Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Prague criticises EU inspection of Temelin nuclear plant
EU 'Big 3' rebuke Iran in nuke draft
Resolution Focuses on Iran Nuke Program
Clarke: More Reasons to Invade Iran Than Iraq
Europeans Seek U.N. Nuclear Watchdog Rebuke of Iran
U.N. Arms Inspectors Say Iraq Sites Were Cleaned Out
South Korea unhappy with planned US troop pull-out
Japan Leader Calls on North Korea to Dismantle Nuclear Program
Koizumi Says N.Korea Open to Deal on Nukes
The Great-Grandson of Star Wars, Now Ground-Based
A Test of Leadership On Sea Island
The Wrong Proliferation Message
Changes in nuclear arsenal recalled
Pantex reports on extraction
Hanford contractor hires experts to review health program
Senate Lowers Standard for High-Level Nuclear Waste Cleanup
MILITARY
Afghan Leader Says Stability Is His Nation's First Priority
Attack in Afghanistan Kills U.S. Soldier
Karzai Shows He'll Cast Lot With a Corps of Warlords
U.S. May Cut Third of Troops In South Korea
U.S. to Order Anthrax Vaccine
Iraqi parties' militias agree to disarm
Decree Outlaws Iraqi Militias In Effort to Bolster Security
Two Car Bombs, and Land Mines, Add to Casualties in Iraq
Kurdish Leaders Demand Safeguards in Resolution
Hezbollah and Israeli Forces Clash
Israel, Our Dangerous Parasite
2 Pro-Settler Members to Quit Sharon's Cabinet
For Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda Threat Is Now Hitting Home
CIA got 'legal guidance' for torture
Forced Nudity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive
Tenet's Departure May Ease an Overhaul of Intelligence
Racing to Ruin the C.I.A.
US submits UN resolution for Tuesday vote
Latest UN draft resolution on Iraq
U.S. Bends to France, Russia on U.N. Iraq Resolution
U.S. Envoy Predicts Passage of Amended Iraq Resolution
U.S. Plans Major Cut Of Forces In Korea
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Reagan's influence on the courts
Threat of Terror Colors Plans for Security at Reagan Funeral
Cigarette Smuggling Linked to Terrorism
Memo Offered Justification for Use of Torture
Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush
Ashcroft Says Bush Rejects Use of Torture
POLITICS
On FOIA Front, More Agencies Contract Out
ENERGY
Can solar power work?
Washington is worried about faltering energy tie with Moscow
Break out the bicycles
OTHER
58 Senators Seek Easing of Rules for Stem Cells
Weapons Makers Turn to Medicine
ACTIVISTS
Rosy Outlook Hid Ugly Facts From Reagan
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Prague criticises EU inspection of Temelin nuclear plant
PRAGUE (AFP)
Jun 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040608151904.0ixp26y6.html
The Czech Office of Nuclear Safety on Tuesday criticised the decision of the European Commission to dispatch a team of experts to the Czech nuclear power plant Temelin after a weekend leak of radioactive water.
"I consider the sending of this mission an exaggeration," Dana Drabova, the office's president, told Czech news wire CTK.
"The breakdown was immediately examined by German experts who judged it to be unimportant," she added.
Drabova said that she knew nothing about the planned mission to the plant in the south of the country, 60 kms (36 miles) from the Austrian border, and stressed again that the accident had not threatened anyone's safety.
"There have been 22 missions from the Atomic Agency there," Drabova told
Austrian representatives have criticised the delay with which they said the Czech side gave information about the defect. The Bavarian Environment Ministry has demanded a detailed explanation of the latest defect at the station.
But Drabova insisted that the Czech Republic informed neighbouring countries of the accident in time.
The Czechs have an agreement with neighbouring Austria and Germany to inform them of any incident within 78 hours and they did so within 24 hours, she said.
"The agreement does not set the dates for the provision of detailed information," Drabova said, adding that the nuclear safety office would be glad to provide details about the water leak to the neighbouring countries.
Drabova said that the media interest in Temelin, which was launched in 2000, was being provoked by non-governmental organisations.
She said she believed that Temelin was under much stricter supervision than others.
For instance, Drabova claimed that in an incident one month ago an amount of radioactive water 10 times larger than the Temelin incident leaked out of a German nuclear power plant directly into the Rhine.
She said that incident had provoked little interest from the public.
The Czech Foreign Ministry also said that the Czech Republic did not violate the international agreement on informing about incidents.
-------- iran
EU 'Big 3' rebuke Iran in nuke draft
Tue 8 June, 2004
(Reuters)
By Louis Charbonneau
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=525754§ion=news
VIENNA - France, Britain and Germany have circulated a draft U.N. nuclear resolution that sharply rebukes Iran for sluggish co-operation with the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The text, seen by Reuters, calls for a continuation of IAEA inspections and urges "Iran to take all the necessary steps on an urgent basis to resolve all outstanding questions". While toughly worded, it does not hint at any punitive actions.
As expected, it does not mention reporting Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, which Washington says would be justified given Iran's 18-year cover-up of its uranium enrichment programme, capable of making material for atom bombs.
Still, Western diplomats on the IAEA board told Reuters the text would likely be acceptable to most members of the board -- including the United States, which says Iran is using its nuclear programme as a front for developing atomic weapons.
Tehran insists its atomic programme is peaceful.
Iranian officials were not immediately available on Tuesday for comment on the draft, which will be revised and submitted to the next IAEA governing board meeting.
Iran's foreign ministry said on Sunday it had done everything necessary to clear up concerns about its nuclear programme and called for an end to the IAEA's investigation.
But one diplomat said the main point of the resolution was to keep the case open until the IAEA gets to the bottom of Iran's programme, the full extent of which Iran tried to keep secret for nearly two decades.
The draft said the IAEA governing board "acknowledges Iranian co-operation in responding to agency requests for access to locations" -- including military sites -- but "deplores... the fact that this co-operation has not been complete, timely and proactive".
In particular, the text "deplores" Iran's decision to delay March inspections of sites connected with Tehran's advanced P-2 centrifuge programme, which Iran had failed to mention in an October declaration it said was a full picture of its programme.
The European Union's "big three" also notes "with concern that the agency's investigations have revealed further omissions in the declarations previously provided by Iran" about the P-2 and other potentially weapons-related research.
DOUBTS ABOUT IRAN'S STORY
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said in a report last week that Tehran had changed its story and admitted to importing P-2 centrifuge magnets, which it had said were produced at home. This has raised more doubts about the veracity of Iran's story.
The IAEA has been investigating Iran's nuclear programme since August 2002 when an exiled Iranian opposition group reported that Tehran was hiding an underground uranium enrichment plant and other sites from U.N. inspectors.
While the draft includes some praise of Iran, it is predominantly critical, said one diplomat familiar with it.
"It's tougher than I had expected," the diplomat said.
Several diplomats said U.S. negotiators would push for even harsher language in revisions over the next few days.
A U.S. official, who declined to be named, said: "We have seen the draft. We think the board is going to take appropriately firm action when it meets next week."
The draft also urges Iran to scrap its plans to begin operating a uranium conversion facility and constructing a heavy water research reactor that would produce bomb-grade plutonium.
The text says the IAEA board also "deeply regrets" that Iran has not fully suspended all aspects of its uranium enrichment programme, as it had promised to do under a deal Tehran struck last year with the three European states.
--------
Resolution Focuses on Iran Nuke Program
June 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Agency-Iran.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Leading European nations presented a draft resolution Tuesday that criticizes Iran for not answering key questions raised by a U.N atomic agency probe of its suspect nuclear program.
The draft, written by France, Britain and Germany, ``deplores'' Iran's failure to cooperate in a ``complete, timely and proactive' way, said a diplomat quoting parts of the text to The Associated Press. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
At the same time, the diplomat said, the draft acknowledges Iranian cooperation in granting agency inspectors access to key locations, including ``defense industry'' sites.
While the Islamic Republic says its programs are geared solely toward producing energy, the United States and its allies say Tehran wants to build nuclear weapons.
In an allusion to Pakistan -- which indirectly supplied much of Iran's covert nuclear program through renegade scientist A.Q Khan -- the draft calls for the ``full and close cooperation of third countries'' to clear up Iran's nuclear ambiguities.
Diplomats close to the International Atomic Energy Agency say Pakistan has refused to allow U.N. experts to independently take samples that would test Iranian assertions that traces of weapons-grade uranium found in Iran came from equipment bought from the Khan network.
If the IAEA cannot match trace samples from Pakistan and Iran, it cannot verify whether Iran's version is accurate or a cover up.
The diplomat said the draft -- circulated among delegations representing the U.N. agency's 35-nation board ahead of a meeting Monday -- also focused on Iran's centrifuge program, the other main outstanding issue in the IAEA's more than yearlong probe.
After initial denials, Tehran has acknowledged that it researched advanced centrifuges capable of uranium enrichment. But it denied it wanted to embark on full-scale enrichment, despite IAEA findings that it bought thousands of parts, far in excess of what it needed for research only.
The draft called on Iran to reveal the full scope of its centrifuge program.
It also urged Tehran to rethink plans to build a uranium conversion plant and heavy water reactors.
Another diplomat said the United States largely approved of the draft, but was likely to push to toughen up the wording.
Monday's board meeting will review a report on Iran by IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, as part of the agency's probe of its covert nuclear activities.
The report voiced the same concerns as the draft circulated Tuesday -- that Iran tried to buy critical parts for advanced P-2 centrifuges and that it was unclear where traces of weapons grade uranium found inside Iran came from.
In the face of mounting international pressure, Iran suspended uranium enrichment last year, and in April said it had stopped building centrifuges.
Iran has rejected U.S. allegations its nuclear program is for military purposes. ElBaradei said last month his agency had not found proof of a concrete link between Iran's nuclear activities and its military program, but ``it was premature to make a judgment.''
On the Net:
International Atomic Energy Agency, www.iaea.org
--------
Clarke: More Reasons to Invade Iran Than Iraq
June 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iran-usa-clarke.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - It would have made more sense to invade Iran than Iraq, says a former U.S. counterterrorism adviser who has already accused the Bush administration of being soft on terrorism and wasting resources by attacking Iraq.
Richard Clarke, a former adviser to three U.S. presidents and four administrations, said mere possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) did not justify invading a country. This was the U.S. government's stated grounds for the Iraq war. ``If you take the case of Iran, its nuclear program is far more advanced than Iraq's was,'' Clarke told the Austrian daily Der Standard in an interview translated into German. ``There would have been far more grounds to invade there (Iran).''
The United States believes Iran's nuclear program is a front for developing atomic weapons. Tehran denies this, saying its atomic ambitions are limited to generating electricity.
The U.S. military has found none of the caches of Iraqi WMD that Washington said Saddam Hussein had possessed in abundance.
In his recently published memoirs ``Against All Enemies,'' Clarke charged that the administration of President Bush did not take the al Qaeda threat seriously enough before the September 11, 2001 attacks and needlessly attacking Iraq.
Clarke's accusations have damaged Bush's reputation for being tough on terrorism -- a key theme in the president's re-election campaign. The Los Angeles Times reported in April that 52 percent of Americans agreed that Bush had been lax on terrorism before September 11 while 40 percent disagreed.
Bush has repeatedly denied Clarke's charges.
In a chapter entitled ``That Almost War, 1996,'' Clarke says former U.S. President Bill Clinton almost launched a war against Iran for what Washington says its support for terrorism against the United States.
However, Clarke says Clinton chose not to attack Iran but ordered an ``intelligence operation'' that seemed to have worked.
``Following the intelligence operation, and perhaps because of it and the serious U.S. threats, among other reasons, Iran ceased terrorism against the U.S.,'' Clarke wrote. ``War with Iran was averted.''
--------
Europeans Seek U.N. Nuclear Watchdog Rebuke of Iran
June 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran-resolution.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog will sharply rebuke Iran for sluggish cooperation under a draft resolution circulated by France, Britain and Germany at the International Atomic Energy Agency Tuesday.
The text, seen by Reuters, calls for IAEA inspections to continue and urges ``Iran to take all the necessary steps on an urgent basis to resolve all outstanding questions'' on its atomic program, which Washington says is a front for developing arms.
As expected, it does not mention reporting Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, which the United States says would be justified given Iran's 18-year cover-up of a uranium enrichment program capable of making bomb material.
But Western diplomats on the IAEA board told Reuters the text would likely be acceptable to most board members, including the Americans.
Tehran says its atomic program is peaceful. Iranian officials were not immediately available for comment on the draft, which will be revised and submitted to the next IAEA governing board meeting.
Iran's foreign ministry said Sunday it had done everything necessary to clear up concerns about its nuclear program and called for an end to the IAEA's investigation.
But one diplomat said the main point of the resolution was to keep the case open until the IAEA gets to the bottom of Iran's program, the full extent of which Tehran tried to keep secret for nearly two decades.
The draft said the IAEA ``acknowledges Iranian cooperation in responding to agency requests for access to locations'' -- including military sites -- but ``deplores...the fact that this cooperation has not been complete, timely and proactive.''
The text also ``deplores'' Iran's decision to delay March inspections of sites connected with its advanced P-2 centrifuge program, which Iran had failed to mention in an October declaration it said was a full picture of its program.
The European Union's ``big three'' also noted ``with concern that the agency's investigations have revealed further omissions in the declarations previously provided by Iran'' about the P-2 and other potentially weapons-related research.
DOUBTS ABOUT IRAN'S STORY
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said in a report last week that Tehran had changed its story and admitted to importing P-2 centrifuge magnets, which it had said were produced at home. This has raised more doubts about the veracity of Iran's story.
The IAEA has been investigating Iran's nuclear program since August 2002, when an exiled Iranian opposition group said Tehran was hiding an underground uranium enrichment plant and other sites from U.N. inspectors.
While the draft includes some praise of Iran, it is predominantly critical, said one diplomat familiar with it.
A European diplomat told Reuters he believed the resolution was ``not aggressive but constructive and factual.''
Several diplomats said U.S. negotiators would push for even harsher language in revisions over the next few days.
A U.S. official, who declined to be named, said: ``We have seen the draft. We think the board is going to take appropriately firm action when it meets next week.''
The draft also urges Iran to scrap plans to begin operating a uranium conversion facility and constructing a heavy water research reactor that would produce bomb-grade plutonium.
The text says the IAEA board also ``deeply regrets'' that Iran has not fully suspended all aspects of its uranium enrichment program, as it had promised to do under a deal Tehran struck last year with the three European states.
-------- iraq / inspections
U.N. Arms Inspectors Say Iraq Sites Were Cleaned Out
Associated Press
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23281-2004Jun7.html
UNITED NATIONS, June 7 -- A number of sites in Iraq known to have contained equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been either cleaned out or destroyed, U.N. weapons inspectors said Monday.
The inspectors' report said they did not know whether the items, which had been monitored by the United Nations, were at the sites during the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
U.N. inspectors were pulled from Iraq just before the war began in March 2003, and the United States has refused to allow them to return, instead deploying its own teams to search for weapons of mass destruction.
"It is possible that some of the materials may have been removed from Iraq by looters of sites and sold as scrap," the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission said in its quarterly report to the Security Council.
UNMOVIC said its experts and a team from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was responsible for dismantling Iraq's nuclear program, were jointly investigating items from Iraq that were discovered in a scrap yard in the Dutch port of Rotterdam.
Through photographs taken during an initial IAEA investigation, UNMOVIC said it discovered that SA-2 engines used in Iraq's banned Al Samoud-2 missile program were among the scrap.
Commission experts examined one missile engine at the site and discovered from the serial number that it had been tagged by U.N. inspectors in the past and had not been declared as having been fired.
Representatives at the scrap yard indicated that five to 12 similar engines had been seen there in January and February, and that more could have passed through the yard unnoticed, the report said.
Company staff said other items made of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys bearing the inscription "Iraq" or "Baghdad" had been observed in shipments delivered from the Middle East since November 2003, it said.
UNMOVIC experts determined that a number of items were composed of heat-resistant Inconel and titanium -- both subject to monitoring because of their possible dual use in legitimate civilian activities and banned weapons production, the report said. The commission said its investigation was continuing.
-------- korea
South Korea unhappy with planned US troop pull-out
SEOUL (AFP)
Jun 08, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040608041925.y4i3boze.html
South Korea took issue Tuesday with the timing of Washington's announced pullout of one third of its forces from the country and said the plan had yet to be finalized.
Washington confirmed Monday that it wants to withdraw 12,500 troops from South Korea as part of a global review of its military posture designed to produce a more agile fighting force for the 21st century.
South Korea is still technically at war with North Korea and the announcement triggered alarm in a country gripped by uncertainty for the past 20 months over the Stalinist state's nuclear weapons drive.
South Korean officials said the troop withdrawal announcement was formulated as a proposal, rather than a final decision, and Seoul was busily preparing its own counter-proposal.
Washington, facing immediate pressure for fresh troops for duty in Iraq, said the pullout would take place within 18 months. Seoul wants the deadline pushed back.
The troop withdrawal proposal was announced on the sidelines of talks on realigning US forces from positions close to the border with North Korea to bases south of Seoul and includes a previously announced redeployment of 3,600 troops from South Korea to Iraq.
The number and type of troops implicated in the proposed withdrawal was still up for discussion, National Security Adviser Kwon Chin-Ho was quoted as saying in a pool report.
"The timetable is nothing but a suggestion from the United States and we need to examine and negotiate it," Kwon said before attending a cabinet meeting presided over by President Roh Moo-Hyun.
"In the reviewing process, we also need to closely consult on which US troops in Korea should be moved."
Defense Minister Cho Young-Kil, in the same pool report, referred to the troop withdrawal announcement as a "suggestion" that was subject to modification.
South Korean security-related ministries were discussing the proposal and would soon present Washington with recommendations, he said.
Media reports said South Korea wanted a delay of several years in the plan for the biggest troop withdrawal from South Korea since the Vietnam War and its first troop pullout from the country in over a decade.
The timeframe should be pushed back to between 2007 and 2113 to allow South Korea to complete a 10-year plan to upgrade its own military forces, according to some reports.
North Korea, which has campaigned strenuously for a pullout of all 37,000 US troops from South Korea, was expected to view the planned troop withdrawal with suspicion.
The Stalinist state earlier condemned US plans to realign its forces in South Korea away from the heavily-fortified border with North Korea as a sinister plot to prepare a pre-meditated strike and trigger the second Korean War.
Talks were in their second day here Tuesday between top US and South Korean officials on the realignment plan that includes the removal of the Yongsan garrison, headquarters of US forces in South Korea, from the capital to a location further south.
North Korea on Monday reiterated its call for a complete US troop pullout on an Internet website operated by Pyongyang, Yonhap news agency said.
It referred to the plan to redeploy 3,600 troops stationed here to Iraq as a "cunning trick" aimed at calming anti-US sentiment building in South Korea as a result of oppositon to Iraq and the hardline US stance on the North Korean nuclear standoff.
In South Korea, conservatives condemned the announcement and blamed President Roh and his left-leaning administration which rose to power on a wave of anti-Americanism and has advocated a more independent stand from the United States.
Legislative elections on April 15 tipped the balance further to the left as reformers loyal to Roh took control of the National Assembly.
The conservative opposition Grand National Party described the plan as "shocking and surprising" and its senior lawmaker Park Jin said it would undermine South Korean security.
--------
Japan Leader Calls on North Korea to Dismantle Nuclear Program
June 8, 2004
By JAMES BROOKE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/asia/08japa.html
TOKYO, June 7 - If North Korea wants Japanese economic aid and diplomatic ties, it must first dismantle its nuclear weapons program and account for Japanese abducted by its agents, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said in an interview on Monday.
"North Korea desired the normalization of relations with Japan," Mr. Koizumi said, recounting his meeting on May 22 with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il.
"I told him face to face, 'If you compare what you gain from nuclear weapons and what you gain from dismantlement of your own nuclear program, there would be a difference of heaven and earth,' " Mr. Koizumi, said in the interview with American and European reporters here before flying to the United States for the Group of 8 summit meeting.
Before securing the visit to Pyongyang, North Korea's capital, an envoy to Mr. Koizumi had hinted that normalization could happen in coming years, unlocking as much as $10 billion in Japanese compensation for its colonization of northern Korea in the early part of the 20th century.
Washington has enlisted North Korea's neighbors in a regional effort to persuade the North to dismantle its nuclear program. The North has said it is building nuclear weapons to protect itself from the United States and wants one-on-one talks with Washington.
"On the nuclear issue, Mr. Kim Jong Il said it is a matter between North Korea and the U.S.," Mr. Koizumi said of his talks last month with Mr. Kim. "I disagreed, and I said Japan is also involved, and he showed understanding."
North Korea has an arsenal of medium-range missiles, and many Japanese feel that Japan is the most likely potential target, rather than China or Russia. The Chinese have proposed holding a round of six-country regional talks on North Korea's nuclear threat later this month. Many analysts have low expectations for such a meeting, partly because North Korea seems to be waiting for the outcome of the American presidential election.
Asked for the message he would transmit to Mr. Bush and the other leaders, Mr. Koizumi said, "I felt personally that North Korea was interested in moving forward in a positive way with the six-party talks."
After his visit to Pyongyang last month Mr. Koizumi enjoyed a bounce in the polls. He returned from the trip with five children of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea almost a quarter century ago, which he had secured from the North in exchange for a promise of economic assistance. But a poll taken over the weekend shows that Mr. Koizumi's approval rating has dropped 10.4 points, to 44.5 percent. Touching on another unpopular issue here, the deployment of about 550 Japanese soldiers to southern Iraq, Mr. Koizumi called for more involvement by the United Nations and the Iraqi people.
"I have very strongly urged the United States to do that," he said, referring to having Washington work closely with the United Nations. "I have always mentioned very strongly that the people who can bring about the stable democratic government in Iraq is not the American people, it is not the United Nations, it is the Iraqi people, " he said
Drawing a lesson from Japanese history, he called on Iraqis to unite to form a democratic and stable government.
"People came to recognize that internal strife and confusion would render Japan a colony of foreign countries," he said, referring to 19th-century civil conflict in Japan. "By overcoming division and opening the country to the outside world, the foundation was laid for the building of the modern country of Japan."
--------
Koizumi Says N.Korea Open to Deal on Nukes
June 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-group-korea-nuclear.html
SAVANNAH, Ga. (Reuters) - North Korea appears to have grown more open to a deal on halting its nuclear weapons program, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said on Tuesday, but U.S. officials said they wanted to see proof.
Koizumi, who met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang in May, told reporters en route to the Group of Eight summit in Sea Island, Georgia, that Kim had signaled he might be willing to freeze North Korea's nuclear program.
``I got the feeling that the North Koreans are willing to make progress ahead of the six-party talks,'' said Koizumi, who conveyed that message in a luncheon meeting with President Bush.
``The prime minister contrasted his meeting with Kim Jong-il in May this year to the meeting in September a year ago, and thought he detected in Kim Jong-il a bit more of a recognition that there might be advantages to giving up nuclear weapons,'' said a U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Koizumi told Bush that Kim appeared to be willing to engage in bilateral talks, according to Japanese officials. But both Japanese and U.S. officials said Bush remained firm in his view that he wanted dialogue to take place through the six-party talks.
The six parties comprise North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
Previous rounds have failed to make much headway as Washington and Pyongyang -- the two main protagonists -- remained split on how to dismantle the North's nuclear weapons.
North Korea, faced with a struggling economy, is seeking compensation for giving up its nuclear arms program, with a freeze as a first step. The United States is demanding that Pyongyang abandon it completely and unconditionally.
``(Bush) completely agreed that these things were possible for North Korea, but the key was verification and making sure that the North Koreans kept their promise,'' a U.S. official said.
``And the two leaders agreed that in that context, making sure that the North Koreans make a commitment to all of the six parties, or all of the other five parties, was absolutely essential,'' the official added.
Another Bush administration said that on the question of whether progress was likely in the talks, ``the ball is in North Korea's court.''
-------- missile defense
THE MISSILE ISSUE
The Great-Grandson of Star Wars, Now Ground-Based, Is Back on the Agenda
June 8, 2004
By CARL HULSE and WILLIAM J. BROAD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/national/08missiles.html
WASHINGTON, June 7 - Ronald Reagan's signature vision of a space shield to protect the nation from a barrage of nuclear missiles has devolved from its original Star Wars concept to a more rudimentary system of ground-based rockets that the Bush administration hopes to put in place this year.
Launched with bravura in March 1983, Mr. Reagan's endeavor was to make enemy missiles "impotent and obsolete," he said. But technological and political realities intervened. The 1986 Challenger disaster rocked the space program and the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the cold war, rendering less urgent Mr. Reagan's plan, officially called the Strategic Defensive Initiative.
The Clinton administration explored a less advanced missile system, but the current Bush administration has embraced a version of Mr. Reagan's idea. Special interceptors now being built at an aerospace factory in Arizona are soon to be deployed in silos in Alaska, California and eventually in other sites. They are not intended to counter the threat that Mr. Reagan saw, a rain of I.C.B.M.'s from the Soviet Union, but to guard against a missile launched from North Korea or an as-yet-unidentified rogue state.
Though the magnitude of the project has been scaled back, opposition and skepticism remain. Until Mr. Reagan's death on Saturday led Senate leaders to put off most legislative action this week, the Senate had been preparing for a debate on Democratic proposals to require more testing for a system that critics say is being put into the field without an adequate gauge of its capabilities. "If we want a missile defense that works rather than one that sits on the ground and soaks up money, we should not shy away from realistic testing requirements," said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
Congressional Republicans and administration officials say that the new system would provide a deterrent and that its potential could be better assessed once the first interceptors were in place. "You can only do so much hypothetical testing," said Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona and a strong advocate of the missile defense program.
The dispute over missile defense is likely to play out in the presidential campaign as well. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate, last week described the Bush administration's missile defense system as unproven and said he would divert money from it to pay for added military personnel.
After Mr. Reagan unveiled his futuristic plan, critics derided the idea as "Star Wars" and the label stuck, largely because of its science fiction vision of laser battle stations. The architects of Mr. Reagan's plan proposed to base the weapons in space, where their reach would be hundreds of times greater than weapons on the ground.
In a frantic hunt for ways to bring Mr. Reagan's dream to life, a gargantuan research effort lurched through a blur of possible weapons over the years, including X-ray lasers, chemical lasers, free-electron lasers, particle beams and space-based kinetic kill vehicles.
"A lot of technology was advanced even though they never seemed to get the holy grail of high reliability in sight," said John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.
It was first envisioned as a five-year, $26 billion research effort, but cost estimates for the system's deployment soared to more than $1 trillion and Pentagon officials said lofting its weapons and associated satellites into space might take up to 5,000 flights of space shuttles or shuttle-sized rockets. Today, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency says it has spent more than $80 billion since 1985, with a request for about $10.5 billion now the subject of Senate scrutiny.
In the current budget, the administration sought to build 40 interceptors for about $50 million each over the next five years. The weapon consists of a booster rocket and a unit that would separate from the booster and destroy an incoming missile, an "exoatmospheric kill vehicle."
Democrats, who say they back the idea of a functional missile defense system, argue that the current configuration of booster and kill vehicle has never been flight tested. They say the Bush administration is rushing the process to claim the political victory of being responsible for the first missile defense network.
"We want to make sure the system we deploy works, not simply having deployment for the sake of having deployment," said Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, who intends to challenge the missile defense policy when the Senate returns to the issue next week. "This is not the way that you develop a military system."
Officials at the Missile Defense Agency say the kill vehicle has been tested on a similar booster eight times and been successful in five cases. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the agency, said the military also had sophisticated modeling and simulation capability and was confident the interceptor would work.
"There is no reason to believe that this kill vehicle and this booster won't perform as successfully as the ones did before," he said. "We have a very good understanding of the performance of the different elements of this ballistic missile defense system."
But Mr. Reed and others say the testing so far has not been realistic. And Dr. Philip E. Coyle III, a former head of weapons testing at the Pentagon, called the system "no more than a scarecrow, not a real defense."
Though the emerging weapon is a far cry from Mr. Reagan's initial idea, some believe the Bush administration has not abandoned pursuit of bigger antimissile goals. Theresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a private group in Washington, said those could include weapons in space, a push that she said has the potential to revive Star Wars.
"There are a number of enthusiasts in the Bush administration," she said, "who believe that space is the next high frontier."
-------- terrorism
A Test of Leadership On Sea Island
By Sam Nunn and Michele Flournoy
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Washington Post; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23589-2004Jun7?language=printer
The Group of Eight leaders who are meeting in Sea Island, Ga., this week face a historic test of leadership. In the wake of the Madrid bombings and warnings that al Qaeda is planning attacks in the United States, this summit must produce more than the usual photo opportunities and joint statements. Its success should be measured in large part by whether the G-8 leaders take concrete and urgent steps to reduce the risk of catastrophic terrorism.
Unfortunately, the risk that terrorists could acquire and use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons is all too real. Over time, and without our decisive intervention, al Qaeda could become the world's 10th nuclear power. The terrorist organization has made several attempts to acquire uranium that could be used to make a crude nuclear device, and documents discovered at an al Qaeda safe house in 2001 showed an understanding of nuclear weapons design. The hardest part for the terrorists is getting the plutonium or highly enriched uranium necessary to build a bomb. Making that impossible should be our goal.
At their 2002 summit the G-8 leaders launched a Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction, in which they pledged $20 billion -- $10 billion from the United States, $10 billion from others -- over 10 years to reduce the risk of catastrophic terrorism. Two years after this global security breakthrough, they are $3 billion short of their pledges, and only a tiny fraction of the $17 billion pledged has been appropriated for programs. Disputes between Russia and donor countries over tax issues, liability questions and site access have slowed implementation.
As a result, less than one-quarter of Russia's nuclear bomb-making materials -- hundreds of metric tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU) -- has been adequately secured against theft or diversion. Globally, there are still more than 130 nuclear research reactors and other facilities in 40 countries using or storing weapons-usable HEU, and many of these facilities have only the most rudimentary security measures.
The problem is not confined to unsecured nuclear materials. Millions of portable artillery shells and hundreds of missile warheads filled with deadly nerve agents await destruction at dilapidated facilities in Russia. Construction of a U.S.-funded destruction plant was delayed for three years by political and compliance disputes, and current destruction plans will take more than a decade to implement. In the meantime, one stolen shell could be used to kill tens of thousands of people in Washington, New York, London, Paris, Tokyo or Moscow.
In addition, Russian military and civilian research facilities still have deadly pathogen collections; we don't know exactly what kind they are, how many there are or how secure they are. Thousands of former weapons scientists and workers in Russia remain underpaid or unemployed, making them more vulnerable targets for recruitment by terrorist organizations.
Although significant work has begun in all these areas, projected completion dates stretch into the next decade and beyond. Given the concerted efforts of al Qaeda and possibly other terrorist groups to acquire nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, there is now a dangerous gap between the pace of our progress and the urgency of the threat. We are not accelerating these programs as if our lives depended on it. They do.
There are at least 10 steps that G-8 leaders could take at Sea Island to give us a chance of winning this race against terrorism:
1. Appoint a senior official in each government, with direct access to the president or prime minister, who is responsible and accountable for ensuring that terrorists do not acquire weapons of mass destruction. Empower this senior official to eliminate all obstacles to cooperation as quickly as possible.
2. Announce an intention to increase pledges to the global partnership above the $20 billion goal. This goal should be treated as a floor, not a ceiling.
3. Expand the global partnership to include all nations with weapons capability and weapons materials, specifically Pakistan, India, Israel and China.
4. Accelerate efforts to consolidate and secure weapons-usable nuclear materials worldwide.
5. Accelerate the demilitarization of Russia's stockpile of 40,000 tons of chemical agents and strengthen the security of all chemical weapon stocks awaiting destruction in Russia.
6. Take immediate steps to account for and secure dangerous biological pathogen collections across Russia and the former Soviet Union.
7. Initiate a global effort to combat both infectious diseases and biological terrorism.
8. Expand efforts to employ former weapons scientists and personnel in the former Soviet Union.
9. Presidents Bush and Putin should pledge to bilaterally increase the transparency, safety and security of all tactical nuclear weapons in and around Europe.
10. Bush and Putin should also announce a new initiative to make U.S. and Russian biological defense research efforts bilaterally transparent as a confidence-building measure to enable greater cooperation in the biological arena.
This is not a list of impossible dreams; these are global security imperatives. Taking these steps will require the personal commitment and persistent action of the presidents of the United States and Russia, the leaders of the G-8 and other countries around the globe. The clock is ticking.
Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator from Georgia, is co-chairman of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Michele Flournoy is a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and co-director of the Strengthening the Global Partnership project.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
The Wrong Proliferation Message
June 8, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/opinion/08TUE3.html
As the world's strongest nuclear and conventional power, America should want to freeze weapons development and halt nuclear proliferation. Yet the Bush administration's proposed military budget moves in a different and more dangerous direction by seeking a sharp increase in the funds for research on two new kinds of nuclear bombs. The Senate should halt this reckless folly by voting next week for an amendment sponsored by Senators Edward Kennedy and Dianne Feinstein.
One of the new nuclear weapons is a reduced-yield explosive, less than half as powerful as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Proponents call these low-yield bombs more "usable" than today's versions. That means easing the taboo that has kept nuclear weapons sheathed since 1945 on behalf of a bomb that could still expose hundreds of thousands of people to death or radiation sickness. With nine countries now believed to have nuclear weapons, including North Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel, the world does not need America's encouraging the idea of more usable bombs.
The administration also wants money to study much more powerful nuclear explosives for use against suspected underground bunkers containing biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Just imagine launching nuclear bunker busters based on weapons intelligence as unreliable as that circulating before the Iraq war. Even if underground sites were accurately identified, the resulting nuclear explosions could spread the blast, radiation and toxins over populated areas. The proposed research money ought to be going into better weapons intelligence and improved conventional methods for putting these sites out of commission, like blocking air intakes and external energy sources.
The only research involving nuclear weapons should involve finding ways to discourage their spread. It's mind-boggling that the administration seems more interested in finding new uses for them.
----
REMEMBERING REAGAN:
Changes in nuclear arsenal recalled
Test site faced new challenges, ex-official says
By KEITH ROGERS
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2004/Jun-08-Tue-2004/news/24053395.html
Troy Wade, seated in the far upper left corner of this photo, listens as President Reagan, right center, asks him a question during a National Security Council meeting at the White House in 1988. PHOTO COURTESY TROY WADE
Longtime Las Vegas resident and Nevada Test Site official Troy Wade was involved in some of the most important nuclear weapons and strategic defense decisions of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
In 1988, Wade sat in on a National Security Council meeting at the White House. During the meeting, Reagan pondered drastic changes in the nation's nuclear weaponry.
The discussion focused on the so-called "Midgetman" weapon, a shift from the massive, multi-warhead missiles built in the era of mutually assured destruction, to smaller, single-warhead systems.
"That was one of the things he was pushing. He wanted to develop smaller nuclear weapons that were more effective and more mobile," Wade said Monday, recalling other sessions he participated in as the assistant secretary of energy for defense programs.
Reagan set the national weapons laboratories and the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, on a course for new challenges, Wade said.
Reagan died Saturday after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease.
"I think early on in his administration he pushed defense. And, in his '83 speech about `Star Wars,' he said the same kinds of brains that developed nuclear weapons now need to develop ways to counter nuclear weapons," Wade said Monday.
What surfaced was the "Star Wars" initiative, a nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray laser, at the Lawrence Livermore lab in California. Project manager Roy Woodruff was adamant that the X-ray laser, a space-based device that would knock out enemy nuclear missiles with intense X-rays, wasn't as far along as the late H-bomb brain trust Edward Teller had claimed.
Teller had met with Reagan seven months before Reagan delivered his famous "Star Wars" address on March 23, 1983. In that speech, Reagan explained his vision to "embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive."
Whether "Star Wars" was as effective as Teller had advised Reagan, it forced the Soviets to invest in similar technologies for fear their weapons would be made obsolete.
"There was a very good chance that if he (Reagan) really pushed defense and if he really pushed `Star Wars,' that he could just simply break the economy of the Soviet Union.
"I don't think he ever wanted to go to war," said Wade, the chairman of the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation. "I just think he wanted to break the economy of the Soviet Union, and he did."
Wade estimated that as billions of dollars was spent on programs such as the X-ray laser, the Soviets were spending huge amounts to explore similar weapons systems. In 1986, at Reykjavik, Iceland, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev asked Reagan to give up "Star Wars." Reagan wouldn't do it. "They left the Reykjavik summit mad at one another," Wade said.
In May 1988, Wade went with Reagan to a summit in Moscow, the last in his presidency. The warming of relations with the Soviets to verify limits on the size of nuclear weapons tests had begun.
The discussions led to the Aug. 17, 1988, Joint Verification Experiment, dubbed "Kearsarge," at the Nevada Test Site. In that unprecedented nuclear test, Soviet scientists observed the detonation on location. A second test was later conducted in the Soviet Union while U.S. scientists watched and verified the data.
Wade was the senior Department of Energy official at the Moscow summit that led to the agreement to conduct the treaty verification experiments.
The agreement, Wade said, "was a very important thing to this country and a very important thing to Nevada."
Wade noted that Reagan also signed the 1982 nuclear waste policy law that started the government's search for a nuclear waste repository site. That search later was narrowed to Yucca Mountain, on the southwestern edge of the test site.
Wade said he admired Reagan for being able to pick "really high-class people" for his administration. "And when you're president of the United States, you're only as strong as the people that surround you."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- texas
Pantex reports on extraction
10,205 pounds of chemicals removed to prevent contamination of water
By JIM McBRIDE jim.mcbride@amarillo.com
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Amarillo Globe (online)
http://www.amarillonet.com/stories/060804/new_pantex.shtml
Pantex's soil vapor extraction and groundwater pump-and-treat systems have stripped thousands of pounds of chemicals from soils and groundwater beneath the nuclear weapons assembly and disassembly plant, a plant official said Monday.
About 40 people attended Monday night's groundwater meeting at Panhandle's Square House Museum, sponsored by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Dennis Huddleston, BWXT Pantex's environmental restoration program manager, said the plant's soil vapor extraction system has removed 10,205 pounds of chemicals from the Pantex burning grounds since 2002. The system strips chemicals from subsurface soils to prevent further groundwater contamination.
For many years, solvents and other chemicals were allowed to evaporate at Pantex's burning grounds and remnants were flash-burned there in pits. Low-level solvent contamination has been reported in the Ogallala Aquifer beneath the burning grounds.
Huddleston said Pantex recently began a burning-grounds risk assessment that will assess potential current and future risks to human health from soil, air and groundwater at the site.
Another pump-and-treat system located on Pantex's southeast side has removed 3,654 pounds of high explosives and 111 pounds of chromium from contaminated perched aquifer groundwater since 1995, Huddleston said.
The perched aquifer is an upper-level aquifer that sits above the Ogallala, a major water source for Amarillo and the High Plains.
Jeff Paine of the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology also gave a detailed presentation on the Time Domain Induction Geophysical Survey, dubbed TDEM. Last year, a Canadian firm flew repeatedly over some areas of Pantex to gather detailed electromagnetic TDEM survey data from beneath the plant, Paine said.
The report's data will help Pantex officials learn more about groundwater flow patterns beneath the plant, Paine said.
Huddleston said the TDEM information is just one part of a complex series of data that help revise computer models of Pantex's subsurface.
-------- washington
Hanford contractor hires experts to review health program
06/08/2004
Associated Press
http://www.kgw.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D832HN6O0.html
A contractor accused of exposing workers to toxic vapors at the Hanford nuclear reservation has hired a team of national experts to evaluate and possibly improve its health program.
CH2M Hill Hanford Group announced the changes Monday, saying the experts will evaluate the company's approach to chemical vapor monitoring and identify any steps that could further strengthen its health program.
"We're leaving no stone unturned in making sure we have an aggressive health monitoring program in place," Robert Iotti, president of Colorado-based CH2M Hill's Nuclear Business Group, said in a news release. "We want to ensure we have a topflight health and safety program and that employees and the public have the utmost confidence in it."
The changes follow a report last week by the Energy Department's inspector general, clearing the contractor of any criminal conduct involving ammonia vapor readings.
About 53 million gallons of radioactive liquid, sludge and saltcake sit in 177 underground tanks less than 10 miles from the Columbia River. Plans call for turning much of that waste into glass logs and burying it at a nuclear waste repository.
Months ago, a government watchdog group alleged that workers at the Hanford tanks were being endangered to speed cleanup. The Government Accountability Project reported that more than 90 workers had sought medical care for exposure to vapors from the tanks in the past two years.
CH2M Hill and the Energy Department, which manages the cleanup, have said most of the chemicals are diluted and pose no danger to workers.
Following the claims, the company has hired more industrial hygiene specialists, increased vapor monitoring and enhanced worker protection in the tank farms. The team hired to review the health program will include experts in the areas of epidemiology, toxicology, occupational medicine and industrial hygiene, the company said.
For 40 years, the Hanford reservation made plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal. Today, work there centers on a $50 billion to $60 billion cleanup to be finished by 2035 under an accelerated schedule pushed by the Bush administration.
-------- us nuc waste
Senate Lowers Standard for High-Level Nuclear Waste Cleanup
June 8, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-08-03.asp
As the leaders of the eight most industrialized countries gather at Sea Island on the coast of Georgia this week, about 150 miles inland at the Savannah River Nuclear Site much of America's most radioactive waste sits in huge tanks, several of which are leaking. Some of that high-level waste will remain in the tanks instead of being enclosed in glass and buried in an underground repository, if a measure passed by the U.S. Senate last week becomes law.
On Thursday, senators approved language as part of the 2005 Defense Department budget that allows the U.S. Energy Department to reclassify millions of gallons of high-level wastes as "incidental" thereby lowering the standard for cleanup. The reclassification would give the department the authority to leave the waste on site, a move opposed by environmentalists and Senate critics as irresponsible and unsafe.
The Senate rejected an amendment by Democrats to strip language from budget bill to allow reclassification of the waste. The language was added to the Senate bill by South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who called the measure an "environmentally friendly and cost-effective" way to expedite cleanup of 37 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste at the site and save billions of dollars.
Federal law currently requires the government to encapsulate this waste in glass and bury it deep underground as set forth in the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982.
South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham authored language to reclassify high-level radioactive waste. (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator) "Ninety-nine percent of the waste would be removed from the tanks and turned into glass logs for eventual shipment to the permanent long-term storage site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada," said Graham.
"Some residual waste, less than two inches deep, will remain in the tank and be mixed with concrete and grout. Removal of this material is impractical and poses dangers to worker safety. The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control would be given veto power over residual waste left in the tank and would determine when the tank is clean enough to be closed," Graham explained.
"Because of this agreement, we're looking to do it 23 years ahead of schedule and at a cost savings to the taxpayer of almost $16 billion," said Graham. "It is a good plan for the Site, state, and the nation."
At issue is high-level radioactive waste stored in 51 massive underground tanks at the site, which contain more than half the radioactivity in the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex. The Savannah River Site is located along 28 miles of the Savannah River between Aiken, South Carolina and Augusta, Georgia.
The Energy Department is keen to grout the waste in the tanks and leave it on site, but for this to be legal, the waste must be reclassified as less hazardous.
Last year a federal court in Idaho rejected the Department of Energy's attempt do this through a rulemaking process - the administration has appealed that ruling but has pressed Congress to provide it with a legislative remedy.
Graham and proponents noted the rider has the support of South Carolina's governor.
In a May 20 letter to Graham, Governor Mark Sanford, a Republican, wrote, "This Administration is concerned about the prospect of long-term storage of radioactive waste in aging tanks at the Savannah River Site. Under the current Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the cleanup process could leave the waste in those storage tanks for an additional 30 years."
"Most important," wrote Sanford, "is ensuring that the State of South Carolina will be able to retain an oversight role in the cleanup process. According to analysis by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, the state's environmental regulatory agency, the clean up process will still require an equal partnership with the State."
But officials in states with similar radioactive waste storage tanks - Idaho and Washington - oppose the language and fear it will give the Energy Department a precedent to force them into accepting a similar deal.
Washington Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, who authored the defeated amendment to strip Graham's language out of the legislation, remained defiant. "Let's see what the rest of America is saying about this because I guarantee this debate will not end today," she told colleagues.
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell proposed an amendment that would have removed all nuclear waste from tanks at the Savannah River Site. (Photo courtesy Office of the Senator) Cantwell is concerned because the huge Hanford Nuclear Site located in south-central Washington with its aging, leaking tanks of high-level radioactive waste presents the same problems as the Savannah River Site.
Tanks at Savannah River are leaking, said Cantwell, and so are the waste tanks at Hanford. "The Hanford Reservation in Washington State has 50 million gallons of highly radioactive nuclear waste that is already leaking into the ground water."
"No one in the region wants to believe that somehow radionuclides are now in the Columbia River, which, in fact, they are, and that it is going to grow to an amount where we cannot protect humans, fish, and safe drinking water," Cantwell said. "Similar leakage is happening at Savannah River."
What bothers the critics of Graham's provision to leave some waste in the tanks and grout it, is that the Department of Energy (DOE) is using this budget bill to get around going through the formal procedure of reclassifying the high-level waste as less hazardous.
"If DOE and the State of South Carolina had the authority to make a decision on this and work together, why don't they just do it?" asked Cantwell on the Senate floor. "If they are not trying to change existing law, why don't they just come together and make an agreement on cleanup?"
"They are not," she said, "because they are trying to change existing law. They are trying to change the definition of what is high-level waste. They are trying to do that without having the proper hearings, without going through the proper committees of jurisdiction, without giving people enough time and enough notice on this issue."
Waste is vitrified at the Savannah River Site's Defense Waste Processing Facility. (Photo courtesy BNFL Inc.) The other senator from South Carolina, Fritz Hollings, joined Cantwell in the amendment to strip Graham's language from the Defense Authorization Bill. Senator Hollings wants no radioactive waste left at Savannah River, because he says the site is too dangerous for it to be stored there.
Hollings said he was warned 49 years ago, when he was lieutenant governor of South Carolina "that the Savannah River was not a place for permanent storage."
"We had the Tuscaloosa aquifer, which is the water supply going into the Savannah River that now furnishes Savannah, Augusta, and other cities along that river their water supply."
"Otherwise, it is on the very edge of an earthquake fault. The earthquake fault comes right through from Calhoun County to Orangeburg County over to Aiken County."
Environmental groups are critical of the plan to reclassify high-level nuclear waste as "incidental," grout it and allow it to remain in waste tanks at Savannah River. Senator Hollings read into the record a letter he received from the South Carolina Wildlife Federation which said, "Merely changing the name of the waste from high-level with the wave of a magic wand does not make the risk to the environment any less."
"Failing to clean up the tanks and remove the waste can lead to serious long-lasting pollution of the Savannah River and the groundwater resources of South Carolina, resources that provide water for drinking, industry, and agriculture," said the state wildlife federation. "The Savannah River is also an extremely important recreational resource for boating and fishing, and it provides critical wildlife habitat for diverse fishery, waterfowl and other species."
But the Department of Energy is spending no time on these concerns. On Thursday, immediately after the Senate turned down the Cantwell-Hollings amendment and voted to allow grouted radioactive waste to remain on the Savannah River Site, Deputy Secretary of Energy Kyle McSlarrow directed the DOE to proceed with the Salt Waste Processing Facility in Savannah River.
As far back as 2002, the DOE contracted with British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., Inc and Foster Wheeler USA to produce a conceptual design for a demonstration scale Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Savannah River Site capable of processing 15 percent of the amount of waste that might eventually be put through the facility.
The absorption/filtration process will remove actinides and a solvent extraction process will separate highly active cesium from a sodium salt solution. The separated actinides and cesium streams will be sent the Defense Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site to be encased in glass in a process called vitrification.
The bulk sodium salt stream will be sent to the Saltstone Grout Facility. "There are approximately 34 million gallons of waste stored in tanks at SRS that will require salt processing," the DOE said.
Although Senator Graham and his supporters said the reclassification language only addresses the waste at the South Carolina site, McSlarrow immediately issued a directive that would apply to "storage tanks in Idaho and Washington."
"There remain issues relating to the final disposition of waste in Idaho and Washington," McSlarrow said, promising to negotiate with these states "to find a mutually agreeable solution that resolves these issues."
There is no similar language in the House Department of Defense budget bill. If it is included in the final Senate version of the spending bill, conference committee members will have to add it in the final committee report.
The 48-48 Senate vote fell along party lines, with Republicans opposing the amendment and Democrats supporting the removal of the waste reclassification language.
Only one Democrat - Georgia's Zell Miller opposed the Cantwell-Hollings amendment; three Republicans - Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter, Oregon's Gordon Smith, Arizona's John McCain - and the Senate's lone Independent, Vermont's James Jeffords, voted to strike the waste reclassification language from the bill.
The senators not voting were Colorado Republican Ben Campbell and three Democrats - North Carolina's John Edwards, Montana's Max Baucus, and presidential candidate John Kerry of Massachusetts.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Leader Says Stability Is His Nation's First Priority
Widespread Concerns Unlikely to Derail Karzai's Election Bid
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22628-2004Jun7?language=printer
KABUL, Afghanistan, June 7 -- President Hamid Karzai is the public face of Afghanistan's troubled transition to democracy, the head of a weak civilian government in a country long controlled by gunmen, the recipient of American support in a society ambivalent toward the United States.
Yet barring an unforeseen or calamitous turn of events, Karzai likely will be elected to a five-year presidential term in late September. The 47-year-old Afghan leader arrives in the United States on Tuesday to begin a two-week international tour that he hopes will serve as a high-profile curtain raiser for his campaign back home.
Since he was installed as Afghanistan's interim leader following the U.S.-led ouster of Islamic Taliban rule in late 2001, Karzai has been belittled as an American puppet, an indecisive leader and a hypocrite who touts democratic ideals while making backroom deals to cling to power. But he prefers to describe himself as a realist who puts the need to pacify his jittery postwar nation before all other goals.
In an interview Sunday on the lawn of his official residence, Karzai outlined his concerns and aspirations for the country, making clear his position that establishing a strong and stable government is a higher priority than building an instant or perfect democracy.
"The Afghan people want elections, and they want stability," he said. "Are they compatible? If there is a choice between bringing peace and security, and holding competitive elections, we must decide very carefully."
U.N. officials and other foreign observers here have expressed increasing concerns that slow and regionally lopsided voter registration, delays in disarming regional militias and mounting Islamic militia attacks could undermine the credibility and security of the elections. But Karzai has said repeatedly that the vote, already delayed by three months, cannot be allowed to slip again.
Many Afghans say they believe Karzai is under U.S. pressure to hold elections soon to provide President Bush with a foreign policy success and bolster his reelection chances. Karzai will travel to Georgia and California this week, then visit the White House and address a joint meeting of Congress on June 15.
In the interview, however, Karzai said the Afghan public was clamoring for the right to choose its leaders, but he also said his victory at the polls would help strengthen the weak central government and maintain the momentum of national reconstruction.
"The Afghan people have suffered for years. We must provide them the opportunity to vote for and create a more legitimate government than we have today," he said. "I want to be more legitimate than I am today."
Yet Karzai, who lives in a heavily guarded residential compound with deer, fruit trees and tennis courts, also suggested he had acquired no love for the trappings of power, saying he is "embarrassed by the pomp" and dreams of retiring to a quiet garden spot in his native southern province of Kandahar.
Last week, Karzai said he was stung by American columnist Robert Novak's description of him as "hopelessly corrupt." In the interview he defended his personal honesty and said he had been frustrated in attempts to attack corruption, especially because Afghan public institutions are weak and the reach of the central government is extremely limited.
"I know there is serious corruption, but somehow I cannot grab it; it is a mirage," Karzai said. He said he intends to create a special corruption court, and he vowed to publicly denounce and prosecute any official found to be corrupt, no matter how highly placed.
As for himself, the president quoted a proverb in the Pashto language: "A person who is naked is not afraid of water." Even if senior officials were to be drenched by scandal, he added, "I would not get wet."
Another major issue that concerns Afghans is intimidation and abuse by gunmen, who have controlled much of the country for years. An internationally backed program to disarm and demobilize about 50,000 fighters before elections has met with resistance from senior militia leaders.
But instead of standing up to the warlords, Karzai has angered many Afghans, including his own aides, by holding private negotiations with them over the past two weeks. The capital is rife with rumors of Karzai promising a share of power to men responsible for years of destructive factional fighting and rapacious rule.
"Mr. Karzai has the right to talk to everyone, to create a good atmosphere for elections. But if he makes a coalition with the fundamentalists, it will kill democracy," said Abdul Hamid Mobarez, the deputy information minister. "People want the warlords to be weakened, not made more powerful."
In the interview, the president sketched a different version of the meetings, saying the militia bosses had offered not to field a candidate against him out of patriotic motives. He said they agreed the country and its institutions "could not sustain" competitive elections between polarized camps without degenerating into conflict.
Karzai adamantly denied having made a deal to form a coalition government, but said he wanted to bring the militia bosses "into the political process, not push them into a corner" or "frighten them away. . . . We are not going to conduct a court of the past."
He said he was less worried about the threat from Islamic terrorism and regional militias than about such issues as poor public service, official corruption, weak provincial administration and political interference by Afghanistan's neighbors.
Often described as a leader cut off from his constituents, Karzai acknowledged that ever since he escaped an assassination attempt in Kandahar in 2002, his personal security has become an obsessive priority for his Afghan and American staff.
But he said he takes the common pulse by meeting constantly with visitors from across the country, listening to their complaints and trying to act on them. Karzai also participates in a weekly radio show called "You and the President," in which he answers questions from the public, although his answers are taped.
Last week, he took questions on low public salaries, judicial bias and his criteria for selecting a new cabinet if elected. In his answer to the third caller, Karzai said he would choose senior aides "according to their patriotism and professionalism. . . . The next cabinet should be representative of the people and acceptable to all."
Eight individuals have declared their intent to challenge Karzai in September. Others could still emerge, but so far none enjoys either Karzai's national stature or international support, and election laws place all challengers at a further disadvantage by allowing only 30 days of campaigning.
Karzai's challengers, though unlikely to defeat him, have already begun raising questions that could weaken his campaign or at least require a public airing. Some have criticized him for reaching out to so-called moderates among the Taliban leadership or neglecting the interests of his Pashtun ethnic group, Afghanistan's largest.
Masooda Jalal, an outspoken physician who ran against Karzai in his successful bid to continue as transitional president during a national convention in 2002, said she was browbeaten by officials who accused her of undermining the U.N. process for Afghan democracy.
"People made the mistake of thinking the process and Karzai were the same thing," Jalal said. "I was seen as a challenge to both, so I was marginalized. I have no office, no party, no international support. I just want to represent myself and the democratic rights of Afghan women."
More recently, Karzai's opponents have jointly protested a provision in the new election law that requires presidential candidates to collect 10,000 voter ID cards as proof of support, a requirement that could be seen as contravening ballot secrecy and a feat that few minority candidates can easily manage.
Last week Karzai said he would consider changing the law, and in the interview he stressed the importance of holding "free, fair and fearless elections." But he clearly expects to win in September, and he clearly believes that continuity, rather than competition, is what's best for his politically fragile country.
"We are building a nation from scratch," he said. "People want stability and they have tasked me to deliver it to them. They see the train is moving, and they want the current pace to continue. They don't want me to cause friction . . . or make any sudden moves that could bring unnecessary bloodshed. They don't want the train to stop."
--------
Attack in Afghanistan Kills U.S. Soldier
Associated Press
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23368-2004Jun7.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, June 7 -- A U.S. soldier was killed and two were wounded Monday when a bomb exploded near their patrol in southern Afghanistan, while warplanes pounded militants holed up in mountain caves nearby.
Taliban gunmen, meanwhile, killed two policemen south of the capital.
The attack on the U.S. soldiers occurred when a bomb blast hit their Humvee near Deh Rawood, about 250 miles southwest of Kabul in the southern province of Uruzgan, said a military spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Michele DeWerth.
She said all three were flown to Kandahar airfield hospital, where one soldier died. She would not provide further details.
The death brought the total number of American service personnel who have died in and around Afghanistan since the start of the U.S. war on terrorism to at least 91, including 54 killed in action.
The warplanes struck early Sunday near Tirin Kot, the capital of Uruzgan, after U.S. troops had exchanged fire with dozens of guerrillas who sought refuge in caves, said another military spokesman, Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager.
The Americans called in "air support that dealt with those caves," Mansager said. He said no U.S. soldiers were hurt in the battle and had no information on casualties among the militants.
The policemen died when Taliban militiamen attacked the government office in Kharwar, a remote district of Logar province 50 miles south of Kabul, said Gen. Atiqullah Ludin, a local military commander.
--------
Karzai Shows He'll Cast Lot With a Corps of Warlords
June 8, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/asia/08afgh.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, June 6 - President Hamid Karzai has accepted the support of powerful mujahedeen leaders for the presidential elections scheduled for September, indicating he will continue an alliance with them in a future government. His move has dismayed many Afghans who were hoping that the nation's first democratic elections would herald an end to the power of the warlords, who have dominated politics for the past decade.
Mr. Karzai is far and away the leading candidate to win a five-year term as president, with Afghanistan's first pre-election opinion survey putting his approval rating at 85 percent. The leaders of the powerful Northern Alliance faction have already said they will not field a candidate and will support Mr Karzai, who is scheduled to meet with American soldiers at Fort Drum, N.Y., on Tuesday to personally thank them for their help in Afghanistan.
Mr. Karzai met last Thursday with the former president and leader of the Jamiat-e-Islami party, Burhanuddin Rabbani; the leader of the Ittehad-e-Islami, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf; and with some of the most powerful mujahedeen commanders, including Gov. Ismail Khan of Herat Province. All pledged support for him. The education minister, Yunus Qanooni, also publicly expressed his support this week. The defense minister, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, and four other important Pashtun mujahedeen party leaders have done the same, presidential aides said.
Mr. Karzai insisted Thursday that he had not made a deal with the faction leaders and was opposed to a coalition government. Yet it is clear that Mr. Karzai, rather than testing his popularity by standing alone, has opted to join forces with the mujahedeen, men who fought the jihad, or holy war, against the Soviet occupation in the 1980's and who have been his traditional allies over the years.
"The president welcomed the offer of support of the two parties," the presidential chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, said in an interview this week. "These are the two distinguished leaders of jihad whom we always respect, and the president of course was also a leader of jihad, and therefore there is no reason that the president would not accept their offer."
Impartial observers say there is more involved than camaraderie among fellow former jihadis. "He knows it is the most important thing to make a bargain with the jihadis," said one Western diplomat. "He came to power with them, and he is not going to change the political dynamic," he said.
Other officials explained it is not Mr. Karzai's style to go it alone, and his strategy has always been a "big tent policy," to co-opt the warlords rather than confront them.
But his joining forces with the jihadi leaders, many of whom still retain armed militias and pay only lip service to the central government, has dismayed some.
"The deal that has taken place is against the national benefit and the will and desires of the people of Afghanistan," said another presidential candidate, a doctor from Kabul, Massouda Jalal.
She accused Mr. Karzai of agreeing to give half the cabinet posts to Mr. Sayyaf and Mr. Rabbani in return for their support in the elections. Mr. Karzai was concerned that he could not win the election without their support, she said.
A coalition with the mujahedeen would prolong the many problems facing the government, she said. "With this coalition, the reconstruction of Afghanistan will not take place, collection of weapons will not take place, we will keep on having instability and anarchy, the unfairness of the current situation will not improve, and the free will of the people will not be implemented," she said.
Underscoring the precariousness of the security situation, United States military officials said one American soldier was killed and two were wounded Monday when an explosive device detonated under their Humvee near the town of Deh Rawood in Uruzgan Province in the south. The attack was the latest in a stretch of violence that has intensified during the last few weeks.
Technocrats in the government, who have battled with the mujahedeen leaders to push through reforms, particularly in the areas of disarmament and reform of the police, military and intelligence service, expressed their concern that without a genuine popular mandate, the future president would not be able to achieve much change.
"The next government must have legitimacy to carry out a difficult series of reforms," said Ashraf Ghani, the finance minister. "It is the people of Afghanistan who are the only judges of legitimacy. We must ensure that the people exercise that right."
The jihadi leaders said they had decided to endorse Mr Karzai's candidacy in the interests of stability and national unity.
"Afghanistan is at a very sensitive, historic moment,'' Mr. Rabbani said. "We need security and trust in each other and national unity. If we do not think of these things, reconstruction will not go forward, and this attention of the international community is our only opportunity."
-------- asia
U.S. May Cut Third of Troops In South Korea
June 8, 2004
By JAMES BROOKE and THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/asia/08KORE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
TOKYO, June 7 - The Bush administration has presented a detailed plan to South Korea for withdrawing one-third of its 37,000 troops on the divided peninsula by the end of next year as part of a wider effort to reposition American forces around the globe, officials in Seoul and Washington said Monday.
A senior Pentagon official in Seoul described the plan, which would remove 12,500 American troops from South Korea, as a "concept proposal" that could still be revised, although South Korean officials indicated they had little doubt the withdrawal would move ahead.
The reduction of the American force, in place for decades to deter attack from North Korea, would be the first since 1992, when about 7,000 troops were withdrawn. The move would include the previously announced transfer of a brigade of about 3,600 soldiers to Iraq this summer, Pentagon and South Korean officials said. Those troops, from the Second Infantry Division, are not scheduled to return to South Korea after their tour in Iraq.
The proposed cutback is sparking debate in South Korea about whether Washington is turning its back on a long and close alliance with the country, especially as new disclosures about North Korea's program to build nuclear weapons have increased concerns about the intentions of that closed society. This week, American and South Korean security officials are conducting regularly planned talks on the future of the alliance.
But conservative editorial writers and politicians are already accusing the liberal government of President Roh Moo Hyun of allowing anti-American views to flourish unchecked, provoking Washington to cut back sharply on the American military presence.
Conservative South Koreans are also complaining that the United States is surrendering a bargaining chip that would have been useful in nuclear weapons talks with North Korea, even though Pentagon planners say South Korea's security would not be affected.
The Grand National Party, a conservative opposition party that has traditionally supported the American military presence, on Monday described the troop cut plan as "shocking and surprising."
But not all shared that view. Outside the Defense Ministry in Seoul on Monday, protesters took the news as a chance to rally against the American troop presence.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been actively drawing up new designs for American forces worldwide, not just in South Korea, to take advantage of new technology to more rapidly assess threats and more quickly move troops to meet them. The Pentagon has also proposed moving two Army divisions out of Germany and making other changes to European-based forces to reflect different security needs since the end of the cold war.
Since last year, Pentagon officials have said a reduction of troops in South Korea was a logical, even likely, outcome of the effort to reorganize forces. But the proposal presented to the South Korean government on Sunday by Richard Lawless, deputy under secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs, was the most specific yet, even though it remains under discussion.
In a statement, Mr. Lawless said, "Details are being worked out as the process of consultation with the Republic of Korea continues."
Kim Sook, head of the North American division of South Korea's Foreign Ministry, said his government would review the proposal before responding. But he referred to the plan as "the notification from the United States," implying that South Korea might not have much influence over the timing and numbers of American troops to be withdrawn.
The proposal was reported Monday in The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Rumsfeld's trip to South Korea in November foreshadowed the changes, but he said his efforts to reorganize forces there would not diminish either the capacity or commitment of the United States to deter aggression by the North.
Pentagon planners have said troop cuts will not represent a retreat from American responsibilities. They say new technologies and strategies will increase the American military's capacity to defend South Korea.
In the months before the war with Iraq, for example, when large numbers of marines were sent to Iraq from bases in the Pacific, where they are on standby for a crisis on the Korean peninsula, the Pentagon ordered a number of long-range bombers to Guam in an overt mission to show North Korea that the United States could still defend the South. Additional surveillance missions were flown in international airspace in northeastern Asia, officials said.
The Pentagon is undergoing what Mr. Rumsfeld has called a process of transformation, reviewing the location and size of its bases and the numbers of troops deployed overseas to incorporate improvements in the ability to gather intelligence, target weapons and field forces quickly.
"It is not numbers of things," Mr. Rumsfeld said during his visit to South Korea in November. "It is capability to impose lethal power, where needed, when needed, with the greatest flexibility and with the greatest agility."
The location of American military forces in South Korea was largely frozen in place half a century ago with the truce that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.
In 1976, President Carter proposed withdrawing ground troops from South Korea, but later backed down in the face of a conservative outcry in the United States and the discovery that North Korea had been digging invasion tunnels under the demilitarized zone. Still, troop levels have been steadily reduced since the end of the war, when they were about 10 times the current level.
North Korea has 1.1 million soldiers, and South Korea has 690,000.
According to Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, the government wants the proposed troop reduction to be phased in over 10 years.
For years, some American soldiers served in border posts as "tripwires," deployments intended to awaken American public opinion in the event of a repeat of North Korea's invasion of the South in 1950.
Discarding the tripwire strategy, Mr. Rumsfeld announced last year that by 2006 all American troops would be shifted south of the Han River, out of artillery range of the North. That would allow the South Korean and American militaries to respond to any attack from the North without sitting so dangerously close to artillery systems just north of the demilitarized zone.
At the same time, the United States promised to spend $11 billion during the next five years to upgrade its military firepower in Korea. But some South Korean conservatives have called it merely a repackaging of planned spending programs.
The outlines of a new arrangement of American forces were evident elsewhere in East Asia as well.
In Tokyo on Monday, the Asahi Shimbun daily said the United States was sounding out Japan about moving some of the 14,000 American marines stationed in Okinawa to a Japanese base on the northern island of Hokkaido. On a stop in Okinawa last fall, Mr. Rumsfeld endured a scolding from the governor, who complained about the disproportionate burden of the American forces on his crowded island.
Separately, Australian Radio reported Monday that Mr. Rumsfeld and his Australian counterpart, Defense Minister Robert Hill, might sign an agreement next month to build a major military training center in northern Australia, either Queensland or the Northern Territories. The joint training center was discussed at a meeting in Singapore between the two defense chiefs.
With Washington's concern growing about monitoring and patrolling international sea lanes in the region, the United States is already investing tens of millions of dollars this year in expanding Air Force and Navy facilities on Guam, an American island in the Western Pacific.
James Brooke reported from Tokyo for this article and Thom Shanker from Washington.
-------- biological weapons
U.S. to Order Anthrax Vaccine
Government Also Wants Treatment, Adviser Says
By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23388-2004Jun7.html
SAN FRANCISCO, June 7 -- Despite slow action on Capitol Hill, the Bush administration is moving forward to create defenses against biological terrorism and expects to place a big new order for anthrax vaccine by late this summer, one of the government's top health experts said Monday.
Philip K. Russell, a top bioterrorism adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services, also revealed that the government plans to buy a new type of treatment for people infected with anthrax, in addition to vaccines that could be used to prevent infection. The proposed purchase suggests one or more companies in the Washington region could be in line for lucrative government contracts to produce an anthrax drug.
Among the top contenders is Human Genome Sciences Inc. of Rockville. The company has reported considerable success in laboratory tests of such a product, but until now it had been unclear whether the government would commit to buying a drug of this type. Even with Russell's pledge, it is far from certain Human Genome Sciences will land the contract, since the government is still trying to figure out which company's drug might offer the best treatment.
Congress has yet to pass Project Bioshield, a broad package of legal changes that President Bush requested in early 2003 to give the government more authority to create and stockpile drugs to combat biological terrorism. A logjam in the Senate was broken only recently, and now the House and Senate must pass identical versions of the legislation before President Bush can sign it.
Even without Project Bioshield on the books, though, Congress has been appropriating large sums for biodefense projects. The government is moving forward on multiple fronts to develop new measures to defend the nation, Russell and other administration officials said here at the annual convention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization.
Russell's remarks came as he and other officials in the Bush administration, including experts from the Pentagon, sought to enlist biotechnology companies in building a broad national defense against biological weapons.
He said the government hoped by late summer to place an order for a new type of vaccine against anthrax sufficient to inoculate 25 million people. That would be enough to mount a defense in a large-scale attack, such as terrorists spreading anthrax over a city by plane. The scale of the plan had been disclosed previously, but it wasn't clear until now how fast the government would move. If an order is placed this summer, companies have said, a large stockpile of anthrax vaccine could be in the government's storerooms by next year.
Russell said the new vaccine, designed to replace an old, primitive type of anthrax shot, won't be perfect. It will have a relatively short shelf life, for instance. "I hope we get up to six years out of this product, but I can't be sure of that," Russell said.
Research will continue to develop another vaccine that might last longer, Russell said.
Russell added that plans are also moving forward to acquire a type of drug that might be used to treat victims of anthrax exposure, with bid specifications to be disclosed "in the very near future." People exposed to anthrax can be treated now with long courses of antibiotics, but some victims who are already sick from the infection can't be saved that way. Scientists have said a new drug using antibodies, a type of protein produced by the immune system, might offer better treatment.
-------- iraq
Iraqi parties' militias agree to disarm
June 08, 2004
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040608-125227-6190r.htm
BAGHDAD - Iraq's interim government yesterday announced an agreement with nine political parties to disarm their militias and integrate their fighters into the national army or civilian life.
The plan would apply to 100,000 armed fighters, three-fourths of them Kurdish soldiers known as "peshmerga" and based mainly in the north.
The agreement was rejected by Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi's Army of at least 10,000, has been battling U.S. troops in Baghdad and in predominantly Shi'ite cities since April.
The demobilization agreement was accepted by Kurdish leaders, as well as the Iraqi National Congress. Both control militias that fought alongside the U.S.-led coalition against Saddam Hussein's army during last year's invasion.
"The completion of these negotiations and issuance of this order is a watershed in establishing the rule of law," said newly appointed Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who leads the transitional government.
The agreement marks an attempt by the new government to enhance its authority throughout Iraq as it prepares to formally take power from the U.S.-led coalition at the end of the month.
Under the agreement, individual militia members could choose to lay down weapons and enter civilian life, with some benefits such as pensions accrued from their time served.
They also could choose to join the Iraqi army or another security service, such as the border patrol or civilian police.
The United States has attempted to negotiate similar agreements in the past.
But earlier efforts were rejected amid a growing distrust of the American presence and a worsening security situation.
Militias, including many smaller groups not covered by yesterday's agreement, were seen by many frightened Iraqis as larger versions of a neighborhood-watch group.
Most groups covered by yesterday's agreement belong to political parties that are represented in the new government.
"We want to disband the Badr Brigade and to enable its members to join the new Iraqi army and police forces and serve the new Iraq," said Haitham al-Husseini, a top official in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which controls the 15,000-member Badr Brigade, a Shi'ite group.
Jassim al-Hilfi, a member of the central committee of the Iraqi Communist Party, said his group was willing to disband its armed components because "we want to be part of the new Iraq."
If successful, the latest agreement could swell the numbers of the Iraqi army, which has about 35,000 soldiers.
Under Saddam, Iraqi's standing army was thought to number more than a half-million.
Yesterday's agreement seeks to demobilize or recommission most soldiers by next year.
Soldiers who do not join the army or lay aside their weapons will be considered "illegal armed forces," according to the transitional government.
The agreement does not cover the brigade organized by the U.S. Marines to take control of the Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah after the end of the three-week siege in April.
U.S. officials described the Fallujah brigade as "a special auxiliary unit" under the nominal control of the Marines, the Associated Press reported.
Also outside the agreement is the Mahdi's Army, which is controlled by Sheik al-Sadr, the fiery young Shi'ite cleric, whose heavy-handed tactics and rhetoric have dismayed other Shi'ite leaders.
An aide to Sheik al-Sadr, Hassan Husseini, told Agence France-Presse that "the demobilization order does not concern us."
He said, "The Mahdi's Army is not a militia but a popular and radical movement," adding that it is not interested in joining a coalition government.
Coalition officials have backed away from threats to dismantle Sheik al-Sadr's army by force.
As recently as two weeks ago, the coalition said the militia did not have to disband as long as fighters stayed off the street.
In a separate development yesterday, a major general in the Badr Brigade, Shahir Faisal Shahir, was killed in Baghdad in a drive-by shooting.
Also, roadside bombs killed an American soldier south of Baghdad and wounded three civilians working for a British security firm in the northern city of Mosul, authorities said.
The attacks came after a weekend in which five civilian workers including two Americans were killed in two separate shootings.
Under the terms of yesterday's agreement, those Kurdish forces who choose to join the Iraqi army or other security departments will be allowed to stay in the predominantly Kurdish north.
The Kurds are seeking to retain internal borders in a federal state, which would act as a buffer from the predominantly Arab central and south.
Participating militiamen are to hand in their weapons to the Ministry of Interior. The effort is expected to cost about $200 million and be completed by next year.
Other fighters covered by the agreement come from militias of Mr. Allawi's Iraqi National Accord, the Shi'ite Dawa party, the Iraqi Islamic Party and Iraqi Hezbollah.
--------
Decree Outlaws Iraqi Militias In Effort to Bolster Security
Shiite Cleric, Aides Barred From Public Office for 3 Years
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21482-2004Jun7?language=printer
BAGHDAD, June 7 -- The new Iraqi government and U.S. occupation authorities declared all militias illegal Monday and outlined a $200 million program to redirect their estimated 100,000 fighters into official security forces, retirement or civilian professions.
According to senior occupation officials, the most immediate effect of the order, issued in the name of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, was to formally outlaw the Mahdi Army of Moqtada Sadr, the defiant Shiite Muslim cleric who has confronted U.S. occupation forces in bloody clashes for the last two months.
The order also stipulated that Sadr and his lieutenants, as members of a now illegal armed group, are barred from holding public office for three years. That put a legal barrier in the path of mainstream Shiite political and religious figures who are seeking to draw Sadr and his followers away from armed resistance and into Iraq's postwar political process.
Sadr's group rejected the ban, saying Allawi's government had no authority to hand down such laws. "Ayad Allawi's agreement does not apply to the Mahdi Army," said Omar Ahmed Shaybani, a Sadr spokesman. "The Mahdi Army is not a militia. It is the Iraqis legitimately resisting the occupation. The Mahdi Army exists as long as the occupation does." The ban was designed in part to dramatize the intention of Allawi's government, named a week ago, to increase security measures in a country shaken by car bombings and hostage-takings directed against foreigners, and robberies and kidnappings directed against ordinary Iraqis by criminals seeking to profit from the disorder. But whether the unelected interim government can enforce such an order remains doubtful given the shaky security situation at present, said Abdul-Wahab Qassab, a retired general staff officer who runs the Azzaman Center for Strategic Studies in Baghdad.
"Unless there is a strong commitment from the political parties, I don't think the outcome will be positive," he said.
Nine other Iraqi political parties and movements have pledged to abide by the ban on militias and seek promised benefits, including job training and veterans' pensions for demobilized fighters, Allawi announced. "All of these parties have accepted detailed plans, timetables and terms for the transition and reintegration of the armed groups under their authority or have already disbanded their militias," he added.
Occupation officials said the timetable calls for as many as 90,000 fighters to turn in their weapons and change status by the time Iraq holds elections next January.
The two main Kurdish groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, field more than 70,000 of the 102,000 Iraqis believed to carry arms in armed political groups, according to senior officials of the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority who briefed reporters on condition they not be named. The other main armed group is the Badr Organization, formerly the Badr Brigades, the military wing of the Iranian-supported Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite group with as many as 15,000 fighters.
The Badr Organization several weeks ago announced it was disbanding as a militia to become a purely political movement, although the group's weapons and fighters remained ready if its leaders saw a need for them again. By signing on to the militia ban, the group has now also pledged to turn in its guns and move its members into the new Iraqi army or police corps, or into civilian jobs, according to a negotiated transition schedule, the officials said.
But the Kurdish region's two military organizations, whose fighters traditionally are called pesh merga, have a different arrangement, reflecting the semi-independence that Kurdish-populated northern Iraq has enjoyed for more than a decade. About half are expected to join the national army or police forces, U.S. officials said. Thousands of others, they explained, will be incorporated into three specialized military units -- mountain troops, counterterrorist forces and quick-reaction battalions -- under the command of the Kurdish regional government that controls northern Iraq.
Adnan Asadi, a member of the Shiite-run Dawa party, said this arrangement should last only until Iraq gets an elected government, scheduled for next January. At that time, he said, an elected national government must reassert authority over the Kurdish region and its military forces. "This is a law and should be done," he said.
But Qassab recalled the Kurds' repeated uprisings against rule from Baghdad over the last 30 years and suggested that their acceptance of central authority might not be so simple, particularly given the often ruthless suppression of their revolts by former president Saddam Hussein's army. That is one reason for their insistence on retaining local command over part of their pesh merga military, he said.
"They are very keen to keep the ability to enforce their will wherever and whenever it becomes necessary," Qassab said.
U.S. officials have said in the past that Kurdish militias must melt into the national army at some point. The occupation officials explaining the ban, who wore button-down shirts and neckties despite Baghdad's stifling heat, insisted that, contrary to appearances, the arrangement for Kurdish fighters does not mean they remain militias under another name.
The Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan field what amount to small armies, with organization and weaponry surpassing those of Iraq's other militias, officials said. In addition, they maintained, the history and geography of the Kurdish-administered area requires special military units of the kind that will remain under Kurdish command.
But Shaybani, the spokesman for Sadr, said the exception for the Kurds shows that Allawi's government does not exercise real power and could not impose its will on them, in part because their insistence on autonomy is supported by the United States.
"The pesh merga is an independent army, with a regional government," he said. "No Iraqi government can impose anything on that army or government."
On another subject, Shaybani said a large explosion Monday in a building adjoining the Kufa Mosque was caused by an electrical short circuit. Kufa, which lies next to Najaf about 90 miles south of Baghdad, had been the main focus of clashes between Mahdi Army fighters and U.S. troops until a cease-fire took effect Friday. Sadr frequently has led Friday prayers at the city's main mosque.
The U.S. military complained that Iraqi policemen who approached the scene of the explosion were fired on by Sadr's militiamen. Residents said the explosion came from Mahdi Army ammunition stored in the building. But Shaybani said flammable construction material was involved.
[A car bomb exploded Tuesday during morning rush hour outside a U.S. base north of Baghdad, killing four Iraqis and wounding 12 others, Iraqi police said. The explosion occurred 10 yards from the main gate of the Army's 1st Infantry Division base in Baqubah, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad.]
Special correspondent Saad Sarhan in Najaf contributed to this report.
--------
Two Car Bombs, and Land Mines, Add to Casualties in Iraq
June 8, 2004
By EDWARD WONG and KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 8 - Two car bombs exploded in different cities in Iraq today, killing at least 14 Iraqis and one American soldier and wounding dozens of people, including 10 American soldiers, officials said.
In other violence, six soldiers with the American-led coalition - two Poles, three Slovaks and a Latvian - were killed while defusing mines, news agencies reported.
The attacks came ahead of a vote at the United Nations Security Council, expected later today, on an Anglo-American resolution that lays out the political framework for a post-occupation Iraq and defines the role of the United Nations after the transition.
American authorities have warned of a spike in violence during the approach to June 30, when the occupation authority is scheduled to transfer sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government.
But all the news in Iraq was not grim today. Coalition forces freed three Italian and one Polish hostage in a bloodless raid south of Baghdad today, the top American general in Iraq said.
The three Italians, who had been working as private security guards, had been held for nearly two months and were in good condition, the Italian Foreign Ministry confirmed. A fourth Italian abducted with them was slain shortly after the kidnapping.
The Pole, an official at a construction company, was abducted last week after seven men stormed the company's Baghdad office.
One of the two car bombs today exploded in the northern city of Mosul and appeared to be aimed at a passing convoy carrying members of the provincial council and other officials. Nine people died in the blast, which caused "significant damage" to nearby buildings, and 25 people were injured, according to a statement by the military's Stryker Brigade, which is responsible for maintaining security in the region. The council members escaped injury; Mosul's deputy police chief was wounded, though not seriously, the statement said.
The explosives were stashed in a taxi, which had three bombers inside, the statement said.
The other car bomb was detonated during rush hour outside an American base in Baquba, about 40 miles northeast of Baghdad. It killed at least six people, including an American soldier, and wounded as many as 15 people, including 10 American soldiers, news agencies reported, quoting American military and Iraqi police sources.
Another American soldier was killed during fighting on Monday in Al Anbar province west of Baghdad, the American military said today in a statement. The soldier, who was assigned to the First Marine Expeditionary Force, was killed while conducting "security and stability operations" in the province, the statement said.
The military also revealed that a base in northern Mosul was attacked with mortar rounds. Two foreign contract employees were injured, a military statement said, though it did not reveal the nationalities of the workers.
The deaths of the Latvian, Poles and Slovaks occurred in As Suwayrah, south of Baghdad, news agencies reported. The account seemed to correspond to an American military statement saying that several members of the occupation forces had been injured during engineering work in an ammunition and explosives storage area in As Suwayrah.
According to The A.P., the nationalities of the soldiers were confirmed by a spokesman for the chief of staff of the Polish army in Warsaw, as well as by the Latvian and Slovakian Defense Ministries.
There are about 2,400 Polish troops, 105 Slovakian troops and 122 Latvian troops deployed in Iraq, the A.P. said.
At the United Nations, John D. Negroponte, the American ambassador there, said on Monday that he believed there was sufficient support on the Security Council to pass the pending resolution.
The foreign minister of France, which has veto power on the Council, told France-Inter radio today that his government would vote for the resolution despite objections over language defining the relationship between the new Iraqi administration and the American-led multinational force that will remain in Iraq after the transfer of sovereignty, news agencies reported.
Edward Wong reported from Baghdad for this article, and Kirk Semple reported from New York.
--------
Kurdish Leaders Demand Safeguards in Resolution
June 8, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/08WIRE-KURD.html
ARBIL, Iraq, June 8 (Reuters) - Iraq's Kurds demanded on Tuesday that an interim constitution safeguarding their autonomy be mentioned in a United Nations resolution due to be put for a vote later on Tuesday.
Iraq's Kurdistan Democratic Party head Masoud Barzani said the document, which gives Iraqi Kurds the power to veto any permanent constitution, was a "red line."
"Calls for rejection of the (interim constitution) are considered a red line for the people of Kurdistan, play with their fate and are contrary to agreements between Iraqi parties," Barzani said in a statement
"It is the agreement on this (constitution) that led the people of Kurdistan to agree to remain within the framework of Iraq," he said. "These persons who call for the rejection of the interim constitution will alone bear responsibility for the consequences."
Members of the U.N. Security Council were due to vote on the resolution on Iraq's transition to sovereignty later on Tuesday. Earlier drafts of the resolution mentioned the interim constitution but the latest does not -- infuriating the Kurdish minority.
Under the interim constitution, agreed earlier this year by Iraq's Governing Council, the Kurds could veto any permanent constitution that encroaches on their autonomy.
Iraq's most revered Shi'ite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, objects to the veto and says the U.N. must not endorse the constitution.
Sistani's views hold huge sway with Iraq's 60-percent Shi'ite majority and his opposition to measures proposed by U.S. authorities in Iraq has prompted changes in the past.
-------- israel / palestine
Hezbollah and Israeli Forces Clash
June 8, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Lebanon-Israel-Airstrike.html
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) -- Hezbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops fired rockets and shells at each other across the south Lebanon border Tuesday, a day after the deepest Israeli airstrike into Lebanon in four years.
Lebanese security officials said the guerrillas attacked Israeli positions in the disputed Chebaa Farms area. Hezbollah issued a statement saying the attack was in retaliation for ``the latest Israeli aggression,'' a reference to the Monday airstrike on a Palestinian base south of Beirut.
In Jerusalem, the Israeli military confirmed the attack, and said one officer was lightly wounded.
Israeli artillery responded by striking the hills above the village of Kfar Chouba in southeast Lebanon, the Lebanese officials said, speaking on customary condition of anonymity.
Later, Israeli planes flew over the area but did not attack. Hezbollah fired a surface-to-air missile at the planes but missed, the officials said.
A U.N. spokesman said the U.N. peacekeeping force on the border had contacted both parties to prevent a further escalation.
Lebanon complained to the United Nations on Tuesday about Israel's airstrike, calling it a ``dangerous aggression'' and saying Lebanon reserved the right to request a U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss it.
U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura called on Lebanon and Israel on Tuesday to exercise ``utmost restraint and live up to their responsibilities in order to avoid further acts of hostility.''
On Monday night, Israeli planes fired at least four rockets at a base of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command in the hills of Naameh, about five miles south of Beirut. It was Israel's deepest airstrike in Lebanon since Israeli troops withdrew from south Lebanon in May 2000.
Israel said the strike was retaliation for a rocket attack from south Lebanon on an Israeli naval boat earlier Monday.
On Tuesday, an Israeli defense ministry official said the airstrike was intended to make the Lebanese government rein in militants.
``This signal, which was sent ... by the air force, was aimed at Lebanon,'' Deputy Defense Minister Zeev Boim told Israel Radio.
A spokesman for the PFLP-GC said the planes attacked a clinic and humanitarian facilities at their Naameh base, causing damage but no casualties.
A second PFLP-GC official, Abu Rushdi, said the base no longer had a military purpose and the staff had left hours before the strike.
----
Israel, Our Dangerous Parasite
By Edward W. Miller
Coastal Post
June 8, 2004
http://www.coastalpost.com/04/06/22.htm
"Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most that has made it possible for evil to triumph."
Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, 1892-1975
The massive invasion of Washington's political arena by supporters of Israel: outright Zionists Jews as well as our Christian Right, that has produced the very situation which our first president, George Washington, felt so strongly about preventing that he dedicated much of his farewell address to the issue: Every American should read our first President's speech, from which these two paragraphs are copied:
"The passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of a common interest where no common interest exists... It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation, of privileges denied others... unnecessarily parting with what ought to be retained... exciting jealousy, ill will, and a disposition to retaliate in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld."
" It gives to ambitious, corrupted or deluded citizens who devote themselves to the favorite nation, facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity, gilding with the appearance of a virtuous sense of obligation, the base for foolish compliance's of ambition, corruption or infatuation. How many opportunities they afford to tamper with opinion, to influence or awe the public councils? ...Since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baleful foes of a republican government.... real patriots, who may resist the intrigues of the favorite, are liable to become suspected and odious... The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, in extending our commercial relations, is to have with them as little political connection as possible."
President George Washington, 1796
This last week, a letter from 50 retired US State Department diplomats urged President Bush to revise his Mideast policy. The letter also applauded the recent strong rebuke to British Prime Minister Tony Blair from 52 former British diplomats, taking Blair to task for acceding to Bush's endorsement of Sharon's destructive Mideast proposal.
The letter to Bush, signed by such former State Department experts as Andrew Kilgore, former Ambassador to Qatar, Richard Curtis, former chair US Information Agency, James Akins, former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia , Eugene Bird, Embassy Counselor in Saudi Arabia, Richatrd Nolte, Ambassador to Egypt and 45 others, stated:
"We are deeply concerned by your April 14 endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Sharon's unilateral plan to reject the rights of 3 million Palestinians, to deny the right of refugees to return to their homeland, and to retain large illegal settlement blocks in the Occupied West Bank.
The plan defies UN Security Council resolutions calling for Israel's return of occupied territoriesÉ ignores international laws declaring Israeli settlements illegal, Éundermines the Road Map for PeaceÉ reverses long-standing American policy in the Middle East."
"Your meeting with Sharon ...left out Palestinians. In fact, you and Prime Minister Sharon consistently have excluded Palestinians from peace negotiations. Former Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abec Rabbo voiced the overwhelming reaction of people around the world when he said :" I believe President Bush declared the death of the peace process."
"You have placed US diplomats, civilians and military doing their jobs overseas in an untenable and even dangerous position. Your unqualified support of Sharon's extrajudicial assassinations, Israel's Berlin Wall barrier, its harsh military measures in the Occupied Territories, and now your endorsement of Sharon's unilateral plan are costing our country its credibility, prestige and friends. É"
Washington's tendency to favor the State of Israel ever since the formation of this artificial entity by the United Nations in 1947, has inflicted upon the American people most, if not all, of the ills and evils described by our First President. Blowbacks continue to this day.
Throughout the fifty-five years of the State of Israel's existence, our government has treated the original inhabitants of Palestine with disregard, disdain and objective repression. Turning its back on the 750,000 Palestinians violently expelled from their homes and properties by the Israeli military in 1948, the US has been most niggardly in contributing to those United Nations funds which provide life support to those who for half a century are still surviving in refugee camps. The same disdain has been visited upon Palestinians violently dispossessed by Israel in her 1967 war of aggression against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Gaza and the West Bank.
When President Reagan supported Sharon's brutal invasion of Lebanon in 1982, by shelling the unprotected population of Beirut offshore from our USS New Jersey, we paid with the loss of over 400 US Marine and Navy lives. When Israel, during the 1967 War planed to seize the Golan Heights from Syria, to hide this invasion from Washington, she bombed, strafed, wounded and killed nearly half the crew of our intelligence ship the USS LIBERTY. The killing of our Marines in Saudi Arabia in 1993, the loss of our embassies in Kenya and Tansania, the bombing of the USS Cole, and finally, the Twin Towers and Pentagon destruction are all related to Washington's political obeisance to Jewish money and the Zionists in our capital.
Throughout the 55 years of Israel's existence, daily repressions of the Palestinians at checkpoints, land seizures, destruction of olive orchards, stealing of water rights, targeted killings, home demolitions, and savage expropriation of farmland by hundreds of illegal Jewish settlements and their interconnected highways have produced scarcely a mention by Washington.
Whenever, under pressure from other nations, the United Nations voted for Resolutions against Israel's egregious behavior, Washington has rushed to defend the Jewish State, and vetoed over 80 attempts by the international community to support Palestinian rights. Israel has ignored those rules set by the Geneva Convention. In this disgusting campaign to protect our "parasite," Washington has weakened the prestige of the United Nations, and shamed us before the world.
In Afghanistan, in the spring of 1998, Osama Ben Laden , speaking to John Miller of the Associated Press, threw down the gauntlet to the US and Israel, saying his Muslim World of over 1.2 billion peoples would no longer tolerate Washington's ongoing genocide in Iraq, a killing fostered by a savage embargo, by sewage-contaminated water, a near-starvation diet, lethal radiation from depleted-uranium shells, and by thousands of "cluster-bomblets" left for Iraqi children to explode, Ben Laden added: his Muslim brethren would no longer tolerate our support for Israel's land theft and human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories. Ben Laden's promises of Muslim reprisal were not long in coming. Americans died in Tanzania, in Kenya, aboard the USS Cole, in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
September 11th presented choices: We could restrain Israel's Sharon, close down Israel's illegal settlements, and remove Israel from our payroll. We could discontinue the deadly embargo of the Iraqis, and allow Saddam's people to rebuild their country. Instead, driven by Bush's Zionist friends, and our Vice President's oil interests, we first sought revenge in Afghanistan, further ravaging its impoverished people.
Next, pressured by Israel's supporters in Washington, plus Cheney and his Halburton Associates, we are again militarily assaulting Saddam's country on the pretext of WMD and Saddam's supposed threats to US interests.
It has not only in the moral costs, or loss of American lives that feeding this Zionist parasite is damaging this Country, but from an economic point of view, support for Israel continues to be a tragedy. Thomas R. Stauffer's : THE COST TO THE US TAXPAYERS OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT (See Washington Report, June 2003 vol. XXII no. 5) details the total burden born by the US taxpayer since the inception of the State of Israel. Stauffer shows that paying for both the instability and conflicts in the Middle East totals out to be "close to $3 trillion in 2002 dollars." Yearly interest-free "loans" to Israel, annual stipends, military advances, millions in military support are but the tip of American's growing indebtedness iceberg.
On May 18th, while Sharon's military was bulldozing homes in Gaza's Rafah refugee camp, killing protesting Palestinians left and right, despite demands by the UN and Amnesty International to cease, our President, desperate to win in November, was kissing the ass of Israel's lobby, AIPAC at their annual meeting in Washington, saying: " Our nation is stronger and safer because we have a true and dependable ally in Israel." (applause)
Senator Ernest F. Hollings in his column and in a speech on May 8 had said it clearly: "With 750 dead in Iraq and over 3000 maimed for life, home folks continue to argue why we are in IraqÉ Bush came to office imbued with one thought- re-election. ..why invade a sovereign country? The answer: President Bush's policy to secure Israel É to take the Jewish vote from the Democrats."
----
2 Pro-Settler Members to Quit Sharon's Cabinet
June 8, 2004
By TERENCE NEILAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/middleeast/07CND-ISRA.html?hp
Two key officials of Israel's pro-settler National Religious Party announced their intention to resign today from the cabinet of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, angering fellow party members and bringing another note of disarray to Mr. Sharon's plans for withdrawing from the Gaza Strip.
Housing Minister Effie Eitam, the leader of the party, and Yitzhak Levy, a deputy minister, told their four other colleagues in the Knesset of their decision, and later confirmed it to waiting reporters.
Mr. Levy said the government's decision to pass Mr. Sharon's revised disengagement plan was the most difficult decision in the history of Israel, and left the party leaders with no choice but to resign, Israel Radio reported.
But a fellow party member and cabinet minister, Zevulun Orlev, said if the two stepped down they would lose their mandate to lead the party, which is expected to approve a compromise proposal for remaining in the government for at least the next three months.
"After three months we will have to decide where we go from here - everyone is trying to keep the N.R.P. faction together," the faction's leader in the Knesset, Nissim Slomiansky, told reporters.
"There are two things," he added. "There is the cabinet and the coalition. They have resigned from the cabinet but at least until Monday they are still in the coalition."
If the party did pull out of the coalition, it would leave Mr. Sharon with 55 seats in the 120-member Knesset. The prime minister might then turn for support to the Labor Party, which is divided about joining the coalition government.
Labor's chairman, Shimon Peres, said today that it would be convenient for Labor if the National Religious Party stayed in the government, the daily Haaretz reported, because it would then bear responsibility for the evacuation of settlements.
"The N.R.P. is willing to enter a government that plans evacuation of settlements and that bans investments in the territories," Mr. Peres was quoted as saying in an interview with Israeli Army Radio. "That's great."
The National Religious Party has been pressed by a former chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu, to quit the government in protest of Mr. Sharon's plans.
The planned resignations of Mr. Eitam and Mr. Levy came after the cabinet voted on Sunday to pull out of Gaza by the end of 2005. The two cabinet members said they refused to serve in a government that intends to pull down settlements, party officials said.
Before the vote, Mr. Sharon dismissed the hard-line National Union Party from his coalition, weakening his grip on power but ensuring that his plan had a cabinet majority.
The cabinet passage of the pullout plan has further roiled Israel's already tense political scene and could lead to new political alliances, or even elections, in the coming months.
-------- mideast
For Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda Threat Is Now Hitting Home
Kingdom Itself Seen as a Target
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23366-2004Jun7?language=printer
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Concrete barriers, razor wire and armored vehicles buttress the high walls of the sprawling residential compounds here that house American workers and thousands of other Westerners, an extra layer of protection designed to thwart suicide bombers.
Recently, similar defenses have been installed at dozens of other sites in this capital city that were once considered unlikely terrorist targets: large government office buildings, palaces belonging to the royal family and the headquarters of the Interior Ministry, a giant inverted pyramid that houses the military and internal security agencies.
As these countermeasures show, it is becoming increasingly clear to the government and many Saudis that the campaign of violence that erupted here a year ago is aimed not only at Westerners long reviled by Islamic radicals, but at the royal House of Saud as well.
If the truck bombing of the main police station here seven weeks ago didn't make that plain, the message was delivered again May 29, when an al Qaeda-inspired group took hostages and killed 22 people at a compound for foreigners in Khobar, along the Persian Gulf.
Afterward, the organization calling itself al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula released a stream of statements on the Internet, denouncing members of the royal family as "tyrants," accusing them of plundering the nation's oil wealth and serving notice that their grip on power was under serious challenge.
On Monday, the same group released another statement warning of pending attacks on Western airlines and other targets. Saudi officials said the same militants were responsible for an attack on a BBC crew in Riyadh on Sunday that left a cameraman dead and a correspondent seriously wounded.
The brewing conflict between the government and the militants has forced many people here to reassess where they stand. In a nation where large segments of society support native son Osama bin Laden's efforts to destroy the United States and its Western allies, mainstream Saudis who cheered him are starting to realize that the government bin Laden and his followers really wanted to topple all along was their own.
"Many people thought that this was just talk, people saying extremist things, but that's it, just talk," said Abdul Muhsen Akkas, a member of the Saudi consultative council, a group that advises the royal family. "Somehow, we had the belief that our people would never cross that bridge" and attack the kingdom's economy and social structure.
Khalil Khalil, a professor at Imam University in Riyadh, said he used to warn fellow Saudis that bin Laden's primary desire was to oust the royal family that exiled him a decade ago, but that few wanted to listen. Khalil described one woman who told him God would make him suffer for saying such things, adding that she admired and loved bin Laden so much for fighting the United States that she was willing to leave her husband and four children to serve him.
Recently, however, that woman and many others have been expressing second thoughts, Khalil said. Since May 2003, the revolt by al Qaeda loyalists has resulted in 85 deaths and more than 300 wounded, with many Saudis and other Muslims among the casualties.
"I often said we should try to fight bin Laden together and clean the world of these dangerous extremists," Khalil said. "But until a year ago, no one would have thought that here. Many people like what bin Laden says. His actions are not what they are all about, but his slogans, yes. That is the question we have in Saudi Arabia: How do we deal with the people who like bin Laden's slogans, his ideas? It's hard."
The ruling family has vowed to wipe out the insurgency and shows no sign of losing its hold on power. But its members have become sufficiently concerned that some are making a renewed effort to retain the allegiance of their subjects.
In a column published last week in the government newspaper al-Watan, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington exhorted the public to "mobilize for war" against the militants, urging Saudis to reject al Qaeda's charges that the government has become corrupt and too cozy with the West.
"We have a religious and national obligation not to be tempted into following those who have misled us, [those who are trying] to persuade us that the flaw lies with us, as a state and as a people, and that this terrorist phenomenon is the result of the cultural situation in which we are living," wrote Prince Bandar bin Sultan.
On Friday, Saudi Arabia's highest religious authority -- a committee controlled by the government -- issued an edict stating that it was every citizen's moral duty to report or turn in suspected extremists. The declaration contrasted sharply with government policy during the 1980s, when thousands of Saudis were encouraged to travel to Afghanistan to join a U.S.- and Saudi-financed Islamic insurgency against Soviet occupation forces. Many of them attended bin Laden's guerrilla training camps, and hundreds of millions of Saudi dollars financed radical Islamic causes around the world.
The royal family has been slow to acknowledge the seriousness of the threat presented by bin Laden's followers and Islamic militants. In November 2002, Prince Nayef, the interior minister whose agency is now surrounded by barricades, bluntly declared that no al Qaeda cells existed in the kingdom.
Six months later, on May 12, 2003, suicide bombers attacked a housing compound for foreigners in Riyadh, killing 35, including the assailants, and wounding about 200 people. Six months after that, an al Qaeda gang bombed another compound in Riyadh within sight of a royal palace, this time resulting in 17 deaths and 122 people wounded.
The government says it has foiled dozens of other terrorist attacks in the making, arresting hundreds of suspected militants and seizing large caches of explosives and ammunition.
Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to London and former intelligence chief, said in a speech last week that 75 percent of all militants believed to be operating in Saudi Arabia had been killed or captured. Other government leaders confidently assert that the insurgency is wobbling and will collapse after its last few leaders are rounded up.
But for now, the bombings and assassinations are having their desired effect. Westerners are leaving the country, depriving the Saudi economy of expertise needed to run operations from oil wells to dental clinics. Oil prices worldwide have soared, in part because of concerns that terrorists might blow up a pipeline or a major petroleum installation.
The frequency of attacks is also on the rise. Last week, gunmen fired on a pair of U.S. soldiers in Riyadh, while two other militants were killed in a firefight with security forces in Taif, in the western part of the kingdom. Two weeks ago, a German was gunned down while visiting an automated teller machine in the capital.
At times, the government's response has appeared weak and ineffective. In December, officials released a list of the kingdom's 26 most-wanted terrorism suspects. Only eight have been apprehended.
In last week's hostage-taking in Khobar, three of the four gunmen escaped even though they were surrounded by hundreds of Saudi security forces. At first, Saudi officials suggested that they were able to flee by using some of the hostages as shields. Later, other officials said the gunmen were allowed to escape after they threatened to blow up a building by remote control unless they were given free passage.
Whatever the reason, the fact that three of the perpetrators remain on the loose has given the group a huge propaganda victory.
"They are euphoric. They've done what almost nobody has done in the history of hostage-taking: They got away with it," said Saad Fagih, a Saudi exile in London who heads the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, a group that advocates greater freedoms in the kingdom and the downfall of the monarchy. "It was pure incompetence on the part of the Saudi security system. Hopeless incompetence."
Few people are predicting that the insurgency will cause the House of Saud to collapse, but worries about the kingdom's stability are growing.
Alex Standish, editor of the London-based Jane's Intelligence Digest, said the situation in Saudi Arabia has strong parallels to the fall of the shah of Iran, another U.S. ally, who was toppled in his country's Islamic revolution in 1979.
"I think the Saudi royal family has been in denial for far too long," Standish said. "In the past, their tendency was to buy off critics. But they can't do that here. There's a lot of evidence to suggest that this organization is gathering strength."
The royal family is also hobbled by factionalism and aging leaders. King Fahd has been incapacitated for years by a stroke. Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler, was born in 1924. His half-brother, Prince Sultan, the next in line, is 76. It is unclear who will emerge from the next generation to take their places.
"The regime in Saudi Arabia today is a regime of old men. It is like the Soviet days," said Ferhad Ibrahim, a political science professor and Middle East specialist at the Free University of Berlin. "They don't have a strategy against the terrorists. They have a crisis. The whole political system has a hard time functioning."
Even so, some Saudi intellectuals say, the attacks have renewed popular support for the government and sparked a backlash against the militants. They say many Saudis are afraid that al Qaeda is trying to ruin the nation's economy and isolate the kingdom from the rest of the world.
"It's a great shock to people. They never expected such a thing to be carried out on Saudi soil, by Saudis," said Abdul Aziz I. Fayez, another member of the consultative council. "Here you have a society that for three years now has been accused of being a breeding ground for terrorists. Now people are seeing that we are victims of terrorism as well."
-------- prisoners of war
CIA got 'legal guidance' for torture
Conventional methods of torture were said to be inadequate
Tuesday 08 June 2004
Reuters
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/62C98A1C-ADFE-4932-AD3C-3F96EBEA5A2B.htm
The US Justice Department offered justification for the use of torture against al-Qaida detainees in an August 2002 memo to the White House, The Washington Post has reported.
The memo said if a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al-Qaida terrorist network", the newspaper reported.
The memo also said that arguments centring on "necessity and self-defence could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability" later, according to the Post.
The view from the Justice Department's office of legal counsel - written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance - was contained in a 50-page document obtained by the newspaper.
It cites government officials familiar with the document as saying that it was offered after the CIA began interrogating suspected al-Qaida leaders following the September 11 attacks.
The legal reasoning in the 2002 memo, which covered treatment of al-Qaida detainees in CIA custody, was used in a March 2003 report by Pentagon lawyers assessing interrogation rules for the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Post said.
Pentagon report
Bush administration officials say that, despite the discussion of legal issues in the two memos, the United States has abided by international conventions barring torture.
"The president directed the military to treat al-Qaida and Taliban humanely and consistent with the Geneva Conventions," a spokesman for the White House counsel's office told the Post.
On Monday, The Wall Street Journal said a classified Pentagon report on interrogation methods concluded that the president was not bound by laws prohibiting torture.
That report, compiled by military lawyers, came after commanders at Guantanamo Bay complained in late 2002 that they were not getting enough information from prisoners using conventional methods, the Journal reported.
--------
SEXUAL HUMILIATION
Forced Nudity of Iraqi Prisoners Is Seen as a Pervasive
Pattern, Not Isolated Incidents
June 8, 2004
By KATE ZERNIKE and DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/middleeast/08NAKE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
In the weeks since photographs of naked detainees set off the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib, military officials have portrayed the sexual humiliation captured in the images as the isolated acts of a rogue night shift.
But forced nudity of prisoners was pervasive in the military intelligence unit of Abu Ghraib, so much so that soldiers later said they had not seen "the whole nudity thing," as one captain called it, as abusive or out of the ordinary.
While there have been reports of forced nakedness at detention facilities in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the practice was apparently far more aggressive at Abu Ghraib, according to interviews, reports from human rights groups and sworn statements from detainees and soldiers. The detainees said leaving prisoners naked started as far back as last July, three months before the seven soldiers now charged and their military police company arrived at the prison. It bred a culture, some soldiers say, where the abuse captured on film could happen.
Detainees were paraded naked past other prisoners and guards; some were ordered to do jumping jacks and sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in the nude, according to a several witnesses. Also, a father and his grown son were stripped, then forced to stand and stare at each other. The International Committee of the Red Cross, visiting in October, found prisoners left naked in their cells for days, modestly trying to shield themselves behind cardboard from meals-ready-to-eat boxes.
It is not clear how the practice emerged and, if it was official policy, exactly who authorized it. Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the military intelligence officer in charge of interrogations at the prison, told Army investigators that detainees might be stripped and shackled for questioning, but not without "good reason." When Red Cross monitors expressed alarm about prisoners being left in their cells or forced to move about naked, they said military intelligence officials "confirmed that it was part of the military intelligence process."
"It was not uncommon to see people without clothing," Capt. Donald J. Reese, the warden of the tier where the worst abuses occurred, told investigators in a sworn statement in January. "I only saw males. I was told the `whole nudity thing' was an interrogation procedure used by military intelligence, and never thought much of it."
An analyst from the 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, who asked not to be identified for fear of being punished for speaking out, said: "If you walked down through the wing of the prison where they were being held, they would have them strip down naked. Sometimes they would stand on boxes and would hold their arms out. That happened almost every night - having them naked. I wouldn't say it's abuse. It's definitely degrading to them."
Soldiers said at least one civilian interrogator, Steven Stefanowicz, had been so alarmed by the use of nudity that he reported a military intelligence interrogator after she made a detainee walk naked down a cellblock to humiliate him. His lawyer said Mr. Stefanowicz, who an Army report said might have been "directly or indirectly" responsible for abuses, had not thought stripping detainees was an appropriate interrogation technique, and had worried that doing so would incite more unrest at a time when guards were fending off rioters with live bullets.
Nudity is considered particularly shameful in Muslim culture, a violation of religious principles. While nudity as a disciplinary or coercive tool may be especially objectionable to Muslims, they are hardly the only victims of the practice. Soldiers in Nazi Germany paraded naked prisoners in daylight, and human rights groups have documented the use of nudity during conflicts in Egypt, Chile and Turkey, and in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. Central Intelligence Agency training manuals from the 1960's and 1980's taught the stripping of prisoners as an interrogation tool. Nudity and sexual humiliation have also been reported in American prisons where a number of guards at Abu Ghraib worked in their civilian lives.
Complaints about sexual humiliation have also emerged in Afghanistan. Seven Afghan men who had been held at the main detention center in Bagram, where the deaths of two detainees and accusations of abuse are now under investigation, said in recent interviews that during various periods from December 2002 to April 2004, they had been subjected to repeated rectal exams, and forced to change clothes, shower and go to the bathroom in front of female soldiers.
"I'm 50 years old, and no one has ever taken my clothes," said Abdullah Khan Sahak, who was released from American custody on April 19 and complained that he was photographed nude in Afghanistan. "It was a very hard moment for me. It was death for me."
Zakim Shah, a 20-year-old farmer, and Parkhudin, a 26-year-old farmer and former soldier who, like many Afghans, has only one name, said female soldiers had watched groups of male prisoners take showers at Bagram and undergo rectal exams.
"We don't know if it's medical or if they were very proud of themselves," Mr. Shah said. "But if it was medical, why were they taking our clothes off in front of the women? We are Afghans, not Americans."
On two or three occasions, the two men said, the women commented to one another about the size of prisoners' penises. "They were laughing a lot," Parkhudin said, adding that the women taunted prisoners during showers, saying, "You're my dog."
Three other prisoners reported being questioned while naked at an American firebase in the city of Gardez in 2003. And at Camp Rhino, John Walker Lindh, the American now serving a 20-year sentence for aiding the Taliban, was stripped and bound with duct tape to a stretcher for two days, according to the statement of fact in his plea-bargain agreement.
At Guantánamo Bay, where some prisoners from Afghanistan were taken, a few British detainees said forced nudity had occurred. One of them, Tarek Dergoul, said after his release that some detainees had been stripped of their clothing, which would then be returned piece by piece in exchange for good behavior.
But Lt. Col. Leon H. Sumpter, a spokesman for the military joint task force that runs the detention center, said in a recent interview that nudity had never occurred in connection with interrogation or discipline and had not been approved.
A military official who served at Guantánamo said that after a wave of suicide attempts by prisoners in late 2002 and early 2003, the military police guards did take away clothing from some detainees who were considered suicide risks, out of concern that they might rip up their garments to make nooses.
In its visits to detention centers and prisons in Iraq, the Red Cross singled out the military intelligence section at Abu Ghraib for using public nudity in a "systematic" pattern of maltreatment. By contrast, the committee said it had heard no complaints of "physical ill treatment" at Camp Bucca, another large detention center.
A list of interrogation techniques posted at Abu Ghraib in September, indicating which were acceptable and which needed special authorization, makes no mention of leaving detainees naked. A senior military officer said, "There was no interrogation authority that authorized the removal of all clothing from a detainee."
But detainees who made sworn statements after the prison abuse scandal broke all mentioned having been left naked, some for days. The practice goes back at least as far as July 10, when, according to his statement, a detainee named Amjed Isail Waleed was left unclothed in a dark room for five days. Another detainee, Ameen Saeed al-Sheik, said he was stripped on Oct. 7, a week before the arrival of the 372nd Military Police Company, the unit where soldiers are now charged with abuse.
By Oct. 20, forced nudity was such accepted practice that an incident report written by two of the soldiers now charged said an inmate in the cell where prisoners were held for interrogation had been ordered "stripped in his cell for six (6) days" for apparently whittling a toothbrush into what a soldier believed was a knife.
In late October, Red Cross monitors were so alarmed by the number of nude detainees that they halted their visit and demanded an immediate explanation.
"The military intelligence officer in charge of the interrogation explained that this practice was `part of the process,' " the Red Cross wrote in a report in February.
In November, Specialist Luciana Spencer of the 66th Military Intelligence Group ordered a detainee stripped and handcuffed behind his back during his interrogation, then paraded him outdoors in the cold past other detainees to his cell.
"I remember we said, `Do you really have to walk him out naked?' " said the intelligence analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "And they said, `Yeah, yeah, we have to embarrass him.' "
Mr. Stefanowicz reported the incident, and Specialist Spencer was moved out of the interrogation unit. Sometime around December, the nudity seemed to stop, according to several soldiers. Captain Reese, the tier warden, credited the Red Cross.
"They were concerned with the amount of nudity, and the area was cold and damp," he said in his statement to investigators on Jan. 18. "The detainees did not have appropriate clothing and bedding. The second visit occurred two weeks ago, and things were much better. The nudity has stopped, and they seemed happy with what they saw."
-------- spies
Tenet's Departure May Ease an Overhaul of Intelligence
June 8, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/politics/08intel.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 7 - The departure of George J. Tenet as director of central intelligence may remove one obstacle to an overhaul that would make him the last person to hold the job in its current form, prominent members of Congress and some members of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks say.
Both the commission, in its review of the attacks, and the Senate Intelligence Committee, in its review of prewar intelligence on Iraq, are preparing reports that are expected to place blame for the intelligence failures in part on the current structure, in which a single person both leads the Central Intelligence Agency and, with limited budget and management authority, oversees all intelligence agencies, officials involved in the internal discussions say.
"You can't wait on reform," Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said in a telephone interview on Monday. In a speech last month, Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who is the panel's chairman, said the committee's findings, still awaiting declassification by the C.I.A., "literally beg for reform."
In interviews on Monday, members of the Sept. 11 commission said the departure of Mr. Tenet would remove a prominent public opponent of the recommendations that the panel was considering.
While the commission has praised Mr. Tenet in public for his energy and dedication in running the C.I.A., the agency itself has been subject to withering criticism in a series of interim staff reports released by the commission, which is facing a July 26 deadline to complete its inquiry.
"Tenet's departure increases the chances that the commission will make recommendations for restructuring the intelligence community," said Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska who is a member of the commission. Mr. Kerrey described Mr. Tenet's resignation as "a fairly significant clap of thunder.''
"I think it creates a vacuum because Tenet was such a significant force," he said.
Another Democrat on the panel, Tim Roemer, a former House member from Indiana, said the departures this summer of both Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A.'s director of operations, James Pavitt, were part of a "perfect storm" that could open the way to an overhaul of the intelligence community, including the creation of the post of national intelligence director to oversee all intelligence agencies.
Most proponents of restructuring intelligence agencies argue that the country's primary intelligence chief needs more power, not less, to control budgets, resolve disputes, avoid overlap and fill gaps among the many intelligence agencies. But any recommendation for change would face resistance from agencies like the Pentagon that could lose power in a reorganization, and it is not clear whether any plan could win approval before Congress ends an abbreviated session in this election year.
The national intelligence post's creation was a central recommendation of a joint Congressional investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks, an inquiry on which Mr. Roemer also served. He said he would urge the independent commission to make the same recommendation, although he would not predict the outcome of the panel's deliberations.
"We need a centralized authority for these 15 disparate agencies," Mr. Roemer said. "I generally support the concept of a director of national intelligence."
Commission members said that the panel was in the middle of deliberations about the structure of the narrative portion of the report and that it had not begun to debate in earnest recommendations for change in the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
The Senate committee plans to hold hearings on intelligence restructuring as early as the end of this month, after it releases what officials have described as a highly critical report highlighting mistakes and miscalculations made by intelligence agencies in reporting on Iraq and its suspected arsenal of illicit weapons.
Options being considered by the commission and being debated in Congress would separate in some way the two jobs that Mr. Tenet and his predecessors have tried, not always successfully, to balance. One would involve running the Central Intelligence Agency; the other, with much less authority, would involve overseeing and coordinate activities among all American spy agencies.
The Senate committee, whose report will focus on Iraq and illicit weapons, is not expected to make a specific recommendation about intelligence reform, Congressional officials said on Monday. But in the hearings that will follow, "we're going to turn our attention to the forward-looking part, which is what do you do about the problems that we're going to describe in the report," one official said.
Mr. Tenet, who has been intelligence chief since 1997, made clear his view that it would be a mistake to remove the director of central intelligence from the "troops," as he described C.I.A. personnel. Mr. Tenet would have liked to have had more power and responsibility over other agencies, including the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and others, but he did not want to lose day-to-day authority over the C.I.A., people close to him have said.
But with Mr. Tenet stepping aside, effective July 11, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, designated so far only as his acting successor, some Congressional officials say the landscape is particularly suited for a major overhaul, which would require legislation.
"With Tenet's departure, the president has the opportunity to transform the job that Tenet held," said Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee and the sponsor of a bill that would create a new director of national intelligence. "We need a true director of the entire intelligence community - all 15 agencies - who has the necessary authority, responsibility and accountability."
Senator Roberts, in his speech last month, said: ''There are many in the Congress who say there is a conflict of interest inherent in a single individual serving as director of the C.I.A. and as director of the entire intelligence community. There is broad agreement that from an organizational standpoint, we need to manage the entire community rather than serve the interests of one particular agency."
President Bush said in April that he was open to the idea of intelligence changes, and administration officials said then that the White House was reviewing various options, including one presented by Brent Scowcroft, the former national security adviser who now heads the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.
Mr. Scowcroft's proposal, drafted more than a year ago but essentially ignored by the White House until recently, would also create a director of national intelligence, one with even broader powers than in Ms. Harman's plan. More recently, however, the White House has given no indication that it might put forward a plan of its own before the Sept. 11 commission completes its work, and administration officials say it is more likely that Mr. Bush and his aides will wait to see what emerges from that panel and from the hearings on Capitol Hill.
The classified 400-page Senate report about intelligence agencies' handling of prewar information on Iraq is still being reviewed by the C.I.A., which has the power to decide how much of it can be declassified for public release. The Senate committee is tentatively planning to make the report public late next week, but that may depend on whether its members decide to protest any C.I.A. decisions about what sections must remain secret, Congressional officials say.
-------
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Racing to Ruin the C.I.A.
June 8, 2004
By ROBERT M. GATES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/opinion/08GATE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
COLLEGE STATION, Tex. - The ink is hardly dry on George Tenet's resignation and the 9/11 commission and Senate Intelligence Committee have yet to release their reports on intelligence failures, yet the demands to overhaul American intelligence are already in full cry. The conventional wisdom seems to be that in the midst of the war on terrorism and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should try something completely different. This would be a grave mistake.
The most-talked-about proposal is to create a new position - a director of national intelligence or "intelligence czar" - reporting to the president, empowered with budgetary authority and managerial control over all dozen or so American foreign intelligence agencies, and divorced from direct control of the Central Intelligence Agency. It would no doubt garner headlines as the kind of bold stroke intended to minimize future intelligence failures and improve our security. But it is a familiar political proposal that emphasizes form over substance and ignores reality. And it would not play out as anticipated.
Today, the director of central intelligence is both the head of C.I.A. and of the intelligence community. He is responsible (and accountable) for the performance of more than a dozen agencies involved in foreign intelligence collection and analysis. He produces the National Foreign Intelligence Program, which includes the annual budgets of these agencies and establishes their priorities. In reality, however, the director has no authority to manage those agencies, apart from C.I.A., or to hold their leadership accountable, or to direct how they spend their money on a day-to-day basis. That is, he can't really control or direct them.
More than 80 percent of foreign intelligence dollars are spent by agencies under the control of the secretary of defense. Virtually all of those agencies have tactical, combat-related tasks to perform for the Pentagon and the military services, in addition to the roles they play under the guidance of the director of central intelligence. In the real world of Washington bureaucratic and Congressional politics, there is no way the secretary of defense or the armed services committees of Congress are simply going to hand those agencies over to an intelligence czar sitting in the White House. Indeed, for the last decade, intelligence authority has been quietly leaching from the C.I.A. and to the Pentagon, not the other way around.
No doubt, Congress would quickly pass a bill creating a director of national intelligence. But you can bet that any provisions transferring Pentagon agencies and their budgets to the new office would be watered down and compromised into meaningless verbiage. Thus, our newly "empowered" national intelligence boss would in all likelihood find himself without real budget and management authority over the defense agencies. He would also be without troops, as the C.I.A. would then be run by someone else. The intelligence czar would, in fact, be an intelligence eunuch.
The impetus to create the new position comes from an acknowledgment that the director of central intelligence has too little real authority. But there are more realistic measures to strengthen his hand in integrating and managing foreign intelligence agencies. They lack the pizazz and headline potential of a new White House position, but they are politically feasible and could be done more quickly. They would also actually improve intelligence collection and analysis.
First, we should give the director of central intelligence total budget authority over all aspects of the National Foreign Intelligence Program. In short, give him the authority to unilaterally move people and money among the agencies and elements of the national intelligence program. Then he could not only set priorities, but also make sure the agencies carry them out. In this, he might be required to consult with the secretary of defense - but not to seek the Pentagon's concurrence. The director of central intelligence alone would be held accountable for his decisions to the intelligence committees and armed services committees of Congress.
Second, for those agencies that have military as well as intelligence responsibilities - like the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency - the secretary of defense should have to send his nomination of their leaders to the intelligence director, who would decide whether to appoint them. Their tenure, too, would be determined by the director of central intelligence.
In addition, the president and Congress, on a bipartisan basis, should agree on a long-term growth rate for the intelligence budget. Intelligence is a profession of experience. Clandestine field officers, analysts and technical collection programs all require 5 to 10 years to develop, on average. The security challenges we face, terrorism above all, will be with us for many years. Budgets are too often raised after a crisis or catastrophic event only to be reduced two or three years later as memory fades. This is a formula for inadequacy and failure. Predictability of resources is essential.
Also, the failures of our agencies related to Islamic terrorism and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction make clear the need for changes in the way analysis and clandestine operations are conducted at the C.I.A. That will be the challenge facing the new leadership at the agency, and it should be the subject of discussions among the next director of central intelligence, the president and the Congressional intelligence committees. Sorting the solutions out in public is not conducive to more effective American intelligence gathering.
Last, trying to restructure the intelligence community during a presidential election campaign is highly unlikely to result in changes that improve our abilities and security. Few Americans probably remember the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols reforms to strengthen the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but they were one of the most effective and least disruptive efforts to improve our national defense in decades. A key to this success was that the reforms were not developed in the heat of a presidential election and did not require dismantling either the Defense Department or the Joint Chiefs.
So let the 9/11 commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee issue their reports and recommendations. Then, after the election, the president, Congress and the new director of central intelligence should decide what changes we really need. The stakes in intelligence reform could not be higher, and playing politics won't help. At a time of national danger, all should take care first to do no harm.
Robert M. Gates, director of central intelligence under President George H. W. Bush, is the president of Texas A&M University.
-------- un
US submits UN resolution for Tuesday vote
UN and Iraq's new president to have no say on security issues
Tuesday 08 June 2004
Aljazeera + Agencies
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/EBD66E0C-78E2-477A-8EF4-56F666A75242.htm
The US has formally submitted its draft resolution for a Security Council vote on Tuesday, after refusing a French demand for Iraqi veto power over major US-led military operations.
A newly revised draft Security Council resolution on Tuesday pledges that US-led military forces and the Iraqi government would coooperate.
The compromise clause "including policy on sensitive offensive operations" stops short of the virtual Iraqi veto over military operations that France requested on Sunday.
However, inclusion of the new language seems to have satisfied a key French concern, diplomats said and the US has submitted the resolution for a Tuesday vote.
Breakthrough?
Earlier, the two major players in Iraq's occupation declined to include a French amendment that would require Iraqi consent for "sensitive" military actions.
But US officials were keen to have the Council pass a vote on the text on Tuesday and brokered a compromise.
France initially put forward its Iraqi veto proposal on Sunday as the 15-nation body with the handover deadline in Baghdad a little more than three weeks away.
The US and Britain had insisted the role and scope of US-led troops was to be governed by two letters of cooperation by US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi. Defining 'terrorist'
Speaking just moments after the release of the latest resolution draft, UN envoy Lakhdar Ibrahimi said that not all the opponents of the US occupation in Iraq were "terrorists".
He urged the new government to reach out to them for the good of the country's future.
"It [US] will need to resist the temptation to characterise all who have opposed the occupation as terrorists and bitter-enders"
Lakhdar Ibrahimi, UN envoy After overseeing months of talks that helped form the interim government, Brahimi told the UN Security Council that the military could not solve Iraq's problems.
"The majority of Iraqis with whom we met stressed that the problem of insecurity cannot be solved through military means alone. A political solution is also required."
Ibrahimi concluded that the US "will need to resist the temptation to characterise all who have opposed the occupation as terrorists and bitter-enders."
Unofficial meeting
In related news, the White House announced that US President George Bush is to meet with Iraqi interim president Shaikh Ghazi al-Yawir on Wednesday at the G8 summit.
Al-Yawir is expected to meet with Bush at the G8 summit
The meeting had not been on Bush's publicly released schedule when he arrived in Georgia, US for the annual gathering of leading industrialised nations plus Russia.
White House aides hope that the United States will have secured passage of a new UN Security Council resolution laying out the way forward in Iraq by the time Bush meets with the newly-appointed president.
Bush is using the Group of Eight to push his Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative, a plan to spread US-style democratic and free market policies throughout the region.
Kurdish setback
However, the Iraqi interim government may already be facing a major challenge.
In a letter addressed to Bush on Monday, Former Iraq Interim Government Kurdish leaders Mustafa Barazani and Jalal Talabani demanded the new UN resolution on Iraq mention Kurdish autonomy. According to Voice of America News, the two Kurdish leaders threatened to withdraw from the new interim government if their concerns were not addressed.
----
Text: Latest UN draft resolution on Iraq
The council is to vote on the draft on Tuesday
Tuesday 08 June 2004
Agencies (AP)
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F8A3D6B6-4A16-4BD7-A530-017534242D83.htm
The United States and Britain circulated a revised draft of a resolution on Iraq to Security Council members on Monday. This is what it said.
The Security Council,
- Welcoming the beginning of a new phase in Iraq's transition to a democratically elected government, and looking forward to the end of the occupation and the assumption of full responsibility and authority by a fully sovereign and independent Interim Government of Iraq by 30 June 2004.
- Recalling all of its previous relevant resolutions on Iraq.
- Reaffirming the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Iraq.
- Reaffirming the right of the Iraqi people freely to determine their own political future and control their own natural resources.
- Recognising the importance of international support, particularly that of countries in the region, Iraq's neighbours, and regional organisations, for the people of Iraq in their efforts to achieve security and prosperity, and noting that the successful implementation of this resolution will contribute to regional stability.
- Welcoming the efforts of the Special Advisor to the Secretary-General to assist the people of Iraq in achieving the formation of the Interim Government of Iraq, as set out in the letter of the Secretary-General of 8 June 2004.
- Taking note of the dissolution of the Governing Council of Iraq, and welcoming the progress made in implementing the arrangements for Iraq's political transition referred to in resolution 1511 (2003) of 16 October 2003.
- Welcoming the commitment of the Interim Government of Iraq to work towards a federal, democratic, pluralist and unified Iraq, in which there is full respect for political and human rights.
- Stressing the need for all parties to respect and protect Iraq's archaeological, historical, cultural and religious heritage, Affirming the importance of the rule of law, respect for human rights including the rights of women, fundamental freedoms, and democracy including free and fair elections.
- Recalling the establishment of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) on 14 August 2003, and affirming that the United Nations should play a leading role in assisting the Iraqi people and government in the formation of institutions for representative government.
- Recognising that international support for restoration of stability and security is essential to the well-being of the people of Iraq as well as to the ability of all concerned to carry out their work on behalf of the people of Iraq, and welcoming Member State contributions in this regard under resolution 1483 (2003) of 22 May 2003 and resolution 1511 (2003).
- Recalling the report provided by the United States to the Security Council on 16 April 2004 on the efforts and progress made by the multinational force.
- Recognising the request conveyed in the letter of 5 June 2004 from the Prime Minister of the Interim Government of Iraq to the President of the Council, which is annexed to this resolution, to retain the presence of the multinational force.
- Recognising also the importance of the consent of the sovereign Government of Iraq for the presence of the multinational force and of close coordination between the multinational force and that government.
- Welcoming the willingness of the multinational force to continue efforts to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq in support of the political transition, especially for upcoming elections, and to provide security for the UN presence in Iraq, as described in the letter of 5 June 2004 from the United States Secretary of State to the President of the Council, which is annexed to this resolution.
- Noting the commitment of all forces promoting the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq to act in accordance with international law, including obligations under international humanitarian law, and cooperate with relevant international organisations.
- Affirming the importance of international assistance in reconstruction and development of the Iraqi economy.
- Recognising the benefits to Iraq of the immunities and privileges enjoyed by Iraqi oil revenues and by the Development Fund for Iraq, and noting the importance of providing for continued disbursements of this fund by the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors upon dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
- Determining that the situation in Iraq continues to constitute a threat to international peace and security.
- Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations:
1. Endorses the formation of a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq, as presented on 1 June 2004, which will assume full responsibility and authority by 30 June 2004 for governing Iraq while refraining from taking any actions affecting Iraq's destiny beyond the limited interim period until an elected Transitional Government of Iraq assumes office as envisaged in paragraph four below;
2. Welcomes that, also by 30 June 2004, the occupation will end and the Coalition Provisional Authority will cease to exist, and that Iraq will reassert its full sovereignty;
3. Reaffirms the right of the Iraqi people freely to determine their own political future and to exercise full authority and control over their financial and natural resources;
4. Endorses the proposed timetable for Iraq's political transition to democratic government including: (a) formation of the sovereign Interim Government of Iraq that will assume governing responsibility and authority by 30 June 2004; (b) convening of a national conference reflecting the diversity of Iraqi society; and (c) holding of direct democratic elections by 31 December 2004 if possible, and in no case later than 31 January 2005, to a Transitional National Assembly, which will, inter alia, have responsibility for forming a Transitional Government of Iraq and drafting a permanent constitution for Iraq leading to a constitutionally-elected government by 31 December 2005;
5. Invites the Government of Iraq to consider how the convening of an international meeting could support the above process, and notes that it would welcome such a meeting to support the Iraqi political transition and Iraqi recovery, to the benefit of the Iraqi people, and in the interest of stability in the region.
6. Calls on all Iraqis to implement these arrangements peaceably and in full, and on all States and relevant organisations to support such implementation.
7. Decides that in implementing, as circumstances permit, their mandate to assist the Iraqi people and government, the Special Representative of the Secretary General and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), as requested by the Government of Iraq, shall: (a) play a leading role to: (i) assist in the convening, during the month of July 2004, of a national conference to select a Consultative Council; (ii) advise and support the Interim Government of Iraq, the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, and the Transitional National Assembly on the process for holding elections; (iii) promote national dialogue and consensus-building on the drafting of a national constitution by the people of Iraq; (b) and also: (i) advise the Government of Iraq in the development of effective civil and social services; (ii) contribute to the coordination and delivery of reconstruction, development, and humanitarian assistance; (iii) promote the protection of human rights, national reconciliation, and judicial and legal reform in order to strengthen the rule of law in Iraq; and (iv) advise and assist the Government of Iraq on initial planning for the eventual conduct of a comprehensive census.
8. Welcomes ongoing efforts by the incoming Interim Government of Iraq to develop Iraqi security forces, including the Iraqi armed forces, operating under the authority of the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors, which will progressively play a greater role and ultimately assume full responsibility for the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq;
9. Notes that the presence of the multinational force in Iraq is at the request of the incoming Interim Government of Iraq and therefore reaffirms the authorisation for the multinational force under unified command established under resolution 1511 (2003) having regard to the letters annexed to this resolution;
10. Decides that the multinational force shall have the authority to take all necessary measures to contribute to the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq in accordance with the letters annexed to this resolution expressing, inter alia, the Iraqi request for the continued presence of the multinational force and setting out its tasks, including by preventing and deterring terrorism, so that, inter alia, the United Nations can fulfil its role in assisting the Iraqi people as outlined in paragraph seven above and the Iraqi people can implement freely and without intimidation the timetable and programme for the political process and benefit from reconstruction and rehabilitation activities;
11. Welcomes in this regard the letters annexed to this resolution stating, inter alia, that arrangements are being put in place to establish a security partnership between the multinational force and the sovereign Government of Iraq and to ensure coordination between the two, and noting also in this regard that Iraqi security forces are responsible to appropriate Iraqi ministers, that the Government of Iraq has authority to commit Iraqi security forces to the multinational force to engage in operations with it, and that the security structures described in the letters will serve as the fora for the multinational force and Iraqi government to reach agreement on the full range of fundamental security and policy issues, including policy on sensitive offensive operations, and will ensure full partnership between Iraqi forces and the multinational force, through close coordination and consultation;
12. Decides further that the mandate for the multinational force shall be reviewed at the request of the Government of Iraq or twelve months from the date of this resolution, and that this mandate shall expire upon the completion of the political process set out in paragraph four above, and declares that it will terminate this mandate earlier if requested by the Government of Iraq;
13. Notes the intention, set out in the annexed letter from the United States Secretary of State, to create a distinct entity under unified command of the multinational force with a dedicated mission to provide security for the UN presence in Iraq, recognises that the implementation of measures to provide security for staff members of the United Nations system working in Iraq would require significant resources, and calls upon Member States and relevant organisations to provide such resources, including contributions to that entity;
14. Recognises that the multinational force will also assist in building the capability of the Iraqi security forces and institutions, through a program of recruitment, training, equipping, mentoring and monitoring;
15. Requests Member States and international and regional organisations to contribute assistance to the multinational force, including military forces, as agreed with the Government of Iraq, to help meet the needs of the Iraqi people for security and stability, humanitarian and reconstruction assistance, and to support the efforts of UNAMI;
16. Emphasises the importance of developing effective Iraqi police, border enforcement, and Facilities Protection Service, under the control of the Interior Ministry of Iraq, and, in the case of the Facilities Protection Service, other Iraqi ministries, for the maintenance of law, order, and security, including combating terrorism, and requests Member States and international organisations to assist the Government of Iraq in building the capability of these Iraqi institutions;
17. Condemns all acts of terrorism in Iraq, reaffirms the obligations of Member States under resolutions 1373 (2001) of 28 September 2001, 1267 (1999) 15 October 1999, 1333 (2000) of 19 December 2000, 1390 (2002) of 16 January 2002, 1455 (2003) of 17 January 2003, and 1526 (2004) of 30 January 2004, and other relevant international obligations with respect, inter alia, to terrorist activities in and from Iraq or against its citizens, and specifically reiterates its call upon Member States to prevent the transit of terrorists to and from Iraq, arms for terrorists, and financing that would support terrorists, and reemphasises the importance of strengthening the cooperation of the countries of the region, particularly neighbours of Iraq, in this regard;
18. Recognises that the Interim Government of Iraq will assume the primary role in coordinating international assistance to Iraq;
19. Welcomes efforts by Member States and international organisations to respond in support of requests by the Interim Government of Iraq to provide technical and expert assistance, while Iraq is rebuilding administrative capacity;
20. Reiterates its request that Member States, international financial institutions and other organisations strengthen their efforts to assist the people of Iraq in the reconstruction and development of the Iraqi economy, including by providing international experts and necessary resources through a coordinated program of donor assistance;
21. Decides that the prohibitions related to the sale or supply to Iraq of arms and related materiel under previous resolutions shall not apply to arms or related materiel required by the Government of Iraq or the multinational force to serve the purposes of this resolution, stresses the importance for all States to abide strictly by them, and notes the significance of Iraq's neighbours in this regard, and calls upon the government of Iraq and the multinational force each to ensure that appropriate implementation procedures are in place;
22. Notes that nothing in the preceding paragraph affects the prohibitions on or obligations of States related to items specified in paragraphs 8 and 12 of resolution 687 (1991) of 3 April 1991 or activities described in paragraph 3(f) of resolution 707 (1991) of 15 August 1991, and reaffirms its intention to revisit the mandates of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency;
23. Calls on Member States and international organisations to respond to Iraqi requests to assist Iraqi efforts to integrate Iraqi veterans and former militia members into Iraqi society;
24. Notes that, upon dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the funds in the Development Fund for Iraq shall be disbursed solely at the direction of the Government of Iraq, and decides that the Development Fund for Iraq shall be utilized in a transparent and equitable manner and through the Iraqi budget including to satisfy outstanding obligations against the Development Fund for Iraq, that the arrangements for the depositing of proceeds from export sales of petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas established in paragraph 20 of resolution 1483 (2003) shall continue to apply, that the International Advisory and Monitoring Board shall continue its activities in monitoring the Development Fund for Iraq and shall include as an additional full voting member a duly qualified individual designated by the Government of Iraq and that appropriate arrangements shall be made for the continuation of deposits of the proceeds referred to in paragraph 21 of resolution 1483 (2003);
25. Decides further that the provisions in the above paragraph for the deposit of proceeds into the DFI and for the role of the IAMB shall be reviewed at the request of the Transitional Government of Iraq or twelve months from the date of this resolution, and shall expire upon the completion of the political process set out in paragraph four above;
26. Decides that, in connection with the dissolution of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors shall assume the rights, responsibilities and obligations relating to the Oil for Food Program that were transferred to the Authority, including all operational responsibility for the Program and any obligations undertaken by the Authority in connection with such responsibility, and responsibility for ensuring independently authenticated confirmation that goods have been delivered, and further decides that, following a 120-day transition period from the date of adoption of this resolution, the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors shall assume responsibility for certifying delivery of goods under contracts prioritized in accordance with that resolution, and that such certification shall be deemed to constitute the independent authentication required for the release of funds associated with such contracts, consulting as appropriate to ensure the smooth implementation of these arrangements;
27. Further decides that the provisions of paragraph 22 of resolution 1483 (2003) shall continue to apply, except that the privileges and immunities provided in that paragraph shall not apply concerning any final judgment arising out of a contractual obligation entered into by Iraq after 30 June 2004;
28. Welcomes the commitments of many creditors, including those of the Paris Club, to identify ways to reduce substantially Iraq's sovereign debt, calls on Member States, as well as intemationa1 and regional organisations, to support the Iraq reconstruction effort, urges the international financial institutions and bilateral donors to take the immediate steps necessary to provide their full range of loans and other financial assistance and arrangements to Iraq, recognises that the Interim Government of Iraq will have the authority to conclude and implement such agreements and other arrangements as may be necessary in this regard, and requests creditors, institutions and donors to work as a priority on these matters with the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors;
29. Recalls the continuing obligations of Member States to freeze and transfer certain funds, assets, and economic resources to the Development Fund for Iraq in accordance with paragraphs 19 and 23 of resolution 1483 (2003) and with resolution 1518 (2003) of 24 November 2003;
30. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Council within three months from the date of this resolution on UNAMI operations in Iraq, and on a quarterly basis thereafter on the progress made towards national elections and fulfilment of all UNAMI's responsibilities;
31. Requests that the United States, on behalf of the multinational force, report to the Council within three months from the date of this resolution on the efforts and progress of this force, and on a quarterly basis thereafter;
32. Decides to remain actively seized of the matter.
--------
U.S. Bends to France, Russia on U.N. Iraq Resolution
Interim Government Will Be Allowed to Opt Out of U.S.-Led Offenses, Hold International Conference
By Robin Wright and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23393-2004Jun7.html
In a major push to win international backing before the Group of Eight summit begins, the United States made several last-minute concessions to incorporate French and Russian demands in a proposed United Nations resolution on Iraq. It should win unanimous support in a Security Council vote today, U.N. diplomats predicted.
Passage would be a pivotal victory for the Bush administration as it ends a 14-month occupation of Iraq -- and be a stark contrast to the divisions and diplomatic disarray at the world body when the United States failed last year to win U.N. backing for a resolution authorizing military intervention in Iraq.
The resolution is critical for Iraq, because it bestows international legitimacy on the new government 22 days before the occupation ends. With the U.N. vote today, U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte said, Iraq will soon begin "a new phase in the political history, the full restoration of sovereignty and authority over Iraq's own affairs."
Even France, the most demanding party in the U.N. debate, sounded pleased with the resolution after both major and minor modifications yesterday. "It's much improved. . . . Things are going in the right direction," said French Ambassador Jean-Marc de La Sabliere. "We're almost finished."
In a widely backed move, France and Germany had insisted that Baghdad have the right to veto Iraqi participation in "sensitive offensive operations" led by a U.S.-dominated multinational force, which was the final major concession by the United States and Britain, the resolution's co-sponsors.
German Ambassador Gunter Pleuger said the new text reflects French and German concerns. "I think we have reached a stage where the resolution has a very good text," he told reporters in New York. "My feeling is we have found a compromise."
The negotiations were fraught with last-minute scrambling, after several of the 15 Security Council members said the fourth draft introduced yesterday was not good enough, forcing the drafters to go back for further revisions and offer a fifth version late last night.
The new draft also now accommodates a Russian demand for an international conference to support the Iraqi transition and foster stability in the region. Moscow had sought to widen the role of countries not in the U.S.-led coalition.
In response to requests from several Security Council countries, the latest draft incorporates language emphasizing the Iraqi people's right "freely to determine their own political future" -- a modification to address the sensitive issue of how much sovereignty the new Iraqi government will assume when the occupation ends on June 30. In addition, the new draft emphasizes that the goal in Iraq will be "full respect for political and human rights," a request by Chile.
But the most controversial aspect of the lengthy resolution has been the "security partnership" arrangements between Iraq and the U.S.-led multinational force of about 160,000 troops.
The resolution now pledges "close coordination" between Baghdad and U.S. commanders and incorporates security arrangements unveiled Sunday in two letters by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Prime Minister-designate Ayad Allawi.
At the same time, however, the draft allows the multinational force to take "all necessary measures" to provide security and reserves the right to detain Iraqis viewed as a security threat. The latter remains a sensitive issue because of prisoner abuse by U.S. troops at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons.
The resolution marks a final personal success for Negroponte, who will move next month to Baghdad to become the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq. "We think this is an excellent resolution," he told reporters. It is "the product of a long process of negotiation and discussion."
In an earlier Security Council briefing, U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi predicted the new Iraqi interim government would face tough times ahead, despite initial indications that it has tentative support from Iraqis. "The days and weeks ahead will severely test this new government, and the solutions to Iraq's current challenges will take years, not months, to overcome," said Brahimi, who helped form the interim government.
The former Algerian foreign minister urged the new Iraqi government to make a special effort to bring opponents into the system. "It will need to reach out to those who have been vocal critics of this past year's process and engage them in dialogue," Brahimi said. "It will need to resist the temptation to characterize all who have opposed the occupation as terrorists and bitter-enders."
As negotiators toiled at the United Nations in New York, President Bush relaxed on Sea Island, Ga., where he will host the three-day G-8 summit, which begins today. Bush spent the day fishing, riding a mountain bike on the beach, planting a tree, touring facilities and receiving briefings in preparation for the summit of world leaders.
But administration officials sought to lower expectations that the U.N. resolution will boost the multinational force. In a pair of television interviews, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the most that can be hoped for is that it will reduce pressure on allies to withdraw troops from Iraq, as Spain has done.
"I don't expect that there will be a large infusion of more foreign forces," Rice told Fox News. "In fact, I think that what you will see, is that some of the countries that have had particularly difficult domestic situations, some of our coalition partners, will find this resolution makes them capable of staying the course."
Milbank reported from Georgia.
--------
UNITED NATIONS
U.S. Envoy Predicts Passage of Amended Iraq Resolution
June 8, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/international/middleeast/08NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, June 7 - The United States said Monday night that it believed that it had the support of the Security Council for its resolution on Iraq and that it would put the measure to a vote on Tuesday.
"We have made a major effort to take into account the comments that have been made by various delegations, and we think it is an excellent resolution," said John D. Negroponte, the American ambassador to the United Nations who is going to Baghdad soon as the American ambassador there. He made the comments after several revisions were made to the resolution for the fourth time in two weeks.
The resolution is intended to enshrine the sovereignty of the interim Iraqi government, taking over on June 30, to confer international legitimacy on the American-led forces there and to define the role of the United Nations after the transition.
Mr. Negroponte made his comments outside the chamber where envoys from the 15 Security Council nations had been debating revisions to the resolution submitted by the United States and Britain, its co-sponsors.
The latest adjustments made Monday included meeting a French-German demand that the relationship between Iraqi troops and the American-led forces - outlined in letters annexed to the measure - be spelled out in the measure itself.
The letters, one from Iyad Allawi, the prime minister of the interim Iraqi government, and the other from Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, describe a partnership between Iraqi forces and the United States command "on the full range of fundamental security and police issues, including policy on sensitive offensive operations."
Mr. Negroponte said that, though he believed the letters spoke for themselves, the United States had agreed to incorporate a "summary paragraph" of what they say into the resolution.
To accommodate Russia's request for an international conference on Iraq, the draft was also changed to say that the Security Council would consider one if Iraq asked it to.
The new version gives the interim Iraqi government the right to order American troops to leave Iraq - a request the new ministers have indicated they are highly unlikely to make for security reasons. Under the terms of the resolution, the mandate of the multinational force would expire in January 2006.
After leaving the Council chamber Monday night, several ambassadors said they would seek instructions from their capitals on any last revisions, and legal experts were expected to work through the night on a final version.
But the diplomats expressed overall satisfaction with the direction the resolution was taking.
Ambassador Jean-Marc de la Sablière of France said: "The new version which has been presented by the American and U.K. delegations is certainly much better than the one we had yesterday. I think things are going in the right direction."
Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz of Chile said the final text reflected suggestions put forth by his country, Spain and Brazil that the resolution state that all forces pledge to observe international human rights laws.
In an open meeting before the closed afternoon session, Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special envoy to Iraq, reported on his just completed effort to help appoint the members of the new caretaker government. He said its first mission would be to gain the support of people who have opposed the American occupation.
"It will need to reach out to those who have been vocal critics of this past year's process and engage them in dialogue," Mr. Brahimi said. "It will need to resist the temptation to characterize all who have opposed the occupation as terrorists and bitter-enders."
-------- us
U.S. Plans Major Cut Of Forces In Korea
12,500 Troops To Be Relocated By End of 2005
By Anthony Faiola and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22074-2004Jun7.html
SEOUL, June 7 -- The United States plans to withdraw a third of its 37,000 troops stationed in South Korea before the end of next year as part of the most significant realignment of U.S. forces on the Korean Peninsula in half a century, South Korean officials said Monday.
The withdrawal underscores a broader move by the Pentagon to transform troops stationed at traditional, fixed bases into more mobile forces for rapid global deployments. Defense officials also have proposed pulling two armored Army divisions out of Germany and repositioning some fighter aircraft and Navy command staff in Europe to make it easier to deploy forces to the Middle East, Central Asia and other potential hot spots.
In the case of South Korea, the planned move would mark the largest U.S. troop withdrawal from the peninsula since the Korean War, while shifting a greater burden of defense to the South Koreans themselves. A U.S. delegation, led by Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Lawless, informed the South Koreans Sunday night of the Pentagon's intention to withdraw the troops, South Korean officials said.
The Pentagon has already announced plans to redeploy 3,600 troops this summer from South Korea to Iraq. The new proposal greatly expands the number of troops to be withdrawn -- involving about 12,500 by December 2005, Kim Sook, head of the Foreign Ministry's North America bureau, told reporters in Seoul on Monday.
It was not immediately clear which U.S. forces would be going -- or where. A senior U.S. military officer familiar with the planning, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said in an interview that many such details have yet to be worked out.
"Much of the planning has involved thinking in terms what military capabilities will still be needed in Korea, not the specific soldiers or units," the officer said.
Moreover, the pullout from Korea could end up being largely offset by a buildup of U.S. forces elsewhere in the Pacific -- notably in Guam, where Pentagon officials envision stationing more aircraft and submarines, and in Hawaii, where an aircraft carrier may be relocated from the mainland United States.
The withdrawal would be the first major troop cut on the Korean Peninsula since the early 1990s, when 7,000 U.S. troops were taken out. Kim said officials at the South Korean National Security Council, Defense Ministry and Foreign Ministry would review the proposal before giving a response. "We'll formulate a position and then notify the United States," he told reporters in Seoul.
The U.S. decision sparked divergent reactions in South Korea. Members of President Roh Moo Hyun's allied Uri Party indicated they would not protest the decision, but legislators from the more conservative opposition Grand National Party, which has accused Roh of warming to North Korea while alienating the United States, expressed dismay.
"In a situation where the nuclear issue in the North and Pyongyang's conventional weapons capabilities still loom as a threat to our security, the drastic reduction of troops would only harm the security of the Korean Peninsula," GNP legislator Park Jin told South Korea's JoongAng Ilbo newspaper. South Korea's semi-official Yonhap news agency quoted an unnamed South Korean official as saying the government in Seoul was advocating a more gradual pullout of the forces by 2013.
The U.S. proposal comes as U.S. relations with the South Korean government are being tested by South Korea's policy of rapprochement with the communist government of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il despite its threats to become a renegade nuclear power. Military officials in Seoul and Pyongyang recently agreed in landmark talks to adopt a standard radio frequency and signaling system for their navies and to exchange data on illegal fishing. They also decided to set up a hotline between the two sides.
The United States has kept troops in South Korea since the Korean War, in part to help repulse a potential invasion from the North.
The South Koreans have said they are now seeking more independence -- although clearly, they are trying to strike a balance, attempting not to distance themselves too much from the United States.
Roh, who recently won a majority in parliament, has insisted that South Koreans should shoulder a greater role in national defense, but this weekend he pledged that his government would continue to "properly nurture the South Korea-U.S. alliance."
Although the number of U.S. troops in South Korea will drop, the U.S. government has insisted it will not weaken defense capabilities against the North, which maintains a 1.1 million-member standing army, possesses ballistic missiles and perhaps six to eight nuclear devices, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
Speaking at an Asian security conference in Singapore last week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the principal author of the plan for a mobile force, said the United States would be making fundamental changes in its troop presence on the Korean Peninsula as well as in Europe.
Proponents of the re-basing plan argue that current overseas concentrations of U.S. forces still largely reflect Cold War calculations, not 21st-century concerns about potential conflicts in the Middle East, the Caucasus and elsewhere. They say it would be more efficient to withdraw from South Korea and Germany and establish skeletal new bases in Eastern Europe and the Central Asian republics that could serve as staging areas in the event of crises.
But some U.S. defense experts and Asian and European officials worry that reducing the U.S. military presence could undercut U.S. influence abroad and prove less advantageous than anticipated. A study published last month by the Congressional Budget Office noted that any major moves from overseas locations would require significant spending to provide basing someplace else. It estimated that while annual savings could exceed $1 billion, the net up-front investment to resettle U.S. troops "would be substantial -- on the order of $7 billion."
Further, the study concluded that the restationing of Army forces "would produce at best only small improvements in the United States' ability to respond to far-flung conflicts." To deploy troops "from the likely locations of new bases would not be significantly faster than deploying them from current bases," the study said.
Graham reported from Washington. Special correspondent Joohee Cho contributed to this report.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Reagan's influence on the courts
June 08, 2004
By Michael Kirkland
UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040608-113436-1409r.htm
Washington, DC, Jun. 8 (UPI) -- The late President Ronald Reagan's hand is still felt on the federal judiciary, especially on the Supreme Court of the United States. But as with other presidents trying to influence nominees who would serve for life, his grip has proved slippery.
Reagan made more appointments to the federal judiciary -- 382 -- and to the Supreme Court -- three -- than any chief executive since President Dwight Eisenhower. Which makes sense, since Reagan was the first president to serve two full terms since Ike.
Federal judges may serve for life, of course, after they are selected by the president and confirmed by the Senate. There is a certain irony to Reagan's continuing influence on the judicial branch nearly 16 years after he left office.
One of the country's foremost scholars on presidential judicial nominees, University of Massachusetts political science Professor Sheldon Goldman, told The Third Branch in an earlier interview that Reagan wasn't that much interested in which nominees his staff came up with, as long as they shared his philosophy.
"Presidents Taft and Franklin Roosevelt were probably the most involved of 20th century presidents" in the selection of judges, Goldman said. "Presidents Harding, Eisenhower and Reagan probably the least."
But Goldman pointed out that once nominees were selected, Reagan took a personal role in getting them confirmed, earning their loyalty -- something President Bill Clinton did not do, despite rivaling Reagan with 377 federal judges confirmed during his two terms in office.
The Reagan administration also made major innovations in the selection process, Goldman said, setting up the Office of Legal Policy in the Justice Department to make recommendations and a White House committee to review potential nominees.
Reagan's greatest reservoir of influence, and possibly his greatest failure in terms of judicial philosophy, is at the Supreme Court.
He appointed three associate justices to the court and raised one sitting associate justice to the chief justice's chair.
Two of those four selections are solidly within the Reagan conservative camp: Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Antonin Scalia.
Reagan elevated Rehnquist from maverick conservative to iron-willed chief justice in 1986 after Chief Justice Warren Burger -- allegedly an intellectual lightweight selected by President Richard Nixon because he "looked like a chief justice" -- retired to head the commission celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Constitution.
Though he exhibits little Reaganesque bonhomie, Rehnquist is an effective chief justice who is willing to make compromises but makes the trains run on time -- he runs the court strictly according to the rules and schedule. God help you if you wander from the script when nominating a lawyer to the Supreme Court Bar, or if you are only halfway through your point when your time runs out during argument.
Rehnquist is even capable of chastising the ebullient Scalia when the associate justice keeps a lawyer from answering another justice's question, and has done so several times.
Scalia, of course, is the high court's most intellectual and consistent conservative.
Two other Reagan nominees, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, have proved more problematic from a conservative point of view.
Reagan appointed O'Connor in 1981. His first appointment to the high court, O'Connor is also the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Reagan's last appointment to the Supreme Court was Kennedy in 1988.
Both came through in the clutch in Bush vs. Gore, together writing the unsigned opinion that stopped the recount in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.
But O'Connor and Kennedy have, at times, given Reagan's constituency fits.
In 1992's Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the two justices teamed up with another conservative disappointment, Bush appointee Justice David Souter, to form the plurality that reaffirmed a woman's right to an abortion contained in the landmark 1973 decision, Roe vs. Wade.
In 1996 Kennedy wrote the 6-3 majority opinion in Romer vs. Evans -- joined by O'Connor -- that said homosexuals could not be singled out for discriminatory laws.
In 2003's Lawrence vs. Texas, he again wrote the 6-3 majority opinion -- again joined by O'Connor. The ruling struck down the Texas sodomy ban and told government it had no business prying into the sexual lives of two consenting adults.
O'Connor outraged conservatives as well in 2003 by writing the 5-4 majority opinion in Grutter vs. Bollinger, which said the University of Michigan's affirmative action program for its law school was constitutional. This time, Kennedy was in the minority.
O'Connor also wrote the 5-4 majority opinion in 2000's Stenberg vs. Carhart that struck down Nebraska's ban on "partial-birth" abortions, and by extension, similar bans in 29 states. The landmark decision probably also dooms the current federal ban on such abortions once it reaches the Supreme Court.
There are other instances where the two Reagan appointees do not meet conservative expectations.
For example, UCLA Law School Professor Eugene Volokh writes that his evaluation shows Kennedy to be the current Supreme Court's staunchest defender of free speech -- leading the liberals in striking down Internet child pornography bans because of their vagueness -- followed by Bush appointees Justices Clarence Thomas and Souter.
The high court member least likely to defend free speech, according to Volokh: Clinton appointee Justice Stephen Breyer.
Though he may have been disappointed, or not, in two of his nominees, there's every reason to believe Reagan would have enjoyed the continuity the high court represents.
Through the more than two centuries of its existence, the Supreme Court has remained steeped in tradition. Quill pens are still placed on the lawyers' tables before each argument and the justices still shake each others' hands before coming through the curtain into the courtroom.
On Friday, the court will add its own sober dignity to a historical event as the justices attend the state funeral for Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president of the United States.
Like offices in the other two branches of government, the Supreme Court will be closed for the national day of mourning.
(Please send comments to nationaldesk@upi.com.)
-------- homeland security
THE PREPARATIONS
Threat of Terror Colors Plans for Security at Reagan Funeral
June 8, 2004
By GLEN JUSTICE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/national/08secure.html?hp
WASHINGTON, June 7 - For Lyndon B. Johnson's funeral here in 1973, security consisted primarily of police officers at the viewing, the service, the airport and the routes in between. The officers did not have radiation detectors on their belts, automatic weapons on their shoulders or gas masks at the ready.
As official Washington prepares to pay tribute to former President Ronald Reagan at its first state funeral in more than 30 years, the threat of terrorism looms large over three days of events starting Wednesday. Though the police say there is no specific indication that the events will be targets, the presence of almost every major federal officeholder, hundreds of foreign dignitaries and thousands of onlookers has the authorities moving into overdrive.
"For L.B.J.'s funeral, the only security was police with sidearms," said Richard A. Baker, the Senate historian. "That was about as sophisticated as it got. It was nothing compared to the sophistication and the resources we have today."
Led by the Secret Service, local police departments, government agencies and the military are canceling days off and scrambling to deploy thousands of people. There will be snipers on rooftops, bomb-sniffing dogs on the ground, plainclothes officers roaming the crowds and helicopter surveillance - and that is just what might be seen. The authorities also promise covert efforts, as well as teams of specialists in the wings to deal with everything from a nuclear response to chemical dangers.
At the Capitol, where Mr. Reagan's remains will lie in state for more than 24 hours beginning Wednesday evening, the police will use a dozen metal detectors to screen as many as 200,000 mourners. Events are being scripted down to the smallest detail for a memorial service there that will draw Vice President Dick Cheney and hundreds of other public officials, including members of Congress and Supreme Court justices.
"We plan how they arrive, what door they use, what hallway they use, what room they are held in and the order of entry into the Rotunda," said Terrance W. Gainer, chief of the Capitol Police.
Preliminary estimates by House officials put the cost at as much as $1.5 million, counting overtime pay and transportation and other expenses. Most officials expect the money to be paid from the budgets of the departments involved.
"I won't know the true costs until after the event," said Dwight Pettiford, acting chief of the United States Park Police, whose officers are involved in the security effort. "Personnel costs are usually the highest."
Far larger may be the costs associated with productivity lost from the nationwide shutdown of the federal government on Friday, which President Bush ordered Sunday. The Office of Personnel Management estimated that a one-day stoppage in Washington alone would cost about $66 million, though officials said the observance for Mr. Reagan was apt to cost less because the State, Defense and Justice Departments and others associated with national security would remain open.
Chad Kolton, a spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget, said his office had no hard numbers. "There's room in the budget to honor President Reagan in a manner befitting his contribution to the country," Mr. Kolton said.
With events spread out over several days and nights in different parts of Washington, the memorial presents a challenge even in a city used to huge events like presidential inaugurations, State of the Union addresses and protests of all kinds. Increased security will be felt from the Capitol to the National Cathedral, where Mr. Bush is scheduled to speak at the funeral on Friday.
The Reagan memorials have been designated a national special security event, which increases resources for major gatherings like political conventions and the Super Bowl.
"We look at each event's uniqueness," one Secret Service official said. "No two events come out or are planned the same way."
But the authorities are all looking at it through the prism of a terrorist threat. Since the 2001 attacks, local police departments have been immersed in terrorism responses. At the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, officers have radiation detection gear. At the Capitol Police, many train on heavy automatic weapons. At the Park Police, they have gas masks. Many officers also have chemical suits and other protective gear. Much of their training each year has been retooled to include responses to terrorist hazards.
"We've been living post-9/11 for three years," said Charles H. Ramsey, chief of the Metropolitan Police. "Like New York, we have a higher level of readiness than most places."
Though security had slowly tightened inside the Capitol in previous decades - cameras and photo identification badges were added - it was not until after the 2001 attacks that security rose to current levels.
Mr. Baker, the historian, said Sept. 11 "was such a searing gash in the national memory. Everything is pre and post."
-------- terrorism
Cigarette Smuggling Linked to Terrorism
By Sari Horwitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23384-2004Jun7?language=printer
Smugglers with ties to terrorist groups are acquiring millions of dollars from illegal cigarette sales and funneling the cash to organizations such as al Qaeda and Hezbollah, federal law enforcement officials say, prompting a nationwide crackdown on black market tobacco.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has more than 300 open cases of illicit cigarette trafficking -- including several with terrorist links -- up from only a handful five years ago, ATF sources said.
"This is a major priority for us," said Michael Bouchard, assistant director of the ATF. "The deeper we dig into these cases, the more ties to terrorism we're discovering."
The lucrative trafficking of cigarettes, known as cigarette diversion, is a simple scheme but difficult to stop, law enforcement officials say. The traffickers purchase a large volume of cigarettes in states where the tax is low, such as Virginia and North Carolina, transport them up Interstate 95 to states such as Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and then sell them at a discount without paying the higher cigarette taxes in those states.
With huge profits -- and low penalties for arrest and conviction -- illicit cigarette trafficking now has begun to rival drug trafficking as a funding choice for terrorist groups, said William Billingslea, an ATF senior intelligence analyst who has studied the issue extensively.
Although black market cigarette sales have been around for decades, the link to suspected terrorist groups is a new and growing phenomenon.
"The schemes provide terrorists millions of dollars which can be used to purchase firearms and explosives to use against the United States and others," said ATF Director Carl J. Truscott, who was appointed to head the agency two months ago after 22 years in the Secret Service.
Several major cases of illicit cigarette trafficking with terrorist links have involved the purchase of cigarettes in Virginia and are currently under investigation, federal law enforcement sources said, adding that there are other cases nationally with links between the traffickers and Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda.
"The money is so lucrative," Billingslea said.
In New York City, for example, where the combined state and city tax on cigarettes is $3 a pack, a carton can sell for about $75. The trafficker can buy a carton for about $20 in Virginia, where the tax is 2.5 cents a pack, and then sell it to a mom-and-pop store in New York at a profit of about $40 a carton, ATF officials said.
A smuggler can make about $2 million on a single truckload of cigarettes. A truckload contains 800 cases, or 48,000 cartons.
"People go shopping for a bargain," Billingslea said. "Why pay $75 for a carton of cigarettes when I know someone down the street who will sell me a carton for $15 less out of the back of a car?"
The first large-scale cigarette trafficking case tied to terrorism was prosecuted in North Carolina in 2002. A federal jury in Charlotte convicted Mohamad Hammoud, 28, of violating a ban on providing material support to terrorist groups by funneling profits from a multimillion-dollar cigarette-smuggling operation to Hezbollah.
The jury also found Hammoud, whom prosecutors described as the leader of a terrorist cell, and his brother guilty of cigarette smuggling, racketeering and money laundering. The two men, natives of Lebanon, were accused of smuggling at least $7.9 million worth of cigarettes out of North Carolina and selling them in Michigan. Hammoud was sentenced to 155 years in prison.
Prosecutors were able to prove that profits from the venture were funneled to high-ranking Hezbollah leaders. And Hammoud was caught on wiretaps speaking on the telephone with Hezbollah's military commander in Lebanon, Sheik Abbas Harake, according to trial testimony.
In another case in September, Hassan Moussa Makki, 41, a key player in a multimillion-dollar interstate cigarette smuggling ring, pleaded guilty in Michigan to providing material support for terrorism and participating in a racketeering conspiracy. Prosecutors said he also funneled money to Hezbollah.
Makki, a native of Lebanon, was one of 12 people indicted last year in the scheme to buy low-tax cigarettes in North Carolina and sell them in Michigan. He was sentenced to 57 months in prison.
Law enforcement sources said the terrorist links are established in these and other ongoing investigations through wiretaps and background intelligence investigations and by running the traffickers' names and those of their associates through CIA, FBI and Homeland Security databases. When a terrorist tie is suspected, the cigarette-trafficking probe becomes a joint investigation with one of 66 Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country. The task forces, run by the FBI, are composed of federal, state and local law enforcement officials.
Paul J. McNulty, the U.S. attorney in Alexandria, last year charged 10 people with possession and distribution of contraband cigarettes, wire fraud and money laundering as part of a scheme to smuggle more than $2 million in cigarettes bought in Virginia to New York. A man whose name came up in that investigation was arrested in Detroit carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in wire transfer receipts showing payments to people associated with Hezbollah.
In an interview, McNulty declined to comment on terrorist links in that case. But he said the ATF and other law enforcement agencies are taking cigarette smuggling "more seriously than ever."
"We are pursuing cases such as cigarette smuggling because of the possibility that proceeds from that crime could end up in the hands of terrorists," McNulty said.
He added that the Charlotte case made law enforcement officials more attentive to cigarette smuggling as a key source of financial support for terrorists.
"There are other sources, but this is the one that has gotten the attention of law enforcement," McNulty said.
Cigarette trafficking is difficult to stop, partly because tobacco is a legal commodity. Smuggling cigarettes becomes a federal crime only when more than 60,000 cigarettes, or 300 cartons, are purchased to avoid payment of state tax, said Jerry Bowerman, chief of the ATF alcohol and tobacco enforcement branch.
McNulty said catching the suspects is extremely labor-intensive.
In his case, he said, New York tax authorities placed advertisements in various newspapers and magazines in the New York City area offering Virginia cigarettes for sale. The ads for A&A Tobacco Wholesale listed a Virginia telephone number to place orders. A Virginia post office box was set up as a billing address. Incoming calls were switched to and recorded by an agent with the New York office of tax enforcement.
An undercover storefront location was established for A&A Tobacco Wholesale by law enforcement personnel in King George County in Virginia, where investigators from the New York tax office posed as employees and filled the cigarette orders.
When prospective cigarette purchasers telephoned the advertised number and placed orders, they were told that the cigarettes being sold would bear counterfeit joint New York State and New York City tax stamps.
-------- torture
Memo Offered Justification for Use of Torture
Justice Dept. Gave Advice in 2002
By Dana Priest and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23373-2004Jun7.html
In August 2002, the Justice Department advised the White House that torturing al Qaeda terrorists in captivity abroad "may be justified," and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in President Bush's war on terrorism, according to a newly obtained memo.
If a government employee were to torture a suspect in captivity, "he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the Al Qaeda terrorist network," said the memo, from the Justice Department's office of legal counsel, written in response to a CIA request for legal guidance. It added that arguments centering on "necessity and self-defense could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability" later.
The memo seems to counter the pre-Sept. 11, 2001, assumption that U.S. government personnel would never be permitted to torture captives. It was offered after the CIA began detaining and interrogating suspected al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the wake of the attacks, according to government officials familiar with the document.
The legal reasoning in the 2002 memo, which covered treatment of al Qaeda detainees in CIA custody, was later used in a March 2003 report by Pentagon lawyers assessing interrogation rules governing the Defense Department's detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. At that time, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had asked the lawyers to examine the logistical, policy and legal issues associated with interrogation techniques.
Bush administration officials say flatly that, despite the discussion of legal issues in the two memos, it has abided by international conventions barring torture, and that detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere have been treated humanely, except in the cases of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq for which seven military police soldiers have been charged.
Still, the 2002 and 2003 memos reflect the Bush administration's desire to explore the limits on how far it could legally go in aggressively interrogating foreigners suspected of terrorism or of having information that could thwart future attacks.
In the 2002 memo, written for the CIA and addressed to White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, the Justice Department defined torture in a much narrower way, for example, than does the U.S. Army, which has historically carried out most wartime interrogations.
In the Justice Department's view -- contained in a 50-page document signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee and obtained by The Washington Post -- inflicting moderate or fleeting pain does not necessarily constitute torture. Torture, the memo says, "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
By contrast, the Army's Field Manual 34-52, titled "Intelligence Interrogations," sets more restrictive rules. For example, the Army prohibits pain induced by chemicals or bondage; forcing an individual to stand, sit or kneel in abnormal positions for prolonged periods of time; and food deprivation. Under mental torture, the Army prohibits mock executions, sleep deprivation and chemically induced psychosis.
Human rights groups expressed dismay at the Justice Department's legal reasoning yesterday.
"It is by leaps and bounds the worst thing I've seen since this whole Abu Ghraib scandal broke," said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. "It appears that what they were contemplating was the commission of war crimes and looking for ways to avoid legal accountability. The effect is to throw out years of military doctrine and standards on interrogations."
But a spokesman for the White House counsel's office said, "The president directed the military to treat al Qaeda and Taliban humanely and consistent with the Geneva Conventions."
Mark Corallo, the Justice Department's chief spokesman, said "the department does not comment on specific legal advice it has provided confidentially within the executive branch." But he added: "It is the policy of the United States to comply with all U.S. laws in the treatment of detainees -- including the Constitution, federal statutes and treaties." The CIA declined to comment.
The Justice Department's interpretation for the CIA sought to provide guidance on what sorts of aggressive treatments might not fall within the legal definition of torture.
The 2002 memo, for example, included the interpretation that "it is difficult to take a specific act out of context and conclude that the act in isolation would constitute torture." The memo named seven techniques that courts have considered torture, including severe beatings with truncheons and clubs, threats of imminent death, burning with cigarettes, electric shocks to genitalia, rape or sexual assault, and forcing a prisoner to watch the torture of another person.
"While we cannot say with certainty that acts falling short of these seven would not constitute torture," the memo advised, ". . . we believe that interrogation techniques would have to be similar to these in their extreme nature and in the type of harm caused to violate law."
"For purely mental pain or suffering to amount to torture," the memo said, "it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years." Examples include the development of mental disorders, drug-induced dementia, "post traumatic stress disorder which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression."
Of mental torture, however, an interrogator could show he acted in good faith by "taking such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts or reviewing evidence gained in past experience" to show he or she did not intend to cause severe mental pain and that the conduct, therefore, "would not amount to the acts prohibited by the statute."
In 2003, the Defense Department conducted its own review of the limits that govern torture, in consultation with experts at the Justice Department and other agencies. The aim of the March 6, 2003, review, conducted by a working group that included representatives of the military services, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the intelligence community, was to provide a legal basis for what the group's report called "exceptional interrogations."
Much of the reasoning in the group's report and in the Justice Department's 2002 memo overlap. The documents, which address treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, were not written to apply to detainees held in Iraq.
In a draft of the working group's report, for example, Pentagon lawyers approvingly cited the Justice Department's 2002 position that domestic and international laws prohibiting torture could be trumped by the president's wartime authority and any directives he issued.
At the time, the Justice Department's legal analysis, however, shocked some of the military lawyers who were involved in crafting the new guidelines, said senior defense officials and military lawyers.
"Every flag JAG lodged complaints," said one senior Pentagon official involved in the process, referring to the judge advocate generals who are military lawyers of each service.
"It's really unprecedented. For almost 30 years we've taught the Geneva Convention one way," said a senior military attorney. "Once you start telling people it's okay to break the law, there's no telling where they might stop."
A U.S. law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon group's report, prepared under the supervision of General Counsel William J. Haynes II, said that "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority."
The Pentagon group's report, divulged yesterday by the Wall Street Journal and obtained by The Post, said further that the 1994 law barring torture "does not apply to the conduct of U.S. personnel" at Guantanamo Bay.
It also said the anti-torture law did apply to U.S. military interrogations that occurred outside U.S. "maritime and territorial jurisdiction," such as in Iraq or Afghanistan. But it said both Congress and the Justice Department would have difficulty enforcing the law if U.S. military personnel could be shown to be acting as a result of presidential orders.
The report then parsed at length the definition of torture under domestic and international law, with an eye toward guiding military personnel about legal defenses.
The Pentagon report uses language very similar to that in the 2002 Justice Department memo written in response to the CIA's request: "If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," the draft states. "In that case, DOJ [Department of Justice] believes that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."
The draft goes on to assert that a soldier's claim that he was following "superior orders" would be available for those engaged in "exceptional interrogations except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful." It asserts, as does the Justice view expressed for the CIA, that the mere infliction of pain and suffering is not unlawful; the pain or suffering must be severe.
A Defense Department spokesman said last night that the March 2003 memo represented "a scholarly effort to define the perimeters of the law" but added: "What is legal and what is put into practice is a different story." Pentagon officials said the group examined at least 35 interrogation techniques, and Rumsfeld later approved using 24 of them in a classified directive on April 16, 2003, that governed all activities at Guantanamo Bay. The Pentagon has refused to make public the 24 interrogation procedures.
Staff writer Josh White contributed to this report.
--------
LEGAL OPINIONS
Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush
June 8, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/politics/08ABUS.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 7 - A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security.
The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.
One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."
"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign," the lawyers wrote in the 56-page confidential memorandum, the prohibition against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority."
Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the March memo, one of several obtained by The New York Times, as an interim legal analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman. "It was not a legal analysis."
Mr. Di Rita said the 24 interrogation procedures permitted at Guantánamo, four of which required Mr. Rumsfeld's explicit approval, did not constitute torture and were consistent with international treaties.
The March memorandum, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, is the latest internal legal study to be disclosed that shows that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the administration's lawyers were set to work to find legal arguments to avoid restrictions imposed by international and American law.
A Jan. 22, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department that provided arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated was used extensively as a basis for the March memorandum on avoiding proscriptions against torture.
The previously disclosed Justice Department memorandum concluded that administration officials were justified in asserting that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war.
Another memorandum obtained by The Times indicates that most of the administration's top lawyers, with the exception of those at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved of the Justice Department's position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. In addition, that memorandum, dated Feb. 2, 2002, noted that lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency had asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.
The March memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, was prepared as part of a review of interrogation techniques by a working group appointed by the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes. The group itself was led by the Air Force general counsel, Mary Walker, and included military and civilian lawyers from all branches of the armed services.
The review stemmed from concerns raised by Pentagon lawyers and interrogators at Guantánamo after Mr. Rumsfeld approved a set of harsher interrogation techniques in December 2002 to use on a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, who was believed to be the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 terror plot.
Mr. Rumsfeld suspended the harsher techniques, including serving the detainee cold, prepackaged food instead of hot rations and shaving off his facial hair, on Jan. 12, pending the outcome of the working group's review. Gen. James T. Hill, head of the military's Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, told reporters last Friday that the working group "wanted to do what is humane and what is legal and consistent not only with" the Geneva Conventions, but also "what is right for our soldiers."
Mr. Di Rita said that the Pentagon officials were focused primarily on the interrogation techniques, and that the legal rationale included in the March memo was mostly prepared by the Justice Department and White House counsel's office.
The memo showed that not only lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments and the White House approved of the policy but also that David S. Addington, the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, also was involved in the deliberations. The State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV, dissented, warning that such a position would weaken the protections of the Geneva Conventions for American troops.
The March 6 document about torture provides tightly constructed definitions of torture. For example, if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith," the report said. "Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control."
The adjective "severe," the report said, "makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the text provides that pain or suffering must be `severe.' " The report also advised that if an interrogator "has a good faith belief his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture."
The report also said that interrogators could justify breaching laws or treaties by invoking the doctrine of necessity. An interrogator using techniques that cause harm might be immune from liability if he "believed at the moment that his act is necessary and designed to avoid greater harm."
Scott Horton, the former head of the human rights committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, said Monday that he believed that the March memorandum on avoiding responsibility for torture was what caused a delegation of military lawyers to visit him and complain privately about the administration's confidential legal arguments. That visit, he said, resulted in the association undertaking a study and issuing of a report criticizing the administration. He added that the lawyers who drafted the torture memo in March could face professional sanctions.
Jamie Fellner, the director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch, said Monday, "We believe that this memo shows that at the highest levels of the Pentagon there was an interest in using torture as well as a desire to evade the criminal consequences of doing so."
The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of the anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.
Kate Zernike contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Ashcroft Says Bush Rejects Use of Torture
June 8, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Prisoner-Abuse.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attorney General John Ashcroft said Tuesday he was not aware of any order by President Bush that would violate U.S. laws or treaties banning torture of military prisoners captured in Iraq or elsewhere in the war on terrorism.
``This administration rejects torture,'' Ashcroft declared under tense questioning by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But he steadfastly refused to comment directly about a policy paper on this issue, or say whether Bush ever responded to it.
But, Ashcroft did say, ``The Department of Justice will both investigate and prosecute individual who violate the law. The Torture Act is a law that we include in that violation.''
The lawyers who wrote the policy paper were not identified by name and were part of a working group writing a policy governing interrogation techniques to be used at the prison for terrorist suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Said Ashcroft: ``The president of the United States has not ordered any conduct that would violate the Constitution of the United States, that would violate not one of the laws enacted by the Congress, or that would violate any of the various treaties.''
Ashcroft would not comment directly on the 2002 departmental memo that laid out a rationale in which the president was not necessarily bound by anti-torture laws or treaties because of his authority as commander in chief to protect national security.
Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., asked Ashcroft whether there is any presidential order that ``immunizes (from prosecution) interrogators of al-Qaida suspects?''
``The president has issued no such order,'' Ashcroft replied.
The attorney general said the policy memo on this issue would not be made available to the committee, however. And Ashcroft said that while he respected the constitutional right of Congress to ask questions, ``there are certain things that, in the interest of the executive branch operating effectively, that I think it is inappropriate for the attorney general to say.''
``Do you think torture might be justified - not a memorandum - just a question to you, attorney general of the United States?'' Biden asked.
``I am not going to issue or otherwise discuss hypotheticals. I will leave that to academics,'' Ashcroft replied.
``John, you sound like you're in the State Department,'' Biden shot back.
``I condemn torture. ... I don't think it's productive, let alone justified,'' Ashcroft responded.
Biden told Ashcroft ``there's a reason why we (Congress) sign those (anti-torture) treaties'' and it is to protect U.S. military personnel.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., blamed the memorandum for the prisoner abuses in the Abu Ghraib facility.
``We know when we have these kinds of orders what happens: we get the stress test, we get the use of dogs, we get the forced nakedness that we've all seen and we get the hooding,'' Kennedy said, holding up pictures of the alleged abuse. ``This is what directly results when you have that kind of memorandum out there.''
Ashcroft strongly disagreed.
``Let me completely reject the notion that anything that this president has done or the Justice Department has done has directly resulted in the kind of atrocity which were cited. That is false. It is an inappropriate conclusion,'' he declared.
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said Monday that a policy paper detailing staff legal analysis was part of an internal administration debate on how to obtain intelligence from al-Qaida operatives in U.S. custody, within the confines of a standard of humane treatment. The intelligence sought was to prevent terrorist attacks, he said.
Di Rita said the final set of interrogation methods adopted for use at Guantanamo in April 2003 are humane, legal and useful -- and more restrictive than the methods some had proposed.
The contents of the paper, labeled ``draft'' and dated March 6, 2003, were first reported in Monday's The Wall Street Journal. A portion of it was then obtained by The Associated Press. The lawyers who prepared it include attorneys from both the Defense and Justice Departments, and possibly other parts of the government.
The paper discusses both domestic law and international treaties governing torture and the treatment of prisoners, and concludes Bush has vast legal authority for a number of reasons.
Mary Ellen O'Connell, a professor of international law at Ohio State University who has seen the draft paper, called its arguments unconvincing.
``In every case it finds defenses, narrower readings of that statute, or justifications that allow torture in a wide variety of circumstances,'' she said. ``The legal analysis is weak.''
Ultimately, the Pentagon adopted a set of 24 interrogation methods it would use at Guantanamo, Di Rita said. The majority are psychological tricks and techniques described in Army field manuals.
-------- POLITICS
-------- foia
On FOIA Front, More Agencies Contract Out
Private Firms Have Growing Role in Handling Backlogs of Requests for Government Records
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23282-2004Jun7?language=printer
Steven Aftergood has waited so long for federal officials to answer his requests for public information that, he says jokingly, he may be in his grave before some of the documents land on his desk. Aftergood, 47, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, is still awaiting responses to Freedom of Information Act requests for Air Force historical papers that he submitted in 1990. Government officials have blamed the delay on backlogs and problems in locating the records, he said.
"There is no end of difficulties," said Aftergood, who specializes in unearthing national security materials. "You almost expect them to ask you to designate a next of kin for when the document is ultimately released, because you won't be here."
Aftergood is hardly alone. Many people who have filed FOIA requests can tell stories of waiting months or years for responses.
These days, however, some agencies say they have found a new way to combat such delays. They are turning increasingly to private contractors to help shrink their mounting backlogs of FOIA requests.
Departments that have tapped contractors include Defense, State, Energy and Transportation, as well as agencies such as the Transportation Security Administration. Officials say outside help is necessary at a time when tight budgets make it all but impossible to permanently hire new FOIA officers.
"Congress puts ceilings on us on the number of billets we can have," said Larry E. Curry, a Defense official, referring to limits on full-time positions. "What we're trying to do is comply with the law and to try to improve the service to the public using contractors. No personnel have been replaced with contractors. So I think it's a positive thing. . . . You know, we get complaints all the time from the public that we're too slow in processing these things."
Despite some concerns that the government is becoming overly reliant on private contractors for basic work, the arrangements have drawn favorable reviews from some outside experts. And those seeking information are eager to see federal agencies fill FOIA requests faster -- as long as no materials are withheld unnecessarily.
Many contract workers "are former officials who retired from civil service that have got the background, and very often they still have an active [security] clearance," said William Ferroggiaro, a past president of the American Society of Access Professionals, a nonprofit group that works on FOIA issues.
Ferroggiaro said the contractors have done a fair job and he has not heard any complaints about their work. His only concern is that they may cut corners in filling requests in order to meet numerical targets set by agencies.
"It raises an issue that needs to be watched," he said.
Aftergood said it's unlikely more information would be withheld just because contractors are on the job.
"On balance, it's a good thing," he said, "because the truth is that the agencies on their own were not exercising good judgment. They were only moving more slowly."
Agencies get FOIA requests from many corners -- academic researchers, corporations, journalists, veterans and prisoners, among others. The law, which dates to 1966, is designed to make the bureaucracy more accessible and accountable to the public.
A 2002 General Accounting Office study found that "agency backlogs of pending requests are substantial and growing government-wide." An average of about 10 weeks' worth of requests remained unfilled at any given time at two-thirds of the 25 agencies the GAO surveyed. Agency officials blamed the problem on increasingly complex requests and a lack of staff and computer expertise to help fill them.
A GAO update last year found that agencies received and processed 2.3 million requests in 2002, at a cost of $283 million. Nearly two-thirds of requests were to the Department of Veterans Affairs, largely because veterans' inquiries about their medical records count as FOIA requests. About 4,900 full-time federal employees handled FOIA requests government-wide that year. The backlog of pending requests, not including those at the VA, decreased by about 23 percent in 2002, the GAO found.
Contractors who have performed FOIA work for federal agencies include CACI International Inc. of Arlington and McNeil Technologies of Springfield. FOIA Group Inc., a 16-year-old D.C.-based company that helps businesses and nonprofits submit FOIA requests, plans to diversify by moving into processing such requests for agencies, said Jeff Stachewicz, a founder of the firm.
"That is going to be the wave of the future," Stachewicz said, citing the Bush administration's policy of moving more government work to private contractors if they can do the work better and more cheaply. "For many years, agencies thought they could not delegate this type of function to private contractors."
McNeil, which also offers services such as translations and records declassification, has been especially active in FOIA work. Over the last eight years, the company has landed contracts totaling more than $10.5 million to perform FOIA work for such clients as State, Defense, Transportation and TSA.
About 50 to 60 McNeil analysts, some of them former government FOIA officers, are doing FOIA work for agencies in any given week, said Tim Ayoub, McNeil's director of information access programs. Those who handle classified information have security clearances, but others need no special credentials other than training in performing the work, he said.
The analysts are involved in nearly every phase of answering a FOIA request -- retrieving documents, reviewing them for relevance, blacking out portions that pose security concerns and composing a response. But it is government officials who make the final decisions on what is released, Ayoub said.
"We do it all for them up until the decision point, and then the government takes over," Ayoub said.
Ayoub, who joined McNeil in 1997, said he learned the shortcomings of the government's FOIA system when he was a command chief at the Naval Historical Center. Handling FOIA requests was just one of his "collateral" duties.
"There is a real need to service the public out there, and obviously the government can't get it done right now," Ayoub said in an interview. " . . . Very few agencies are staffed at the right level to do an adequate job."
According to GAO figures for 2002, average processing time for pending requests was longer than one year at eight agencies, including the Agency for International Development, the CIA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Agriculture, Justice, State, Treasury and Interior departments.
Will Kammer, FOIA chief for Defense's Directorate for Freedom of Information and Security Review, said his agency hired two McNeil analysts three years ago to supplement its staff of 18. The agency plans to expand that number to eight in a contract that will pay McNeil $1.1 million a year, according to the company, which says it cut the agency's backlog by 20 percent.
"We are very pleased with the contracting effort," Kammer said. "It has resulted in a reduction in the backlog, which is exactly what we wanted it to do. . . . The backlog that the contractor has been working on, it's a backlog for a reason -- because it's a complicated request."
Federal officials and contractors said there is little chance that full disclosure would be sacrificed in pursuit of speedier responses to FOIA requests. Federal supervisors review contractors' work and have final say on what is released, they note.
"All of their work is cleared and approved, and there is oversight by a TSA FOIA officer," said Yolanda Clarke, a TSA spokeswoman.
Moreover, the threat of lawsuits by requesters who are denied access to information provides an important check. Donald Kirkley Jr., a McNeil vice president, said the company has a reputation for quality to protect.
"I have never, ever counseled someone on low numbers, but I have terminated people for poor quality," Kirkley said. "It only takes one mistake to hit the street. . . . We'll be dead in the water."
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Can solar power work?
Pioneering community answers yes and no
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
By Jeff Donn,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-08/s_24634.asp
Renewable energy is on the minds of Americans, who know fossil fuel supplies will run short. Crude oil output is certain for perhaps 40 more years and natural gas for 70, according to experts. Are there realistic alternatives? Solar power is touted, and one town has been testing a system for two decades, illustrating sun power's promise and limits.
GARDNER, Massachusetts - This old mill city built prosperity from the force of its waterways. So there was a legacy of renewable energy when the local electrical utility sought to thrust Gardner into the age of inexhaustible sun power, ahead of everyone.
On a summery evening in June 1985, Massachusetts Electric Co. dispatched three managers, two engineers, and an analyst to demystify photovoltaic power for about 70 mostly working-class locals gathered in a college auditorium.
Panels that convert sunlight into electricity had been powering satellites. Now they could electrify Gardner's homes, not to mention its library and even the Burger King. They would help the country save oil and coal used by utilities to make electricity.
People listened politely. But what got them excited - and helped launch the first photovoltaics test on a community scale - was a question: How would you like to save up to 40 percent on your electric bills?
Sun-catching panels soon covered rooftops of 30 homes and five other buildings around town. The experiment is still running today, almost 20 years later.
Has solar power worked here? Has it worked around the country? Can it help us get beyond our dependence on fossil fuels? Yes and no, to all three questions.
The industry says solar electric power has reached as many as 20,000 American rooftops, where it has proved it can supplement electrical grids and trim bills. But its contribution so far is meager. Despite technological progress, it hasn't worked reliably enough or economically enough to expand beyond a small fraction of 1 percent of the country's power generation.
Paul Maycock, who once ran the federal program in photovoltaics, sees its long-range potential as 15 percent, at best. In other words, in the coming age of whatever-replaces-petroleum, it can help greatly - but even its boosters say it can't carry the load.
It's not cause for panic. While still a heavy polluter, the coal industry has made environmental strides and can deliver energy for perhaps another 250 years. Photovoltaics and wind power are forecast as the growth leaders among alternative electricity sources for the next 20 years, but other renewables will certainly generate power, produce heat, and run cars. They include solar and geothermal heat, methane gas from garbage, crop-derived gasoline substitutes, and even older methods like burning wood.
Yet 20 years from now, renewable energy will amount to less than 7 percent of Americans' fuel, the Department of Energy predicts. The dominant 40 percent share will come from that 20th century standby - can you guess? - petroleum.
"Renewable energy will not solve the problem of increasing energy demand by a booming world population, but it does offer a bridge of hope until a replacement energy source for nonrenewable fossil fuels can be developed," writes geophysicist Dohn Riley.
A paid-for opinion from some oil executive? Not at all. He was commenting as director of the Alternative Energy Institute in Tahoe City, California.
Gardner's solar pioneers discovered the limits of alternative energy the hard way: by trying it.
In theory, photovoltaics is sheer simplicity: When silicon, extracted from sand and superpurified, is struck by sunlight, it gives off electric current. No generators, turbines, or toil. Unfortunately, in a real building the system isn't so simple.
First, a solar cell's direct current won't run a normal household's appliances. It must be converted to alternating current by a box called an inverter. At sites far from power lines, a battery bank is also needed to store electricity for times when the sun isn't shining. With acid and hydrogen gas, batteries are heavy, expensive, and potentially dangerous.
That's why in Gardner and most other places, photovoltaics are installed in tandem with the existing power grid. The grid handles the load at most times: when the sun sets, clouds thicken, or appliances suck more juice than the solar cells can pump. When the sun comes out, the solar panels take over and send any surplus into the power line for use in the grid. The electric meter spins backward to credit the contribution.
Gardner, a central Massachusetts city of about 20,000, was eager to trail-blaze this new technology. Like much of hilly New England, its advantage had long been plentiful water power. With coal and oil dominating hydropower in the 20th century, most of Gardner's busy furniture mills eventually cranked to a halt. Manufacturing and wealth slipped south and west.
When the solar experiment was proposed, some wondered about the choice of a site in New England, which captures one-third less solar energy than the Southwest. Still, backers figured, if it worked here, that would prove its versatility.
The 4-by-6-foot solar panels started going up in the waning light of autumn 1985. Leon Rice, a supermarket meat cutter, got one of the first systems. Studying the inverter and gauges splayed on his cellar wall like the controls of a nuclear submarine, he saw that, sure enough, when the sky brightened, red lights blinked to life. The inverter softly hummed.
He looked forward to the savings. And yet as his monthly electric bills arrived, Rice didn't see much change; perhaps $5 saved in the best months, he says.
About a year into the experiment, the inverter broke down and needed to be replaced. Rice didn't worry. Massachusetts Electric, which had paid to install the $19,000 system and guaranteed upkeep, fixed the inverter. But later, as the inverter's lights again went dark, Rice climbed to his roof to check his 10 panels. Water had wicked inside, where it can corrode the cells.
This time when Rice again called the utility, it seemed reluctant to help. Nothing happened for months, until Rice decided to replace his roof shingles. The utility sent workers who unscrewed the 90-pound panels, eased them down by rope, and piled them against the backyard fence to remount later.
There, beneath a tarp, they waited. A project manager at Massachusetts Electric was hoping to find spares somewhere. Weeks passed.
"So I gave them an ultimatum," Rice says. "I'll give you a week. Either they're outta here, or I'm going to have my son throw them in the rubbish."
Two men came by in a truck and hauled them away forever.
Today's photovoltaic panels are at least 50 percent better at wringing electricity from sunlight and tougher in resisting nature's assaults. Some come with 25-year guarantees. They still hog considerable roof space, though. Compared to coal or petroleum, the Sun's energy is diluted. That means it must be harvested by big collectors.
The inverters are still temperamental, solar advocates acknowledge. They chug along well enough for five or six years, then often conk out.
If Gardner had a solar zealot, it was an affable steelworker named Roger Charest, who was happy to help the country cut down on fossil fuels and generate more of its own energy.
In 1985, a $6,500 liquid-heating solar system on his house roof - a simpler technology - already gave him hot water, thanks to a tax credit. So the free photovoltaics went up on his garage. He had a tall maple tree felled to let in more sunlight.
Tax breaks lured thousands of other Americans to try solar heating and power in those years. But the energy crunch subsided, tax benefits disappeared in the mid-1980s and never fully returned, and electricity stayed cheaper than predicted. Solar power never took off.
"It really did look like something of a breakthrough" about 25 years ago, says Joe Broyles, a New Hampshire state energy planner. "Most of the buzz you saw did not include the cost."
By industry estimates, up to 20,000 solar electricity units and 100,000 heaters have been installed in the United States - diminutive numbers compared to the country's 70 million single-family houses. Most solar units are in the sunny West and Southwest. Some can supply half of a home's electricity.
Photovoltaic production has doubled over the past five years. The federal government has a goal of 1 million rooftop photovoltaic and heating solar systems by 2010. For now, it gives solar tax breaks only to businesses, not homeowners. For them, systems now cost $12,000 or more for typical homes and can take more than 15 years to pay for themselves. Tapping into a power line on the street can cost as little as $100.
A dozen states, including California and New York, are again trying to help by subsidizing photovoltaic systems. The Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust Fund says about 200 sites have been approved for subsidies in that state.
In Gardner, which was usually overlooked by tourists en route to the Berkshire Mountains, nearly everyone seemed to enjoy the national visibility the test brought at first. Engineers from Europe, Japan, and Australia came. They ate fries at the photovoltaic Burger King.
Japan, with initially heavy government funding, now has close to 200,000 photovoltaic systems. It is the biggest single force behind a fivefold rise in world production since 1998, as reported by the Solar Energy Industries Association. Germany has more than 100,000 units. India and parts of Africa rely on battery-equipped photovoltaics for power in many remote places.
Gardner's experiment, meanwhile, had mixed results. Project engineers quickly declared the experiment a technical success. It was the economics, even with free systems and upkeep, that proved underwhelming. Average annual electric bill savings were less than $200, one consultant estimated. With that kind of return, the units needed to operate with virtual perfection for many years. They didn't - and still can't.
Massachusetts Electric once hoped to transfer responsibility for the units entirely to the homes, and it is trying again this year to extricate itself from the upkeep. But if the utility stopped caring for the systems, many homeowners say they would get rid of them.
Market deregulation has turned many utilities, including Massachusetts Electric, into distributors with little direct stake in how the electricity is generated.
"That's not really part of our mission at this point," says Richard Sergel, chairman of parent National Grid USA.
Massachusetts Electric was hoping to interest the state in taking over the project in Gardner, where so far, only four homes have given back their equipment. Rob Pratt, director of the state's Renewable Energy Trust, said he's willing to talk about it.
Rice, the meat cutter, has moved to Maine and given up on photovoltaics. "If your goal is to save money, you're not going to do it. If your goal is to save fossil fuel, that's fine, but I'm a working guy," he says. "If I had it to do over, I think I'd get a windmill."
-------- energy
Washington is worried about faltering energy tie with Moscow
Tuesday, June 08, 2004
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-08/s_24631.asp
MOSCOW - The United States is worried that the much-touted energy cooperation between Moscow and Washington might be faltering, a senior U.S. energy official said Monday.
"We are concerned about some negative trends that might be developing," U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow said at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. "There is an issue with barring foreigners from participation in licensing tenders ... and we've seen on occasion selective application of the law."
He cited the "faltering of major initiatives" such as the development of oil fields off the Far Eastern island of Sakhalin among the concerns.
In January, the Russian government said it wouldn't issue a license for the development of the Sakhalin-3 oil project to a consortium led by two U.S. companies, ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco. The group won a tender for the project in 1993, but the license was never issued due to the lack of a legal framework for production-sharing agreements.
The Russian government has since passed laws that make those agreements unfeasible.
The ExxonMobil-led consortium, which also includes the Russian state-owned Rosneft, has already spent US$600 million to explore the oil-rich shelf and has said that it will pursue licensing terms under standard Russian legislation. But it warned that the cancellation of the tender sent a negative signal to foreign investors.
Meanwhile, McSlarrow also said that he is scheduled to meet Tuesday with the deputy chief executive of the beleaguered oil producer Yukos. He gave no further details.
Yukos and its key shareholders are the targets of a multipronged official probe, under which the company's former chief executive and Russia's wealthiest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has been jailed since October awaiting trial on charges including tax evasion and fraud.
A preliminary hearing into Khodorkovsky's case, which was delayed last month, is scheduled for Tuesday.
----
Break out the bicycles
Oil is running out, but the west would rather wage wars than consider other energy sources
George Monbiot
Tuesday June 8, 2004
The Guardian
Some people have wacky ideas," the new Republican campaign ad alleges. "Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That's John Kerry." Cut to a shot of men in suits riding bicycles.
Sadly, the accusation is false. Kerry has been demanding that the price of oil be held down. He wants George Bush to release supplies from the strategic reserve and persuade Saudi Arabia to increase production. He has been warning the American people that if the president doesn't act soon, he and Dick Cheney will have to share a car to work. Men riding bicycles and sharing cars? Is there no end to this madness?
Like the fuel protests that rose and receded in Britain last week, these exchanges are both moronic and entirely rational. The price of oil has been rising because demand for a finite resource is growing faster than supply. Holding the price down means that this resource will be depleted more quickly, with the result that the dreadful prospect of men sharing cars and riding bicycles comes ever closer. Perhaps the presidential candidates will start campaigning next against the passage of time.
But a high oil price means recession and unemployment, which in turn means political failure for the man in charge. The attempt to blame the other man for finity will be one of the defining themes of the politics of the next few decades.
This conflict was exemplified last month by the leader of the British fuel protests of 2000, Brynle Williams. "I'm afraid to say I'm not very proud of what happened three years ago," he admitted in a documentary broadcast on S4C on May 4. "We all want turbo-charged motors now ... but we must remember that it's some poor sod at the other end of the world who ends up paying for it." Five days later, on May 9, he told GMTV that he was ready to start protesting again. Self-awareness and self-interest don't seem to mix very well.
To understand what is going to happen, we must first grasp the core fact of existence. Life is a struggle against entropy. Entropy can be roughly defined as the dispersal of energy. As soon as a system - whether an organism or an economy - runs out of energy, it starts to disintegrate. Its survival depends on seizing new sources of fuel.
Biological evolution is driven by the need to grab the energy for which other organisms are competing. One result is increasing complexity: a tree can take more energy from the sun than the mosses on the forest floor; a tuna can seek out its prey more actively than a jellyfish. But the cost of this complexity is an enhanced requirement for energy. The same goes for our economies.
They evolved in the presence of a source of energy that was both cheap to extract and cheap to use. There is, as yet, no substitute for it. Everything else is either more expensive or harder to use. Without cheap oil the economy would succumb to entropy.
But the age of cheap oil is over. If you doubt this, take a look at the BBC's online report yesterday of a conference run by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. The reporter spoke to the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. "In public, Mr Birol denied that supply would not be able to meet rising demand ... But after his speech he seemed to change his tune: 'For the time being there is no spare capacity. But we expect demand to increase by the fourth quarter by 3m barrels a day. If Saudi does not increase supply by 3m barrels a day by the end of the year we will face, how can I say this, it will be very difficult. We will have difficult times.'" The reporter asked him whether such a growth in supply was possible, or simply wishful thinking. "'You are from the press?' Birol replied. 'This is not for the press.'" So the BBC asked the other delegates what they thought of the prospects of a 30% increase in Saudi production. "The answers were unambiguous: 'absolutely out of the question'; 'completely impossible'; and '3m barrels - never, not even 300,000'. One delegate laughed so hard he had to support himself on a table." And this was before they heard that two BBC journalists had been gunned down in Riyadh.
The world's problem is as follows. We now consume six barrels of oil for every new barrel we discover. Major oil finds (of over 500m barrels) peaked in 1964. In 2000, there were 13 such discoveries, in 2001 six, in 2002 two and in 2003 none. Three major new projects will come onstream in 2007 and three in 2008. For the following years, none have yet been scheduled.
The oil industry tells us not to worry: the market will find a way of sorting this out. If the price of energy rises, new sources will come onstream. But new sources of what? Every other option is much more expensive than the cheap oil that made our economic complexity possible.
The new technology designed to extract the dregs from old fields is expensive and doesn't seem to work very well, which is why Shell was forced to downgrade its anticipated reserves (other companies, under pressure from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, will surely follow). Extracting oil from tar sands and shales uses almost as much energy as it yields. The same goes for turning crops such as rape into biodiesel. Nuclear power is viable only if you overlook both the massive costs of decommissioning and the fact that no safe means has yet been discovered of disposing of the waste. We could cover the country with windmills and solar panels, but the electricity they produced would still be an expensive means of running our cars.
Just as the oil supply begins to look uncertain, global demand is rising faster than it has done for 16 years. Yesterday morning, General Motors announced that it is spending $3bn on doubling its production of cars for the Chinese market. Seventy-four minutes later, we saw the first signs of entropy: the International Air Travel Association revealed that the airlines are likely to lose $3bn this year because of high oil prices. The cheap carriers complained that they could be forced out of the market.
If the complexity of our economies is impossible to sustain, our best hope is to start to dismantle them before they collapse. This isn't very likely to happen. Faced with a choice between a bang and a whimper, our governments are likely to choose the bang, waging ever more extravagant wars to keep the show on the road. Terrorists, alert to both the west's rising need and the vulnerability of the pipeline and tanker networks, will respond with their own oil wars.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle," HG Wells wrote, "I no longer despair for the human race." It's a start, but I'd feel even more confident about our chances of survival if I saw George Bush and Dick Cheney sharing a car to work.
· George Monbiot's book The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order is now published in paperback
-------- OTHER
-------- genetics
58 Senators Seek Easing of Rules for Stem Cells
Bush Urged to Alter Research Policy
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 8, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23279-2004Jun7.html
A majority of the Senate, including 14 Republicans, have sent a letter to President Bush asking him to loosen the restrictions on human embryonic stem cell research that he imposed nearly three years ago.
The letter, dated Friday, echoes a similar plea signed last month by 206 members of the House. It may have special resonance during this week of remembrances for Ronald Reagan. Nancy Reagan has been increasingly outspoken in her support for stem cell research, which some experts believe could speed the development of treatments for many ailments, including Alzheimer's disease, the brain-wasting syndrome that took Reagan's life on Saturday.
The field is controversial because obtaining the cells requires the destruction of five-day-old human embryos.
"This issue is especially poignant given President Reagan's passing," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), one of five Senate organizers behind the letter. "Embryonic stem cell research might hold the key to a cure for Alzheimer's and other terrible diseases."
Human embryonic stem cells are able to grow into virtually all kinds of tissues and show a promising capacity to help regenerate failing organs. Bush, expressing concern about the ethics of embryo destruction, announced on Aug. 9, 2001, that federal funds could be used to study only those human embryonic stem cell colonies that were established by that date. That has precluded federally funded studies on more recently derived colonies that many scientists agree are more medically promising.
"We would very much like to work with you to modify the current embryonic stem cell policy so that it provides this area of research the greatest opportunity to lead to the treatments and cures for which we all are hoping," the two-page Senate letter concludes. It is signed by 58 senators, including Feinstein and her four fellow organizers: Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).
The letter does not recommend specific policy changes, but it notes that an estimated 400,000 frozen embryos are being stored at U.S. fertility clinics, most of them fated to be discarded. Advocates would like to create a mechanism by which couples could donate unused embryos to federally supported researchers.
The letter notes that the number of available lines under the Bush policy has proved to be far smaller than anticipated. Fewer than 20 such lines are available today, compared with the nearly 80 the government said it had identified early on.
Moreover, the Senate letter says, all those lines have been mixed with mouse cells, compromising their therapeutic potential.
The letter also warns that the United States may be falling behind other countries that are aggressively pursuing stem cell cures, including Britain, Singapore, South Korea and Australia.
The White House has consistently rebuffed suggestions that its policy is inadequate, saying the private sector is welcome to pursue the field -- a position that spokesman Trent Duffy reiterated yesterday. The administration has emphasized the medical potential of adult stem cells, which can be extracted without destroying embryos but which some scientists believe to be less useful medically.
Among the notable signatures on the Senate letter are those of abortion opponents Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) and Trent Lott (R-Miss.). Also signing was Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who had worked closely with Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) to oppose embryo research but has distanced herself from the Brownback camp since winning a close reelection late in 2002.
-------- health
Weapons Makers Turn to Medicine
By Kristen Philipkoski
Jun. 08, 2004
http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,63759,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_8
SAN FRANCISCO -- A little more than a decade ago, Amir Maksyutov was developing virulent strains of influenza and other infectious agents for potential use as bioweapons against the United States. Today, he's working on vaccines for HIV, flu and malaria.
Maksyutov is happy to be one of the scientists taken under the wing of the United States since the Soviet Union fell. After the Cold War, when Russia employed brilliant scientists to create vats of super-virulent infectious agents, many of those researchers were out of jobs.
Lest the researchers go to work for its enemies, the United States developed programs to collaborate with former Soviet scientists.
"(Developing medicine) feels much better than to destroy," Maksyutov said through an interpreter here Monday at the Biotechnology Industry Organization annual conference. "Now, our potential is so strong that we can develop many new medications."
Maksyutov is a scientist at the Vector State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in the Novosibirsk region in Siberia, where he says bears walk in the streets. Everyone in the town, he said, is somehow affiliated with the research center, which was once a facility for producing the most dangerous pathogens on Earth.
Its transformation into a medical facility is one of several successful collaborations between the U.S. government and Russian scientists.
"There is so much talent and human capital in Russia," said Jeffrey Gelfand, senior adviser of international medical affairs at Massachusetts General Hospital, who works with the State Department Bioindustry Initiative on establishing research projects in Russia. "At one point, years ago, it was being misspent, and it's so exciting to put them on track to help mankind."
Garland said Russian researchers often approach projects in ways that Americans wouldn't think of. Maksyutov, for example, figured out that there are 46,000 different ways in which HIV could mutate in order to evade a vaccine. He developed a vaccine that can provide a counterpunch to each one of those 46,000 mutations.
"Our dogma would have said it can't work," Gelfand said. But in rabbits the vaccine did work, and the State Department will support further tests.
Dr. Vsevolod Kiselev is another former bioweapons researcher who has been transformed into a medical miracle worker. Kiselev is now developing a vaccine to fight human respiratory papilloma, or HPV, as head of the biotechnology laboratory at the Research Institute of Molecular Medicine in Moscow. HPV causes warts in the respiratory tract of infants and can cause breathing problems or even death. With funding from the State Department, Kiselev not only developed the vaccine, but also a whole new technology for making vaccines.
"Vaccines are usually weak and cannot give good protection," Kiselev said. "I developed a technology that significantly improved the protection level -- a small amount of the compound can give a high level of protection with no side effects."
The vaccine is in its early stages. Once it's tested in animals, the technology could potentially be translated to other types of vaccines, Kiselev said.
Despite these advances, it's not likely that the United States has managed to lure every former Soviet bioweapons scientist. Funding from the United States has helped prevent bioweapon proliferation, but more efforts are needed, he said. Maksyutov worries that "laboratories not friendly towards mankind" will develop bioweapons in the next five to 10 years.
"The level of biotech now is so high that it's possible to create new, very dangerous viruses such as modified flu viruses," Maksyutov said. "The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 would look like nothing. Those potentially dangerous viruses need to be under tight control."
Maksyutov is also studying the function and structure of the flu virus to try to develop a vaccine.
"It's very clear to me how to make the virus more virulent," Maksyutov said. "Unfortunately it's really very simple."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Rosy Outlook Hid Ugly Facts From Reagan
By Marc Fisher
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Washington Post; Page B01
Ray Lamb's story was the kind that Ronald Reagan so winningly used to turn the policies of the world's most powerful nation.
I met Lamb in 1988 in Alderson, W.Va., on a farm atop a mountain, a place where men like him who lived on Washington's heating grates could go for sanctuary.
Ray Lamb had been on the streets since 1981. He was a bright man and carried a Bible with him, as well as books about beekeeping. He also drank -- a lot. At the farm, where no alcohol was allowed, Lamb spent weeks by himself in a tiny log cabin, praying and reading. He read religious works and inspirational tracts. When I was there, he was deep into a volume called "The Incredible Human Potential."
"When I come here," Lamb told me out in the cabin, "I quit drinking fast, and it is great. I can even see a little better. Everything's changing for me. I take a deep breath, sit out here, watch the sun rise, eat off the land. Berries. Nuts. Find a honeycomb."
President Reagan could hear a story like Lamb's and spin it into a lesson for us all about the power each of us has to rise up from the depths and grab hold of life's opportunities. This was more than an actor's ability to enliven a character; there was in Reagan an imaginative empathy that connected with people of all walks.
Reagan would have left out the rest of Lamb's story, the part about how he had been working and functioning up until 1981, when Reagan fired all of the country's air traffic controllers because they had launched an illegal strike. Lamb had been a controller for 17 years, working in Leesburg.
"Ray's world fell apart," said Michael Kirwan, a saintly man who would drive the homeless of Washington to that farm and knew Lamb well. Kirwan, who has since died, would not have blamed Lamb's fall on the president, nor do I.
Sacking the controllers and hiring new ones was classic Reagan, a dramatic demonstration that, despite his amiable manner, he meant business. It was one of his boldest, most effective moves.
But it was also classic Reagan in that the president did what he believed was right and was able to maintain absolute deniability about any pain that resulted from his actions because he filtered out such bad news. He could say with apparent honesty that he didn't know his administration had traded arms for hostages in the Iran-contra scandal. He could say that there couldn't be much unemployment because the Sunday paper was chockablock with help wanted ads.
And he could visit Congress Heights Elementary School in the District and get chummy with his student pen pal, Rudolph Hines, and even travel to the Hines family's wretched patch of Southeast for a fried chicken dinner, yet remain oblivious to the hopelessness, dysfunction and utter separation of that part of this nation.
Those of us who never quite got the adoration that Reagan engendered couldn't get past his seeming blindness to the homeless and the jobless and the lost. Reagan freed Americans to believe that looking out for number one was morally and socially okay, that a happy and consuming middle class would lift up those below.
But what came out of those years was an ever-wider gap between the incomes and experiences of the haves and the have-nots. In this city, Experience Unlimited, the great go-go band, sang of Reaganomics, "No matter what they cut back, we're going to say, 'Ooh la la la' to that," and a generation that saw no way out other than the foolish dreams of hustling and pro sports was lost to crack, music videos and a deepening disconnect from the ideals of work and family.
The picture of Reagan we see this week is filled with the soft images and gentle words his administration worked so hard and effectively to create, and there can be no question that he was an extraordinary politician and ultimately far less doctrinaire than some admirers make him out to be.
Almost since the day he left office, those who were captivated by his idea that the selfish life could be a morally upstanding one have sought to turn Reagan into an icon. Soon, the campaign to put a Reagan memorial on the Mall will begin anew. It doesn't seem to matter to that crowd that Reagan himself signed into law a bill that barred any memorial from being built until 25 years after the honoree's death. Like their hero, they can't be bothered with the facts.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.