Cleveland and Columbus along Interstate 71, is home to three prisons, including the reformatory where the movie "The Shawshank Redemption" was filmed. Brenda Kauffman, president of the Ashland County Humane Society, had no connection with the prisons' high fences, guard towers and razor wire when officials there first approached her about starting the program.
"I saw the possibilities," Kauffman said. "I believe in retraining animals. The more you can do for the dog, the better their lives. A lot of these animals are throwaways."
Animals typically arrive having suffered some form of abuse. Many are so afraid of human contact that they lash out at anyone who approaches. There are rescued greyhounds that spent their entire lives shuttling between cages and dirt racetracks, with little interaction with humans or other dogs.
Here, the dogs live in inmates' 8-by-10-foot cells, get walked several times each day, and are showered with attention by inmates and guards.
At weekly sessions led by dog trainer Therese Backowski, the animals are taught to sit, stay, come and control their temper -- all the things that will be needed for them to be successfully placed with a family. She instructs inmates to be firm but fair with reprimands.
"This is not to make [the dog] feel stupid or inadequate but to make him feel successful," she said at a recent Wednesday afternoon training session. Some dogs trained here have been placed with families as far away as Chicago and Florida.
Many of the inmate trainers have been convicted of serious crimes, including murder. Even the most hardened, however, can be suckers for the dogs. They get down on the floor and talk in playful voices to the dogs.
No tax dollars go into the program, officials said, and the animals' food is donated or purchased with the $100 adoption fees.
Participation is considered a privilege, because trainers have slightly more freedom of movement than other inmates. Sex offenders and child abusers are not allowed to participate. Inmates must maintain good behavior.
"It makes inmates realize that they can't just reach out and slug somebody," said Roma Paulsen, a prison secretary who has helped run the program since it started in 1995.
Inmate Mark Painter, who has trained more than 15 dogs in three years, said initially it was hard to part with an animal with which he had spent so much time. Now, he said, he looks forward to getting a dog ready to go home with a family and starting fresh with a new one. His latest project is a 2 1/2-year-old coon hound named Blue.
"It helps pass the time," said Painter, 34, who is serving nine years for aggravated felonious assault. "It gives me something to look forward to."
Painter also keeps records for the program, including histories of shots and lists of donations. He's grateful to have something meaningful to do, but says there's little question about who gets the better end of the deal.
"Him," he said, pointing to an excited Blue. "He gets to go home."
-------- terrorism
Did al-Qaida trainee warn FBI before 9/11?
Says he told agents of terrorist plan to hijack passenger planes
By Lisa Myers, Jim Popkin and the NBC Investigative Unit
NBC News
June 03, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5131524/
LONDON - More than a year before 9/11, a Pakistani-British man told the FBI an incredible tale: that he had been trained by bin Laden's followers to hijack airplanes and was now in America to carry out an attack. The FBI questioned him for weeks, but then let him go home, and never followed up. Now, the former al-Qaida insider is talking.
In March, 2000, Niaz Khan said he was down and out, waiting tables in a curry house north of London, overwhelmed by gambling debts and increasingly drawn to the message of a radical local imam. The imam extolled Osama bin Laden and the rewards of dying for jihad.
Then, one night, outside a casino in Manchester, England, Khan said two mysterious men approached him. "First they say, 'We can help you,'" recalls Khan. "I say, 'How can you help me?' Say, 'OK, come sit in car.' Said 'Do you heard Osama name'?"
Khan, now 30, said the men told him they were working on behalf of Osama bin Laden, knew all about his background and gambling debts - information presumably gleaned from his fellow mosque members - and offered to teach him the ways of jihad.
They gave Khan several thousand dollars and flew him to Lahore, Pakistan, where he waited for instructions in a local hotel. He says that bin Laden's followers then drove him, blindfolded, to a nearby safe house.
In training
Khan told NBC News that for the next few weeks he was trained by al-Qaida to hijack passenger planes, and then sent to the United States. But when he told the FBI, headquarters was skeptical and, after several weeks, senior FBI officials ordered him released to the custody of British intelligence. Khan said, "I told them before the 9/11, about more than year, be... hijacking in America or on America airline."
Khan said that at the Lahore training compound he and up to 30 other men were taught hijacking basics, including how to smuggle guns and other weapons through airport security, techniques to overpower passengers and crew and how to get into a cockpit.
Khan says he did not think about all the other people he might have killed and, at the time, didn't care. "Not that time," he said. "If I die, it doesn't matter because this life anyway, it's no good."
After about a week of training, Khan said he was given money to fly a circuitous route from Pakistan to Doha, Qatar, to London, to Zurich, Switzerland, back to London, and then off to New York. The purpose, he said, was to allow him to observe flight operations and on-board security measures.
Upon landing at JFK airport, Khan says he was supposed to go to a taxi stand, find a man in a white prayer cap and use a code. "He say, 'Your name Babu Khan?' " said Khan. "And you will be saying, 'Yes, my name Babu Khan.' 'Your name Babu Khan?' You say, 'Yes, my name Babu Khan.'"
But Khan claims he got cold feet. Instead of meeting his contact, he slipped away, retreated to New York, then took a bus to Atlantic City and gambled away almost all his money. Fearful that he had blown al-Qaida's cash, and aware that his terrorist trainers had copied his passport information and easily knew how to find him, Khan turned himself in and confessed. "I've been to Pakistan," he said. "I know about this hijacking, something going on."
Khan said his trainers never told him exactly what his terrorist mission in the United States would be. He said he was told he would learn more details from a half dozen other trained terrorists who, he was told, already were in the U.S.
For three weeks, FBI counter-terrorist agents in Newark, N.J. interrogated Khan, created composite drawings of his terrorist trainer and a fellow student and then wired Khan up and took him back to JFK airport, hoping to smoke out other conspirators. But they had no luck.
Lie-detector tests
Congress' 9/11 report confirms that in April, 2000, an unnamed "walk-in" told the FBI he "was to meet five or six persons" - some of them pilots - who would take over a plane and fly to Afghanistan, or blow the plane up. The report adds that the "walk-in" passed a lie-detector test.
NBC News has learned that Khan passed not one but two FBI polygraphs. A former FBI official says Newark agents believed Khan and tried to aggressively follow every lead in the case, but word came from headquarters saying, "return him to London and forget about it" -- which, critics say, is exactly what the FBI did.
But the FBI insists it investigated Khan's allegations thoroughly, could not confirm them, and had no legal grounds to hold him. Federal prosecutors agreed. FBI officials say they did the right thing in turning Khan over to British authorities, and assumed they would carefully investigate.
But NBC News has learned that New Scotland Yard only interviewed Khan for about two hours, and then released him. Spokesmen for Scotland Yard and MI-5, the British intelligence agency, would not comment.
Khan said he watched the 9/11 attacks on television and was horrified. He said he was sad for the victims and relieved he had not carried out any attacks of his own. To him, the 9/11 plot rang familiar. "Maybe same plan," he said. "Maybe same training."
There's no evidence Khan was part of the 9/11 plot. But lawyers for 9/11 families urged him to tell his story, arguing it reveals a major missed clue.
Khan says the British tabloids offered to pay him to tell his story, but he declined. He wants it known that he has not accepted any money for any interview.
He is fearful for his life and, at first, was reluctant to talk to NBC. He changed his mind after a British newspaper published his name and, he says, surreptitiously took his photograph. Once it was published, he agreed to go on camera to talk about what he sees as a missed opportunity.
Khan remains surprised that, to this day, the FBI, CIA and Scotland Yard have never asked for his help in identifying the street address of the Lahore safe house where he and dozens of other men were trained. He says he saw some identifying signs and might be able to locate it today. "I just surprised because [they] never come back to ask some more things," he said. "[The FBI] believed me, but maybe not seriously."
Now that he's told his story, Khan plans to go back into the shadows-branded by some a terrorist and by others a traitor to the cause.
Lisa Myers is NBC News' Senior Investigative Correspondent
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
With Some Strings Attached, Senate Approves War Money
June 3, 2004
By CARL HULSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/politics/03spend.html
WASHINGTON, June 2 - The Senate on Wednesday gave the White House $25 billion for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq but joined the House in putting new controls on the money despite administration requests for substantial freedom in how to use it.
On a 95-to-0 vote, senators agreed to add the money to a broad Pentagon spending plan, bringing the total cost of the legislation to more than $447 billion. Even Democrats who have raised objections to administration policy in Iraq did not oppose the spending, saying they viewed it as a necessity for troops in need of new armor and other vital equipment.
"I draw a distinction between this and an endorsement of the whole policy," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "I look at this as support for the troops."
Under the Senate approach, $22.5 billion of the money is devoted to specific Pentagon accounts while the administration is allowed to allocate $2.5 billion as it sees fit.
However, it cannot spend any of the money unless the secretary of defense consults with senior members of both parties and provides a written report at least five days before any shift. The Pentagon must also provide monthly reports on how it uses the money. The House is imposing similar requirements.
"This is a new approach," said Senator Ted Stevens, Republican of Alaska and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, which is advancing its own Pentagon plan. "This is much different than in the past. We have got a lot of controls."
The White House initially sought wide latitude in its ability to spend all the money, which it says it could need to finance military operations until early next year. At that time, it expects to submit another emergency request for money. Members of both parties said the first proposal amounted to a request for a blank check and they balked, particularly in light of reports that the White House had diverted emergency money allocated after Sept. 11 to begin planning the war in Iraq without informing Congress.
Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said he was satisfied with the new restrictions. "Congress should not sign away its power of the purse by giving a rubber-stamp approval to the president's proposal," Mr. Byrd said.
Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is another critic of the administration's initial plan, said the Senate approach was a significant improvement. But he said Congress should push for the war money to proceed through normal channels rather than be treated as emergency spending. "We need accurate estimates as to what their needs will be and then we can crank them into the regular process," Mr. McCain said.
In a second significant vote on the Pentagon measure, senators agreed 70 to 25 to open military health care coverage to members of the National Guard and military Reserves for a monthly premium, a program its sponsors said could assist about 300,000 people and their families. Backers of the proposal said it would help ensure that reservists are medically fit when called up and provide a valuable benefit to service members who are being increasingly relied upon to serve in dangerous theaters.
Opponents objected to the estimated cost, $700 million the first year, and suggested it was overly generous given the part-time status of Reserve and Guard members.
But Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a Reserve officer himself, objected to that characterization, noting that members of the Guard and Reserves constitute about 40 percent of the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"They are getting killed," said Mr. Graham. "It is not an average, everyday part-time job."
--------
Republicans Ponder Not Adopting a Budget This Year
June 3, 2004
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/politics/03budget.html
WASHINGTON, June 2 - They have tried sweet-talk and dire warnings, insults and bluffing tactics. None of it has worked, which is why a growing number of Republicans are beginning to despair about agreeing on a budget plan for next year.
Embarrassing as that would be for the party that controls both houses of Congress, many Republicans are concluding they would be better off with no budget plan than with one that would require them to pay the cost of permanently extending last year's tax cuts.
Senate Republican leaders, back from their Memorial Day recess, showed little sign on Wednesday of persuading a small band of rebels within their own party to drop their insistence on "pay as you go" rules.
The four Republican dissenters, joined by most Democrats, are demanding rules that would force Congress to pay the cost of any new tax cuts either with spending cuts or tax increases in other areas.
The impasse has already undermined President Bush's top domestic goal, which is to make the tax cuts permanent, and it will apparently postpone major budget decisions until after the elections.
It has also exposed a rift over Republican priorities: Is it more important to cut taxes or to prevent the budget deficit from expanding beyond its current level of about $400 billion?
The White House and House Republicans have staunchly opposed any such restrictions, because permanently extending Mr. Bush's tax cuts would cost about $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years.
On Tuesday, Senate Republican staff members floated a possible compromise: If the Republican hold-outs would accept a budget framework negotiated with the House, the Republican leaders would support a separate pay-as-you-go rule that would only apply to the Senate.
But that idea vanished before Republican leaders had even proposed it, apparently because some Senate Republicans viewed it as a capitulation to opponents of the tax cuts.
"I'm still working on a couple of ideas," said Senator Don Nickles, the Oklahoma Republican who is the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. "I'm going to invest some more time in this - but not a lot."
And while some of the Republican holdouts said they were open to compromise, they were far from certain that one would be possible.
"It's closing the barn door after the cows are gone," said Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of the most vocal holdouts, dismissing the proposed budget resolution with a thumbs-down sign.
In addition to Mr. McCain, the major Republican Senate holdouts are Senators Olympia J. Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island.
"I hope we can come up with a compromise," Ms. Collins said. "But I feel very strongly that there needs to be real budget enforcement."
On Wednesday, two liberal policy research groups released a study estimating that the ultimate cost of the tax cuts would fall overwhelmingly on middle- and lower-income families.
According to the study, by the Tax Policy Center and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, more than three-quarters of all households would end up net losers if the government actually paid for the tax cuts by either spending cuts or other tax increases.
But the wealthiest one-fifth of families, who are by far the biggest beneficiaries of the tax cuts, would end up big winners.
"We should think of tax cuts as loans, not as grants, and in particular as loans that are not paid back by the same people who get them," said William G. Gale, a senior economist at the Tax Policy Center.
One Republican official said Congress could muddle through without a budget agreement. Democrats have already made it clear they will vote to extend at least temporarily three major tax cuts - an expansion of the child tax credit, a reduction in the so-called "marriage penalty" for two-income families and an expansion of the 10-percent tax bracket to cover more middle-income taxpayers.
Failing to adopt a budget resolution would make it harder to prevent lawmakers from adding pet spending projects. It would also mean that any tax-cut extensions would fall under the Senate's normal debating rules, which require at least 60 votes before debate can be ended.
But the biggest issue for Republicans may simply be the embarrassment of not being able to pass a basic budget plan even though they control both chambers of Congress and the White House.
"It's optics," said one Republican aide. "The issue is, can the Republicans do the most basic of things, which is to pass a budget?"
With elections just five months away, neither Democrats nor Republicans want to vote in favor of either tax increases or big budget cuts. But Democrats want to put obstacles in the way of future tax cuts while most Republicans simply want to leave the issue open until next year.
"It's true it would defer the decisions for a year, but at least it would get us through the year that we're in," said Senator Arlen Specter, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania.
-------- propaganda wars
Media Vows to Pry Open Closed Doors in Washington
By Joe Strupp
Editor and Publisher
June 03, 2004
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000523635
NEW YORK Press efforts to thwart government secrecy are moving forward on two fronts as Washington bureau chiefs unite to more aggressively cover federal government attempts to hide information and the head of Associated Press offers plans for a new open government lobbying center in Washington, D.C.
"We wanted to raise awareness that this is a growing problem for us," says Andy Alexander, D.C. bureau chief for Cox Newspapers and new chair of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' FOI Committee, who is leading the bureau chiefs' effort. "We have a special obligation to be more aware of threats to public information."
Alexander's comments followed his participation in a May 3 luncheon at the National Press Club that included speakers from the First Amendment Center, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the new Coalition of Journalists for Open Government. Nineteen Washington bureau chiefs attended and agreed to boost their efforts to cover more issues related to government secrecy.
"It was an interesting discussion and out of it was an agreement that we all need to write more about secrecy," says Alexander, who created a new government secrecy beat in his office three months ago. "We have two people writing about it as part of their responsibilities."
While the bureau chiefs did not formulate a specific plan or agenda, the group agreed to put more resources on coverage of federal government attempts to keep information from the public, with an emphasis on how that affects readers, not just the press.
"The real issue is telling our readers what it is they are not getting," says Vickie Walton-James, Chicago Tribune Washington bureau chief. "We need to pay attention to this, and not just when a big case pops up."
For Tom DeFrank, who began covering Washington as a Newsweek correspondent 36 years ago and now heads the New York Daily News bureau, the need for prying open government doors has never been greater. "This administration is the most aggressively unhelpful that I have ever covered, and that goes back to Nixon," he says. "This White House and administration are far more secretive than the Nixon crowd."
Peter Copeland, Washington bureau chief of Scripps Howard News Service, says he plans to ratchet up the privacy beat even more. "It started as a beat concerning privacy aspects of the Internet, but has evolved into secrecy related to terrorism," he explains.
Bureau chiefs also are urging their reporters to get more information on the record and stop allowing federal officials to hide behind the mask of anonymity. "We need to push for more transparency," says Alexander, adding that reporters too often will allow a high-ranking official, like National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice or a cabinet member, to brief them behind the mask of a vague attribution. Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times bureau chief since 1983, said such a practice must be challenged more. "It is happening more frequently in this administration," he said. "They speak less on the record than their predecessors."
Copeland is pushing his staff to get more information through public records instead of nameless sources. "Get documents or letters or testimony on the record," he says.
At the same time, reporters are being trained to look for secrecy abuses in government and bring any denial of access to their bosses for review. "Staffers must let us know when they run into efforts to make things secret that shouldn't be," says David Cook, bureau chief for The Christian Science Monitor. "We can find ways to cover that."
AP President and CEO Tom Curley, meanwhile, unveiled a plan on May 7 for a "media advocacy center" to lobby for open government in Washington. "The government is pushing hard for secrecy," Curley said in a speech announcing the plan. "We must push back equally hard for openness. I think it is time to consider establishment of a focused lobbying effort in Washington ... The essence of the FOI Act is that government information is open and accessible to the public unless there is a very good reason to keep it secret."
But in a conversation with E&P, the AP chief stopped short of offering any detailed plans for the center, saying he wanted to bring together various journalism advocacy groups first to discuss the need. Among the center's efforts, however, may be to push for a federal reporters' shield law.
Joe Strupp (jstrupp@editorandpublisher.com) is senior editor for E&P.
-------- us politics
Plan to Allow Appointed Successors Is Defeated
Associated Press
Thursday, June 3, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11045-2004Jun2.html
House lawmakers rejected a proposed constitutional amendment yesterday that would have allowed governors to name replacements if half the 435-member chamber died in a terrorist attack or other disaster.
Opponents said the House should never abandon direct election. Lawmakers supporting the amendment said that without the succession plan, the House would expose itself to a lengthy period of powerlessness should hundreds of members die at the same time.
"We feel very, very passionately about the need to ensure that no one ever serves in the 'people's house' without having first being elected," said House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.), a critic of the amendment.
Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) wrote the amendment to keep the House functioning with appointees until special elections could be held to restore depleted numbers. "Elections are sacred, but so too is representation," Baird said.
His proposal was defeated by a vote of 353 to 63, well short of the two-thirds needed to approve a constitutional amendment.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is considering a similar amendment, but the House vote effectively ends the chances that Congress will move to change the Constitution this year.
Amendments to the Constitution also must be ratified by three-fourths of state legislatures.
In May, the House passed legislation that would require affected states to hold expedited special elections within 45 days if 100 or more members die in an attack.
The 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, provides for the direct election of senators and allows governors to temporarily fill Senate vacancies until special elections can be held. House vacancies can be filled only by special elections.
Baird argued that the House could be paralyzed for months, at a time of terrible crisis, if hundreds of lawmakers were incapacitated or killed and the House had to wait for elections to restore a working majority.
"If the terrorists strike us, they will in fact change our system of government at their discretion," Baird said. "They will change the political makeup of this body, and we are unprepared to deal with that, and it is irresponsible."
Baird proposed that governors appoint replacements any time a majority of the House is unable to carry out its duties because of death or incapacity. A governor would make the appointment within seven days from a list provided by the representative before he took office. The appointee would serve until the representative could resume work or a special election were held.
----
Clinton's team aids Kerry on military
June 03, 2004
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040603-122407-4374r.htm
Sen. John Kerry, who delivers a major speech today on how he would reshape the military, is getting his national security ideas from a cadre of retired generals and ex-civilian officials who advised President Clinton.
But in speeches so far, the Massachusetts Democrat sounds like President Bush when discussing his strategy for the war on terrorism and a military of the future. Mr. Kerry even attempts to sound tougher than the hawkish president.
The presidential candidate said this week that he wants to "secure all bomb-making materials" in the world. The phrase seemed designed to trump Mr. Bush's achievements in getting Libya to disarm and cracking Pakistan's nuclear weapons black market.
Mr. Kerry's series of national security speeches also is a bid to close poll numbers that give Mr. Bush a big edge in fighting the war on terror. In the process, the candidate is positioning himself to the right of the Democratic Party's left wing, which ridicules the need for a global war on terror.
"His speech will be focused on strengthening the military to meet the new threats we face," said campaign spokeswoman Brooke Anderson.
Mr. Kerry says he wants to hunt down terrorists worldwide and prepare the military for new threats - themes that closely mirror those of the Bush administration.
The president has adopted a policy of pre-emption to kill or capture al Qaeda and other terrorists before they attack.
Mr. Kerry seemed to echo that position in a May 27 speech. "As president," he said, "my No. 1 security goal will be to prevent the terrorists from gaining weapons of mass murder. And our overriding mission will be to disrupt and destroy their terrorist cells. ... We must take the fight to the enemy on every continent."
In the speech, Mr. Kerry did not repeat his earlier position that the military would play "far less" of a role in the war on terror if he is elected.
The earlier statement has stirred questions on whether Mr. Kerry would revert to counterterrorism policies of the Clinton presidency, when no military attack on the ground was launched against Osama bin Laden or his al Qaeda network.
Mr. Kerry also said in the speech that "we must modernize the world's most powerful military to meet the new threats."
The statement is similar to Mr. Bush's pledge as candidate in 1999 and 2000 to transform the military for the 21st century by ending some developing weapons systems in favor of more futuristic ones.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has pushed the armed forces to break away from Cold War doctrines and to adopt battlefield tactics that emphasize speed in getting to the battle and in fighting the enemy.
Mr. Kerry also says he would temporarily increase Army strength by 40,000 soldiers to ease the burden on the 10 active-duty divisions that are stretched thin globally. The Army, under Mr. Bush, has used emergency powers to increase the ranks by up to 30,000 to keep troop levels in Iraq at about 138,000.
Mr. Kerry's most conspicuous supporters among retired four-star generals are John Shalikashvili, whom Mr. Clinton appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1993; and Wesley Clark, whom Mr. Clinton named as chief of U.S. Southern Command at a time when some in the Army wanted him to retire at three-star rank. Mr. Clinton later appointed the general as chief of NATO, where he directed the 79-day air war against Serbian forces of deposed leader Slobodan Milosevic.
Also speaking out for Mr. Kerry is retired Adm. William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first Bush administration. Adm. Crowe, upon retirement, backed Mr. Clinton in the 1992 election and became ambassador to Britain.
He has come to Mr. Kerry's defense in response to attack ads from the Bush campaign.
Also advising the Kerry campaign is retired Army Lt. Gen. Claudia J. Kennedy, the Army's top intelligence officer. She gained fame as the Army's most prominent spokeswoman against sexual harassment and then found herself involved in one of the military's most famous cases. She accused a two-star general of groping her in her Pentagon office.
The Army inspector general substantiated the charge, based mostly on her testimony. The general, who denied the charge, was disciplined and forced to retire. The inspector general's report said Gen. Kennedy had no motive to lie.
Civilians advising Mr. Kerry on national security are mostly Clinton Cabinet members, including Defense Secretary William Perry, National Security Adviser Samuel R. Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. Mrs. Albright has emerged as one of Mr. Kerry's most partisan Bush attackers on cable TV. At one event, she announced her alliance with left-wing activist Michael Moore.
Mr. Kerry also has benefited from two retired generals who are frequent Bush critics: retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, an NBC News on-air analyst; and retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni.
Gen. Zinni, a former head of U.S. Central Command, argued against using ground troops to go after al Qaeda in the 1990s. Today, he frequently criticizes Mr. Bush for the Iraq war and says Mr. Rumsfeld should quit. The general supported Mr. Bush in the 2000 election.
Ms. Anderson had no comment on whether Mr. Kerry, as president, would move to end the ban on open homosexuals in the military. As a senator, he has opposed the prohibition. But he also has said that commanders in some units should have the flexibility to exclude homosexuals to protect unit cohesion.
Mr. Clinton began his first term by trying to lift the ban, but ended up signing a defense bill that codified the restriction. If Mr. Kerry wants to change the policy, he would need the approval of Congress.
----
Kerry Condemns White House Support for Chalabi
June 3, 2004
New York Times
By JODI WILGOREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/politics/campaign/03kerry.html
TAMPA, Fla., June 2 - Responding to reports that Ahmad Chalabi may have leaked critical United States secrets to Iran, Senator John Kerry on Wednesday blasted the Bush administration for ever backing Mr. Chalabi as an Iraqi exile leader, saying he met him in London years ago and deemed him unworthy of American support.
"That was a judgment I made and I regret that this administration, for whatever reasons, bought into Mr. Chalabi hook, line and sinker," Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, told reporters.
He was referring to his meeting in 1998 with Mr. Chalabi, whose exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, fed intelligence to the Bush administration about unconventional weapons in Iraq that helped the drive toward military action.
"I think it's cost us significantly," Mr. Kerry said.
In a 15-minute news conference, his first since May 14, Mr. Kerry disputed Mr. Bush's assessment that Iraq is the main front in the effort against terror and said the administration was creating a "backdoor draft" by repeatedly extending military duty tours. He used the session, which followed a panel discussion on biological weapons, to praise the recent outreach to the United Nations, saying, "All of us want the president to be successful."
But Mr. Kerry said the internationalization of the Iraq mission had to include "boots on the ground" from other countries.
"The Guard and Reserve have been turned into almost active duty," Mr. Kerry said. "People serving beyond the time of their voluntary service are no longer volunteers."
Regarding Mr. Bush's statement on Wednesday in a speech at the Air Force Academy that Iraq is the main front in the antiterror effort, Mr. Kerry said: "I think it is a much bigger and broader operation than that. It's multifront almost, a war with so many fronts that it's a mistake to singularize it in that way."
Instead, he said, the main front is "60 countries around the world," including some friendly to the United States, where Al Qaeda and other rather radical organizations operate freely. Arguing that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have not been convincingly linked to Iraq and that unconventional weapons were the rationale given Congress for the military action, Mr. Kerry said of Mr. Bush's statement, "I think that's once again misleading America, frankly."
Mr. Kerry also distanced himself from a statement by President Jacques Chirac of France that urged further Iraqi sovereignty, saying, "American troops will not be put under the command of another country or another institution."
Asked whether politics might have heightened terror alerts last week, Mr. Kerry said that he "wouldn't want to believe that."
But he added: "The problem is for many Americans, however, they can't take it as face value. Which means something has happened about the credibility of this administration in this process. It's a question of the level of confidence Americans have in this administration, and I think that's a serious issue."
The question-and-answer session with reporters here at the University of South Florida, in one of the most critical counties in one of the most critical states in the campaign, was held after a 90-minute event in which bioterrorism experts painted doomsday scenarios about preparedness.
Saying the Bush administration lacks a coherent plan to deal with such problems, Mr. Kerry promised to name a point person in the White House and convene a meeting of experts in the first 100 days of his administration.
"Nothing that I'm saying here is said to alarm, nothing that I'm saying here is said to play on anyone's fears," he said.
After lengthy briefings from the experts, he acknowledged, "It's a pretty daunting task."
"All of this,'' he added, "is solvable, all of this is achievable, if you provide leadership."
His presentation was short on specifics, and an aide said the campaign did not know how much the ambitions would cost.
The Bush campaign shot back with documents that showed that the administration had, after the Sept. 11 attacks, increased spending on bioterrorism 1,600 percent, to $5.2 billion, and on bioterror research 3,100 percent, to $1.7 billion.
Richard Falkenrath, who was until recently a leading White House aide on the subject, said the attacks were akin to Thomas E. Dewey's arguing in 1944 that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was weak on retaking Europe.
"Of all the issues Senator Kerry could choose to campaign against the president on," Mr. Falkenrath said, "this has got to be his worst choice."
----
Kerry to call for 40,000 new troops for overextended US Army
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jun 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040603155608.0d6imel9.html
Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry will propose increasing the US Army's ranks by 40,000 troops to confront new threats, his campaign said Thursday.
"The world has changed after the Cold War, and especially after September 11," said Kerry security adviser Rand Beers, a former counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush.
"Threats now include terrorists and failed states that can become sanctuaries for terrorists. Bush has focused on traditional war threats, and we need to broaden that.
"We are very much overstretched in overseas deployments, especially in Iraq," he said in a conference call just before Kerry was to make his call for a bigger army in a speech in Missouri.
The Massachusetts senator, running neck-and-neck in opinion polls with Bush for the November 2 presidential election, has been making a series of national security speeches.
Beers said Kerry would propose an increase of 40,000 troops for the army, "evenly divided between combat forces and special operations forces."
He estimated this would cost 5.0 billion to 8.0 billion dollars a year, which Beers said would be "budget neutral" if funds were pared from other defense programs.
Former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff John Shalikashvili, another Kerry security team member, said "how quickly we can do this clearly will depend on the number of volunteers. You can and you should increase special ops in light of the missions before us."
But Shalikashvili underscored: "I do not believe and Senator Kerry does not believe at this time that there is a need for a draft."
Beers said Kerry's plans included ensuring the Defense Department is integrated with other security agencies to avoid turf wars, and building alliances to help win the war on terror.
The Kerry team also includes retired general Wesley Clark, a former contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, and retired admirals William Crowe and Stansfield Turner.
Beers said Kerry would seek to give the national guard and reserve forces a new role in homeland security.
That could include missions that they might fulfill as first responders in disasters -- for example, in the event of a event of nuclear attack, said Ashton Carter, an international security expert on Kerry's team who served as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy from 1993 to
On military transformation, "the first (priority) is 'get on with it,'" said Carter. "We have been talking about it and haven't done it."
He also said that, while Bush has focused on traditional warfare-centered change for the armed forces, a counterterror focus and other components -- including a new role for the national guard and reserve troops -- were critical.
Earlier this week, Kerry charged that the United States was ill-prepared to fend off biological attacks that could kill millions, launching a call for better defenses.
He also charged in a New York Times interview published Sunday that Bush's fixation on Iraq has made the United States less safe and allowed North Korea and Iran to pursue efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
----
Bush Knew About Leak of CIA Operative's Name
By Staff and Wire Reports
Jun 3, 2004,
Capitol Hill Blue
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/printer_4629.shtml
Witnesses told a federal grand jury President George W. Bush knew about, and took no action to stop, the release of a covert CIA operative's name to a journalist in an attempt to discredit her husband, a critic of administration policy in Iraq.
Their damning testimony has prompted Bush to contact an outside lawyer for legal advice because evidence increasingly points to his involvement in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
The move suggests the president anticipates being questioned by prosecutors. Sources say grand jury witnesses have implicated the President and his top advisor, Karl Rove.
White House spokesmen, however, dismiss the hiring of outside counsel as a routine precaution.
"The president has made it very clear he wants everyone to cooperate fully with the investigation and that would include himself," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Wednesday night.
He confirmed that Bush had contacted Washington attorney Jim Sharp. "In the event the president needs his advice, I expect he probably would retain him," McClellan said. There is no indication Bush has been questioned yet.
A federal grand jury has questioned numerous White House and administration officials to learn who leaked the name of CIA operative Plame, wife of former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, to the news media. Wilson has charged that officials made the disclosure in an effort to discredit him.
Bush has been an outspoken critics of leaks, saying they can be very damaging, but he has expressed doubts that the government's investigation will pinpoint who was responsible. While Bush has said he welcomed the leak investigation, it has been an awkward development for a president who promised to bring integrity and leadership to the White House after years of Republican criticism and investigations of the Clinton administration.
Even though he has a White House counsel, Bush is dependent on outside lawyers for private matters. A memo distributed to the staff last year reminded officials that the counsel's office works solely for the president in his official capacity and is not a private attorney for anyone.
Democrats seized on the news to criticize the president.
"It speaks for itself that the president initially claimed he wanted to get to the bottom of this, but now he's suddenly retained a lawyer," said Jano Cabrera, spokesman for the Democratic National Committee. "Bush shouldn't drag the country through grand juries and legal maneuvering. President Bush should come forward with what he knows and come clean with the American people."
Plame was first identified by syndicated columnist and TV commentator Novak in a column last July. Novak said his information came from administration sources.
Wilson has said he believes his wife's name was leaked because of his criticism of Bush administration claims that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger, which Wilson investigated for the CIA and found to be untrue.
Disclosure of an undercover officer's identity can be a federal crime. The grand jury has heard from witnesses and combed through thousands of pages of documents turned over by the White House, but returned no indictments.
The probe is being handled by Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, appointed after Attorney General John Ashcroft stepped aside from case because of his political ties to the White House.
Wilson has suggested in a book that the leaker was Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney. But Wilson's book, "The Politics of Truth," gave no conclusive evidence for the claim.
The White House denied the claim and accused Wilson of seeking to bolster the campaign of Democrat John Kerry, for whom he has acted as a foreign policy adviser.
Wilson also said it's possible the leak came from Elliott Abrams, a figure in the Reagan administration Iran-Contra affair and now a member of Bush's National Security Council. And Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, may have circulated information about Wilson and Plame "in administration and neoconservative circles" even if Rove was not himself the leaker, Wilson wrote.
Another possibility is that two lower-level officials in Cheney's office - John Hannah or David Wurmser - leaked Plame's identity at the behest of higher-ups "to keep their fingerprints off the crime," Wilson speculated.
Sources within the investigation say evidence points to Rove approving release of the leak. They add that their investigation suggests the President knew about Rove's actions but took no action to stop release of Plame's name.
----
Bush Consults Lawyer About CIA Name Leak
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 3, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11084-2004Jun2.html
President Bush has consulted an outside lawyer about representing him if he is questioned as part of the grand jury investigation into the leak of a CIA officer's identity, administration officials said yesterday.
The officials said Bush is poised to hire Jim Sharp of Washington, a former assistant U.S. attorney who heads his own firm, if prosecutors or FBI agents want to interview the president about the Valerie Plame case or if he is called by a federal grand jury investigating the matter.
Plame's undercover status was revealed when her name appeared in a newspaper column by Robert D. Novak last July 14 that attributed the information to "two senior administration officials." In February 2002, the CIA sent Plame's husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, to investigate assertions that Iraq had attempted to buy nuclear material in Niger, claims that he discredited. Wilson later became a leading critic of the White House's case for invading Iraq and has suggested that his wife's identity was leaked to discourage others from questioning the administration.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Bush "has had discussions" with Sharp about representing him in connection with the case.
"In the event he needs his advice, the president would probably retain him," McClellan said. "The president has been very clear in saying that he wants the White House to cooperate fully, and that would include himself."
McClellan, repeating the White House position about the case, added: "No one wants to get to the bottom of this more than the president. Leaking of classified information is a very serious matter." McClellan would say only that the discussions between Bush and Sharp occurred "recently."
Bush's consultation was first reported yesterday by CBS News.
The White House counsel's office advises the president in his official capacity, but presidents can retain outside lawyers to represent their personal interests.
The Justice Department began an investigation in October into whether administration officials had illegally leaked Plame's identity. Under U.S. law, the disclosure could be a crime if the person knew Plame was undercover and revealed that information intentionally.
In December, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft recused himself from the politically sensitive case and appointed U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald of Chicago as a special prosecutor.
The grand jury has questioned several current and former aides to Bush and Vice President Cheney, including McClellan. In May, the grand jury subpoenaed Tim Russert, moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," and Time reporter Matthew Cooper, and Fitzgerald sought voluntary interviews with two reporters for The Washington Post.
Joseph E. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney who worked with Sharp as a young prosecutor, said Sharp is known for his litigation skills. He called Sharp "a brilliant tactician who is very persuasive" and said he is "folksy like a fox." DiGenova said any possible interest by prosecutors in Bush could suggest that they are nearing the end of the investigation. "The tree of the investigation starts at the bottom and works up, and now they're nearing the top," he said. "They can ask him about conversations they may have been told about and can ask him, 'Did this person admit anything to you?' "
Wilson wrote in a memoir published in April, "The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity," that journalists told him more than once that "the White House was actively promoting the leak of my wife's name and employment."
Wilson suggested publicly that Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove, was Novak's source but later backed off that accusation. In the book, Wilson wrote that "at a minimum, Rove had engaged in unethical behavior -- by pushing the disclosure of Valerie's status."
Democrats accused Bush of chilling the investigation when he said in October: "I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's a lot of senior officials." But he went on to say, "I want to know the truth."
Bush was asked again about the case on New Year's Day in Texas, when he said: "I'm not involved with the investigation in any way, shape or form. I've told the members of the White House to totally cooperate. I think you'll find that there has been total cooperation."
----
Bush Finds Lawyer to Use if Called in Leak Case
June 3, 2004
New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/politics/03CND-LEAK.html?hp
WASHINGTON, June 3 - President Bush has met with a private lawyer whom he intends to hire to represent him if he is questioned as part of a grand jury investigation into the public disclosure of a C.I.A. undercover officer's identity, the White House said Wednesday.
Mr. Bush met recently with the Washington lawyer, Jim Sharp, to consult with him about the case, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said, confirming a report on "CBS Evening News."
Today Mr. Bush said he wanted to "know the truth" about what had happened, and if he needed the lawyer's advice, "I'll probably hire him." The president was speaking at a White House news briefing with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia.
Mr. McClellan said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that Mr. Bush had had discussions with Mr. Sharp, adding: "The president has stated on numerous occasions that he wants the White House to fully cooperate, and that would include himself. He wants the investigation to come to a successful conclusion."
Federal prosecutors are seeking to determine who disclosed the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. officer, to the syndicated columnist Robert Novak for a column he wrote last summer. Disclosure of the identity of an undercover officer for the Central Intelligence Agency can be a federal crime.
It was unclear on Wednesday night why Mr. Bush waited until what appears to be the last stages of the investigation into the leak before he consulted with a lawyer. One administration official speculated that the president must have had some indication that investigators now want to question him.
The case unfolded after Ms. Plame's husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador, publicly questioned the president's assertion in the 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase uranium in Africa. Mr. Wilson's statements led to a White House admission that the evidence behind the statement was insufficient, and probably wrong, and that the C.I.A. had successfully cautioned the White House against making such statements in another speech the president had given in the fall of 2002.
Mr. Wilson and some Democrats have charged that the White House leaked Ms. Plame's identity as a way of retaliating against Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Bush's decision to consider hiring his own lawyer in the case surprised many law enforcement officials and political figures who have followed the politically charged case for months.
While Mr. Wilson has mentioned several prominent White House advisers - including Karl Rove, I. Lewis Libby and Elliott Abrams - as possible sources of the leak, the president himself has not been seen as a potential target of the investigation.
He could, however, become a witness if prosecutors believe he had information about the events that led to the disclosure of Ms. Plame's name or if he had personal records that might aid in the inquiry.
Randall Samborn, a spokesman for Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago who is acting as a special counsel in the investigation, declined to comment on the developments.
Mr. Sharp, who represented Gen. Richard V. Secord of the Air Force in the Iran-contra affair but is not widely known in Washington legal circles, could not be reached for comment late Wednesday.
The Justice Department named Mr. Fitzgerald to lead the investigation last December when Attorney General John Ashcroft withdrew from oversight of the case after Democrats charged for months that his close ties to the White House posed a conflict of interest.
The developments on Wednesday came at a time when Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation has shown signs of movement. The grand jury recently subpoenaed journalists from NBC and Time magazine to testify about the leak - a move that lawyers for the journalists said they would fight. Mr. Fitzgerald has kept a tight seal on the progress of his investigation, and legal observers are split over whether the subpoenas signal that he may be nearing an indictment or whether the investigation has hit a wall and he is seeking information from reporters as a last resort.
Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who has led the calls for an aggressive investigation into the leak, said after word of Mr. Bush's legal consultation: `I've always said we should find the wrongdoers no matter who is implicated. I have confidence that Special Counsel Fitzgerald will follow the path no matter where it leads.`
----
Bush Real Target of Chalabi Smear
Joel Mowbray
June 3, 2004
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/joelmowbray/jm20040603.shtml
Inside the halls of the State Department, career members of the Foreign Service have been buzzing about a prospect that excites them very much: President John Kerry. Never mind that their current boss is President George W. Bush.
Bush administration officials are assumed by the public to be loyal to the president, but the fact is that Bush's foreign policy team is dominated by people who were not appointed by him-and most of them desperately want Bush to lose come November.
And if Bush doesn't act soon, their wish might be granted.
For proof, look at the "scandal" surrounding Iraqi Governing Council member and longtime U.S. ally Ahmed Chalabi. Almost two weeks after Chalabi's Baghdad home was raided-and he had been publicly smeared with anonymous quotes continuously-"intelligence officials" told the New York Times a downright silly story.
Well, it would be silly if any idiot who believed it was true took a moment to use some common sense.
Quoting anonymous government officials, the Times informed readers that Chalabi informed Iran that the U.S. had broken their codes. How did U.S. officials make this shocking discovery? Iranian agents in Baghdad used that same broken code to tell their bosses what they had learned-rather than simply protect that valuable tidbit by having someone hand-deliver the message 90 miles away in Tehran.
Confused? Chalabi, you see, has been hated by State and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), for different reasons, for years.
State's diplomats have long resented the Iraqi's promotion of a war against Saddam that none of them wanted. And Chalabi's push for a strong, secular democracy in the heart of the Arab world would threaten the most cherished of all State Department objectives: stability.
Although the CIA largely shares State's worldview, its contempt for Chalabi is personal. In the mid-1990's, the CIA organized a ham-handed coup attempt against Saddam. Chalabi warned them it wouldn't work. He was right-and said so publicly. The CIA fumed. Bad blood has existed ever since.
In striking Chalabi, State and CIA are not simply attacking him, but his allies inside the administration, the decision to go to war in the first place, and most significantly, President Bush himself.
And that's not unintentional.
State Department diplomats and "intelligence officials" from State and CIA hate Bush's political appointees-the hawks inside the Pentagon, the so-called "neocons"-almost as much as they do Chalabi. Luckily for them, they can-they hope-kill two birds with one smear campaign.
After all, it was the administration hawks-primarily based in the Pentagon, though there are others, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and a handful at the State Department-who championed Chalabi from the very beginning of this administration.
This is most likely why anonymous "intelligence officials" leaked to the New York Times last week (and again yesterday) that there was an investigation that centered on "a handful" of officials, most of whom "are at the Pentagon."
The dividing line is very clear: on one side are the president's political appointees, and on the other are careerists who have no loyalty to the commander-in-chief.
To fully appreciate the mutinous sentiment at State, consider that it is a place where its employees feel free to display on desks and doors political cartoons lampooning President Bush. Anecdotally, many Foreign Service members joined anti-war rallies last spring, according to several State Department officials.
The undermining is not merely symbolic, either.
Last spring, State Department officials learned from Pyongyang representatives in New York that North Korea was admitting, for the first time, that it was reprocessing plutonium. It kept that bombshell a secret, even from the White House, because it knew administration hawks would cancel upcoming talks-something for which State had lobbied very hard.
The insubordination continues to this day. Bureaucrats at State and CIA-despite CIA Director George Tenet having claimed the case for WMD was a "slam dunk"-largely did not support the war. They can no longer win the fight on the decision to go to war, but taking out Chalabi is the next best thing. It calls into question the motives and justification for the war, and in the process, defends the institutional integrity of both State and CIA.
So far, the White House has not refereed the open revolt within its ranks. This has only emboldened the president's enemies at State and CIA. If there is evidence against Chalabi-beyond Iran sending a message in a code it had supposedly just been told was broken-it should be put on the table.
But if not, if this smear campaign is merely a bluff to carry out character assassination, then Chalabi might not be the only one who unfairly falls from grace.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
China can use wind power to 'leapfrog' over polluting energy: Greenpeace
BEIJING (AFP)
Jun 03, 2004
http://www.terradaily.com/2004/040603065640.we2dnlow.html
China has unveiled ambitions to become a global wind power within the next decade, grasping a chance to "leapfrog" over more polluting forms of energy, environmental group Greenpeace said Thursday.
China has just published an action plan which foresees renewable energy sources accounting for 10 percent of the nation's total installed electricity capacity by 2010, Greenpeace said in a statement.
"This is a golden opportunity," said Lo Sze Ping, campaign director of Greenpeace in China.
"If China is able to fully utilize its immense renewable energy resources, it can leapfrog over the polluting fossil fuel age straight into a clean renewable energy future," he said.
China already seems well into the fossil fuel age, with auto sales soaring 29 percent in the first three months of 2004 to 1.28 million.
China targets 60 gigawatts coming from renewable energy sources by the end of the decade, including four gigawatts from wind power and six gigawatts from biomass, Greenepace said.
The group did not say where the majority of the renewable energy would come from.
Hydropower is likely to account for a large part, although environmental organizations generally do not welcome such projects if they are too large to be sustainable.
China's roaring economy demands ever-larger amounts of energy, meaning policy planners have to look either abroad or investigate alternative energy sources to meet demand.
As an indication of China's huge appetite for power, the country last year overtook Japan as the world's second-largest importer of oil after the United States.
-------- OTHER
-------- health
Cancer death rates drop across the U.S.
June 03, 2004
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040603-122349-8803r.htm
Death rates for all cancers combined have fallen steadily in the United States since the 1990s, including among the four top cancer killers: lung, colon, breast and prostate, a new report by the nation's leading cancer groups said.
The study, called the "Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975 to 2001," found that death rates from all cancers combined dropped 1.1 percent annually from 1993 to 2001.
"This is wonderful. We are really making progress" in fighting cancer, said Ahmedin Jemal, program director of cancer surveillance for the American Cancer Society (ACS), who was the report's lead author.
Dr. Jemal said that the American cancer death rate peaked in 1991, and that from then to 2001, the overall death rate dropped 9 percent to 10 percent.
Authors of the study said the new data reflect factors such as more aggressive prevention, earlier detection, improved treatment and longer survival.
"Survival has really improved," said Brenda Edwards, associate director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), who has worked on the annual cancer studies for the past seven years.
Dr. Edwards said from 1975 to 1979, there was an overall five-year cancer survival rate of 43 percent. By 1995 to 2000, the five-year survival rate had increased to 64 percent.
The annual cancer report is a collaborative effort by NCI, ACS, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries.
"Overall, cancer death rates are declining," Dr. Jemal said. He added that this positive development includes "all cancers combined and the most common types of cancer."
Death rates have fallen in 11 of the top 15 types of cancer afflicting men, he said. They also have dropped in eight of the top 15 types of cancer affecting women.
Dr. Jemal noted that death rates have fallen for the "four major types of cancer." He said lung-cancer deaths have declined, but only in men. Deaths from colon cancer have dropped in both men and women. Breast-cancer deaths have declined among women, while prostate-cancer deaths have decreased among men.
Lung-cancer death rates among women leveled off for the first time between 1995 and 2001, after rising for many decades. And the lung-cancer incidence among women is declining.
"This new report clearly shows we've made considerable gains in reducing the burden of cancer in the United States," said John R. Seffin, chief executive officer of the ACS.
"The first ever drop in lung-cancer incidence rate in women is remarkable proof that we are making a difference in the No. 1 cancer killer and is powerful evidence that our successful efforts must continue," Mr. Seffin said.
Childhood cancers have shown some of the biggest improvements in survival during the past two decades. There has been an increase of 20 percent in the survival rate among boys and of 13 percent among girls.
The current five-year survival rate of more than 75 percent for children with cancer confirms the substantial progress that has been made in this area, beginning with President Nixon's War on Cancer in the early 1970s. In the prior decade, childhood cancers were nearly always fatal.
Despite all the good news in the new cancer report, it showed that not all U.S. populations have benefited equally. It also identified some malignancies, such as liver cancers in which the death rate continues to rise.
Cancer remains the nation's No. 2 medical killer after heart disease. In 2001, 553,768 Americans died of cancer, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
Black men and women were both found to be at higher risk of dying from cancer than white people.
Black men had a 9 percent greater risk of dying from lung cancer than white men and a 67 percent greater risk of mortality from cancer of the oral cavity than white men.
Black women had a 7 percent greater risk of dying from lung cancer than white women. Also, their risk of dying from cancer of the uterus or from melanoma, or skin cancer, was 82 percent greater than white women.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Tiananmen Protesters Wish for New System
June 3, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-Tiananmen-Anniversary.html
BEIJING (AP) -- Fifteen years after the bloodshed at Tiananmen Square, exiled student leaders of China's 1989 pro-democracy protests are settled abroad as academics and entrepreneurs. But they nurture one wish above all -- to come home to a new system.
``Living in exile, we have to keep our faith that there will be democracy some day,'' said Wu'er Kaixi, who gained fame as a pajama-clad hunger-striker who harangued then-Premier Li Peng and now is a political commentator in Taiwan.
Though the protest leaders have built new lives and Chinese society has changed drastically since 1989, communist leaders are still intensely sensitive about the protests that drew thousands to vast Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing to demand a more open system and an end to corruption.
The government is trying to prevent any commemoration of the 15th anniversary on Friday of the military attack on the demonstrators that killed hundreds and perhaps thousands. Activists and relatives of the dead have been detained or ordered out of the Chinese capital.
Now in their 30s, protest leaders who escaped after the crackdown are still labeled traitors and threatened with arrest. Others served prison terms and left China to start over.
Wang Dan, a principal strategist of the protests, spent seven years in prison. Now 35, he is working toward a doctorate at Harvard University with a thesis on Chinese politics and history and the democratic movement in Taiwan, the self-ruled island that had one-party rule in 1989 but is now a thriving ethnic Chinese democracy.
Chai Ling, a student leader known for her impassioned speeches, runs a software firm in the United States. Fellow demonstrator Li Lu heads an American investment company.
Since 1989, the government has carried out changes demanded by the protesters. It scrapped rules that dictated where Chinese could live or work and even whom they could marry. Economic growth has given millions new power over their lives, while Beijing is cracking down on rampant corruption that it once denied existed.
Beijing is experimenting with what it calls ``village democracy,'' with nonpartisan local elections that let tens of millions of Chinese pick officials for low-level posts. President Hu Jintao, who took power last year, has called for more ``socialist democracy'' -- though that means making the Communist Party more attentive to public needs, not allowing real opposition parties.
Real power is still held by the closed, secretive ruling party, which prohibits independent political activity and has imprisoned or driven nearly all of China's active dissidents into exile.
``The 1989 movement was instrumental for the country's economic development today,'' Wu'er, 36, said by phone from New York. ``Fifteen years has marked tremendous progress economically, but still the biggest obstacle is political.''
The government defends the crackdown and continued one-party rule as a key to China's economic success. It rejects pleas to reverse its verdict that the protests were a counterrevolutionary riot.
The protests were ``political turmoil no matter what you call it,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said this week. He defended the crackdown as playing ``a very good role in stabilizing the situation, which enabled China to develop its economy and make contributions to the peace and development of the world.''
Liu refused Thursday to say whether the student exiles would be able to return to China without being arrested.
``China is going to handle the cases in accordance with relevant laws,'' he said.
Wu'er said he, Wang and other 1989 veterans plan to protest Thursday in front of the Chinese Embassy in Washington.
Wu'er was on the government's list of 21 most-wanted pro-democracy campaigners. He was smuggled out through Hong Kong, first to France and then the United States before settling in Taiwan.
``It was never meant to be easy, challenging other people's supreme power,'' he said.
Zhang Boli, also on the wanted list, escaped in 1991.
``My personal wish is to go back to China,'' Zhang, 40, said last week from Washington. ``This, I believe, is also my right. ... I believe all I have is still in China. It's very sad.''
Wang Juntao, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison but released in 1993, is in the United States pursuing a doctorate in political science at Columbia University.
He said he is studying how a democratic government can be established in China.
``If we are ready for change, and if we want change, then we will finally get change,'' he said from his home in New Jersey. ``I believe that one day in the future, China will launch a new democracy with a peaceful vision.''
He added: ``I still have hope. I still have my dreams. Otherwise, I would not have stayed in jail or paid that kind of cost.''
Another veteran dissident, Frank Lu, lives in exile in Hong Kong and runs a one-man news agency that collects information on Chinese activists and funnels it to news organizations.
Lu was detained at 17 for writing an essay on political reform. In 1989, he spent a year in jail for organizing student protests in central China in support of the Tiananmen demonstrators.
Lu, 39, longs to see his parents back in Hunan province.
Still, he said, ``I have absolutely no regrets.''
----
Boston Protester Faces Felony Charges For Protesting Abu Ghraib Abuse
Thursday, June 3rd, 2004
Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/03/142254
A 21-year-old college student could spend years in jail on bomb threat charges after he stood silently outside a military recruitment office dressed like an Iraqi prisoner: in a black cape, hooded, wearing stereo wires hanging from his fingers. The police charged Joseph Previtera with making a bomb threat since the stereo wires resembled wires to a bomb. An article in today's Boston Phoenix begins like this:
"It was a skinny pair of stereo wires that got 21-year-old Joe Previtera charged with two felonies. A week ago on Wednesday, the Boston College student poked his head through a gauzy shawl, donned a black pointy hood, and ascended a milk crate positioned to the right of the Armed Forces Recruitment Center's Tremont Street entrance.
"He extended his arms like a tired scarecrow; stereo wires dangled from his fingers onto the ground below.
"Without those wires, the Westwood native could have been mistaken for an eyeless Klansman dipped in black, or maybe even the Wicked Witch of the West...
"But those snaky cords made the costume's import clear: Previtera was a dead ringer for one of Abu Ghraib's Iraqi prisoners - specifically, the faceless man who'd allegedly been forced to balance on a cardboard box lest he be electrocuted."
Prvitera stood outside the recruitment center for over an hour. And then the police arrived. Within hours he was facing charges more serious than any US soldier is facing for their role in the actual prison abuse in Iraq. Previtera was charged with three crimes: disturbing the peace, possession of a hoax device and making a false bomb threat. If convicted he could face years in prison.
The Boston Herald reported on Wednesday that prosecutors in the Suffolk County District Attorney's office are considering ``amending'' bomb-threat charges against Previtera.
But the Boston police have defended the arrest:
Michael McCarthy, a spokesman for the Boston Police Department told the Boston Phoenix: "It can be implied, with fingers and wires - especially in a heightened state of alert, as we are. Mr. Previtera should know better. He's a young adult educated at Boston College from a wealthy suburb. I'm sure he knows wires attached to his fingers, running to a milk crate, would arouse suspicion outside a military recruiters' office [when he's] dressed in prisoner's garb. If he has any questions as to why people think he may've had a bomb, then he needs to maybe go back to Boston College to brush up on his public policy. Or at least common sense, but they can't really teach that there."
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Midwest city feels conflict in the Mideast close to home
Madison, Wis,. debates being first to adopt a Palestinian 'sister city.'
By Frank Bures,
June 03, 2004
Christian Science Monitor
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0603/p02s02-ussc.html
On a cool, cloudy day in Madison, Wis., a city once at the heart of the 1960s antiwar movement, a handful of activists gather for a press conference on the terrace of the city government building to protest a different war in a different way.
In front of a row of television cameras, members of a "sister city" project take turns reading a long list of reasons for the Madison City Council to vote to adopt Rafah, an embattled city on the southern edge of the Gaza strip, as an official sister city.
To date, no American city has officially adopted a town in Israel's occupied territories. Even that other redoubt of liberalism, Berkeley, Calif., tried and failed to do so with the town of Jabaliya in the late 1980s.
But activists in Madison are undeterred. They have already helped turn the city into one of the cause capitals of America - forging relations with beleaguered cities across the world in places like East Timor, Nicaragua, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union. The city also has long history of tackling controversial issues on everything from the Vietnam War to gay rights to the pledge of allegiance in schools. If the sister city campaign is "going to succeed anywhere, it's going to succeed here," says Jennifer Loewenstein, a founder of the Madison Rafah project, aimed at highlighting civilian suffering in the city.
Still, the debate over Rafah has been pitched even by Madison standards. Passions are running high on both sides, especially since Israeli's recent incursions into Rafah in search of smuggling tunnels, which left around 45 Palestinians dead and 2000 homeless, according to the UN. "I've been flooded with e-mails from across the world either opposing or supporting this project," says Mike Verveer, an alderman who originally cosponsored the resolution, but who has since removed his name from it.
In the council chambers, Mr. Verveer and others listened as residents testified, trading accusations of McCarthyism and anti-Semitism, a virulence not often seen even in this city of passion and crusades. "Madison has been known nationally since the Vietnam era as being right there on the front line, opposing war," Verveer says. "And many of the communities that we sister with have had very serious strife and violence. So from that perspective, this isn't new. What is new is the tremendous amount of opposition here at home."
Leading the opposition are local Jewish groups, which argue that Rafah's leaders are anti-Semitic and that they have links to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. They ardently refute that the Rafah project falls in line with Madison's antiwar tradition. "It's just the opposite of being antiwar," says Steve Morrison, director of the Madison Jewish Community Council.
Marc Rosenthal disagrees. In the 1980s, Mr. Rosenthal helped found a sister city relationship with Arcatao, El Salvador. He credits the official tie with saving hundreds of noncombatant lives during that country's civil war. "We really understand that we are part of a broader globalization from below," he says. "And with something like Rafah, you're just trying to project the humanity of the people caught in this struggle."
In the current Madison debate, there may be less tear gas employed than in the past, but the debate is still fierce. For some, it's what gives the city its character. "There's a pretty healthy argument about issues in Madison," says David Maraniss, a Madison native and an associate editor at The Washington Post whose book, "They Marched into Sunlight," chronicled an antiwar protest here in 1967. "It's not all one-sided. I think the city has come to accept that ideological debates are part of its definition."
This week, a City Council committee voted to postpone a Rafah decision to allow more dialogue. At the councilors' behest, the two sides are meeting and will report back to the committee before it votes. "At the end of the day, any dialogue on this is a good thing," says supporter George Arida.
"That's what these sister city relationships are supposed to be all about," says Verveer. "Learning from one another."
----
Soldiers, Families Speak Out on War
Thursday 03 June
Pulse of Twin Cities
http://www.pulsetc.com/article.php?sid=1118
"My daughter enlisted in the Oregon National Guard in 1999. She is a highly trained Army engineer, and her contract specifically read that she would never be in combat ... Her unit was told they would build schools and homes in Iraq, that they would be welcomed as liberators. Instead she was put behind a 50-caliber machine gun, with no body armor, or even any ammo at first ... she rode on roads covered with depleted uranium dust and littered with burned cars full of dead bodies."
- Adele Kubein, mother of a soldier wounded in Iraq; from a speech in Portland, Oregon, to introduce Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich.
"Our president may be a war president, but I don't believe the American people want an open-ended war based on lies, secrecy and deceit. Let the media, and the rest of America see the coffins when they return to U.S. soil. It's the least we can do. Our children did not live in secrecy, they should not be shrouded in secrecy upon their passing."
- Jane Bright, mother of Evan Ashcraft, killed in Iraq July 24, 2003; letter to Military Families Speak Out.
"Bring our troops home now. Not one more Mother deserves to bury her child."
-- Lila Lipscomb, mother of Sgt. Michael F. Pedersen, killed in Iraq April 2, 2003; letter to Military Families Speak Out.
"This has completely changed my view of the administration. My husband is a soldier and his job is to fight for freedom. But after so many months and so many deaths, no one has shown us any weapons of mass destruction or given us any explanation."
- Sammie Drown, wife of soldier in Iraq; quoted in the New York Times, April 11, 2004.+
"You inherited peace and prosperity and created murder, mayhem, and massive debt. According to the ongoing investigation of the helicopter crash that took Brian's and 15 other American lives, the Illinois National Guard aircraft were sent into the field without basic survivability equipment, to accommodate your "shoot and bomb first, think and investigate later" brand of foreign policy. We don't need a trigger happy president."
- Rosemarie Dietz Slavenas, mother of Brian Slavenas, killed in Iraq November 2, 2003; open Letter to George W. Bush.
"The war is supposed to be over, but every day we hear of another soldier getting killed. Is it worth it? Saddam isn't in power anymore. The locals want us to leave. Why are we still here?"
- Sergeant with the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division; quoted in the Washington Post, June 30, 2003.
Today marks a year since the death of the son I adore, Jesus Alberto ... a year of yet another of Bush's lies, lying to my family about the causes of his death; a year of insult to the memory of my son by Bush for trying to avoid paying the costs of his burial."
- Fernando Suarez del Solar, father of Jesus Alberto, killed in Iraq March 27, 2003; letter to Military Families Speak Out.
"My nephew is a vehicle mechanic stationed somewhere north of Baghdad. His mother, my sister, goes to sleep every night, wondering if her son will ever come home to her. Her life goes on, but every day she steels herself against the possibility that she will get a notification that her son has died in a faraway land.
It grieves her even more to know that he has spent over six months there, risking his life for a false cause. She is one of over 120,000 American mothers who fear for their children's lives."
- Robert Smith, in a speech at the Unity Festival in Tokyo, October 18, 2003.
"Sherwood never did own a Hummer; he was a gunner on a Humvee. Today, he's not lying on the couch in his remodeled living room with a Big Screen TV and surround sound, playing video games with his son. He's lying alone in his grave. Sherwood worked until the very end-he died pulling perimeter security for the Iraqi Survey Group. This group has assumed the responsibility of finding those elusive weapons of mass destruction (WMD)-any WMD-with the high hopes of making an honest man out of the President."
Dante Zappala, brother of Sherwood Baker, killed in Iraq in March; letter to the Los Angeles Times.
"I'll kill for a ticket home."
Message scrawled by a soldier on a Fallujah rooftop; quoted in the Washington Post, June 30, 2003
----
Vanunu lawyers urge Israeli supreme court to ease restrictions
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Jun 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040603141350.gjf886n5.html
Lawyers for Israel's nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu filed a petition with the supreme court Thursday appealing for restrictions imposed on his release from prison to be eased.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in a statement that the conditions, which forbid their client to travel abroad or associate with foreigners, "constitute a harsh and daily punishment".
Its attorneys argued in their petition to the court that Vanunu was being denied "the basic rights of flexibility, mobility and opportunity to reintegrate into society, to which he has re-emerged after lengthy imprisonment."
Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in southern Israel, was released in April after 18 years in prison for revealing secrets about the Jewish state's nuclear programme to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper.
He stated his desire to leave Israel after his release but the authorities argue that he may still have secrets to reveal. Vanunu, 50, is widely despised in Israel where he is regarded as a traitor not only for leaking nuclear secrets but also for converting to Christianity.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Vanunu said that "all my future is going to be outside Israel... There is hate and danger to my life."
ACRI's petition said that "the prohibition on Vanunu leaving the country not only imposes an unreasonable infringement on his freedom of movement but it also sentences him in a way that he is unable to rehabilitate his life as he is forced to live in a society that abhors him."
Peter Hounam, the Sunday Times journalist who broke the Vanunu story in 1986, was expelled from Israel last week after senior security officials said he had secured an exclusive interview with Vanunu for the BBC.
----
Anti-War Group Enlists Father of Beheaded American
By Susan Jones
CNSNews.com Morning Editor
June 03, 2004
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNation.asp?Page=%5CNation%5Carchive%5C200406%5CNAT20040603c.html
The group organizing an antiwar rally in Washington on Saturday has openly expressed support for Palestinian terrorism, a watchdog group says.
On June 5, International A.N.S.W.E.R. says "thousands of people will march from the White House to Rumsfeld's house to say: 'Bush and Rumsfeld -- guilty of war crimes.'"
The group said Michael Berg, the father of civilian Nicholas Berg who was beheaded in Iraq, will be a speaker at Saturday's rally. In a statement on International A.N.S.W.E.R.'s website, Michael Berg says, "I am hoping that everyone who cares about peace in this country will join us."
The group says "solidarity" protests will also take place in San Francisco and Los Angeles on Saturday.
The Anti-Defamation League says International A.N.S.W.E.R. has played a "key role in inserting anti-Israel sentiment into the antiwar movement, which has led to extreme invective against Israel during protests."
The ADL said it has compiled background information on International A.N.S.W.E.R. and its recent activities, including expressions of support for Palestinian terrorism.
"During recent A.N.S.W.E.R. demonstrations, protestors have chanted in support of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists, extolled slain Hamas leaders, and invoked Nazi imagery to delegitimize Israel," the ADL said in a press release.
The ADL offers the following examples:
-- On April 18, A.N.S.W.E.R. leaders participated in a New York rally memorializing Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who was called a "symbol of resistance against a racist apartheid regime." Protestors held signs with messages such as "What's next Sharon? Ovens!!"
-- On March 23, along with the pro-Palestinian groups Al-Awda and New Jersey Solidarity, A.N.S.W.E.R. sponsored an "emergency rally" outside the Israeli consulate in New York following the killing of Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, at which speakers memorialized Yassin, and the crowd chanted "Hamas will never go" and "long live jihad." One speaker praised three terrorist leaders.
-- A December 2003 conference in Cairo brought together A.N.S.W.E.R. leaders and hundreds of international and Arab activists to support "acts of resistance in Iraq and Palestine." A Hamas representative attended the conference.
International A.N.S.W.E.R. -- the latter word an acronym for "Act Now to Stop War & End Racism" -- offers a list of demands on its website. They include:
-- Bring the troops home now; all foreign troops OUT of Iraq
-- End the colonial occupation of Palestine; support the [Palestinians'] right of return
-- U.S. OUT of Haiti, Korea, Afghanistan, Philippines, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela
-- Money for jobs, education, housing & healthcare -- not for war! Defend civil liberties & civil rights
Later this summer, International A.N.S.W.E.R. plans to protest at the both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, which it has dubbed the "twin parties of the war machine."
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark is among the founders of International A.N.S.W.E.R.
----
Anti-war camp rallies for Bush arrival
Thursday, 3 June, 2004
By Clive Myrie
BBC correspondent in Italy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3772787.stm
It is no coincidence that as I am writing this in my hotel room on the eve of the arrival of George W Bush, on TV in front of me are upsetting pictures for every Italian.
Anti-war protests have already clouded Italy's Republic Day parade
Three men looking drawn and dishevelled but otherwise in seemingly good health are having a meal.
They are hostages being held by kidnappers in Iraq.
Four men were originally abducted, all Italians, but one has since been murdered.
The video of the men, the presenter says, was taken two days ago but only just made available to al-Jazeera TV.
Italian ally
Soon President Bush will fly into town to join the commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Rome from Nazism.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is a staunch supporter of America's war on terror and sent 3,000 troops to Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
On a recent visit to Washington, he reaffirmed his commitment to Iraq and rejected suggestions Italian troops might leave early.
The kidnappers of his countrymen are demanding Italian soldiers pull out and executed one of their hostages, on camera, to show their determination to see this happen.
Most Italians do not want their troops in Iraq and opposed the war.
Demonstrations will greet the US president when he arrives.
Chance to protest
Anti-war campaigners have said they will try to disrupt his visit by blocking roads and attempting to break through barriers erected to protect his entourage.
The Italian army is serving in Iraq alongside the US
Many here see his visit as an opportunity to express deeply held feelings.
The mayor of Rome says it is every citizen's right to protest as long as it is peaceful.
But the authorities here are worried there could be a repeat of the terrible events during the G8 summit in Genoa three years ago.
Violent protests led to one man being shot dead and more than 100 injured in clashes with the police.
Again there were angry demonstrations in October last year here in Rome, when the European Union held an intergovernmental conference.
Rallying support
But for Mr Bush the trip provides a vital opportunity, kicking off a European tour taking in the Vatican, Paris and Normandy that will see him push for backing for a new UN resolution on Iraq
Here in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi will make it clear he will stick with the US.
In Paris, President Jacques Chirac may be less co-operative.
Other European leaders will be sounded out when the US president joins in the 60th D-Day Commemorations in Normandy over the weekend.
As such, the next few days are very important for George W Bush.
D-Day and Iraq
At home, most Americans now do not believe the war in Iraq was worth fighting, and his poll numbers are down to their lowest levels since he took office.
He is facing re-election in just five months' time and is anxious to get more international help for the coalition in Iraq.
In a keynote speech this week, the president likened the war on terrorism to the global fight for freedom during World War II.
Both conflicts, he said, represented a clear choice between democracy and tyranny.
On his European tour he will be hoping vital Nato allies heed his words.
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