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NUCLEAR
A ticking nuclear clock
MoD to speed up nuclear convoys
Uranium round believed found on Cape base
Europe's big three to push for cooperation with Iran over nuclear program
EU 'Big 3' Draft Nuclear Resolution on Iran
U.S. Indifferent, Experts Anxious Over Pakistan Tests
India, Pakistan Pledge to Carry on Peace Process
Iran tells UN nuclear watchdog to look elsewhere
Iran Says It Has Removed All Nuclear Concerns
Nuclear Power Plant in New York Prepares to Drill for Terror Attack
MILITARY
Where Guns Rule, Disarmament Falls Short
US navy to launch 'show of force' off oil-rich west Africa
African Leaders Urge Elections in Burundi
No Progress in Raising Troops By Rumsfeld in Bangladesh
Dutch want EU to return power to nation states
Fighters Loyal to Radical Cleric Start Pullout From 2 Iraq Cities
Clash With Shiites Shifts To Baghdad;
At Least 19 Die as Violence Continues to Surge in Iraq
Sharon Fires Two Who Oppose Gaza Plan
Sharon's Gaza Plan Is Approved but Final Decision Is Put Off
Barghouti Sentenced to Five Life Terms in Israel
Gadhafi Regrets Reagan Died Before Trial
Young Men Vanishing in Russian Region
Was It Ever Easy to Lead the C.I.A.?
Iraqi's Offer to U.S. Troops Could Lead to U.N. Action
16 U.N. Workers Abducted in Western Sudan
Wars Put Strain On National Guard
In Normandy, Bush Honors Veterans of D-Day
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
A 9/11 Lesson: Don't Photograph the Water
Trouble in Private U.S. Jails Preceded Job Fixing Iraq's
Rumsfeld Shows Concern on Terror War
POLITICS
Leak Probe Appears To Be in Active Phase
Wide Gaps Seen in U.S. Inquiries on Prison Abuse
Kerry Faces the World
Reagan Had Long Struggle With Alzheimer's Disease
Ronald Reagan Dies 40th President Reshaped American Politics
OTHER
Towns That Grew on Oil Count The Costs in Straitened Times
ACTIVISTS
War protesters march to Rumsfeld's home
5,000-strong peace rally denounces terrorism in Karachi
Protesters Demand Immediate Iraq Pullout
Hong Kong Vigil Honors Tiananmen Dead On Anniversary,
Six Peace Activists Arrested At Sub Christening
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
A ticking nuclear clock
Sunday, June 06, 2004
Berkshire Eagle
http://www.berkshireeagle.com/Stories/0,1413,101~6267~2195737,00.html
The Bush administration's announcement last week that it would spend $450 million on collecting and securing nuclear materials around the world sounds good until it's placed in perspective. Next year alone the Pentagon wants $9.2 billion for a missile-defense shield no reputable scientist thinks will work. It is doing this even though the chance of a rogue state lobbing a nuclear missile at the U.S. is close to nil, while the danger of terrorists using unsecured nuclear materials from any one of 40 countries to build and detonate a "dirty" bomb in an American city is great indeed.
The Energy Department's Global Threat Reduction Initiative comes on the heels of a Harvard University Kennedy School of Government report explaining the awful risks of not gathering up nuclear fuels from storage depots, research reactors and other poorly guarded sites fast enough. Former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, whose nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative funded the Harvard study, deplores the administration's lack of urgency and says, "If one of the great cities of the world goes up in smoke. . . it will make our retroactive rearview mirror look at 9/11 look like a waltz."
Only about a fifth of the world's nuclear materials are under reliable lock and key. Sites in Russia, where 60 percent of that country's plutonium and weapons-grad uranium are stored, are widely known to be secured by little more than chain-link fences and padlocked gates. The U.S. had been helping Russia destroy the materials at some of these sites, but that project stalled over insurance and liability disputes. George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin need to give the negotiators taking their own sweet time with all this a good kick.
The most unnerving point in the Harvard report is that less nuclear material was secured or destroyed by the U.S. in the two years after 9/11 than in the two years before. Has the Iraq debacle distracted Mr. Bush from confronting a danger to the American people far more menacing than Saddam Hussein ever was? Probably. And it's certain, as the Harvard report states explicitly, that the world's nuclear messes could be cleaned up in no time at all if the administration devoted to this combustible situation just one-tenth the resources and attention it has devoted to Iraq. But nuclear controls and nonproliferation lack the personal and ideological appeal of the administration's most urgent obsessions. Which is bad luck for the victims of any future nuclear 9/11.
This year the long-time head of Pakistan's nuclear program admitted that he had sold equipment used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons to Iran, Libya and North Korea. This was also the year when Senator Joseph Biden asked leaders of this country's nuclear programs if they could build a nuclear weapon with parts obtained on the open market. They said they could and a few months later showed up in a secret Senate room with an atomic bomb. All it lacked was fissile material.
Mr. Biden and his scientists are among those who consider Mr. Bush's attention to the on-the-ground nuclear threat to the United States -- as opposed to an imagined from-the-skies threat -- disastrously inadequate. Last week, John Kerry announced that his top national security priority as president would be greatly accelerating the timetable for securing the world's nuclear weapons and materials. He understands that the United States is in a race against time.
-------- britain
MoD to speed up nuclear convoys
Anti-terror plan could increase threat of disaster, activists warn
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
06 June 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/42399
The nuclear bomb convoys that regularly trundle along roads to and from the Trident submarine base on the Clyde are to be speeded up following a secret review of security.
Fears that terrorists could attack the bomb convoys and spread plutonium over a wide area have prompted the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to rethink timing and routes. The MoD police have had to launch an "urgent" shake-up to introduce the new arrangements within the next six months.
Some anti-nuclear cam paign ers say the new system, known internally by the MoD as "continuous running", will increase the risk of an accident. But others acknowledge that it may marginally reduce the danger of a terrorist attack.
In the past, nuclear warheads have been moved between the bomb factories at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire and the Royal Naval Armament Depot at Coulport, on Loch Long, up to six times a year. The journey by road usually took three days . But now there are plans to speed up and vary the journey to make it less predictable. In a trial run at the end of last year the convoy made the journey in two days .
The convoys have frequently been tracked by protesters, who sometimes try to interrupt their progress. The most recent convoy, a month ago, was halted in Stirling when demonstrators blocked the road. The next, whenever it comes, is being threatened with a bigger pro test.
The changes emerged from minutes of a meeting of the MoD Police and Guarding Agency on 19 April 2004, made available by the MoD under freedom of information laws.
One item discussed was the impact the project will have on the Special Escort Group, the police division responsible for guarding the bomb convoys. The meeting agreed that the arrangements to achieve continuous running would be in place by November 2004.
It was minuted that "this was a top-priority issue for the agency and that, through no fault of the agency, severe time constraints had been imposed and ... the agency would have to take urgent measures to ensure it was achieved".
On Friday, the MoD declined to comment on what its police force was doing, or on the convoys' detailed movements. But a spokesman did confirm there had been an inter-agency review to consider varying the routing and timing of nuclear convoys . He described the suggestion that the journey would be cut from three to two days as "speculation".
Nuclear bombs need regular maintenance because the tritium that triggers them decays and becomes unreliable. So the warheads are removed from Trident submarines, stored at Coulport, and taken south for refurbishment.
The warheads are carried in a strengthened vehicle known as a Truck Cargo Heavy Duty. It is normally accompanied by a fire tender, several support vehicles and motorcycle outriders. The convoy is crewed by up to 50 people, some of them armed.
According to MoD guidance to local authorities, the warheads contain plutonium and uranium, which are both toxic and radioactive. "In the very unlikely event of a nuclear weapon accident involving the release of radioactive material, it is the release of plutonium into the environment which presents the dominant radiation hazard," the MoD warns.
Nukewatch, the organisation which co-ordinates convoy monitoring and protest, argues that speeding up the journey could cause breakdowns and accidents. In May 1993, one of the bomb carriers broke down near Glasgow and had to be repaired in a lay-by.
According to Juliet McBride from Nukewatch, on 7 December 2003 a convoy was returning to Burghfield along a back road in the dark . Oncom ing traffic, including her van, was neither stopped nor warned .
After parking her van across the road to stop the convoy she was charged with careless driving. "I have never [before] seen vehicles allowed to approach the convoy head-on on this road," she said.
"By attempting to move such a dangerous cargo this huge distance in a continuous run the MoD is cutting out all margins of error in an operation which has been shown to be full of errors."
Nuclear consultant John Large intends to give evidence in court in defence of McBride, who has been monitoring convoys for 15 years. He will say the convoys are inadequately protected and, if attacked, could cause plutonium contamination up to nine miles away.
The changes might nevertheless remove some risk, he told the Sunday Herald. "It must be a response to a terrorist threat," he said. "The convoys have been so easy to spot and so routine."
Jane Tallents, vice-chair of Scottish CND, agreed the chan ges might make a marginal difference to safety. "But by far the safest thing to do would be to take all the bombs back to Burghfield, dismantle them and stop transporting them around the country for good," she said.
-------- depleted uranium
Uranium round believed found on Cape base
Army officials say munition no threat
By Associated Press
June 6, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2004/06/06/uranium_round_believed_found_on_cape_base/
SANDWICH -- Army contractors uncovered what they believe is a depleted uranium round at the Cape Edwards military base last week.
The round is to be shipped to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland for further analysis, the Cape Cod Times reported.
Army officials have long said depleted uranium was never fired on Camp Edwards. But some Upper Cape base activists said the military did not always monitor defense contractors who improved and developed weapons.
Military and environmental officials were perplexed by the discovery of the round.
"It's important to inform us and the public about how it got there, when it was used, and for what purpose," Jim Murphy, Environmental Protection Agency spokesman, said Friday.
Depleted uranium is toxic and radioactive, but the Pentagon considers it a valuable weapon because it can pierce tank armor.
The 20 millimeter round was found during excavation as part of the Camp Edwards cleanup. The 2 1/2-inch round was discovered about a foot deep in the soil of a possible burn pit.
Army officials said the round is not a danger to public health and is not explosive.
Investigators concluded it was a depleted uranium round after testing it with a machine that measures radioactivity, said groundwater program manager Kent "Hap" Gonser. "They found it was giving off very low levels of radioactivity," he said.
James Kinney of Sandwich, a member of the citizen panel that monitors the Camp Edwards cleanup, said if the Army determines the round contains depleted uranium it will stoke concerns that depleted uranium was fired at the base.
"I don't think anyone just happened to have one depleted uranium round out there that fell out of their pocket," Kinney said.
-------- europe
Europe's big three to push for cooperation with Iran over nuclear program
VIENNA (AFP)
Jun 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040606175908.tu7t8m6l.html
Europe's big three -- Britain, France and Germany -- are not ready to break off cooperation with Iran in uncovering its nuclear secrets despite damning new revelations from the UN nuclear watchdog, diplomats said over the weekend.
The Euro-3 told a meeting of European Union states in Vienna Friday that would present a draft resolution when the International Atomic Energy Agency meets in the Austrian capital on June 14 urging Iran to answer all the IAEA's remaining questions about alleged weapons-related activities, according to diplomats.
The resolution "will be quite factual and reflect the IAEA report (on Iran's nuclear program) but not pass judgement on Iran," a Western diplomat who asked not to be named said.
The United States accuses Iran of hiding a program to develop nuclear weapons but is not expected to push for a tough resolution.
Washington has called for the IAEA, which has been investigating the Iranian program since February 2003, to refer the Islamic Republic to the UN Security Council for possible international sanctions.
But Washington does not have support at the IAEA for its hardline stance and is also hampered by the situation in Iraq, where it needs Iran's backing to not further inflame the Shiite population.
Washington accused Iran last week of continuing to hide clandestine nuclear activities, after an IAEA report said agency inspectors had found more traces in Iran of highly enriched uranium that could be bomb-grade.
This cast serious doubt on Iran's claim that the contamination came from imported equipment rather than uranium it had introduced or tried to make.
Iran insisted Sunday it had given a complete explanation of the contamination and urged the IAEA to focus its search on a "third country," apparently a reference to Pakistan.
The IAEA also reported that Iran, which says 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 manufactured the parts domestically.
Highly-enriched uranium is made by centrifuges and can be fuel for nuclear reactors or the explosive in an atom bomb.
US ambassador to the IAEA Kenneth Brill 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."
"Even a disinterested observer must now ask, what is it that the Iranians are so intent on hiding," Brill said.
The EU-3 had in October 2003 struck an agreement with Iran to work with the IAEA, including building confidence with a voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment. The Europeans are still holding to this line despite Iran's failure to halt all enrichment-related activities and failure to fully disclose its nuclear program.
The Western diplomat said the EU-3 had told their European colleagues on Friday that "maybe there are some worrisome things in the IAEA report. It is clear the Iranian file can not be closed.
"But a new resolution should be designed to move things along, rather than to condemn Iran," the diplomat said.
A tough US-inspired IAEA resolution in March on Iran's omitting to report its work into P-2 centrigues had led Iran to delay crucial agency investigations, a delay that makes it difficult for the IAEA to draw conclusions this June.
Diplomats said the EU-3 would avoid harsh wording for the meeting by IAEA's 35-nation board of governors.
"I don't think they will use strong language. There will be some measure of pressure but also encouragement to cooperate," another Western diplomat said.
"The resolution will be asking Iran to be more pro-active in cooperation," the diplomat said.
The United States clearly expects more revelations to come forth of Iran hiding weapons development, diplomats said.
This could mean that the showdown over Iran at the IAEA may only be on hold until after the US presidential election in November, they added.
----
EU 'Big 3' Draft Nuclear Resolution on Iran
By REUTERS
June 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html?pagewanted=print&position=
VIENNA (Reuters) - France, Britain and Germany are drafting a U.N. nuclear resolution on Iran that could set them on course for a confrontation with Tehran at an International Atomic Energy Agency board meeting next week, diplomats said.
The IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, issued a report last week praising Iran for granting U.N. inspectors access to sites, but said it has continued to change its story about imports of nuclear technology that could be used to develop atomic weapons.
``The three Europeans'...draft resolution is going to say that there are areas where Iran has been cooperating with the agency and areas where they haven't been cooperating,'' a Western diplomat on the IAEA's board of governors told Reuters.
``It will also tell them (the Iranians) to cooperate more,'' the diplomat said, adding that the point of the resolution will be to keep the inspection process going.
Iran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful, wants to be off the IAEA board's agenda as a special item, but diplomats on the board said the resolution would likely keep Tehran on the agenda for some time.
Iran said Sunday it had done everything necessary to clear up concerns about the program, which the United States said could be used to make atomic bombs.
``Iran has answered all ambiguities on its nuclear activities and there is nothing left on the table,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a weekly news conference.
IAEA HOPES TO WIND UP PROBE
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday the agency hoped to it could wind up its probe into Iran's nuclear program within the next few months.
I would hope it's a matter of months that we should be able to bring these issues to closure,'' he said at a symposium in the eastern French town of Talloires.
ElBaradei said he also hoped a second dossier Tehran has provided -- after its first report was found to be incomplete -- was now the full picture of the nuclear program. The United Nations has been investigating Iran since an exiled Iranian opposition group reported in August 2002 that Tehran was hiding a massive uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and other sites from U.N. inspectors.
The IAEA's new Iran report and the draft resolution prepared by the European Union's ``big three'' will be the main topics of discussion at a meeting of the IAEA's 35-nation board that begins on June 14.
The Europeans have been working with Iran since last year to get them to end their uranium enrichment program in exchange for peaceful nuclear technology. The Iranians agreed to suspend enrichment activities but, to the annoyance of the Europeans, have yet to fully put the program into abeyance.
The United States, which said the latest IAEA report contained further evidence that Iran is trying to cover up a nuclear weapons program, will push the Europeans to include sharp language that describes the difficulties the agency had getting access to military sites in the Islamic republic.
Diplomats said Washington would likely delay until after the November presidential election any attempt to push the IAEA to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions because of Tehran's two-decade cover-up of a uranium enrichment program capable of making material for weapons.
Iran, which says its program is devoted to the peaceful generation of electricity, said that the IAEA's outstanding questions were ``minor'' and has challenged the United States to come up with hard evidence that it is working on an atom bomb.
ElBaradei, the author of the report, said last week it would be premature to say now that it was clear Iran's program was not peaceful in nature.
ElBaradei's report appeared to contain ammunition for hard-liners who want to criticize Iran and those who would like to praise them to keep the IAEA inspection process going and avoid an international crisis if Iran pulled out of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The report praised Iran for ``providing access to locations in response to agency requests, including workshops situated at military sites.''
But it also said inspections were ``delayed in some cases'' due to discussion of terms of access to defense industry sites.
Diplomats close to the IAEA said it took several months to reach an agreement with Tehran on the terms for inspecting a small group of military sites in Iran. One Western diplomat on the board said Iran may have wanted the delays to sanitize sites ahead of inspections.
-------- india / pakistan
U.S. Indifferent, Experts Anxious Over Pakistan Tests
By REUTERS
June 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-pakistan-missile-usa.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States reacted with indifference after Pakistan conducted its second ballistic missile test in less than a week last Friday, but experts see new evidence of an ominous trend.
An inexorable arms race in South Asia is proceeding while President Bush -- focused on re-election, Iraq and the war on terrorism -- is unable or unwilling to grapple with it in a significant or effective way, they say.
``I think the United States is distracted by other issues ... They have crisis overload,'' said Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution, author of books on Pakistan and India.
Lee Feinstein, a former Clinton administration official, said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a key ally in Bush's war on terrorism, probably believes correctly that he can test-fire missiles without risking U.S. pressure.
``In general the administration has been unsuccessful or unwilling to apply pressure on Pakistan with respect to its nuclear program and the missile test ... is another indication of our lack of influence or unwillingness to use it,'' said Feinstein, now with the Council on Foreign Relations.
But he warned that the last few times India-Pakistan tensions erupted over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir, ``the risks increased when there has been inattention by the Americans.''
On May 29, Pakistan test fired a Ghauri missile capable of carrying nuclear and other warheads up to 900 miles. Six days later, the same missile was tested again.
The United States had nothing official to say and unofficially, officials were nonchalant.
The test was ``nothing particular ... There have been a whole series of tests by Pakistan and India ... These things go off every three or four months,'' one official told Reuters.
NUCLEAR FEARS
Many experts believe if a nuclear weapon is fired in anger, it will result from an India-Pakistan conflict.
The two countries stunned the world when they tested nuclear weapons in 1998.
They fought three wars after independence from Britain in 1947 and nearly did again in 2002 when New Delhi blamed Pakistan-based militants for a bloody attack on its parliament.
New details about Pakistan's capabilities came to light after Abdul Qadeer Khan, the country's nuclear progenitor, was arrested for running a nuclear blackmarket that sold to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Musharraf later pardoned Khan.
Western diplomats have said Khan could not have acted independently and appeared to be a scapegoat for the army, which Musharraf heads.
Pakistan's recent missile tests came just after a new Indian government took office and as the two countries prepare for talks this month on reducing the risks from their nuclear rivalry, part of a peace process relaunched last year.
Musharraf suggested the tests had more to do with his domestic critics than sending a pre-talks message to India.
Cohen said Pakistan's program is driven by ``technological logic'' with scientists largely dictating the testing schedule.
But the tests are also a signal that ``my country cannot be treated lightly,'' Cohen said.
Ahead of the talks, the tests ``could be Pakistan's way of emphasizing they are ahead in the arms race in South Asia and the Indians are behind,'' he added.
Feinstein said Musharraf was showing hard-liners at home he will not be outflanked on security and was also trying to create ``negotiating space'' ahead of the talks.
``In some sense you've got two leaders whose nationalist credentials are challenged at home and in that sense they are both weak going into these talks,'' Feinstein said.
The talks were initiated when the Bharatiya Janata Party governed India but it was ousted in recent elections. Pakistan views India's new government as weak, and it lacks officials with significant security experience, Cohen said.
``I think the Pakistanis believe they have strongly supported us in the war on terror and if the Indians are not forthcoming in terms of concessions on Kashmir, the talks will run down pretty quickly. That sets the stage for another crisis in fall or winter,'' he predicted.
----
India, Pakistan Pledge to Carry on Peace Process
By REUTERS
June 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-india-pakistan.html?pagewanted=print&position=
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The foreign ministers of India and Pakistan spoke by telephone Sunday and vowed to carry on their peace process, an Indian Foreign Ministry official said.
Indian External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh told his Pakistani counterpart Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri that contacts between the neighbors would be intensified and ``both sides had vested interests in promoting good bilateral relations.''
It was the second telephone conversation between the two in the past three days. After their last call Thursday, the nuclear-armed rivals, who came to the brink of war in 2002, agreed to keep in close touch and avoid publicizing differences ahead of peace talks this month.
That telephone call appeared to be aimed at putting to rest a public row that had erupted between the two ministers on how to proceed on the tentative peace process.
The official quoted Singh as saying ``we hold the Pakistani leadership in the highest esteem'' and ``the future of Indo-Pak relations does not lie in the past.''
Pakistani and Indian officials are due to meet in Delhi on June 19 and 20 to discuss ways to improve nuclear security and then on June 27 and 28 on other issues, including their bitter dispute over the divided Kashmir region.
There was a fresh surge of violence in Indian Kashmir where at least 14 people, including eight rebels, were killed in one explosion and a string of gun battles between soldiers and militants, police said.
Officials say more than 40,000 people have been killed since an armed rebellion broke out in 1989 in Muslim-majority Kashmir. Separatists put the toll at more than 90,000.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars -- two over Kashmir -- since independence from Britain in 1947 and went to the brink of a fourth in 2002, when New Delhi blamed Pakistan-based militants for a bloody attack on its parliament.
But ties have warmed since last year and both countries have pledged to carry forward the tentative peace process despite a change of government in India last month.
-------- iran
Iran tells UN nuclear watchdog to look elsewhere for enriched uranium source
TEHRAN (AFP)
Jun 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040606100205.5cxjmjxz.html
Iran insisted Sunday it had given a complete explanation of the discovery of highly enriched uranium by UN inspectors here, and urged the UN nuclear watchdog to focus its search on a "third country".
"We have nothing more to add. This contamination came on imported equipment, so it is the third party or third country that should cooperate with the IAEA," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.
A report by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agencyreleased on Tuesday said agency inspectors had found more traces in Iran of highly enriched uranium that could be bomb-grade.
But Iran has consistently contended that such traces came into the country on equipment bought on an international black market originating in Pakistan.
The IAEA is pressing Pakistan to allow its inspectors access to verify Iran's insistence that the traces -- of uranium enriched to a level beyond that needed for civilian purposes -- were not from domestic enrichment activity.
But so far there is no sign that Iran's neighbour, which is not a signatory of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), will agree to a probe of its top-secret nuclear sites.
Neither Iran nor the IAEA have openly named Pakistan, but ElBaradei said in his report that despite the information received from Tehran and discussions with a third country, his agency was still not in a position to reach a conclusion.
The source of the contamination -- discovered by IAEA inspectors at three sites in Iran -- is one of the main outstanding issues the IAEA has with Iran, which denies US allegations it has a covert nuclear weapons programme.
But Asefi also accused IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei of "nit picking" in his latest report on Iran, released ahead of a June 14 meeting of the Vienna-based body's executive.
"This report has nothing new to say. It is a repetition of previous issues, but written in a different way," Asefi said, before complaining that the report had generated yet more suspicions.
"Rather than referring to our non-cooperation, the report is just nit-picking," he said, insisting ElBaradei's findings "show there is no evidence for keeping the file open."
The IAEA report also said Iran had admitted to importing parts for sophisticated P-2 centrifuges for enriching uranium, going back on claims that it had manufactured the parts domestically.
Washington has called on the IAEA, which has been investigating the Iranian programme since February 2003, to refer the Islamic republic to the UN Security Council for possible international sanctions.
----
Iran Says It Has Removed All Nuclear Concerns
By REUTERS
June 6, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-nuclear.html?pagewanted=print&position=
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran has done everything necessary to clear up outstanding concerns about its nuclear program, which Washington says could be used to make atomic bombs, a top Foreign Ministry official said Sunday.
``Iran has answered all ambiguities on its nuclear activities and there is nothing left on the table,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told a weekly news conference.
Asefi's comments came a few days after Tehran challenged the United States to produce hard evidence Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb. Washington said there is proof enough in a new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report.
The IAEA, in a report issued last week, said the origin of enriched uranium traces found in Iran's sites and the issue of advanced P2 enrichment centrifuges must be resolved before the agency can verify Tehran's atomic aims.
Iran insists its nuclear program is geared solely to the peaceful generation of electricity.
It says the traces of enriched uranium were caused by contamination from components bought from black market suppliers. Tehran also argues its work on P2 centrifuges -- which could be used to make bomb-grade fuel -- has not gone further than preliminary research.
Under intense international pressure following revelations Tehran had engaged in an 18-year cover-up of sensitive nuclear research, Iran last month submitted what it says is a full declaration of its past nuclear activities.
``On the contamination, we do not have anything new to say,'' Asefi said. ``On the P2, ... after the second report that we handed in we have nothing more to say.''
The IAEA's 35-member Board of Governors will meet on June 14 to discuss Iran's nuclear case.
Asefi was optimistic about the result of the June meeting.
``We are confident the ill-wishers will not achieve what they want,'' he said in a clear reference to Washington which has called for Iran to be reported to the U.N. Security Council.
He renewed Iran's call for its nuclear case to be removed from the U.N. nuclear watchdog's agenda afterwards.
``If the case remains open, it is because of the agency's laziness...and its unfounded fussiness,'' he said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
Nuclear Power Plant in New York Prepares to Drill for Terror Attack
June 6, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/nyregion/06indianpoint.html
WASHINGTON, June 5 - For two decades, the emergency drills at the Indian Point nuclear reactors have been meant to show federal regulators how plant operators and local public safety officials would cope with a radiation release that began with a pipe break or a pump failure. But the exercise planned for Tuesday has a different script and a different audience.
The hypothetical crisis that will be the subject of the drill is a terrorist attack. And this time, the targets of persuasion are not only the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but also the local governments and the public. The maneuvering and arguments began last month, and include efforts by plant opponents to contend that no plan could be adequate.
The terrorism scenario is a first for an emergency drill at Indian Point, the nuclear plant closest to ground zero and the nexus of much anxiety since the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the differences in this exercise is the participation of the F.B.I., said a spokesman for Entergy, which owns Indian Point, in Westchester County.
But the radiation releases that game planners are sure to throw into the script are not new, said an under secretary of homeland security, Michael D. Brown, and the issues of emergency planning at the plant, in Buchanan, about 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, are no different from those anywhere else. ''The fundamentals are exactly the same,'' he said in a telephone interview on Friday, during which he expressed confidence in the emergency preparations.
A spokesman for Entergy, Larry Gottlieb, made a related argument. "It doesn't matter how the event starts; you have to deal with the emergency planning piece of it," he said.
Last Wednesday the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission made similar points when he came to Capitol Hill to meet for 90 minutes with three members of Congress from Westchester, in an effort to persuade them that the drill would be a real test for plant officials, with no warning of what to expect, and that Indian Point can withstand various kinds of attacks. The previous week, he met with county officials in New York.
The chairman, Nils J. Diaz, may not have been successful in his meeting with the members of Congress, but he may have won some points for trying. "Chairman Diaz is to be commended for keeping members of Congress in the loop, but that alone doesn't make Indian Point any safer," said Representative Nita M. Lowey, a Westchester Democrat, in a statement. She has introduced legislation that makes local government approval of emergency plans a condition of operation.
Representative Eliot L. Engel, another Democrat who attended, said that he still has strong doubts about emergency preparedness, but that ''at least we had a frank discussion, and a chance to give our views."
While Mr. Diaz was meeting with the members of Congress, in White Plains the critics of the Indian Point nuclear plant, including members of the environmental group Riverkeeper and the Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition, were holding a news conference to complain that authorities and Entergy were not prepared for a catastrophic release of radiation. They said they feared that Tuesday's drill would be too narrow in scope. Opponents have been arguing that the drill is mired in the old concept of accident, not the new reality of terrorism.
They said hospitals would have trouble decontaminating large numbers of people, schools were not prepared to evacuate children safely and keep track of them, and widespread panic would clog roadways with people ignoring orders to "shelter in place" at their homes or workplaces.
"Common sense underlies many of our concerns," said Kyle Rabin, policy analyst at Riverkeeper. "Three years after 9/11, the Indian Point plan remains unworkable."
But Mr. Gottlieb of Entergy said that the plan was always workable and is improving. For example, he said, in this year's drill, officials deciding whether and where to order evacuations will use a new computer program with a much more refined picture of how long it takes to move people. The program, which incorporates weather and other data, estimates an evacuation time of roughly double what was previously assumed.
The activities of most participants will, in fact, be similar to those in prior years. About 1,000 people, including plant personnel, local public officials, public safety workers and test evaluators, will handle tasks like watching the weather and calculating the spread of a hypothetical plume of radioactive material, calculating doses, and testing the ability to take radiation readings in the field, to erect traffic barriers and to coordinate with one another.
The maneuvering before the drill involves a plant for which, alone among the sites where nuclear power is generated, the federal government has ruled that there is "reasonable assurance" of adequate emergency preparedness without the concurrence of local government. Agreeing with antinuclear activists, the county executives for Westchester and for Rockland, Orange and Putnam Counties, which all have sections inside the 10-mile Emergency Planning Zone, refused to sign off on their parts of the plan.
But, Mr. Brown, the homeland security under secretary, said, "There is this technicality that we need their signature." The Federal Emergency Management Agency, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, is well acquainted with local capabilities, he said, adding, ''we don't need these technical things to know whether there is reasonable assurance or not."
Randal C. Archibold, in White Plains, N.Y., contributed reporting for this article.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Where Guns Rule, Disarmament Falls Short
An effort by the United Nations to demilitarize Afghanistan is called a failure. Warlords continue to hold power in much of the country.
By Hamida Ghafour
The Los Angeles Times
June 6, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/latimes179.htm
KABUL, Afghanistan - Taj Mohammed picked up a gun when he was 18 and fought the Soviets, and then the Taliban, in the Panjshir Valley, the heart of the Afghan resistance against occupiers. After two decades of serving his homeland, the longtime commander is among 100,000 fighters who have been told to hand over their weapons and return to civilian life, as part of a $370-million United Nations plan to disarm Afghanistan.
But the plan, the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration program, which began last fall, has been floundering.
Afghanistan's top warlords have been reluctant to cooperate, and the mujahedin fighters have felt betrayed, jeopardizing the chances of bringing security to the nation before a general election planned for September.
"It's a big failure," said Andrew Wilder, head of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a think tank in Kabul. "We have no hope of rebuilding Afghanistan when the rule of gun is outside Kabul."
Referring to the U.S.-led war that toppled the Taliban regime, Wilder said: "In the first six months after November 2001, the warlords wouldn't have thumbed their noses. But now they know the United States has problems in Iraq and feel they don't have to listen."
By this month, about 40,000 men loyal to rival militias were to have been disarmed, with the rest turning in their guns over the next three years.
So far, only about 6,000 have responded. The most powerful warlords in the country, such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, Atta Mohammed and Ismail Khan, have been reluctant to surrender their weapons and their men because they would lose power.
Unusual concessions have been offered, including one by the Japanese Embassy, the biggest funder of the program, to send military units overseas for business training.
The disarmament program calls for the United Nations to verify lists of soldiers provided by regional commanders.
Originally, the soldiers were to hand over a functioning weapon, usually a Kalashnikov, in exchange for $200 and a bag of food. The money and food were meant to tide them over while they looked for work, such as ditch-digging or demining, or were taught skills such as farming or shopkeeping.
But the program has been a case of trying to implement a 21st century idea within a feudal society.
Commanders in towns and villages in Afghanistan provide weapons, food and wives to residents in exchange for allegiance, much the way society operated in medieval Europe.
The aim of the program has been to free soldiers from their dependency on local commanders in particular, and military life in general, thus breaking the power the warlords have on communities.
But hundreds of fighters complained to the United Nations that the commanders would release them from service but would take their $200. The world body recently discontinued the payments.
"The U.N. panicked, then canceled the $200 clause," said Noel Cossins, an advisor to the Disarmament and Reintegration Commission, funded by the U.N. to handle the reintegration of fighters into civilian life. "Now the big commanders are saying, 'See? You can't trust the U.N.' "
The other problem, Cossins said, was that the United States was unwilling to take on the warlords.
U.S. officials "are obsessed with the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban and are prepared to use any resource to that end," Cossins said.
"The people who are being called warlords are the ones armed by the Americans to take on the Taliban," he said. "We are getting rid of a bunch of military people who are ill-disciplined and replacing them with another."
It has also been hard to find jobs for soldiers who, for the most part, are illiterate, have little experience other than fighting and yet are seen as too undisciplined to serve in the new Afghan national army. About 200 soldiers loyal to Taj Mohammed have been disarmed, and he has surrendered about 50 heavy weapons. But he has been reluctant to hand over any more lists of fighters because there has been no clear sense of what they would do in civilian life.
"The mujahedin who were disarmed last year have not been given professions," he said. "They have been walking around without anything to do. When my soldiers leave, there should be the possibility of jobs in the private sector, or the Afghan police or army. They haven't offered us an alternative."
In some cases, the warlords and their fighters have been responsible for the increase in crime in cities. Illegal drugs account for nearly half the nation's gross domestic product, and poppy crops are expected to reach record levels this year.
Jean Arnault, the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, said recently that the militias that were to be disbanded had not been helping to protect the country.
That job has been performed by international peacekeepers and the Afghan national army. The militias have been involved "neither in combating terrorism nor in fighting organized crime or drug trafficking," Arnault said. "Quite the contrary, many of them have been, in the past two years, involved in factional fighting, which is a continuing cause of instability and of suffering for the communities affected by it."
In Kabul, where about 6,500 foreign soldiers under the command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization patrol the streets day and night, many residents fear that the city will fall under the control of rogue commanders. Warlords virtually destroyed Kabul in the 1990s as they tried to control the capital.
"If NATO left tomorrow, the city would collapse into civil war within 24 hours. People are afraid of the commanders," said Weed, a political activist who campaigns for women's rights and preferred to be identified only by her first name.
Parents in Kabul are afraid to send their children to school because child-trafficking is increasing. In the last five months of 2003, the U.N. Human Rights Commission received 300 complaints of kidnapping. One Kabul resident, whose two cousins, girls ages 4 and 8, were kidnapped in May as they walked to school with their mother, said a warlord living north of the capital had demanded $10,000 for their release.
"The police are too scared because the commander is too powerful," said the resident, who requested anonymity. "How many people in this country have that kind of money?"
Warlord Taj Mohammed said that he supported the disarmament project but that the uncertainty of Afghanistan's future gave him pause.
"If mujahedin [are] disarmed in the south and Taliban came again, who will be there to stand against them?" he asked. "Who can say the United States will stay for a long time? Tomorrow they can say that Afghanistan is a free country and leave.
"The present government in Afghanistan is a result of the hard work of mujahedin in the last 24 years," he said. "They are here because of our hard work. God forbid if this country goes toward instability, because it would fall to the mujahedin to save it again."
-------- africa
US navy to launch 'show of force' off oil-rich west Africa
LAGOS (AFP)
Jun 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040604140326.25ziagdr.html
A US navy carrier battlegroup is to launch a "show of force" in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea off west Africa as part of an unprecedented global operation to demonstrate America's command of the high seas, a US diplomatic source told AFP on Friday.
The foray by a heavily armed battlegroup into the waters off Nigeria, Sao Tome, Equatorial Guinea and other African oil producers, comes at a time when fuel prices are topping the US political agenda and security crises in the Gulf region are pushing demands for greater diversification in energy supplies.
The Abuja-based diplomat told AFP, on condition of anonymity, that the Gulf of Guinea was "a place where there is not normally an American presence" and described the operation as "a show of force."
"Operation Summer Pulse '04 aims to demonstrate the capabilities of the US navy; before we only had two or three operations involving aircraft carriers at any one time," he said, adding that now seven carrier groups are to be deployed in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Mediterranean and the Gulf of Guinea.
"The navy wants, through this exercise, to demonstrate to the world that even with all its current responsibilities, it can still position half-a-dozen aircraft carriers withh all the neccessary support ships in the four corners of the world at the same time," he said.
In Washington, a statement on the Pentagon website, said: "Beginning this week and continuing through August, the Navy will exercise the full range of skills involved in simultaneously deploying and employing carrier strike groups around the world.
"Summer Pulse '04 will include scheduled deployments, surge operations, joint and international exercises, and other advanced training and port visits," it added, although the Nigerian military told AFP it had no knowledge of any upcoming joint programmes in the Gulf of Guinea.
The US diplomatic source said that future joint exercises were under consideration, but that the planned visit of a US navy admiral had been postponed until "August or September".
--------
African Leaders Urge Elections in Burundi
June 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/international/africa/06buru.html
DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania, June 5 (Reuters) - Leaders from seven African nations said Saturday that Burundi must hold elections by the end of October as called for under a 2000 peace accord aimed at ending a decade of civil war.
After a daylong meeting in Tanzania, the leaders also said they would restrict the movement of the Forces for National Liberation, the rebel group that is the only Hutu force still fighting the Burundi government.
Burundi is struggling to emerge from a decade of conflict between its politically dominant Tutsi minority and rebels from the Hutu majority. The fighting has killed 300,000 people and paralyzed the economy.
The peace accord reached in the Tanzanian town of Arusha called for a transitional government in which Tutsi and Hutu would share power, culminating in elections.
President Domitien Ndayizeye of Burundi said his government was committed to holding elections by October, although he said last month that they might be postponed because some rebels had not disarmed.
The summit meeting was attended by the presidents of Tanzania, South Africa, Zambia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Uganda and Burundi.
-------- asia
THE DEFENSE SECRETARY
No Progress in Raising Troops By Rumsfeld in Bangladesh
June 6, 2004
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/international/asia/06RUMS.html
DHAKA, Bangladesh, June 5 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld met Saturday with top officials of Bangladesh, which currently has more peacekeepers around the world than any other nation, but he reported no progress in finding new troops for Iraq or Afghanistan.
"I think countries ought to do that which they are comfortable doing," Mr. Rumsfeld said, after meeting with the foreign minister, Morshad Khan.
American and Bangladeshi officials said the issue was not raised in their talks, which were hastily arranged at the request of Mr. Rumsfeld, who attended a conference on Asian security in Singapore on Saturday. But a senior defense official said the Pentagon had made clear that it would welcome forces from this predominantly Muslim nation, which has said it would be willing to contribute troops only under United Nations auspices. "We have always worked under a blue helmet," said Mr. Khan, referring to the uniform for United Nations forces.
A third draft of a Security Council resolution is circulating among members, and administration officials said they hoped it would satisfy the Bangladeshis.
Troops from Bangladesh could add a moderate Muslim cast to the forces seeking to stabilize Iraq, administration officials say. Most Bangladeshis practice a tolerant, mystical form of Islam that is compatible with a secular government.
Bangladesh sends peacekeepers partly to bolster its international standing. With nearly 5,000 deployed around the world, it is a well-regarded source of troops, and is skilled in police training and mine removal.
The United Nations compensates countries for peacekeepers, and Bangladesh uses the funds for army morale-building and family support.
Earlier on Saturday, at the conference on Asian security, Mr. Rumsfeld told defense officials and experts gathered by the International Institute for Strategic Studies that the United States and its allies - for all their firepower and intelligence techniques - did not have an effective strategy to crush terrorism at its source.
Mr. Rumsfeld said the American-led campaign must extend beyond arrests and warfare to a political effort that stems the development of recruits in the Muslim world.
"If the schools that are teaching young folks are teaching them terror" instead of mathematics, Mr. Rumsfeld said, the supply of militants will never end. "We do not have a coherent approach to this," he said.
While countries like Pakistan have pledged to increase public education to counter the zealotry taught in some religious schools, few governments have focused on the problem, Mr. Rumsfeld said.
The administration's own public diplomacy efforts have been hampered by scant resources, the resignations of high-level officials and a failure to engage ordinary Muslims in the battle over ideas, critics say.
In a question-and-answer session, Mr. Rumsfeld brushed aside most Southeast Asian security concerns to focus on the war in Iraq. Participants in the conference privately expressed views ranging from misgivings to satisfaction at the American difficulties in the Middle East.
Officials from Singapore, one of America's closest allies in the region, expressed strong support for the United States presence in Iraq, and Cambodia's defense minister, Sisowath Sirirath, somberly recalled the massacres in his homeland under the Pol Pot government in the 1970's after the United States withdrew from Vietnam.
"I think you should continue to be in Iraq until Iraq is stable," he said.
Officials and experts from other nations were more plainly skeptical of the United States, with some wondering whether the Bush administration is pursuing a unilateralist campaign that is cloaked in the rhetoric of cooperation. One participant asked Mr. Rumsfeld if he was managing a "coalition of the reluctant."
Mr. Rumsfeld insisted that the Bush administration was fully aware that no single nation could effectively combat terrorism on its own. He noted that there were currently 33 nations active in Iraq and 26 in Afghanistan. And he defended American-led coalitions, like the one now drawing its mission in Haiti to a close, as a swift solution when the bureaucratic wheels of the United Nations and other international organizations turned too slowly.
-------- europe
Dutch want EU to return power to nation states
June 06, 2004
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040606-120736-3651r.htm
BRUSSELS - The Dutch government has called for a major return of powers from the European Union to the nation states, saying that European integration has gone too far and lacks popular consent. It said it was time to consider taking back control of health, culture, social policy, aid to poor regions and the subsidy regime of the Common Agricultural Policy.
Foreign Minister Bernard Bot laid out the new Dutch-first aims in a Berlin speech on Wednesday night. The next day, the Dutch press compared the proposal to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Bruges speech in 1988. The proposal marks a dramatic departure for a founding member of the European Union that once could be counted on to support every push for closer union.
Though Mr. Bot endorsed the overall idea of European federalism, he put forward a list of concrete national demands that go further than those suggested by Michael Howard, the British Conservative Party leader.
Calling on the European Union to learn self-restraint, he said it was time to stop shoving fresh treaties down the throats of citizens every couple of years.
"We must realize that there are limits to the degree of integration that Europeans can digest," he said. "People must be given a chance to adjust. There is a widespread sense of unease about Europe, about loss of national identity, and about an EU that increasingly intrudes into their everyday lives.
"The European Union is, after all, a union of member states. That is something we should never forget."
He said that "patronizing" Eurocrats were pushing through ludicrous regulations "such as telling window cleaners how to hold ladders." By doing so, they are "creating a culture of tolerance for rule-breaking" by forcing local authorities to defy the law.
Mr. Bot is no firebrand populist. He has been toiling in the EU vineyards for almost 40 years, serving as head of the Dutch delegation in Brussels for a decade before becoming foreign minister for the Christian Democrats - the most pro-European party in the Netherlands.
Answering questions in Berlin, he said it was "ludicrous" that the European Union is deciding how many beds there should be in a hospital room. He said such meddling would stretch the European project to a snapping point.
"Is Europe really the best level at which to regulate landscape gardening?" he asked.
A senior Dutch official said the speech was intended to be a warning to a high-handed elite in Brussels that appears to have lost touch with reality.
"The feeling is that we risk a popular revolt unless the citizens start to feel represented," he said.
Mr. Bot said he supports the new European constitution, believing it makes "the locus of power more visible" in the system and gives EU citizens more say over the institutions. At the same time, the Netherlands has imposed its own red line by threatening to block the treaty this month unless member states retain their veto over the budget.
-------- iraq
Fighters Loyal to Radical Cleric Start Pullout From 2 Iraq Cities
June 6, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS and JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/international/middleeast/06IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 5 - Fighters loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite radical who fashioned an army from the discontented populace of Iraq's slums, began to withdraw Saturday from the centers of Najaf and Kufa where they have caused disturbances since April. At the same time, Mr. Sadr met with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, according to several reports.
Shiite leaders and American officials said the armed followers of Mr. Sadr, known as the Mahdi Army, had cleared out of many parts of Najaf and that they appeared to be making preparations to leave altogether. The Shiite leaders said American forces, who encircled the city in recent weeks, had also cleared out of the city center and areas near the Imam Ali Shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shiite Islam.
The withdrawal, coupled with the apparent meeting of the rival clerics, who are vying for influence in the new Iraq, gave rise to hopes here that the two-month-old rebellion led by Mr. Sadr, and which at one point controlled a half-dozen cities in southern Iraq, might be coming to an end.
"The people of Najaf are walking the streets, the cars are moving on every avenue, the Iraqi police have moved back in," said Adnan Ali, a senior official with the Dawa Party, whose leaders were directly involved in the negotiations. "This is a good step forward."
The meeting, which was reported by the Reuters news agency and Agence France-Presse, suggested that Mr. Sadr was being given a face-saving gesture by appearing with the ayatollah, whose prestige across Iraq far exceeds that of Mr. Sadr.
The agreement struck Friday, and borne out Saturday, came on the heels of a previous accord, struck late last month, in which Mr. Sadr had also agreed to remove his forces from Najaf. That agreement unraveled almost immediately and led to bloody fighting between his forces and the Americans.
As in other cities in southern Iraq, Mr. Sadr's fighters were allowed to walk off with their guns, suggesting there was little to guarantee that they would not rise up again or that the truce would hold.
Still, if it sticks, the new agreement would appear to blunt, at least for now, the attempt by the 31-year-old Mr. Sadr to seize the leadership of Iraq's Shiite majority from its more mainstream leaders, who have largely tolerated the American occupation.
And it would appear to end a dangerous confrontation between Mr. Sadr and the Americans, whose use of armed force so near the holy shrines in Najaf and Karbala alienated Shiites across Iraq, even among those who did not care for Mr. Sadr's radical brand of Shiite Islam.
Scores of Iraqis, including many civilians, were killed, and the Ali Shrine sustained minor damage.
American officials said Saturday that the pullback of Mr. Sadr's forces was an implementation of the deal struck earlier this month. As a condition of the withdrawal, Iraqi officials agreed to suspend the execution of the arrest warrant issued for Mr. Sadr for his suspected role in the murder of a rival cleric last April.
Nor does the agreement require that Mr. Sadr's fighters put down their guns; the fate of Mr. Sadr's militia, like the man himself, has been left for a future date.
The agreement that appeared to take hold on Saturday seemed to reflect the desire of Iraq's mainstream political and religious leaders to rid themselves of Mr. Sadr, evidently fearing that he would threaten their chances at the ballot box when elections are held next year. For the Americans, the agreement appears to reflect a desire to eliminate Mr. Sadr, whose persistence has proved a major embarrassment, as a visible problem before the Americans hand over sovereignty here on June 30.
American officials said Saturday that they were encouraged by the withdrawal of the Mahdi Army. But they acknowledged that Mr. Sadr's fighters were, for the most part, still armed, in Najaf as in the other cities in southern Iraq where they have been allowed to walk away.
Dan Senor, a spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority here, said the American objective regarding Mr. Sadr had not changed, but he deflected questions about how and when the Americans might carry it out. Mr. Sadr, he said, had to yield to the arrest warrant, signed by an Iraqi judge last year, implicating him in the murder of a rival cleric.
"He must disband and disarm his militia, and he must meet the requirements of the Iraqi arrest warrant issued against him," Mr. Senor said. "Moktada al-Sadr must face Iraqi justice."
One Iraqi official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, suggested that Mr. Sadr had grown demoralized in the face of political isolation from other Iraqis and the relentless American military pressure. American commanders claim to have killed hundreds of Mr. Sadr's fighters in the past several weeks.
"There is every indication that the man is in a deplorable state of affairs," said a senior Iraqi official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "He feels very weak. The Mahdi Army has suffered big losses."
The Mahdi Army took control of six southern cities in early April after the Americans closed a newspaper controlled by Mr. Sadr and made public an warrant for his arrest in connection with the murder of a rival cleric. His forces soon withdrew from all but Najaf and Kufa, two of Islam's holiest cities, where the fighters found refuge near shrines that occupation forces were extremely reluctant to damage, fearing widespread outrage among Shiites across the Muslim world.
The meeting also confers an enormous boost in the credibility of Mr. Sadr, who comes from a long line of notable clerics but was considered little more than hot-headed intruder when he began his defiance of the occupation a few months ago.
Mr. Sadr and Ayatollah Sistani are both Shiite clerics, but comparison between them ends there in the minds of most Iraqis. The pronouncements of Ayatollah Sistani have taken on a Delphic significance. Mr. Sadr has little more than the prestige of his family's long line of respected clerics to draw upon. His father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, an ayatollah who dared to criticized Saddam Hussein, was murdered with his two eldest sons by at Mr. Hussein's orders in 1999.
There was no evidence on Saturday that violence across Iraq was any closer to ending than it had been the day before. In Baghdad, two soldiers were killed and two others were wounded when a bomb exploded, and three civilian contractors were killed when their vehicles were attacked on the main road between Baghdad and the airport.
In Mosul, a rocket attack wounded 17 people who were lined up at a recruiting post for the new Iraqi Army, where gunmen also killed the brother of the man widely believed to have betrayed Saddam Hussein's sons to American forces last year.
--------
Clash With Shiites Shifts To Baghdad;
Seven Killed Tenuous Truce Between U.S. and Sadr Forces Holds in Najaf
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18026-2004Jun5?language=printer
BAGHDAD, June 5 -- Shiite Muslim militia fighters and U.S. troops observed a nervous truce in the Najaf area Saturday, but a pair of attacks on civilian contractors took five lives and a roadside bomb killed two U.S. soldiers and injured two more in clashes in and around Baghdad's main Shiite district.
Two heavy four-wheel-drive vehicles came under attack on the road to Baghdad International Airport when several carloads of insurgents pulled up close and fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles. U.S. military officials said four foreign security contractors in the vehicles -- two Americans and two Poles -- were killed in the assault.
A group headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian member of al Qaeda, took responsibility, saying the vehicles were carrying CIA operatives. "After a fierce battle, the mujaheddin burned the cars and those in them," according to a posting on the Web site of his organization, Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad, relayed by the Reuters news service.
Another civilian contractor was killed by an explosive that went off beside a highway as a supply convoy passed near Haditha in the desert 175 miles northwest of Baghdad, U.S. authorities announced. A U.S. soldier was also injured in the blast, they said.
The resurgence of violence in Sadr City, a slum of at least 3 million inhabitants in eastern Baghdad, suggested that the conflict between U.S. forces and fighters loyal to Moqtada Sadr, a militant Shiite cleric, might be shifting back to the capital after two months of confrontation in the southern cities of Najaf and Kufa. Many members of Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, have returned with their weapons from Najaf to their homes in Sadr City in recent days, residents said.
A dull boom shook Baghdad at midmorning when a homemade explosive went off, leaving several U.S. military and Iraqi civilian vehicles in flames. As a fire engine sought to douse the fires, U.S. soldiers swiftly closed off a heavily traveled avenue with Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Humvees, causing a traffic jam that forced Baghdad drivers to cut through vacant lots in search of unclogged side streets.
Hassan Adhari, who runs Sadr's headquarters in Sadr City, said the immediate cause of recent fighting around the slum was an attempt by U.S. forces to set up a base in a police station just down the street from Sadr's office. U.S. armored personnel carriers took up positions outside the station two days ago, he said, and soldiers brought in bulldozers and concrete barriers on Saturday to reinforce their position.
"We won't stand for it," Adhari said. "This is going to result in many clashes between us."
In addition, he complained that U.S. soldiers have been making arrests in the Sadr City homes of Shiite militiamen suspected of attacking occupation troops, responding to gunfire from residents with heavy machine guns and tank cannons that carve a wide swath of destruction in the neighborhood's flimsy buildings.
More broadly, the Mahdi Army has resolved to oppose the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and prevent U.S. forces from carrying out their declared objective of arresting Sadr and turning him over to Iraqi courts on charges he conspired in the murder of a rival cleric, Abdel-Majid Khoei, last spring. Sadr, a young cleric whose father was a revered champion of Iraq's Shiite underclass, has been spending recent weeks in Kufa, where he occasionally leads Friday prayers at the main mosque, and the attempt to take him into custody appears to be on hold.
Daniel Senor, spokesman for the U.S.-run occupation authority, said that despite the easing of tension in Najaf and Kufa, the military continues to regard Sadr's militia as an outlaw force that must be disbanded and disarmed. If acted on by U.S. forces, that stand would likely lead to rough days ahead in Sadr City, where the cleric's followers are well armed.
"Moqtada fighters present in other parts of Iraq and other cities will continue to be regarded as hostile elements if they bear arms," Senor said at a briefing.
Sadr paid a visit Saturday to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric, to discuss security arrangements for the revered Shiite shrines in Najaf and Kufa and, in his words, "for discussions on the Mahdi Army subject." Asked whether Sistani requested a disbanding of the militia as U.S. officials had demanded, Sadr said, "He did not ask me this question."
Mahdi Army gunmen for the most part stayed off the streets in Kufa and Najaf, as provided for in the truce accord renewed Friday. Iraqi police moved back into their headquarters in Kufa. U.S. soldiers continued to occupy the Najaf police station but did not mount any of the patrols that have often ended up in skirmishes in recent weeks. Shops and other businesses reopened in both of the adjoining cities.
"We hope this truce will continue, and we ask the U.S. forces not to enter the city and to stay in their bases," said Abdu-Amir Hussein, 35, who sells car parts in Najaf. "The Mahdi Army should also respect the truce and not violate it. We are peaceful people and do not like wars."
In northern Iraq, a rocket was fired at a line of Iraqis seeking jobs in the new national army being formed by U.S. trainers, wounding 16 potential recruits, Reuters reported from Mosul. It was the second such attack in a month, one of a series mounted against Iraqis seeking to work with occupation authorities or the Iraqi administration it has organized.
In the same city, about 215 miles north of Baghdad, unidentified gunmen killed a brother of the man believed to have informed the U.S. military on where to find the sons of former president Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay, the Associated Press quoted witnesses and hospital officials as saying. Both sons were killed July 22 in a U.S. attack on the house where they were hiding.
No one has ever officially revealed who turned in the Hussein sons, but Mosul residents have identified the informant as Nawaf Zidani, who they said collected a $30 million reward and disappeared. His brother, Salah Zidani, was killed when gunmen fired on his car.
Al-Jazeera television, meanwhile, broadcast videotape of a man identifying himself as a Kuwaiti truck driver delivering supplies to U.S. troops who was kidnapped by Iraqi gunmen as he drove toward the Iraqi capital. The driver, who gave his name as Saad Saadoun, was shown reading a statement, with a group of armed and masked men standing behind him.
"I promise I will not do this again, and I advise my brothers not to cooperate with the Americans," he said after prodding from his captors.
[On Sunday, the U.S. military announced that a U.S. Marine died Thursday from wounds received during a May 27 patrol and security operation in western Iraq's Anbar province, according to the Associated Press.]
Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
--------
At Least 19 Die as Violence Continues to Surge in Iraq
June 6, 2004
By JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/international/middleeast/06CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 6 - American forces released hundreds of Iraqi prisoners from the scandal-ridden Abu Ghraib prison today. Elsewhere, terrorist bomb blasts killed at least 19 people in a car bombing at a military base north of just of Baghdad and at an Iraqi police station 40 miles to the south.
But the streets reportedly remained calm in Najaf, where the Mahdi Army, a militia loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, began withdrawing Saturday as part of a peace deal worked out with American-approved Shiite clerics. Hopes that the quiet in the streets could last were raised on Saturday when Mr. Sadr met with Iraq's most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
Still, in Sadr City, the Baghdad slum named after Mr. Sadr's father, gunmen shot at and then blew up a police station that was apparently unoccupied at the time. The police station had earlier been taken over by the United States Army. Around Baghdad, there was speculation today that armed fighters returning from Najaf and nearby Kufa could spark a surge in violence here in the capital.
Those concerns were intensified by the possibility that insurgents might try to disrupt the official transfer of power from the American-led occupation to a newly appointed Iraqi government on June 30.
After dark today, two large explosions were heard in central Baghdad. The causes could not be immediately determined.
Also today, the private security firm Blackwater USA confirmed that four civilians, two Americans and two Poles, who were killed in an attack on the main road from Baghdad on Saturday were employees of the company. The killings of four Blackwater employees in Falluja in March provoked an invasion of the town by occupation forces.
The attack at the police station in Mussayab, south of Baghdad, began when approximately 10 men in Iraqi police uniforms entered the station and then forced the local police officers into their own cells. Then the insurgents wired the station with explosives and apparently set them off when others arrived and attempted to free the police.
A spokesman for the occupation authorities said that as many as three separate bombs may have been detonated in the attack, which occurred around 4:20 p.m.
``A portion of the front of the police substation collapsed,'' the spokesman said. At least 10 Iraqi police and 2 civilians died in the explosions, Reuters reported.
The car bombing took place early in the morning outside the gates of a major military base in Taji, north of Baghdad. Reuters reported that a group led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a militant linked by the United States to al Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the attack, which hospital officials said left at least 9 Iraqis dead and 61 injured. The group described the bombing as a suicide attack.
The release from Abu Ghraib prison began at 8 a.m., and a series of buses carrying the detainees left the site during the day as local sheiks stood by. The prison, west of Baghdad, become infamous when photographs of Iraqi prisoners being humiliated and abused were made public in April. An occupation spokesman said that about 320 prisoners were released from Abu Ghraib during the day and that 3,100 remained under detention.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell reportedly submitted joint letters to the United Nations Security Council pledging to reach an agreement on how the American-led occupation force would be deployed after June 30.
Although the letters left unclear the issue of how disagreements would be resolved, Mr. Allawi wrote that the countries would need to ``reach agreement of the full range of fundamental security and policy issues, including policy on sensitive offensive operations.''
-------- israel / palestine
Sharon Fires Two Who Oppose Gaza Plan
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 5, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14878-2004Jun4?language=printer
JERUSALEM, June 4 -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon fired two members of his cabinet on Friday, gaining the cabinet majority needed to pass his Gaza Strip withdrawal plan but placing the future of his coalition government in doubt.
Sharon sent a messenger to deliver notices of dismissal to two nationalist members of the National Union party, Transportation Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Tourism Minister Benny Elon, after they failed to answer his summons to a meeting Friday morning.
Members of Sharon's coalition said the dismissals would help the prime minister avoid either a defeat of the measure in a cabinet vote on Sunday or adoption by the cabinet of a toothless version of the plan.
"I didn't ignore the attempts to reach a compromise, but there were some things I couldn't give in to and I didn't," Sharon told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. "I need a majority on Sunday."
The cabinet is to vote on Sharon's proposal to evacuate, by the end of 2005, the 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza along with four West Bank settlements. The cabinet is then expected to vote on the first of four phases of the plan, the evacuation of three Gaza settlements. Each following phase of the withdrawal would be voted on in turn.
"We can't freeze the plan any longer," said a source in the prime minister's office. "We don't have a partner, but the world is not going to accept us staying still and not doing anything."
But Friday's dismissals also threw the future of Sharon and his government -- and future stages of any evacuation plan -- into question.
Sharon's coalition controls 68 of 120 seats in parliament. But with the firing of its two leaders in Sharon's cabinet, the National Union party, which holds seven seats, plans to leave the coalition, according to members.
"We will do whatever we can to make it impossible to go on with his terrible program," said Yuri Stern, chairman of the party's faction in the parliament, or Knesset.
Without the National Union, Sharon's coalition would depend for its survival on another small, pro-settler faction, the National Religious Party, whose six members are also threatening to bolt.
"I don't like the price and it won't bring peace," said Nisan Slomiansky, chairman of the National Religious Party faction in the Knesset, who said he hopes his party will abandon the government.
Shas, an Orthodox Jewish party whose chairman phoned members of the National Union to bless them, according to reports in the Israeli press, has called for a no-confidence vote on Monday.
Abraham Diskin, a Hebrew University expert on Sharon's Likud Party, said the prime minister is likely to try to form a new governing coalition with the Labor Party, and that Labor, despite internal divisions, seems amenable.
In addition, Sharon's proposal faces opposition within his party. Likud has supported settlement construction in Gaza and the West Bank for decades, and party members defeated Sharon's pullout plan in a referendum May 2.
Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a Likud leader and former prime minister, opposes it on the grounds that the party has rejected it, said an aide. Netanyahu's goal is to abide by the Likud members' decision, not "to topple Sharon or to form a different government," the aide said.
But that "could be the outcome," he said.
"There are so many open possibilities, it's hard to predict what will happen," said Deputy Prime Minister Yosef Lapid, a member of the Shinui party who supports withdrawal from Gaza.
Lapid and other members of Sharon's cabinet expressed relief at the dismissal of two of the most right-wing members of the government.
"We shouldn't sit with these kinds of people anyway," Lapid said, noting that Elon and Lieberman are proponents of deporting Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank and Gaza. Lapid said he hoped a centrist base could be formed in a coalition of Likud, Shinui and Labor.
A messenger spent Friday morning chasing the two ministers, who were trying to avoid receiving the notices of their dismissal, which would take effect only 48 hours after receipt. They hoped that this hide-and-seek would allow them to vote in the cabinet meeting Sunday morning. Lieberman was finally handed his notice while on a treadmill at a gym, said his spokesman, Shai Rosenfeld. Elon had not yet received the message by Friday evening, an aide said.
Lieberman told Israel Radio he was "proud" to have been fired for standing up for his beliefs. "I joined this coalition on the basis of principles which we agreed to," he said. "There is no connection between these principles and the disengagement plan."
Researcher Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
--------
Sharon's Gaza Plan Is Approved but Final Decision Is Put Off
June 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's coalition was in danger of collapse on Monday as a rightist partner considered bolting after he extracted a cabinet majority in favor of his Gaza withdrawal plan. It passed by a 14-7 vote on Sunday but only after Sharon placated mutinous ministers in his own right-wing party by agreeing not to evacuate Jewish settlements for at least nine months and then only in four phases each requiring another vote.
Hedged by politicking, the historic decision could become a hostage to fortune if Palestinian militants pull off further major attacks in their resolve to prove they forced an Israeli retreat, which could harden rightists against carrying it out.
President Bush endorsed Sharon's blueprint to ``disengage'' from conflict with Palestinians as a potential means of reviving the U.S.-backed ``road map'' plan for a Palestinian state on land Israel occupied in war with Arabs 37 years ago.
Polls show most Israelis are behind Sharon too, seeing Gaza as a bloody liability rather than biblical birthright touted by 7,500 Jews who carved out enclaves amid 1.3 million Palestinians crammed into the rest of the tiny coastal strip.
But the National Religious Party, linchpin of Sharon's Knesset (parliament) majority, was debating whether to quit the cabinet in protest at a vote that the NRP's leader branded a recipe for a militant takeover in Gaza endangering Israel.
``No tricks of language can cover up one of the darkest decisions ever taken by an Israeli government, which means expulsion of Jewish residents and setting up a Hamas terrorist state,'' Housing Minister Effi Eitam told reporters.
Political sources said Eitam favored jumping ship at an NRP meeting late on Sunday but the second NRP minister demurred, believing the party had a better chance of heading off ``disengagement'' from within the government.
The meeting including the NRP's seven Knesset deputies ended inconclusively and was followed by consultations with party rabbis. Further deliberations were expected on Monday.
TENUOUS ONE-SEAT MAJORITY
Sharon was clinging to a majority of just one seat in the Knesset after firing two ministers of the ultra-rightist National Union to help secure the cabinet vote.
If the NRP abandoned Sharon, his coalition would drop to 55 seats in the 120-mandate parliament, opening the way either to a possible unity government with the pro-withdrawal center-left Labour Party, which has 19 legislators, or new elections.
Labour decided to withdraw a motion of no-confidence that was to have been debated in the Knesset on Monday, temporarily averting another mortal threat to Sharon's coalition.
But it kept Sharon in a tight spot by showing no inclination to join him in power before a decision by the attorney general on whether to indict the premier in a bribery scandal. He is not expected to rule until at least mid-June.
The deal Sharon struck with Likud hard-liners allows ``preparatory work'' for settlement evacuations to begin, which would entail finding new homes for uprooted settlers.
``Disengagement is getting under way,'' he said afterwards.
But by bowing to future votes of his unruly cabinet for each phase of withdrawal, Sharon effectively left the fate of Gaza's 21 settlements and four of 120 in the West Bank -- earmarked for evacuation by the end of 2005 -- up in the air.
His original plan, which was spurned in a May 2 Likud party referendum, envisioned getting out of Gaza all at once.
Bitter divisions simmered within Likud and the coalition over Sharon's volte-face from decades of promoting settlements.
Sharon may only have bought time before the next coalition crisis but he seemed upbeat in a speech after the vote, saying his plan would benefit Israel internationally and economically.
The plan, billed by Sharon as a unilateral effort to reduce friction with Palestinians in whom he sees no peace partner, also declared Israel's intent to keep tracts of the West Bank where most of its 240,000 settlers live in 120 enclaves.
Palestinians welcome any pullout but suspect Sharon wants to swap Gaza for West Bank areas they need for a viable state.
``He negotiated with his party and cabinet but not with those whose future is being determined,'' Palestinian Negotiations Minister Saeb Erekat told Reuters.
--------
Barghouti Sentenced to Five Life Terms in Israel
June 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Barghouti.html
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- An Israeli court on Sunday sent popular Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti to prison for life for his role in deadly attacks on Israelis, sidelining a possible successor to Yasser Arafat.
Barghouti was given five consecutive life terms and 40 years -- the maximum sentence -- after he was convicted last month of involvement in shootings that killed four Israelis and a Greek monk. The ruling said Barghouti was ``involved up to his neck in terror activity.''
Before the sentencing, Barghouti rejected the right of the court to judge him, to the cheers of supporters in the courtroom. ``The Israeli courts are a partner to the Israeli occupation,'' Barghouti said. ``The judges are just like pilots who fly planes and drop bombs.''
Barghouti was the West Bank leader of Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian political force. Among the most popular leaders of the young generation, Barghouti, 45, has been mentioned as one of the possible successors to Arafat, with whom he has had a stormy relationship.
Israel charged that Barghouti was also a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a violent offshoot of Fatah, supplying funds and weapons to militants who carried out dozens of shooting and bombing attacks, killing and wounding hundreds of Israelis. The ruling said Arafat encouraged attacks against Israelis but did not order them specifically.
For years the small, energetic Barghouti was a close ally of Israeli peace activists, advocating creation of a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel. However, with the outbreak of violence in September 2000, Barghouti became a strident backer of resistance against Israeli occupation.
Though he defended attacks against Jewish settlers and soldiers in the West Bank, he insisted that he did not actively encourage violence.
In their ruling Sunday, the three judges scoffed at Barghouti's claim to be a man of peace. Barghouti's ``path to peace follows the bloody route of terrorism,'' they wrote.
Israeli forces abducted him from the West Bank city of Ramallah in April 2002. He was the first Palestinian political leader to be tried in an Israeli civilian court.
Last month, he was convicted of a role in three shooting attacks that killed a Greek Orthodox monk in the West Bank in 2001; an Israeli near the Givat Zeev settlement in the West Bank in 2002; and three people at a Tel Aviv restaurant in 2002.
He was also given two consecutive terms of 20 years each for a botched car bombing at a Jerusalem mall and membership in a terror organization.
The judges regretted that they could not, under Israeli law, convict him of the other attacks carried out by Fatah militants, because the evidence did not point to direct involvement.
Barghouti ``was the leader of a terror group'' and ``carries heavy moral responsibility for the deaths of many people'' beyond the five for which he was convicted, they wrote.
Barghouti's wife, Fadwa, dismissed the verdict. ``This is a court of occupation, pursuing its role as tool from the many tools of the Israeli occupation,'' she said.
Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said the Palestinian Authority does not recognize the court decision. ``Israeli courts have no jurisdiction over an elected Palestinian official like Marwan Barghouti or anybody else, and we demand his immediate release,'' Erekat said.
Outside the courtroom, Palestinian legislator Hater Abdel Khader denounced the court decision. ``It is a message for Palestinians to continue the uprising and to resist the occupation,'' he said.
-------- mideast
Gadhafi Regrets Reagan Died Before Trial
Jun 6, 2004
(AP)
By TANALEE SMITH
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040606/D831MSC02.html
CAIRO, Egypt - Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi expressed regret Sunday that Ronald Reagan died without standing trial for 1986 airstrikes on his country, while other Arabs used the occasion of the former president's death to lambast his Mideast policies.
Gadhafi said he was sorry that Reagan died Saturday before he could stand trial for deadly 1986 airstrikes he ordered that killed Gadhafi's adopted daughter and 36 other people.
Reagan ordered the April 15, 1986, air raid in response to a disco bombing in Berlin allegedly called for by Gadhafi that killed two U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman and wounded 229 people.
"I express my deep regret because Reagan died before facing justice for his ugly crime that he committed in 1986 against the Libyan children," Libya's official JANA news agency quoted Gadhafi as saying.
The United States branded Libya a rogue state in the 1980s, alleging state-sponsored support of terrorism and imposing trade sanctions on the country in 1986. But relations have warmed substantially since Gadhafi agreed in December to dismantle Libya's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
Gadhafi wasn't alone in recalling Reagan's 1981-1989 administration as a dark period for the Arab world.
Lebanon's president expressed condolences, but Culture Minister Ghazi Aridi said the Reagan years marked the beginning of a "bad era" of American Mideast policy that continues to this day. He noted Reagan's support of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which ended in May 2000, and the fact that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also served under Reagan, as a Middle East envoy.
"Rumsfeld was part of Reagan's administration, this means that his policy is still going on," said Aridi, who is with the Druse Progressive Socialist Party. Areas controlled by the party came under heavy American shelling by the U.S. destroyer New Jersey in 1983.
"In Reagan's days, the destroyer New Jersey bombed poor areas of Mount Lebanon, the Americans protected Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and joined the Israelis in imposing the May 17 agreements," Aridi said referring to a failed deal to withdraw Israeli troops.
American interests were hit hard in Lebanon during that time. Suicide attacks against the U.S. Embassy in 1983 killed 63 people, and the bombing of U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut six months later killed 241 American servicemen. Dozens of Westerners were taken hostage.
Syria also has had tense relations with the U.S. for decades.
"Reagan's role was bad for the Arab-Israeli conflict and was specifically against Syria. He was the victim of the Israeli right wing that was, and still is, dominating the White House," said Haitham al-Kilani, a political analyst and former Syrian ambassador to the United Nations.
But some in the Middle East remembered Reagan as a friend.
Lebanese President Emile Lahoud paid condolences in a letter to President Bush, saying he received the news of Reagan's death with "deep pain."
Reagan's term in office "formed an important period in the international political life and a prominent juncture in the deep relations between our countries," his office said in a statement.
The Israeli government also expressed sorrow over Reagan's death.
"The people of Israel mourn the loss of one of the heroes of this generation, a committed leader and vigilant promoter and protector of the freedoms and democratic values that continue to serve as the solid foundation of the community of nations today," a statement said.
-------- russia / chechnya
Young Men Vanishing in Russian Region
Prosecutor Probing Role of Secret Police Is Among the Missing in Ingushetia
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18953-2004Jun5?language=printer
NAZRAN, Russia -- The young men started disappearing a few months ago, one by one, often with no trace. Prosecutor Rashid Ozdoyev suspected a dark conspiracy: Maybe the abductions were the work not of ordinary criminal gangs but of Russia's top law enforcement agency.
Then Ozdoyev himself disappeared. Shortly after he got off an airplane from Moscow, where he had delivered a report criticizing alleged abuses by the agency, the Federal Security Service, Ozdoyev climbed into his car, drove off and has not been seen since.
The case has sent a chill through the southern region of Ingushetia, already anxious because of the recent wave of kidnappings and violence. The search for the missing prosecutor has turned up nothing; the investigation has gone nowhere. No one at the security service has been interviewed. And some of Ozdoyev's nervous fellow prosecutors said they assume the security service snatched their whistle-blowing colleague to shut him up, yet they feel powerless to do anything about it.
"It looks like the special services took him," Mikhail Akhiliyev, a friend and fellow prosecutor, said in a hushed conversation in a corridor of the prosecutor's office building, where that is not the official theory. "Everybody says we don't know anything. It's like a wall. There's no Rashid."
A spokesman for the agency, known by its Russian initials FSB, disputed allegations that it was behind the disappearance. But that has not quieted suspicions, drawing new attention to the evolving role in Russian society of this domestic successor of the KGB. The agency has been amassing new powers in the four years since its former director, Vladimir Putin, became president of Russia.
In places like Ingushetia, right next door to the war-ravaged region of Chechnya, the FSB increasingly operates with impunity, largely unchallenged by the local government, which is headed by a former KGB officer and Putin ally. At least 40 men have disappeared in the last six months, mostly members of the Ingush and Chechen ethnic groups, according to human rights activists who said they suspect involvement by the security service.
"We have a Bermuda Triangle here," said a stout bodyguard for another Ingush prosecutor, a handgun tucked into his belt. In reality, he confided, far more than 40 people have disappeared. He asked not to be identified: "We watch what we say. The less we say, the safer it is."
The only person who seems to be aggressively looking for Rashid Ozdoyev is his father, Boris, who is convinced that his 27-year-old son fell victim to the FSB and that no one else wants to prod too hard out of fear that they would be next. "It's absolutely outrageous," said Boris Ozdoyev. "The power of the FSB is enormous."
"How do they differ from terrorists?" he asked, complaining that FSB agents operate outside the law. "The only difference is they have a state krysha," a Russian term for "roof" that has come to mean mafia-style protection.
Boris Ozdoyev, 60, is no anti-establishment radical. A judge for two decades in Soviet times and later a member of Ingushetia's regional parliament, Ozdoyev and his family have devoted their lives to maintaining order in their oil-rich mountainous region. A second son is an officer of the FSB.
When Rashid disappeared in March, he had 10 years of government service and had risen to be the chief prosecutor's deputy. Working in a modest office at the end of the hall on the third floor of the prosecutor's headquarters, he had filed three reports sharply critical of the FSB in the previous six months, according to his father, who said he urged him not to do so for his own safety.
One of the reports -- a two-page memo sent to Col. Sergei Koryakov, local head of the FSB, late last year and reviewed by a reporter -- accused the agency of dropping the ball on investigating three explosions in Ingushetia in 2002. The FSB is sometimes accused of staging terrorist acts for political reasons, then covering up its involvement.
The most recent report, according to Boris Ozdoyev, was a 14-page paper outlining FSB abuses. His son delivered it to Moscow, then flew back to Ingushetia on March 11. He brought with him a DVD of "The Last Emperor" and planned to drive to the home of his friend, Mikhail Akhiliyev, to watch it. He never made it.
"We drove around, asking around. Nothing," said Akhiliyev. "No car. No him."
Boris Ozdoyev said his investigation into Rashid's disappearance points the finger directly at Koryakov. Ozdoyev said his other son found Rashid's missing car, a green Lada, covered by a tarp at an FSB garage, but it was later moved. Ozdoyev said he then picked up rumors that the kidnappers were FSB officers.
So, following the customs of local Ingush society, Ozdoyev and other male elders from his family convened a council meeting with one of the FSB officers and his relatives. At the meeting, Ozdoyev said, the FSB officer admitted involvement and said the operation was ordered by Koryakov.
"They staged an accident and stopped [Rashid's] car," Ozdoyev said. Then the abductors grabbed Rashid, stuffed him into another vehicle and drove him away while others removed the green Lada from the scene, Ozdoyev recalled the FSB officer telling the group. "He didn't know why. He was personally ordered by Col. Koryakov."
Musa Ozdoyev, 65, a retired economist and Boris's cousin, confirmed in an interview that he was at the council meeting and heard the FSB officer admit his involvement. "He was sitting in the [other] car. He said, 'I was playing the role of driver.' The others took care of the rest," Musa said.
Koryakov rebuffed requests for an interview in person or by telephone for nearly two weeks, saying he was too busy, but an FSB spokesman disputed that the colonel had ordered Ozdoyev's abduction. "If he ever did this he would be removed from his post immediately," said the spokesman, Alexei Baigushkin. He dismissed the allegations as propaganda by terrorists hunted by the FSB. "You should understand there are moments when terrorists use not only bombs but information channels."
The Ozdoyev case comes when human rights groups and local residents worry that the war in Chechnya, which pits local separatists against Russian troops and their Chechen allies, is increasingly spilling over into Ingushetia. More than a dozen people have been injured or killed, some summarily executed, in recent months, according to information compiled by relatives.
In early March, armed men stopped a car near the village of Altievo, pulled out the passengers and shot one of them dead as he crawled on the ground, then opened fire on another car that happened on the scene, killing a 24-year-old woman. The human rights group Memorial said it found evidence that the gunmen were FSB officers.
Then in early April a suicide bomber tried to kill the president of Ingushetia, Murat Zyazikov, by slamming an explosives-packed car into his motorcade, but Zyazikov was saved by his armored Mercedes.
The abductions seemed to mirror a pattern in Chechnya, where authorities have been regularly accused of seizing men in the middle of the night.
Bashir Mutsolgov, 29, was grabbed in December by armed men in camouflage and masks who jumped out of a car not far from his Ingushetia home, according to his brother, Magomed. Bashir has not been seen since, and his brother said contacts in the FSB told him their agency was responsible. "There are too many cases like this for it to be people in the wrong place," said Magomed, 30.
Mukhammed Yandiyev's son, Timur, 24, was taken away in Ingushetia in March by six masked men in camouflage. "If the ones who captured him know about some sort of crime, they should just tell me," said Yandiyev, 63. But after so much time, he said he fears his son may no longer be alive. "I'm beginning to doubt. Either they're being tortured somewhere in a basement or they're not with us anymore."
Authorities play down the problem, characterizing it as isolated. Zyazikov, the former KGB officer who is now president of Ingushetia, said in an interview that he knew of only seven reports of men disappearing. But he acknowledged that federal forces had sought to conduct zachistki, or cleansing operations, as they do in Chechnya, and said he had stopped that.
"We don't accept this. . . . We don't want to be in a war," he said in his office beneath a portrait of his grandfather, who once ruled the province as well. "We need stability, peace and mutual understanding."
Zyazikov, whose government has rebuilt schools, bridges and houses and sent sometimes reluctant Chechen refugees home, declined to comment on accusations against the FSB but said every disappearance is being investigated.
So far, the official investigation of Rashid Ozdoyev's disappearance has wound up in a dead end. The chief investigator, Nurdi Doklayev, said he could not rule out FSB involvement but could not interview Koryakov or other officers because the agency had disavowed any knowledge about the disappearance in writing. "I have an official answer from them that they don't have any information," Doklayev said. "How can I go to them when I don't have any evidence?"
Doklayev said he doubted Ozdoyev's reports would have inspired the FSB to kidnap him because they were not that important. "If we disappeared for writing reports there wouldn't be any of us here," he said. But he said that Ozdoyev's family, with a son in the FSB, should be able to solve the crime itself.
That's what Boris Ozdoyev is trying to do. With a wide array of contacts built up during a lifetime as a judge and legislator, he has found people who sell him information. He has been told his son had been held in Chechnya but was moved to another location last week.
"I'm looking for my son in all possible ways," he said. "I'm letting people know what's happening here to avoid creating a second Chechnya."
-------- spies
Was It Ever Easy to Lead the C.I.A.?
June 6, 2004
By PHILIP TAUBMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/weekinreview/06taub.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON - It seems an immutable law of Washington: directors of central intelligence are better remembered for their failures than their successes. George J. Tenet joined the roll last week. Historians may someday credit him for rebuilding the marquee spy service at a dangerous hour in the nation's history, but for now his critics will consign him to the company of men like Allen W. Dulles, who was fired by President Kennedy after the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and William J. Casey, who died in office as the Iran-contra scandal engulfed the Reagan administration.
As he packs up his papers, Mr. Tenet is facing the sort of treatment Dulles was accorded after the Bay of Pigs debacle. Upon learning of the failed invasion, Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state, acidly observed to his old boss, "Why we ever engaged in this asinine Cuban adventure, I cannot imagine.''
As Mr. Tenet bid a sad farewell to his colleagues at the Central Intelligence Agency last week, it was hard to recall the last time a Washington spy master stepped down in triumph - or, for that matter, the last time the nation celebrated the achievements of the C.I.A. The closest thing to a rousing success in recent years was the agency's clandestine role in the 1980's in evicting Soviet forces from Afghanistan - though that operation inadvertently laid the groundwork for the rise of Osama bin Laden - and the capture or killing of top Al Qaeda leaders since Sept. 11, 2001.
In recent decades, the most notable distinction of directors of central intelligence has been their limited tenure. Until Mr. Tenet's seven-year run, the turnover rate was dizzying. There were 10 directors from 1973 to 1997, when Mr. Tenet was appointed.
The casualty rate, and the C.I.A.'s reputation, were not always so dismal. Though the agency has courted trouble almost from the day it was born in 1947, there was a halcyon era: the 1950's.
It was a time of expanding ambitions for the C.I.A., when its founding generation - many from Yale, Princeton and other elite universities - came to Washington to serve secretly on the front lines of the cold war. Raw practices that the agency would later come to rue, including assassination plots and expedient alliances with repressive foreign security services, first appeared in the 1950's, but the small circle of people who knew about them ardently believed that the hard-boiled methods were justified by the need to contain the Soviet threat.
Before his unhappy departure in 1961, Dulles spent most of his nearly nine years as director building a first-class intelligence agency, a pioneer in espionage science and technology. At the direction of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, he reluctantly took the lead in developing exotic hardware that revolutionized the spy business, including highflying spy planes and satellites. Eisenhower's decision to turn the projects over to the C.I.A. instead of the Air Force - he thought the agency was more nimble and better at keeping secrets - gave it an important new role that produced some prized accomplishments, including the first photo reconnaissance satellite in 1960.
The C.I.A. prospered, in part, because Dulles operated in a freewheeling environment that most of his successors would have envied. Congressional intervention was almost nonexistent. Only a handful of House and Senate leaders were kept informed, and even those limited consultations were treated like chummy conversations at a well-heeled men's club.
The Washington press corps was much smaller and less aggressive than it is today. There were no embarrassing headlines about the agency's serial failures to get its first spy satellite into operation, for example, because reporters didn't know that the rockets blowing up on a launch pad in California were part of a secret project.
Even the most audacious covert operations - the installation of a pro-American leader in Iran in 1953 and a coup in Guatemala a year later - largely escaped public scrutiny and only enhanced the reputation of the C.I.A. in the classified corridors of Washington.
The turning point was the Bay of Pigs invasion, an improbable scheme cooked up in the final months of the Eisenhower administration that presumed that a small force of Cuban exiles trained by the C.I.A. would ignite an uprising against Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader. The failed attempt, just weeks after John F. Kennedy's inauguration, taught the new president and the nation about the dangers and embarrassments of misconceived covert operations. It has been mostly downhill ever since for the C.I.A., at least in terms of public esteem.
Part of the reason for this is the nature of the work. The C.I.A.'s victories are often shrouded in secrecy for decades. "What you have achieved in this fight against a clever, fanatical enemy around the world - the cells destroyed, the conspiracies defeated, the innocent lives saved - will for most Americans be forever unknown and uncounted,'' Mr. Tenet told his colleagues last week.
But there is more to it than that. If the C.I.A. sometimes seems cursed, it may be because the agency lives at the hazardous intersection where America's noble aspirations cut across the coarse exercise of power. Since its creation, the agency has struggled to live by the principles of a democratic society while sporting brass knuckles and slugging it out with the world's thugs.
It's nearly an impossible balance to maintain, and most men who have left the director's job with their reputations in tatters ran into trouble when they forgot that serving the president unswervingly is not always synonymous with serving the nation.
William E. Colby spent a good part of his brief tenure as director in the mid-1970's explaining to Congressional committees why the C.I.A. had tried for years to knock off unfriendly foreign leaders and engaged in other brutish and bizarre dirty tricks. The answers could often be found in opaque directives - some never committed to paper - that commissioned the C.I.A. to do whatever was necessary to execute the president's secret policies. The Senate inquiry, led by Frank Church, found that "if the intelligence agencies act in ways inimical to declared national purposes, they damage the reputation, power and influence of the United States abroad.''
They can also do damage by feeding presidents assessments that conform with White House policies, even if the supporting evidence is more ambiguous. Mr. Casey indulged in that practice by supplying President Ronald Reagan with alarming reports about Soviet influence in Central America that many intelligence analysts at the time thought exaggerated the threat.
Arguments still rage in Washington over whether the C.I.A. deliberately understated the economic decline and political instability of the Soviet Union in the 1980's. It is hard to divine whether the fault was insufficient data, inept analysis or a desire, however shaded, to remain in line with White House policy.
Forthcoming reports from Congress may help determine whether the C.I.A. under Mr. Tenet misjudged the intelligence about Iraq's illicit weapons or told the White House what the agency thought it wanted to hear.
Mr. Tenet leaves a mixed legacy. The C.I.A.'s failure to detect that Osama bin Laden was planning a devastating strike within the United States on Sept. 11 and its misreading of the Iraqi threat overshadow, at least for now, his strenuous efforts to strengthen the agency's clandestine service and create a crack counterterrorism force.
As he awaits the verdict of history, Mr. Tenet can find a measure of comfort in the partial rehabilitation of Dulles's reputation in the years after he resigned. His recovery shows it is possible to come back from a headlong fall. Just days after the Cuban invaders were routed at the Bay of Pigs, Robert F. Kennedy ran into Dulles and observed, "He looked like living death.''
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Iraqi's Offer to U.S. Troops Could Lead to U.N. Action
Bush, Chirac and Powell Praise 'Positive' Development
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17614-2004Jun5?language=printer
PARIS, June 5 -- President Bush, meeting here with President Jacques Chirac of France, said Saturday that Iraq's new interim prime minister had formally invited U.S. troops to remain in Iraq, a development the French and American sides said could lead to a new U.N. Security Council resolution endorsing the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced on Air Force One en route to Paris from Rome that Ayad Allawi had sent a letter outlining the terms under which he would agree to the presence of U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq. Powell said he would respond in a letter "in a positive vein" to Allawi's proposal. He said the letters would form annexes to the U.N. resolution.
Bush hailed the development as a "positive step forward."
Chirac, the main international opponent of Bush's policies in Iraq, agreed that "we have moved forward positively, and we should be able to put the finishing touches to this text very shortly." Chirac indicated, however, that he did not agree with Powell's plan to include the agreement in annexes. Chirac said the "thrust" of the agreement in the letters "has to be picked up in the language of the resolution."
The movement toward a new U.N. resolution, which would give international approval and possibly money and troops to the Bush plan to transfer partial sovereignty to Iraqis, was a bright spot in a news conference held by the French and U.S. presidents that exposed the tense disagreement between them over Iraq.
Chirac said during the session at Elysee Palace that he had told Bush he was not convinced that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. While applauding the removal of Saddam Hussein as Iraq's president, Chirac said that "what's less positive is there is a degree of chaos prevailing" in Iraq.
"We have certainly not put the difficulties behind us. Do not believe that," Chirac said. "We are in a situation which is extremely precarious."
The two leaders expressed common cause in such areas as Afghanistan and the Balkans. But their comity broke down as Bush was confronted with hostile questioning from French journalists, one of whom compared Bush to Hussein, adding that the U.S. president had been "accused of state terrorism."
In a frosty moment that ended the conference, Chirac criticized Bush's efforts to compare the Iraq war and World War II, a sentiment that Bush expressed anew in advance of Sunday's 60th anniversary of the D-Day landing in Normandy.
"I fully understand what led President Bush to make this comparison, if only for reason of circumstance," Chirac said. "History does not repeat itself, and it is very difficult to compare historical situations that differ. The situation in Iraq has to be contained, has to be mastered. We have to roll up our sleeves. . . . Perhaps we will succeed."
Despite the tension, both sides emphasized progress toward a U.N. resolution that would set aside diplomatic strain.
"We are very, very close to completing the work," Powell said on Air Force One. He said he believed the letters would address objections from countries, particularly France, that have sought a more specific outline of Iraqi sovereignty than the Bush administration proposed in a draft resolution.
"I am confident within a few days we will be there," Powell said. "We are in the endgame."
Powell said Allawi's letter "lays out a committee structure where there would be political-to-political and political-to-military dialogue about the strategy that would be followed, the broad policy on the use of forces and how we would deal with any sensitive operations that might be contemplated."
Powell, who did not provide a copy of the letter, said Allawi would have the "committee structure going all the way down throughout the country, so that throughout the country, Iraqi authorities would be in contact with the coalition military authorities present to make sure there is full coordination and understanding of the operations that are being planned."
Powell said that while the letters would be expressed in annexes for technical reasons, they "are totally consistent with the intent, purpose and language of the resolution."
Later, the French president said he hoped that a resolution would be reached "very shortly, in the next few days" and that "things are moving in the right direction."
But Chirac repeated the French requirement that Iraqi sovereignty be detailed in the resolution. "We must say loud and clear that the international community is hell-bent on achieving one objective, which is returning sovereignty to an Iraqi government, which will give hope to the people of Iraq."
Speaking after Chirac, Bush said, "I appreciate our discussions" on Iraq. He spoke of the exchange of letters with Allawi in less detail, saying only that it "lays out the parameters of the security cooperation in Iraq."
Chirac also expressed worry about escalating violence in the Middle East, echoing a concern addressed to Bush by Pope John Paul II in Rome on Friday. "We are very worried when we see that this conflict is continuing to spread," Chirac said, adding: "We cannot ignore the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Lebanese dimensions of the problem."
Bush arrived in Paris this afternoon after a meeting and news conference in Rome with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. "I sense a spirit of unity in terms of working with the new Iraqi government," Bush said. "That's why we're working closely with nations to get a United Nations Security Council resolution. . . . And I am confident we will get one soon."
Berlusconi said Italian troops would remain in Iraq at least until a new government is elected in January. Tens of thousands of Italians marched in Rome on Friday demanding that the country withdraw its troops from Iraq, as Spain recently did.
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16 U.N. Workers Abducted in Western Sudan
Reuters
Sunday, June 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18659-2004Jun5.html
CAIRO, June 5 -- About 16 people working for the United Nations have been abducted in Sudan's western Darfur region, a Sudanese official said Saturday.
The state minister for foreign affairs, Najeeb al-Kheir Abdul Wahab, said the government was communicating "with all sides." He gave no further details, and a U.N. official declined to comment on the report. Spokesmen for the rebels were unavailable for comment.
Rebels took up arms against the government in Darfur last year, accusing it of neglecting the remote area bordering Chad and of arming Arab militias to loot and burn villages, a charge the government denies.
The United Nations has warned of a humanitarian crisis in Darfur, where the conflict is believed to have killed about 10,000 people, displaced about 1 million and left several hundred thousand in danger of starvation. About 158,000 refugees have fled to Chad, where the U.N. agency for refugees says many are at risk of attack by militias, and malnutrition and disease are spreading.
On Wednesday, the government said humanitarian workers could enter Darfur after notifying officials, a change from rules set up in May that required first applying for travel authorization. The move was apparently part of Sudan's efforts to streamline humanitarian aid and a response to complaints of delays and lack of full cooperation from the government.
Separately, the government and rebels in the southern part of the country signed a declaration restating their commitment to a string of peace accords aimed at ending Africa's longest civil war.
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki hosted the signing ceremony, which also launched the final phase of talks between Sudan's first vice president, Ali Uthman Muhammad Taha, and rebel leader John Garang to end 21 years of war.
Sudanese women in brightly patterned robes ululated as Taha and Garang signed the declaration, which covers six previous accords, the building blocks for a comprehensive peace deal.
"The document we have just signed . . . represents a solemn declaration on our part that war in Sudan is truly coming to an end," Garang said.
Before a gathering of foreign dignitaries, including Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, Taha and Garang held aloft copies of the document in which both sides pledged to wrap up negotiations as quickly as possible.
"I would like to reiterate the determination of the government of Sudan to continue the peace process and implement all texts relating to this peace process," Taha said.
The negotiators are expected to nail down the remaining issues, including arrangements for a cease-fire and how to implement a final deal, when they resume talks on June 22. Mediators in Kenya, where talks are being held, have said a final deal could be concluded within two months.
The war is often depicted as a conflict between the Arab, Muslim north and the black animist and Christian south. The fighting has killed 2 million people in the south.
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Wars Put Strain On National Guard
Fire, Flood Relief Efforts Threatened
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18980-2004Jun5?language=printer
With almost 40,000 troops serving in the unexpectedly violent and difficult occupation of Iraq, the National Guard is beginning to show the strain of duty there, according to interviews and e-mail exchanges with 23 state Guard commanders from California to Maine.
The Iraq mission is placing new stress on the active-duty Army as it leans more heavily than it has in decades on the Guard -- which, with 350,000 troops, rivals the active force in size. That new reliance, in turn, is raising concerns about the Guard's long-term ability to recruit and retain troops, and it is provoking more immediate worries in states that rely on the Guard to deal with fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and earthquakes.
Some Guard commanders are beginning to say they simply can't deploy any more troops. "As far as New Hampshire goes, we're tapped," said Maj. Gen. John E. Blair, that state's adjutant general, or Guard commander. Of his 1,700 Army National Guard troops, more than 1,000 are in Iraq, Afghanistan or Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or on alert for deployment. And to get units fully manned to head overseas, he said, "we've had to break other units."
Blair, who piloted a medical evacuation helicopter in the Vietnam War, said he informed the Pentagon's National Guard Bureau two weeks ago that "before you call us again, you've got to know that we are at our limit."
Earlier this year, 60 percent of Maine's 2,300 Army Guard troops were deployed. "The current pace isn't sustainable," said the state commander, Brig. Gen. John W. Libby, who said that pace appears to be damaging his efforts to raise manpower. "Our recruiting is down significantly from last year, and our retention rates are down also," he said. The biggest problem, he said, is that parents are discouraging their children from joining. "We've got a level of reluctance with parents this year that we haven't seen in the past."
Some soldiers in West Virginia's 1092nd Engineering Battalion got home in April from 14 months of duty in Iraq -- only to be activated in the past few days for weeks of flood-relief work in Mingo County and other southwestern parts of the state. One soldier told the state commander, Maj. Gen. Allen E. Tackett, that he had been back to his civilian job for exactly one day. "The spouses and the employers are raising hell with me," the general said.
Tackett said he is especially worried that his most seasoned soldiers are getting out. "A lot of my experienced people are coming back from deployments and retiring," he said. "They've paid their dues."
It isn't just the Guard that is feeling the pinch. In Montana, the Guard, facing an alert for deployment, has withdrawn its Black Hawk helicopters from the job of being the first responder to small fires that can flare into forest fires. With that system, "last year, we caught a lot of fires that we wouldn't have otherwise," Montana State Forester Bob Harrington said Friday from his office in Missoula.
Now, with the start of the fire season just a month away, Harrington is scrambling to contract for commercial choppers to fill that quick-reaction job. Their payloads are less than half that of the powerful Black Hawks, which can tote 600 gallons of water.
The last time the U.S. military engaged in sustained ground combat, during the Vietnam War, it could rely on a draft to provide new personnel. Now, lacking conscription, the Pentagon is relying on other tools to find enough soldiers to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has imposed controls such as "stop-loss" to keep active-duty troops from leaving. It has extended the tours of duty in Iraq for some soldiers from a planned year to a possible 15 months. It is reorganizing itself to create more units that can be deployed.
But most of all, it is looking to the Guard. As active-duty troops leave Iraq after tours of a year or more, they are often replaced by Guard troops, with the result that almost one-third of the 125,000 Army troops now in Iraq are from the Guard. Eighty-one Guard soldiers have died in Iraq, 29 of them in the upsurge in violence in April and May. For some states, those were the first combat deaths suffered by the Guard since the Korean War.
Parts of the Guard are beginning to stagger under the burden. Nearly three years into the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world, Guard commanders said they have shed the "weekend warrior" image their force once had. But several said they are deeply worried about how the citizen-soldiers will react to the repeated deployments into combat zones that they now are facing -- and even more about the responses of the families and employers.
Since Sept. 11, North Dakota's Maj. Gen. Michael J. Haugen said, his state has mobilized as many troops as were called up during World War II. Five of the state's Guard members have died in Iraq. While Haugen supports the Iraq mission and his troops like it, he said "we will eventually hit the wall," probably in a couple of years, and be unable to deploy overseas. For certain specialized units, such as engineers, he added, "I'm almost there."
Concerns about the new load being placed on the Guard were aired in mid-May at a meeting in Colorado Springs attended by most of the 54 Guard commanders, who come from all 50 states, Guam, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.
Idaho, a small-population state that faces a big fire threat, was kind of a poster child for officers at the meeting. Out of 3,200 people in the Idaho Army Guard, about 2,000 are members of the 116th Cavalry Brigade, which is expected to deploy to Iraq later this year. Their departure poses the question of who will be ready to deal with the state's natural disasters.
Lt. Col. Tim Marsano, a spokesman for the Idaho Guard, said, "I think everybody in the western states is concerned that it could be a very significant fire season." But he said the Idaho Guard is confident that it will have sufficient personnel on hand, in part by tapping members of the Air National Guard if necessary.
Some commanders from the Southeast likewise worry about hurricane season. After a big storm, there is high demand for precisely the sort of troops that have been deployed most heavily -- military police to keep order and engineers to clear debris.
"It's not just how many, it's who, and what kind of skill sets they have," said Maj. Gen. David B. Poythress, Georgia's commander. "When both my MP companies are gone, I don't have any MPs to put on the street."
In Mississippi, the unit designated as "first responders" to repair hurricane damage, the 223rd Engineer Battalion, was deployed for the past year to Iraq. It has come home, said Maj. Gen. Harold A. Cross. But, he added, "they left the equipment in Iraq." He has been told that by hurricane season he will be given the gear belonging to another unit being deployed. He also noted that he has sent 21 helicopters to Iraq, leaving just five for post-storm rescues and transport of cargo and troops.
The brigade the North Carolina Guard now has in Iraq came from the southeastern and southern parts of the state, the area that tends to bear the brunt of hurricanes. "We're a little short people in those areas," said Maj. Gen. William E. Ingram Jr., commander of the North Carolina Guard. In order to ensure that he can serve those areas after a disaster, he said, he will have to mobilize more-distant troops sooner, which will make it more expensive for the state.
As Ingram spoke, he almost seemed to be mentally crossing his fingers. "We're stretched, to a degree, but we're certainly not at the breaking point," he said. "If we can get through this year, we'll be in pretty good shape for next year's hurricane season."
Not all state commanders are sending up the alarm.
"We're an adaptive force," said Florida's Maj. Gen. Douglas Burnett. The new demands, he said, are "just part of the leadership challenge." Even at his peak level of deployment of 5,200 troops, he said, "I could still do about a hurricane and a half" with the remaining 7,000. "You're not going to see me jump up and say, 'We can't do this.' "
Rather, Burnett's complaint is money: "We're proud to be in the fight, but we've got to be funded."
Similarly, Ohio's commander, Maj. Gen. John H. Smith, warned, "We will soon be a hollow force without replenishment dollars to replace what is being consumed or lost."
Commanders from the biggest states generally seem most optimistic. Maj. Gen. Wayne D. Marty of Texas said he expects to send 3,000 soldiers to Iraq later this year. But he has a total force of about 19,000. "We're busy, but we're not stressed," he said. Morale also appears to be high, with reenlistment rates at a 10-year high, he said.
Even so, Marty said, he could see a point when the current pace will no longer be sustainable. "There will be a time when we reach diminishing returns, if this thing keeps going with the op [operational] tempo we have now," he said.
Another big-state commander, Michigan's Maj. Gen. Thomas G. Cutler, also said he saw problems on the horizon. "We're concerned," he said. "Everybody has a certain level of concern about how long-term this will be."
The Pentagon says there are solutions to all the potential shortfalls.
Brig. Gen. Frank Grass, deputy director of the Army National Guard, said he envisions states supporting one another with troops, aircraft and other equipment. "In any state where we may be short assets to respond to a homeland mission, whether it's a tornado in a town or a fire, we can cross state lines with just a phone call or two," he said.
For example, he said, if Montana is short on helicopters this summer, it could borrow from Wyoming or other states. (A spokeswoman for the Wyoming National Guard said that state has eight Black Hawks, half of which are deployed to the Middle East.)
Overall, Grass said that he isn't aware of any state commanders who have informed his office that they cannot contribute any more troops. But he said he does know that "certain types of units have been used up -- MPs, security forces, military intelligence." The answer, he said, is to convert to those skills some less-used units, such as artillery and chemical protection forces.
Guard commanders agreed that sharing is the answer, at least in the short run. "Until the aviation picture gets fixed, that's what we're going to have to do," said Texas's Marty. "We're not going to stand there and watch another state burn."
Researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
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In Normandy, Bush Honors Veterans of D-Day
June 6, 2004
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/international/europe/06CND-PREX.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
COLLEVILLE-SUR-MER, France, June 6 - President Bush, commander in chief of the first wars of this century, paid solemn tribute today to the Americans who on D-Day 60 years ago fought their way across the beaches here to propel the allies toward victory in the mightiest conflict of the last century.
Standing above the sands where the invasion began, amid 9,387 headstones marking the resting places of American troops who died in the invasion and its aftermath, Mr. Bush hailed as heroes those who never made it home and those who, six decades later, are a dwindling band of old men now honored as liberators.
Invoking the spirit of a war that united rather than divided the nation and forged alliances now put under strain by the American-led invasion of Iraq, Mr. Bush said those who faced the hail of German machine gun fire and artillery, some who made it up over the cliffs and some who did not, had served "the noblest of causes" and would never be forgotten.
"We think of them as you, our veterans, last saw them," Mr. Bush told an audience at the Normandy American Cemetery that included scores of American servicemen who fought here on June 6, 1944. "We think of men not far from boys who found the courage to charge toward death and who often, when death came, were heard to call, `Mom,' and `Mother, help me.' We think of men in the promise years of life, loved and mourned and missed to this day."
To those who survived, fought on and traveled back here, some frail in their 80's and beyond, some hearty and full of stories, Mr. Bush said, "That difficult summit was reached, then passed in 60 years of living. Now has come a time of reflection, with thoughts of another horizon, and the hope of reunion with the boys you knew. I want each of you to understand, you will be honored ever and always by the country you served and by the nations you freed.
The landings and memories were bittersweet for returning veterans.
"I'm getting near death. I'm 82, and I'm not getting any younger," Harry Hudec of Cleveland, Ohio, told The Associated Press. A "Red Devil" of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division, Mr. Hudec landed inland from Utah Beach.
Soldiers remembered the terrifying journey across the Channel in rough waters.
"We were all seasick," said Dick Atkinson, 83, a retired bricklayer from Newcastle, England, who came ashore on June 6 driving a 3-ton truck filled with ammunition.
"We just wanted to get off the landing craft," he said.
For Mr. Bush, the ceremony here was the centerpiece of a day that brought together heads of state or government from 17 nations for military pomp, rememberances and a reaffirmation of common values.
Among the countries represented here was the one most of the others united to defeat, Germany. Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, an opponent of the Iraq war, was not present for Mr. Bush's address at the cemetery, but he participated, at the invitation of President Jacques Chirac of France, who also broke with Mr. Bush over Iraq, in commemorations held in Caen and Arromanche. Not invited was Prime Minster Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, an ally of Mr. Bush in confronting Iraq.
Queen Elizabeth II, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and President Vladimir Putin of Russia attended, along with leaders and royalty from Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Greece, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia and New Zealand.
As they addressed the veterans and their families, the presidents of France and the United States put aside their differecences.
"In the name of every French woman and French man, I would like to offer the eternal gratitude of our nation," Mr. Chirac said on a stage facing the graves here.
France will "never forget what it owes to America, its friend forever," Mr. Chirac said.
Mr. Bush said that France was "America's first friend in the world," a reference to the assistance the colonial Americans received from France inthe Revolutionary War.
Above Mr. Bush fluttered an American flag flying at half-mast to honor former President Ronald Reagan, who died Saturday at 93. Twenty years ago Mr. Reagan gave one of the most memorable speeches of his presidency here to mark the 40th anniversary of D-Day, linking the use of American power to free Europe from fascism to his efforts to confront and defeat communism.
"He was a courageous man himself, and a gallant leader in the cause of freedom," Mr. Bush said of Mr. Reagan.
Like Mr. Reagan did in 1984, Mr. Bush came here as a candidate for re-election, and his appearance provided him the kind of platform that gives incumbents such an advantage. Representing the country before the world and celebrating one of the most pivotal moments of the 20th century, Mr. Bush on one level transcended domestic politics.
But the very act of taking on that statesmanlike role gave him a political opportunity. In the heat of a presidential campaign that seems likely to hinge in large part on voters' judgments of his role as commander in chief at a time when American troops are dying in Iraq, it allowed him to associate himself with the same ideal invoked by Mr. Reagan: using military might for liberation, not conquest, working with allies to ensure freedom and prosperity, not to impose ideology.
Mr. Bush never explicitly mentioned Iraq. But he suggested that France, the United States and the other nations they stood with through the Cold War and into a new millennium need now, as much as ever, to stick together in the face of new threats.
"The nations that battled across the continent would become trusted partners in the cause of peace," Mr. Bush said. "And our great alliance of freedom is strong, and it is still needed today."
Like the soldiers who crossed the English Channel from Britain 60 years ago only after bad weather led to the cancellation of the original plan to invade on July 5, Mr. Bush was bedeviled by fog on his way in. Air Force One arrived an hour late from Paris after being forced to pull up from two attempted landings in Caen and circle until the heavy fog cleared.
But a warm sun was out by the time Mr. Bush delivered his address here, the Channel to his right, the 22-foot memorial statue, "The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves" behind him.
The only guns fired were in salute, the only boats offshore three ships providing security. The crowd included the actor Tom Hanks and the director Steven Spielberg, whose work together on "Saving Private Ryan" and the television adaptation of "Band of Brothers" did much to focus the attention of younger generations on the bloody everyday heroism of the GI's who pushed from the French coast toward Berlin.
Lester Baumann of Parma, Ohio, now 83, was a 23-year- old who came ashore here on D-Day with a naval combat demolition unit, given the job of clearing the beach of the obstacles placed there by the Germans to impede the invasion.
"It's exciting, and it brings back a lot of good and bad memories," Mr. Baumann said. "It was a fouled-up mess, that's what it was like for me. It went wrong from the very beginning."
His landing craft went off course, got stuck on a sandbar and was raked by machine gun fire, Mr. Baumann said. He jumped into the water, which was over his head, struggled to shore, and two hours later was hit by a German mortar shell that killed four American soldiers and wounded five others plus himself.
Mr. Baumann said he had no objection to the German chancellor being invited to the D-Day commemoration. But he said he was a little disappointed in the Germans and the French for not supporting the United States in Iraq. "But I'm a little disappointed with Bush for his misreading of the intelligence," Mr. Baumann added while waiting for the president to arrive.
Residents of Normandy who attended the ceremonies recalled, many with remarkable clarity, the events of June 6.
Jeanine Hardy, 83, a resident of Caen, said she remembered hearing earthshaking bombardments and peering out of the window of her house. Caen is perhaps 15 kilometers inland, or about 10 miles, from the D-Day beaches.
"The sky was completely red," she remembered. "I knew it had begun."
Thomas Fuller and Katrin Bennhold of The International Herald Tribune and Elaine Sciolino of The Tims contributed reporting for this article.
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A 9/11 Lesson: Don't Photograph the Water
June 6, 2004
By LISA W. FODERARO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/nyregion/06hudson.html?pagewanted=all&position=
HUDSON, N.Y. - On a cloudless autumn day three years ago, Ansar Mahmood, a pizza deliveryman for a Domino's near here, took a few hours off from work to snap pictures of the Hudson River amid the foliage, to send home to his family in Pakistan.
Mr. Mahmood had seen the view from a customer's house on Rossman Avenue, but was told it was even better up the street. So up he went, to a bluff overlooking the river and the Catskill Mountains next to some official-looking buildings. He said he knocked on a door and asked an employee to take his picture. "He said, 'Of course, of course,' " Mr. Mahmood recalled.
That moment marked the end of Mr. Mahmood's brief American dream, as he stumbled into a vortex of fear, politics and deportation proceedings.
The official-looking buildings turned out to be a water-treatment plant for the city of Hudson. The crisp afternoon fell exactly four weeks after Sept. 11, when the nation was panicked at the possibility of more terror attacks, including poisoned drinking water.
And Mr. Mahmood - who had hit the ultimate jackpot for a young Pakistani when he won a green card through a lottery - was suddenly from the wrong part of the world.
Any notion that Mr. Mahmood was tied to terrorism quickly evaporated into the fluorescent ether of the Hudson police station. But he was soon charged with helping Pakistani friends whose visas had expired, an offense that led to his detention and pending deportation.
With his arrest, Mr. Mahmood became part of the wave of Arab and Muslim aliens and citizens who were detained for questioning in the two months after Sept. 11. A United States Department of Justice report estimates that 1,200 people were rounded up, but advocates for the detainees say the number was much higher. Like Mr. Mahmood, many were then prosecuted for immigration violations or past crimes.
But the moment also thrust him into the embrace of a local community of peace activists who took up his cause with a gritty intensity.
They circulated petitions and propelled Mr. Mahmood's story into a number of national media outlets. They strategized in weekly meetings and button-holed politicians in an effort to prevent his deportation, recently winning letters of support from seven United States senators, including Hillary Rodham Clinton.
They became so fond of Mr. Mahmood, a slight 26-year-old with a searching gaze and a quick grin, that they have traveled hours, individually and as a group, to visit him at a detention center outside Buffalo. One supporter awaits his call every Thursday between 2 and 4 p.m. Another sent him a copy of the Emily Dickinson poem "Hope Is the Thing With Feathers."
"We started doing this from an abstract, idealistic point of view - that they can't pull someone off the streets of Hudson, that it was racial profiling - and all of that is still important," said Susan Davies, a supporter who prodded her fellow advocates from the nearby Chatham Peace Initiative to rally around Mr. Mahmood.
"But since then we've gotten to know Ansar very well," she added. "He's very spiritual and loves beauty and that's why he took that picture that got him into trouble in the first place."
When Mr. Mahmood returned to the Domino's in Greenport later that evening, on Oct. 9, two police officers were waiting for him. (A treatment plant worker had reported him after he left.) The next 24 hours, he said, were a frightening blur.
He was handcuffed and placed in a holding area at the police station, in Hudson. There he was questioned by a stream of federal agents who had converged on this quiet city in Columbia County, a popular antiques center 109 miles north of New York City.
They wanted to know why he was interested in the water-treatment facility, what connection he had to the World Trade Center attack. Mr. Mahmood recalled explaining that he did not even know that there was a water-treatment plant.
Eventually, the investigators found that he was just a hapless immigrant taking pictures. As Senator Charles E. Schumer wrote in March, calling for his release, Mr. Mahmood was "cleared by the F.B.I. of any suspected terrorist activity, including tampering with the water supply."
But during a search of Mr. Mahmood's apartment, law enforcement officials uncovered evidence that he had helped a Pakistani couple by co-signing their apartment lease and registering their car in his name. In an interview from the detention center in Batavia, N.Y., Mr. Mahmood said he was a good friend of the couple's: the woman's brother was his best friend in Pakistan.
But he said that he did not know they were here illegally, explaining that it would have been rude to discuss their immigration status. "They never ask me if I have a green card, and I cannot ask them either," he said.
Mr. Mahmood was then charged with harboring illegal aliens, which is a felony, and following the advice of his court-appointed lawyer, pleaded guilty. In January 2002, he was sentenced to five years' probation and time served. But by pleading guilty, he was automatically subject to deportation and detention.
One of nine children from a poor family in Punjab, Mr. Mahmood is now waiting for the federal Department of Homeland Security to decide whether he can somehow find a way back to his former life.
It was a life in which he worked up to 14 hours a day, earning enough money to send home $400 to $500 a month to his ailing parents. The money had allowed his three younger sisters to attend good schools for the first time. "Everything was looking up," he said, and his family had begged him to send home photographs of the Hudson region where he had settled.
Through a new lawyer, Mr. Mahmood has asked the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, to release him despite his guilty plea.
Specifically, he is seeking to have his deportation deferred, a rare status that would allow him to stay in the country with working papers under a supervised release.
"It's very discretionary," said his new lawyer, Rolando R. Velasquez, who took the case pro bono. "It's something that is only used in exceptional circumstances, and we're hoping that this qualifies."
A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Michael W. Gilhooly, said that the agency could not act on Mr. Mahmood's petition until an appeal that he has pending in federal court is withdrawn. Mr. Velasquez said the appeal would be withdrawn shortly.
Mr. Mahmood's supporters, who recently worked through a 21-point agenda at a weekly gathering in the village of Chatham, are optimistic. "They can't afford to deport him, not in the face of Abu Ghraib and seven senators," said Bob Elmendorf, a retired state employee and the one who reserves Thursday afternoons for their phone conversation.
Indeed, the latest coup was a May 21 letter of support from five Democratic United States senators addressed to the homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge. The letter - signed by Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Jon S. Corzine of New Jersey, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont - cited a report last year from the Justice Department's own inspector general that criticized the roundup and detention of hundreds of Muslim and Arab immigrants after Sept. 11.
The report, the letter said, "noted that 'it is unlikely that most if not all of the individuals arrested would have been pursued by law enforcement' but for the Sept. 11th investigation and that 'some appear to have been arrested more by virtue of chance encounters ....' " Mr. Mahmood's core group of seven supporters has tried to keep the heat on. In late May they organized a call-in to an immigration official in Buffalo, and they are now arranging a tour of the detention center.
They have also assured federal officials that Mr. Mahmood will be well positioned upon his release.
"He has at least 10 to 15 offers of a place to live and all kinds of offers for jobs," said Azim Goldrick, a handyman who has visited Mr. Mahmood four times.
Not everyone in Columbia County believes Mr. Mahmood should be allowed to stay, however. Robert Nedwick, a 32-year-old construction worker, lives on Rossman Avenue near the water-treatment plant.
"He got caught trespassing and that led to this other thing he got in trouble for," he said. "If you break the law, you should be punished."
But his supporters are encouraged that they now have more than 2,000 signatures on a petition. And their unrelenting advocacy will continue, they say, until Mr. Mahmood is released or deported.
"There have been thousands of deportations since 9/11 for very bureaucratic reasons and glitches," said Marcie Gardner, a supporter. "But he is someone taken from our midst. He was taken 20 minutes from where I live, and that's not O.K."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Trouble in Private U.S. Jails Preceded Job Fixing Iraq's
June 6, 2004
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/national/06jail.html?pagewanted=all&position=
SANTA FE, N.M. - Tyson Johnson was in the Santa Fe County jail here in January 2002, awaiting trial on charges of stalking and aggravated assault, when his longtime claustrophobia gave him anxiety attacks and he asked to see a psychiatrist.
But the jail, which is run by a private prison company, Management and Training Corporation, did not have a psychiatrist or a psychologist. So Mr. Johnson tried slitting his wrist and neck with a razor, and when that failed, he told the jail's nurse, Sheila Turner, "Today I am going to take myself out."
A guard, Crystal Quintana, told investigators that the nurse replied, "Let him." Ms. Turner denies this, her lawyer says.
Ten minutes later, Mr. Johnson, 27 and with no previous criminal record, was found hanging from a sprinkler head in a windowless isolation cell where he was supposedly being closely watched.
The account is taken from a lengthy Justice Department report, depositions in a civil lawsuit filed by Mr. Johnson's mother, Suzan Garcia, and statements by guards to investigators. And the Justice Department report prompts another question: Why did Attorney General John Ashcroft pick an executive of Management and Training, Lane McCotter, to lead a mission to Iraq to restore its prisons only a month after the report was released in the spring of 2003, charging unconstitutional practices in the jail?
Justice Department officials have repeatedly declined to answer questions about how Mr. McCotter was picked, including a series of written requests from Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. But the department's findings about Management and Training's operation of the jail were so severe that the United States Marshal's Service withdrew more than 100 inmates it was housing there.
It was Mr. McCotter, by his own account in Corrections.com, an industry online magazine, who selected Abu Ghraib to be the main American prison in Iraq and then directed its reconstruction after the major fighting ended. (Mr. McCotter left Iraq in September 2003, before the worst abuses by American guards there took place, and no one has suggested he bears responsibility.)
Mr. McCotter, who is director of business development for Management and Training, has declined all requests for interviews.
Experts say the troubles in the Santa Fe jail are emblematic of the problems that often happen when cities and states turn to private companies to run their jails and prisons. Private prison companies are in business to make money, for their owners or shareholders, and the only way they can do that is to operate at a lower cost than city- and state-operated jails and prisons, said Judith Greene, a criminal justice policy analyst in Brooklyn who has written extensively about private prisons. In practice, Ms. Greene said, this has often meant private prison companies pay their guards less, provide less training and skimp on services like medical and mental health care.
"This goes to the heart of the problem in the private prison business," Ms. Greene said. "You get what you pay for."
Carl Stuart, a spokesman for Management and Training, in Centerville, Utah, said he could not comment on questions raised by the Justice Department report about the size of the jail's staff or its medical personnel "because there is still pending litigation."
But Mr. Stuart said that after the Justice Department issued its critical report last year, "we've worked hard to remedy their concerns and we feel like we have gained a lot of ground."
The Justice Department investigation of the Santa Fe jail, conducted by four experts for the department's Civil Rights Division, cataloged a series of problems that seemed to stem from an effort to keep costs down.
The nearest doctor on contract was in Lubbock, Tex., a two-hour plane flight away, and he visited the jail on average only every six weeks, seeing only a few patients each time, the report found. The nurse had an order in her file to spend no more than five minutes with any inmate patient, which the report said was not enough time.
There was no psychologist or psychiatrist, and although the nurse had no mental health training care, she was distributing drugs for mentally ill inmates, the report said.
The jail did have a mental health clinician, Thomas Welter, who was employed by Physicians Network Association, a subcontractor. But he never did any evaluations of mentally troubled inmates, the report said. Instead, he boasted to them about his own history of drug use, according to a recent deposition by Cody Graham, who was then warden of the Santa Fe jail. Not long after Mr. Johnson hanged himself, Mr. Graham escorted Mr. Welter to the gate and told him not to come back.
Asked to comment, Mr. Welter's lawyer, Robert Corchine, said Mr. Welter "categorically denies the allegations in the suit filed by Tyson Johnson's estate as well as the findings in the Justice Department report."
In his deposition, Mr. Graham also said there was no increase in guards or supervisory staff even though Mr. McCotter arranged a sizable increase in the number of inmates, to 580 from 180 in a matter of months, Mr. Graham said. But Mr. McCotter and other officials of Management and Training ignored his requests for a bigger staff. Another former official at the jail, Gregory Lee, a major who was second in command, said in his deposition that he grew frustrated because the pay for guards was so low - $8.50 an hour with no benefits - that the jail constantly lost staff members to a New Mexico state prison across the street.
Management and Training was spun off from the training division of Morton Thiokol, the defense contractor, and at first concentrated on training low-income youths for the Job Corps, said Mr. Stuart, the spokesman. But in the late 1980's, as the number of prisoners exploded around the nation and private prison companies began to boom, Management and Training, known as M.T.C., branched off into running its first prison, in California.
The company says on its Web site that it now guards 7,500 inmates in 11 jails and prisons. Until the recent publicity surrounding Mr. McCotter, it was less well known than its larger competitors like Corrections Corporations of America and the GEO Group, formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. Both have been criticized for understaffing, inmate escapes and their medical care.
In the Justice Department report on the Santa Fe jail, Manuel Romero, a prison consultant, wrote that the jail was so short staffed that one guard was expected to monitor 120 inmates for a 12-hour shift, with no relief for meals or going to the bathroom.
"This indicates that the staff are not in sufficient quantity to adequately supervise inmates," Mr. Romero wrote.
The Justice Department report also found that some inmates had to go two or three weeks without being given a pair of underwear. In addition, the report said, the jail's mattresses were old and cracked and some inmates were not given sheets.
The booking area was so crowded that some inmates lay on mattresses on the floor next to each other for up to five days, the report said. Some cells had no light, either from windows or electric lights.
Last December two inmates were stabbed and bludgeoned to death and seven others were injured in a riot at the company's Eagle Mountain Community Correctional Facility in the desert east of Los Angeles. After the riot, California closed the prison. In early May, an inmate was stabbed to death at the company's supermaximum-security prison in Penetanguishene, Ontario.
A survey by James Austin, a criminal justice researcher based in Washington, found there were 49 percent more assaults on guards per capita and 65 percent more assaults on other inmates in privately run prisons than in government-operated prisons nationwide.
Mr. Johnson's mother, Ms. Garcia, said her son had called her often after being put in jail to complain about how his claustrophobia was bothering him. "He called and told me he couldn't breathe, that he was getting more and more claustrophobic," she said.
"I called the jail and asked to speak to a doctor, but they said they didn't have a doctor," Ms. Garcia said. "When I asked to speak to the warden, they just put me on hold and then the phone would disconnect."
In the end, said Jeffrey Haas, another lawyer for Ms. Garcia, when a guard noticed Mr. Johnson had hanged himself, the officer on duty first went looking for a camera to record the scene, rather than cut him down.
"The response of the jail was to protect themselves by taking pictures rather than to save his life," Mr. Haas said.
-------- terrorism
Rumsfeld Shows Concern on Terror War
Associated Press
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19406-2004Jun6.html
SINGAPORE, June 5 -- The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the war against terror but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Saturday.
The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed "zealots and despots" bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
"It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this," Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
His remarks showed a level of concern about the long-term direction of the U.S.-led global fight against terrorism that Rumsfeld rarely addresses in public.
The Pentagon chief usually lauds the efforts of U.S. troops, denounces terrorist networks and urges other countries to join the effort to stop terrorist acts.
On Saturday he went further, saying that while terrorists must be confronted, the bigger problem is the extremist Islamic ideology that produces them.
"What you have is a civil war in that religion where a small minority are trying to hijack it," he said.
Later Saturday, in Bangladesh, Rumsfeld discussed that South Asian nation's possible interest in sending peacekeepers to Iraq after an interim government in Baghdad takes limited political control on June 30.
After meeting with Bangladesh's Foreign Minister M. Morshed Khan in Dhaka, the capital, Rumsfeld told reporters the two had spoken about Iraq and Afghanistan, but not the specifics of peacekeeping in those countries. Rumsfeld also had talks with Prime Minister Khaleda Zia and senior generals.
U.S. defense secretaries rarely visit Bangladesh, but Rumsfeld wanted to draw attention to the mostly Muslim nation as a moderate Islamic country that denounces terrorism. While thousands of anti-American protesters took to the streets of Dhaka on Friday, there was no sign of hostility when Rumsfeld's entourage drove through the capital on Saturday.
In other parts of the city, however, a few hundred protesters from the Islamic Constitutional Movement, carried anti-Rumsfeld placards and burned a replica of a U.S. flag.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Leak Probe Appears To Be in Active Phase
By Susan Schmidt and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19137-2004Jun5.html
Vice President Cheney's recent interview with representatives of a special prosecutor looking into the leak of a covert CIA officer's name is the latest suggestion that the grand jury probe is in a highly active phase.
News of the Cheney interview, confirmed yesterday by a government official who was briefed on it and who refused to be identified publicly, comes on the heels of last week's disclosure that President Bush has lined up a private attorney in case special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald seeks to question him about the public disclosure last summer of the identity of CIA employee Valerie Plame. The grand jury investigation, now in its sixth month, has for the most part been conducted in extraordinary secrecy because it involves a national security matter.
In recent weeks, however, prosecutors have subpoenaed at least two reporters and sought to interview others in an effort to learn whether Plame's identity was intentionally disclosed by administration officials who sought to cast doubt on the credibility of her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV.
In 2002, the CIA sent Wilson to the African nation of Niger to investigate claims that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium there. The agency asked Wilson to make the trip after Cheney asked for more information about the Niger claims. Wilson, a critic of the Iraq war, publicly charged a year ago that the administration had exaggerated Iraq's efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Last July, syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that two administration officials told him Wilson was selected for the mission by his wife, Plame, a CIA specialist on weapons of mass destruction. Disclosure of a covert officer's name is a criminal act if it is done intentionally by someone authorized to have the information.
Lawyers representing witnesses in the case said the latest flurry of witness interview requests could signal that prosecutors are about to bring the investigation to a close. Several lawyers said they expect Fitzgerald would want to talk to Bush and Cheney no matter how his investigation comes out in the end.
"It was inevitable he would talk to both of them," one lawyer said. He, like other lawyers in the case, asked not to be quoted by name.
The White House declined to comment on Cheney's interview with prosecutors, which was first reported Friday night by the New York Times, or to say when it occurred. Cheney's office referred inquiries to Fitzgerald's office, which has declined to comment on any aspect of the investigation. Cheney's attorney, Terrence O'Donnell, did not return phone calls for comment.
--------
INVESTIGATIONS
Wide Gaps Seen in U.S. Inquiries on Prison Abuse
June 6, 2004
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/international/middleeast/06ABUS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 5 - Disparate inquiries into abuses of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan have so far left crucial questions of policy and operations unexamined, according to lawmakers from both parties and outside military experts, who say that the accountability of senior officers and Pentagon officials may remain unanswered as a result.
No investigation completely independent of the Pentagon exists to determine what led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, and so far there has been no groundswell in Congress or elsewhere to create one.
But on Capitol Hill, even some Republicans have begun to question whether the Pentagon's inquiries are too narrowly structured to establish the causes of the abuses, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have pledged to do, and then to determine if anyone in the chain of command was responsible for them.
Some House Republicans, bucking their leaders who have said the focus on Abu Ghraib is distracting from the larger effort in Iraq, have joined Democrats in urging a more aggressive review of the investigations. In the Senate, members of both parties said there remained major aspects that fell outside the scope of any of the investigations that are under way - including the role of military lawyers in drafting policy on detainees and the involvement of civilian contractors in their interrogations.
Senator Lindsay O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said he was troubled that the only criminal cases brought so far involved seven low-ranking soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company. He said he believed that there was "command failure at many levels that could be criminally culpable."
Representative Heather Wilson, a New Mexico Republican and former Air Force officer, was unsparing in her assessment of the House's investigative oversight role to date: "We should be doing this directly and bluntly, and in the House we are not. It's been very disappointing to me."
The top military spokesman in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, this week defended the range and scope of the various military investigations. "We're going to go wide, we're going to go deep, we're going to look under every rock and find out just how far this went," he said.
Dozens of criminal investigations into accusations of abuses against prisoners have yet to be resolved, and some may never be, officials concede. Additional criminal cases stemming from the abuses at Abu Ghraib appear to have been put on hold while a separate investigation is completed into the role military intelligence soldiers may have played there and at other prisons in Iraq - an inquiry whose findings have been delayed at least until July.
In addition to the criminal cases, which have included investigations into the deaths of at least 40 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has ordered six inquiries or reviews since a soldier came forward in January with evidence of the Abu Ghraib abuses. Two have been completed. The others have narrow focus and limited scope; while in theory they could recommend criminal charges, that is not their focus.
Mr. Rumsfeld, facing criticism over his leadership and calls from some Democrats to resign, last month appointed a four-member panel, led by James R. Schlesinger, a former defense secretary, to assess whether the inquiries are sufficient. That has led some to push for broader inquiries under various authorities, possibly a select committee in Congress, a military court of inquiry, or a panel like the one created to investigate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The commission plans to begin interviews on June 14 at the Pentagon and by teleconference with officers in Iraq. It is building a staff of 25, including several military lawyers on loan from the Pentagon.
One of its members, Tillie K. Fowler, a former Republican congresswoman from Florida, said the commission intended to do a wide assessment, and would probably interview senior military officers, including Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq. But she also made it clear that Mr. Rumsfeld was not a focus.
"The secretary is an honest, decent, honorable man, who'd never condone this type of activity," she said in a telephone interview, referring to the images of naked, hooded and shackled prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib last fall. "This was not a tone set by the secretary."
Statements like Mrs. Fowler's have prompted some lawmakers and outside legal experts to question whether the Pentagon can be entrusted to investigate itself in a scandal that has badly tarnished the military and the United States.
"They have created a patchwork with cracks in it, and a lot will fall through it," said John D. Hutson, who served as the Navy's judge advocate general from 1997 to 2000 and is now the dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire. "There's no umbrella or overarching investigation that has the power to go wherever it leads."
Mark L. Waple, a civilian lawyer in North Carolina who represented a soldier ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing in the deaths of two prisoners in Afghanistan in 2002, said the Army's criminal investigators were well equipped to investigate individual crimes but less so to look at systemic problems.
According to documents that included investigative reports on the abuses, agents from the Army's Criminal Investigation Command focused intensely on securing known copies of the photographs but were cursory in questioning the role of the chain of command.
"It's easier for law enforcement to investigate the assault in the prison rather than the systemic problem of abuse of prisoners," Mr. Waple said.
Various military inquiries have tried to address some of these problems. The first major one, completed in February by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, concluded that military police at the prison had committed "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses." Despite complaints from lawmakers, the Pentagon still has not provided the Senate with important supporting documents from this report, including information on interrogation procedures at the prison. A second one, headed by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, is examining the role of military intelligence soldiers. After being granted a 30-day extension, he is now supposed to submit the report in July.
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, disclosed last month that a preliminary inquiry by the Army inspector general found problems with the training, organization and doctrine regarding military detention centers in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he said the inspector general found no "pattern of abuse" of prisoners in the central command's area of responsibility.
However, new figures reported by the Army on Friday showed that the number of criminal investigations into prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan had increased to 85 from 69 a month ago, suggesting more widespread problems.
In the Senate, Democrats and Republicans said they were not ready to accuse the Pentagon of failing to carry out a vigorous inquiry. At the same time, some said there were aspects that were not being explored.
Senator Graham said one was whether military lawyers had raised questions about detainee policies, only to be ignored by the Pentagon's civilian leaders.
Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, said "one of the critical unanswered questions" is at the heart of General Fay's review. "We really don't have a picture of whether this abuse was the brainchild of a small number of prison guards or whether it was something created or condoned by military intelligence officials," she said.
Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who is on the panel, said: "The real acid test will be how thorough and comprehensive the Fay report is. If it's just confined to the four walls of the prison or the instructions given there, it will create the appearance this is all being slow-walked."
James Ross, the senior legal adviser for Human Rights Watch in New York, questioned remarks by President Bush that he contended could prejudice any investigation of senior officials.
"It's very disconcerting to hear the president say it was just a few bad apples, which is a conclusion about how high the case goes," Mr. Ross said. "I don't think we know how high the case goes."
Mr. Hutson, the former Navy judge advocate, said the myriad investigations had blurred the distinction between criminal cases and institutional or bureaucratic problems. He said General Taguba's investigation was thorough, but was not intended to satisfy the requirements for a court-martial.
"I think in a very narrow sense we'll see that justice was done for the seven low-level soldiers, or whatever number it ends up being," he said. "Whether justice is done for the more senior people implicated remains to be seen. I don't hold out great hope that any of these investigations are going to result in that."
-------- us politics
Kerry Faces the World
What would a John Kerry foreign policy look like? In some ways a lot like one the current President's father could endorse
by Joshua Micah Marshall
The Atlantic Monthly
July/August 2004 Posted online June 6, 2004
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/07/marshall.htm
In early February I sat in a Starbucks in downtown Washington with Dan Feldman, who is helping to organize Senator John Kerry's foreign-policy team. We discussed Kerry's vision of America's role in the world, and the people who might play important roles in his Administration if he is elected President, touching on everything from the crucial issue of Iraq and the simmering crises in North Korea and Iran to NATO and the proper balance between international alliances and the brute force necessary to secure American interests abroad-collectively, the foreign-policy questions that are central to the next election, and to the next four years.
Even before Kerry triumphed in the primaries, foreign policy generally, and Iraq specifically, dominated the campaign-a state of affairs from which he unquestionably benefited, though the benefits may not hold indefinitely. His experience, both as a senator and as a combat veteran, proved instrumental in his victory, and as the situation deteriorates overseas, he and Bush, who was expected to be comfortably ahead, are essentially running neck and neck. At the same time, Kerry has come under constant attack for failing to articulate a clear plan to halt Iraq's slide into anarchy.
As we discussed this, Feldman outlined a course that starkly departed from the one charted by President Bush, yet was equally unlike the approach-characterized by soft multilateralism and fealty to the United Nations-portrayed by Republicans as typical of Democratic foreign policy. Feldman emphasized the need for skilled diplomatic management and a willingness to use force abroad, but also an essential caution. The more he spoke, the more he called to mind the policies of the first Bush Administration.
George H.W. Bush has receded into history. But his Administration's traditional if unimaginative attitude toward foreign relations lives on through his National Security Adviser, Brent Scowcroft, who re-emerged two years ago as one of the most unabashed and difficult-to-dismiss critics of the buildup to war in Iraq. Democrats once viewed Scowcroft as the champion of an amoral and shortsighted foreign policy that sacrificed American values in order to achieve stable relations with great powers and avoid trouble in hot spots like the Balkans (a view, incidentally, shared by many of the neoconservatives who surround the current President). It was Scowcroft who secretly traveled to Beijing shortly after the Tiananmen Square massacre to reassure the Chinese that government-to-government relations needn't suffer despite the bipartisan indignation of the American public. But in 2002, lacking a consistent criticism of the drive toward war, many Democrats eagerly took shelter in Scowcroft's high-profile opposition.
Wondering how he would take it, I said to Feldman, "What you're describing to me sounds a lot like what I'd expect from Brent Scowcroft."
"Yes," he said. "I think a lot of what you'd see from a Kerry Administration might be like that. I think there'd be a lot of similarities." When I later made the same suggestion to Kerry's chief foreign-policy adviser, Rand Beers, he agreed.
John Kerry has yet to flesh out his positions on many key foreign-policy questions. But he has nonetheless provided clues-through his speeches, public statements, and choice of advisers-to how he would govern if elected. What's more, it's not difficult to identify the people he would be likely to rely on in the area of foreign policy-they're a close-knit group, many of them veterans of the Clinton Administration. During the spring I interviewed a wide range of people who are in the running for roles in a Kerry Administration, including such probable candidates for Secretary of State as Senator Joseph Biden and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, current Kerry advisers such as Jonathan Winer and Rand Beers, and many of the lower-level bureaucrats and congressional staffers who would fill out the foreign-policy apparatus of a new Democratic Administration.
Last December, Kerry delivered a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations titled "Making America Secure Again," in which he declared, "Those of us who seek the Democratic presidential nomination owe the American people more than just anger, more than just criticisms of the Bush policy, or even piecemeal solutions. We need to convince America that we Democrats are responsible stewards of our national security and of America's role in the world."
As a Democrat trying to unseat a Republican in time of war, Kerry faces a historic challenge. In the period after Vietnam the Democratic Party became a house divided against itself, with an articulate and energetic dovish base battling a diffuse but larger Cold War constituency. This had two effects. First, it created a poisonous dynamic whereby Democratic politicians came to approach national-security policy less in substantive than in tactical terms-searching for the sweet spot of political safety or attempting to dispense with national security as quickly as possible in order to move on to matters with which they were more comfortable. Over the years this habit of reflexively adopting the politically expedient position sent voters a clear message: many Democratic politicians were just not serious about national security. The second effect was to cede the ideological and intellectual battlefield to Republicans. In the post-Cold War era Republicans developed a foreign-policy vision based on the notion that America should aggressively assert itself abroad, and in which the problem of Saddam Hussein became an idée fixe.
These twin perceptions-of Democratic feebleness and Republican assuredness-combined to devastating effect in the 2002 elections. Democrats were trounced, and President Bush seemed unstoppable. But as conditions in Iraq have grown steadily worse, the terrain has shifted. What voters once viewed as the President's steely resolve many now see as stubbornness, which has led to skepticism about his practical know-how and ability to carry out the mission of stabilizing and democratizing Iraq. Against this backdrop Kerry's foreign policy could prove attractive. Democratic foreign-policy hands tend to be less ideologically driven than Republican ones. Their strengths lean toward technocratic expertise and procedural competence rather than theories and grand visions. This lack of partisan edge is best illustrated by the fact that two of Kerry's top advisers served on Bush's National Security Council staff as recently as last year (Beers as senior director for counterterrorism, and Flynt Leverett as senior director for Middle East initiatives). The team that advised candidate Bush in 1999 and 2000-the so-called "Vulcans"-was practically the mirror opposite of the Kerry team. Though all its members had served at least one stint in government, most had held political appointments rather than working for decades in the security bureaucracy, as Beers did. And whereas Kerry's team is the embodiment of the nation's professional national-security apparatus, key members of Bush's team, such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had spent entire careers trying to overthrow it.
In a telling sign of the parties' differences on foreign policy, discussion of the next Secretary of State is rampant among Democrats. (The issue of who would run the Pentagon-more of a power base in Republican Administrations, particularly this one-is a subject of much less debate.) Speculation focuses primarily on Richard Holbrooke, Clinton's former ambassador to the United Nations, who gained fame and no little notoriety for his peacemaking efforts in Bosnia; and Joseph Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who remains its senior Democratic member. Both men are stars in the somewhat gray firmament of Democratic foreign policy; both boast outsize personalities and loyal followings; and the two scarcely differ in their approach to the major foreign-policy issues of the moment.
Other key appointments would most likely be filled by the advisers who have surrounded Kerry since he launched his bid for the nomination. Rand Beers is often touted as a Democratic successor to Condoleezza Rice; he functioned as the equivalent of a National Security Adviser to Kerry throughout the primaries, crafting many of his policy positions. Others who figure prominently are Nancy Stetson, the chief foreign-policy adviser on Kerry's Senate staff, and Jonathan Winer, a longtime aide who specialized in international money laundering and terrorist financial networks for Kerry in the 1980s and early 1990s, and later in Clinton's State Department.
From the archives:
"Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong" (January/February 2004) How could we have been so far off in our estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs? A detailed account of how and why we erred. By Kenneth M. Pollack
From Atlantic Unbound:
Interviews: "Weapons of Misperception" (January 13, 2004) Kenneth M. Pollack, the author of The Threatening Storm, explains how the road to war with Iraq was paved with misleading and manipulated intelligence. A number of former Clinton officials, turned out by Bush's victory, would probably return to fill additional positions in a Kerry Administration. Some likely candidates are Ron Asmus (a State Department veteran and a possible assistant secretary of state for Europe), Jamie Rubin (Madeleine Albright's chief spokesman at the State Department), and several notable veterans of Clinton's National Security Council staff, including James Steinberg, Ivo Daalder, and Kenneth Pollack. Although some divisions exist among them (Daalder was an adviser to Howard Dean, for instance), these veterans tend to take a more hawkish approach to foreign policy than most professional Democrats of the post-Vietnam generation and even many current Democratic voters. Pollack is the author of The Threatening Storm, an influential book that argued for regime change in Iraq and was frequently cited by Republicans during the buildup to the invasion. Late last year, when Howard Dean was the front-runner, Pollack, Asmus, and another key Kerry adviser-the former State Department official Greg Craig-signed a manifesto titled "Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy," which aimed to put the Democratic foreign-policy establishment on record against Dean's perceived slide toward the party's dovish past.
Over the course of Clinton's presidency, especially during his second term, the President's foreign-policy team crafted a new vision of how America should engage with the post-Cold War world. Because this process got into gear well before 9/11, when the world was less keenly attuned to lofty questions of foreign policy, their vision received far less attention than the high-octane theorizing of Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and the neocons before and after the attacks. Nevertheless, it offers a road map to the probable overall direction of a Kerry Administration-one that might surprise people familiar with Kerry only through his relentless criticism of Bush on the campaign trail. These ex-Clintonites are quite comfortable with the use of force, and actually agree with the Bush Administration on some key goals-for instance, exporting democracy and political liberalization-though they differ significantly on how they would pursue them. They also differ on the question of where the true threats to America lie and how to combat them. Kerry's advisers focus less exclusively on nation-states like those Bush identified in his infamous "Axis of Evil" speech and more on the host of diffuse dangers that have arisen in the wake of globalization: destabilization, arms smuggling, and terrorism.
As the situation in Iraq has worsened, Kerry has stepped up his criticism of the Bush Administration. In an April 30 speech at Westminster College, Kerry laid out a three-part plan for the occupation and reconstruction of the country. First he would expand and internationalize the security force by seeking the support of the UK, France, Russia, and China, and also NATO, which, he suggested, might take control of the borders and train Iraq's army. Second he would propose an international high commissioner to oversee elections, write a constitution, and organize the reconstruction efforts. Third he would launch a "massive training effort" to expand Iraqi security forces. Taking those steps, Kerry declared, "is the only way to succeed in the mission while ending the sense of an American occupation." On the surface this may sound like merely a difference of emphasis-as though the only change Kerry proposes is a dash more multilateralism and UN involvement. But beyond specifics, the significance of which can be misinterpreted, lies a fundamental difference in world view between Democrats and Republicans-a difference in how they see the nature of the threat facing America. This, more than any distinction between hawk and dove, is also the fundamental foreign-policy difference between Bush and Kerry.
From its inception the Bush Administration has viewed states as the key actors on the world stage, and relations among them as the primary concern of U.S. foreign policy. It is a mindset rooted in the realities of the Cold War, which defined U.S. foreign policy at the time when most of the President's key advisers gained their formative experience in government. The fixity of this mindset also explains why the Bush Administration spent its first months so heavily focused on the issue of national missile defense, and seemed so surprised by al-Qaeda's transnational terrorism. The Bush team didn't discount the problem of weapons of mass destruction; it simply expected trouble to come from an ICBM-wielding "rogue state" like Iraq or North Korea, rather than from Islamic terrorist groups.
Viewed through this lens, the Administration's fixation on Iraq after 9/11 becomes somewhat easier to understand. As Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith explained to Nicholas Lemann, of The New Yorker, on the eve of the Iraq War, "One of the principal strategic thoughts underlying our strategy in the war on terrorism is the importance of the connection between terrorist organizations and their state sponsors. Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they don't have support from states."
To the Democrats in Kerry's orbit, this approach is at best inefficient and at worst akin to fighting fire with gasoline-for example, it has created terrorism in Iraq where little or none previously existed. Last fall, when I asked the presidential candidate General Wesley Clark about Feith's characterization of the threat, he said it was the "principal strategic mistake behind the Administration's policy." Clark went on, "If you look at all the states that were named as the principal adversaries, they're on the periphery of international terrorism today."
First as a military negotiator in Bosnia and later as NATO Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the second Clinton Administration, Clark was one of the figures at the center of the process that shaped current Democratic foreign-policy views. In its early years, rhetoric aside, the Clinton Administration hewed closely to George H.W. Bush's policy of studied non-involvement in the Balkans, even as Yugoslavia slid into chaos. But over time that region became a forcing ground for re-evaluating Democratic beliefs about foreign policy. The Balkans proved that soft-sounding concerns like human-rights abuses, ethnic slaughter, lawlessness, and ideological extremism could quickly mount into first-order geopolitical crises.
By the mid-1990s this had led the Clinton Administration to focus on terrorism, failed states, and weapons proliferation, and as it did, its foreign-policy outlook changed. The key threats to the United States came to be seen less in terms of traditional conflicts between states and more in terms of endemic regional turmoil of the sort found in the Balkans. "The Clinton Administration," says Jonathan Winer, "started out with a very traditional Democratic or even mainstream approach to foreign policy: big-power politics, Russia being in the most important role; a critical relationship with China; European cooperation; and some multilateralism." But over the years, he went on, "they moved much more to a failed-state, global-affairs kind of approach, recognizing that the trends established by globalization required you to think about foreign policy in a more synthetic and integrated fashion than nation-state to nation-state."
As Winer argues, the threats were less from Russia or China, or even from the rogue states, than from the breakdown of sovereignty and authority in a broad geographic arc that stretched from West Africa through the Middle East, down through the lands of Islam, and into Southeast Asia. In this part of the world poverty, disease, ignorance, fanaticism, and autocracy frequently combined in a self-reinforcing tangle, fostering constant turmoil. Home to many failed or failing states, this area bred money laundering, waves of refugees, drug production, gunrunning, and terrorist networks-the cancers of the twenty-first-century world order.
In the Balkans, Holbrooke, Clark, and other leading figures found themselves confronting problems that required not only American military force but also a careful synthesis of armed power, peacekeeping capacity, international institutions, and nongovernmental organizations to stabilize the region and maintain some kind of order. Though the former Yugoslavia has continued to experience strife, the settlement in the Balkans remains the most successful one in recent memory, and offers the model on which a Kerry Administration would probably build. As Holbrooke told me, the Bush Administration's actions in Iraq have shown that the Administration understands only the military component of this model: "Most of them don't have a real understanding of what it takes to do nation-building, which is an important part of the overall democratic process."
A key assumption shared by almost all Democratic foreign-policy hands is that by themselves the violent overthrow of a government and the initiation of radical change from above almost never foster democracy, an expanded civil society, or greater openness. "If you have too much change too quickly," Winer says, "you have violence and repression. We don't want to see violence and repression in [the Middle East]. We want to see a greater zone for civilization-a greater zone for personal and private-sector activity and for governmental activity that is not an enactment of violence." Bush and his advisers have spoken eloquently about democratization. But in the view of their Democratic counterparts, their means of pursuing it are plainly counterproductive. It is here, Holbrooke says, that the Administration's alleged belief in the stabilizing role of liberal democracy and open society collides with its belief in the need to rule by force and, if necessary, violence: "The neoconservatives and the conservatives-and they both exist in uneasy tension within this Administration-shift unpredictably between advocacy of democratization and advocacy of neo-imperialism without any coherent intellectual position, except the importance of the use of force."
Because Afghanistan was the Bush Administration's first order of business following the 9/11 attacks, the results of this policy have advanced the furthest there. And because Kerry is on record as saying he would increase the number of U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, it's probably the clearest measure of how a Kerry Administration would differ from Bush's. Afghanistan is a subject that Kerry's advisers and other senior Democrats turn to again and again. When I interviewed Joseph Biden in late March, he recounted a conversation he'd had with Condoleezza Rice in the spring of 2002 about the growing instability that had taken hold after the Taliban was defeated, in late 2001. Biden told Rice he believed that the United States was on the verge of squandering its military victory by allowing the country to slip back into the corruption, tyranny, and chaos that had originally paved the way for Taliban rule. Rice was uncomprehending. "What do you mean?" he remembers her asking. Biden pointed to the re-emergence in western Afghanistan of Ismail Khan, the pre-Taliban warlord in Herat who quickly reclaimed power after the American victory. He told me: "She said, 'Look, al-Qaeda's not there. The Taliban's not there. There's security there.' I said, 'You mean turning it over to the warlords?' She said, 'Yeah, it's always been that way.'"
Biden was seeking to illustrate the blind spot that Democratic foreign-policy types see in Bush officials like Rice, who believe that if a rogue state has been rid of its hostile government (in this case the Taliban), its threat has therefore been neutralized. Democrats see Afghanistan as an affirmation of their own view of modern terrorism. As Fareed Zakaria noted recently in Newsweek, the Taliban regime was not so much a state sponsoring and directing a terrorist organization (the Republican view) as a terrorist organization sponsoring, guiding, and even hijacking a state (the Democratic view). Overthrowing regimes like that is at best only the first step in denying safe haven to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Equally important is creating the institutional bases of stability and liberalization that will prevent another descent into lawlessness and terror-in a word, nation-building.
This marriage of power and values is the essence of the foreign-policy vision espoused by leading Democratic thinkers. Out of political caution Kerry's campaign advisers still tend to seek the safety of a Scowcroftian middle ground, but the foreign-policy advisers who would serve President Kerry have quite a different vision-much more ambitious and expansive than anything pursued by the first Bush Administration. In my interviews with the people around Kerry, it became clear how this Democratic world view would apply to some of the major problem areas in the world. For example, Kerry Democrats do not believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the cause of Middle East instability and extremism. But they do believe that almost nothing the United States does to liberalize and pacify the region can have much chance of success so long as the standoff on the West Bank remains unresolved.
This is another area of disagreement between Bush and Kerry. Before the war Bush Administration hawks said that the road to Middle East peace ran through Baghdad. They meant that deposing Saddam Hussein would ease negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This claim was based on three beliefs: that ousting Saddam would remove a threat to the Israelis, making them more willing to accommodate; that regime change in Iraq would deprive Palestinians of a potential ally; and that building a modern democracy in the heart of the Middle East would blunt persistent doubts about U.S. intentions-doubts that had hampered previous efforts. Today that vision looks increasingly improbable, and Kerry's team believes it is deeply misguided.
The Kerry team's plan for handling the looming crises in North Korea and Iran is similarly distinct from the Bush Administration's, principally in its willingness to seek a negotiated settlement in each case. Whether such settlements can be achieved is debatable. But the approach is a marked departure from that of the Bush Administration, which has been unwilling to negotiate with the North Koreans but equally unwilling to risk using force-the only serious alternative to some sort of agreement.
On Iraq, Kerry's policy is more obscure, in part because, as his advisers point out, they simply don't know what the country will look like next January-and the possibilities are becoming ever more limited in light of the worsening state of affairs there. But Kerry's top advisers make clear that their main priorities would be internationalizing the occupation and adopting a broader regional approach to stabilizing the country. As the situation deteriorated throughout the spring, Bush grudgingly embraced several policy alternatives long advocated by his critics, including Kerry-such as increasing the number of troops in the country and creating a substantially larger role for the United Nations. But Kerry's advisers argue that the Bush team is simply too invested in ideology and too compromised by its mistakes in Iraq ever to truly make the right decisions. Some allies simply distrust the Administration too much to lend a hand. Only a new Administration, they argue, can make the clean break that America needs in Iraq.
Polls show that the public's faith in Bush's ability to manage foreign policy has dropped precipitously over the past year, and that more voters now oppose his Iraq policy than support it. With the economy stuck in an ambiguous middle ground, it seems likelier than ever that this election will turn on whether Kerry can convince voters that he offers a credible foreign-policy alternative.
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Reagan Had Long Struggle With Alzheimer's Disease
June 6, 2004
By MARILYN BERGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/obituaries/06REAG.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
Ronald Wilson Reagan, a former film star who became America's 40th president, the oldest to enter the White House but imbued with a youthful optimism rooted in the traditional virtues of a bygone era, died peacefully on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 93.
To a nation hungry for a hero, a nation battered by Vietnam, damaged by Watergate and humiliated by the taking of hostages in Iran, Ronald Reagan held out the promise of a return to greatness, the promise that America would "stand tall" again.
President Bush, who was in Paris for meetings with allies on the eve of the 60th anniversary of D-Day, said after he learned of Mr. Reagan's death, "A great American life has come to an end."
Mr. Bush said that under Mr. Reagan, "America laid to rest an era of division and self-doubt, and because of his leadership the world laid to rest an era of fear and tyranny."
Mr. Reagan lived longer than any United States president, spending his final years in seclusion and out of the public eye as he coped with the mental debilitation of Alzheimer's disease.
In 1994, he touched the hearts of Americans again when, in a handwritten letter, he let it be known he was suffering from the illness. "I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life," Mr. Reagan wrote. "I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead."
Last month, Nancy Reagan, the former first lady, said that his mental condition had worsened considerably. "Ronnie's long journey has finally taken him to a distant place where I can no longer reach him," she said.
When he first entered the White House, he was a vigorous 69-year-old Republican who called America back to the traditional values of a simpler era, promising he could make it "morning in America again."
He managed to project the optimism of Roosevelt, the faith in small-town America of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the vigor of John F. Kennedy. In his first term he restored much of America's faith in itself and in the presidency, and he rode into his second term on the crest of a wave of popularity that few presidents have enjoyed.
But late in 1986, halfway through his second term, Mr. Reagan and his administration were plunged into disarray by an effort to deal too rashly with the same kind of hostage crisis that he had accused former President JimmyCarter of handling too gingerly.
Contrary to official policy, Mr. Reagan's subordinates sold arms to Iran as ransom for hostages in Lebanon and diverted profits from the sales to the rebels fighting the Marxist Sandinistas then governing Nicaragua. A joint Congressional investigating committee reported that the affair had been "characterized by pervasive dishonesty and secrecy" and that Mr. Reagan bore ultimate responsibility for the wrongdoing of a "cabal of zealots."
The deception and disdain for the law invited comparisons to Watergate, undermined Mr. Reagan's credibility and severely weakened his powers of persuasion with Congress. Scrutiny of his appointees increased; Supreme Court nominees were rejected or withdrawn; and more of his aides were charged with ethics violations than in any other administration.
But until the Iran-contra affair, Mr. Reagan enjoyed tremendous popularity. He used that popularity and a consummate political skill to push many of his major programs through Congress. And despite the affair, he crowned his two terms with a nuclear arms agreement with the Soviet Union that reduced the nuclear arsenals of both countries for the first time, setting the stage for a new relationship with the Soviets under the leadership of Mikhail S. Gorbachev.
It was Mr. Reagan's good fortune that during his time in office the Soviet Union was undergoing profound change, eventually to collapse, setting off a spirited debate over Mr. Reagan's role in ending the cold war. His supporters argued that his tough policies were the coup de grâce and his detractors attributed the end to the accumulated influence of 45 years of the American policy of containment. But wherever the credit was due, the thaw came on his watch.
Michael R. Beschloss, the presidential historian, said he believed that the cold war had ended more quickly under Mr. Reagan than it would have had his opponent, Mr. Carter, been re-elected in 1980.
"With Reagan," Mr. Beschloss said, "the Soviets could no longer con themselves into thinking they would prevail in the cold war because the American people had lost their will and strength and lost their taste for confronting Soviet aggression. They were sufficiently convinced that Reagan meant business."
The Soviet economy, he said, was beginning to flag and Mr. Gorbachev was selected and "charged with improving the economy and making the best deal he could with the West."
Mr. Reagan, meanwhile, was able to climb the rocky road back from the Iran-contra scandal so successfully that he handed over the office to another Republican, George Bush, who had been his loyal vice president for eight years.
He won the hearts of Americans all over again in 1994 when, in a handwritten letter, he let it be known that he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease.
"I now begin the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life," Mr. Reagan wrote in a poignant note that once again displayed his characteristic patriotism and optimism. "I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead."
For some time after the disclosure of his illness, Mr. Reagan continued to go to his office in Los Angeles and, occasionally, to play golf. But as the disease took its toll, he receded into the background while his official biographer, Edmund Morris, completed the story of his life.
`America Is Back'
If the rise and fall and rise again of Ronald Reagan reads like the script of a made-for-television movie, the "Great Communicator" was indeed a made-for-television president. Seventy-seven years old at the end of his presidency, he never lost his boyish charm or his ability to look Americans in the eye and make them feel good about themselves. "America is back," he told them, and his confidence made them confident.
Critics and supporters alike found it paradoxical that Mr. Reagan, who campaigned against government for most of his political life, was the man who restored popular faith in the presidency and the American government. The 40th president was a combination of ideologue and pragmatist who could compromise and still appear to be a man of unbending principle.
His resilience and good humor after he was struck by an assailant's bullet in 1981 reinforced the public's affection for him. Gliding gracefully across the national stage with his boy-next-door good looks and his lopsided grin, he managed to escape blame for political disasters for which any other president would have been excoriated. If the federal deficit almost tripled in his presidency, if 241 marines he sent to Beirut were killed in a terrorist bombing, if he seemed to equate Nazi storm troopers with the victims of the Holocaust, he was always able to rekindle public support. He became known early on as the Teflon president.
His Hollywood background, long considered a liability, became his greatest asset in the political arena, and he was a master at using it to captivate the American people.
His extraordinary ability to communicate served him well until the Iran-contra affair. That is when his reluctance to deal with governmental processes, his habit of delegating authority and his failure to concern himself with facts, figures and details first became known to people outside his official family. Then a different image emerged: that of a passive president who reigned but did not rule.
From the first moment of a political career that spanned more than two decades, Mr. Reagan was a crusader, trying to correct what he saw as the governmental excesses that began with the New Deal. He preached the gospel of self-reliance. "Government is not the solution," he said over and over. "Government is the problem."
Against Mr. Carter's politics of sacrifice and retrenchment, Mr. Reagan offered an America of inexhaustible resources and boundless opportunity. And indeed, under his presidency came an end to the sharp inflation of the Carter years, along with a sustained economic boom that brought prosperity to regions hit hard by recession. But huge deficits, brought on partly by tax cuts and increases in military spending, made a mockery of his campaign pledge to balance the budget by the end of his first term.
Mr. Reagan did not change course. The America of his deepest convictions was a nation favored by God that would triumph over its adversaries abroad and its troubles at home if only it had the will to be strong and the sense to let free enterprise solve its problems.
A `Huck Finn Idyll'
Those beliefs were a heritage of his prairie small-town beginnings. He was born at home in an apartment above a store in Tampico, a village in northwestern Illinois, on Feb. 6, 1911. His father, John Edward Reagan, who was working as a clerk in the H. C. Pitney General Store, called his newborn son "a little bit of a fat Dutchman," and the nickname Dutch stayed with him.
Ronald Reagan was later to describe his father as a hearty Irish Roman Catholic who was restless, ambitious and an alcoholic. His mother, Nelle Wilson Reagan, was a gentle Scotch-Irish Protestant who passed on to her children her religious faith and her interest in amateur theater.
The family was poor, but Mr. Reagan wrote in his first autobiography, "Where's the Rest of Me?" (Duell, Sloan, Pearce, 1965), that he had never been troubled by any sense of need. He liked to remember his boyhood as "a rare Huck Finn idyll," and he developed a sunny nature and an irrepressible optimism.
He and his older brother, Neil, moved with their parents from one small Illinois town to the next. After living briefly in Chicago, they eventually settled in Dixon, where his father managed a shoe store for H. C. Pitney and Ronald finished grammar school and high school.
Despite extreme nearsightedness (later corrected with contact lenses), he played football at Northside High School. In his junior year he also won his first role in a play, "You and I," by Philip Barry. He was not an especially attentive student but managed to get fairly good grades with the help of a nearly photographic memory.
His name first appeared on the front page of a newspaper on Aug. 3, 1928, when he was cited for his 25th rescue as a lifeguard at Lowell Park in Dixon. In seven summers on the job he worked seven days a week, and the $15 a week, later raised to $20, helped pay for his college tuition.
He had an unsophisticated, unpretentious manner that stamped him as a product of his youth in the heartland. Throughout his long public career in the movies, on television and in politics, he never lost the shy tilt of the head and the puckish grin so favored by Hollywood.
He left Dixon to attend Eureka College, a small Christian school near Peoria. By his own account, he was concerned mainly with maintaining his eligibility for football and with acting in school productions.
With the nation mired in the Depression, the 21-year-old graduate had few prospects. It was 1932, and with little notion of what he wanted to do, he returned to Dixon. He grew to admire Roosevelt, who used his masterly command of radio to steady a nation in despair, and a former teacher urged Mr. Reagan to try his hand at radio, where he might capitalize on his interest in sports and acting. After some big stations turned him down he landed a job at WOC in Davenport, Iowa, broadcasting University of Iowa football games.
When the football season ended, Mr. Reagan was out of work again. But two months later, WOC hired him as a staff announcer at $100 a month. He learned how to read a script, rehearsing commercials until they sounded spontaneous. It was a talent he would use to great effect later in life.
Soon he was transferred to WOC's sister station, WHO in Des Moines, the major Midwestern outlet for the National Broadcasting Company. He conducted interviews and covered football, swimming and track, but he became best known for his play-by-play of major league baseball games.
His commentary became an exercise of imagination; he never saw any of the games he described so vividly. Instead, he recreated them from telegraphic reports from Chicago. In his 1965 autobiography, Mr. Reagan described what happened the day the wire went dead: "I had a ball on the way to the plate and there was no way to call it back. At the same time, I was convinced that a ball game tied up in the ninth inning was no time to tell my audience we had lost contact with the game." He proceeded to give meticulous descriptions of what may be the longest series of foul balls in baseball history, even describing in detail the redheaded boy who scrambled for a souvenir ball. It was a story he loved to tell.
Birth of the Gipper
In 1937, on a spring training trip with the Chicago Cubs, Mr. Reagan took an airplane to Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California. The flight was so turbulent that he refused to fly again for almost 30 years. But he took advantage of the trip to California to look up a friend from WHO, who by then had been in several movies. She arranged a meeting with an agent, the agent arranged a screen test, and by the time Mr. Reagan returned to Des Moines, a telegram was waiting. Warner Brothers was offering a seven-year contract beginning at $200 a week.
His first role was made to order for him. He played a radio news reporter in "Love Is on the Air," the first of many "good guy" parts. From the B pictures that Hollywood churned out in those years he moved up to bit parts in A movies. In three years he landed the role he coveted above all, as George Gipp, Notre Dame's legendary Gipper, in "Knute Rockne - All American." The film, with its heroic deathbed scene, provided Mr. Reagan with a line he came to use to inspire political supporters: "Win one for the Gipper."
He had parts in major movies with Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore and a chimp named Bonzo. Then, in 1941, he starred in "King's Row," which Mr. Reagan always called his finest picture.
He played the role of a small-town playboy whose legs are amputated by a sadistic doctor. Awaking from surgery, he cries out in anguish, "Where's the rest of me?" That line became the title of the campaign autobiography he wrote with Richard G. Hubler before his race for governor of California.
Flights of Imagination
He made 50 movies, a number of them about World War II. "The Hasty Heart," in 1950, took him overseas for the first and only time until he went into politics. In the war, poor eyesight had kept him from the front, and he spent his years in the Army making training films. But in his autobiography he wrote of wanting nothing more after the war than a good rest and time with his wife, the actress Jane Wyman; in fact, they had both been in Hollywood throughout the war.
His flights of imagination remained equally vivid when he went to the White House. In 1983 he told Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir of Israel that as part of his war duties he had been assigned to film the Nazi death camps. One of his favorite stories, one that he told over and over again to different audiences, concerned a pilot in World War II who told his crew to bail out of their crippled B-17 bomber. When the tail gunner said he could not move because he was badly wounded, the pilot replied, "Never mind son, we'll ride it down together." When he told the story to a meeting of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society he added that the pilot was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously. In fact, no medal was ever awarded for such an incident and the story came, almost word for word, from the script of a movie starring Dana Andrews called "Wing and a Prayer."
"For Ronald Reagan, the world of legend and myth is a real world," said Patrick J. Buchanan, a longtime political ally who was Mr. Reagan's director of White House communications. "He visits it regularly, and he's a happy man there."
Stormy Times for a Union Leader
Mr. Reagan had married Miss Wyman in 1940. They had a daughter, Maureen, and adopted a son, Michael. Miss Wyman divorced him in 1948, after Mr. Reagan had become active in the Screen Actors Guild. Miss Wyman told the court that although she did not share his interest in the guild, Mr. Reagan insisted that she attend meetings. Finally, she said, "there was nothing in common between us, nothing to sustain our marriage."
He was stunned by the divorce and often said his life did not become whole again until 1952, when he married Nancy Davis. An actress who was the daughter of a prominent Chicago surgeon, she became his political partner and adviser as well as his wife. They had two children, Patricia and Ronald.
Mr. Reagan never became a major star, but he continued to make movies and threw himself into the work of the guild. He was elected its president and re-elected five times, through some of the stormiest years in the history of the film industry. Mr. Reagan led his union's intercession in a jurisdictional struggle between two movie unions, one dominated by gangsters, the other accused of being led by Communists.
When he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 to testify about Communist influence in the movie industry, Mr. Reagan refused to name names before the committee. But the historian Garry Wills said the Federal Bureau of Investigation file on Mr. Reagan that was later released disclosed that he had named people in secret.
In those years Mr. Reagan was a Democrat and, as he later put it in his autobiography, "a near-hopeless hemophiliac liberal." In 1950 he actively supported Helen Gahagan Douglas, the liberal Democrat who was defeated by Richard M. Nixon in a California senatorial campaign that became a portent of an era of Red-baiting.
But behind the scenes, as president of the guild, he worked closely with the Motion Picture Industry Council to weed out Communist influence in Hollywood.
In 1952 the Music Corporation of America offered Mr. Reagan the role of host on one of its first major productions, General Electric Theater. It was on that broadcast that he became familiar to the first television generation, a familiarity that was to serve him well later.
For G.E., Country, and Goldwater
During his years on General Electric Theater, Mr. Reagan became the company spokesman, visiting G.E. plants around the country to give speeches and bolster employee morale. Hundreds of times a year he delivered a speech warning of a growing tide of government control and wasteful government programs. He was apparently so convincing that he convinced himself.
In 1962 he changed his party registration to Republican from Democratic, and two years later, with a polished version of the General Electric speech, Mr. Reagan burst onto the national political scene in a fund-raising appearance for Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential candidate. Here is how Lou Cannon described the event in his biography "Reagan" (Putnam, 1982):
"On Oct. 27, 1964, a washed-up 53-year-old movie actor named Ronald Reagan made a speech on national television on behalf of a Republican presidential candidate who had no chance to be elected. . . . Most of Reagan's address was standard, antigovernment boilerplate larded with emotional denunciations of Communism and a celebration of individual freedom. His statistics were sweeping and in some cases dubious. His best lines were cribbed from Franklin Roosevelt, and he quoted from nearly everybody else as well."
Mr. Cannon said the oratorical effort turned out to be the biggest moment in the Goldwater campaign, raising a million dollars.
Within a few months a group of wealthy Californians - Holmes Tuttle, A. C. Rubel and Henry Salvatori - formed a committee, Friends of Ronald Reagan, to initiate his 1966 candidacy for governor.
After Mr. Reagan defeated the incumbent, Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, by almost a million votes, his friends underwrote the most expensive inaugural celebration in California history. When Mrs. Reagan did not like the Victorian mansion provided for the governor, the friends bought the Reagans a house in Sacramento, just as they would buy the couple a house in the Bel-Air section of Los Angeles after they left the White House. The same California millionaires bought designer dresses for Nancy Reagan when she was first lady, until the practice was criticized as a breach of ethics.
Moving Beyond Sacramento
In Sacramento, Mr. Reagan found a Legislature controlled by Democrats who were unwilling to adopt his proposals to freeze hiring and cut the number of state employees. Time after time, the ideologue gave way to the pragmatist.
Mr. Reagan signed a succession of tax increases to erase the state's deficit. Mr. Reagan, who was later to oppose legalized abortion, signed a bill that essentially permitted abortion on demand. In his two terms, the budget more than doubled and the number of state employees grew by 34,000.
Mr. Reagan, who had been re-elected in 1970, decided not to seek a third term. In early 1975, nearing his 64th birthday, he left Sacramento to write a syndicated column, broadcast a daily radio commentary and prepare to run for the presidency.
In 1968 he briefly ran in the presidential primaries as the Republican to the right of Mr. Nixon. Eight years later he nearly wrested the nomination from the incumbent president, Gerald R. Ford.
In the early months of the 1980 campaign, Mr. Reagan made television appearances and sought to stay above the battle, acting as if the nomination was his. But George Bush won the Iowa caucuses in January. Abruptly Mr. Reagan changed his tactics, campaigning long and hard in New Hampshire, at one point working 21 consecutive days. By demonstrating vigor, Mr. Reagan defused concerns about his age (he turned 69 during the primary campaign) and won New Hampshire, drawing more than half the votes.
On July 16, 1980, in Detroit, the Republican National Convention jubilantly awarded Mr. Reagan the nomination for president. His choice of Mr. Bush as his running mate was a blow to his conservative followers, but it reassured moderates who had viewed Mr. Reagan as a dangerous ideologue.
In his acceptance speech, Mr. Reagan called on Americans to "recapture our destiny," attacking what he called the Democratic legacy: "a disintegrating economy, a weakened defense and an energy policy based on the sharing of scarcity."
The 1980 Campaign
Most opinion polls showed a close race to the end. The nation was in the grip of crises foreign and domestic. For all its military strength, it was powerless to liberate 52 Americans held hostage by Iran since November 1979. At home, consumer prices had risen 12.4 percent in one year, and in October 1980 a million and a half more people were out of work than in January.
Mr. Reagan criticized the Carter administration for its policies abroad - the Panama Canal treaties, the second strategic arms limitation agreement, the response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan - and warned that a continuing Communist threat required a stronger military.
He also said Mr. Carter had created an economic disaster that threatened the ethical and financial foundations of American family life.
Mr. Reagan promised that if elected he would cut federal tax rates 30 percent over three years, reduce government spending and hiring, eliminate gift and estate taxes and balance the budget by 1984. He said the government should turn welfare and other social programs back to the states. He urged a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion and opposed government financing of abortions for poor women. He called for a return of God to the classroom and prayer in the schools. He spoke against limitations on buying and owning firearms.
A week before the election Mr. Reagan and Mr. Carter faced each other in a 90-minute televised debate in Cleveland. Mr. Reagan asked a question that later became a campaign refrain, not only for him but for a host of future candidates: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
And when Mr. Carter went on the attack, Mr. Reagan replied in a faintly exasperated tone with another oft-quoted line: "There you go again."
Two days before the election, Iran announced tough terms for the release of the American hostages, and national attention was once again focused on the year-old crisis that had frustrated Mr. Carter. On Nov. 4, Mr. Reagan's victory was so overwhelming that Mr. Carter made the earliest concession statement of any major Presidential candidate since 1904.
A White House Change of Style
Washington had not seen a president like Ronald Reagan for a long time. He showed no lust for power. He seemed to have no need to prove that he could work harder, or longer, on less sleep than anybody. Where his predecessor was criticized for involving himself in every detail, Mr. Reagan was a 9-to-5 president, a chairman of the board.
He delegated authority to his staff. Associates said he left details to subordinates and tended to rely on 3-by-5 index cards that they gave him for information he needed at meetings. He paced himself, got a good night's sleep and took afternoon naps when he could.
Mr. Reagan kept light office hours and went to the presidential retreat at Camp David, Md., or his ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif., as often as he could. All told, he spent nearly a year of his presidency in California, said Mr. Cannon, who kept an eye on his schedule.
With the arrival of the Reagans, the capital became suffused with a new elegance and glamour absent in the Carter years. Washington was soon dubbed Hollywood on the Potomac as Mr. Reagan's wealthy friends converged on Washington. Some helped Mrs. Reagan raise $822,641 to renovate the White House family quarters.
In forming his administration, Mr. Reagan went against accepted political wisdom when he selected a Republican moderate, James A. Baker 3d, as his chief of staff. Mr. Baker had been the campaign manager for Mr. Bush in the Republican primaries and had been on the Reagan team for only six months.
But others had been with Mr. Reagan since the early days in California. Edwin Meese 3d, Mr. Reagan's campaign chief of staff, was given cabinet rank as counselor to the president; Michael K. Deaver was named assistant to the president and deputy chief of the White House staff. A longtime family friend and a favorite of Mrs. Reagan, Mr. Deaver held a position that made him the final arbiter of whom the president saw and what papers reached the Oval Office.
Mr. Reagan's cabinet appointments, however, were a reflection of the Republican establishment. Among his choices were Alexander M. Haig Jr., a retired Army general, for secretary of state; Caspar W. Weinberger, secretary of defense; Malcolm Baldrige, secretary of commerce; Raymond J. Donovan, secretary of labor, and Richard S. Schweiker, secretary of health and human services.
Mr. Reagan sought to perpetuate his philosophy through his appointments to the federal judiciary. By the time he left office he had appointed nearly half the sitting judges, judges who will be issuing decisions well into the 21st century.
He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court. He had no difficulty with his appointments of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor as the first woman on the High Court in 1981 and Justice Antonin Scalia in 1986, though his elevation of William H. Rehnquist to chief justice that year provoked some opposition in Congress.
But a year later, after the Republicans lost control of the Senate, he lost his first fight over a Supreme Court appointment when he nominated Judge Robert H. Bork. His next appointment, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, withdrew his name after it was disclosed that he had smoked marijuana when he was a law professor. Mr. Reagan succeeded in his third attempt; Judge Anthony M. Kennedy was confirmed in February 1988.
Mounting Ethics Troubles
Before the end of Mr. Reagan's first term, more than a dozen officials in his administration faced charges of improper financial dealings, some minor, some major. There was cause to investigate some of Mr. Reagan's closest friends and advisers, including Lyn Nofziger, Mr. Deaver and Mr. Meese.
When top Justice Department officials resigned in March 1988, criticizing Mr. Meese's ethics and his handling of the Iran-contra investigation, there were widespread calls for the attorney general's resignation. The Senate Democratic leader, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, called Mr. Meese "the crown jewel of the sleaze factor in Reagan Administration history." Mr. Meese resigned in August 1988.
Mr. Deaver remained an adviser even after he left the White House in 1985. He was convicted in 1987 of lying under oath to a federal grand jury and to a Congressional subcommittee about using his influence with the president to enhance his lobbying activities after leaving the White House. In September 1988, Mr. Deaver was given a suspended three-year prison sentence, placed on probation and fined $100,000.
`I Forgot to Duck'
On the afternoon of March 30, 1981, the president, in office only two months, was leaving a Washington hotel where he had addressed a union convention. As Mr. Reagan turned to hear a reporter's question, John W. Hinckley Jr., a 25-year-old college dropout with an arrest record for carrying handguns, emerged from a crowd of onlookers and shot the him and three other people with a .22-caliber pistol. James S. Brady, the president's press secretary, was left with permanent brain damage; a bullet penetrated Mr. Reagan's left lung.
"Honey, I forgot to duck," he was reported to have told Mrs. Reagan when she arrived at the hospital. He was about to be taken into surgery to arrest a life-threatening loss of blood; he was in severe pain, but his sense of humor was reported to be intact.
A jury found Mr. Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity, and he was sent to a Washington hospital for treatment.
Mr. Reagan recovered his vitality with remarkable speed. Less than a month after the shooting, he addressed a joint meeting of Congress to urge passage of his economic program.
He made an equally quick recovery from surgery four years later. On July 12, 1985, he entered Bethesda Naval Medical Center for what was expected to be a routine removal of a noncancerous polyp in his colon. But doctors found a previously unsuspected growth in the upper tract of his large intestine. The next day, in nearly three hours of surgery, doctors removed a malignant polyp but found no evidence that the cancer had spread. Looking fit, he returned to the White House a week later.
The president bounced back from three other operations - two in 1985 and one in 1987 - to remove cancerous skin lesions from his nose. His recovery from prostate surgery in 1987 was not as speedy. During his recuperation, which coincided with the unfolding of the Iran-contra affair, Mr. Reagan made few public appearances.
Reaganomics I: Big Changes
Two weeks after he took office, on Feb. 5, 1981, Mr. Reagan delivered a speech from the Oval Office. "I regret to say that we're in the worst economic mess since the Great Depression," he declared. With inflation raging, growth flagging and interest rates soaring, he said, "it's time to try something different, and that's what we're going to do."
What he proposed came to be called the Reagan Revolution. Almost overnight it transformed the national debate over domestic policy. From the beginning of the New Deal, the question had been what federal programs to expand. Under Mr. Reagan the question became what programs to cut.
"Feeding more dollars to government is like feeding a stray pup," he told the National Association of Manufacturers. "It just follows you home and sits on your doorstep asking for more."
Mr. Beschloss, the historian, said: "Because Mr. Reagan was a wonderful communicator, he was able to make the case for less government and for moving power away from Washington. The idea took stronger hold than it would have without him. He became the embodiment of the conservative movement and hurried it along."
Reaganomics, as his economic program became known, was based on the theory that a cut in taxes would stimulate economic growth, generating higher revenues and making the deficit disappear. In the 1980 Republican primaries Mr. Bush called this supply-side plan "voodoo economics." And Mr. Reagan's own director of the budget, David A. Stockman, suggested that the president was simply proposing a repackaging of economics intended to favor the rich, whose gains would ultimately trickle down through the rest of the economy.
Despite widespread criticism of the idea, Mr. Reagan was able to sell the program to Congress, both a tax cut and a $28 billion increase in the military budget.
Reaganomics II: Deficits
The administration had to fight harder to cut federal spending programs created to help the needy, but it had some notable successes. CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, under which more than 300,000 of the poor were employed in 1980 and 1981, was eliminated. Eligibility standards were tightened for food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Medicaid rolls were reduced, and limits were put on Medicare payments.
In the first years of the Reagan administration, when unemployment was rising, insurance for workers who lost their jobs because of foreign competition was scaled back. Middle-income college students became ineligible for government-backed loans and more than a million people lost their food stamps. In 1981, the Department of Agriculture proposed that ketchup be considered a vegetable in calculating the nutritional values of school lunches. The suggestion caused such an uproar that the rule was never instituted.
When Social Security disability benefits were cut off for 500,000 people, the federal courts restored payments to 200,000, but the cuts furthered the perception that the administration was heartless.
Despite the many budget cuts, the deficit kept growing. After he left government, Mr. Stockman wrote a book, "The Triumph of Politics" (Harper & Row), in which he described how, on behalf of Mr. Reagan's programs, he had exaggerated the administration's success in reducing spending and minimized the projected deficit. He said he invented the "rosy scenario," making optimistic assumptions about future growth, inflation and interest rates.
"If the Securities and Exchange Commission had jurisdiction over the White House," Mr. Stockman wrote, "we might have all had time for a course in remedial economics at Allenwood penitentiary."
Within six years the deficit more than doubled, from $79 billion in Mr. Reagan's first year in office to $173 billion. In the 1987 fiscal year it dropped back to $150.4 billion but edged up again in 1988.
Still, Mr. Reagan repeatedly refused to consider tax increases. "I don't want to hear any more talk about taxes," Mr. Stockman quoted him as saying. "The problem is deficit spending."
He repeatedly called for a constitutional amendment to require that the budget be balanced, and for the authority to veto individual items in budgets passed by Congress.
But by the middle of 1982, with a recession continuing and deficit projections soaring, Mr. Reagan grudgingly agreed to a $98.6 billion increase in excise and other taxes. But he refused to call them taxes, insisting on the term "revenue enhancers."
Reaganomics III: Boom and Crash
After the 1981-82 recession, Mr. Reagan presided over the longest economic expansion in history, one that saw the creation of 16 million jobs. By his seventh year in office the stock market was reaching an all-time high. Inflation had dropped and the prime interest rate was down, partly a result of the collapse of oil prices and partly from the policies of the Federal Reserve.
But Mr. Reagan got the credit, just as he had gotten the blame for the recession and the deficit. Economists noted that foreign capital pouring into the country had shielded the United States from the consequences of the deficit, but warned that it would be only a matter of time before that buffer disappeared. Mr. Reagan also got much of the credit for the 1986 overhaul of the federal tax code, hammered together by a bipartisan coalition in Congress. The changes, among the most sweeping ever, reduced the rates for most taxpayers and curbed or eliminated many exemptions that enabled people to shelter income from taxation.
"Had Reagan not moved up front, it would have gone nowhere," said the economist Alan Greenspan, whom Mr. Reagan later named to head the Federal Reserve. "He was the first president to succeed in doing it."
On Oct. 16, 1987, The Wall Street Journal reported that the economy was one of the two bright spots in a Reagan administration that was increasingly paralyzed by its Iran-contra troubles. Then, on Oct. 19, the stock market suffered the most severe single-day decline up to that point in its history, dropping 508 points.
The market meltdown highlighted the administration's failure to deal with the budget and trade deficits and the failure of supply-side economics to encourage investment and productivity. Economists' warnings that the administration was mortgaging the country's future were finally heeded, and the president and Congress agreed to a deficit-reduction package.
Reaganomics IV: Balance Sheet
Unemployment declined, but more people were living below the poverty line, and the homeless became a national concern. When Mr. Reagan was asked about the problem in 1984, he replied that some needy people might be "homeless by choice."
Economists vary widely in their assessments of Mr. Reagan's record.
"We know for a fact that Reagan has and will have a more profound effect on the American economy than any president in the post-World War II period," Mr. Greenspan said in an interview before his appointment to the Federal Reserve. "The problem is that it is not exactly clear whether the very strong pluses or strong minuses will prevail."
On the plus side, Mr. Greenspan said, Mr. Reagan "instituted an extraordinary change in tax policy." And he said Mr. Reagan had been responsible "for a fairly pronounced slowing" in the growth of social benefit programs. On the minus side, Mr. Greenspan cited the "extraordinary budget deficits which have occurred as a consequence of his original tax proposals."
Prof. James Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Yale University, said the Reagan legacy was "a crippled federal government."
"He tried to squeeze ambitious growth of defense spending into a budget he was simultaneously depriving of tax revenues," Professor Tobin said. "Legislators of both parties, most of whom knew better, deserve a share of the blame for their supine surrender to the president's program."
Domestic Policy: Changing Rules
When Mr. Reagan accepted the Republican nomination for re-election in summer 1984 in Dallas, he told the delegates that Americans confronted a choice: a government of pessimism and fear or a government of hope, confidence and growth. Walter F. Mondale, his Democratic opponent, he said, did not represent mainstream America.
On Nov. 8, Mr. Reagan scored one of the biggest victories in American political history, winning 525 electoral votes to Mr. Mondale's 13. At the beginning of his second term, he said the nation "was poised for greatness." Then, with a line that sounded like an echo from his first national political speech in 1964, he said, "We must never again abuse the trust of working men and women by spending their earnings on a futile chase after the spiraling demands of a bloated federal establishment."
The effort to reduce the size of that establishment was a constant of the Reagan presidency. His campaign pledge to reduce government policing of business was most effectively redeemed in the broadcasting and energy industries. Banking was another major area of deregulation, the disastrous consequences of which were to become clear after Mr. Reagan left office in the savings and loan scandals that could cost the nation hundreds of billions of dollars.
The Federal Trade Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were curbed by budget cuts and by the appointment of conservative administrators who were often accused of opposing the missions of the agencies they headed.
To put an end to what he called the "adversary relationship" between government and business, Mr. Reagan's Justice Department reined in its antitrust division. In a move that environmentalists said was intended to aid timber, oil and mining companies, the Interior Department removed thousands of acres of public lands from the protected category.
Although there were efforts to reduce farm price supports, federal spending on this program rose, reaching an all-time high in 1986. Still, a worldwide surplus of grain caused prices to plummet, and there were more farm foreclosures in the Reagan years than at any time since the Depression.
The Reagan administration also sought to shift government activities to the private sector, a move that would automatically result in a cut in government spending. In 1986, for example, the administration persuaded Congress to authorize the sale of Conrail, the federal corporation that ran much of the rail freight system.
Mr. Reagan's opposition to governmental interference in the private sector made him a strong advocate of free trade with foreign countries. But he pressured Japanese manufacturers to accept a voluntary quota on automobile exports and gave some trade protection to steel, textiles and motorcycles. In the first year of Mr. Reagan's second term, the United States, once the biggest creditor nation, became the biggest debtor nation in the world despite some efforts on his part to alter the trade balance.
Civil Rights Retrenchment
The Reagan administration also challenged the longstanding view that the government should aggressively protect civil rights. The budget for the Civil Rights Commission, the agency that monitors federal civil rights activities, was cut. The civil rights division in the Justice Department led an attack on court-ordered measures to correct discrimination, based on the administration's opposition to quotas as discriminatory against whites. But the courts repeatedly upheld affirmative action in the workplace, saying it helped overcome past discrimination against minorities.
The administration's actions provoked bitter criticism from civil rights advocates. Jack Greenberg, who served for many years as counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said Mr. Reagan had "showed a clear hostility to civil rights aspirations."
Foreign Policy: New Doctrines
No sooner had Mr. Reagan taken the oath of office at noon on Jan. 20, 1981, than the 52 American hostages who had been held in Iran since Nov. 4, 1979, were released in accordance with an agreement that President Carter had completed only hours before. The timing of the release led to questions about whether Mr. Reagan or his staff had struck a private deal with the Iranians.
Although Mr. Reagan said little about Iran in his Inaugural Address, the battle against terrorism became the cornerstone of his foreign policy, and he sounded a warning.
"Our reluctance for conflict should not be misjudged as a failure of will," he said. "When action is required to preserve our national security, we will act."
Halfway into his first year in office, Mr. Reagan made good on his promise of swift retaliation against terrorists and the countries he accused of supporting them. On Aug. 19, 1981, American planes shot down two Libyan jets over the Gulf of Sidra in a dispute with the Libyan leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who claimed that the gulf was Libyan territory.
Five years later, in April 1986, Mr. Reagan ordered the bombing of Tripoli to punish Colonel Qaddafi for his supposed role in a terrorist attack on a discothèque in West Germany that killed an American soldier. Some reports said the target of the retaliatory raid was Colonel Qaddafi himself.
In 1985 Mr. Reagan sent F-14 fighters to intercept an Egyptian plane carrying four Palestinian terrorists and forced it to land in Sicily. The hijackers, who had seized the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and killed an American passenger, were taken into custody by Italian officials.
The "Reagan Doctrine" was the name given to the administration's policy of supporting forces fighting Soviet-backed governments in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Angola. Although support of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan was to have lasting repercussions in the fight against terrorism, Mr. Reagan believed Soviet withdrawal from that country was a vindication of his policies.
In keeping with this doctrine, the administration persistently supported the contras fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. (The Sandinistas were ultimately ousted in national elections in 1990.) In El Salvador, the Reagan administration supported the government against a Marxist insurgency.
In October 1983, Mr. Reagan sent American forces to Grenada in a mission to rescue American students in medical school on that Caribbean island and to evict a Grenadian government that he called "a brutal group of leftist thugs."
Frustration and Statesmanship
Until the Iran-contra scandal, Mr. Reagan's most searing setback in foreign affairs came in fall 1983. Over the objections of some top advisers, he had dispatched a force of marines to Beirut to be part of a multinational force to bring a semblance of calm to Lebanon. On Oct. 23 a terrorist driving a truck laden with explosives crashed into the Marine compound, killing 241 Americans. Four months later phe President withdrew the Marine contingent.
In 1987, after the Iran-contra scandal became public knowledge, there was more misfortune when Mr. Reagan ordered American warships to the Persian Gulf to protect Kuwaiti tankers under attack by Iran. In an unusual arrangement, the president also permitted Kuwaiti tankers to fly the American flag, a decision intended to prevent Soviet domination of the gulf and to permit tankers to move without interference.
Calamity befell the plan when 37 American sailors were killed by a missile fired from an Iraqi plane at the American frigate Stark. A year later, the Navy warship Vincennes shot down an Iranian commercial airliner over the gulf after mistaking it for an attacking F-14 fighter jet. All 290 people aboard the plane were killed.
In 1984, on a 10-day trip to Europe, Mr. Reagan toured the beaches of Normandy in a celebration of the 40th anniversary of D-Day. At Pointe de Hoc, against the sweep of the cliffs and beaches that have become indelibly associated with the victory over fascism, Mr. Reagan delivered one of the most memorable speeches of his Presidency. The scenes were captured in a film that was used to introduce Mr. Reagan at that summer's Republican National Convention. His travels were meant to send an important message to the voters back home: that the domestic reformer had come of age as a statesman.
A year later, a trip to Europe produced a major embarrassment for Mr. Reagan. On the eve of a visit to West Germany, in which he was scheduled to stop at a cemetery in Bitburg, it became known that Nazi storm troopers were among those buried there. The president rejected advice to cancel the stop, and there was an uproar when he tried to justify it by saying that the German soldiers buried there were victims of Nazism, "just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps."
Mr. Reagan was not a strategic thinker, his own aides said; he thought in terms of anecdotes, not analysis. His knowledge of international developments was considered thin, and those who met with him said his participation in discussions was usually limited to what his staff had provided him on the 3-by-5 cards.
In his biography of Mr. Reagan, Mr. Cannon noted the President's tendency to misspeak: "He did not know enough. And he did not know how much he didn't know. Because of Reagan's knowledge gaps, his presidential news conferences became adventures into the uncharted regions of his mind."
Iran-Contra Affair: Zeal and Denial
By late 1986, the president had become obsessed by the hostages held in Lebanon by allies of Iran; aides said he mentioned them at almost every staff meeting. Two national security advisers, Robert C. McFarlane and Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, and a National Security Council staff assistant, Lt. Col. Oliver L. North of the Marines, were emboldened by his concern to undertake some extremely unorthodox measures to try to free the hostages.
Publicly, Mr. Reagan had condemned Iran as an outlaw state "run by the strangest collection of misfits, Looney Tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich." Yet Mr. Reagan's own security council staff conceived and put into operation a secret plan to supply weapons to Iran as ransom for the American hostages. Under this scheme, profits from the sales were earmarked for the contras, whom Mr. Reagan had called "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers."
When the secret operation was first reported, Mr. Reagan denied that it existed. On Nov. 13, 1986, het said, "In spite of the wildly speculative and false stories about arms for hostages, we did not, repeat, did not trade arms or anything else for hostages." But almost four months later, he ruefully referred to that remark in a speech to the nation. "My heart and my best intentions still tell me that is true," he said, "but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."
The facts and evidence were presented in the report of a commission led by former Senator John G. Tower, and later in the majority report of a Congressional investigating committee, showing that Mr. Reagan had approved shipments of weapons to Iran months before he issued his first public denial. The findings of the Tower commission, in early 1987, left open the question of whether Mr. Reagan, then 76 and just recovering from prostate surgery, had the vigor to recover and the ability to reverse a lifelong habit of detachment.
After Mr. Reagan's Alzheimer's became known, questions were raised as to whether he had already started to have memory lapses when he was president, especially in the Iran-contra affair. He had often said he would step down if he felt his capabilities had been reduced and had expressed concern that his mother's Alzheimer's might have been passed on to him. Doctors did not rule out that a subdural hematoma resulting from a fall from a horse in 1989, after he left the White House, might have also affected his memory.
The 1987 report of the Tower commission noted: "The president did pretty well . . . for the better part of five years. And then all of a sudden the style and the consequences failed him." The report said Mr. Reagan's staff not only failed to make up for his deficiencies but also took advantage of his inattention. Mr. Reagan liked to say that in his years in the White House he lived over the store. But the Tower commission said in effect that nobody was minding the store.
`This Happened on My Watch'
On March 4, 1987, a week after the Tower report was issued, Mr. Reagan appeared on television, looking healthy and alert, to deliver what was seen at the time as the most important speech of his presidency. To demonstrate that he was back in charge, he outlined actions to correct the flaws in the way his White House had operated. As chief of staff he appointed former Senator Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, who was more conciliatory and more collegial than the man he replaced, Donald T. Regan.
Accepting the sharp criticism of the Tower commission report, Mr. Reagan said that what had started as a strategic opening to Iran had "deteriorated in its implementation into trading arms for hostages." He said, "This runs contrary to my own beliefs, to administration policy and to the original strategy we had in mind." He accepted "full responsibility" for the Iran-contra affair: "As the Navy would say, this happened on my watch."
Yet even after Mr. Poindexter and Mr. North were indicted on charges of conspiracy, theft and fraud in the affair in 1988, Mr. Reagan declared that he still believed that Mr. North was a hero and that his former aides were not guilty. He said, "I just have to believe that they're going to be found innocent, because I don't think they were guilty of any wrongdoing or any crime."
On May 4, 1989, Mr. North, who had left the Marines, was found guilty of three felonies, including destroying and falsifying official documents, and acquitted of nine other charges. On July 15 he was fined $150,000, placed on probation for two years and ordered to perform 1,200 hours of community service. On Sept. 16, 1991, a federal judge dismissed all charges against Mr. North. Prosecutors said they would not be able to show that the trial had not been affected by televised Congressional testimony that Mr. North had given under immunity.
For the same reason a divided federal appeals court on Nov. 15, 1990, threw out five felony convictions of Mr. Poindexter. In June, 1990, Mr. Poindexter had become the first person in the Iran-contra affair to receive a jail term, and the highest White House official since Watergate sentenced to a prison term for illegal acts committed in office.
Mr. Reagan was not brought to court, but he faced the judgment of history. The historian C. Vann Woodward said in an interview that he knew of "nothing comparable with this magnitude of irresponsibility and incompetence."
Mr. Woodward observed: "This is not simply the self-serving of a politician who was using illegal methods. This involved the country's policy and its foreign relations and reputation."
Long Struggle, on Arms Control
Mr. Reagan had sought a place in history as a president who dealt forcefully with terrorists and took vigorous action to rescue Americans taken hostage anywhere in the world. Perhaps even more than the president, it was said, Nancy Reagan was concerned that the Iran-contra scandal would damage her husband's place in history. She pressed for an arms agreement with the Soviet Union, hoping it would establish his reputation as statesman and peacemaker and undo some of the damage.
But distrust of the Soviet Union had been a hallmark of Mr. Reagan's political career. He had labeled it the "evil empire" and his suspicions were confirmed in September 1983 when a Soviet fighter jet shot down a South Korean airliner, killing 269 people and plunging Soviet-American relations into a new and bitter round of recrimination.
Chances for an arms agreement seemed slim. In his first term, Mr. Reagan was less concerned with arms control than with an arms buildup to counter Soviet military power. In 1979, as a candidate, he had opposed ratification of the strategic arms limitation agreement, saying it strongly favored the Soviets. (Although that agreement never came to a vote in the Senate, his administration continued to observe its terms until late 1986, when the United States exceeded the limits.)
In 1981 Mr. Reagan said SALT had not brought any arms reductions, and, proposing a new beginning, called for "Strategic Arms Reduction Talks," with the felicitous acronym Start.
He had promised in his 1980 campaign, that his top strategic priority would be to close "the window of vulnerability" through which he believed the Soviet Union could launch a successful nuclear first strike. As president, he essentially speeded the strategic modernization program sought by Mr. Carter. He began procurement of the B-1 bomber. In accordance with a decision of the Carter administration, some medium-range missiles were deployed in Europe. The administration strengthened the Navy and pushed for modernization of bombers and missiles, helicopters and tanks.
Some analysts believe that buildup, along with military exercises and reconnaissance that were seen from the Soviet perspective as provocative, may have strengthened Soviet hawks and actually delayed efforts by Mr. Gorbachev to bring reform to the Soviet Union.
`Star Wars' and a Breakthrough
On March 23, 1983, Mr. Reagan announced plans for a system of exotic, space-based defenses that would make nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete. Former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger said the program, the Strategic Defense Initiative, which came to be called "Star Wars," was nothing but "a collection of technical experiments and distant hopes." But the president, Mr. Schlesinger said, treated it "as if it were already a reality."
Nevertheless, minutes of Politburo meetings that have come to light, show that Mr. Gorbachev was, in the words of a Russian scholar, "obsessed" by the proposal, which he feared would lead to a new and more dangerous round in the arms race. Some Russian scholars say it was this fear, even more than the cost, that concerned the Soviet leader, because his scientists had assured him they could meet the threat at 10 percent of what it would cost the United States. But hardliners in the Reagan administration believed that heightened military spending would cause the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Indeed, Mr. Gorbachev had come to recognize that he would have to find new sources of revenue as his country's economy declined, and a cut in the arms budget was a prime candidate.
Just when it began to look as if Mr. Reagan would be the first president in two decades to fail to get any arms agreement with the Soviets, it was announced that he and Mr. Gorbachev would meet in Reykjavik, Iceland, on Oct. 11 and 12, 1986.
There, Mr. Reagan proposed the elimination of all ballistic missiles by 1996. Mr. Gorbachev, not to be outdone, proposed the elimination of all strategic nuclear weapons, a proposal that, to the consternation of his aides, Mr. Reagan accepted. Mr. Reagan had found in Mr. Gorbachev a Communist he could deal with, and the tenor of the United States-Soviet relationship in his second term differed markedly from his first years in office.
In February 1987, two days after the Tower commission issued its report on the Iran-contra affair, Mr. Gorbachev announced the Soviet Union's willingness to sign "without delay" an agreement to eliminate Soviet and American medium-range missiles in Europe within five years. For Mr. Reagan, the Soviet proposal provided an opportunity for a foreign policy breakthrough when he appeared immobilized by the Iran-contra scandal. The intermediate-range nuclear force, or I.N.F., treaty was signed the next December.
"The importance of this treaty transcends numbers," Mr. Reagan said at the signing ceremony in the White House. "We have listened to the wisdom in an old Russian maxim Davorey no provorey - Trust, but verify.`
Mr. Reagan's attitude toward the Soviet Union had evolved. With Mr. Gorbachev promising glasnost and perestroika, the restructuring of his country's political and economic system, Mr. Reagan reconsidered the "evil empire" and relegated it to another era.
"My personal impression of Mr. Gorbachev is that he is a serious man seeking serious reform," the president said in 1988. "We look to this trend to continue. We must do all that we can to assist it."
But along the way he urged the new Soviet leader to move farther, faster. On June 12, 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Mr. Reagan, in one of his most noted speeches, delivered a challenge to Mr. Gorbachev: "If you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate, Mr. Gorbachev. Open this gate, Mr. Gorbachev. Tear down this wall."
Like a modern-day Joshua at the battle of Jericho, Mr. Reagan lived to see the Berlin Wall come tumbling down. "I never dreamed that in less than three years the wall would come down and a 6,000-pound section of it would be sent to me for my presidential library," Mr. Reagan wrote in his autobiography, "An American Life," (Simon & Schuster, 1990).
Time and the Man
The former House speaker, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., Democrat of Massachusetts, said of Mr. Reagan: "Most of the time he was an actor reading lines who didn't understand his own programs. I hate to say it about such an agreeable man, but it was sinful that Ronald Reagan ever became president."
Mr. O'Neill, who served in much of Mr. Reagan's tenure, said he had "known every president since Harry Truman and there's no question in my mind that Ronald Reagan was the worst." But, he added, "he would have made a hell of a king."
But, in the view of Kenneth Lynn, professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, Mr. Reagan "will remain as one of the most important presidents of the 20th century."
Professor Lynn said in an interview: "He fulfilled a restorative function we desperately needed. His belief that we can come out of our travail with a renewed strength, his ebullience, his optimism and his lack of guilt in his personal life and in America in general were a breath of fresh air. To have someone speak in terms of possibility, of limitlessness rather than of limits, was an elixir, a real upper. He was the most important President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in these symbolic respects."
Paul Johnson, the historian and journalist, gives Mr. Reagan credit for more than symbolic accomplishment. "Reagan's rearmament program, accompanied as it was by a resurgence in the U.S. economy, had a demoralizing effect on the Soviet elite," Mr. Johnson wrote in Foreign Affairs.
"Thus," he continued, "the concept of perestroika was born, not merely of internal shame and exasperation at empty shops and shabby conditions, but of an external recognition that their chief ideological competitor, under Reagan's leadership, was far more formidable and durable than they had supposed."
But to many other historians and political scientists, Mr. Reagan's accomplishments will not secure his place among great American presidents.
Thomas Cronin, the McHugh Professor of American Institutions at Colorado College, said Americans evaluated the greatness of a President on "criteria that are over and above popularity and re-election."
Mr. Cronin credited Mr. Reagan with enhancing national security with the I.N.F. treaty but asked: "Did he expand opportunities for all Americans regardless of race, gender or income bracket? It's my view Reagan has not enlarged the equity factor nor the educational opportunities for most Americans."
And the Reagan presidency was lacking in moral leadership, he said, an essential quality for greatness. "He was too late, too little and too lame when it came to human rights abuses at home and abroad," Professor Cronin said. "He was not willing to be a leader."
Moments after the inauguration of George Bush as the nation's 41st President, Mr. Reagan returned to California, to writing his autobiography, to riding his horses and chopping wood on his ranch and to the new house in Bel-Air. There were some political appearances and a visit to Japan that occasioned an uproar when it became known that he was being paid $2 million by a Japanese communications group for his appearances there.
Not a man given to introspection, he nevertheless wrote his autobiography with the help of a former journalist, Robert Lindsey, a narrative of his life and his presidency as he remembered it.
There followed a round of television interviews in which he promoted the sale of his book. Barbara Walters asked him how he thought history would remember him.
"Well," Mr. Reagan replied, "I hope it'll remember me on the basis that when I took office, I felt very strongly that our government had grown too officious and imposing too much on the private sector in our society, and that I wanted to see if the American people couldn't get back that pride, and that patriotism, that confidence, that they had in our system. And I think they have."
--------
Ronald Reagan Dies 40th President Reshaped American Politics
By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18566-2004Jun5?language=printer
Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United States, who transformed the Republican Party and substantially defined the terms of contemporary political debate during two momentous terms in office, died yesterday afternoon. He was 93.
Ten years after Reagan announced his Alzheimer's disease in an open letter to the American people, he reached the end of his long twilight at his home in Bel Air, Calif., in the company of his wife and their children.
"My family and I would like the world to know that President Ronald Reagan has passed away," former first lady Nancy Reagan said in a written statement. "We appreciate everyone's prayers."
President Bush received the news shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern time; he was in Paris and had just left a dinner with French President Jacques Chirac. In Washington and California, plans were quickly implemented for the capital's first presidential funeral in more than 30 years.
Plans call for Reagan's body to lie at his presidential library in Simi Valley, Calif., early this week and then travel by Air Force One to Washington on Wednesday, where he will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. Late in the week, probably Friday, there will be a funeral procession with horse-drawn caisson from the Capitol to a spot near the White House. From there, a hearse will carry the casket to Washington National Cathedral for a funeral officiated by the newly nominated ambassador to the United Nations, John C. Danforth, an Episcopalian minister and a former Republican senator from Missouri.
The body will then be flown back to California to be buried at the Ronald W. Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.
Official plans will be announced this morning, a library spokesman said.
"This is a sad hour in the life of America," Bush said after speaking with Nancy Reagan by telephone. "A great American life has come to an end. Ronald Reagan won America's respect with his greatness and won its love with his goodness. He had the confidence that comes with conviction, the strength that comes with character, the grace that comes with humility and the humor that comes with wisdom."
Blinking back tears, Bush added: "He always told us that for America, the best was yet to come. We comfort ourselves in the knowledge that this is true for him, too. His work is done. And now a shining city awaits him."
It was an almost unbelievable life, a melodrama, a rags-to-riches tale, a multi-part saga written by someone with boundless imagination and an infinite sense of the possible. Born in tiny Tampico, Ill., educated at Eureka College in nearby Dixon, Reagan was a radio sportscaster, a Hollywood B-movie star, host of a TV variety show, a soap salesman, a motivational speaker, governor of California and -- starting at age 53 -- arguably the most important American political figure since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
So it was no wonder that he believed all things were possible, from the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he predicted even when the clash of superpowers seemed near its most menacing point, to the complete disarmament of all nuclear arsenals, which Reagan proposed in a stunning arms-control summit near the end of his administration. What seemed to some as naivete struck others as good old gumption.
Reagan was a champion salesman of the American dream, mayor-for-life of the land he called "a shining city on a hill."
Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry said, "Ronald Reagan's love of country was infectious," and he praised the late president for his "goodwill in the heat of partisan battle."
"Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate. Despite the disagreements, he lived by that noble ideal that at 5 p.m., we weren't Democrats or Republicans, we were Americans and friends," said the senator from Massachusetts.
Like all forceful leaders, Reagan deeply angered some -- but his gift for communication and his bedrock optimism attracted far more supporters than critics. In 1984, he was reelected with the largest number of popular and electoral votes in U.S. history. Though the nation has added about 50 million people since then, no candidate has surpassed his record. His electoral vote landslide that year was among the most lopsided in history.
He entered the White House older than any previous occupant, and yet as the candidate of fresh ideas, from supply-side economics to welfare reform. He intrigued and imprinted students of the 1980s much as John F. Kennedy had done for the previous generation, dispatching them into the mills of commerce rather than the halls of government.
It had been 20 years since a president had completed two full terms. Five administrations had been cut short: by assassination, Vietnam, Watergate, rampant inflation and civic malaise. In a sense, Reagan's signal achievement was that he restored in Americans their hope for normalcy.
"He got the country to believe in itself again," his longtime aide Michael K. Deaver said in an interview before Reagan's death.
Beyond that, experts argue over his record. Among the ranks of Republican conservatives who live and breathe Reagan's catechism of low taxes, small government, unregulated liberty and a strong military, he is rated one of the most important presidents in U.S. history. They credit him with winning the Cold War.
"Ronald Reagan was a president of great historic impact who led the United States with strength and conviction, and the positive impact of his policies is still felt today here and around the world," Republican Party Chairman Ed Gillespie said. "Because Ronald Reagan lived, people across the globe live in greater freedom and prosperity."
Reagan's critics acknowledge that he dramatically recast the nation's political agenda, replacing the aging New Deal consensus with an entirely new language. But they see little good coming from it.
As Walter Williams, professor emeritus of the University of Washington, put it in a recent book, "Reaganism -- with its antigovernment, antiregulation, antitax, and probusiness philosophy -- achieved its objective of hamstringing the federal institutions concerned with domestic policy." Williams blames failures from the Enron scandal to inadequate airport security on that achievement.
In a recent history of the Republican Party, Lewis L. Gould of the University of Texas rates Reagan as the most important president in terms of his influence over the party, but gives him a more mixed report as chief executive. "Reagan stands supreme as the embodiment of GOP virtues and conservative ideals," he wrote. "Reagan transformed the Republican Party into a conservative unit with a diminishing band of moderates on its fringes. . . . Reagan thus serves as a talisman of what it means to be a Republican."
Reagan's successor, president George H.W. Bush, quickly discovered just how deeply Reagan had carved the new creed into Republican stone. Bush's decision to raise taxes as part of a broad budget deal with congressional Democrats outraged the GOP base and crippled his bid for reelection in 1992.
Gould added, however, that "when hard choices loomed, Reagan and the people around him preferred a conservatism of gestures rather than one of substance."
At the end of his presidency, Reagan lamented that he had not substantially cut domestic spending, despite years of rhetoric, nor had he come close to balancing the federal budget.
Unquestioned was Reagan's ability to connect with the American public through formal speeches, offhand remarks, even mere gestures. He was the most effective presidential communicator since Roosevelt and probably one of three greatest to hold the office -- Abraham Lincoln, master of the written speech; Roosevelt, master of the radio address; and Reagan, master of television.
Wounded in an assassination attempt shortly after taking office in 1981, Reagan quipped, "I forgot to duck."
Dogged by worries about his age during his reelection campaign, he promised during a presidential debate: "I am not going to exploit for political gain my opponent's youth and inexperience."
Comforting a nation stunned by the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, he said: "Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue."
Crystallizing the final stage of the Cold War confrontation between Western liberties and Soviet repression, he visited the Berlin Wall in 1987 and challenged Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev to tear it down. In a perfect summary of his core faith, Reagan declared, "After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor."
Reagan's legacy can be seen in the current White House, where his example is revered; in Congress, where Reagan Republicans captured control of the House in 1994 and have held it ever since; and on the Supreme Court, where Reagan appointees hold the balance of power on most issues. (He filled four vacancies, elevating William H. Rehnquist to chief justice and adding Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia.)
He left the public eye in 1994, soon after attending the funeral of Richard M. Nixon, the last president to die.
Reagan's farewell note to his fellow citizens was his final masterpiece. "I only wish there was some way I could spare Nancy from this painful experience," he wrote in the same small, neat hand he used for thousands of personal letters. "When the time comes I am confident that with your help she will face it with faith and courage."
In a recent speech promoting stem cell research, Nancy Reagan said her husband had been for several years "in a distant place where I can no longer reach him." Death in Alzheimer's disease usually results from the accumulated effects of immobility, disordered swallowing and malnutrition. Pneumonia is often the immediate cause of death. The stress of illness can also worsen underlying cardiovascular disease, triggering heart attacks or strokes. Alzheimer's is now the eighth-leading cause of death in the United States, and its rate is rising.
"In closing let me thank you, the American people, for giving me the great honor of allowing me to serve as your President," Reagan wrote 10 years ago. "When the Lord calls me home, whenever that may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future."
Staff writer David Brown contributed to this report.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Towns That Grew on Oil Count The Costs in Straitened Times
By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19078-2004Jun5?language=printer
NEODESHA, Kan.
For years, Lucille Campbell told anyone who would listen that pollution from the old Standard Oil refinery, shuttered in 1970, was killing people here.
Too many friends and neighbors were dying at too young an age, so Campbell scoured reports and microfilm for information, distributed makeshift newsletters and submitted opinion articles to local newspapers. She was so single-minded that people here started calling her that "crazy old lady."
"People were getting sick and dying, and nobody would listen," said Campbell, 66, a former teacher who believes her infant daughter who died 40 years ago might have been a victim.
For years Campbell was a lone voice, but more recently town leaders began to take notice, too. In March, the town filed a lawsuit in state District Court alleging that the refinery had poisoned the groundwater and soil and that its managers covered up the pollution to avoid liability. The suit sought monetary damages and an expedited cleanup.
The refinery's current owner, BP PLC, one of the world's largest oil companies, maintains that the plume of benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene in the groundwater beneath schools, churches and nursing homes poses no risk because the town's drinking water comes from elsewhere. The company has a cleanup agreement with the state, and BP representatives have gone door to door talking to residents and taking air samples to determine risks. "We recognize the contamination issues," said Ronald D. Rybarczyk, a spokesman for BP. "We haven't tried to dodge that. The questions we asked are 'Are people drinking the water?' and 'Are people exposed?' and the answer is no."
What's happening in Neodesha is but one example of how communities across the nation that once hosted refineries are suing for damages, pressing companies to buy their homes and seeking out federal health agencies to determine whether exposure to chemicals from old refineries is making them sick. Many residents said that while they knew the operations were dirty, they did not believe, until recently, that they could be life-threatening.
Over the past two decades, more than 170 of these refineries have closed, according to a recent survey of industry, government and private reports by the Washington-based Natural Resources News Service, which covers the environment.
Many, like the refinery here, were built around 1900. While some of the old sites have been redeveloped, most remain bound by government regulatory agreements to clean up toxic pollution in the groundwater and soil. In the Kansas City, Mo., suburb of Sugar Creek, home to another former Standard Oil refinery, several residents have filed individual suits against BP, claiming that years of exposure to chemicals gave them cancer. The refinery there was shut down in 1982 by Amoco, one of Standard Oil's offshoots, after 78 years of operation.
"Any refinery that's been in operation even 10 or 15 years is sitting on gigantic underground lakes of diesel and crude oil," said Denny Larson, director of the San Francisco-based Refinery Reform Campaign.
His group provides technical assistance and advice to residents who live near refineries. The campaign helped residents of Norco, La., move to new homes to flee the pollution. The sites are contaminated, Larson said, because many regulators and residents ignored health and environmental concerns.
"America's refineries and its gasoline are considered sacred cows because they are the number one things we love: our gas and our cars," Larson said.
Neodesha has a closer connection than most. With 2,800 residents, this southeastern Kansas town is proud of its links to the oil patch. It is home to the first commercial oil well west of the Mississippi River. A 40-foot replica of that well towers at one end of Main Street.
The connection to Standard Oil, the defunct oil giant, runs deep.
Retirees and their offspring fondly recall the company as a benevolent corporate citizen that sponsored youth sports teams and provided good-paying jobs that financed new cars and houses, vacations and college tuitions.
But Neodesha's legal complaint accuses this once-revered company of intentionally releasing hazardous materials, including benzene -- known to cause cancer -- into the air and groundwater, and hiding the dangers from residents. Mayor J.D. Cox acknowledged that the decision to sue was difficult. The site, home to the refinery from the late 1800s to 1970, now houses several new businesses.
"This is a conservative area," said Cox, the town's mayor for seven years. "Filing suit is not something you just do. There is a level of trust in our community because they were Standard Oil, and they had a long history here."
The city's hand was forced, Cox said, because two years of negotiation for an acceptable cleanup and compensation plan proved fruitless.
"We weren't getting anywhere," said Cox, referring to talks since 2002 between city and county leaders and BP officials.
That was also the initial experience of elected leaders in Sugar Creek, which is the site of a Standard Oil refinery that closed in 1982. The town filed suit several years ago before settling on an agreement that will pay the town $11.5 million over the next several years to redevelop the old site as an industrial park.
A group of residents near the site, organized as Cleanup (Citizens Learning Everything about Amoco, Negligence and Underground Pollution), also sued, and several hundred owners settled in 1999 for average payments of about $25,000. The situation in Neodesha appears a long way from resolution.
Standard Oil loyalists were incredulous and dismissive of the argument that town leaders went to court out of necessity to break an impasse in negotiations with BP. While well aware that harmful chemicals had long ago contaminated the groundwater, critics said that it was downright disloyal and an affront to decency to ask the court to decide the matter.
"You have put a gash in our hearts and our very spirits," said a recent letter from 39 residents published in the Neodesha Daily Derrick. "Don't you realize what you're doing to our town. . . . If people were contemplating moving here, they certainly would have second thoughts. We think you should . . . quit dividing the town."
One of those people was DeWayne Prosser, a pastor and a Wilson County commissioner, who took the suit as a personal slight. Members of his family, including his father, worked at the refinery and assured him that whatever contamination exists was an accident and that there is no scientific link between the contamination and cancer cases.
Prosser said that he felt that the city should have continued to negotiate through a committee set up for that purpose. "We were making progress," he said.
Marci Culley, who did doctoral work on the Sugar Creek project and was a Cleanup member, found, after years of study and interviews with all parties involved, that the most successful methods for residents to get what they wanted were also the most controversial: trespassing, e-mail campaigns and seeking news media attention.
"To be effective, folks have to find their own way," she said. "The planned opportunities for public participation largely block public participation because all the important decisions appeared to have been made behind closed doors."
That's why Campbell is a little skeptical of the suit filed by the city.
"If they file a lawsuit, they can settle out of court, but the issue of the sick and dying would never be addressed," Campbell said. "If this stuff can make you sick, people need to know."
-------- ACTIVISTS
War protesters march to Rumsfeld's home
June 06, 2004
By Denise Barnes
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040606-120738-6803r.htm
Hundreds of antiwar demonstrators gathered in Lafayette Park in Northwest yesterday to call for an end to the U.S. occupation in Iraq and the immediate return of American troops.
Protesters from across the nation chanted slogans and carried signs with such messages as "Bush Lied. Thousands Died," and "A Few Bad Apples: Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld [and] Wolfowitz."
Empress Inity, 46, traveled from the Bronx to attend the demonstration and show her support for the troops.
"We would like to see the troops come back safely, alive and not in body bags," Ms. Inity said. "This war is about economics and greed. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and Powell, all need to be" removed from office.
The activist group International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), organized the afternoon rally. Protests also took place in California.
Despite the rain, the crowd, estimated to be in the hundreds, listened to a series of short speeches by representatives of various interest groups, including the Free Palestine Alliance, the National Committee to Free the Cuban 5 and the International Action Center, headquartered in New York.
"More and more people are outraged about Iraq," said Larry Holmes, co-director of the International Action Center. "The debate should not only be in Congress. The debate also should be in the streets through rallies and demonstrations.
"I truly believe George Bush is a warmonger," Mr. Holmes said. "It's impossible to conclude anything else. There was a false reason for the war and many on both sides died, many on both sides were wounded."
Michael Berg, the father of Nicholas Berg, 26, the American businessman who was beheaded in Iraq by an Islamist extremist group, addressed the crowd with a message of peace and nonviolence. Mr. Berg embraced the philosophy of the late Martin Luther King.
"America has been in touch with me, Dr. King, [and] the people of America told me they have a dream of peace. I am here to answer the people who offered me help. Don't let what happened to me and my family happen again," Mr. Berg said.
"Yes, this is a war and it is racist. Dr. King knew how to make change. He preached nonviolent direct action. Those of you [standing] before this platform are taking direct action," he said.
After the two-hour rally ended, protesters marched from Lafayette Park to the tree-lined Northwest home of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Although the gathering remained peaceful throughout the day, the crowd chanted, "No blood for oil, U.S. off Iraqi soil," and "Bring the troops home now" as marchers moved up 14th Street toward Mr. Rumsfeld's home, located off Connecticut Avenue.
Mr. Rumsfeld was out of town.
"Donald Rumsfeld spent a lot of time intellectualizing about the war, not because the United States was under attack. He is a servant of corporate America. The solution is not to fire Donald Rumsfeld," said Brian Becker of ANSWER.
"Donald Rumsfeld shouldn't simply be fired; Donald Rumsfeld should be put on trial," Mr. Becker told the crowd.
Sue Niederer of Pennington, N.J., held on tight to a picture of her only son, Seth Dvorin, 24, who was killed in Iraq on Feb. 3.
Ms. Niederer, a member of the organization, Military Families Speak Out, said her son was home on leave from Iraq in January and had no desire to return to the war.
"I asked him if he wanted to go back, and he said 'no,' Ms. Niederer said. "He said, 'We're making no headway.' "
----
5,000-strong peace rally denounces terrorism in Karachi
KARACHI (AFP)
Jun 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040606144148.h9k7941a.html
Some 5,000 peace activists, including women, rallied in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi Sunday to denounce acts of terror which claimed some 50 lives here last month, witnesses said.
Chanting "No to terrorism, Yes to peace," and "No to guns, Yes to pens," marchers carrying banners, placards and national flags paraded in the streets.
The rally was led by Sindh Provincial Governor Ishratul Ibad and Chief Minister Ali Mohammad Mahar.
"People of Karachi want peace, economic prosperity. We will not allow terrorism ... in the name of Islam," Ibad told the participants.
Some 50 people were killed in May, including a top Sunni cleric, in two suspected suicide bomb attacks on Shiite mosques.
Karachi has a history of political, ethnic and sectarian violence which has claimed 4,000 lives in the past several years.
----
Protesters Demand Immediate Iraq Pullout
Demonstrators Rally in Lafayette Square, Then March to Rumsfeld's House
By Avram Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 6, 2004; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18983-2004Jun5.html
Protesters rallied in Lafayette Square yesterday against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and demanded the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of U.S. forces.
After two hours of emotional speeches, the rain-soaked throng of about 1,300 marched up 14th Street to express their views at the Kalorama home of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was in Asia.
Demonstrators said Iraqis should be placed in charge immediately, even if civil war is the result.
"Iraq is a 5,000-year-old civilization," said Caneisha Mills, a Howard University history major and one of the leaders of the protest. "The Iraqi people can determine their destiny for themselves."
The event was organized by the International ANSWER coalition, an antiwar collective that demands that the United States maintain a hands-off foreign policy worldwide and stop support for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
A parade of speakers addressed the noon gathering, their voices echoing off the north side of the White House across the street. President Bush was also out of the country yesterday, in France commemorating the 60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of Europe in World War II.
Speakers said the Bush administration had trampled civil liberties by its use of the Patriot Act, allocated money for an overseas military adventure despite a great need for human services at home and used false information to justify the war.
The crowd paid the most attention to Michael Berg, an ardent pacifist whose 26-year-old son, Nicholas, a contractor seeking work and adventure in Iraq, was decapitated last month by five masked Islamic militants. The crime was videotaped and widely seen on the Internet.
Berg, a teacher from West Chester, Pa., invoked the nonviolent philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. and urged people to take direct action. He blamed Bush for pursuing the war and causing casualties in Iraq, and he demanded that the men who killed his son be brought to justice.
"I do blame them," he said. "They should be arrested and subject to a trial in a court of law, and if found guilty, never again be allowed to practice the brutality that cost my son's life."
Berg said in an interview later that he holds the Bush administration responsible for failing to accept an offer by the killers to save Nicholas Berg's life in exchange for detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Vanessa Heim, 41, a Manassas social worker who assists the homeless and mentally ill, carried a large sign with an obscenity before Bush's name. "I do not believe this war is right," she said. "There are too many people in our own country who don't have their basic needs met. Why are we spending billions and billions of dollars on this war? I want Bush out of there."
Sue Niederer, of Pennington, N.J., came to the rally with a large photo of her son, Army 1st Lt. Seth Dvorin, who died in Iraq in February while trying to disarm a roadside bomb 35 miles south of Baghdad. She said she wants U.S. forces to leave Iraq now, even if that would unleash hostilities among ethnic factions.
"The Iraqis will kill each other, and they'll find their own type of democracy," she said. "I don't think it's possible for us to force our type of democracy on another type of country that doesn't want what we want."
Protesters marched up 14th Street NW, then turned on U Street NW to reach Rumsfeld's home on Kalorama Road NW. There was a heavy police presence and a few dozen counter-protesters, but no incidents were reported.
--------
Hong Kong Vigil Honors Tiananmen Dead On Anniversary,
Tens of Thousands Protest Beijing's Stance Against Democratic Reform
By K.C. Ng and Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 5, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A16687-2004Jun4.html
HONG KONG, June 4 -- Tens of thousands of people dressed in funereal black or white gathered in a central park in Hong Kong and lit candles Friday night to mark the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and protest the Chinese government's hard line against democratic reform in this former British colony.
The vigil was the only public commemoration of the June 4, 1989, military crackdown permitted in China. In Beijing, police thwarted several attempts to mark the anniversary, dragging away more than a dozen unidentified people from Tiananmen Square and keeping many dissidents and relatives of those slain in 1989 under surveillance or house arrest.
The contrast between the security clampdown in the Chinese capital and an emotional, two-hour candlelight vigil here highlighted the special freedoms that the people of Hong Kong enjoy -- and the thorny challenge that their demands for greater democracy continue to pose to the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Police estimated that 48,000 people attended the demonstration in Victoria Park, but organizers put the figure at 82,000, the largest turnout since the event was first held in 1990 and a sharp increase over the 50,000 who participated last year.
In previous years, the June 4 vigil focused on mourning the hundreds, perhaps thousands, killed when Chinese troops and tanks suppressed student-led, pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But this year, participants also linked the vigil to Hong Kong's own struggle for democracy.
"China's brutal suppression of Hong Kong's democracy is like a June 4 crackdown without blood," said Bishop Joseph Zen, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Hong Kong and an outspoken supporter of democratic reforms.
Emotions have been running high since April, when Beijing rejected popular demands for direct elections in 2007 and 2008 to choose the territory's next chief executive and all its legislators. Pro-democracy activists have vowed to keep fighting and are planning a major demonstration on July 1, the anniversary of the territory's 1997 return to Chinese rule and an anti-government rally that drew 500,000 people last year.
"We included the theme of democracy this year because without a government that is responsible to the people, the community can have no hope and no future," said Szeto Wah, a lawmaker who is a veteran of the pro-democracy movement and the vigil's chief organizer. "Democracy is also the spirit of the 1989 student movement."
Waving candles and singing, the crowd filled an area of six soccer fields and carried signs that urged people to both "Remember June 4" and "March on July 1." Many participants wept quietly when footage of the 1989 massacre was shown on a large screen under a banner that declared, "Return Power to the People." But then the crowd began chanting "End Communist rule" and "Free the dissidents," and the roar echoed through the glitzy streets of the nearby Causeway Bay shopping district.
The Chinese government maintains that the Tiananmen Square crackdown was necessary to ensure social stability, which in turn made possible the country's historic economic growth over the past 15 years.
In recent months, Beijing has made it easier for mainland tourists to visit Hong Kong, part of a strategy to boost the territory's slumping economy and win over public sentiment. But pro-democracy activists passed out fliers and persuaded many tourists to attend the vigil.
Some who did, like Xie Chunyong, 36, an office manager from southern Guizhou province, had never seen footage of the Tiananmen killings. "In China, I had only heard about the incident," she said. "Hong Kong people are lucky. They can know the truth. . . . I admire their courage."
In another development certain to alarm Chinese officials, members of a pro-Taiwan organization raised a Taiwanese flag during the vigil. "Chinese in Taiwan can vote for their president," said Tang Man-chun, 29, of the China Youth Services and Recreation Center. "It is a shame that we people in Hong Kong cannot have the same rights, even after returning to the so-called motherland."
Lee Cheuk-yan, a pro-democracy lawmaker, said the large turnout at the vigil reflected growing anger that Beijing is breaking its promise to give Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy and is trying to influence the results of legislative elections in September. Pro-democracy candidates hope to win a majority that could be used to block government legislation and force concessions from China on democratic reform.
But three popular radio talk show hosts critical of the Chinese government have quit their jobs in the past month, claiming they had received threats authorized by Beijing.
"China has started stretching its hands into Hong Kong," said Lai Man-heung, 30, who arrived at the vigil in a wheelchair. "It banned our democracy. It's time for us to come out and show our anger."
Pan reported from Beijing.
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Six Peace Activists Arrested At Sub Christening
By AMY SULLIVAN
6/6/2004
Jonah House
http://jonahhouse.org/groton0604.htm
Groton - Six people were arrested after a group of between 30 and 40 demonstrators marched from Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park to the Electric Boat main gate Saturday morning to protest the christening of the newest nuclear submarine.
Groton City Police made the arrests. Four people were arrested on charges of obstructing free passage on Eastern Point Road, and two were charged with disorderly conduct.
The protest march was in response to the christening of the Jimmy Carter, SSN-23, at Electric Boat's shipyard. The demonstrators argued that the new submarine is "the most recent example of this country's advanced technology accompanied by a damaged morality."
The demonstrators handed out fliers explaining their position on nuclear war and protested at the gates of the shipyard as those attending the ceremony entered the facility.
"In these days of endless war I think it is absolutely crucial that people be there to say no," Stephen Kobasa, one of the demonstration's organizers, said. "In a world full of such violence, we think that peaceful nonviolent ways are the only way to bring about real security."
Kobasa added that the group was especially upset that the ship was named for former president Jimmy Carter and that he was attending the ceremony.
Carter received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development," according to the Nobel Committee.
"That made it an even more painful thing, to have it named after a Nobel Peace Prize winner," Kobasa said.
"Every time they create one of these machines, we will be there. No matter whose name they put on them."
Kobasa said the group comprised individuals and did not represent any larger organization.
The activists arrested for obstructing free passage included Christopher Doucot, 36, of Hartford; Calvin Robertson, 58, of 3 Ridge St., Groton; Ken Krayeske, 32, of Hartford and Emmett Jarrett, 65, of 30 Broad St., New London.
In addition, Maureen Ostensen, 44, of 539 Beach Pond Road, Voluntown and Thomas Lewis, 64, of Worcester, Mass., were charged with disorderly conduct. All six people were released on apromise to appear and were scheduled to appear in New London Superior Court on June 22.
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