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NUCLEAR
The Netherworld of Nonproliferation
French firm Areva to recycle US military plutonium for civil purposes
Weeping, Dancing Turkish Kurds Welcome Freed MPs
India test-fires cruise missile
Police interrogate Indian man accused of trying to sell nuclear secrets
India Police Question Man on Nuke Secrets
Mullahs with nukes
U.S. Pushes Europe to Get Tougher on Iran Nuke Plans
Iran Seeks to Blunt U.N. Censure on Nukes
Iran Rejects Nuclear Restrictions
Discussion of Nuclear Weapons No Longer Taboo in Japan
N. Korea threatens to reinforce nuclear programme
Tackle the Nuke Threat
Nuclear shell game
Funding nuclear research
Capturing the Rosenbergs
Guest Viewpoint: Nuclear waste no problem if we redefine 'safe'
MILITARY
U.S. Marines Kill 80 Rebels in Afghanistan
U.N.: Sudan Forces, Militias Execute Civilians
UK sells WMD components to 'axis of evil' countries
BA flight crews will not stay in Saudi Arabia
Speculators hope to cash in on Iraq's new dinar
Iraqi General: US Helped Us as We Used Chemical Weapons
Army Withholds Chemical Attack Antidote
European voters batter governing parties
Iraq President Won't Destroy Abu Ghraib Prison
Another Iraqi Official Is Killed; At Least 12 Die in Car Blast
Iraqis Start to Exercise Power Even Before Date for Turnover
Road for Relief Team Is Gantlet of Enemy Fire
Israel Says Children Enlist Children as Suicide Bombers
The Crisis Without End
Israel would move two main Gaza crossing points
Red Cross Urges Release of Iraqi POWs
In '54, leftist Guatemalan leader no match for CIA
Nazi commander 'was CIA agent'
Iraq Tactics Have Long History With U.S. Interrogators
Fury as MI5 describe IRA terror as 'just'
This Spy for Rent
No 'Weekend Warriors' as U.S. Towns Count Guard Dead
Errors Are Seen in Early Attacks on Iraqi Leaders
Mr. Bush's Mismatch
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Soldier's defense team wants 100 witnesses
Russia Seeks Balance in Drug-Use Sentencing
A Look Behind the 'Wire' At Guantanamo
US to keep 4,000- 5,000 prisoners after June 30
Secret world of US jails
Justice Dept. Memo Says Torture 'May Be Justified'
POLITICS
South Korea Dissolves Ties That Once Bound the Press to the Powerful
Retired Officials Say Bush Must Go
McCain rejects Kerry's vice presidential overtures
Inaccurate U.S. report on terrorism was 'big mistake,' Powell says
Group Seeks Change In Security Policy
26 Former U.S. Officials Oppose Bush
'Power, Terror, Peace, and War': 2.5 Cheers for George Bush
Bush Asked for Vatican's Help on Political Issues, Report Says
ACTIVISTS
Activists Protest World Economic Forum
Ellsberg: Still Ahead of the Curve
Nukes, Rumsfeld, Medflies
Documentarian kept quiet after filming U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqis
Documentarian kept quiet after filming U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqis
Activists Protest World Economic Forum
'Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Those Old Protest Tactics Have to Go'
-------- NUCLEAR
The Netherworld of Nonproliferation
By JAMES TRAUB
June 13, 2004
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/magazine/13NUKES.html?ei=5062&en=3cdcb6517dd14a87&ex=1087704000&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=
President Dwight D. Eisenhower saw nothing even remotely paradoxical about the expression ''Atoms for Peace'' when he delivered a speech of that name to the United Nations General Assembly on Dec. 8, 1953. Eisenhower had come to disclose ''a new conception'': that ''if the fearful trend of atomic military buildup can be reversed, this greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon.'' Atomic energy could be applied to ''agriculture, medicine and other peaceful activities'' and ''provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.'' This speech led directly to the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency, under the aegis of the United Nations, and, 15 years later, to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Both were founded on a grand bargain: countries that agreed to place their nuclear programs under a system of international inspection and forgo the development of nuclear weapons (if they didn't already have them) would gain access to the expected atomic bounty.
Today the premise of that bargain seems almost quaint. Nuclear energy has never achieved anything like the World of Tomorrow promise it enjoyed half a century ago; meanwhile, the world feels menaced by the threat of nuclear weaponry in a way unimaginable in Eisenhower's day. Authoritarian and, even worse, potentially unstable states like Pakistan and North Korea have opted out of the nonproliferation system in order to develop a bomb; terrorist groups seek weapons of mass destruction; and a global black market delivers nuclear fuel, equipment and weapons designs to states that aspire to join the nuclear club. The United States has already fought what may be thought of as the first war of counterproliferation; the fact that Iraq turned out not to possess weapons of mass destruction shows, among other things, how extraordinarily difficult it is to gain certain knowledge of an adversary's nuclear capacities.
Tomorrow the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency will meet, and the principal item on the agenda will be, as it has been for the last year, Iran's nuclear program. The Bush administration is convinced that Iran is secretly trying to build a bomb. The Iranian officials I spoke with in a visit to Tehran last month insist that they are merely trying to improve their ''energy mix'' by adding nuclear power to their abundant oil supplies. But even in the unlikely event that that is so, an Iran capable of producing weapons-grade uranium is plainly unacceptable, not only to the Bush administration but also to its chief allies. What is not at all clear is how to make the Iranians surrender that capacity.
The nuclear bargain has become hopelessly one-sided, and the instruments created to sustain that bargain seem unequal to the task. Bush administration officials describe the current impasse over Iran as a test that the international community, and specifically the I.A.E.A., is failing. Even the I.A.E.A.'s director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, says that the entire nonproliferation system is in danger of collapse, though he would include American bellicosity among the forces that are endangering it. President Bush and ElBaradei, along with a wide range of scientists and policy makers, have proposed a variety of designs for a new and much more comprehensive nonproliferation system. Whether a new network of laws and institutions can plug the holes faster than terrorists, brokers, freelancing scientists and rogue states can fill them is an open question.
he bargain at the heart of Atoms for Peace made the I.A.E.A. a very conflicted agency from the start. It was responsible for developing peaceful uses of nuclear energy and ensuring the safe handling of nuclear materials, but also for monitoring the facilities and stockpiles of the world's nuclear powers. Even today, the curving halls of the agency's circular headquarters building in the urban hinterland beyond Vienna's Ringstrasse are lined with the offices of scientists working out nuclear applications for seed development and medical imaging. Until the last decade, nuclear verification routinely gave way before the demands of nuclear promotion. Inspectors were to serve as accountants, not policemen. Over the years, they logged countless hours earnestly cross-checking the statements of harmless countries like Canada and Sweden. As ElBaradei put it, ''Inspections were often Mickey Mouse.''
It was an almost invisible organization until the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war, when it discovered that Iraq had advanced its nuclear weapons program beyond the gaze of inspectors and under the noses of the world's intelligence services. This past March, when I was at I.A.E.A. headquarters in Vienna, I went to the office of Olli Heinonen, the agency's head of verification for the Middle East and much of Asia, and he showed me an aerial photograph of Iraq's Tuwaitha complex taken after it was bombed in 1991. In the years before the war, Heinonen explained, the Iraqis would lead inspectors on a mazelike journey through the one-kilometer-square complex and then deposit them at an innocuous building. And every year the I.A.E.A. gave Iraq a clean bill of health. After the war inspectors returned to Tuwaitha with a license to roam at will. Heinonen pointed to the map and said: ''The building next to that is where they did the centrifuge testing. This is where they first separated plutonium. Here in these two buildings they did the electromagnetic separation.'' And so on.
I asked Richard Hooper, who conducted inspections in Iraq from 1991 to 1993, if the inspectors couldn't have demanded to see a neighboring facility before the war, and he said, ''The Iraqis would have just refused.'' Visits were governed by elaborate agreements and subagreements that stipulated exactly where, when and how inspectors could operate. The agency could have invoked its power of ''special inspections,'' but this would have constituted an act of confrontation wholly foreign to the I.A.E.A.'s nature.
The I.A.E.A. had no intelligence-gathering capacity of its own, and the 35-nation board of governors was reluctant to let the agency use data gathered by national intelligence services. This changed in 1993, when inspectors in North Korea scrutinized a fuel-reprocessing plant designed to recover plutonium. Tests showed that the North Koreans had produced plutonium more frequently than they declared. Inspectors were at a loss to explain the discrepancy until the Clinton administration made available to Hans Blix, then the I.A.E.A.'s director, a series of satellite photos that showed, first, a waste-storage facility, then a row of trees tall enough to screen the facility from the road to the reprocessing plant, then finally a patch of fresh sod where the facility had been buried.
Blix showed the pictures to the board of governors to support his request for a special inspection. As Richard Hooper recalls: ''Blix arranged to show the photographs in the boardroom. The board members were literally stunned into silence.'' The North Korean delegates ''sat there with their mouths open -- but not for long. They walked out, and then they announced that they were withdrawing from the safeguards.''
In some ways, North Korea's withdrawal was more mortifying to the I.A.E.A. than Iraq's duplicity had been. The agency had, for once, been successful in exposing a clandestine program -- and for that very reason, it lost control over the program. ElBaradei, who was then the I.A.E.A.'s chief legal official, says that the ensuing approach to the issue ''was really a model of how things should not be done.'' At the time, the North Koreans might have responded to harsh criticism from the United Nations Security Council, but the Chinese blocked any action. Looking for an alternative, the Clinton administration agreed in 1994 to help the North Koreans build up their nuclear-energy program in exchange for halting work on weapons. But the inspectors were no longer on hand to monitor compliance. As ElBaradei says, the North Koreans ''got five, six, seven years without inspections, and they managed to keep the spent fuel'' -- the plutonium -- ''as a Damocles sword.'' A nuclear-armed North Korea may now be a fait accompli. Worse yet, the North Koreans may already have gone into the proliferation business. Inspectors recently unearthed evidence that suggests that the country shipped two tons of uranium to Libya in 2001.
The agency never got a second chance in North Korea, but it did in Iraq. After the gulf war in 1991, when I.A.E.A. inspectors returned to Iraq as part of Unscom, the United Nations body whose chief responsibility was chemical and biological weapons, inspectors quickly found evidence of Iraq's secret weapons program not only in Tuwaitha but also across the country. Iraqi officials tried to frustrate the inspectors at every turn, and critics charged that agency officials were all too willing to climb down from confrontation -- proof of the institutional timidity that came of years of passive monitoring. Yet by the time Unscom left Iraq in late 1998, inspectors believed that they had discovered and eliminated virtually every vestige of Iraq's nuclear program. (They were subsequently proved right.)
It was, of course, the run-up to the Iraq war last year that afforded the I.A.E.A. its first real taste of public notoriety. In November 2002, the Iraqis let inspectors return to search for weapons of mass destruction. It took only a few weeks for inspectors to realize that Iraq's technological capacity had, if anything, deteriorated since 1998. ''It was embarrassing when we came back,'' one of the inspectors told me recently. In his report to the Security Council on Jan. 27, 2003, ElBaradei said that his inspectors had, at that point, found no evidence of renewed activity, and he asked for a ''few months'' more as ''a valuable investment in peace.''
This was, of course, precisely what the Bush administration did not want to hear. Vice President Dick Cheney said the previous September that he knew ''with absolute certainty'' that Saddam Hussein was actively seeking to purchase uranium-enrichment technology. President Bush had told the American people about ''high-strength aluminum tubes'' that Saddam was trying to acquire for his nuclear program, and about the uranium Saddam had sought to buy in Africa. (Secretary of State Colin Powell would repeat many of these claims in his speech to the Security Council in early February.) The I.A.E.A. investigated each one and found them baseless. The most flagrantly unsubstantiated, of course, was the tale of the uranium from Niger. It was Jacques Baute, a veteran I.A.E.A. inspector, who discovered that the underlying documents were fraudulent. This triggered an internal debate that spoke volumes about the agency's relationship to the Bush administration. Could they say ''forgeries,'' which is just what they were -- or would that provoke the administration? ElBaradei, ever the peacemaker, opted for ''not authentic.'' Nevertheless, Baute says, ''I feared that I was sending him to the front to be blown up.''
The I.A.E.A. did come under full assault from the Bush administration. On March 16, 2003, days before the war began, Vice President Cheney said on ''Meet the Press'' that the I.A.E.A. had ''consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing,'' though he did not elaborate on those supposed mistakes. The vice president added, ''I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past.'' There were public broadsides as well from Powell and from Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. Some I.A.E.A. officials say that they had several very bad weeks in the spring of 2003, waiting to see if the U.S. military would find something they had missed. But nothing turned up. And then came vindication: in October, David Kay, a former I.A.E.A. official and longtime thorn in the agency's side whom the administration appointed to hunt for W.M.D. in Iraq, stated that he found no evidence of significant post-1998 nuclear activities. He also said that ''the inspectors in the early 1990's did a tremendous amount.''
ElBaradei, who guards his feelings closely, does not admit to a sense either of resentment or of vindication. (Others in the agency freely admit to both.) He does, however, view the war in Iraq, like the current impasse in North Korea, as an instance of failed diplomacy. The Iraqis, he said, ''had been cheating the system for years'' and needed to be constantly challenged and confronted over their duplicity. At the same time, he added: ''We never gave the Iraqis the feeling that there was light at the end of the tunnel. They complained that it didn't matter what they did.'' ElBaradei said that he recognized that closing the nuclear file, or lifting some sanctions, might have affixed to Saddam's rule precisely the seal of approval that he sought. But he also argued (if not altogether convincingly) that doing so might have afforded Saddam an incentive to cooperate on his chemical and biological weapons programs. It is in ElBaradei's nature, as it is in the nature of Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations, to err on the side of engagement, and to acknowledge the interests and concerns of even the most odious interlocutor. At the end of a long conversation in his elegant apartment in Vienna, ElBaradei said: ''One of the supreme lessons you learn in life is compromise. And you have to compromise by putting yourself in the other person's shoes.''
Like Iraq in the 1980's, Iran through much of the 1990's received a clean bill of health from the I.A.E.A. Iran reported that it had only a ''limited nuclear program,'' and inspectors duly certified that it was so. American and foreign intelligence agencies felt certain that Iran was hiding something, but the agency, as one inspector put it to me, ''was sleeping on its ear.'' Then, in the summer of 2002, an Iranian resistance group disclosed the existence of several secret nuclear facilities, chief among them an enrichment plant in the town of Natanz. ElBaradei and a team of inspectors visited the compound the following February and discovered a highly sophisticated facility with an array of the centrifuges necessary for enriching uranium.
The Iranians claimed that Natanz was intended for civilian purposes; and since the exact same technology is used to make the low-enriched uranium required for a power plant and the highly enriched uranium required for a bomb, this was a plausible claim. But Iranian officials began to make matters much worse by lying about almost everything else. The inspectors immediately recognized that the centrifuges were a Pakistani variation on a Dutch design, known as the P1, but the Iranians insisted they had been domestically designed. The Iranians called Natanz a ''pilot plant,'' though plainly it was intended for large-scale enrichment. The Iranians said that they had never run uranium through the machines, though the inspectors later found evidence that they had. And this pattern of deceit, evasion, delay and literal-minded legalism continued for months.
At the time, the Bush administration had its hands full with war in Iraq, and European diplomats seized the situation as an opportunity to affirm the virtues of diplomacy. In October of last year, the foreign ministers of England, France and Germany journeyed to Tehran, where they offered trade opportunities that Iran craved in exchange for a suspension of nuclear activities and a complete disclosure of the program. This surprising display of deference, possibly coupled with growing American threats to bring the matter before the Security Council, persuaded the Iranians to sign a joint statement with the E.U.-3, as the delegation has come to be known. In the so-called Tehran Declaration, issued in October, the Iranians agreed to suspend all activities associated with enrichment; to offer a complete accounting of the nuclear program; and to accept an ''additional protocol'' to the Nonproliferation Treaty that expands the ability of inspectors to look for facilities that the host country has not disclosed.
So by last fall the Iranians, the Europeans and the I.A.E.A. all had reason to feel that a new, cooperative paradigm might be at hand, an alternative both to war (as in Iraq) and to the stalemate in North Korea. At that very time, however, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi decided to trade Libya's secret nuclear program for better relations with the West. One by-product of his decision was a bumper crop of information about the nuclear-arms trade. Agency experts became convinced that the Iranians must have received the same designs for an advanced centrifuge, known as the P2, that the Libyans had. And when Olli Heinonen confronted Iranian officials in December, they admitted that it was so. The Iranians then made matters worse by concocting one of their legalistic defenses; they didn't think ''research and development'' had to be disclosed.
hen I arrived in Vienna for the board meeting in March, the Americans and their allies -- chiefly, the Canadians, the Australians and the British -- were demanding a resolution harshly criticizing Iranian noncompliance. Rumor had it that John Bolton, the U.S. under secretary of state for arms control and a scorching critic of international bodies generally (and the I.A.E.A. in particular), had been sighted haunting the hallways. A few weeks earlier, Bolton sent a spine-stiffening letter to his chief European counterparts designed to remind them of the threat Iran posed to international peace and security. The rumor turned out to be the product of a fevered imagination; but Mohamed ElBaradei seemed to be hearing footsteps. In remarks to reporters before the session, he said that Iran was in ''violation'' of its obligations to fully disclose its nuclear program -- unusually strong language for him.
When I first spoke to ElBaradei, at the beginning of the week, he said that he welcomed a tough resolution to keep pressure on the Iranians, though he also felt that the moderates in Iran needed some gesture to keep the conservative clerics at bay. Above all, he was hoping to stay clear of the rhetorical battlefield. I said to ElBaradei that his situation was very much like that of Kofi Annan, forever trying to prove to Americans that he is not hopelessly conflict-averse without making developing countries dismiss him as a stooge of the West. ''Actually,'' he said, ''it's even worse than that. I have the right to sit in judgment, where Kofi Annan does not. And that makes many countries uncomfortable. We're in the driver's seat, and they're not. That's why impartiality for us is an absolute key. If we try to offer our own interpretation of the facts, we'll be shot down in no time.''
ElBaradei, who is 61, is a habitually cautious man, with a lawyer's faith in process as well as a diplomat's belief in engagement and compromise. He earned his Ph.D. in international law at New York University, and his father was the president of the Egyptian Bar Association. You hear grumbling among hard-liners in the Bush administration that ElBaradei is a third-world man or an Egyptian nationalist, but he has spent far more of his adult life in New York and Vienna than in Cairo. We had a lengthy colloquy on the merits both of the Yankees' acquisition of Alex Rodriguez and the Knicks' of Stephon Marbury.
With his large head, shining pate, little round glasses and bottlebrush mustache, the director general is an endearing rather than an imposing figure. He seems perpetually flustered, falling all over his own sentences and darting off in new directions. He is fond of American idioms, which he occasionally mangles. He is, according to his aides, very shy and has only slowly adapted to the public demands of his job. And yet he is given a great deal of credit for changing the culture of the agency. Gary Milhollin, a nonproliferation expert who has often mocked the I.A.E.A. for its timidity, says that ElBaradei has projected ''a much more muscular image'' for the agency and that inspectors have ''done a good job of challenging the Iranians and demanding that the Iranians explain the inconsistencies in their story.'' Senior Bush administration officials tend to be less charitable. One confidently assured me that the Iranians ''are stiffing the inspectors, but ElBaradei won't say it'' -- which the inspectors themselves deny -- and speculates that he is soft-pedaling the truth in service to ''higher ambitions'': to head the Arab League, or even to qualify for the Nobel Peace Prize.
ElBaradei spent much of that week in Vienna fielding complaints from the Iranians, who wanted him to stand up to the Bush administration. But they had lost him after the discovery of the P2 centrifuge design. ElBaradei told me he had said to top Iranian figures, ''I stick my neck to try to help you, and then we see that.'' ElBaradei worried about the damage the revelation had done to the I.A.E.A. ''It goes to our credibility as an institution,'' he said. ''We are balanced, and we are weighing our words carefully, but we do not want to be fools.'' ElBaradei would be going to Washington at the end of the week to meet with President Bush as well as with George Tenet, the C.I.A. director; the I.A.E.A. receives intelligence from U.S. agencies as well as from the intelligence services of several other nations, but only intermittently. ''We must communicate that the agency is not a blue-eyed bureaucrat sitting in Vienna,'' he told staff members one morning. Also, he instructed, no gloating about who was right about Iraq, and no meeting during the visit with emissaries from the John Kerry camp. ElBaradei wanted to lay out a vision for putting the nuclear genie back in the bottle that was different from President Bush's; but, he said, ''we need to get them to see that our view complements their view.''
The week ended on a good note for ElBaradei. The Iranians had won the support of countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, few of whom evince much concern with nonproliferation issues; and the two sides had been hopelessly deadlocked on language for the resolution. It didn't help matters that the Americans and Iranians refused to be in the same room with the other, so the Canadian ambassador had to run back and forth, bearing proposed changes. Late on Thursday night, ElBaradei was awakened by a call from Secretary Powell asking him to become personally involved. ElBaradei would go to almost any lengths not to say no to a request from Powell, whom he considers his greatest champion inside the Bush administration. The following day, the two sides began meeting -- separately, of course -- in ElBaradei's office, and by Saturday morning they had agreed on a draft that had enough ''deplores'' in it to satisfy the Americans, and enough caveats to mollify the Iranians.
ElBaradei flew off to Washington the next day. I had a cup of coffee with him in the midst of his tour, and he said, with no little relief, ''We're coming at a good time, because they're very pleased.'' He had already met with Republican congressmen, several of whom seemed to be under the impression that the I.A.E.A. was denying that Iran had a nuclear program; he tried to explain the difference between a nuclear program and a weapons program. He met with several administration officials and was delighted by the professional and nonideological tone of the discussions. ''Now that we have this relationship,'' one moderate said, ''don't be surprised if we turn to you even more in the future.'' ElBaradei then left for his meeting with President Bush. When he returned, ElBaradei said that the president, obviously well briefed, broke the ice by saying, ''So, I hear you're a Yankees fan.'' They talked about A-Rod and then about family. In the course of a 40-minute discussion, ElBaradei raised the need to secure nuclear material in Russia; to criminalize the export of nuclear weapons technology; and to improve the quality of intelligence. I asked whether he carried a message from the Iranians, as I was told he might have, seeking a deal with the United States. ElBaradei declined to answer. He did say that the president was obviously pleased about the resolution on Iran. He realized, however, that the mood could prove transitory.
When I visited Tehran last month, my plan was to accompany the I.A.E.A. inspectors as they visited the country's nuclear sites. The agency agreed to let me do so, and so, apparently, had the Iranians. On my first morning, however, it became plain that officials from the Foreign Ministry had no idea what to do with me. They sent me across town to get a press card from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, which ultimately refused to give me credentials. When I returned to my hotel, I was told that a caller, who had not identified himself, left instructions that I was to appear at a police station the following morning. Still later, the I.A.E.A.'s chief inspector in Iran, Christian Charlier, knocked on my door to let me know that the general director of the Foreign Ministry himself approved of my plans for the next day. But by the following morning, that official had been overruled by the Atomic Energy Organization. And that was the end of my nuclear tour of Iran.
Iran turns out to be a very peculiar kind of totalitarian state, one that seeks iron control over public behavior and expression yet is subject to constant improvisation. The Islamic Revolution never fostered an entirely coherent authority structure. Underneath the supreme authority, Ayatollah Khamenei, are councils and ministries that have a more or less horizontal relationship and continually vie to fill whatever vacuums are left by the Leader. Ali Salehi, a nuclear physicist who was serving as Iran's representative to Vienna when the truth about his country's nuclear program first began to come out, told me that ''at the outset, there was not one particular organization that would say the last word; one would not know where to get the authorization and permission. This is because high officials here are all on an equal footing and power is shared among so many.'' Salehi said he grew so frustrated with the secrecy back home that he began leaking information to the Iranian press, at which point he was swiftly relieved of his position.
I had been caught up in the same internal contest that Salehi had -- that between the forces of more-or-less transparency and those of defensive withdrawal. The Foreign Ministry, which apparently gained control over the nuclear program from the Atomic Energy Organization, generally pushes for openness toward the world; sometimes it wins, often it loses. In my case, it seemed to have lost, to both the Atomic Energy Organization and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. But Iran is not a one-man state, like Libya or North Korea. Diplomats point out that the Tehran Declaration represented a major victory for the forces in Iran that, however tentatively, seek engagement with the larger world; if Iran is seen to get nothing in exchange for the risk it took, those forces will be discredited.
The Iranians were, in fact, very eager to let the world know how thoroughly they had been misunderstood, and I received a call from Ali Asghar Soltanieh, deputy director general of the division of international political affairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, asking me to meet with him. I was bowed into Soltanieh's office by various supernumeraries. It was a very big office filled with ponderous, high-backed, carved wooden chairs. On one wall was the official photographic triptych: Ayatollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Khamenei flanking Mohammad Khatami, the country's increasingly marginalized president.
Soltanieh heard of my travails, and he was profoundly apologetic and solicitous. Tea was served, as were sweets. Soltanieh also had prepared a monologue for my benefit. He was, he said, a nuclear physicist who had served in the Atomic Energy Organization in the days of the shah. America was then eager to support Iran's fledgling nuclear program, and Germany was all too happy to begin work on a reactor in Bushehr. ''At that time, we had oil,'' Soltanieh observed; ''but nobody questioned, 'What is the justification for going nuclear if you have oil?' '' He then went on to serve as his country's representative to the I.A.E.A. from 1982 to 1987, a period when the West was blocking all shipments of uranium to Iran. How was Iran to acquire fuel to get its nuclear power program under way? ''The country had no option other than working on the fuel cycle,'' he said. (The fuel cycle is the process required to transmute uranium metal mined from the ground into fissionable material.) ''We had to try all the routes possible -- plutonium, gas centrifuge, laser enrichment.'' And of course it had to be clandestine, since the West wouldn't stand for Iran having its own nuclear ability.
Soltanieh proceeded to offer me a litany of patently absurd explanations for Iran's undisclosed nuclear facilities. He explained, for example, that Natanz could not be described as ''clandestine'' because the villagers all around knew very well what it was. I could see why Iran is so widely believed to be harboring a secret weapons program; why else would authorities be concocting such laughably transparent lies? And yet, Soltanieh himself may have been kept in the dark about the nuclear program, and then did his best to brazen it out. Inspectors say Iranians from the Foreign Ministry often seemed as amazed as they were by many of the discoveries.
Is it possible, then, that all those lies don't add up to a terrible truth? John Bolton ridiculed ElBaradei last fall for reporting that no evidence had yet emerged that Iran was developing a nuclear weapons program. And yet ElBaradei was stating a fact. Last summer inspectors found particles of uranium enriched as high as 54 percent, far above the 3 to 4 percent needed to produce energy; but the material may have entered as contaminants on foreign equipment the Iranians purchased from their intermediary. Officials like Soltanieh have been so oblique on the subject that it's impossible to tell. Nor have the Iranians yet provided convincing explanations for experiments involving polonium and other radioactive materials. But inspectors have found no weapons, no weapons drawings, no evidence of weapons research. ''Everything seems to be lined up to support enrichment of 3 to 4 percent to produce fuel,'' said Christian Charlier, an I.A.E.A. inspector. While he finds all the lies maddening, ''so far, we don't have any facts that say they have a nuclear weapons program.''
You would think, given the humiliating experience in Iraq, where no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program has been found, that the Bush administration would subject the evidence in Iran to exacting scrutiny. But it hasn't. In fact, its position amounts to ''Where there's smoke, there's fire.'' One White House official explained to me that ''there is no other rational explanation'' for Iran's nuclear program than the development of weapons. But of course there was no other rational explanation for Saddam Hussein's stonewalling of inspectors. You would think that by now ''no other rational explanation'' might have been discredited as a cause of action.
One Western diplomat I met with in Tehran said: ''The Americans are right in saying that a nuclear energy program in this country with these enormous oil reserves does not make sense. At the same time, what is clear is that this country for national security reasons wants to have a nuclear industry. There is agreement across the board to the point of saying, 'We need to have a nuclear capacity to a certain level.' The level is not clear. I am absolutely not sure that there is a decision even by the religious leadership to go for a bomb.''
If Iran is developing a bomb, the Iranian officials I talked to are much better liars than I give them credit for being. On this subject, there was not a hint of waffle. The official line is that Iran must have the capacity to produce its own enriched nuclear fuel. When I asked why they couldn't just buy fuel from others -- they are already working on a deal with Russia to do just that for the Bushehr reactor -- I was told that experience taught them they couldn't rely on others. But that wasn't really the point. When I pressed Dr. Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a top official with Iran's Security Council, he said bluntly, ''To stop Iran from a legitimate right of NPT [the Nonproliferation Treaty], which is to enjoy the peaceful technology of nuclear power, is not acceptable to Iran.'' Mousavian spoke -- repeatedly -- of ''the double standard,'' of ''discrimination.'' Why should Iran, he asked, be denied benefits available to Japan? The answer, of course, is that Japan is not a theocratic state with a history of support for terrorism, and it is not located in the Middle East. Mousavian was not much impressed with this point. He said he expected that ''in a very short time -- I would say two years -- we should reach the full transparency and confidence'' promised in the Tehran Declaration, and then the suspended fuel-enrichment activities would resume.
But this almost certainly will not happen. The reason it won't happen is that the bargain enshrined in the Nonproliferation Treaty -- the bargain Iranian authorities wish to see fulfilled -- is effectively defunct. The distinction between peaceful and warlike uses of nuclear power has become hopelessly blurred. The threshold issue in nuclear nonproliferation is not the hardware -- bombs are no longer so hard to make -- but the capacity to enrich uranium. In the case of the ''fuel cycle,'' the same technology serves military as well as civilian uses. It's only a matter of time, and not much time at that, to go from the harmless to the lethal. If Natanz is permitted to go back online, and if the Iranians go back to manufacturing centrifuges, they could soon have a facility capable of converting low-enriched uranium to the highly enriched uranium needed for a weapon. Nobody would know until it was too late. And that is why what is nonnegotiable to the Iranians is unacceptable to the Bush administration, the E.U.-3 and ElBaradei himself.
Can the Iranians be persuaded to mothball their entire enrichment industry? That depends on whether you think the Iranians are a pack of unscrupulous liars, as many Bush administration officials do. For them, the debate over Iran offers more proof that the international community and its institutions are not up to the challenge of confronting evildoers. Administration policy makers are growing increasingly impatient with both the Iranians and European diplomats who have, they say, a ''delusional'' faith in the value of further negotiations -- just as they did with Iraq. This time, of course, there will be no calls for war -- Iraq has seen to that. What the administration wants the I.A.E.A. board to do is refer the matter to the Security Council as a threat to international peace and security, though officials recognize that they have not won that battle. Instead, as one says, ''We have to raise the issue higher than we have'' by calling on allies to at least threaten to impose economic sanctions and political isolation on Iran.
The Europeans take a very different view -- and this time the British, who have taken a fearful pasting over Iraq, will not stray far from the French and the Germans. For one thing, American credibility on the issue of weapons of mass destruction is not what it used to be. The Europeans, too, see the smoke, but they are not convinced of the fire. As one E.U.-3 diplomat says, ''We have been through so many surprises that I cannot rule out'' a clandestine program, but ''we have never seen any additional convincing evidence.'' Nor do the Europeans agree that the Iranians have grossly abused the commitments they made last October. Neither is there an appetite either for Security Council resolutions or for sanctions. ''We consider that the I.A.E.A. process is the best game in town'' is how an official with the British Foreign Office put it.
The European approach is to keep the pressure on the Iranians but to offer them a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel -- a limited expansion of trade relations, perhaps, when the Iranian Parliament ratifies the additional protocol, thus committing Iran to transparency. And the problem of the fuel cycle? Keep the ''temporary'' suspension in place for as many years as it takes for the mullahs to finally go home in favor of a new government able to see the light of reason. In other words, stall. A Western diplomat in Tehran suggested to me that this is not a moment to seek ''truth, justice and clarity'' but rather ''what is pragmatically possible.'' This is, of course, just the kind of counsel that registers as the moral fatigue of Old Europe in certain quarters of the White House and the Pentagon.
Iran is unlikely to make good on its threats to eject the I.A.E.A., which would lead to just the kind of isolation the Bush administration would like to impose. But a policy of unyielding pressure would almost certainly lead the Iranian Parliament to refuse to adopt the additional protocol and generally strengthen the hard-liners. Iran also has the capacity to cause enormous mischief among the Shiites of Iraq. Perhaps something of ElBaradei's empathy is required. Iranians feel encircled by unfriendly countries and threatened by Israel and are now surrounded by U.S. troops. The fuel cycle has taken on a talismanic power for them not only as a matter of national pride and autonomy, but perhaps also as a deterrent (though they won't admit as much). That doesn't mean they get to keep it, but their motivations and political worries and calculations go well beyond ''evil.''
Each of the shocks of the last 15 years has exposed a different failure in the nonproliferation system -- in Iraq, the absurdity of the gentlemen's agreement; in North Korea, the benefits of noncompliance as well as the dangers of diplomatic irresolution; in Libya, the ease and impunity with which the black market in nuclear supplies operated; and in Iran, the legal protections extended to fuel-cycle activities. A new international architecture of nonproliferation, if there is to be one, must address all of these problems.
The I.A.E.A. began to rewrite the gentlemen's agreement when it began promoting the additional protocol in 1997. The additional protocol permits I.A.E.A. inspectors to visit any building that they have reason to believe might contain nuclear facilities, and to conduct spot inspections with as little as two hours' warning. Inspectors say that the protocol gives them all the latitude they need to find what is findable. The problem is that some countries with nuclear programs (including the U.S.) have signed but not yet ratified it. President Bush has proposed that many of the benefits that flow from the Nonproliferation Treaty should be made conditional on ratification of the protocol. But even the countries that do sign up can still bamboozle the inspectors, as the Iranians may or may not be doing. The I.A.E.A. will always have to rely on surveillance conducted by the major intelligence agencies, as it has, sporadically, since the North Korean incident in 1993; officials say that the C.I.A. has promised to work closely with the agency in the future.
And if a country withdraws from the NPT, as North Korea did, or refuses to sign it, as Pakistan, India and Israel have, or blocks inspectors, as Iraq did, the I.A.E.A. is helpless. ElBaradei has proposed making the Nonproliferation Treaty obligatory, like the convention on genocide, so that withdrawal would be illegal. But the international community has to be prepared to deal with the outlaws, as it was not with North Korea. Jessica Mathews, head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, points out that the mechanism for referring nuclear delinquents from the I.A.E.A. board to the Security Council is hopelessly creaky, but that is largely because most of the members of the 35-nation board care much more about getting access to peaceful technology than about blocking proliferation. Countries like Malaysia have consistently taken Iran's side over the last year. The problem, at bottom, is political will; nonproliferation must move closer to the top of the global agenda than it is now, and not just for nations that see themselves as potential victims of nuclear terrorism.
How can we choke off the black market in nuclear material and know-how? The Bush administration, which is given higher marks for its engagement with this issue than it is on most other international fronts, has promulgated what it calls the Proliferation Security Initiative, a set of agreements with a widening range of countries to work together to interdict nuclear materials; the seizure of centrifuge parts from a ship bound for Libya late last year was the most spectacular success of the P.S.I. so far. The administration also promised to spend $450 million to secure tons of uranium and plutonium originally manufactured by the United States and Russia. (In a speech earlier this month, Senator John Kerry said securing this nuclear material would be his highest security goal as president, and vowed to do it much faster than President Bush would.) But Russia is scarcely the only proliferation problem. Many countries do not now ban the sale of nuclear material, and ElBaradei often speaks of the need for a new regime of export controls.
Clearly the nuclear bargain must be rewritten so that states no longer have the right to make their own enriched fuel. ElBaradei has proposed that the manufacture of enriched uranium for export be placed under multinational control. The supply of nuclear fuel would be guaranteed by international agreements, giving countries like Iran no legitimate grounds to insist on a program of their own. President Bush laid out an alternative vision in a speech last February in which he proposed to vest control over enrichment in the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a 40-member community of nations with nuclear programs. ElBaradei says that the problem with allowing only some countries to sell enriched fuel is that ''the representative from South Africa'' -- a country that volunteered to surrender its nuclear program -- ''is going to say, 'How can we accept that Pakistan, India and Israel, which are rogue states so far as the NPT is concerned, are in and we are out?' '' And how will Iran be induced to dismantle its own nuclear program if others -- Brazil and Japan -- get to keep theirs?
ElBaradei insists that the differences between him and the Bush administration are matters not of ''ideology'' but of ''perception.'' But it is also the difference between a preference for universal, treaty-based solutions as opposed to ad hoc ones like the Bush administration's Proliferation Security Initiative. Nonproliferation would seem, in fact, to constitute the supreme test of the world's ability and willingness to act in concert. A proposal for a ''Strategy of Universal Compliance,'' to be issued next week by the Carnegie Endowment, gives the Bush administration credit for forcing a change in ''international threat assessments'' and in the calculus of noncomplying states, but also notes: ''The core problem is that stopping the spread of nuclear weapons requires more international teamwork than the Bush administration recognizes, and more international resolve than previous administrations could muster. . . . The United States cannot defeat these threats alone, or even with small coalitions of the willing. It needs sustained cooperation from dozens of diverse nations to broaden, toughen and enforce nonproliferation rules.''
How can we get that cooperation? Many nonweapons states complain that the U.S. wants to rewrite the rules so that they cannot produce nuclear fuel and must sign the additional protocol -- but itself flagrantly violates the commitment to pursue disarmament enshrined in the NPT. What's more, the Bush administration has begun research on a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons. Is this not, as the Iranians would have it, a double standard? ElBaradei says he believes that it is. In a speech last month before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, he said, a bit more provocatively than is his custom, ''There are some who have continued to dangle a cigarette from their mouth and tell everybody else not to smoke.''
This is not considered a serious argument inside the Bush administration. One official said that the professed concern about American disarmament was ''rhetorical'' rather than real, and in any case failed to account for the destruction of weapons and fuel stocks. (John Kerry says he would also stop development of any new nuclear weapons.) When ElBaradei came to Washington, Brent Scowcroft, the Republican sage and Bush family friend, suggested he keep a lid on the disarmament stuff, and ElBaradei was prudent enough to do so. After all, no responsible president would ever expose the United States to the possibility of nuclear blackmail. Nonetheless, just as we are unlikely to persuade Iran to eliminate its fuel-cycle program through a campaign of threats, so we are unlikely to enlist allies in erecting a new global nonproliferation order if we treat ourselves as wholly exempt from some of its central requirements.
In his ''Atoms for Peace'' speech, Eisenhower said, ''I know that the American people share my deep belief that if a danger exists in the world, it is a danger shared by all; and equally, that if hope exists in the mind of one nation, that hope should be shared by all.'' It is, perhaps, an archaic sentiment. And yet Eisenhower recognized a central tenet of a world into which the destructive power of the atom has been unleashed: as we are collectively menaced, so we must collectively act.
James Traub, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of ''The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square.''
-------- europe
French firm Areva to recycle US military plutonium for civil purposes
13 June 2004
AFP
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world_business/view/89766/1/.html
PARIS : Excess US military plutonium stocks are to be transformed by French nuclear group Areva into fuel under a program that symbolizes a new stage in French-US cooperation in disarmament.
At the request of the US government, Areva is to set up test facilities in France before building a factory in the United States.
The company, which has already received a green light from the French government, is now awaiting approval from French nuclear security regulators to build several mixed oxide or MOX treatment sites in Cadarache, southern France for demonstration.
The use of MOX, a reactor fuel made by combining plutonium and uranium, carries many operating constraints because of the fuel's delicate chemical and radiological nature.
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union built up huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, leaving the United States with weapons-grade plutonium it now wants to eliminate.
"This program cocks a snook at history. This plutonium, it was Hiroshima, now it will be used to produce kilowatts," the head of the Cadarache plant Michel Pibarot said.
When US President George W. Bush came to office in early 2001, his administration concluded that since plutonium is an energy, it should be used to generate electricity. A gram (0.035 ounces) of plutonium can produce as much energy as 1.5 tonnes of oil.
During the test period of the programme, 140 kilograms (309 pounds) of US weapons-grade plutonium is due to set sail for France in the second half of the year from Charleston, South Carolina.
MOX pellets will then be made from the plutonium before being tested in the reactors of Duke Power in the United States, according Areva executive Arthur de Montalembert.
In a second phase, Areva will then build a plant in the United States to convert 34 tonnes of plutonium into nuclear fuel. Work is scheduled to begin in mid 2005 so that the site is operational in 2008.
Only four sites in the world are able to recycle plutonium into MOX: two French plants run by Areva, a Belganucleaire factory in Belgium and a BNFL factory in Britain.
Despite persisting tensions between France and the United States, the programme is one of the few areas of cooperation, especially in military matters, between the two countries.
"Today the subjects where there is real cooperation between the French and the Americans involving military matters are not very numerous," an expert in French-US relations said.
The contracts for the programme are worth between 250 million and 300 million dollars (207 million-248 million dollars), the group said.
"In terms of the amount, it's not the contract of the century, but the strategic aspect for disarmament os clearly important," Montalembert said.
Areva executives at Cadarache are also hoping that the Russians, who are less advanced in their disarmament programmes than the Americans because of financial reasons, will chose Areva as well.
"Ideally the same factory in the United States could be built in Russia, but no Russian has come yet to give us a visit," Cadarache factory head Pirabot said.
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Weeping, Dancing Turkish Kurds Welcome Freed MPs
Reuters
By Abdurrahman Akin
Jun 13, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040613/wl_nm/turkey_kurds_dc_1
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Kurds wept and danced as they welcomed four former Kurdish lawmakers freed from prison in southeastern Turkey on Sunday and called for an end to clashes between soldiers and rebels.
Waving traditional Kurdish flags of red, green and yellow, people jammed the road to Diyarbakir, capital of the mainly Kurdish southeast, in the region's largest rally in years.
They cheered Nobel peace prize nominee Leyla Zana and three other former parliamentarians, freed by a court last week after 10 years in prison.
The European Union has hailed their release, which coincided with the launch last week of Kurdish-language broadcasts on state television and radio, a reform that is crucial to Muslim Turkey's bid for EU membership.
The festival-like atmosphere at the rally belied rising tensions in the region amid renewed fighting between Turkish security forces and rebels of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), also known as Kongra-Gel. The rebels ended a unilateral cease-fire declared in 1998 late last month.
Zana urged the PKK to extend the truce for six more months.
"This call is for Kongra-Gel: Demand your rights without harming others. We will never be the instigators of violence," she told the crowd after speaking for 10 minutes in Kurdish.
Zana and the other ex-lawmakers -- Hatip Dicle, Selim Sadak and Orhan Dogan -- were stripped of their parliamentary immunity and jailed in 1994 for ties to Kurdish guerrillas, after taking the oath of office in Kurdish.
For decades Turkey denied the very existence of its estimated 12 million Kurdish minority and courts came down hard on expressions of Kurdish identity.
CHANTS FOR OCALAN
Dicle called on the military to end its operations against the PKK and on the government to allow some 5,000 guerrillas holed up in northern Iraq to return and join Turkish society.
He also described Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK commander captured and jailed in 1999, as a potential "architect of peace."
Ocalan is reviled by most Turks. Turkey blames him for the deaths of more than 30,000 people, mostly Kurds, during the PKK's armed campaign for an ethnic homeland in the southeast in the 1980s and 1990s.
Some Kurds at the rally chanted slogans in support of Ocalan, while others wept openly during Zana's speech. Many danced to Kurdish music under the hot sun, and police kept a close watch but did not intervene.
Two Turkish soldiers died in a bomb attack on Saturday in the nearby Tunceli province after the military launched a massive operation against some PKK rebels.
The violence threatens a fragile peace that has held in the southeast since Ocalan ordered his followers from his jail cell to withdraw from Turkey and use political means to win their rights.
-------- india / pakistan
India test-fires cruise missile
BHUBANESWAR, India (AFP)
Jun 13, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040613090317.vuba9yn7.html
India on Sunday test-fired the BrahMos cruise missile developed jointly with Russia which can hit a ship with a conventional warhead, a defence official said.
The missile was launched from a testing site at Chandipur on the Bay of Bengal in the eastern state of Orissa, the official said.
The BrahMos, which has a range of 280 kilometres (173 miles), has been tested repeatedly since its first launch in June 2001.
India has said an unspecified number of countries are interested in buying the eight-metre (26-foot) BrahMos, which in modified form can also be used in air or land combat.
Rival Pakistan has tested its nuclear-capable Hatf V twice since India's new government took office on May 22.
----
Police interrogate Indian man accused of trying to sell nuclear secrets
6/13/2004
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-06-13-india-nuke_x.htm
BOMBAY, India - Police interrogated an Indian businessman Sunday after he was extradited from the United Arab Emirates on suspicion of trying to sell Indian nuclear secrets.
Dubai-based Akhtar Hussain Ahmed, 35, was taken into Indian custody on Saturday after Dubai authorities arrested him for allegedly trying to sell information to a foreign diplomatic mission, said Satyapal Singh, joint commissioner of the Bombay Police.
Bombay police were investigating reports that one of Ahmed's brothers was a nuclear scientist in India, and have asked their Dubai counterparts to send documents seized from Ahmed, Singh said.
Ahmed had been under surveillance for several years after Arab embassies he had contacted reported him to police, the official Emirates News Agency quoted Dubai police chief Lt. Gen. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.
The report said Ahmed confessed to Dubai police that he wanted to sell nuclear secrets but that he was working alone and was not part of any organized network.
Dubai police officials could not immediately be reached Sunday for comment. An Indian embassy spokesman said he was not able to comment because the embassy did not have all the details of the case.
Dubai's role as a crossroads for nuclear smuggling became known after President Bush said in a February speech that Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Dubai-based Sri Lankan businessman, was at the center of an international network spanning from Pakistan to Malaysia.
Tahir was allegedly the middleman in the network, run by disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, has confessed to selling know-how and equipment to Iran, Libya and North Korea. He was pardoned after apologizing.
Tahir fled from Dubai, the commercial hub of the United Arab Emirates, to Malaysia several months ago. He was arrested by Malaysian authorities last month.
India and Pakistan both have a nuclear weapons program.
--------
India Police Question Man on Nuke Secrets
By RAMOLA TALWAR
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 13, 2004; 9:52 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38192-2004Jun13.html
BOMBAY, India - Police interrogated an Indian businessman Sunday after he was extradited from the United Arab Emirates on suspicion of trying to sell Indian nuclear secrets.
Dubai-based Akhtar Hussain Ahmed, 35, was taken into Indian custody on Saturday after Dubai authorities arrested him for allegedly trying to sell information to a foreign diplomatic mission, said Satyapal Singh, joint commissioner of the Bombay Police.
Bombay police were investigating reports that one of Ahmed's brothers was a nuclear scientist in India, and have asked their Dubai counterparts to send documents seized from Ahmed, Singh said.
Ahmed had been under surveillance for several years after Arab embassies he had contacted reported him to police, the official Emirates News Agency quoted Dubai police chief Lt. Gen. Dhahi Khalfan Tamim as saying.
The report said Ahmed confessed to Dubai police that he wanted to sell nuclear secrets but that he was working alone and was not part of any organized network.
Dubai police officials could not immediately be reached Sunday for comment. An Indian embassy spokesman said he was not able to comment because the embassy did not have all the details of the case.
Dubai's role as a crossroads for nuclear smuggling became known after President Bush said in a February speech that Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Dubai-based Sri Lankan businessman, was at the center of an international network spanning from Pakistan to Malaysia.
Tahir was allegedly the middleman in the network, run by disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, has confessed to selling know-how and equipment to Iran, Libya and North Korea. He was pardoned after apologizing.
Tahir fled from Dubai, the commercial hub of the United Arab Emirates, to Malaysia several months ago. He was arrested by Malaysian authorities last month.
India and Pakistan both have a nuclear weapons program.
-------- iran
Mullahs with nukes
By Bennett Ramberg,
June 13, 2004
Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.iran13jun13,0,1002782.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines
IT'S BEEN nearly two years since the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) initiated efforts to determine Iran's nuclear weapons status. Iranian dissidents prompted the investigation when they revealed the revolutionary regime's secret nuclear enrichment program. The disclosure set off alarms in Washington and other capitals.
It is now evident that Iran, despite intense international pressure, will not fully divulge its nuclear enterprise. The scheduled IAEA Board of Governor's meeting tomorrow will have little impact in changing this. Rather, the time is approaching when we will have to acknowledge that international efforts to halt the mullahs' nuclear ambitions have failed.
A harbinger of Tehran's effective indignation and sham cooperation strategy to deflect international demands emerged when it contested the IAEA decision to investigate the dissidents' claims. Iran called the action "selective" and "discriminatory." It stammered that the IAEA based the decision on "false attributions," "arm-twisting at many capitals" and U.S. "partisan politics."
Feigned interest in collaboration emerged when Iran announced its "full" commitment to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT). Subsequent events belied the representation. On June 6, 2003, drawing on international inspections and new documentation, the IAEA revealed its initial findings: Iran had "failed to meet its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with respect to reporting of nuclear material, the subsequent processing and use of that material and the declaration of facilities where the material was stored."
In August, the IAEA said that Iran had increased its cooperation by providing better access to facilities and information. But the finding of high enriched uranium residues - suggesting an effort to acquire nuclear weapons material - generated concerns. Continuing reticence to release information also raised eyebrows. However, a visit to Iran in October by the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany resulted in Tehran's commitment to halt production of uranium hexafluoride, a feed material for enriching uranium, prompted hope that Tehran might mend its ways.
But November brought more serious revelations about centrifuge testing, laser experimentation and plutonium generation. This prompted the IAEA board to "strongly" deplore Tehran's failed safeguards' compliance. Despite Iran's apparent violation of the NPT, most board members resisted calls to bring the matter before the U.N. Security Council for action. Iran would be given more time to come clean. Iran fed the hope by agreeing to sign the Additional Protocol.
By the March IAEA meeting, it became apparent that Iran was stalling. True, it had provided access to military installations and new data on its enrichment program. But the IAEA expressed serious doubts over "a number of discrepancies and unanswered questions concerning the source for centrifuge components and high enriched uranium contamination uncovered on components." The findings raised the troubling question: Was Tehran close to acquiring weapons-usable high enriched uranium?
Tension between the IAEA and Iran may be coming to a head. The mullahs recently declared that they had honored their NPT commitments and the time to halt further investigations had arrived. But inspectors report yet more traces of increasingly enriched but not quite bomb-grade uranium. They have evidence that Iran continues to produce centrifuge components despite its declared suspension. Separate reports that Iran seeks to import magnets to make 4,000 centrifuges prompt further concerns.
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami recently threw down the gauntlet when he threatened to resume enrichment uranium production unless the IAEA becomes more accommodating. Ominously, the Iranian parliament also called for the abandonment of the NPT should international pressure continue.
This game of chicken presents the IAEA with a stark choice. It can continue to press Iran to pry loose the smoking nuclear gun - which is wishful thinking - or it can refer Iran's noncompliance to the U.N. Security Council for action.
Unfortunately, Iran has the Security Council over an oil barrel in the current tight energy market. Aside from rhetorical reprimands, material action from the squeamish council is unlikely. The United States normally would pick up the gauntlet. But wounded in Iraq, it will be unable to mobilize either international or domestic support for bold measures.
Britain, France and Germany could take the lead, as they tried in October. But the latter two would prefer to stay in the shadow of the American bogeyman taking the heat. Israel's response, however, is an unknown quantity.
More likely, the Iranian atomic weapons die is cast. Therefore, it's not too early to ponder strategies to prevent the nuclear Middle East from exploding.
Bennett Ramberg served in the State Department's Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs in the administration of President George H. W. Bush.
--------
U.S. Pushes Europe to Get Tougher on Iran Nuke Plans
Reuters
Sunday, June 13, 2004; 6:15 PM
By Louis Charbonneau
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38913-2004Jun13.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - Washington is pressuring France, Germany and Britain to toughen their draft resolution rebuking Iran for lax cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, whose board will vote on the text this week, diplomats said.
The Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) begins meeting on Monday. On their agenda is the agency's investigation of Iran's nuclear program and the draft resolution.
Washington says Tehran's nuclear power program is a front to make atomic weapons, but Iran denies this, insisting its ambitions are limited to the peaceful generation of electricity.
"The Americans want a deadline," a diplomat from one of the 35 nations on the IAEA board told Reuters. "A deadline would be to keep the pressure on Iran."
Another diplomat said a deadline could be used to force Iran to finally keep some of the promises it made to the Europeans in October 2003, when Tehran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment activities in exchange for peaceful atomic technology.
Washington would also like a "trigger mechanism" that would call for the board to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions if its cooperation remains sluggish.
In September 2003, the IAEA passed a resolution setting an October 31 deadline for Iran to submit a complete declaration of its nuclear program. Tehran submitted the declaration on time, though it was later shown to be incomplete.
Last week, the European trio circulated a toughly worded draft resolution that "deplores" Iran's failure to fully cooperate with the IAEA and urged Tehran to urgently "resolve all outstanding questions."
The text, to be voted on by the IAEA board this week, also "deeply regrets that Iran has not fully implemented (the enrichment suspension)...including by taking steps to produce UF6, and by continuing to produce centrifuge components."
UF6 is uranium hexafluouride, the form of uranium that is fed into gas centrifuges, machines that purify it for use as fuel in power plants or weapons. Iran insists that producing UF6 is not part of the suspension deal, but the Europeans disagree.
Iranian negotiators are pushing the Europeans to remove the word "deplores" and generally soften the text, which already has the support of most of the 35 board members, diplomats said.
DEADLINE TO STOP ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES
Valerie Lincy, an analyst at the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a U.S.-based think-tank, said a deadline would make the European draft even stronger.
"The resolution could set out a specific definition of what such activity includes and set a deadline, before which Iran must truly suspend all such activities," Lincy told Reuters.
She said the draft could go further in demanding Iran halt operations at a uranium conversion plant, which makes UF6, and scrap plans to build a heavy water research reactor experts say would yield little electricity but ample bomb-grade plutonium.
The IAEA is most concerned with two outstanding issues -- the scale of Iran's advanced P-2 centrifuge program and traces of enriched uranium the IAEA found in Tehran, which diplomats said could mean Iran was secretly enriching uranium for weapons.
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said on Saturday he hoped the IAEA board would not only resist U.S. pressure to toughen the draft resolution but would drop Iran's case from the board's agenda.
"It is not fair that Iran's case remains on the agenda for two minor issues," he said.
--------
Iran Seeks to Blunt U.N. Censure on Nukes
By GEORGE JAHN
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38890-2004Jun13?language=printer
VIENNA, Austria - Iran mixed public bluster with quiet diplomacy in a drive to soften U.N. criticism for its nuclear program. But on the eve of the 35-nation International Atomic Energy Agency conference, diplomats insisted Sunday that Tehran would be censured.
The diplomats said Iran hoped to temper the language of a draft resolution laden with negative terms for the Islamic republic's lack of cooperation with a probe by the U.N. nuclear watchdog. The draft "deplores" omissions and delays by Iran or notes them with "serious concern."
The resolution will likely be presented during a meeting of the IAEA board of governors starting Monday. The gathering will review an agency report that acknowledges Iran's granting IAEA inspectors access to sites but otherwise gives Tehran low marks in eliminating concerns about activities the United States and its allies say point to attempts to make nuclear weapons.
Iran denies the charges, insisting its uranium enrichment program - which can be used to make bombs - is geared solely to generating electricity.
Under pressure since the start of international scrutiny a year ago, Iran has suspended uranium enrichment and stopped building centrifuges, and allowed IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities without notice.
The draft resolution, written by France, Britain and Germany, urges Iran to halt operations of a plant it inaugurated in March that processes uranium into gas. The demand also calls for aborting plans to build a heavy water reactor.
But sounding a tough note, Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi insisted the government would not give up its development of the nuclear fuel cycle. Iran says it has achieved the full cycle, but is not now enriching uranium.
"We can't accept such an additional demand, which is contrary to our legal and legitimate rights," he said Saturday in Tehran.
Kharrazi also condemned the draft as "unacceptable unless changes are made so that it can be acceptable to all parties."
In Amman, Jordan, Iran's ambassador to that country accused Israel on Sunday of being behind international concerns about Tehran's nuclear program and threatened Israel with a "painful" response if it attacked Iranian nuclear installations.
"Israel is behind politicizing Iran's program for developing peaceful nuclear technology because of our positive stances regarding many issues in the region, including our support for the oppressed Palestinian people," ambassador Mohammad Irani said.
He claimed that Israel - which has never confirmed or denied having nuclear weapons - has often threatened to strike Iranian nuclear installations, "but we don't imagine they would carry out such a foolish act." An Israeli air strike in 1981 destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad before it became operational.
In Vienna, home to the IAEA, diplomats representing agency board member countries said they had heard that Iran was seeking a meeting with France, Germany and Britain to have the draft's language toned down ahead of Monday's meeting.
One of the diplomats - who like the others spoke on condition of anonymity - said that to his knowledge, no such meeting had been held in Vienna by late Sunday. But another suggested that representatives of the four nations could have met in another European capital or Tehran.
The first diplomat said small changes were made Friday to the draft including a reference to a "time element." But that fell short of U.S. hopes for a deadline on Iran to come clean or a "trigger mechanism" to allow additional pressure if Tehran failed to satisfy board demands within a given time.
"We expect at the end of the day a firm resolution acceptable to the entire board of governors," said another diplomat.
The two major IAEA concerns are contradictory, missing or withheld information on the scope of Iran's enrichment program and the source of enriched uranium found inside the country.
The latest agency report, written by IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei, says Iran inquired about buying thousands of magnets for centrifuges on the black market - casting doubt on Iranian assertions that its centrifuge program was purely experimental and not geared toward full enrichment.
On the traces of enriched uranium - which include minute amounts at weapons-grade levels - Tehran says they were not domestically produced but inadvertently imported on purchases through the nuclear black market.
But IAEA investigators have not been able to fully test that claim because Pakistan, the main source of the equipment, has blocked free access to its nuclear material. That means the agency cannot match isotope samples to the traces found in Iran.
At a closed-door meeting Thursday, IAEA officials complained that the agency has in some cases waited in vain for information from Iran on enrichment since October. They also said Iran inquired about buying "tens of thousands" of centrifuge magnets - even more than the ElBaradei report had mentioned.
Iran long has rejected U.S. allegations its nuclear program is for military purposes. ElBaradei said last month his agency had not found proof to date 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
--------
Iran Rejects Nuclear Restrictions
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37992-2004Jun13.html
TEHRAN, Iran - Toughening its stance in advance of a meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, Iran on Saturday said it would reject international restrictions on its nuclear program and challenged the world to accept Tehran as a member of the "nuclear club."
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi rejected further outside influence on Tehran's nuclear ambitions two days before the International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors meets to discuss Iran's highly controversial program.
"We won't accept any new obligations," Kharrazi said. "Iran has a high technical capability and has to be recognized by the international community as a member of the nuclear club. This is an irreversible path."
Iran has repeatedly insisted its nuclear program is geared toward generating electricity, not making weapons, but the United States and its allies say Tehran has a secret nuclear weapons program. The IAEA has wrestled with the dilemma for more than a year.
Iran has already suspended uranium enrichment and stopped building centrifuges. It has also allowed IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities without prior notice, part of the additional protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that still must be approved by parliament.
Kharrazi insisted that Iran would not give up its development of the nuclear fuel cycle, the steps for processing and enriching uranium necessary for both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Iran says it has achieved the full cycle, but is not now enriching uranium.
"That somebody demands that we give up the nuclear fuel cycle ... is an additional demand," Kharrazi said, apparently referring to demands by U.S. and European countries that Iran halt operations of a plant it inaugurated in March in Isfahan, central Iran, that processes uranium into gas. The demand also calls for aborting plans to build a heavy water reactor in Arak, another city in central Iran.
"We can't accept such an additional demand, which is contrary to our legal and legitimate rights," he said. "No one in Iran can make a decision to deny the nation of something that is a source of pride."
Iran has confirmed possessing technology to extract uranium ore, processing it into a powder called yellow cake and then converting it into gas. The gas is then injected into centrifuges for low-grade enrichment that turns it into fuel for nuclear reactors.
Uranium enriched to low levels has energy uses, while highly enriched uranium can be used in bombs.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment last year under mounting international pressure. In April, it said it had stopped building centrifuges. IAEA inspectors had found traces of highly enriched uranium at two sites, which Iranian officials have maintained was from contaminated imported materials.
Kharrazi condemned a draft resolution critical of Iran drawn up by Germany, France and Britain and being debated before the IAEA board meeting Monday which says Iran's cooperation has not been complete.
"The draft resolution is unacceptable unless changes are made so that it can be acceptable to all parties," he said.
The minister said insistence by Europeans on "very tiny issues is contrary to the spirit of cooperation." He said that by doing so, the European countries are bowing to U.S. pressure and showing a "lack of independence."
Kharrazi warned that failure in settling the debate over Iran's nuclear dossier will be a "failure for all," including Iran, Europe and the IAEA.
The minister confirmed Iran's efforts to buy 4,000 magnets needed for uranium enrichment equipment, saying the issue was blown out of proportion. He did not say where the magnets were bought.
Diplomats told The Associated Press in Vienna that Iran had acknowledged inquiring about 4,000 magnets needed for uranium enrichment equipment with a European black-market supplier and had dangled the possibility of buying a "higher number."
"If everybody is looking to settle this issue (Iran's nuclear dossier), they have to look at it in a broad outlook," Kharrazi said.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said last month his agency had not found proof to date of a concrete link between Iran's nuclear activities and its military program, but "it was premature to make a judgment."
-------- japan
Discussion of Nuclear Weapons No Longer Taboo in Japan
VOA News
June 13, 2004
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200406/200406130015.html
Japan, as the first and only nation to be the target of wartime atomic weapons, has long had what is called a "nuclear allergy." The country has vowed never to produce, introduce or possess nuclear weapons. But recently there has been debate about whether Japan should one day cure itself of that allergy and abandon its post-World War II pacifism.
It had long been taboo for any Japanese politician to discuss the possibility of Japan going nuclear, especially with the country sitting under the protection of the U.S. nuclear umbrella.
As recently as 1999, Defense Agency vice minister, Shingo Nishimura was fired for suggesting there might be nuclear weapons in Japan's future.
In recent years such comments have not been career-ending utterances. And among those making the once taboo statements are not just hawkish members of the conservative governing coalition, but some leading lawmakers in the main opposition party, as well.
The change has come in wake of what are regarded here as hostile intentions by North Korea, its nuclear weapons development program, the test firing of missiles over Japan and clashes between the Japanese Coast Guard and North Korean spy ships.
There is also a rising mood that Japan eventually might not be able to or should not rely on the American nuclear umbrella.
The director of policy studies at Japan's National Institute for Research Advancement, Akiko Fukushima, is an advocate of discussing the nuclear option.
"We shouldn't negate our option to go nuclear," said Akiko Fukushima. "But I do not see any reasonable reasons for Japan to go nuclear at this point of time. If U.S. decides not to provide nuclear deterrence to Japan then [at] that time we have to make a very difficult decision."
Some analysts say the contemporary discussion about a nuclear-armed Japan also results from the perception that countries without such weapons are not being taken seriously on the world stage. Professor Matake Kamiya teaches at Japan's National Defense Academy.
"That kind of attitude taken by major powers in the world could drastically alter the calculation in the minds of the Japanese people," he said.
Public opinion surveys have consistently indicated that around 80 percent of Japanese oppose their country going nuclear, even if the security alliance between Tokyo and Washington were to end.
When he was chief cabinet secretary, Yasuo Fukuda - a longtime confidant of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi - once commented that "depending upon the world situation, circumstances and public opinion could require Japan to possess nuclear weapons."
Experts have little doubt Japan could quickly produce its own nuclear arsenal, perhaps within a year. Japan's domestic atomic power program is based on reprocessed plutonium. Technology and capital would also not be a problem for the world's second largest economy.
Lawmaker Ichiro Ozawa, now a leading figure in the opposition Democratic Party, has previously warned if China were to be perceived as a nuclear threat to Japan then Tokyo could respond by making "several thousand" nuclear weapons, making the country an unbeatable military power.
But professor Kamiya says despite the potential nuclear threats in the region, there would be little for Japan to gain by having its own such weapons.
"For this country, even militarily, nuclear weapons actually don't bring much benefit," he said. "Because of my argument like this I have been strongly criticized by so-called right wing conservative people in this country."
Professor Kamiya and others argue if Japan turned its back on the nuclear proliferation treaty - which it ratified in 1976 - that would totally destroy its diplomatic legacy of advocating the abolition of such weapons. But there is a loophole in the treaty, allowing a signatory state to withdraw if "extraordinary events" jeopardize its "supreme interests."
Yoshihide Soeya, a professor of political science at Keio University who has been consulting on Japan's 21st century defense goals, agrees there is little point for Japan to have nuclear weapons.
"I can't think of any possibility of Japan actually going nuclear, even though I understand the topic will remain, perhaps, real in the minds of many people," he said.
Japan's government, at least behind the scenes, seems to have less of an aversion to nuclear weapons than stated in its non-nuclear principles. In recent years, secret agreements have been uncovered by researchers showing Tokyo has permitted U.S. nuclear warheads to be kept on Japanese territory and unloaded at American naval bases in the country.
This seeming contradiction can be best explained if one understands the Japanese concepts of "honne" and "tatemae", which are integral parts of social behavior here. Honne is the actual truth of a matter, which is not expressed openly to maintain tranquility. Tatemae is a kind of polite or tactical facade but without the negative ramifications in this society of what non-Japanese might consider deception.
Proponents of the nuclear option seem to be quietly biding their time awaiting changes in the geopolitical situation.
Those on all sides of the argument acknowledge raising the issue in parliament prematurely would polarize the public and paralyze the domestic political process. There is also little doubt it would also ignite a huge diplomatic row with Japan's neighbors and possibly be the catalyst for the likes of South Korea and Taiwan to join a new nuclear arms race.
-------- korea
N. Korea threatens to reinforce nuclear programme
June 13, 2004
Sunday GEO TV
http://www.geo.tv/main_files/world.aspx?id=23430
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA: North Korea on Sunday accused the Group of Eight leaders of conspiring to turn the communist state into `"another Iraq,'' and said that gives it a "strong catalyst'' to strengthen its nuclear weapons development.
The leaders of G8 industrialized countries reportedly adopted a statement this week urging North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons-related programs.
The United States and its allies are locked in a 20-month-old standoff with North Korea. Pyongyang refers to the demand that it dismantle its nuclear programs as a "gangster's logic'' aimed at disarming and then invading the isolated country.
"This is a way of forcing North Korea to disarm itself first through forcible (weapons) inspections, and looks exactly like the demand the United States imposed on Iraq,'' a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman told Pyongyang's official news agency, KCNA.
"This is aimed at creating another Iraq.'' KCNA was monitored by South Korea's national news agency Yonhap. The G8 statement on North Korea "does nothing but provide us with a strong catalyst and ample justification for strengthening our self-defensive nuclear deterrent,'' the spokesman was quoted as saying.
North Korea refers to its nuclear weapons programs as a "nuclear deterrent'' designed to protect itself from what it calls U.S. plans to unleash a "nuclear holocaust'' on the Korean Peninsula.
Washington denies such intentions and accuses North Korea of breaching agreements not to develop nuclear weapons. The nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002 when the United States accused North Korea of running a secret weapons program using enriched uranium, besides its plutonium-based program supposedly frozen under the 1994 accord.
The United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia hope to meet in Beijing next week to begin a third round of six-nation talks aimed at curbing North Korea's nuclear weapons development.
North Korea insists that it will first freeze and dismantle its nuclear facilities only if the United States provides it with economic aid and security guarantees.
-------- terrorism
Tackle the Nuke Threat
Bin Laden has called it a 'duty' for Al Qaeda to get a nuclear bomb. But policies to prevent nuclear terror have hardly changed since 9/11
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek,
June 13, 2004 (June 21 issue)
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5197531/site/newsweek/
The G8 Summit in Sea Island, Ga., produced no new cooperation on Iraq. No surprise there. The rifts over it are deep, and though the United States has changed course, it will take time before other countries jump in. What is less excusable is that there was no real progress on a crucial issue to which the G8 pays lip service: preventing nuclear proliferation.
President George W. Bush has often said that the greatest danger we face is that "the world's most dangerous people" will get their hands on "the world's most dangerous weapons." He's right. Osama bin Laden has called it a "duty" for Al Qaeda to acquire a nuclear bomb. But the truth is that our policies to prevent nuclear terror have not changed much since 9/11.
This is particularly surprising when you consider that the problem of nuclear terrorism is actually solvable. Making a nuclear bomb requires fissile materials-weapons-grade plutonium or uranium. To produce either, you need reprocessors, reactors and enrichment facilities. These are out of the reach of even a large, well-funded terrorist organization. Terrorists can get such materials only by buying them from states. So, if all fissile material around the world were locked up and monitored and no new material were made, it would eliminate the worldwide threat of nuclear terrorism.
Obviously it's easier said than done, but it can be done. We lack not the means but a clear goal and the determination to get to it. In a recent speech John Kerry proposed setting out this objective, comparing it to putting a man on the moon. Actually it would take less time and would certainly be much less expensive.
For America, the additional cost of such an effort would run about $1 billion a year. We spend $10 billion every year on a national missile defense that doesn't work. When it does eventually work, it will guard us (sort of) against the least likely means of delivering a nuclear bomb-a missile. Why not spend 10 percent of that to thwart the most likely method of delivery-a suitcase bomb?
But this is not simply an American problem. The European Union is searching for a way to play a major role in combating terrorism different from some of the Bush administration's bellicose strategies. Fine. Here is a policy that is preventive and nonviolent, and requires broad cooperation. To work, it must have several components:
- Secure the former Soviet Union's arsenal and destroy what is supposed to be destroyed. The former Soviet Union accounts for more than 90 percent of all existing fissile material outside the United States. Russia still has 20,000 nuclear missiles and enough material to make 50,000 Hiroshima-size bombs. The Nunn-Lugar program, which works with Russia to destroy or secure these materials, should be dramatically expanded.
- Stop using highly enriched uranium in research reactors. The United States and the former Soviet Union have furnished dozens of reactors around the world that are used for scientific research. Most use bomb-grade uranium as fuel. These reactors should be closed or converted so that they require non-bomb-grade uranium.
- Ban new enrichment and reprocessing. To his credit, President Bush recently proposed a version of this idea. Countries that want nuclear energy for peaceful purposes should agree to forgo enrichment and reprocessing. In return, existing nuclear exporters will provide them with the nuclear fuel they need for their production process.
- Allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to check that all states with nuclear programs have strict safeguards and controls. The case of Pakistan's A. Q. Khan, who set up a nuclear supermarket, is a scary example of what can happen without such checks.
- Prevent Iran from gaining access to these materials and reverse North Korea's nuclear program. These are the two most difficult cases. In Iran's case, Kerry proposes to call its bluff and offer it nuclear fuel. Tehran should happily accept, unless it wants a nuclear program for some reason other than to produce energy.
Even if North Korea and Iran prove intractable problems, the rest of these measures would safeguard 99 percent of the world's fissile material. This would not solve all our problems-bioterror is at least as scary. But it would take one of the greatest dangers the world faces off the table.
Ashton Carter, the Harvard expert who is John Kerry's adviser on this issue, argues that "our current path is unfocused and 'effort oriented.' We measure progress by how much we have spent, how many nukes we have secured, etc. Instead let's become 'goal oriented.' We know what the end zone would look like. Why don't we define it? How close are we to eliminating the danger of nuclear terror?" Right now, not very close.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Nuclear shell game
A smaller stockpile, but not smaller weapons
June 13, 2004
Florida Herald Tribune
http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040613/OPINION/406130429/1030
The Bush administration intends to set into motion a plan to cut America's stockpile of nuclear weapons almost in half over the next eight years. As welcome as that news is, the plan is missing a critical element -- a pledge to scuttle development of so-called mini-nukes for battlefield use.
The Department of Energy informed Congress a few days ago that the administration wants to begin eliminating weapons soon, eventually reducing the stockpile to what one official called "the smallest in several decades."
The exact number hasn't been disclosed, but Tom Cochran, an expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The New York Times that it appears the stockpile of nuclear weapons would drop from the current level of 10,000 to about 6,100.
Unfortunately, administration officials are trying to use the plan to justify a new "pit facility," where plutonium would be shaped for use in nuclear arms.
The plutonium pits, located in the heart of nuclear weapons, break down over time. The Energy Department contends a new facility will be needed to ensure the safety and effectiveness of remaining weapons.
Linton F. Brooks, who heads the National Nuclear Security Administration, says the pit facility could be smaller than originally proposed but still must be built. He expressed frustration with the administration's inability to convince some members of Congress that the facility isn't being proposed to build new weapons.
There's a very good reason for that skepticism. President Bush and others have talked repeatedly of developing "mini-nukes" that theoretically could be used to reach deep bunkers hiding weapons or outlaws like Osama bin Laden.
But there's no research indicating that these weapons could be used effectively or that their destructive power could be contained. The mini-nukes would carry roughly one-third of the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Congress should continue to push for constraints on America's nuclear program. Perhaps a convincing argument can be made that a new pit facility is needed to stabilize a scaled-back stockpile of weapons. But the Bush administration should be blocked, at every turn, from pursuing any program that might lead to a mini-nuclear arms race.
----
Funding nuclear research
June 13, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040612-105251-9793r.htm
An important, timely U.S. nuclear-weapons research program is currently in the second year of a project expected to last three years. The purpose is to investigate the feasibility of developing an earth-penetrating nuclear warhead capable of destroying deeply buried weapons of mass destruction developed and/or hidden by rogue regimes or their stateless terrorist allies. The study needs to go forward to completion. It is essential for Congress, which sliced in half the Bush administration's $15 million funding request for fiscal 2004, to fully fund the $27 million requested for fiscal 2005, the final year of the study.
Regrettably, on Wednesday a House appropriations subcommittee that is chaired by Republican Rep. David Hobson of Ohio, deleted the funds for the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. The subcommittee also eliminated $9 million in funding for researching the feasibility of a low-yield nuclear warhead of less than five kilotons. Last month, the House passed a defense authorization bill after rejecting an amendment that would have transferred funding for both projects to other areas. Meanwhile, in the Senate, Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Edward Kennedy are leading the charge against both research projects.
We can fully appreciate the distinction between nuclear and non-nuclear weapons. But we also fully understand the importance of deterrence. Thus, we heartily disagree with the House subcommittee's action and the Kennedy-Feinstein amendment in the Senate. Remember: Both of these projects are research programs, not deployment decisions. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld emphasized at a February appropriations hearing in the House, "There's no funds in here to deploy it, since it doesn't exist."
Sens. Feinstein and Kennedy argue that such research sends the wrong message to potential enemies and actually encourages nuclear proliferation. Yet recent history reveals quite clearly that the likes of North Korea and Iran have not been deterred by conventionally armed "bunker busters." In fact, the Pentagon's current nuclear arsenal contains powerful nuclear weapons that were developed to deter a superpower of the Soviet Union's caliber. Those weapons are so destructive that the United States might be deterred from using them against much smaller states. Hence, they have little deterrent value.
The purpose of the research into the nuclear earth penetrator and the low-yield "mini-nuke" is to determine if it is even possible to develop smaller, mission-specific weapons. Any subsequent deployment decision would require congressional approval. In these uncertain times, unilaterally limiting potential deterrence options is not in the security interests of the United States.
----
Capturing the Rosenbergs
June 13, 2004
By SAM ROBERTS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/arts/television/13ROBE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
HALF CENTURY after the Rosenbergs were executed as atom spies, there's really only one nagging question left about the case: Why did two seemingly ordinary people from Manhattan's Lower East Side sacrifice their lives for a distant cause when it meant orphaning the two young sons they claimed to love? What did they die for?
"Heir to an Execution: A Granddaughter's Story," Ivy Meeropol's sometimes teary 99-minute documentary film about her grandparents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, provides some answers. While still unsatisfying, they may be as definitive as we're ever going to get. (The film has its television premiere tomorrow night at 8 on HBO.)
Despite portentous newsreel narration and archival footage that morphs into modern characters and locales, "Heir to an Execution" isn't really journalism or historical documentary. Instead, it's a "Capturing the Friedmans"-style home movie: Reclaiming the Rosenbergs. Like "Capturing the Friedmans," the film refuses to issue a definitive judgment about the legal guilt or innocence of the accused. Instead, it generally gives the Rosenbergs the benefit of the doubt, by dwelling on their unalloyed idealism.
It does so less, though, than defenders of the Rosenbergs who for decades invoked largely tangential questions to justify their shrinking claim of innocence (it's now narrowed to "Julius did not steal the secret to the atomic bomb") or to suggest dismissively that he was a hapless victim of a witch hunt.
Hapless? As Ms. Meeropol and her cousin Rachel, a daughter of the Rosenberg's younger son, Robert, visit the courtroom where the couple was tried, Rachel, a civil liberties lawyer, remarks: "I can't really imagine anyone in our family being a completely hapless victim."
I asked Ms. Meeropol over coffee last week whether the on-camera revelations of Abe Osheroff - a friend (though he refers to Julius as a "drip-nose") and to this day a Rosenberg defender, but one who boasts that Julius provided the Soviets with vital specifications of an airplane propeller - persuaded her that, indeed, Julius had been a Soviet spy. She replied with the circumspection of a hostile witness.
"If he did it," she replied, "I would say, yes, that's a spy."
Let's stipulate that he did not steal the secret to the atomic bomb. Was he still an atom spy?
"I have accepted the ambiguities," Ms. Meeropol replied. Forget the ambiguities, I said. Assume that he conspired to deliver even inconsequential classified information about nuclear weapons research, would that define him as an atomic spy?
"I could accept that that could be true," she said.
Veronica Ethel Meeropol (Ivy was derived from Hi, "V") wasn't even a teenager when her father, Michael, and her uncle Robbie, who used their adoptive name, revealed publicly that they were the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. While she was mostly shielded from publicity while growing up in western Massachusetts, by the time she enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, and later when she was mobbed in Florida by elderly constituents of the Democratic congressman she wrote speeches for, she had been elevated into what she dubbed a "bizarre royalty" - descendants of the best-known martyrs of a movement spawned when capitalism appeared to have failed many Americans and communism, embodied by the Soviet Union, commanded a utopian appeal. "You had to be dead from the neck up not to be radical," Miriam Moskowitz, a defendant at a dress rehearsal for the Rosenberg trial, recalls in the film. (Unfortunately, while the film explains the motivation for radicalism, it doesn't give equal context for the government's over-reaction to the radicals. Paranoia about atomic warfare, coupled with blanket denials by pro-Soviet apologists that any communists were subversive, fueled McCarthyism - a noun that the senator himself is seen defining with beguiling disingenuousness as "calling a man a communist who is later proven to be one").
Ms. Meeropol, who is 35 and married to a film production designer and lives in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, bravely pursued the documentary despite the resistance of relatives who even now refused to be interviewed (one cousin, a software designer in California, apologizes on camera because the family abandoned Michael and Robbie after their parents were imprisoned) and despite the reluctance of potential producers, at least one of whom expressed concern about further inciting anti-Semitism. (Sheila Nevins, the HBO executive producer, was supportive; when she was a child, she carried a placard at a rally in Union Square that pleaded: "Please Don't Kill the Rosenbergs.")
The film offers few factual revelations (Michael acknowledges that the letter he wrote to President Eisenhower appealing for clemency was copied from someone's typed script) and a few flashes of irony. The Rosenbergs lived in Building G at Knickerbocker Village in apartment 11E (when Michael and Robbie visit, it's home to three generations of immigrant Chinese); Ethel referred to the apartment as "General Electric," which happened to have helped make the electric chair.
The Rosenbergs' endearing fellow defendant, Morton Sobell, his gray hair pulled tightly into a ponytail, recalls that Michael Meeropol, reflecting the family's ambivalence about the impact of any new evidence on what it wants to believe, had asked him more than once, "Do you know something I don't know?"
"Do you?" Ms. Meeropol presses gently.
Mr. Sobell, who served nearly 19 years in prison, laughs evasively, (but, as if for the record, states: "I have no private knowledge"). Then, whatever he knows privately, he reiterates his public doubts: "People ask me was he innocent and you know as much as I do."
Ms. Meeropol grew up believing the Rosenbergs were completely innocent, but had doubts even before she interviewed Mr. Osheroff. Her film might be even more powerful, if less tearful, were certain now generally established facts stipulated up front: Julius Rosenberg was a spy. He delivered valuable military and industrial secrets to the Soviets, mostly when they were our World War II allies. He recruited his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, an army machinist at Los Alamos, to gather classified information about the atomic bomb. That the Soviets had already stolen those secrets from other sources and that it was relatively minor (though confirmatory) would not have mitigated the Rosenbergs' legal guilt because they were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. Still, the government framed a guilty man. It also cynically prosecuted Ethel on flimsy evidence to bludgeon the couple into confessing and implicating other Soviet agents. To justify the death penalty, not as punishment but as the ultimate weapon to win their cooperation, the government grossly exaggerated their offense - claiming the couple had stolen the secret to the atomic bomb.
Ms. Meeropol might have learned more if she had confronted her great-uncle, David Greenglass, Ethel's brother, who lives under an assumed name and whose most incriminating testimony - false testimony, he admitted to me when I interviewed him for a book about the case - doomed the Rosenbergs to the electric chair. "What I would have wanted from him was some sign of remorse," she says. Instead she proceeds down Mr. Greenglass's suburban block, pauses briefly in front of his house, and then drives off.
"I grew up with him representing the ultimate evil," she explains. "I say in the film I'm letting go of that. I didn't go after him, not because I sympathize with him but I do see him as another victim." Still, when Ms. Meeropol asks rhetorically in the film, "I wonder if his neighbors know," you can't help but suspect that she is making sure that they do. "Maybe," she told me, "that's my own little revenge."
It is jarring to be reminded that the Rosenbergs were in their 30's - about Ms. Meeropol's age - when they were executed and, like Mr. Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, were only in their 20's when most of the spying took place. Also, that if they were alive today they would be grandparents and that some of the same policies they challenged still resonate.
"If he was trying to shore up the Soviet Union to ensure the United States wasn't the only superpower who held the potentially devastating secret," Ms. Meeropol said, "then they - and I say they because she was not the naïve housewife and mother, she would have known and believed in it too - they probably believed they were saving humanity from the destructive force of a single American superpower, and their fears have come true. The notion that if you criticize your government you're a traitor is also very similar."
Ms. Meeropol says she started off hoping to raise more questions than she could answer. She succeeded. She doesn't quite address how Julius could have been such a loving father and doting husband and still have placed his family in such jeopardy. But she does help answer that one bedeviling question: why her grandparents were willing to sacrifice themselves and abandon their children to strangers.
"I absolutely think they thought it was a gamble," Ms. Meeropol said, "that my dad and Robbie would be O.K., and that we as a family would somehow understand their actions. I do, I didn't before, but when you see how we live in our family, compared to how the Greenglasses live, in shame and fear of being exposed . . . I think they died because they believed that would be a greater legacy to leave for all of us than if they named names. I don't think they died for communism, even necessarily to make some kind of statement. It was a simple equation: they couldn't do anything else."
Abe Osheroff says their refusal to cooperate was a form of bonding, and adds, apparently without irony: "They became loyal comrades in the deepest sense of the word." Michael Meeropol goes even further, telling his daughter: "Think of your grandmother. She would have had to repudiate her marriage, basically, testify against her own husband. She would have then had to live her entire life bringing up Robbie and me having testified against our own father. She would know that someday as we got to be adults we would hate her for it."
Imagine if Julius had confessed and spent 10 years in prison, Ethel had gone free and then the family had been secreted in a witness protection program. "If your grandfather had been another David Greenglass and your grandmother had been another Ruth Greenglass," Michael says, "I have to say I'm happy I didn't lead that life."
Ms. Meeropol says that while most Rosenberg descendants remain ashamed of their heritage, she is proud of her grandparents: "Yeah, I am, for being incredibly strong in the face of death. If they were `spying' I believe they were doing it out of great love for humanity. There was nothing cynical, nothing motivated by self-interest. I can look now from our vantage point and say maybe they were myopic, but I wish I had some of their idealism."
Suppose she could ask them one question today, what would it have been? Ms. Meeropol paused. "Was it worth it?" What does she think their answer would be? "I think," she said, "it would probably be yes."
Sam Roberts, an editor at The Times, is the author of "The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case."
-------- us nuc waste
Guest Viewpoint: Nuclear waste no problem if we redefine 'safe'
June 13, 2004
Register Guard, Oregon
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/06/13/ed.col.aucoin.0613.html
When the U.S. government insists on making so many nuclear weapons that it can annihilate any country on Earth three to five times over, it would be nice if it at least cleaned up after itself after the bombs are built. But from the onset of the Atomic Age, it has not done so. Real men build bombs; they don't mop up.
At the nation's three major nuclear reservations - Hanford, Wash., Aiken, S.C., and Idaho Falls, Idaho - radioactive wastes sit in underground containers that will give way long before the deadly substances stored inside them become inert.
Some tanks are already leaking, threatening to contaminate ground water and soils well past our lifetime.
A huge debate has gone on for decades about removal and disposal of this menace. The government designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a national repository for most radioactive wastes.
But it turns out that removing the hard-to-get-at radioactive sludge at the three nuclear reservations will be massively expensive.
The problem could be avoided if Congress insisted that the price of every new weapon included the cost of cleaning up wastes from its production. The resulting sticker shock would have the additional virtue of curbing the Congress' appetite for wave after wave of exotic weapons.
But last week, the clever Senate came up with its own way to "solve" the waste problem. It supported South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham's amendment to ease clean-up requirements for underground tanks by deeming the wastes to be harmless enough to stay in place - despite scientific findings showing serious risks to the environment if they remain.
One wave of the wand, and - presto! - the threat is gone.
The vote would allow the Energy Department to reclassify radioactive sludge so that it can be covered with concrete rather than be shipped to a permanent repository in the Nevada desert.
Although the amendment was designed by Senator Graham for the South Carolina nuclear reservation, the language is likely broad enough to apply to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state along the Columbia River, where 53 million gallons of waste is stored in 177 primitive tanks.
Sixty-seven Hanford storage tanks are known to have leaked or are leaking. Tritium is known to have leached into the Columbia River, presaging a radioactive threat to fisheries and millions of residents downstream. In 1992, the mixture in some tanks became so combustible that officials worried that the cylinders might explode.
Scientists don't know precisely what's in the tanks at Hanford. Workers from the old days are thought to have tossed chemicals, oily truck parts and all manner of other debris into the tanks along with the hot stuff.
Hanford is rooted in the U.S. drive to make weapons grade material first for World War II, and later for the Cold War.
In this atmosphere, spent fuel and other wastes were regarded as a secondary nuisance, their disposal an afterthought - a pesky diversion from the real work of munitions making. At times, hasty workers even poured radioactive wastes into open, unlined pits.
"It's a witch's brew," says Robin Klein of a citizens group in Portland called Hanford Action.
That it is. But thank God Senator Graham knows how to handle it! Just redefine the problem so it's no longer a problem.
No scientific testimony was allowed on the Graham amendment. No public testimony was allowed, either.
In fact, there wasn't a single public hearing. Instead, Senator Graham slipped the amendment into a huge defense bill during a closed-door meeting from which the public and media were excluded.
Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell's attempt to remove the provision died on a tie vote, 48-48.
Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Gordon Smith supported Cantwell, but it was not enough to save the day.
Even now, as the Bush administration pushes for a new generation of nuclear munitions, it's sobering to realize that making weapons to protect us from threats abroad is endangering us here at home.
Hmm. Safety is danger: George Orwell could not have put it better.
Les AuCoin is a writer and teacher living in Ashland. He represented Oregon's 1st District in Congress for 18 years.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S. Marines Kill 80 Rebels in Afghanistan
Troops Target Taliban Stronghold
By Stephen Graham and Riaz Khan
Associated Press
Sunday, June 13, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37577-2004Jun12.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, June 12 -- U.S. Marines have killed more than 80 insurgents during a three-week assault on a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan, the military said Saturday. The tally highlights the fighting that has engulfed parts of the country's south.
"The Marines have been aggressive, relentless and successful," Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager, a U.S. military spokesman, said. "They have demonstrated that there is no refuge for the terrorists." Only two Marines have been wounded in the latest fighting, the U.S. military said.
American commanders sent about 2,000 Marines into Afghanistan in the spring, boosting the U.S.-led force to 20,000 in an attempt to put insurgents on the defensive ahead of September elections.
Insurgents have stepped up their own operations, fueling a spiral of violence that has killed more than 450 people across the country this year.
In neighboring Pakistan, Pakistani troops backed by helicopter gunships and fighter jets searched mountains and skirmished with Islamic fighters Saturday as they closed in on a cluster of suspected al Qaeda hideouts and a training facility near the Afghan border.
The offensive focused on three compounds linked to al Qaeda -- a training facility, a safe house, and the home of an alleged terror financier -- near the town of Shakai, about 15 miles west of Wana, the largest town in South Waziristan province.
On Friday, Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said troops launched the operation in response to "unprovoked firing" by foreign fighters. He said the army killed 35 insurgents on Wednesday and Thursday.
Pakistani forces used artillery and helicopter gunships Friday against rebels near Shakai, the security official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Pakistani forces met little opposition, he said.
In Kabul, Mansager said American forces were in "very close contact" with Pakistani troops about the operation and sharing information.
"We maintain a very robust presence on that portion of the border in anticipation of any anti-coalition militants that might try to escape the Pakistani army across the border," Mansager told reporters.
In Afghanistan, U.S. troops on Friday detained a bomb maker about 40 miles south of Kabul, Mansager said.
The U.S. military and international peacekeepers based in Kabul have been warning since last year that Islamic fighters are using the kind of roadside bombs that have proved so deadly in Iraq.
Seven American troops have been killed in southern Afghanistan since early May and dozens of Afghan soldiers have died in the region this year.
The Marines, based in Uruzgan, the home province of fugitive Taliban leader Mohammad Omar, called in warplanes to pound a large group of suspected fighters in nearby mountains. At least 20 people reportedly died in a clash last week.
Most of the fighting has been near Daychopan, in neighboring Zabol province. Mansager said the Marine offensive was allowing Army troops to focus on building ties with local communities across the troubled border region. Commanders said they hope this approach, which includes offering millions of dollars in reconstruction aid, will persuade villagers and tribes to turn against the insurgents and provide intelligence.
Khan reported from Peshawar, Pakistan.
-------- africa
U.N.: Sudan Forces, Militias Execute Civilians
Nima Elbagir
Reuters
Sunday, June 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38347-2004Jun13.html
KHARTOUM, June 13 - A senior U.N. official said on Sunday she had "credible information" that Sudanese forces and government-backed militias had carried out summary executions of civilians in west Sudan.
Asma Jahangir, the U.N. special rapporteur on executions, also said after visiting conflict-stricken Darfur that members of the militia, which locals accuse of looting and killing villagers, were being integrated into the armed forces.
Independent rights groups have already accused the government and militia, known as janjaweed, of carrying out mass executions in the region where rebels launched an armed uprising in February 2003.
Fighting in the remote area has affected two million people and driven 158,000 people across the border into Chad, creating what the United Nations has said is one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
"I received numerous accounts of the extrajudicial and summary executions carried out by government-backed militias and by the security forces themselves," Jahangir told reporters.
"According to credible information, members of the armed forces, the Popular Defense Forces and various groups of government-sponsored militias attacked villagers and summarily executed civilians," she said in Khartoum.
Rights groups have accused the government of arming the Arab janjaweed to drive out African villagers from their homes, in what U.N. officials have said is a campaign of ethnic cleansing. The government calls the janjaweed outlaws and denies any link.
"According to the information I collected, many of the militias are being integrated into the regular armed or the Popular Defence Forces. There is no ambiguity that there is a link between some of the militias and government forces," Jahangir said.
But she said some criminal elements had taken advantage of the conflict.
Jahangir also travelled around other areas of Sudan, including Malakal in the south. The Sudanese government is close to reaching a final peace deal with southern rebels to end a separate 21-year-old conflict in that region.
"In my report, I will forcefully stress the question of accountability as a fundamental principle in addressing violations of human rights... The government of the Sudan must make every effort to end the culture of impunity," she said.
-------- arms
UK sells WMD components to 'axis of evil' countries
By Neil Mackay Investigations Editor
13 June 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/42750
BRITAIN is now a leading exporter of components of weapons of mass destruction.
The UK has sold the components for chemical weapons to 40 countries including North Korea and Iran, both deemed part of the so-called "axis of evil".
Libya, which has only recently come in from the cold after decades of being labelled a "state-sponsor of terrorism", also bought chemical weapons technology from the UK.
Britain is also selling chemical weapons capabilities to India and Pakistan - deadly enemies whose hatred could boil over into full-scale war.
Details of the sales are contained in the government's Strategic Export Control report published on Monday. Chem ical weapons are illegal under international law and controlled under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
The products that Britain is selling are known as toxic chemical precursors (TCPs) that, when combined with other compounds, create weapons such as sarin - the nerve agent - and mustard gas.
Many of the countries that the UK exports chemical weaponry to have poor human rights records , are in the grip of brutal conflicts , and are terribly impoverished .
Two years ago, the Sunday Herald revealed the extent of the UK's sale of chemical weapons in an award-winning investigation into Britain's chemical bazaar. We revealed that some 26 countries - including Libya, Israel and Iran - were buying chemical weapon components from the UK.
The UK has since upped the sale of these components .
Following the Sunday Herald's investigation , Labour MP Ann Clwyd said she would raise the sale of TCPs with the Prime Minister and ask him to pass legislation allowing MPs to scrutinise all weapon exports.
Nicholas Gilby of Campaign Against the Arms Trade, said the UK's actions were "potentially very dangerous and destabilising".
Labour MP Paul Flynn, a critic of the invasion of Iraq, said: "The cynicism of providing weapons to both sides makes it difficult to call the UK's foreign policy 'ethical'.
A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "When we consider export licences we consider the end use as thoroughly as we can."
-------- business
BA flight crews will not stay in Saudi Arabia
breakingnews.ie
13/06/2004
http://www.breakingnews.ie/2004/06/13/story152083.html
British Airways has stopped its flight crews from staying overnight in Saudi Arabia following a series of attacks on Westerners, it emerged today.
Staff on flights from Heathrow will now leave the plane at Kuwait, while another BA crew takes the aircraft on to Saudi, according to a spokesman.
That crew will remain in the airport while the plane is refuelled, and will not stay in the country overnight, he added.
The new guidelines, which came in to force on Wednesday and affect all flights to Riyadh and Jeddah, are in reaction to a series of attacks on foreign workers in the Middle East state.
An American was shot dead in Riyadh yesterday, and another has been kidnapped.
BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers was killed and the corporation's security correspondent Frank Gardner was critically injured in a drive-by shooting in the capital on June 6.
The BA spokesman said today: "We keep our situation in Saudi under constant review, and the new schedule is in place until further notice.
"The security of our staff is paramount," he added.
-----
Speculators hope to cash in on Iraq's new dinar
The Baltimore Sun
June 13, 2004
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.dinar13jun13,0,4937383.story?coll=bal-home-headlines
Notes: Currency experts aren't sold, but some Americans -- on the Net and in Iraq -- think stability will come and make what is now nearly worthless worthwhile.
Steve Foran headed to Iraq in January for risky but lucrative work as a truck driver, running a fuel tanker on dangerous highways with a soldier riding shotgun and hopes of banking $60,000 or more for the year.
But now he thinks he has found an Iraqi payday that could dwarf his Halliburton contract.
Like thousands of other U.S. contractors and troops -- and stateside Americans drawn by Web pitches from newborn businesses with names like BetOnIraq.com -- Foran is taking a chance on the new Iraqi dinar.
Today, the colorful currency that replaced banknotes bearing the portrait of Saddam Hussein isn't worth much. A dollar will buy about 1,000 dinars -- more if you're in Iraq, fewer if you're sitting safely in the United States.
But next month? Next year? Once Iraq is a stable democracy pumping oil like nobody's business? Who can say what the payoff might be?
"They expect it to hit really big," said Foran, 29, speaking in the confidential tone of the military-base rumor mill working overtime on the future of the dinar. Home in New Jersey for a 10-day rest break, he said he has bought 6 million dinar for "a few grand" and that nearly all his contractor buddies in Iraq have similarly invested.
"If it does like they're saying," Foran said, "there's a lot of people who will leave there as millionaires."
Currency experts are less enthusiastic. The Iraq war has produced its share of desert mirages -- the absence of hoped-for Iraqi masses grateful for liberation, the missing weapons of mass destruction, the oil revenues that were to pay for reconstruction but have not materialized. The dinar boom so eagerly anticipated by Americans in Iraq and at home may be next in line, experts say.
Hitting the wall
"The only thing the Iraqi dinar is likely to hit is a wall," said Steve H. Hanke, professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University and an international authority on currencies and a currency trader.
He said he has been bombarded in recent months with e-mails from people -- many of them contractors or soldiers in Iraq -- seeking his advice on what the dinar will do. For a while, he replied with polite discouragement, but the volume grew too great to bother.
It's impossible to predict the dinar's course with certainty, Hanke said. But the most likely outcome is that a new Iraqi government, faced with crushing debt and ballooning demands, will finance the budget the old-fashioned way: by printing money. That would threaten the currency with collapse, he said.
Foran, like others who are betting on the dinar, is not deterred by such naysaying. He speaks of Iraq's enormous oil reserves, of foreign companies bringing American billions to Iraq and trading them for dinars, of the Bush administration's commitment to supporting the new government.
According to what he is hearing, if the dinar "hits" -- and Foran is thinking that the June 30 date for limited Iraqi sovereignty might be the moment -- he'll be practically a tycoon.
Foran said the word in Iraq is that a dinar could be worth as little as $1 or as much as $4. That's $6 million to $24 million for Stephen Christopher Foran, future man of leisure.
So many contractors in Iraq have joined the dinar chase that Foran is anticipating an unusual complication for Iraqi rebuilding -- an exodus of Americans with newfound dinar-trading fortunes.
"If [contractors] are millionaires, why are they going to stay in a war zone?" he asked, logically enough.
The lure of Iraqi currency might not be obvious when news dispatches from Iraq are replete with accounts of bombs and body counts.
But the dinar craze is not limited to Americans. In Pakistan, the ministry of finance has warned the public against buying dinars, and Pakistani newspapers have carried accounts of unsophisticated purchasers duped by slick traders.
Egyptian authorities have cautioned the public against hoarding what Egyptians call "Bremer dinars," for interim U.S. Administrator L. Paul Bremer III, to distinguish them from the "Saddam dinars" that they replaced starting last fall.
In the first months after U.S. forces took control of Iraq last year, the Coalition Provisional Authority was forced to take the politically embarrassing step of printing more of the old-style banknotes bearing the portrait of the dictator who had just been overthrown.
From September to January, handsome new banknotes, printed in England with the latest anti-counterfeiting features at a cost of $130 million, were flown into the country and distributed to 250 bank branches throughout Iraq. About 10,000 tons of the Hussein-adorned cash was collected and burned.
Bush administration officials promoting their achievements in Iraq often mention the currency swap.
"By all accounts," Treasury Secretary John W. Snow told a congressional committee in March, "the Iraqis have wholeheartedly embraced their new dinars, and confidence in the new currency remains strong."
In a May 5 speech in Philadelphia, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz boasted of the new currency as a victory for the new order. "More than 4.5 trillion Iraqi dinars have been exchanged, making it the most heavily traded currency in the Middle East," he said.
Wolfowitz did not add that the trade is also booming on U.S. Web sites. Put "Iraqi dinar" into Google and advertisements from a dozen traders appear alongside the search results.
The traders
At dinarbrothers.com, the slogan is: "We're so crazy, we're giving it away!" (The fine print says that although 1 million dinars are free, "all you pay is $1,500.00 dollars for next-day shipping and handling.") BetOnIraq.com has a more patriotic come-on: "You say a free Iraq could thrive? Put their money where your mouth is."
Nearly all the traders are small-time operators who order their dinars from suppliers in Jordan and add whatever mark-up the market will bear. Few have previous experience trading currency.
Call the phone number on investindinar.com and proprietor Marshall Donnerbauer answers his cell phone in Kenosha, Wis., where he is busy with his day job building swimming pools.
His Web site is upbeat on prospects for dinar appreciation. "Due to the war, the Iraq Dinar is at an all time low," the site says. "Due to the rebuilding of Iraq led by the United States, the Dinar is set to spike in price."
But on the phone, Donnerbauer, 26, who said he left the University of Minnesota three courses short of a degree in kinesiology, was more circumspect. He acknowledged that because the dinar is not a freely convertible currency, U.S. banks won't take it in return for dollars.
"Here's the problem with this investment," Donnerbauer said. "You can't exchange it in an American bank. So we have to see after June 30 what happens. Maybe the banks will start accepting it. Otherwise, somebody is going to have to go to Iraq to exchange it."
Told of the professional economists' skepticism concerning the dinar, Donnerbauer replied, "The economists have to be realistic. We have to be hopeful."
Katja Morgenstern, who works for Dinar Trading Co. in Charleston, S.C., said she got her optimism about the dinar from studying the resources of Iraq on the Web. "Not only are they sitting on untapped oil, Iraq is an exporter of figs," she said.
Jeff Pasquarella, who runs BetOnIraq.com from his home in Danbury, Conn., wrote on his Web site that "some experts say" the dinar might stabilize at 10 cents, 100 times its current value. Asked which experts he consulted, he said that in the scramble to get the business operating, "I really can't remember where I saw that."
But business is great. "It's been incredible," Pasquarella said. "I've sold 20 million dinars in the last three days."
Most of the dinar dealers are uncertain about what state and federal licensing and reporting rules apply to their businesses. But two said they have recently been cut off by PayPal, the online payment system owned by Internet auctioneer eBay.
PayPal spokeswoman Amanda Pires confirmed that the company has cut off service to some dinar traders who could not show that they were licensed as financial institutions, registered with the federal Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and in compliance with other regulations.
Hanke, the currency expert, said the dinar purchasers are playing at a highly risky enterprise that is not for amateurs.
But Foran, the Halliburton contractor, clearly has a high tolerance for risk.
He said more than a dozen acquaintances among the contractors and soldiers he has met in Iraq this year have been killed. He described driving past the wreckage of vehicles just destroyed by bombs and sitting outside his shared trailer at Camp Anaconda north of Baghdad at sunset, watching a U.S. helicopter blasting away at insurgents outside the gate.
If he loses a few thousand dollars in his dinar venture, it won't be the end of the world. But he doesn't expect to.
"My brother's a trainee broker, and he wants me to pick him up a mill" (a million dinars), Foran said. "It's not often that there's new money created."
-------- chemical weapons
Iraqi General: US Helped Us as We Used Chemical Weapons
by Aaron Glantz
(Inter Press Service),
June 13, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/glantz.php?articleid=2804
BAGHDAD (IPS) - The Iraq issue today may never have arisen if it were not for the support former U.S. president Ronald Reagan gave Saddam Hussein.
Reagan died Saturday June 5 in his Los Angeles home.
Reagan's two terms as President correspond roughly to the Iran-Iraq war, the longest conventional war of the 20th century.
Saddam Hussein invaded Iran on Sept. 22, 1980 with the stated goal of gaining control of the Shatt al-Arab, the river that has formed a border between Iran and Iraq, and which would give Iraq better access to the Persian Gulf.
The U.S. government was then interested in containing Iran, which had just become one of Washington's major enemies after the Islamic Revolution lead by Ayatollah Khomeini. U.S. hostages had been taken, and Ronald Reagan had just been elected partly on the strength of criticizing President Jimmy Carter's inability to free them.
"America and Saddam thought the same way at that time, because America wanted to destroy the revolution in Iran," retired Iraqi Brigadier-General Zekki Daoud Jabber told IPS in an interview in his Baghdad home.
When Reagan was President, Gen. Jabber was in charge of communication and radar for the Iraqi military. Almost from the beginning of the conflict, U.S.-manned AWACS aircraft leased to Saudi Arabia were used to relay intelligence to the Iraqi military.
"It was very important to us," Gen. Jabber told IPS, "because it allowed us to know where Iran's planes were; where they would strike."
More significant assistance for Saddam's regime would come later, but it took Reagan some time to arrange that.
Reagan took the first step in November 1983 when he removed Iraq from the U.S. government's official list of "nations that support international terrorism." That opened the door to full diplomatic and economic cooperation between Iraq and the United States.
The next month he sent an emissary to Baghdad bearing a personal letter for Saddam. That emissary was none other than current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
A declassified official note at the time read: "Saddam Hussein showed obvious pleasure with the President's letter and Rumsfeld's visits in his remarks."
Rumsfeld also met Saddam's foreign minister Tariq Aziz. According to a State Department memo made available by the National Security Archives in Washington, Rumsfeld told Aziz: "The United States and Iraq share many common interests," and that the Reagan administration had a "willingness to do more" to "help Iraq."
In 1984 Tariq Aziz, now under arrest after being on the list of Iraqis most wanted by the U.S. administration, traveled to Washington and met Ronald Reagan at the White House. Following that meeting, the United States made its intelligence in the Gulf available to Iraq on a regular basis, and set up direct links between the CIA and the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
Through this time the Reagan administration largely ignored reports that Saddam Hussein was using chemical weapons against the Iranian army and against domestic Kurdish insurgents.
"While condemning Iraq's resort to chemical weapons," a U.S. government press release read, "the United States finds the Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of Iraq to be inconsistent with accepted norms."
Jabber says the Reagan administration never seriously tried to stop Iraq using chemical weapons. "Everything we did was checked with America," he said. "They knew our policy was to use chemical weapons on the Iranian army when they entered our territory. We told them that and they continued to help us."
As the war dragged on, Saddam's tactics became increasingly more brutal. He launched al-Anfal in northern Iraq, a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing against his own Kurdish population, which - tired of Saddam's oppressive rule - was siding with Iran. That campaign left tens of thousands of Kurds dead. Hundreds of thousands were led out of their villages at gunpoint, and their homes bulldozed behind them.
"I remember very well," recalls Rafat Abdel Mohammed Amin, mayor of Benslawa, a Kurdish refugee camp outside Arbil in northern Iraq. "They came one morning, Saddam's soldiers. They brought the bulldozers to destroy the house the moment we left it. Then they gave us a tent to live in. We were completely surrounded by check-points of the Iraqi Army."
The Reagan administration barely took note of the Anfal campaign. While U.S. forces did nothing to protect Iraqi Kurds, they began to fight directly with Iran. On October 8, 1987 U.S. warships destroyed two Iranian patrol boats in the Persian Gulf. Then, on April 18, 1988 U.S. warships blew up two Iranian oil rigs, sank a frigate and destroyed an Iranian missile boat.
Amin is forgiving. "The U.S.A. supported Saddam because they thought this relation with Saddam would benefit them. Every country does this. Then they changed their mind. They wanted to remove Saddam, so they started a war against him."
But memories of the Reagan administration's support for Saddam linger in northern Iraq where 150,000 Kurdish refugees still live in camps.
Seventeen years after Saddam Hussein gassed her home in Hallabja, packed mud and a canvas tarp still serve as the roof of Aftow Khafood's home in Benslawa refugee camp. "We would like to improve our situation," she says. "When it rains, we are afraid our house will collapse over our heads. We want to return to our homes and live like others in normal houses."
As the eulogizing of President Reagan pours in, Khafood says the only international help she has got has come from the United Nations, which has provided her family with toilet facilities and 200 cinder blocks, which she stacked into makeshift walls.
----
Army Withholds Chemical Attack Antidote
Army Withholds Antidote for Terrorist Chemical Attacks From U.S. State, Local Emergency Teams
The Associated Press
June 11, 2004
http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20040611_181.html
WASHINGTON - A New York City police department physician thinks she has found a promising antidote for emergency workers to use if terrorists launch a chemical weapons attack, but the federal government won't let the city buy it even though the U.S. Army can.
The product, Reactive Skin Decontamination Lotion, was developed by the Canadian military years ago, won Food and Drug Administration approval in 2003 and is sold in other NATO countries for neutralizing sarin, mustard gas and other chemical agents.
It is being tested by the Army. But the companies that make it aren't permitted to sell it or even advertise it to state and local governments in the United States.
"Right now they have no product to decontaminate people other than soap and water," said Phil O'Dell, president of O'Dell Engineering, a Canadian-based company licensed by the Canadian government to sell the lotion. "There is only one FDA-approved. It's the RSDL. These first responders correctly have been trying to buy RSDL since FDA approval."
Dr. Dani Zavasky, deputy medical director for the New York Police Department's counterterrorism bureau, thinks the antidote is promising and wonders why her agency cannot buy it.
As described by the FDA at the time it approved it for the Army in April 2003, a lotion-soaked sponge is packaged in a special foil pouch that people can carry, ready to rip open and wipe on any exposed skin as soon as possible after exposure to a chemical attack.
Zavasky said she heard about the antidote from Marines, not from the Army or the Homeland Security Department, whose duties include tipping off state and local governments to new anti-terrorism technologies.
"I'm not aware of any substance other than this out there that has been used for so long by others that has this benefit," Zavasky said. "I've been hearing about it for a year and a half now and still it's not widely available."
The Army says it wants to do more testing on issues such as whether the lotion is safe to use with bleach, before it making it standard issue for its troops or letting police, firefighters and other first responders buy it.
"The manufacturer will have to be patient. Until the compatibility with bleach solutions is determined and can be clearly defined, we can't field it," said Maj. Gary Tallman, an Army spokesman. "It wouldn't be proper to field it to our war fighters and our first responders."
In the United States, the Army rather than O'Dell Engineering obtained the FDA's approval, meaning O'Dell cannot sell it to state and local governments without Army permission. But that doesn't preclude other federal agencies from trying to bring the drug to first responders.
Homeland Security Department spokesman Kirk Whitworth said the agency doesn't comment on specific products but is "committed as a department to speeding the access to the most effective products available."
Frustrated by the delay, O'Dell Engineering and its U.S. business partner, New York state-based E-Z-EM Inc., have started lobbying lawmakers and the Army.
"The companies are all part of the group that are approaching their members of Congress, number one to educate them about this issue and number two to give them their spin on it and basically say if we don't produce this in the United States, they're going to produce this overseas," said James Albertine, a Washington lobbyist coordinating the campaign.
The lobbying is paying off: At least two Republicans whose constituents include companies involved in the making of RSDL Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and New York Rep. John Sweeney have written the Army.
The Army could be at least two years away from buying RSDL in significant quantities.
That time lag could force companies that make RSDL ingredients to shut down or scale back their assembly lines, raising RSDL's cost or making it hard to produce large quantities quickly, said Tony Lombardo, chief executive of E-Z-EM, a health care company involved with the lotion.
Lombardo estimates the product, packaged in a pouch that can treat one person, would cost roughly $20 to $22 per pouch.
E-Z-EM and O'Dell Engineering said the product has been used safely in several countries, including NATO allies, for years and that they are considering seeking FDA approval themselves to market the lotion to first responders.
J.R. Thomas, director of the Franklin County Emergency Management Agency in Columbus, Ohio, past president of the International Association of Emergency Managers, said he wasn't aware of RSDL.
"That's one of our big beefs as local emergency management people, is we need to make sure there's a good wave of communication between the federal government, the states and the locals," Thomas said. "Not only policy but also these materials that are coming through the pipeline. Because we don't know what's good and what's bad."
Fire Chief Joe Wallin of Minnetonka, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb, said he too never heard of RSDL, but questions whether many communities would buy it when soap and water can remove chemical agents from many people.
The NYPD's Zavasky said that while removing contaminated clothes and using soap and water works, the lotion would be useful after showering to neutralize any chemical agent that penetrated the skin.
Army: O'Dell Engineering:
-------- europe
European voters batter governing parties over widespread grievances: Iraq, economies and EU
By ROBERT BARR
Associated Press Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38675-2004Jun13.html
LONDON (AP) -- Voters in European Parliament elections -- having already punished leaders in Britain and the Netherlands for getting involved in Iraq -- turned their ire Sunday on German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac, Europe's leading opponents of the conflict.
The 25-nation vote, which ended with 19 nations voting Sunday, also revealed anxieties about an issue close to home: the newly expanded European Union itself.
The massive democratic exercise came at a crucial time in the development of the EU. The bloc just added 10 members, largely from Eastern Europe, and leaders hope to agree on a new EU constitution later this month.
Schroeder's Social Democrats took a bashing Sunday, with their share of the vote falling to 21.6 percent compared with 30.7 percent five years ago, Germany's ARD television exit polls indicated. The big winners were the Christian Democrats and their Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union, who were projected to take 45.3 percent of the vote.
Schroeder's popularity has waned under the pressure of unemployment above 10 percent and his drive to trim social programs. "We can't gloss over the result -- we have taken a clear defeat," said Klaus Uwe Benneter, general secretary of Schroeder's party. Christian Democrat leader Laurenz Meyer said the result showed that "people want policies that ensure work and growth."
In France, Chirac's conservative Union for a Popular Movement, with about 16.5 percent of the vote, finished a far second behind the Socialist Party, which garnered 30 percent of ballots cast, according to the Sofres polling firm.
Polls indicated that many voters were angry about Chirac's reforms of pensions and other social programs.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair was humbled Thursday in local government elections held at the same time as the euro poll, in which his governing Labour Party fell into third place. Some party officials said they feared they might lose the next national election, expected next year.
"Our job is to keep our nerve as Tony says, to get our case across, because the exit polls show us that health and education and jobs and the economy are still the issues that people are concerned with," Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott said Sunday. "When we come to the election they will dominate."
Iraq was also an factor in The Netherlands, where the deployment of 1,400 troops with the U.S.-led coalition was a key issue in Thursday's vote. Preliminary results showed gains for leftist opposition parties at the expense of the ruling coalition government. Nonetheless, the government announced Friday that it was extending the deployment for eight months.
The Iraq war split Europe, with Blair, Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar strongly backing the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein. Voter backlash on Iraq after the deadly train bombings in Madrid already cost Aznar his job, and Spain's new prime minister, Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, hoped for a strong result to dispel the belief that he won power merely on a protest vote.
Polls in Italy pointed to a drop in support for Berlusconi, who sent 3,000 Italian troops to help in rebuilding Iraq. Most Italians opposed the war.
Portugal's main opposition Socialist Party, which has attacked the conservative government over its unpopular support for the Iraq war and its patchy economic record, also was looking for a clear victory.
Anxiety about EU expansion and the growing power of EU institutions was an issue in several countries.
The U.K. Independence Party, which advocates a British withdrawal from the union, was expected to poll strongly
The Czech Republic's opposition Civic Democratic Party, which campaigned against giving up too many powers to the EU, was projected to win nine of the nation's 24 European seats, while the governing Social Democrat/Christian Democrat coalition was projected to win five.
"The anti-integration parties won," said Czech Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla.
-------- iraq
Iraq President Won't Destroy Abu Ghraib Prison
Reuters
Sun Jun 13
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040613/ts_nm/iraq_usa_prison_dc_1
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Interim Iraqi President Ghazi Yawar on Sunday said he had no plans to destroy the Abu Ghraib prison despite an offer by President Bush to tear down the jail where U.S. troops abused inmates.
Asked if he would tear down the prison, Yawar told ABC's "This Week," "No. Why? It's a prison that we spent more than $100 million building."
He acknowledged the prison was a symbol of the repressive regime of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, but said it would be unwise and reactionary to destroy all such symbols, given the high cost of rebuilding Iraq.
"We need every single dollar we have in order to rebuild our country instead of demolishing and rebuilding," he said.
Bush last month said the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad would be torn down, if the Iraqi government approved, and the United States would fund the construction of a modern, maximum security prison.
Photographs and videotapes of American soldiers sexually and physically abusing and humiliating Iraqi inmates at the prison have seriously undermined U.S. efforts in Iraq.
The Pentagon last week said it would widen a probe into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners to include actions of the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld requested that autopsies be conducted when detainees die.
Yawar said the new Iraqi government would assume control over the Abu Ghraib prison when the United States hands over power on June 30. "We have to start taking care of all our entities," he said.
--------
Another Iraqi Official Is Killed; At Least 12 Die in Car Blast
June 13, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13CND-IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 13 - Gunmen killed a senior Education Ministry official today and a powerful car bomb exploded in a neighborhood in southern Baghdad killing at least 12 Iraqis, 4 of them police officers, and wounding 13, officials said.
Insurgents also detonated a car bomb in the nearby town of Taji, killing an American soldier and wounding two others. In an exchange of small-arms fire, soldiers killed one attacker, a military spokeswoman said.
The assassinated official, Kamal al-Jarah, 63, the cultural affairs officer for the Education Ministry, was attacked as he left his home in the neighborhood of Ghazaliya, a Sunni-dominated area in western Baghdad. He died later at Yarmouk Hospital.
The assassination came a day after gunmen shot and fatally wounded Bassam Salih Kubba, a deputy foreign minister. Officials of the interim government were named by the United Nations on June 1, and a wave of assassinations appears to have begun in advance of the transfer of limited sovereignty on June 30.
Two senior police officers escaped ambushes on Saturday with minor injuries. Insurgents sprayed a two-car convoy carrying Maj. Gen. Hussein Mustafa Abdul-Kareem, head of the Iraqi border police, as he traveled on a Baghdad highway, according to news agencies. Maj. Gen. Majeed Almani Mahal, a police official, was ambushed later in the day in the restive town of Baquba, 35 miles northeast of the capital.
The deadly Baghdad car bombing today exploded near a sewage treatment plant, an American military spokeswoman said.
Some two hours later, the blackened shells of three cars sat on the east side of the street, near a sedan with a shattered windshield and bloodstains on the hood. Another wrecked car sat on the median. Bits of metal littered the roadway. American soldiers and Iraqi policemen turned traffic away from the scene.
A series of other ambushes and killings were reported by news agencies today.
A geography professor at the University of Baghdad, Sabri al-Bayati, was fatally shot after leaving the campus of the college of literature in western Baghdad.
In the northern oil-rich city of Kirkuk, a 52-year-old district official, identified as Dalil Jabir, was shot eight times late Saturday in his home, according to Hussein Allawi, a police officer. Mr. Jabir had moved to Kirkuk as part of a program started by Saddam Hussein to flood the area with Arabs and lower the percentage of Kurds in the population.
Sheik Iyad Kurshid Abdel Razzak, a Sunni Kurdish religious leader, was gunned down by attackers at his home in a Kurdish neighborhood on Saturday, Col. Adel Ibrahim of the police said.
Violence occasionally flares up between the Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen who vie for control of the city.
Two Iraqi men working for Al-Iraqiya, an American-financed television station, were killed on Saturday near the Syrian border, their colleagues said. The victims were Abdel Karim al-Haidary, a television technician, and Jawad Qazem, a driver.
Intense fighting continued in the Shiite slum of Sadr City in northeastern Baghdad. Six people were killed in overnight battles between American soldiers and a militia loyal to rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. At least two of the victims were insurgents. There were no details on American casualties, if any.
A an unnamed hostage mediator told news services today that a Turk and an Egyptian who had been kidnapped by insurgents had been freed. Many foreigners are still being held hostage.
Mr. Jarah, the slain Education ministry official, was in charge of contacts with foreign governments and the United Nations. The Foreign Ministry blamed loyalists of Saddam Hussein for the killing, news services reported.
"These assassinations are an attempt to stop the march of Iraq toward complete sovereignty," Industry Minister Hakim al-Hasni told Al-Arabiya television, The Associated Press reported. "They are not a resistance because they are resisting their own people. They are killing the highly qualified people. What kind of a resistance is this?"
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," said American forces would "try to defeat these murderers," but he acknowledged that "it's hard to protect an entire government."
The assassinations of the Iraqi officials underscored the dismal security situation in Iraq, especially in relation to Iraqis who are seen by insurgents as collaborators with the American-led occupation. Occupation officials have said the guerrilla war is likely to intensify as some powers are transferred to the Iraqis on June 30.
"There are some people who will be out to test the new Iraqi government, the sovereign Iraqi government, to see how durable it is, how capable it is," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces, said at a news conference.
Hajim al-Hassani, the minister of industry, said in an interview with the Qatar-based television network Al Jazeera that he believed Mr. Kubba was killed because of his role in the new interim government, not because of his past work with Mr. Hussein's government.
The Adhamiya neighborhood, a stronghold of Mr. Hussein's, remains turbulent after fierce battles there between American soldiers and insurgents in April. Many Sunni Arabs who had been supporters of Mr. Hussein and now feel disenfranchised under the American-led occupation live there. At Friday Prayers at Abu Hanifa Mosque, which serves the neighborhood, an imam called for former officers of the Hussein-era military to join the insurgency.
Violence has also continued against foreign civilians in Iraq.
A Lebanese diplomat said on Saturday that insurgents had killed a Lebanese contract worker and two Iraqi colleagues who were kidnapped on Thursday in Baghdad, Reuters reported.
The kidnappers had slit their throats and dumped their bodies on the road between Ramadi and Falluja, a town about 30 miles west of the capital that has been a center of unrest in the insurgency against the American-led occupation.
Seven Turks who had been abducted in Falluja five days ago, however, were released on Saturday, a Turkish diplomat said.
In late April, the Marines gave up control of Falluja to a militia composed partly of insurgents and loyalists to Mr. Hussein, and the city has since become a haven for anti-American forces.
--------
Iraqis Start to Exercise Power Even Before Date for Turnover
June 13, 2004
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13HAND.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 12 - With less than three weeks to go before sovereignty returns to Iraq, American and Iraqi officials are saying that much of the transfer has already happened.
The new interim Iraqi government has been formed, the old governing council has been dissolved and the majority of the ministries, including some crucial ones like oil, transportation and foreign affairs, have been turned over to Iraqi management. Meanwhile, both American advisers and Iraqi leaders said their roles had already shifted, with Iraqis running day-to-day affairs and Americans dispensing advice - and dollars.
Walid Saleh, planning director for the Water Resources Ministry, said his ministry used to be controlled by a team of six American water experts. Now, Mr. Saleh said, these advisers have become "consultants."
"They work for us," Mr. Saleh explained. "They are very good technicians and they give us expertise. But we make the decisions."
The United States will continue to steer Iraq through its control over the $18.4 billion reconstruction budget and the presence of 140,000 American troops, who are struggling to end the insurgency.
On Saturday, a Foreign Ministry official of the newly named government was assassinated. [Page 26.]
[On Sunday, a senior official in Iraq's education ministry, Kamal al-Jarrah, was shot and killed in Baghdad, a ministry official said, according to Reuters. Mr. Jarrah, the director-general for cultural relations, was attacked by gunmen as he left his house and died later in a hospital, the official said.]
Besides the money and troops, a large United States Embassy is being built on the grounds of the occupation authority in central Baghdad, essentially to serve as a shadow government. Yet the process that has been unfolding, with Iraqi leaders taking control of government operations and American advisers receding into the background, provides the clearest preview yet of what the American-Iraqi dynamic will be like after June 30.
On that day, in an elaborate ceremony that is still in the planning stages, L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, will probably present a written declaration to the chief of Iraq's judicial council recognizing the nation's sovereignty and formally ending the occupation. After that, the two countries will resume diplomatic relations, a process that usually takes the form of an exchange of letters between heads of state.
In renovated government buildings and offices that smell of fresh paint, the American-Iraqi relationship is taking a fundamentally new shape, one that is sure to be tested by the pressures to provide security and to set up a legislature and judiciary. So far, the political focus has been on the executive branch, selecting the president, the prime minister and a cabinet of 31 ministers.
In the days before June 30, both Iraqis and Americans are eager to demonstrate how independent Iraq already is. "June 30 will not be some magical date when Iraqis suddenly assume authority," said Dan Senor, an American adviser. "The process is already well under way."
American advisers say they have no more major decrees to issue. All the substantial political changes have been put in place. Several senior advisers to the Iraqi ministries are even leaving the country before the June 30 ceremonies because they say their work is done.
"June 1st was the big event," said one American official, referring to when the new interim Iraqi government was announced, with the top leaders negotiated by the United Nations and United States. "At that moment, there was something palpable," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "A bunch of us were saying to ourselves, `It's over now, it's time to let go.' "
Marc Sievers, a State Department official and senior adviser to the Iraqi foreign affairs ministry, said Iraqis recently chose diplomats to serve in the nation's 47 embassies. "We were shown the list, we weren't asked," Mr. Sievers said. "That's a sovereign decision."
It is also a dramatic change from six months ago, Mr. Sievers said, when he would bring tasks to the ministry, "and they would essentially ask me what they should do."
Mufeed al-Jazairi, the minister of culture, said that ever since a formal "sovereignty ceremony" last month, complete with songs, speeches and cake, his ministry, with 2,300 employees, had been operating independently from the occupation government.
"I am the boss," Mr. Jazairi said. "I am deciding about everything."
Other ministers, though, concede that the United States will continue to play a big role in Iraq. The question is, how big?
"Will there be obstacles?" asked Bakhtiar Amin, the new human rights minister. "Will they be in my way? I don't know. But I'm not worried. The way I see it, I wouldn't be sitting in this office if it weren't for the Americans."
With most of the crucial political decisions resolved, Iraq's tense security situation remains the greatest concern swirling around the June 30 date. Mr. Senor and other officials said a large terrorist attack was likely. "We're going to be tested," Mr. Senor said.
In the last few weeks, American military commanders have been pushing to field as many Iraqi forces as possible. During a recent tour of a military base in Taji, Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton ticked off the current Iraqi security staff: 92,000 police officers, 74,000 facility guards, 25,000 civil defense soldiers, 17,000 border guards and 7,000 army soldiers.
"By this point, we have met or exceeded most of our goals in terms of numbers," General Eaton said, though he acknowledged that the quality of the forces was not what it should be.
After June 30, Iraqi and American forces will continue to serve with each other and under American command, though the finer points of the relationship have not yet been worked out.
Meanwhile, some security issues continue to be problems.
In Falluja, in the heart of the Sunni triangle, masked insurgents have returned to the streets despite a celebrated agreement for United States troops to pull out of the city and for an all-Iraqi force to restore order. In Najaf, in the south, Shiite militiamen loyal to the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr attacked a police station and burned eight police cars in the last week, despite two truce agreements.
The process of making ministries autonomous began in March. But it seems to be a sprint to the finish, with ministries being turned over nearly every day now as American officials take an increasingly low profile.
There is no better evidence than Mr. Bremer's schedule in his final days. A veteran diplomat who came to Baghdad more than a year ago and quickly patented the fad of wearing business suits and combat boots, he has gone from signing orders and handing out decrees to dispensing advice and saying goodbyes.
"I'm counting on you to give me your long-lost recipe for fesanjoon," Mr. Bremer said in a recent meeting with one of Iraq's new vice presidents, referring to a favorite local dish of chicken, pomegranate juice and walnuts. When the vice president, Ibrahim Jafari, promised he would, Mr. Bremer laughed and said, "Oh, yeah, I've heard it before - promises, promises."
Mr. Bremer has been appearing in public much less. At the swearing-in of the new government, Mr. Bremer sat in the audience, in the second row. When it came time to announce the new militia policy last week, even though it was Mr. Bremer who essentially wrote the policy, it was Iyad Allawi, the new prime minister, who announced it.
"We want people to get used to the idea of him leaving," said one senior American official who asked that his name not be used. "Basically, we want Bremer to fade away."
Some Iraqi politicians who have worked closely with Mr. Bremer said that behind the scenes he was still dominating. Raja al-Khuzai, a member of the governing council, the advisory body that was dissolved when the interim government was announced, said she had once counted herself among Mr. Bremer's friends. But last month, Dr. Khuzai said, Mr. Bremer alienated her when he intervened in a dispute over choosing the new Iraqi president. The council favored Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar; Mr. Bremer wanted Adnan Pachachi.
According to Dr. Khuzai and other council members, when they gathered for a vote, Mr. Bremer stepped into the council chambers and told them he would not honor their choice.
"He told us, `You do not represent the Iraqi people,' " Dr. Khuzai said. "I was shocked by this. Two members of this council have been murdered. All of us have received death threats. And Mr. Bremer told us we don't represent Iraqis."
Mr. Bremer declined to be interviewed. His spokesman, Mr. Senor, took issue with Dr. Khuzai's account, saying that Mr. Bremer's standard explanation was always that United Nations officials would pick the Iraqi leadership after meeting with multiple Iraqi organizations, including the governing council.
As it happened, the council's choice for president won.
But Dr. Khuzai's hard feelings against Mr. Bremer linger. "He used us, and now that he is finished with us, he will throw us away," Dr. Khuzai said. "I used to say I would cry when Mr. Bremer left Iraq. But not now. I will not miss him."
Dexter Filkins and James Glanz contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Road for Relief Team Is Gantlet of Enemy Fire
June 13, 2004
By MICHAEL KAMBER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13CIVI.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 12 - On June 6, Lt. Eduardo Plascencia was on an assignment to improve relations between American forces and Iraqis in Baghdad's sprawling Sadr City slum. Though his mission was civil affairs, he wasted no time on pleasantries.
As a convoy of armored vehicles bristling with machine guns idled nearby, the lieutenant grabbed a yellow bag packed with food and detergent from his Humvee and ran to a nearby house. He thrust the bag into the hands of a pleasantly surprised homemaker, sprinted back and roared off with the convoy.
"If we stay anywhere more than five minutes, they start shooting at us," Lieutenant Plascencia said. The barrel of his gun was still warm from a firefight just minutes earlier.
On his previous stop on a relief mission, the lieutenant, a 14-year Army veteran from Las Cruces, N.M., had been inquiring about conditions at a local power station when a flash burst from a nearby rooftop. With a whoosh, a rocket-propelled grenade screamed over troops keeping an uneasy watch and exploded 30 yards away. As they scrambled for cover, Lieutenant Plascencia began firing his M-4 rifle at the attackers. Then he gathered his troops, ran for the armored vehicles and escaped into the afternoon traffic.
"These guys are not like a normal enemy," he said later. "They hide between buildings," he added. "You've got an instant to shoot and make sure it's not a civilian."
As the leader of civil affairs for Company A of the Second Battalion, Fifth Cavalry Regiment, First Cavalry Division, Lieutenant Plascencia oversees projects costing $10,000 or less in the Commander's Emergency Response Program. "They're small, quick visceral projects where we can say, `Hey, we're doing something for you,' " he said.
Sadr City is the hottest battleground in Iraq, and Lieutenant Plascencia's task may be one of the most thankless and dangerous in the country. Nine hundred Iraqis have been killed in Sadr City in the last three months, and last week two roadside bombs here claimed the lives of six American soldiers. The quadrant of the impoverished and hostile slum that Lieutenant Plascencia oversees houses about a million people.
The lieutenant and his team, Sgt. Abdullah Clark and Specialist Paul Loza, were first trained as an artillery fire support team, and that is still their official designation. "They said the fighting was going to be over when we got here, so they retrained us as a civil affairs team," he said.
The training was not uncommon. The Coalition Provisional Authority, to be dissolved on June 30, has put scores of infrastructure and relief projects in the Army's hands. Its ability to carry them out amid deadly attacks may determine the longevity of an insurgency fueled partly - and paradoxically - by frustration with the pace of reconstruction.
Sergeant Clark recalled that in the team's first week in Sadr City in late March, "everyone was cheering."
"Then the mood changed overnight," he said, referring to an April 4 ambush in which Alpha Company sustained about 30 casualties, including 5 deaths.
Soon, routine missions became complex and dangerous. The team, which had traveled the area in Humvees that were often unarmored. added two 25-millimeter cannon-equipped Bradley fighting vehicles, and began using armored Humvees.
Still, the artillerymen identified their first big project, two garbage-filled parks. "Kids here love soccer, so we decided to put up goal posts and fence the parks in," Lieutenant Plascencia said.
The team relied heavily on Rhiad Jasmine, a interpreter and Sadr City resident who found contractors and solicited bids. Then Mr. Jasmine and another interpreter, Ali Nasser, both committed members of the team, were fatally shot as they drove to the base. Both had been warned against working for the Army.
Other interpreters were found, and the job progressed. Today, Lieutenant Plascencia points to the soccer fields as a success.
He can also point to spruced-up traffic circles, an occasional park and some repainted schools. But 14 months into the occupation, Sadr City is still characterized chiefly by grinding poverty, filth and ubiquitous posters of the anti-American Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Sewage runs in rivulets and gathers in festering ponds, fires burn on trash-strewn streets and jobless men linger outside shops darkened by blackouts that last four of every six hours.
"Services have been broken here for some time," said Capt. Jeff Hembree, director of civil military operations for the battalion. "The infrastructure can't support the population, rebuilding it is a massive undertaking."
Captain Hembree trained Lieutenant Plascencia's team and oversees Operation Iron Broom, a large cleanup mission in Sadr City, and other multimillion-dollar jobs. A $40 million sewer rebuilding project is set to begin next month, a $7 million road reconstruction project is under way and distribution of 300 concrete garbage receptacles is to begin in a few weeks. By rebuilding generating stations Captain Hembree expects that by December electricity will surpass prewar levels.
But residents seem to know little of such efforts, and Mr. Sadr is winning the public relations war. "The reconstruction plan was not communicated, or understood, as effectively as we would like," Captain Hembree said. "The main method of communication here is through the mosque; we can't go into mosques and start putting our message out."
Two days after the firefight at the power station, Lieutenant Plascencia and his team went out again, but the streets were quiet. With them was Staff Sgt. Joe Smith of the 345th Psychological Operations Company. A crowd gathered, and Sergeant Smith fielded questions and explained that the sewers and electricity were being worked on. "You got to tell them to stop shooting at us," he told the crowd. "We can't fix anything if they're shooting at us."
Some people listened, others laughed at the Americans. "For one year, we get promises and nothing more," one man shouted in Arabic.
Lieutenant Plascencia's team checked in at a police station and a health clinic, taking notes and speaking at length with Iraqis. "This one went well," he said he thought. Cars and donkey carts jockeyed on the street; shop owners chatted in front of their stores. But suddenly there was an orange flash, and a blast knocked the lieutenant hard to the left of his armored Humvee.
An insurgent had exploded a roadside bomb, probably by remote control, but missed his mark. The device went off between the lieutenant's vehicle and the one behind it. Still, the blast shattered the inch-thick bulletproof windshield of the trailing Humvee, and its gunner, Sgt. Jacob Kramer, was hit by shrapnel in the face and arm. The convoy continued. Trying to find the bomber in the crowded streets would have been futile and could have invited further ambushes.
Lieutenant Plascencia's expectations are not inflated. For him, this was a successful mission: the soldier's wounds were not serious and his team discovered useful information - the health clinic urgently needed generator fuel and running water. The team could act on these requests immediately. It also gave bags of food to a bone-thin watchman and his family. In the yellow bags, with rice, beans and chocolate, was a message in Arabic. The lieutenant could not read it, but he was pretty sure it said, "We're here to help."
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Says Children Enlist Children as Suicide Bombers
June 13, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13mide.html?pagewanted=all&position=
NABLUS, West Bank - When teenage suicide bombers began emerging from Nablus last fall, Israeli and Palestinian leaders expressed concern that Palestinian factions were cynically exploiting the youths.
In November, a 16-year-old from Nablus blew himself up near Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, killing no one else. Another 16-year-old carried out a nearly identical action in January, with the same result. In March, Hussam Abdo, 16, was captured on videotape when he was confronted and arrested by Israeli troops at a checkpoint with a bomb belt cinched under his red sweater. In early May, Israel arrested two Nablus residents, ages 18 and 19, who are accused of planning a bombing.
Not all the cases are directly linked, but Israel says that it also has arrested a teenager it accuses of recruiting several youths in Nablus to become bombers. He is Nasser Awartani.
Nasser, 15, a good student with no previous record of trouble, is one of four youths from the same 10th-grade class who are in Israeli custody, suspected of links to attacks emanating from Nablus.
"In his interrogation, Nasser admitted recruiting and attempting to recruit suicide bombers," says a report of his questioning, conducted by Israel's Shin Bet security service. The report was made available in response to a request from The New York Times.
Nasser's family members say they do not believe the accusations.
"In this atmosphere, all mothers are worried that something could happen to their sons," said Nasser's mother, Iklas Abu Saud, who is divorced and uses her maiden name. "I tried to keep an eye on him at all times, and didn't want him mixing with armed people. I can't believe he would do something like this."
As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict grinds on, with many Palestinian militants now arrested or dead, the ranks are increasingly filled by eager youths, some in their middle to late teens.
Some Palestinian leaders have condemned the use of teenagers, and opposition to the practice is widespread among ordinary Palestinians, but it is not clear that the practice has stopped. Palestinian factions say that women and youths are more able than men to slip past Israeli security checks.
The number of young bombers coming out of Nablus has raised questions about their recruitment. Israel says Nasser's case shows that the factions have used teenagers to lure other teenagers.
"A 16-year-old can be very effective using peer pressure on another 16-year-old," said an Israeli lieutenant colonel stationed in the Nablus area who has been involved in investigating several of the incidents.
"These kids believe they are going to become heroes by becoming bombers," said the colonel, who declined to speak for attribution because of army regulations. "I see them as scared children who don't grasp what they are doing."
According to the Shin Bet report, Nasser joined Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades last year. He also had links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the report said.
Initially, Nasser's role was limited to such activities as putting up the "martyr posters" that are produced when Palestinians are killed. But last October, two students in Nasser's class at the Abdel Hamid Assayeh school asked him if he wanted to be a suicide bomber, the report said.
Nasser refused, but he agreed to recruit potential bombers, the report said, adding that his first choice was his friend and relative Sabih Abu Saud, a 16-year-old who lived nearby.
The mothers of Nasser and Sabih are cousins, and the two boys had known each other and played together all their lives. Shortly before Sabih's attack, the boys went to a photo studio and posed together, arms around each other's shoulder.
According to the Shin Bet report, Nasser introduced Sabih to Al Aksa leaders, and Sabih left to carry out his bombing on Nov. 3. The teenage bombers generally have been ineffective, and Sabih never made it out of the West Bank, blowing himself up as soldiers were closing in on him.
The parents said the boys' friendship was evidence that Nasser would not have led Sabih toward becoming a bomber. In addition, they said, Sabih was a year older and was the big brother in the relationship. It was unrealistic that the younger boy could have exerted so much influence on the older one, the parents said.
The Israelis tore down the Abu Saud family home in retaliation for Sabih's bombing. Still, the two Palestinian families remain on good terms.
"I don't believe that Nasser recruited Sabih," said Sabih's mother, Nawal Abu Saud, who wears a gold locket with her son's picture inside around her neck. "Sabih didn't need to be recruited by anyone. He did this based on the suffering he saw."
Nasser's mother married and divorced as a teenager. Nasser is the elder of her two sons, and together they have lived with her parents in a middle-class Nablus neighborhood. She said her son was a good student, though he began to withdraw and his grades slipped after the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000.
When Nasser asked her permission to take karate lessons, she refused because it would have required him to go to downtown Nablus, where she feared he might find trouble.
"I didn't want him to stray from the neighborhood," she said.
Still, one of the city's main hospitals was near Nasser's school, and when there was violence, Nasser and other students would often visit to see the Palestinians who had been killed or wounded.
"Nasser would come home and say, 'Today I saw someone who lost his hand,' " his mother said. "And then he would cry."
To keep tabs on him, she made him carry a cellphone. But Shin Bet said Nasser used the phone to contact Al Aksa leaders in Nablus and update them on his recruiting efforts.
Nasser approached several additional teenagers, and in at least three more instances, introduced youths to Al Aksa leaders for talks about potential bombings, the report said.
One case involved Hussam Abdo, the 16-year-old captured on videotape and in photographs on March 24 as he reached an Israeli checkpoint on the edge of Nablus. After Hussam was stopped and removed his bomb belt, he was seized by Israeli soldiers and interrogated.
The next morning, at 3 a.m., Israeli troops arrived at the second floor apartment where Nasser lived, handcuffed and blindfolded him and took him away. He has been in a juvenile prison since, his mother said.
Three of Nasser's classmates also have been arrested in the last six months. The military, which has detained thousands of Palestinians in recent years, did not reply to an inquiry seeking information of the status of those youths.
"None of the four had any problems here," said an official at the Abdel Hamid Assayeh school, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We were quite surprised to hear about the charges."
The school official said he tried to keep politics out of the classroom, but that often proved impossible.
"This place is for education, and we don't want to talk about politics," he said. "But these kids live politics every day."
A picture of two Palestinian cousins in some copies yesterday with a front-page capsule summary of an article about teenagers who recruit others as suicide bombers carried an erroneous credit. It was supplied by the cousins' family.
--------
The Crisis Without End
Israel's Perpetual Emergency Has Become a Political Tool
Sunday, June 13, 2004; Page B01
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35985-2004Jun11?language=printer
JERUSALEM - A few weeks back, while Israeli soldiers were blasting through the bleak urban neighborhoods of Rafah in search of Palestinian militants, and cabinet ministers were playing musical chairs over a proposal to disengage unilaterally from the Gaza Strip, an even more telling measure of Israel's perpetual state of siege quietly worked its way through the Knesset here.
For the 56th year in a row, lawmakers voted to renew the state of emergency that has been in effect since the Jewish state's birth in 1948. Fifty-six years is a long time for an emergency -- most babies born in extremis then are either long-cured or long-dead by now -- but for Israel, crisis has always been a natural state. And the latest renewal is not just a recognition of grim reality, but something of a triumph for those on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide who believe that crisis is their best friend, a state of affairs that allows them to define and dominate the struggle.
You can view the conflict through many complex and overlapping prisms -- Jew vs. Arab, soldier vs. militant, secularist vs. believer, dove vs. hawk, two-state proponent vs. territorial maximalist. But in many ways it has evolved into something very simple: those who strive for normality vs. those who thrive in the hyper-charged state of emergency. And despite Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's qualified triumph last Sunday in force-feeding his Gaza withdrawal plan to a reluctant cabinet, it seems to me that the latter remains in command, asserting the relentless power of blood, history and tradition, and suffocating at birth any and all attempts at normalcy.
Normalcy was what Israel originally was supposed to be about. Theodor Herzl and the early Zionists believed Jews needed a state of their own to take their rightful place as a nation among nations. David Ben-Gurion once quipped that Israel would be considered a success only when there were Jewish policemen and Jewish prostitutes. But a number of historical factors -- including the enduring hostility of Arabs to the idea of a Jewish homeland in their midst, five wars and the fevered messianic dreams of an influential minority of Israelis -- marred that original vision and transformed Israel into a besieged garrison state.
Still, the longing for a normal existence has remained a powerful undercurrent in Israeli society, and in the early 1990s it seemed tantalizingly close. The 1993 Oslo accords were the high-water mark. A majority of Israelis, exhausted by 45 years of struggle, had asserted control over their own destiny and defied history by calling a halt to the conflict, believing they had located a moderate Palestinian majority that felt the same way. When it all went wrong, both sides were sucked back into the whirlpool -- but the yearning for normalcy has never died. Despite the violence, Jerusalem is full of people riding buses, going to movies and dining at cafes . Most Israelis desperately crave a bourgeois, consumerist existence -- shopping malls and cineplexes, Japanese electronics, new cars and software -- even while in the grip of the siege. These ambitions are not territorial. That's a big reason why polls show that 70 to 80 percent of Israelis favor withdrawal from Gaza, and most of them also support a two-state solution to the conflict.
So why is it that those who are opposed to both seem to wield veto power? Partly it's because in any democracy those who care most passionately about a particular issue tend to wield influence far out of proportion to their numbers. And partly it's because most Israelis perceive there is no viable peace partner on the Palestinian side. But it's also because two of the main institutions that are supposed to keep Israel's democracy healthy and responsive to majority rule are themselves in crisis. The emergency, which was designed to protect these institutions, instead has worn them down to the bone.
Chief among them is Israel's citizen army. Because it is the ultimate people's army -- everyone serves two to three years, and virtually every male does two decades of reserve duty as well -- the Israel Defense Forces have long acted as a self-corrective mechanism, pulling the society back to the political center whenever it veered too far to the right or left. A prime example was during the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s when the army's growing disaffection with the role of muscle-bound riot cop meting out rubber bullets and beatings to rebellious Palestinian youths seeped back into Israeli society and ultimately led Israel's reluctant leaders toward the Oslo peace accords.
These days the army itself is dispirited and uncertain. Given the absence of a clear political program, Israel's generals fear they are being asked to undertake military initiatives to fill a vacuum left by their civilian masters. Those initiatives inevitably take on a political content and meaning that make many of the generals uncomfortable.
The recent offensive in Rafah, Gaza's poorest and most densely populated urban center, was a case in point. Sharon wants to pull out of Gaza, but he can't find an acceptable Palestinian partner to turn it over to. Four years of warfare have eliminated potential friend and foe alike, undercut the already dubious hold of the remnants of Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and given Muslim extremists the upper hand. Moreover, Sharon wants to make a show of force before Israel pulls back. So the army was asked to "clean out" the area. Such operations inevitably produce widespread civilian casualties and hardship. The army found itself under attack from both ends of the political spectrum: Those on the right criticized it for not being aggressive enough in Rafah, while those on the left deplored the suffering inflicted on innocent civilians. Either way, the army's stature dropped another notch, and those who oppose the army's moderating influence, such as the settlers, benefit.
"What troubles the military is when there is no clear-cut political consensus on what is legitimate," a senior security official told me. "The military fears being used and abused. We feel like we're in the crossfire."
The generals fear the army is losing its iconic status and will soon be perceived as just another grubby, politicized institution. More and more reservists and pilots are rebelling against the missions they are asked to undertake in the West Bank and Gaza. More and more young people express sympathy with conscientious objectors -- both those opposed to serving in the occupied territories and those who would refuse an order to evict Jewish settlers from their homes. And no one wants to be the last soldier to die in Gaza before a pullout.
The state of emergency has also ground down Israel's fractious political system. The two major blocs that have dominated since the founding of the state are crumbling, yet their elderly leaders -- the Likud Party's Sharon, 76, and the Labor Party's Shimon Peres, 80 -- are fighting off challenges from younger opponents. The two men may form a national unity coalition later this summer that would perpetuate their grip and keep younger, possibly fresher rivals at bay even longer. Their critics will tell you that both men have lost their main constituencies. Both have come back from the political dead. Sharon was publicly humiliated by receiving a minor cabinet post in 1996 when fellow Likudnik Binyamin Netanyahu became prime minister, while Peres was betrayed by his own allies and denied the ceremonial post of president a few years later. But every time a crisis recurs, Israelis instinctively turn to these wily veterans for answers. Unable to end the conflict, the two leaders have ended up being sustained by it.
Netanyahu, 54, is Sharon's main rival and heir apparent. He has spent the last year as finance minister carrying out painful economic reforms and establishing a reputation as a modernizer. But the tug of war over the Gaza withdrawal has thrust him back into the heart of the conflict, propelled him toward the camp of those to the right of Sharon and damaged his newfound stature.
Every few years, a centrist party comes along that seeks to break the stagnant duopoly by offering a vision that is not tied to the siege. None of those parties has survived. The latest to try is Shinui, which finished a surprisingly strong third in last year's election just behind Labor and joined Sharon's governing coalition. Shinui imagines a modern, middle-class, pluralistic Israel with less centralization and more individual choice. It also wants to strip the ultra-orthodox religious establishment of its powers. Yet critics contend that Shinui's impact on social and economic issues while in office has been minimal.
The party's leader, Yosef Lapid, a former journalist and TV talk-show host, has found himself in the incongruous position of mediating between Sharon and right-wingers in the cabinet who oppose the Gaza withdrawal. (Lapid is deputy prime minister and justice minister.) Lapid's own utterances have stirred the pot -- he said televised images of an elderly Palestinian woman searching for her medications in the rubble of her Rafah home reminded him of his grandmother's suffering during the Holocaust.
Shinui wants to focus on modern Israeli concerns. But the siege keeps interfering with the party's real agenda, draining its energy and deflecting attention from socioeconomic issues back toward the main event.
Optimists here will tell you that the political stalemate is beginning to crack. Both Likud and Labor now agree that a two-state solution -- Israel and Palestine living side by side in separate nations, with a high wall between -- is the only way to prevent the Jewish state from being overwhelmed demographically. Sharon may hope to hang onto large portions of the West Bank. But his withdrawal scheme could set in motion a process he can't control that would inevitably lead to Israel's departure from most of the West Bank. Like the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev or South Africa under F.W. de Klerk, momentum will take over. "The status quo has stopped being an option," declares Dan Meridor, a former justice minister and Likudnik who says that many of his fellow former party members have come around to this view.
Perhaps he's right. But I recall how the Oslo peace process wore a similar air of inevitability in 1993. Peace, prosperity and normalcy were fated to follow.
Only they didn't. From this vantage point, Oslo looks more like a temporary blip in the 100-year war between Arab and Jew than a turning point. In May, 111 Palestinians were killed, the highest monthly Palestinian death toll in two years. Nineteen Israelis -- 14 soldiers and five civilians -- also died. Each of the dead had a family and friends, and each death is another reason for enmity and revenge. The conflict never sleeps. The state of emergency continues.
Author's e-mail:
frankelg@washpost.com
Glenn Frankel, The Post's London bureau chief, just completed a three-week reporting tour in Israel. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for his coverage of Israel.
-------
Israel would move two main Gaza crossing points as part of its pullout
By MARK LAVIE
Associated Press Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38695-2004Jun13.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel will move two main crossing points in its withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, a senior Israeli official said Sunday, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered work to begin on implementing the plan.
The Erez crossing, the main entrance for Palestinian workers into Israel and site of an industrial park, will shift northward into Israel.
If the Egyptians agree, the Rafah crossing would be moved 1.5 miles south into Egyptian territory, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Moving the crossing points away from Gaza would end the cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces mandated by interim peace accords in the 1990s, but erased by more than three years of violence.
Also, distancing the crossings from Gaza itself would reinforce Israel's contention that the pullout means the end of its occupation of Gaza, though Palestinians complain that Israel plans to maintain control of its borders and air space.
Israel announced last week that the Erez industrial park, where 4,000 Palestinians work for Israeli and Palestinian employers, will be closed as part of the pullout -- another symbolic blow to coexistence.
Last week, the Cabinet approved Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan, but at the cost of Sharon's parliamentary majority. To ensure Cabinet approval, Sharon fired the two ministers from a pro-settler party. After the vote, two members of another pro-settlement faction resigned, leaving Sharon with the support of only 59 legislators in the 120-seat parliament.
On Monday, the parliament votes on three motions of no confidence, but Sharon's government does not appear in danger.
To bring down the government, opponents must garner 61 votes, and the moderate opposition Labor Party, with 19 seats, is abstaining to give Sharon a "safety net," a gesture of support for his Gaza pullout plan.
However, the two members of the National Religious Party who quit said they would vote against the government. "We left the government in order to make every effort to bring it down," said Yitzhak Levy, a deputy minister until his resignation.
Sharon says the withdrawal from Gaza and four small West Bank settlements will reduce friction with the Palestinians and ward off international peace initiatives that would be unfavorable to Israel.
Also, Sharon says that by giving up Gaza, Israel would strengthen its case to retain large West Bank settlements.
Palestinians are ambivalent about the plan, welcoming the evacuation of Gaza but rejecting the idea that Israel would retain any of the West Bank. The Palestinians claim both territories for a state.
Under a timetable put together by Israel's National Security Council, the voluntary evacuation of settlements would begin next month and end in August 2005. If settlers refused to leave, they would be forcibly removed in the first two weeks of September.
Disclosure of the timetable set off a political storm since Sharon had promised Cabinet hardliners to hold another vote by February on the actual dismantling of settlements. Sharon critics said the timetable made a future Cabinet vote meaningless.
-------- prisoners of war
Red Cross Urges Release of Iraqi POWs
By SAM CAGE
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 13, 2004; 9:48 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38186-2004Jun13.html
GENEVA - All Iraqi prisoners of war and interned civilians should be released when sovereignty is transferred to a new Iraqi government, according to rules governing warfare, a spokeswoman for the international Red Cross said Sunday.
"If we consider that the occupation ends June 30, that would mean it's the end of the international armed conflict," Nada Doumani of the International Committee of the Red Cross told The Associated Press Sunday by phone from Baghdad.
According to article 118 of the third Geneva Convention, prisoners of war should be repatriated without delay at the end of hostilities. Article 133 of the fourth convention says that interned civilians should also be released when conflict ends.
It remains to be seen whether the occupation effectively ends with the handover of sovereignty, however, and Doumani stressed that "the situation on the ground determines the facts."
"This is the legal situation: When the conflict ends the prisoners of war should be released according to the Geneva Conventions," she explained. "Therefore ... all people detained in relation to the conflict should be released unless there are penal charges against them."
Although Iraqis will run their own affairs after June 30, about 150,000 U.S. and other coalition troops will remain in the country to help improve security under a U.N. resolution approved unanimously by the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday.
After the handover of sovereignty, detainees held by the Iraqi authorities will be subject to Iraqi law. But current prisoners who are not released because they face penal charges will remain under the protection of the Geneva Conventions, Doumani said.
In an interview published Saturday in the daily Neue Zuercher Zeiting, ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger said it was unclear which authorities the Red Cross should deal with after the transfer of sovereignty.
The ICRC is empowered under the 1949 Geneva Conventions to visit prisoners of war and other detainees and make sure their care meets international standards.
"In principle all prisoners of war and interned civilians must be released July 1," Kellenberger said. "If prisoners remain under the responsibility of the multinational troops, then we'll have to check whom we should report to. We will negotiate directly with the Iraqi authorities over our visits to prisoners in their care."
Kellenberger noted that the legal status of Iraqi detainees remained unclear and that every person has the right to know on what grounds they are being held prisoner.
The neutral ICRC, which began visiting detainees of the coalition immediately after the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, has been complaining privately to U.S. authorities about mistreatment of prisoners.
But the complaints were made public only when a written ICRC report was leaked following the publication of photographs showing U.S. guards mistreating and humiliating detainees.
-------- spies
In '54, leftist Guatemalan leader no match for CIA
Associated Press
June 13, 2004
http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2004/06/13/build/nation/80-cia-arbenz.inc
WASHINGTON - It was a time when Cold War concerns transcended all others. So when Guatemala's reformist president, Jacobo Arbenz, appointed communists to several posts in 1951, the alarm bells sounded in Washington.
The CIA began drawing up contingency plans, including the assassination of leftist officials and their allies.
Over time, the planning was expanded, with the CIA arming and training an anti-Arbenz "Liberation Army."
On June 17, 1954 - 50 years ago this Thursday - some 150 insurgents crossed the border into Guatemala from Honduras.
Within days, CIA bombers were strafing the capital, Guatemala City, and agency propagandists were broadcasting fake reports about rebel battlefield triumphs.
On June 27, Arbenz fled the country, never to return. His three-year rule was best known for its ambitious land reform program. With his departure, Washington no longer had to worry that his social reform ideas could inspire a peasant rebellion in neighboring countries.
U.S. officials also rejoiced in the knowledge that Moscow, at least for the time being, would not be able to add a Latin American country to the European and Asian ones already in its fold.
For Guatemala, it was a prelude to a tragic civil war that was to last 30 years.
An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans died, largely due to the excesses of the Guatemalan military. A postwar independent commission concluded that the military had committed "acts of genocide," mostly against the country's indigenous population.
The civil war began about a decade after the 1954 intervention, perhaps inspired by the land reform rollback imposed by the government that replaced Arbenz and by the 1959 Cuban revolution, a model at the time for leftists throughout the hemisphere.
Picked by the CIA to lead the assault against Arbenz was a Guatemalan former colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas, who was working as a furniture salesman in Honduras when he was recruited for the assignment.
An account of the invasion was written by Latin American historian Douglas Kraft, who is now a State Department historian.
Arbenz believed his army would defeat the rebels, Kraft wrote. That seemed the case when they attacked by land and sea, meeting strong resistance and stalling. It was then that the CIA undertook the psychological campaign.
"Jamming Guatemalan radio waves and broadcasting fictitious reports of an advancing rebel force, the CIA worked to unnerve the Guatemalan Army," Kraft wrote. "Simultaneously, CIA bombers strafed Guatemala City streets and dropped small bombs to arouse fear among the local population. ... Senior Guatemalan officers began to fear that the United States might invade should the rebel incursion fail.
By June 25, "these fears circulated at the front" and the military forces would not take on the rebels at Zacapa, according to Kraft.
"The military had effectively turned against Arbenz. His alternatives narrowed, the Guatemalan president ordered the military to arm peasant and labor organizations in a last ditch effort to stop Castillo Armas. The order represented Arbenz's fatal error," Kraft wrote.
"Entrusting the nation's defense to a band of peasants represented a vote of no confidence in the military. What little loyalty Arbenz still enjoyed evaporated."
Arbenz's ouster was not entirely the work of the CIA.
Much of the army had been alienated by what they considered reckless implementation of the land reform; peasant land invasions were common. Some question whether the Arbenz government would have survived even if the CIA had done nothing.
Arbenz fled to Mexico. Castillo Armas, with a big assist from U.S. diplomats, was named to replace him.
The Eisenhower administration's concerns about Arbenz were reinforced just a few weeks before the invasion when his government bought several hundred thousand dollars worth of arms from Czechoslovakia, a Soviet ally.
Over the years, perceptions about the U.S. intervention have been colored by the financial interests of two of Eisenhower's top national security aides: Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the director of the CIA.
As a private lawyer in the 1930s, John Foster Dulles had helped broker a deal enabling the United Fruit Co., a major U.S. banana producer, to control Guatemala's only railway. The Dulles brothers also held stock in United Fruit after joining the Eisenhower administration. The company lost a huge swath of land under Arbenz's reforms.
John Foster Dulles dismissed suggestions that American hostility toward Arbenz was influenced by United Fruit's fate. American policy, he said, was motivated by "communist infiltration" in Guatemala.
José Manuel Fortuny, former leader of the Guatemalan Communist Party and a member of the Arbenz administration, agreed. The United States "would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas," he said, according to a study by Stephen M. Streeter of Canada's McMaster University.
Arbenz saw things differently. "Our crime," he said in his resignation speech, "is having enacted an agrarian reform which affected the interests of the United Fruit Company."
Many Latin Americans were angry about the CIA intervention.
Adolphe Berle, the State Department's troubleshooter for the region at the time, wrote in his diary: "We eliminated a communist regime at the expense of having antagonized half the hemisphere."
--------
Nazi commander 'was CIA agent'
(SA)
13/06/2004
http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_1541999,00.html
Berlin - An 86-year-old ex-commander of a Nazi German army unit charged with murdering 164 people at the end of World War II worked as a double agent for the United States, Focus magazine says in its new edition.
Ladislav Niznansky, who is in custody in Munich, southern Germany, worked as a double agent for the Central Intelligence Agency while he was a member of the Czech secret service just after the worker, it said quoting CIA documents.
Niznansky is accused over the massacre of 146 people in two villages in modern-day Slovakia and later of ordering the execution of 18 Jews. He was arrested in January after a probe by Czech and Slovak officials.
In its edition on sale on Monday, Focus said he collaborated with the CIA just after he recruited by the Czech secret service in 1947 to keep tabs on the communist opposition in Austria.
He supplied the Americans with codenames, the addresses of safe houses and helped turn in enemy agents, according to the documents.
Niznansky lived unnoticed for years in Munich where he used to work for Radio Free Europe until he obtained German citizenship in 1996.
In early 1945, Niznansky was the commander of the Slovakian section of a Nazi unit codenamed Edelweiss that was tasked with hunting resistance fighters after an attempted uprising.
On January 21, 1945 the unit, which also included SS troops, rounded up and shot 146 people from Klak and Ostry Grun, including 70 women and 51 children, according to the statement.
Niznansky is said to have ordered that no one should be allowed to escape, and to have personally shot dead 20 of the victims.
On February 7, 1945 he formed an execution commando and ordered the killing of 18 Jews who had been found hiding in bunkers, prosecutors said.
He was sentenced to death in his absence in 1962 by a Czech court.
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Iraq Tactics Have Long History With U.S. Interrogators
washingtonpost.com
By Walter Pincus
June 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37340-2004Jun12?language=printer
A CIA handbook on coercive interrogation methods, produced 40 years ago during the Vietnam War, shows that techniques such as those used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have a long history with U.S. intelligence and were based on research and field experience.
Declassified 10 years ago, the training manual carries in its title the code word used for the CIA in Vietnam, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation -- July 1963." Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presents "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation."
The specific coercive methods it describes echo today's news stories about Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, for example, photographs and documents have shown that detainees were hooded, blindfolded, dressed in sloppy garb and forced to go naked.
The KUBARK manual suggests that, for "resistant" prisoners, the "circumstances of detention are arranged to enhance within the subject his feelings of being cut off from the known and the reassuring and of being plunged into the strange."
The 1963 handbook describes the benefits and disadvantages of techniques similar to those authorized for use at Abu Ghraib, such as forcing detainees to stand or sit in "stress positions," cutting off sources of light, disrupting their sleep and manipulating their diet.
And among the manual's conclusions: The threat of pain is a far more effective interrogation tool than actually inflicting pain, but threats of death do not help.
Like the lists of interrogation methods approved for Iraq and Guantanamo, the KUBARK manual offers a menu of options for confusing and weakening detainees. A neat or proud individual was to be given an outfit one or two sizes too large without a belt "so that he must hold his pants up," the manual said. Forced changes in diet and sleep patterns should be done "so that the subject becomes disorientated [and] is very likely to create feelings of fear and helplessness."
Tactics involving deprivation of accustomed sights, sounds, taste, smells and tactile sensations were presented as primary methods for producing stress, and mirror the techniques seen at Abu Ghraib. Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top U.S. military officer in Iraq, approved in September a list of methods that included "sensory deprivation," "minimum bread and water," "light control," enforced silence and yelling at prisoners. Those methods have since been barred in Iraq.
The KUBARK manual cited research supporting the effectiveness of the deprivations. "Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light or weak artificial light which never varies, which is sound-proofed, and in which odors are eliminated," the manual said.
An experiment referred to in the handbook was done in the 1950s and involved conditions designed to produce stress before an interrogation -- similar to those applied to John Walker Lindh after his capture in Afghanistan. Lindh was tied to a stretcher naked and later held for long periods in a large metal container.
In the experiment done about 50 years earlier, volunteers were "placed in a tank-type respirator" with vents open so that the subjects could breathe but their arms and legs were enclosed in "rigid cylinders to inhibit movement and tactile contact." Lying on their backs in minimal artificial light, the subjects could not see their own bodies, and the respirator motor was the only sound.
Only six of the 17 volunteers completed the 36 hours of the experiment; the other 11 asked for early release -- four because of anxiety and panic, and the others because of physical discomfort.
The conclusion reached, the handbook said, was that "the early effect of such an environment is anxiety" and that "the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects," some of whom "lose touch with reality [and] focus inwardly."
The payoff of such techniques, the manual said, is that when the interrogator appears, he or she appears as a "reward of lessened anxiety . . . providing relief for growing discomfort," and that sometimes, as a result, "the questioner assumes a benevolent role."
When it comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to inflict pain . . . can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."
"In general, direct physical brutality creates only resentment, hostility and further defiance," the manual said.
Intense pain, interrogators were taught, "is quite likely to produce false confessions concocted as a means of escaping from distress."
While pain inflicted by others tends to create resistance in a subject, the manual said, "his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself."
Reports from Iraq and Afghanistan indicate that detainees have been told to stand at attention for long periods or sit in "stress positions." In one of the photographs from Abu Ghraib, a hooded detainee is shown being forced to stand on a box with wires attached to his body. He was told he would get an electric shock if he moved. Seven military police soldiers have been charged in connection with the abuse shown in that and other photographs. Investigations continue into the role military interrogators played in those incidents.
In such situations, the manual said, the source of pain "is not the interrogator but the victim himself." And while the subject remains in that uncomfortable or painful position, he must be made to think that his captor could do something worse to him, creating in him the stress and anxiety the interrogator seeks.
Threats of death, however, were described as "worse than useless" because they can leave the prisoner thinking "that he is as likely to be condemned after compliance as before."
Experiments at that time also showed that creating physical weakness through prolonged exertion, extremes of heat, cold or moisture, or through drastic reduction of food or sleep do not work.
"The available evidence suggests that resistance is sapped principally by psychological rather than physical pressures," the handbook advised.
-----
Fury as MI5 describe IRA terror as 'just'
Secret briefings enrage victims' relatives
sundayherald
By Neil Mackay
13 June 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/42752
MI5 has caused outrage after one of its spies stated publicly that the IRA "fought a just cause" and won a "successful campaign" during the 30-year Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The Sunday Herald is unable to name the MI5 officer following a threat of legal action from the government. However, the spy's comments have provoked fury from the victims of IRA violence and Ulster politicians.
The controversy centres on a briefing given by the MI5 officer, a former Royal Navy commander, at a maritime security conference on Orkney. Details have been given to the Sunday Herald by Mark Hirst, the former head of communications at Orkney Islands Council, who attended the seminar.
The conference was held by the Department of Transport (DoT) in Kirkwall. Delegates included representatives from the council, port authorities, ferry services, energy firms, the tourist board and police.
Hirst says the MI5 officer said the IRA was "the biggest threat to British national security". But the officer then said "in our opinion they [the IRA] have fought a just cause".
"The conclusion of MI5, according to this officer," said Hirst, "was based on the fact there had been legitimate grievances among, and discrimination against, the nationalist community and this had sustained the IRA through the length of the campaign."
The MI5 officer then added: "Has it been a successful campaign? The answer is yes."
Hirst said: "He referred to the fact Sinn Fein had two ministers in power. What better success can you wish for, he said, than to have your people in positions of power in government."
Hirst said the comments were "not off-the-cuff as they were supported by an official MI5 PowerPoint presentation, complete with the official crest".
"Presumably this was sanctioned at some level," he added.
The DoT confirmed that the briefing took place, adding: "This was part of a programme to ensure that security staff at UK ports were up to date with the terrorism threat they are countering. We are not prepared to comment further ."
Orkney Council declined to comment. However, William Frazer, who runs Fair (Families Acting for Innocent Relatives), a Northern Ireland support group for victims of paramilitary violence, was horrified .
Frazer's father, a member of the security forces, was killed by the IRA, as were two uncles and two cousins. Five of his friends were also murdered, and his home was bombed five times.
He said the officer's claims reinforced his belief that the government and intelligence agencies controlled the IRA campaign, using double-agents to manage republican violence. Frazer pointed to Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Stakeknife, who was exposed by the Sunday Herald last year. Scappaticci, who worked for British intelligence, was also one of the IRA's highest-ranking volunteers.
"The MI5 officer's comments back up the fact there was no determination to beat the IRA," said Frazer, who is now writing to the Prime Minister in protest. "It is a disgrace to the memory of victims. He is talking about the killing of innocent people .
" This MI5 officer needs to be held to account. What this man is saying is treason - it shows the 'dirty war' really was dirty."
A senior source in the intelligence services said: "I am staggered by these comments."
But Kevin Fulton, a former double-agent who infiltrated the IRA, said he was not surprised by the MI5 officer's comment. He said : "The insight I have leads me to ask 'who was running this war?'. I believe it was run from London."
Martin Ingram, a former intelligence officer in the army's spying arm, the Force Research Unit, said: "I think what this officer is saying is an honest appraisal. The nationalist community was unjustly treated and that led to the resurgence of the IRA, although I disagree with the IRA's methodology.
"What this man has said will be detrimental to his career , but there are those in senior positions in MI5 who would probably agree with him."
Hardline unionist MP, Jeffrey Donaldson, said it was "totally out of order" for an MI5 officer to make such statements. " How would MI5 explain this officer's comments to people who lost loved ones in Enniskillen, La Mon House or the Shankill bombing? It is incredible that a man in his position would justify the slaughter of innocent civilians and the security forces.
"It is still an offence to be a traitor and this man's comments are treacherous. He is betraying Britain. He should be removed immediately."
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OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
This Spy for Rent
June 13, 2004
By JAMES BAMFORD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/opinion/13BAMF.html
Assessing, cultivating and recruiting spies has long been a key job of Central Intelligence Agency officers. But now it is the C.I.A. officers themselves who are being assessed, cultivated and recruited - sometimes right out of the agency's cafeteria. In what is leading to a critical spy drain, private companies are aggressively seeking highly trained employees of our espionage agencies to fill government contracts.
With the resignation of George Tenet as director of central intelligence and the final hearings of the 9/11 commission this week, the stage is set for the first major restructuring of the intelligence community in decades. While there has been much discussion of moving agencies and creating an "intelligence czar," the privatization of our spies has been largely overlooked.
The C.I.A. is awash in money as a result of post-9/11 budget increases. But because of the general uncertainty over the future, it faces a long delay before it can recruit, train and develop a new generation of spies and analysts. So for now it is building up its staff by turning to the "intelligence-industrial complex."
These corporations range from Fortune 500 giants like Booz Allen Hamilton and Northrop Grumman to small companies made up almost entirely of former senior C.I.A. officers, like the Abraxas Corporation in McLean, Va. For example, one Abraxas expert, Mary Nayak, formerly ran the Directorate of Intelligence's South Asia group; now she's been hired as a consultant to the C.I.A.'s review group on 9/11.
Private contractors are taking over jobs once reserved for highly trained agency employees: regional desk officers who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the 24-hour crisis center; analysts who sift through reams of intelligence data; counterintelligence officers who oversee clandestine meetings between agency officers and their recruited spies; and reports officers who act as liaisons between officers in the field and analysts back at headquarters.
While there is nothing inherently wrong with the intelligence community working closely with private industry, there is the potential for trouble unless the union is closely monitored. Because the issue is hidden under the C.I.A.'s heavy layers of secrecy, it is impossible for even Congress to get accurate figures on just how much money and how many people are involved. But many experts inside and outside the agency feel that we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of contractors.
As was made clear by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, involving private contractors in sensitive intelligence operations can lead to disaster. And the potential for disaster only grows when not just the agents on the ground, but their supervisors and controllers back at headquarters too, are working for some private company.
Another problem has been an increased cost to taxpayers. Desperate to fill their contracts, the companies frequently offer to double a federal employee's salary. Because the recruiters have security clearances, they often make their recruiting pitches at the C.I.A.'s headquarters in Langley, Va. And many of those who do sign on end up going right back to their old office - only now working for a private company. Thus, after spending millions of dollars training people to be clandestine officers, taxpayers are having to pay them twice as much to return as rent-a-spies.
"The money is incredible," one agency veteran, who handled spies overseas for years, told me. "I doubled my salary to go out and come back in and continue doing what I was doing."
But some of these former officers warned me that their talents are being wasted on unsophisticated tasks, and that because of the slap-dash nature of the rush to expand, the quality of intelligence produced has become questionable. "The problem is these jobs are mindless," one officer-turned-contractor with decades of Middle East experience told me. "So we're all just sitting there looking at each other, and we're making a ridiculous amount of money."
Another former agency employee told me that he was among a group of contractors assigned to analyze e-mail messages on computer hard drives snatched by operatives in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries. "A lot of it was in Arabic and none of us spoke Arabic - just a little problem," he said. "None of us really knew what we were doing and we had management who didn't know what they were doing either."
As the United States gets more deeply involved in the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq, there will be a corresponding increase in private spies. This isn't all bad: by marrying well-trained federal employees with innovative contractors working in a less structured role, perhaps we can find more effective ways of tackling old problems.
But better oversight is critical. If Congress doesn't even know whom the C.I.A. is hiring, how can anyone ensure that what they are doing (and how much they are being paid) is acceptable? As we decide how to remake our intelligence services, we need to find the right balance between the people who make the cloaks and daggers and the people who wear them.
James Bamford is the author, most recently, of "A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies."
-------- us
No 'Weekend Warriors' as U.S. Towns Count Guard Dead
Reuters
By Jon Hurdle
Sun Jun 13, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=UTDAVW12DGGV2CRBAEKSFEY?type=topNews&storyID=5407444&pageNumber=1
BRICK, N.J. (Reuters) - On the wall of the municipal building in Brick, New Jersey, there is a small shrine to Christopher Duffy, a member of the New Jersey National Guard killed in Iraq on June 4.
There is a photo of Duffy in battle fatigues and the legend "Gone but not Forgotten" is written on a black border. The 26-year-old left behind a wife and 8-month-old son.
By the sidewalk in front of the building is a larger version of the same memorial, facing the traffic grinding through this coastal town south of New York.
Across the street at the high school, a sign that usually announces band concerts or football games says the thoughts and prayers of students and faculty are with the family of Spc. Duffy, who graduated in 1996.
Duffy was one of the first four members of New Jersey's National Guard killed in Iraq within two days of each other this month. They joined the growing ranks of National Guard troops to fall in the conflict, belying the guard's one-time reputation among some as an easy source of extra income for "weekend warriors."
Sgt. Frank Carvill, 51, of Carlstadt, New Jersey, died with Duffy in an ambush by insurgents. The next day, June 5, Spc. Ryan Doltz, 26, of Mine Hill, and Sgt. Humberto Timoteo, 25, of Newark, were killed when their vehicle hit a homemade bomb.
The deaths of men who once spent just one weekend a month in military training but were thrust into the role of full-time soldiers by the war in Iraq, shocked many people in Brick.
"You just wouldn't expect it to happen in the National Guard," said Gloria Clement, 59, a customer at the Rainbow Diner. "It's horrible. My heart goes out to their families."
Atrocities committed against Americans in Iraq -- notably the beheading of contractor Nick Berg from neighboring Pennsylvania -- angered Clement.
"They are not human people over there," she said.
But she is steadfast in her belief that the United States was justified in invading Iraq, a conviction she said probably motivated Duffy. "If he didn't support this war, he would not have been over there," she said.
A waitress who declined to give her name said she found it hard to understand why the U.S. troops are in Iraq, given the financial and human costs.
"We are spending all that money in Iraq and there are people here who can't afford health insurance or to pay their mortgages," she said. "When I open the paper and see pictures of charred bodies hanging from the bridge, it makes me want to bring the troops home."
A Democratic party bastion, New Jersey has been considered one of the states most likely to support Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry over President Bush in November's presidential election. But recent polls have shown Kerry in a virtual tie with the Republican president among the state's voters.
A couple of hours' drive northwest of Brick, Mine Hill is similarly shaken at the loss of Doltz. But that has not altered support for the war, said Jack Deacon, a member of the town's first aid squad, as Doltz was.
Local anger, said Deacon, 68, is directed at Iraqi insurgents. "People are very resentful at what they are doing to our troops. We are over there trying to help them out, and then they do this to us."
The 6-foot, 5-inch (196-cm) Doltz was a popular figure around town, known for his ability to get along with people. Deacon said Doltz worked for a pipe-making company and wanted to be mayor as the first step in a political career that would culminate in becoming President of the United States.
"He had his dreams like anybody else," Deacon said.
The people of Mine Hill accept Doltz's death as the tragic consequence of a necessary war, said municipal clerk Pat Korpos.
"There are no ill feelings," she said. "It was his duty as a soldier."
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Errors Are Seen in Early Attacks on Iraqi Leaders
June 13, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/middleeast/13SADD.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 12 - The United States launched many more failed airstrikes on a far broader array of senior Iraqi leaders during the early days of the war last year than has previously been acknowledged, and some caused significant civilian casualties, according to senior military and intelligence officials.
Only a few of the 50 airstrikes have been described in public. All were unsuccessful, and many, including the two well-known raids on Saddam Hussein and his sons, appear to have been undercut by poor intelligence, current and former government officials said.
The strikes, carried out against so-called high-value targets during a one-month period that began on March 19, 2003, used precision-guided munitions against at least 13 Iraqi leaders, including Gen. Izzat Ibrahim, Iraq's No. 2 official, the officials said.
General Ibrahim is still at large, along with at least one other top official who was a target of the failed raids. That official, Maj. Gen. Rafi Abd al-Latif Tilfah, the former head of the Directorate of General Security, and General Ibrahim are playing a leadership role in the anti-American insurgency, according to a briefing document prepared last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency.
The broad scope of the campaign and its failures, along with the civilian casualties, have not been acknowledged by the Bush administration.
A report in December by Human Rights Watch, based on a review of four strikes, concluded that the singling out of Iraqi leadership had "resulted in dozens of civilian casualties that the United States could have prevented if it had taken additional precautions."
The poor record in the strikes has raised questions about the intelligence they were based on, including whether that intelligence reflected deception on the part of Iraqis, the officials said. The March 19, 2003, attempt to kill Mr. Hussein and his sons at the Dora Farms compound, south of Baghdad, remains a subject of particular contention.
A Central Intelligence Agency officer reported, based primarily on information provided by satellite telephone from an Iraqi source, that Mr. Hussein was in an underground bunker at the site. That prompted President Bush to accelerate the timetable for the beginning of the war, giving the go-ahead to strikes by precision-guided bombs and cruise missiles, senior intelligence officials said.
But in an interview last summer, Lt. Gen. T. Michael Moseley, of the Air Force, who directed the air campaign during the invasion, acknowledged that inspections after the war had concluded that no such bunker existed. Various internal reviews by the military and the C.I.A. have still not resolved the question of whether Mr. Hussein was at the location at all, according to senior military and intelligence officials, although the C.I.A. maintains that he was probably at Dora Farms.
One possibility, a senior intelligence official and a senior military officer said, is that Mr. Hussein was above ground in one of the houses that were not destroyed in the raid.
In the raid, the Air Force primarily used deep-penetrating munitions because of their ability to destroy an underground bunker. The person who was the primary source of the information about the bunker was killed in the raid, according to intelligence officials, but had described it using an Arabic word, manzul, that could have been translated either as place of refuge or as bunker.
A C.I.A. officer who relayed that report from a base in northern Iraq translated the word as bunker, said a senior intelligence official, who confirmed a detailed report that first appeared in "Plan of Attack," a book by the journalist Bob Woodward.
A Warning Sign
In retrospect, the failures were an early warning sign about the thinness of American intelligence on Iraq and on Mr. Hussein's inner circle. Some of the officials who survived the raids, including General Ibrahim, have become leaders of what the Defense Intelligence Agency now believes has been a planned anti-American insurgency, several intelligence officials said.
"It was all just guesswork on where they were," said a senior military officer. Another official, a senior Army officer who served in Iraq, described early intelligence on the Iraqi leadership as producing "a lot of dry holes."
A third senior military officer described the quantity of "no kidding, actionable intel" as having been limited, but added, "In a real fight, you go with what you've got."
Senior military officials said they were not sure whether the Iraqis deliberately deceived the United States, in the information that they provided or that was intercepted. They described the intelligence as problematic at best, but said intelligence agencies were engaged in a hard task.
An unclassified Air Force report issued in April 2003 categorized 50 attacks from March 19 to April 18 as having been time-sensitive strikes on Iraqi leaders. An up-to-date accounting posted on the Web site of the United States Central Command shows that 43 of the top 55 Iraqi leaders on the most-wanted list have now been taken into custody or killed, but that none were taken into custody until April 13, 2003, and that none were killed by airstrikes.
An explicit account of the zero for 50 record in strikes on high-value targets was provided by Marc Garlasco, a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who headed the joint staff's high-value targeting cell during the war. Mr. Garlasco is now a senior military analyst for Human Rights Watch, and he was a primary author of the December report, "Off Target: The Conduct of the War and Civilian Casualties in Iraq."
The broad failure rate was confirmed by several senior military officials, including some who served in Iraq or the region during the war, and by senior intelligence officials.
Immediately after the March 19 attack and others, including an April 5 strike aimed at Gen. Ali Hasan al-Majid, a top official known as Chemical Ali for his role in the gassing of Kurds in 1988, top American officials expressed confidence that the strikes had been successful. On April 7, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, played a videotape of the strike, and Mr. Rumsfeld declared, "We believe that the reign of terror of Chemical Ali has come to an end."
But General Majid survived that raid and others, and was not captured until August. Mr. Hussein was not captured until Dec. 13, and his sons Uday and Qusay were at large until they were killed on July 22. General Ibrahim, General Tilfah and perhaps others who were singled out have not yet been captured.
An unclassified analysis prepared last month by the Defense Intelligence Agency and obtained by The New York Times describes Mr. Ibrahim as having "assumed Saddam's duties" as the titular head of the insurgency after Mr. Hussein's capture. It lists General Tilfah, a cousin of Mr. Hussein's, as one of the leaders of former government leaders involved in the insurgency.
The Iraqi officials singled out during the war were all from the top-55 "blacklist," which was drafted by the C.I.A. and depicted on playing cards distributed to American troops, military officials said.
Other leaders singled out in repeated strikes included Gen. Abid Hamid Mahmud, Mr. Hussein's secretary and senior bodyguard, who was taken into custody on June 16, and Mr. Hussein's half brother Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, a presidential adviser, according to current and former military officials.
Rules for the Raids
General Moseley, the top Air Force commander during the war who is now the Air Force vice chief of staff, said in the interview last summer that commanders were required to obtain advance approval from Mr. Rumsfeld if any planned airstrike was likely to result in the deaths of 30 more civilians. More than 50 such raids were proposed, and all were approved, General Moseley said.
But raids considered time-sensitive, which included all of those on the high-value targets, were not subject to that constraint, according to current and former military officials. In part for that reason, the report by Human Rights Watch concluded, "attacks on leadership likely resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths from the air war."
The four case studies examined by the organization included the failed March 19, 2003, strike on Mr. Hussein and his sons at Dora Farms, which it said killed a civilian. According to Human Rights Watch, a failed April 5 strike that singled out General Majid in a residential area of Basra killed 17 civilians; a failed April 8 strike that was aimed at Mr. Hussein's half brother Watban Ibrahim Barzan in Baghdad killed 6 civilians; and the second raid on Mr. Hussein and one or both of his sons, on April 7 in the Mansur district of Baghdad, killed an estimated 18 civilians.
In an e-mail message, Mr. Garlasco described the campaign to attack high-value targets as "abject failure," saying, "We failed to kill the H.V.T.'s and instead killed civilians and engendered hatred and discontent in some of the population."
Senior military officers said some of the strikes might have failed because the Iraqi leaders were on the move during the war. On occasion, they said, reports from spies or communications intercepts may have given their locations accurately, but the strikes may have come too late.
But according to a senior defense official and two former intelligence officials, there were also indications that some intelligence had been wrong, and might have reflected deliberate disinformation from Iraqis enlisted as spies by the United States or from Iraqis who suspected that American intelligence agencies were listening in on their communications.
According to a former defense official, Iraqi leaders who were singled out included Lt. Gen. Muzahim Sab Hassan, commander of Iraqi Air Defense Forces; Brig. Gen. Barzan Abd Ghafur Sulayman Majid, commander of the Special Republican Guard; Taha Yassin Ramadan, the Iraqi vice president; Brig. Gen. Rukan Razuki Abd al-Ghafar Sulayman, a senior bodyguard to Mr. Hussein; and Watban Ibrahim Barzan and Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hasan, Mr. Hussein's half brothers.
There were conflicting accounts about whether another Iraqi leader who is still at large, Col. Hani Abd al-Latif al-Tilfah, the director of the special security organization under Qusay Hussein, had been a target in the raids. The colonel, the brother of General Tilfah and another maternal cousin of Mr. Hussein, is listed by the D.I.A. as among the leaders of the insurgency.
Another Iraqi leader from the top 55 list who is still at large and is identified in the D.I.A. report as a leader of the insurgency is Abd al-Baqi Abd al-Karim al Abdallah al-Sadun, chairman of the Baath Party regional command for Diyala. The current and former military officials said they had no indication that he had been a target.
Since April 2003, senior American officials have acknowledged that the intelligence reports that placed Mr. Hussein and at least one of his sons in the Mansur district of Baghdad had been regarded as less than solid at the time of that strike. Even now, a senior intelligence official said the C.I.A. believed that Mr. Hussein was "possibly" at the site in Mansur, which was stuck by four 2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs.
By contrast, the intelligence reports that preceded the March 19 strike on Dora Farms, which was carried out with four 2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs and more than 30 Tomahawk cruise missiles, were regarded as highly credible, according to senior intelligence officials. At the C.I.A., George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told other administration officials that he was certain that Mr. Hussein had been killed in the raid, citing a report that had been relayed by satellite phone to the C.I.A. officer in northern Iraq by one Iraqi agent on the scene.
Mr. Hussein, since his capture on Dec. 13, has not directly answered when American interrogators have sought to determine whether he was at either location at the time of the two strikes, according to two senior government officials.
At the Pentagon last October, Brig. Gen. Robert W. Cone of the Army, director of the military's Joint Center for Lessons Learned, acknowledged that the intelligence necessary to carry out attacks like these had not measured up to expectations.
"When you take a large country the size of Iraq, with all those sensors and communications, how do you get the right information to the right person who needs it in a timely manner?" General Cone said.
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Mr. Bush's Mismatch
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35762-2004Jun11.html
THE VOLUNTEER ARMY expects to bear the brunt of danger on behalf of the country in any war. But when failed leadership turns volunteers into conscripts, soldiers have every right to feel misused. President Bush has compared the war against terrorism to the 20th-century struggles against totalitarianism and communism, calling it "the great challenge of our time." But he has refused to adjust his policies to those stakes. And the first casualty of this crippling disconnect between rhetoric and reality is the U.S. Army.
The latest evidence of institutional strain was the Army's recent announcement that thousands more troops will be ordered to extend their duty well beyond their expected discharge dates. Soldiers, including reservists, whose units are deployed or redeployed to Iraq or Afghanistan will be expected to complete those tours of one year or more and an additional 90 days, even if they would have been scheduled for release months earlier. The Army is doing this for the same reason it extended the Iraq deployments of units that were supposed to have been sent home, depleted its force in South Korea and even explored sending an elite training regiment into combat: It's short of troops.
The president's failure to adequately staff the armed forces is just one way in which he fails his own commitment to what he called last week "the imperative of our age." The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed Mr. Bush's view of the world, but he never adjusted his fiscal strategy; he continues to reduce the tax burden on the wealthy and leave the government without adequate resources for the fight. He has yet to invest the funds and energy, on a scale appropriate to an existential struggle, in public diplomacy, Arab-language training, foreign student exchanges, nuclear materials control and many other ventures that are key to eventual victory. And he has yet to acknowledge that the downsized military he favored in 2000 is no longer suitable in 2004.
The reason for this failure -- whether an unwillingness to face the political consequences of demanding sacrifice, or an inability to let go of cherished views on military transformation, tax cuts and the like -- matters less than the consequences. We support Mr. Bush's "vision of dignity and freedom in every culture," but he undermines the cause and feeds only cynicism when he refuses to match the tools to the task. More immediately he places an unfair burden on those in uniform and their families.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Soldier's defense team wants 100 witnesses from Cheney on down for Abu Ghraib case
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
By Cindi Lash and Michael A. Fuoco
Sunday, June 13, 2004
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04165/331166.stm
Defense attorneys preparing for Pfc. Lynndie England's upcoming hearing on charges she abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison have compiled a list of 100 potential witnesses stretching from the halls of power in Washington, D.C., to the sand-swept vistas of Iraq.
By putting top government officials like Vice President Dick Cheney on their witness list, England's attorneys are serving notice that in defending their client, they will attempt to put on trial the Bush administration's policies on intelligence gathering from detainees. Like most other military police reservists charged in the abuse scandal, England has claimed military intelligence officers ordered the MPs to "soften up" the detainees prior to interrogations.
However, just because her attorneys want those witnesses doesn't mean that many of them will be on the stand later this month at England's Article 32 hearing in Fort Bragg, N.C. That's because a military investigating officer, the presiding authority at the Article 32 hearing, will decide which witnesses are most relevant.
The goal at this stage of the military justice system is to determine whether there is sufficient probable cause to believe a crime was committed and whether England committed it. If the investigating officer determines there is enough evidence to proceed to a court-martial, he will make that recommendation to a higher-ranking officer, who will make the final determination.
Given that, it would seem highly unlikely that the most prominent names listed will be asked to take the witness stand at England's hearing, tentatively scheduled for June 22.
The wished-for witness list, obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, includes, in addition to Cheney, other high-ranking officials such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone; Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and other high-ranking Army officers; White House General Counsel Alberto Gonzales; and Justice Department officials.
An Army spokeswoman said last week that any military personnel chosen as witnesses by the investigating officer will be ordered to appear. Spokesmen for Cheney and the Defense Department did not return calls seeking comment.
England, 21, of Fort Ashby, W.Va., has become perhaps the most recognized of the seven soldiers from the 372nd MP Company who were charged in the prison abuse scandal. She provoked international ire for her exuberant smile and thumbs-up sign while posing with naked, hooded prisoners in widely published photographs. In one, she holds a leash attached to the neck of a naked Iraqi who is on the ground.
The witness list includes 16 members of the 372nd, headquartered in Cresaptown, Md., many of whose names will be familiar to those who have followed the abuse scandal.
Among the group are Spc. Joseph M. Darby, the Somerset County native who turned in the others and is not facing charges, and Spc. Jeremy Sivits of Hyndman, Bedford County, who pleaded guilty May 19 at a special court-martial in a plea bargain with prosecutors in which he promised to testify against England and the six other MPs charged thus far.
The five other charged MPs -- Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick II, Sgt. Javal S. Davis, Spc. Charles Graner Jr., Spc. Sabrina Harman and Spc. Megan Ambuhl -- remain in Iraq where they are performing tasks other than jail guard duty. They are not expected to be ordered to testify because they almost certainly would invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if ordered to do so.
Frederick, Davis and Graner have already had their Article 32 hearings and have had charges referred to general court-martial. A military judge set June 21 for pre-trial hearings in their cases, where pleas and motions must be entered.
Ambuhl has had her Article 32 hearing, at which two of four charges lodged against her were dropped. A decision is expected by early summer on whether she should face a court-martial.
Harman's Article 32 hearing is scheduled for June 24. An Army spokesman in Iraq said the hearing is tentatively set to be held at the Victory Base Courthouse outside of Baghdad but it may be moved to the Green Zone, the heavily guarded area in central Baghdad, to provide for additional seating.
Unlike the other charged MPs, England was transferred to the United States because she is pregnant. She told investigators that Graner is the father.
At this stage, prosecutors are likely to draw much of their case against England from her own words, found in the signed, sworn statement she gave agents from the Army's Criminal Investigation Division at Fort Bragg on May 5. Her attorneys, who did not return calls last week, have in the past argued that England was pressured into giving that statement and they will try to have it suppressed.
In that statement, obtained by the Post-Gazette, England implicates herself and five other members of the 372nd in varying types of abuse at Abu Ghraib. She maintains they committed no crimes because they were following orders from superior officers and that what occurred there was widely known and, in some cases, "funny."
England acknowledged in her statement that the MPs were not given specific orders on how to "break'' detainees for interrogation by military intelligence officers or other government agents. But she said those officers praised the MPs and told them to "keep it up'' with their treatment of detainees.
England's witness list also includes White House counsel Gonzales and Justice Department officials who were involved in a controversial Bush administration decision two years ago to deny Geneva Conventions protections to captured Taliban and Al-Qaida combatants detained in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo, Cuba. That paved the way for U.S. agents to employ a new, more aggressive set of interrogation rules that included stress and duress while they attempted to extract information from detainees at Guantanamo and other sites.
Attorneys for England and other charged MPs, as well as administration critics, contend that policy was gradually expanded to also cover Iraqi detainees, creating conditions where military and civilian intelligence officers used MP guards at Abu Ghraib to intimidate detainees before interrogations.
Also on the witness list are 12 Abu Ghraib detainees, although what assistance they could provide in England's defense is unclear, other than if they would say she wasn't involved in any incidents involving them.
One of them, Abdou Hussain Saad Faleh, is identified in CID documents obtained by the Post-Gazette as the inmate in the iconic photo of the abuse scandal -- hooded, standing on a box and with wires attached to his fingers, toes and penis -- after MPs told him he would be electrocuted if he stepped off.
Another detainee on the witness list, Abd Alwhab Youss, told CID investigators that after he was mistakenly identified as the owner of a broken toothbrush that could be used as a weapon, he was stripped and six unnamed guards poured cold water on him and "forced me to put my head in someone's urine," beat him with a broom, stepped on his head, spit on him and yelled at him with a loudspeaker for three hours.
The witness list also includes:
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who supervised operations at the U.S. Detention Center in Guantanamo before he was sent to Iraq to improve intelligence gathering in summer 2003. In November, Sanchez transferred control of Abu Ghraib to military intelligence and other agencies.
Maj Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who headed a military investigation that produced a report detailing abuses at Abu Ghraib. His report includes MPs' contentions that their controversial treatment of prisoners was directed by military intelligence and other government officials.
Maj. Gen. George Fay, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, who was appointed after Taguba's report to investigate the conduct of military intelligence officers at Abu Ghraib. Fay, however, may be replaced by a higher-ranking general because, as a two-star general, he lacks authority to question officers of greater rank.
Brig. Gen. Janis L. Karpinski, who as commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade oversaw military prisons in Iraq, and other Army officials who worked in the prison. Karpinski and other officers have been reprimanded.
Col. Thomas M. Pappas, who as commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib.
Other soldiers who were witnesses to abuse, according to CID documents obtained by the Post-Gazette.
(Cindi Lash can be reached at clash@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1973. Michael A. Fuoco can be reached at mfuoco@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1968.)
-------- drug war
Russia Seeks Balance in Drug-Use Sentencing
June 13, 2004
By C. J. CHIVERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/europe/13RUSS.html
MOSCOW, June 12 - Vladimir Loginov, 25 years old but with the tired eyes of a man much older, sat reading the Russian criminal code and explaining his fate. He had been arrested on the streets here in 1999, accused of possessing roughly a quarter gram of heroin.
He spent five years and two months in prison. By the time he left, he had contracted tuberculosis.
Under a new Russian drug policy, such a bleak journey through the country's penal system for small-scale drug possession has become much less likely.
After years of harsh penalties for people convicted of possessing small amounts of illegal drugs, Russia has liberalized policies underpinning the law. The effect is not legalization, or even free-spirited tolerance. No one mistakes Moscow for Amsterdam. Possession of small amounts of illicit substances remains punishable by fines, and possession of larger amounts or drug trafficking risks prison.
But the new policies restore a balance between crime and punishment and protect small-time drug offenders - those caught with up to 10 doses of illicit substances for personal use - from prison and its associated risks. Drug treatment specialists and aid workers describe the change as a breakthrough that could alleviate prison overcrowding and perhaps the spread of infectious diseases.
"It is a liberalization of thinking, and in this sense it is a revolution," said Dr. Oleg V. Zykov, a member of President Vladimir V. Putin's Human Rights Commission and president of No to Alcoholism and Drug Addiction, a nongovernmental organization counseling drug users.
In theory, Russian drug laws already worked much like many laws in the West, delineating drug crimes by degree. Suspects were charged according to the amounts of drugs they were accused of possessing, with progressively stiffer penalties for larger quantities.
In practice, however, it had been almost impossible for a suspect to be classified as a small-time user.
To determine charges, the police and courts used a table of weights to classify charges, and critics said weights were set absurdly low. For example, a "large" amount of heroin, punishable with imprisonment, was five-thousandths of a gram. "We are talking about dust," Dr. Zykov said.
Such policies seemed at odds with the spirit of the law. "The will of the legislators was distorted," said Lev Levinson, head of New Drug Policy, a nongovernmental organization. Last year Mr. Putin signed a law amending drug-possession charges, allowing possession of up to 10 doses before risking imprisonment. This spring a special commission compiled a table of weights defining 10 doses of heroin as a gram. The threshold for cocaine is a gram and a half. For marijuana, it is 20 grams - more than half an ounce.
The table took effect last month by resolution from Prime Minister Mikhail Y. Fradkov, to the praise of organizations sometimes critical of Russian practices. "It brings the criminal regulations in the country closer to those accepted by the world community," said Alexander Petrov of Human Rights Watch.
Still, the new practice has divided elements of the government. Last year Aleksandr Mikhailov, deputy head of the federal antidrug agency, called drugs "weapons of mass destruction." When Prime Minister Fradkov released the new standards, Mr. Mikhailov railed against them.
Drug use here is generally considered less common than in the West. Alcoholism remains the dominant addiction. But drug use has sharply increased since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the authorities say, and the spread of heroin injection, with its contribution to a surge in H.I.V. cases, is particularly worrisome.
The problem seems unlikely to wane. Mr. Putin noted this week that heroin trafficking into Russia from Afghanistan had increased since the defeat of the Taliban in 2001.
With heroin having become a permanent part of Russian life, advocates expressed hope that the new law might allow for the release of many small-time drug users now in prison, reducing the risks of exposure to H.I.V. and tuberculosis, which are often contracted in jails. By one survey, as many as 65,000 people were imprisoned under the old law, Dr. Zykov and Mr. Levinson said.
Aid workers also say the law may help reduce the corruption they say surrounds arrests of the indigent and the young, Mr. Loginov, who insists he was framed by police officers who planted heroin in his clothes and apartment, said the new table would make it more difficult to rig cases. "With these new amounts, this won't happen anymore," he said.
-------- prisons / prisoners
A Look Behind the 'Wire' At Guantanamo
Defense Memos Raised Questions About Detainee Treatment as Red Cross Sought Changes
By Scott Higham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 13, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37364-2004Jun12?language=printer
On the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the newly arriving detainees thought they were walking into certain death. Dressed in reddish jumpsuits, a hue reserved for condemned men in the Arab world, the captives believed they were about to be executed.
U.S. military officers wondered whether the fears could work in their favor.
"The detainees think they are being taken to be shot," the military officers noted in one of a series of Defense Department memos written at the base and obtained by The Washington Post. "Should we continue not to tell them what is going on and keep them scared."
The previously undisclosed memos provide one of the most complete pictures to date of life behind the "wire" at Guantanamo. The detainees wanted an extra pair of shorts to wear in the shower, for privacy. They asked that the call to prayer be broadcast in camp, but a CD player could not be found. They asked for tea with "lots of sugar." The response: "Not now. However, we will reconsider in the future." Of the 600 detainees, 200 cooperated with their keepers.
The memos also document for the first time the precise nature of a number of long-standing concerns issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross over the treatment of suspected al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban fighters held at the base.
Among them: U.S. interrogators were placing detainees in isolation holds for as long as a month at a time for refusing to furnish information. Extraordinarily long interrogation sessions were having a "cumulative effect" on the mental health of the captives. And the reliance upon open-air cages instead of enclosed cells constituted inhumane treatment under the international laws of war.
Nearly two years after the camp opened, Red Cross officials sharply criticized the U.S. government for continuing to use the cages and keeping detainees in "excessive isolation," and for failing to establish due process or a stepped-up release schedule, according to the memos.
"There was no improvement in any of the four major areas of concern," an Oct. 9, 2003, memo states.
The memos also contain tantalizing clues about several high-value detainees who were off-limits to Red Cross inspectors during their periodic visits to Guantanamo, which typically lasted four to six weeks. A source familiar with captives at the base said one of the detainees, No. 760, is a close associate of Osama bin Laden, Abdallah Tabarak. The Moroccan citizen was bin Laden's personal bodyguard, took part in the Tora Bora battles in Afghanistan at the end of 2001 and sacrificed himself to secure bin Laden's escape by making calls on the al Qaeda leader's personal satellite telephone.
Red Cross officials were not permitted to interview Tabarak as recently as Feb. 2, according to a memo documenting a meeting at the base that day.
"Is there a possibility we can see him?" asked Vincent Cassard, the head of the Red Cross inspection team.
"Because of military necessity, the ICRC may not have private talks with him," said Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then commander of detention operations at Guantanamo and now in charge of U.S. prison facilities in Iraq. ". . . He is the only one here at the Camp who has restricted access."
A Defense Department spokeswoman declined to say last week who is being held at Guantanamo as part of a broader policy barring the disclosure of the identities of detainees at the base. Red Cross officials also declined to identify detainees or discuss the memos. Red Cross officials rarely issue public comments and criticisms, fearing they could lose access to detention facilities and prisoners.
"Confidentiality prevents us from being able to confirm or deny what we have seen, what we have heard from detainees and what we have discussed with the authorities," Red Cross spokeswoman Amanda Williamson said.
Defense Department officials declined to discuss the memos, stressing the importance of maintaining confidentiality in their conversations with the Red Cross. "There's been a good working relationship," said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Barbara Burfeind, a Defense Department spokeswoman. "A lot of the concerns that they have brought up have been addressed."
She said there have been "significant improvements" in the quality of life for detainees and the Pentagon is planning hearings to review the status of each of the 595 detainees. "Basically, a lot of things have changed and improved down there since it first opened," Burfeind said. "There's been an ongoing dialogue with the Red Cross, and that has been very helpful."
Since Guantanamo received its first detainees in January 2002, U.S. officials have closely guarded what takes place on the cellblocks, who is held there and when the captives might be released. The open-ended nature of the detentions has been condemned by foreign governments and human rights groups. The constitutionality of the detentions is being weighed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to rule within the next few weeks whether detainees can be held without access to lawyers or courtrooms.
Record of Visits
While the Defense Department memos are not a complete record of the half-dozen Red Cross visits to the base, they do provide a rare account of detainee life and the conversations between members of the international humanitarian group and top detention commanders.
On Jan. 11, 2002, the Defense Department opened Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo, a primitive collection of hastily erected chain-link cages on slabs of concrete in a remote area of the Navy base. Six days later, Red Cross officials visited the base. They met with the prison commanders on Jan. 21.
The conversation was cordial.
"The meeting was very informal, but well structured," a military officer wrote in one of the memos. "The ICRC delegates were very appreciative of support and access provided."
Red Cross officials said they were "very pleased" with the treatment of the detainees and appreciate that the situation is "fluid" and commanders must be flexible, the memo said. "They accept that the U.S. must factor protection as a paramount consideration."
After the meeting, military officers prepared a document titled "General Observation and Meeting Notes." The document shows that military officers were forced to confront numerous questions and concerns raised by the Red Cross.
The military officers noted that the detainees, the vast majority of them Muslim, believed the reddish jumpsuits were a sign that they were going to be put to death. The officers wondered whether they should explain that was not the case, change the color of the jumpsuits or do nothing.
In a section of the document subtitled "Issues for Commander," the military officers wrote:
• Should we continue not to tell them what is going on and keep them scared. ICRC says that they are very scared.
• What are the benefits of keeping them scared vs. telling them what is happening?
• What additional problems are caused when they are this scared?
The military officers said the commander of Guantanamo might want to consider that the detainees were not "thinking logically" and "the detainees think they are being taken to be shot." The officers also noted that the varied religious and ethnic backgrounds of the detainees were causing confusion and generating a series of issues that had to be resolved.
The detainees felt humiliated by being forced to shower naked in front of other captives and military police soldiers. The prisoners were not permitted to grow beards, a key religious practice. They did not have cloth to keep their Korans clean and off the floor. Pakistanis said they could not sleep unless their faces were covered. Detainees said they needed prayer beads and caps, and wanted calls to prayer to be broadcast five times a day.
"We need to get an expert in their culture to help us," the officers wrote in the memo.
Concerns Outlined
A few days later, on Jan. 24, 2002, military officers prepared a five-page memo documenting 29 concerns the Red Cross delegation had raised on behalf of the detainees. The detention commanders decided to provide detainees with cloth for their Korans, daily prayer calls once they found a CD player and shorts for the shower. The commanders also decided to tell the detainees that the color of the jumpsuits did not portend a death sentence.
"Detainees are informed that the purpose of the fluorescent jump is to identify them as 'detainees' and that it is worn for security purposes," the memo said.
The military commanders also denied or delayed decisions on some of the Red Cross requests made on behalf of the detainees. The detainees would not initially be told where they were. They would not be permitted to be arranged in cells near those of similar nationalities who speak the same language.
"Not until the initial round of interrogations is completed," the memo said.
Within a few months, the military would close Camp X-Ray and replace it with a more modern facility called Camp Delta. Although detainees were still kept in metal cages, military officers made improvements to the camp. They also started an incentive-based system in an effort to improve the flow of intelligence during interrogations.
In October 2003, the Red Cross team was back at Guantanamo. On this trip, the team conducted more than 500 interviews on the cellblocks before meeting with Miller and his top aides. The Defense Department memo recounting that meeting suggested that the once-cordial relationship had cooled.
Cassard, the Red Cross team leader, said the humanitarian group was deeply troubled that little progress had been made in four key areas: the lack of a legal system for the detainees, the continued use of steel cages, the "excessive use of isolation" and the lack of "repatriation" for the detainees.
"The ICRC feels that interrogators have too much control over the basic needs of detainees. That the interrogators attempted to control the detainees through use of isolation," the memo said. "Mr. Cassard stated that the interrogators have total control of the level of isolation in which detainees were kept; the level of comfort items detainees can receive; and also the access of basic needs to the detainees."
Miller bristled at the comments, telling the Red Cross representatives that interrogation techniques were not their concern. "There is no issue with the interrogation methods. The focus of the ICRC should be the level of humane detention being upheld, not the interrogation methods," the memo said.
Cassard replied that those methods and the lengths of interrogations were coercive and having a "cumulative effect" on the mental health of the detainees. Cassard also said that the steel cages, coupled with the maximum-security nature of the facility and the isolation techniques, constituted harsh treatment. He said interrogators were putting detainees into isolation holds for 30 days at a time for refusing to cooperate, an apparent violation of international law.
Miller denied the assertion. He said detainees were never put into isolation cells for failing to cooperate. He said those cells were used to punish those who failed to follow prison rules or had assaulted guards. He said only he had the authority to order isolation, and he "is careful not to exceed 30 [days] unless a detainee has committed a serious breach of the disciplinary rules."
Cassard then said he had been told that interrogators at the facility were gaining access to the medical files of the detainees and using the information to develop their interrogation plans. "This is a breach of confidentiality between a physician and a patient," Cassard said, according to the memo.
Miller denied the allegation, demanding that Cassard provide proof.
"Miller asked the ICRC to confirm their facts with regard to the medical records issue," the memo said.
Cassard shot back.
"Mr. Cassard raised a concern that MG Miller was not taking the discussion seriously," the memo said. "Miller explained that he was taking the discussion seriously, that he respected the work and opinions of the ICRC. He also asked the ICRC team to respect his opinions."
Cassard also criticized Miller for expanding a section of the prison called Camp Echo, a collection of isolation huts. Cassard said he was "shocked" to see more of the huts going up and called conditions at the camp "extremely harsh" with "very strict interrogations."
Miller called Camp Echo an "appropriate facility" and said it was designed to hold disciplinary cases and detainees scheduled to be tried before military commissions. He said the secluded nature of the camp permitted "detainees to have private conversations with their attorneys," the memo said. Miller added: "There are currently very few detainees in Camp Echo and they are there for serious assaults against MPs."
The chief of the Red Cross in North America, Christophe Girod, concluded the meeting by saying that the detainees should have visitation rights and that the open-ended detentions were "very hard" on the captives. "Mr. Girod stated that after two years it is time for ICRC and the U.S. to put everything on the table and make some real policy changes."
Miller said changes were underway.
"Miller asked that the ICRC respect the fact that some detainees here are very high risk, very dangerous and must be treated as such," the memo said.
On Oct. 10, the day after the meeting, Girod issued a rare public criticism of the Guantanamo operation, noting "a worrying deterioration in the psychological health of a large number" of the detainees because of the uncertainty about their fate. "One cannot keep these detainees in this pattern, this situation, indefinitely."
He said he spoke out because negotiations with the Bush administration failed to produce results.
This February, the team members returned to Guantanamo and met with Miller for an update. The general told them they could have access to several detainees who were previously off-limits but not Tabarak, No. 760. "We are in the process of getting a medical summary of his record for you to see how he's doing," Miller told the delegation, according to a Feb. 2 memo. He also said that an Australian held in Guantanamo, David Hicks, who was charged last week with conspiracy to commit war crimes, was cleared to make phone calls.
"So far, he's made two, one to his father and the other to his mother," Miller said in February.
Miller also said that several juveniles being held at the base had been freed, and more than 200 detainees -- close to a third of those held at the base -- were cooperating with U.S. interrogators. Because of their cooperation, the general said, he was "opening up new recreations" as a reward.
Today, a Red Cross team is on the ground in Cuba, inspecting the base again and interviewing detainees. Williamson, the Red Cross spokeswoman, said the U.S. government has made numerous changes since the detention camp opened 29 months ago. Still, she said, concerns remain.
"Some of our concerns have been addressed, and others have not," Williamson said. "A key problem that hasn't changed at all is the lack of a legal framework to regulate and govern the detentions."
Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.
--------
US to keep 4,000- 5,000 prisoners after June 30
Mideast - AFP
Sun Jun 13
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20040613/wl_mideast_afp/iraq_us_prisoners_040613132418
BAGHDAD (AFP) - The US-led coalition plans to hold on to between 4,000 and 5,000 people after Iraq receives sovereignty on June 30 and to free or hand over to the Iraqi authorities 1,400 prisoners, a military officer told AFP.
"Currently, there are approximately 6,400 detainees," said Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, a spokesman for detention operations in Iraq.
"At this time, we estimate there will be approximately 4,000-5,000 detainees after June 30, keeping in mind that anti-Coalition activities occur every day, resulting in further detentions."
About 200 prisoners held at Camp Bucca, a detention camp located by the southern port of Umm al-Qasr, will be transferred to the Iraqi authorities, Johnson said.
The coalition will also shut down one of its three main nationwide prison centres, Camp Cropper, located at the Baghdad airport, Johnson said.
"Currently, there are three theater-level detention facilities in Iraq: Camp Redemption at Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr, and Camp Cropper.
"The plan is to have only two theater-level facilities after June 30, Camp Redemption and Camp Bucca," he said.
The bvlk of the 44 most-wanted members of Saddam Hussein's regime captured by the coalition are being held at Camp Cropper, a humanitarian group said on condition of anonymity.
The moves come as the US-led coalition looks to overhaul its detention facilities ahead of Iraqi sovereignty.
The US-run detention system has been tarnished by allegations of physical and sexual abuse of detainees, notably in Abu Ghraib.
Coalition officials have acknowledged issues of over-crowding and that Iraqis no longer considered a threat have lanquished behind bars for months.
--------
Secret world of US jails
Jason Burke charts the worldwide hidden network of prisons where more than 3,000 al-Qaeda suspects have been held without trial - and many subjected to torture - since 9/11
The Observer
Sunday June 13, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1237650,00.html
The United States government, in conjunction with key allies, is running an 'invisible' network of prisons and detention centres into which thousands of suspects have disappeared without trace since the 'war on terror' began.
In the past three years, thousands of alleged militants have been transferred around the world by American, Arab and Far Eastern security services, often in secret operations that by-pass extradition laws. The astonishing traffic has seen many, including British citizens, sent from the West to countries where they can be tortured to extract information. Anything learnt is passed on to the US and, in some cases, reaches British intelligence.
The disclosure of the shadowy system will increase pressure on the Bush administration over its 'cavalier' approach to human rights and will embarrass Tony Blair, a staunch ally of President George Bush.
The practice of 'renditions' - when suspects are handed directly into the custody of another state without due process - has sparked particular anger. At least 70 such transfers have occurred, according to CIA sources. Many involve men who have been freed by the courts and are thus legally innocent. Renditions are often used when American interrogators believe that harsh treatment - banned in their own country - would produce results.
The Observer has obtained details of two incidents in which men have been detained by the US despite being found innocent by courts in their own country. In one, a British businessman called Wahab al-Rami, an Iraqi living in the UK and a Palestinian seeking asylum were arrested by US and local officers in Gambia in November 2002 as they stepped off a flight from London.
Their seizure, which followed a tip-off from the UK security services - came just days after they had been arrested by British police on suspicion of terrorism and then freed by a British court.
Two were transported from Gambia to Guantanamo Bay - where they remain today - without any legal process. In the other incident, two Turks, a Saudi, a Kenyan and a Sudanese man were arrested in Malawi in June 2003 on suspicion of funding terrorist networks. Though freed by local courts, the men were handed over to the CIA and held for several months. Campaigners say these incidents are 'the tip of an iceberg'.
Few escape the ghost network of detention facilities, which range from massive prison camps such as that at Guantanamo Bay to naval vessels in the Indian Ocean, so accounts of life inside the new gulag are rare.
One of the most harrowing stories concerns a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, who was arrested by US authorities in late 2002 during a stopover in New York, on suspicion of terrorist activities.
After several days of questioning, the 34-year-old IT specialist was flown to Jordan, where the CIA passed him on to local security officials. He was repeatedly assaulted in Jordan before being driven to Syria, where he was kept in solitary confinement in a 6ft by 3ft cell for several months and repeatedly beaten with cables. All charges were dropped on his release. Arar said last week that he was 'trying to rebuild [his] life'. 'I never did anything to make me a suspect. I could not believe they would send me back to Syria, but they did,' he said. 'They sent me back to be tortured.'
The ghost prison network stretches around the globe. The biggest American-run facilities are at the Bagram airbase, north of Kabul in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, where around 400 men are held, and in Iraq, where tens of thousands of detainees are held. Saddam Hussein and dozens of top Baath party officials are held in a prison at Baghdad airport.
However, Washington is relying heavily on allies. In Morocco, scores of detainees once held by the Americans are believed to be held at the al-Tamara interrogation centre sited in a forest five miles outside the capital, Rabat. Many of the detainees were originally captured by the Pakistani authorities, who passed them on to the Americans.
One is Abdallah Tabarak, a militant who is alleged to have been Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and was seized in late 2001 by the Pakistanis. Tabarak was handed over to US agents, sent to Bagram and then to Guantanamo, before being flown to Morocco. Last November, Amnesty International criticised the 'sharp rise' in torture during 2003 in Moroccan prisons.
In Syria, detainees sent by Washington are held at 'the Palestine wing' of the main intelligence headquarters and a series of jails in Damascus and other cities. Egypt has also received a steady flow of militants from American installations. Many other militants have been sent to Egypt by other countries through transfers assisted by the Americans, often using planes run by the CIA.
In Cairo, prisoners are kept in the interrogation centre in the general intelligence directorate in Lazoughli and in Mulhaq al-Mazra prison, according to Montasser al-Zayat, an Islamist lawyer in Cairo and former spokesman for outlawed militant groups.
Terrorists have also been sent to facilities in Baku, Azerbaijan, and to unidentified locations in Thailand. Scores more are thought to be at a US airbase in the Gulf state of Qatar, and a large number are believed to have been sent to Saudi Arabia, where CIA agents are allowed to sit in on some of the interrogations. Elsewhere, security officials merely provide the Americans with summaries.
The fate of high-value prisoners - such as those directly connected to the 11 September attacks or other al-Qaeda strikes, or senior aides of bin Laden - is unknown. Abu Zubaydah, the Palestinian-born al-Qaeda logistics expert, was arrested after a shoot-out in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad in March 2002 by a joint team of American and Pakistani special forces.
After a brief interrogation, Abu Zubayda was handed over to the Americans, who took him to Bagram and then, it is believed, flew him on to Jordan, where he has been held, along with several other high-value prisoners, in prisons in the capital, Amman, and in desert locations in the east of the country. Jordanian investigators are seen as 'professional' by Western intelligence services, although the nation has been repeatedly criticised for its human rights record.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who both helped plan the 11 September attacks, were also transferred to American custody soon after their capture by Pakistani security forces in September 2002 and March 2003 respectively. They are believed to have been interrogated in Thailand.
The whereabouts of Riduan Isamuddin, the Indonesian activist dubbed 'the bin Laden of the Far East', who was passed to the Americans following arrest by Thai security forces in August last year, are unknown. Jabarah Mohamed Mansur, allegedly involved in an attempt to bomb the US and Israeli embassies in Singapore, is reported to have been interrogated in Oman.
What is clear is that the Americans are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to capture suspects and to ensure that they are taken to an environment where information can be extracted as speedily as possible.
In March 2003, FBI agents kidnapped a Yemeni al-Qaeda suspect from a hospital in Mogadishu, where he was being treated for gunshot wounds. Two months earlier, a sophisticated operation involving a fake charity lured a 54-year-old Yemeni to Germany, where he was detained and later extradited to the US. To seize Mohammed Iqbal Madni, a suspected al-Qaeda operative, in Indonesia, US investigators worked three states' legal systems to provide an excuse to pick up the 24-year-old Pakistani. They then flew him to Cairo on a private US-run jet.
The exact number of prisoners held by the Americans or their allies is unknown, but US officials claim that more than 3,000 al-Qaeda militants have been arrested since 11 September. Only around 350 are held in Guantanamo Bay. Very few have been released.
The incarceration of prisoners captured by the Americans in jails in the Middle East has enraged militants. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born terrorist leader who is active in Iraq, said in April that prisons in his native land had become 'the Arab Guantanamo'.
'Whoever the Americans find hard to investigate in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they move to Jordan, where they are tortured in every way,' he said.
American officials are unrepentant. 'You have to break eggs to make omelettes,' said one last week. 'The world is a bad place.'
And Cofer Black, then head of the CIA counter-terrorist centre, said last year that 'there was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves came off.'
But former intelligence officers criticised the new tactics last week. Milton Bearden, who ended a 30-year career with the CIA in 1994, said that coercion did not work.
'You just get all kinds of confessions that turn out to be completely untrue,' he said. 'And rendition to someone who will torture a suspect is as bad as doing it yourself.'
Wahab al-Rawi, whose brother is still being held in Guantanamo Bay, said that he was angry at both the British government and the US government.
'I just want to know how my own government can just give me up to the Americans. Who do these people answer to?
'I just ask God to punish them, because there is no power on earth that they seem to be afraid of.'
-------- torture
Justice Dept. Memo Says Torture 'May Be Justified'
Washington Post Staff Writer
By Dana Priest
June 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38894-2004Jun13?language=printer
Today washingtonpost.com is posting a copy of the Aug. 1, 2002, memorandum (PDF)(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/documents/dojinterrogationmemo20020801.pdf) "Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation under 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340A," from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for Alberto R. Gonzales, counsel to President Bush.
The memo was the focus of a recent article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23373-2004Jun7.html) in The Washington Post.
The memo was written at the request of the CIA. The CIA wanted authority to conduct more aggressive interrogations than were permitted prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The interrogations were of suspected al Qaeda members whom the CIA had apprehended outside the United States. The CIA asked the White House for legal guidance. The White House asked the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel for its legal opinion on the standards of conduct under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
The Office of Legal Counsel is the federal government's ultimate legal adviser. The most significant and sensitive topics that the federal government considers are often given to the OLC for review. In this case, the memorandum was signed by Jay S. Bybee, the head of the office at the time. Bybee's signature gives the document additional authority, making it akin to a binding legal opinion on government policy on interrogations. Bybee has since become a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Another memorandum (http://news.findlaw.com/wp/docs/torture/30603wgrpt.html), dated March 6, 2003, from a Defense Department working group convened by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to come up with new interrogation guidelines for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, incorporated much, but not all, of the legal thinking from the OLC memo. The Wall Street Journal first published the March memo.
At a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, senators asked Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to release both memos. Ashcroft said he would not discuss the contents of the Justice and Pentagon memos or turn them over to the committees. A transcript of that hearing is also available(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25211-2004Jun8.html).
President Bush spoke on the issue of torture Thursday, saying he expected U.S. authorities to abide by the law. He declined to say whether he believes U.S. law prohibits torture. Here is a link to the transcript of the president's press conference (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32143-2004Jun10.html), which included questions and answers on torture.
The Post deleted several lines from the memo that are not germane to the legal arguments being made in it and that are the subject of further reporting by The Post.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
South Korea Dissolves Ties That Once Bound the Press to the Powerful
June 13, 2004
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/asia/13kore.html?pagewanted=all&position=
SEOUL, South Korea - As a vigorous, debate-filled democracy becomes entrenched here, South Korea is rapidly dismantling the press club system, an enduring symbol of the collusive relationship between the government and the news media.
Starting a year ago at the presidential offices, known as the Blue House, press clubs - in which reporters from major media outlets excluded other journalists and decided what to report, sometimes in conjunction with government officials - have been eliminated in one government office after another. Where they survive, as in Seoul's Police Department, they are expected to go soon.
Instead, shiny new briefing rooms have been built, their doors flung open to all. Although journalists and government officials are still groping for a new balance in their relationship, most believe that the changes will lead to the emergence of something rare in East Asia: a fiercely independent press.
The dismantling of the deep-rooted press club system, a vestige of the Japanese colonial rule that ended in 1945, resulted from the confluence of several events. In 2002, President Roh Moo Hyun was elected despite the fierce opposition of traditional outlets, especially conservative newspapers and television networks. At the same time, Internet-based alternative sources of information, popular among the young and generally supportive of Mr. Roh, have emerged as rivals to the traditional media here in the world's most wired nation.
The speed of the change is particularly stunning because, in Japan, the press club system survives intact. Hyun Seung Yoon, 39, a reporter for The Korea Economic Daily and the former vice president of the Finance Ministry's press club, which was abolished on Dec. 29, said that in the past the government and the media were united.
"Fundamentally, it's better now," Mr. Hyun said. "It's healthier now. The relationship that existed before was a collusive one."
When Mr. Roh came to power a year and a half ago, a priority was to make the government's relationship with the media more open, and to give "equal opportunity to all media," said Jung Soon Kyun, the minister of the government information agency, who traveled to the United States, Japan, Germany and Britain to study how each government dealt with the media. The press club system had allowed the big media outlets to "monopolize information" and sometimes "offer and receive personal favors," said the minister, a former reporter.
For Mr. Roh, a political outsider who had not won the backing of the mainstream media during his election campaign, the abolition of the press club system also worked to his political advantage.
Under the old system, members of the major news outlets controlled membership and expelled organizations that failed to abide by club rules. The club decided, sometimes through a senior member acting as a liaison with the government, what news to focus on, what to play down or, in some cases, what to suppress.
The government paid for all the expenses the press club incurred, including phone bills, and even provided a secretary for the members. Until a few years ago, the government also paid for the reporters' air fare, hotel bills and other expenses whenever the president traveled.
Under the new system, the government charges each reporter assigned to the Blue House about $50 a month to cover various fees. With reporters for any news organization, big or small, free to register, the number of Blue House reporters has increased to more than 300 from 90.
Press clubs exist all over the country, from the Blue House to the ministries to police precincts, said Lee Jae Kyoung, a journalism professor at Ewha Womans University and a former television reporter.
"The loser was always going to be the reader, the people's right to know," Mr. Lee said.
Years ago, when Mr. Lee was a cub reporter covering a police precinct, the press club discovered some bad news involving a local tea manufacturer, he said. Instead of reporting the news, the club's senior members met with company officials, pocketed some cash and then treated the club members to a lavish dinner and drinks, he said.
South Korea's press club system, like its bureaucracy and legal systems, was a holdover from Japanese colonialism, said Youn Jung Suk, a professor at the Sejong Institute specializing in Japan-Korea relations. After the end of World War II and the end of Japanese colonialism, South Korea's American occupiers decided to retain the press club system.
"It was easy to control Korea through this system," Mr. Youn said.
South Korea's military leaders and a largely compliant press also shared the same belief, experts say, and so the movement to reform the press club system started only after South Korea began democratizing in the late 1980's.
In Japan, a de facto one-party state for the last half century, only maverick politicians in a few places, like Kamakura and Nagano, have abolished the press clubs, saying they are not appropriate in a democracy. Press clubs still exist in government agencies, companies and institutions all over the country, curtailing the nature and level of information available to the public.
The media revolution in South Korea has been almost completely ignored by Japan's own media, even though almost all have bureaus in Seoul. Japan's Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association argues that press clubs have officially been opened to non-members since 2002, though most Japanese journalists will acknowledge that, in practice, little has changed.
Hiroshi Wada, an official at Japan's newspaper association, went so far as to deny the changes occurring here.
"We checked the Korean situation and we do not think press clubs in South Korea have been abolished," Mr. Wada said. "It is that they allow everyone's participation freely, but press clubs still exist."
He added: "So it is not that Japan is more conservative with regards to press clubs. We understand that South Korea has caught up with us."
Here in South Korea, there had been previous attempts to abolish the press club system, notably under former President Kim Dae Jung's administration. But the resistance from the established media was too strong.
But in recent years, Internet-based news services, like OhmyNews.com, rose to challenge the big media outlets, and their influence has grown, particularly with the young.
In 2001, one of OhmyNews's reporters was barred from attending a news conference at Inchon Airport because he did not belong to its press club. Oh Yeon Ho, the news service's chief executive, sued and won.
"Only a few years earlier, people's acceptance of privileged media had been embedded in our culture," Mr. Oh said. "Now the idea of abolishing the press club has become mainstream."
In fact, Mr. Roh granted his first domestic interview as president to OhmyNews, signaling the beginning of a new era. The changes have been hard to swallow for the mainstream media, but most acknowledge that they have been positive.
"Without the press club system, we can no longer maintain embargoes or - it's an extreme example - even abolish news items," said Shin Kyoung Min, deputy managing director for MBC, a major television network. "Inside the press clubs, we did sometimes do that, though not often. The fact that everything is now open to all the media, that's a good change for everybody."
-------- us politics
Retired Officials Say Bush Must Go
Sun, Jun 13, 2004
By Ronald Brownstein
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20040613/ts_latimes/retiredofficialssaybushmustgo&e=5
WASHINGTON - A group of 26 former senior diplomats and military officials, several appointed to key positions by Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, plans to issue a joint statement this week arguing that President George W. Bush has damaged America's national security and should be defeated in November.
The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, will explicitly condemn Bush's foreign policy, according to several of those who signed the document.
"It is clear that the statement calls for the defeat of the administration," said William C. Harrop, the ambassador to Israel under President Bush's father and one of the group's principal organizers.
Those signing the document, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, include 20 former U.S. ambassadors, appointed by presidents of both parties, to countries including Israel, the former Soviet Union and Saudi Arabia.
Others are senior State Department officials from the Carter, Reagan and Clinton administrations and former military leaders, including retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East under President Bush's father. Hoar is a prominent critic of the war in Iraq.
Some of those signing the document - such as Hoar and former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. McPeak - have identified themselves as supporters of Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. But most have not endorsed any candidate, members of the group said.
It is unusual for so many former high-level military officials and career diplomats to issue such an overtly political message during a presidential campaign.
A senior official at the Bush reelection campaign said he did not wish to comment on the statement until it was released.
But in the past, administration officials have rejected charges that Bush has isolated America in the world, pointing to countries contributing troops to the coalition in Iraq and the unanimous passage last week of the U.N. resolution authorizing the interim Iraqi government.
One senior Republican strategist familiar with White House thinking said he did not think the group was sufficiently well-known to create significant political problems for the president.
The strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, also said the signatories were making an argument growing increasingly obsolete as Bush leans more on the international community for help in Iraq.
"Their timing is a little off, particularly in the aftermath of the most recent U.N. resolution," the strategist said. "It seems to me this is a collection of resentments that have built up, but it would have been much more powerful months ago than now when even the president's most disinterested critics would say we have taken a much more multilateral approach" in Iraq.
But those signing the document say the recent signs of cooperation do not reverse a basic trend toward increasing isolation for the U.S.
"We just felt things were so serious, that America's leadership role in the world has been attenuated to such a terrible degree by both the style and the substance of the administration's approach," said Harrop, who served as ambassador to four African countries under Carter and Reagan.
"A lot of people felt the work they had done over their lifetime in trying to build a situation in which the United States was respected and could lead the rest of the world was now undermined by this administration - by the arrogance, by the refusal to listen to others, the scorn for multilateral organizations," Harrop said.
Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was appointed by Reagan as ambassador to the Soviet Union and retained in the post by President Bush's father during the final years of the Cold War, expressed similar views.
"Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, the U.S. has built up alliances in order to amplify its own power," he said. "But now we have alienated many of our closest allies, we have alienated their populations. We've all been increasingly appalled at how the relationships that we worked so hard to build up have simply been shattered by the current administration in the method it has gone about things."
The GOP strategist noted that many of those involved in the document claimed their primary expertise in the Middle East and suggested a principal motivation for the statement might be frustration over Bush's effort to fundamentally reorient policy toward the region.
"For 60 years we believed in quote-unquote stability at the price of liberty, and what we got is neither liberty nor stability," the strategist said. "So we are taking a fundamentally different approach toward the Middle East. That is a huge doctrinal shift, and the people who have given their lives, careers to building the previous foreign policy consensus, see this as a direct intellectual assault on what they have devoted their lives to. And it is. We think what a lot of people came up with was a failure - or at least, in the present world in which we live, it is no longer sustainable."
Sponsors of the effort counter that several in the group have been involved in developing policy affecting almost all regions of the globe.
The document will echo a statement released in April by a group of high-level former British diplomats condemning Prime Minister Tony Blair for being too closely aligned to U.S. policy in Iraq and Israel. Those involved with the new group said their effort was already underway when the British statement was released.
The signatories said Kerry's campaign played no role in the formation of their group. Phyllis E. Oakley, the deputy State Department spokesman during Reagan's second term and an assistant secretary of state under Clinton, said she suspected "some of them [in the Kerry campaign] may have been aware of it," but that "the campaign had no role" in organizing the group.
Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's communications director, also said that the Kerry campaign had not been involved in devising the group's statement.
The document does not explicitly endorse Kerry, according to those familiar with it. But some individual signers plan to back the Democrat, and others acknowledge that by calling for Bush's removal, the group effectively is urging Americans to elect Kerry.
"The core of the message is that we are so deeply concerned about the current direction of American foreign policy . that we think it is essential for the future security of the United States that a new foreign policy team come in," said Oakley.
Much of the debate over the document in the days ahead may pivot on the extent to which it is seen as a partisan document.
A Bush administration ally said that the group failed to recognize how the Sept. 11 attacks required significant changes in American foreign policy. "There's no question those who were responsible for policies pre-9/11 are denying what seems as the obvious - that those policies were inadequate," said Cliff May, president of the conservative advocacy group Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
"This seems like a statement from 9/10 people [who don't see] the importance of 9/11 and the way that should have changed our thinking."
Along with Hoar and McPeak, others who have signed it are identified with the Democratic Party.
Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., though named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan, supported Clinton in 1992. Crowe has endorsed Kerry. Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner served as Carter's director of central intelligence and has also endorsed Kerry. Matlock said he was a registered Democrat during most of his foreign service career, though he voted for Reagan in 1984 and the elder Bush twice and now is registered as an independent.
Several on the group's list were appointed to their most important posts under Reagan and the elder Bush. These include Matlock and Harrop, as well as Arthur A. Hartman, who served as Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1981 through 1987; H. Allen Holmes, an assistant secretary of state under Reagan; and Charles Freeman, ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the elder Bush.
Many on the list have not been previously identified with any political cause or party. Several "are the kind who have never spoken out before," said James Daniel Phillips, former ambassador to Burundi and the Congo.
Oakley, Harrop and Matlock said the effort began this year. Matlock said it was sparked by conversations among "colleagues who had served in senior positions around the same time, most of them for the Reagan administration and for the first Bush administration."
Oakley said frustration over the Iraq war was "a large part" of the impetus for the statement, but the criticism of President Bush "goes much deeper."
The group's complaint about Bush's approach largely tracks Kerry's contention that the administration has weakened American security by straining traditional alliances and shifting resources from the war against Al Qaeda to the invasion of Iraq.
Oakley said the statement would argue that, "Unfortunately the tough stands [Bush] has taken have made us less secure. He has neglected the war on terrorism for the war in Iraq. And while we agree that we are in unprecedented times and we face challenges we didn't even know about before, these challenges require the cooperation of other countries. We cannot do it by ourselves."
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
The signatories
Although not explicitly endorsing Sen. John F. Kerry for president, 26 former diplomats and military officials, including many who served in Republican administrations, have signed a statement calling for the defeat of President Bush in November. Their names and some of the posts they have held are:
Avis T. Bohlen - assistant secretary of State for arms control, 1999-2002; deputy assistant secretary of State for European affairs, 1989-1991.
Retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr. - chairman, President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Committee, 1993-94; ambassador to Britain, 1993-97; chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1985-89.
Jeffrey S. Davidow - ambassador to Mexico, 1998-2002; assistant secretary of State for inter-American affairs, 1996.
William A. DePree - ambassador to Bangladesh, 1987-1990.
Donald B. Easum - ambassador to Nigeria, 1975-79.
Charles W. Freeman Jr. - assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs, 1993-94; ambassador to Saudi Arabia, 1989-1992.
William C. Harrop - ambassador to Israel, 1991-93; ambassador to Zaire, 1987-1991.
Arthur A. Hartman - ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1981-87; ambassador to France, 1977-1981.
Retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar - commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, overseeing forces in the Middle East, 1991-94; deputy chief of staff, Marine Corps, 1990-94.
H. Allen Holmes - assistant secretary of Defense for special operations, 1993-99; assistant secretary of State for politico-military affairs, 1986-89.
Robert V. Keeley - ambassador to Greece, 1985-89; ambassador to Zimbabwe, 1980-84.
Samuel W. Lewis - director of State Department policy and planning, 1993-94; ambassador to Israel, 1977-1985.
Princeton N. Lyman - assistant secretary of State for international organization affairs, 1995-98; ambassador to South Africa, 1992-95.
Jack F. Matlock Jr. - ambassador to the Soviet Union, 1987-1991; director for European and Soviet affairs, National Security Council, 1983-86; ambassador to Czechoslovakia, 1981-83.
Donald F. McHenry - ambassador to the United Nations, 1979-1981.
Retired Air Force Gen. Merrill A. McPeak - chief of staff, U.S. Air Force, 1990-94.
George E. Moose - assistant secretary of State for African affairs, 1993-97; ambassador to Senegal, 1988-91.
David D. Newsom - acting secretary of State, 1980; undersecretary of State for political affairs, 1978-1981; ambassador to Indonesia, 1973-77.
Phyllis E. Oakley - assistant secretary of State for intelligence and research, 1997-99.
James Daniel Phillips - ambassador to the Republic of Congo, 1990-93; ambassador to Burundi, 1986-1990.
John E. Reinhardt - ambassador to Nigeria, 1971-75.
Retired Air Force Gen. William Y. Smith - deputy commander in chief, U.S. European Command, 1981-83.
Ronald I. Spiers - undersecretary-general of the United Nations for political affairs, 1989-1992; ambassador to Pakistan, 1981-83.
Michael Sterner - deputy assistant secretary of State for Near East affairs, 1977-1981; ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, 1974-76.
Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner - director of the Central Intelligence Agency, 1977-1981.
Alexander F. Watson - assistant secretary of State for inter-American affairs, 1993-96; deputy permanent representative to the U.N., 1989-1993.
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McCain rejects Kerry's vice presidential overtures
June 13, 2004
(AP)
http://www.klrt.com/news/national/story.aspx?content_id=A39C9DBD-FAC7-435C-9D85-A412F582757E
WASHINGTON - Republican Sen. John McCain has personally rejected John Kerry's overtures to join the Democratic presidential ticket and forge a bipartisan alliance against President Bush, The Associated Press has learned.
Kerry has asked McCain as recently as late last month to consider becoming his running mate, but the Arizona senator said he's not interested, said a Democratic official who spoke on condition of anonymity because Kerry has insisted that his deliberations be kept private. A second official familiar with the conversations confirmed the account, and said the Arizona senator made it clear he won't change his mind.
Both officials said Kerry stopped short of offering McCain the job, sparing himself an outright rejection that would make his eventual running mate look like a second choice.
"Senator McCain categorically states that he has not been offered the vice presidency by any one," said McCain's chief of staff, Mark Salter, who would not confirm the officials' account.
Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter declined to comment.
The development may lay to rest speculation that Kerry and McCain would reach across Washington's deep partisan divide and forge an unprecedented political partnership.
The notion has been rife with obstacles from the start - McCain is a strong-willed conservative and Kerry a liberal from Massachusetts who would be loath to surrender presidential responsibilities that McCain might demand.
But the fellow senators and Vietnam veterans are friends, their bond sealed as they worked together to help President Clinton normalize relations with Vietnam. Clinton, who avoided service in the war, needed the political cover from Kerry, a decorated Navy veteran, and McCain, a prisoner of war.
McCain's cool relationship with Bush fostered Democrats' hopes, but the senator has repeatedly declared his allegiance to the GOP. McCain lost a bitter campaign against Bush for the 2000 Republican nomination, leaving wounds that may never heal.
McCain has said publicly he had no intention of serving as vice president, but he left the door open just enough to create a constant buzz. His advisers say McCain has ruled out serving under Kerry, despite his respect for the Democrat.
Officials close to Kerry have reached out to McCain's advisers in hopes of persuading the senator to join the ticket.
A GOP maverick, McCain jumped to Kerry's defense when the White House accused the Democrat of being weak on defense. "This kind of rhetoric, I think, is not helpful," he said in March, admonishing the White House.
A shoot-from-the-hip style has made McCain one of the nation's most popular politicians, a champion of campaign finance reform and critic of pork-barrel spending - two issues that antagonized his fellow lawmakers. They accuse him of being a showboat, but a politically potent one.
A recent CBS News poll showed that a hypothetical Kerry-McCain ticket had a 14-point advantage over Bush-Cheney among registered voters, 53 percent to 39 percent. That's a huge improvement over polls showing Kerry tied or slightly ahead of Bush in head-to-head matchups.
Kerry is giving serious consideration to Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri and retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark of Arkansas - all former primary rivals - as well as Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack.
When Vice President Dick Cheney's political status was shaky, McCain's name emerged as a potential replacement and officials close to the senator never ruled out that possibility. Bush has since said Cheney will remain on the ticket.
A new Associated Press poll conducted by Ipsos-Public Research shows that 51 percent of registered voters believe Bush should keep Cheney on his ticket, with 43 percent wanting him to pick somebody else.
Among those also mentioned as potential Kerry running mates are Sens. Bob Graham of Florida and Evan Bayh of Indiana; former Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska; and Govs. Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Mark Warner of Virginia, Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania.
McCain, a Navy bomber pilot, spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Kerry, who also served in the Navy during Vietnam, came home with three Purple Hearts and Bronze and Silver Stars and became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. At one protest in 1971, he threw away war medals belonging to other veterans and cast his own military ribbons over a fence. McCain heard about it while he was still being held captive in the Hanoi Hilton.
After McCain was elected to the U.S. House, he campaigned against Kerry in his first Senate race, faulting him for tossing away those medals and ribbons. But the two came to terms in the Senate and began working together.
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Inaccurate U.S. report on terrorism was 'big mistake,' Powell says
June 13, 2004
(AP)
http://www.klrt.com/news/national/story.aspx?content_id=161393A4-295F-40A7-889E-A9B05FDC415C
WASHINGTON - A State Department report that incorrectly showed a decline last year in terrorism worldwide was a "big mistake," Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.
He said he was working with the CIA, which helped to compile the data, to determine why the errors got into the report.
Powell said he planned a meeting on the issue Monday and that the intelligence agency was working through the weekend in preparation.
"I'm not saying it is responsible until I sit down with all of the individuals who had something to do with this report: CIA, my department, members of my department, other agencies that contributed to it," Powell said.
"It's a numbers error. It's not a political judgment that said,
'Let's see if we can cook the books.' We can't get away with that now. Nobody was out to cook the books. Errors crept in," he told ABC's "This Week."
He pledged to release a corrected report as quickly as possible.
A leading House Democrat, Rep. Henry Waxman of California, had challenged the findings, contending they were manipulated for political purposes. The conclusion that terrorism was on the decline was used to boost one of President Bush's chief foreign policy claims, success in countering terror.
Waxman asked Powell for an explanation and the secretary called last week to say the mistakes for unintentional.
"He says it wasn't politically motivated so I will accept that," Waxman said after their conversation. Still, the lawmaker said, "We are still left with the fact that this report is useless until it is corrected."
The April report said attacks had declined last year to 190, down from 198 in 2002 and 346 in 2001. The 2003 figure would have been the lowest level in 34 years and a 45 percent drop since 2001, Bush's first year as president.
The report also showed the virtual disappearance of attacks in which no one died.
"There's a new terrorist threat information center that compiles this data under the CIA. And we are still trying to determine what went wrong with the data and why we didn't catch it in the State Department," Powell said Sunday.
"It's a very big mistake. And we are not happy about this big mistake," he added.
The department has said that one of the mistakes was that only part of 2003 was taken into account. When the annual report was issued April 29, senior administration officials used it as evidence the war was being won under Bush.
"We weren't saying terrorism has gone away. The report clearly says terrorism is a main problem facing the world today. We've got to continue going after terrorists," Powell said.
"But based on the data we had within the report, there was a suggestion that the number of incidents had dropped and it was the lowest since 1969," he added. "That turns out not to have been correct. We were wrong. We will correct it."
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Group Seeks Change In Security Policy
Dignitaries Fault Bush Administration
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 13, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37557-2004Jun12.html
Angered by President Bush's conduct of foreign policy and dismayed about America's diminished reputation abroad, more than two dozen former top diplomats and military leaders will release a statement this week calling for a change in U.S. national security policy.
Members of the group -- a mix of Republicans and Democrats -- have served in capitals from Moscow to Tel Aviv and Lima to Kinshasa. The list includes a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a former head of U.S. Central Command, a former CIA director and a decorated array of former ambassadors and assistant secretaries of state and defense.
"We all have this extremely strong feeling that this administration has failed in its responsibilities to the nation," H. Allen Holmes, former assistant secretary of defense for special operations, said yesterday. "We have never been so isolated in the world, and feared. It's incredible that the United States should be in that position."
As a group, they are the latest and most prominent collection of former national security figures to complain about the direction of Bush administration foreign policy. They came together at a moment of growing public doubt about Bush's handling of foreign affairs and the war in Iraq.
While their views are largely shared by Bush's Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the group avoided including people connected to the Kerry campaign. To gain the maximum impact, organizers said, they also tried not to enlist figures whose anti-administration views are well-advertised.
"Our ethos is that we're professionals. We serve the president, whatever party. It's very unlike the vast majority of people in our group to do this," Holmes said. "If you're working for Kerry, we don't really want you in the group. This is supposed to be independent."
Among the signatories are former ambassadors to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock and Arthur A. Hartman. Also voicing support are former CIA director Adm. Stansfield Turner, former Joint Chiefs chairman William Crowe Jr., former Air Force chief of staff Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak and former Central Command chief Gen. Joseph P. Hoar.
Others include Phyllis E. Oakley, former chief of the State Department's intelligence operation, as well as former ambassadors Avis Bohlen and Charles Freeman and onetime U.N. ambassador Donald F. McHenry.
The group calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change.
The one-page statement, which will be released formally Wednesday at a Washington news conference, criticizes the Bush administration for ineffectiveness in its approach to the world. It mentions Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- on which the White House has strongly backed hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- and cites evidence of increasing anti-American attitudes among Muslim young people.
The statement also mentions a range of other issues, including the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and U.S. approaches to HIV-AIDS, the environment and the distribution of wealth.
"We've lost a lot of our international partnerships. We've lost a lot of lives. We've lost a lot of money for something that wasn't justified," said Ronald Spiers, former ambassador to Pakistan and Turkey, referring to the Iraq war. "This concept of transplanting democracy is a 'fool's rush in where angels fear to tread' idea."
Spiers added, "The damage we've done to key and valuable alliances is going to take a long time to fix."
Bill Harrop, former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Kenya, said he and his co-signers became "extremely disillusioned with the administration." He perceives Bush administration "scorn for multilateral organizations, the United Nations and, to some extent, even NATO." He described a "sense of unilateralism, the haughty style of international affairs."
"I really am essentially a Republican. I voted for George Bush's father, and I voted for George Bush," Harrop said. "But what we got was not the George Bush we voted for.
"There is a feeling that the administration from the very outset took a righteous black-and-white view toward diplomacy," said Harrop, who referred to administration "dissembling" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and a "complete failure to prepare for the aftermath" of war.
"It's called the war against terrorism," Harrop asserted, "but in fact it has created terrorism in Iraq. It has made Iraq itself a very dangerous place."
Three State Department workers resigned from the government during the buildup to the Iraq war, saying they could no longer represent official U.S. policy in good conscience. The most senior figure was Mary A. Wright, a decorated and widely traveled diplomat then serving as the number two U.S. official in Mongolia.
"I have served my country for almost 30 years in some of the most isolated and dangerous parts of the world," Wright wrote Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. "I want to continue to serve America. However, I do not believe in the policies of the administration and cannot defend or implement them."
John Brady Kiesling, a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, wrote in his resignation to Powell that the pursuit of war in Iraq was "driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. . . . Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security."
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26 Former U.S. Officials Oppose Bush
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A39279-2004Jun13.html
WASHINGTON - Angered by Bush administration policies they contend endanger national security, 26 retired U.S. diplomats and military officers are urging Americans to vote President Bush out of office in November.
The group, which calls itself Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, does not explicitly endorse Democrat John Kerry for president in its campaign, which will start officially Wednesday at a Washington news conference.
The Bush-Cheney campaign said Sunday it would have no response until the group formally issues its statement at the news conference.
Among the group are 20 ambassadors, appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents, other former State Department officials and military leaders whose careers span three decades.
Prominent members include retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East during the administration of Bush's father; retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., ambassador to Britain under President Clinton and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Reagan; and Jack F. Matlock Jr., a member of the National Security Council under Reagan and ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991.
"We agreed that we had just lost confidence in the ability of the Bush administration to advocate for American interests or to provide the kind of leadership that we think is essential," said William C. Harrop, the first President Bush's ambassador to Israel, and earlier to four African countries.
"The group does not endorse Kerry, although it more or less goes without saying in the statement," Harrop said Sunday in a telephone interview.
Harrop said he listed himself as an independent for years for career purposes but usually has voted Republican.
The former ambassador said diplomats and military officials normally avoid making political statements, especially in an election year.
"Some of us are not that comfortable with it, but we just feel very strongly that the country needs new leadership," Harrop said.
He said the group was disillusioned by Bush's handling of the war in Iraq and a list of other subjects, including the Middle East, environmental conservation, AIDS policy, ethnic and religious conflict and weapons proliferation.
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'Power, Terror, Peace, and War': 2.5 Cheers for George Bush
June 13, 2004
By DAVID FRUM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/books/review/13FRUML.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WALTER RUSSELL MEAD is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in United States foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Despite the crushing respectability of that title, Mead has earned a deserved reputation as one of the country's liveliest thinkers about America's role in the world. And in ''Power, Terror, Peace, and War,'' his originality has led him dangerously -- but gratifyingly -- away from respectability.
Mead says, ''A mix of incredulity, outrage, shock, anger and despair is running through the foreign policy establishment as many of its most cherished ideas and institutions are impatiently brushed aside.'' As one of the leading lights of that same establishment, Mead might have been expected to join in the keening and wailing. Instead, he has concluded that President Bush has been right on just about everything important in the war on terror.
For those who support the president and his policies, ''Power, Terror, Peace, and War'' is interesting not only in itself but also as evidence of how dramatically Bush has transformed the American foreign policy debate. For those who do not support the president, this book is a sharp reminder that, in Mead's words, opponents have ''not yet managed to present a cogent and convincing alternative strategy.''
In tandem with the eminent historian John Lewis Gaddis, the author of the equally arresting new book ''Surprise, Security, and the American Experience,'' Mead has done something that academic experts rarely do: defy their professional consensus and open their minds to new ideas. Yes, Mead can be critical of the White House. He writes, ''The Bush administration's conduct of affairs has been too choppy and uncertain, its ability to formulate and express its strategic direction too crude and unconvincing.'' But on the specifics, he is almost entirely approving.
Employing overwhelming force against terrorist enemies? Check: ''Those who cannot stand us must learn at least to fear us.''
Invading Iraq to rebuild the Middle East? Check: ''Taking Iraq's political weight out of the radical Sunni Arab camp would make a permanent and probably beneficial change in the political geometry of the Middle East.''
Threatening pre-emption as a tool against nuclear proliferation? Check: ''The European nations . . . who engaged Iran in the process that led to the Iranian agreement to accept weapons inspectors would never have taken this issue so seriously if they had not feared that the alternative to European demands was an American invasion.''
Grounding decisions in national values? Check: ''Foreign policy can't be conducted over the heads or against the basic instincts of the American people.''
De-emphasizing the Israeli-Palestinian dispute? Check: ''The Palestinian peace party cannot reliably deliver Palestinian society unless peace offers concrete benefits for the overwhelming majority of displaced Palestinians, and since there is no peace party in Israel if the return of millions of Palestinians is the price of a deal, peace remains tantalizingly out of reach. In a situation where neither of the parties is willing to accept any of the feasible solutions, there is very little that an outside power can do to force an agreement.''
Understanding the conflict with militant Islam as an ideological struggle? Check: '' 'Arabian Fascism' is a totalitarian ideology inspired by a mythologized vision of the past. . . . And it aims by force to restore this past not only in the world of Islam, but ultimately throughout the world.''
If anything, Mead's basic views are even starker than those of the Bush administration. Europe is fading -- militarily, economically, demographically. America is rising. The Europeans sense that their positions will count for less and less in the world of the future, and so, while they still can, they seek to lock the United States into arrangements and institutions that will grant them an effective veto over American decision making.
Mead is not quite ready to hammer a Bush/ Cheney sign into his front lawn. Despite his admiration for most of the administration's actions, he finds its personality and style ultimately off-putting and alien.
Yet if Bush presents his ideas too bluntly for Mead's taste, some will find Mead's own presentation too circumlocutory. Short as this book is, it could have been shorter still, especially in its opening chapters -- as if Mead were cushioning his expected reader against the audacious thoughts contained in the second half.
Thus he lingers over a lengthy discussion of the changes in the world economy since 1970, retelling the familiar story of how the shift from a mass-production economy has lifted America's position relative to that of Europe, Japan and Russia. However, Mead does not have a good deal to add about the question that obviously follows: why did America do so much better than the other industrial countries? The answer to that question is crucial to the next -- and even more important -- question: how long can the American advantage be expected to continue?
But if Mead's opening drags, his ending dazzles. He closes with a fascinating prediction about how the war on terror will change the country. Just as the struggle against the Soviet Union prodded Americans to prove that capitalism ''could do better than Communism at improving the lives of working people and enhancing the lives of the poor,'' so, Mead suggests, the struggle against Islamic extremism will intensify the trend toward greater piety in American public life.
The Islamic extremists, Mead says, have falsely accused the United States of having lost touch with its spiritual roots. ''As part of our grand strategy . . . we shall have to take steps to make these charges less plausible in the future. Inescapably, this will lead many Americans to renew their personal faith commitments and make the moral and social ideals of their religious roots more relevant in their daily conduct and in their assessments of politicians and of political ideas.''
If Mead is right, then it is not only President Bush's foreign policies that begin to look visionary, even inescapable. So too does his religious style. It could be the future. Get ready.
David Frum, who served as a speechwriter to President Bush, is the author, with Richard Perle, of ''An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror.''
--------
Bush Asked for Vatican's Help on Political Issues, Report Says
June 13, 2004
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/politics/13george.html
On his recent trip to Rome, President Bush asked a top Vatican official to push American bishops to speak out more about political issues, including same-sex marriage, according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper.
In a column posted Friday evening on the paper's Web site, John L. Allen Jr., its correspondent in Rome and the dean of Vatican journalists, wrote that Mr. Bush had made the request in a June 4 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state. Citing an unnamed Vatican official, Mr. Allen wrote: "Bush said, 'Not all the American bishops are with me' on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism."
Mr. Allen wrote that others in the meeting confirmed that the president had pledged aggressive efforts "on the cultural front, especially the battle against gay marriage, and asked for the Vatican's help in encouraging the U.S. bishops to be more outspoken." Cardinal Sodano did not respond, Mr. Allen reported, citing the same unnamed people.
A spokesman for the Vatican declined yesterday to disclose the contents of the meeting, which followed the president's brief meeting with the pope. Jeanie Mamo, a spokeswoman for the White House, said: "They had a good, private discussion. They discussed a number of priorities of shared concern, and the president's and the Vatican's positions on these issues are well known."
The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, called the report "mind-boggling."
"It is just unprecedented for a president to ask for help from the Vatican to get re-elected, and that is exactly what this is," Mr. Lynn said. Linda Pieczynski, a spokeswoman for Call to Action, a liberal Catholic group, said, "For a president to try to get the leader of any religious organization to manipulate his fellow clergymen to support a political candidate crosses the line in this country."
But some with experience in Roman Catholic politics said they were hardly shocked. "Any head of state who goes to the Vatican will attempt to present a case," said Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete, a professor of theology at St. Joseph's Seminary in New York. Monsignor Albacete, who has served as a translator for Catholic officials in meetings with heads of state, said: "If it is done in a very rude way, then the Vatican will remember and you won't get invited again. But if it is done in a diplomatic way, that is why they go to the Vatican anyway. It is not an act of devotion. It is a political thing." Mr. Bush's campaign is betting heavily on churchgoers in his re-election effort, and how Catholic voters apply their faith to politics is emerging as a focal point of the race. There are an estimated 63 million Catholics in the United States. Bush campaign pollsters have said that in the last election, people who attended church regularly voted disproportionately for Mr. Bush, though Catholics were much more evenly split than Protestants were.
Once a reliably Democratic constituency, Catholics have become divided, with traditionalist Catholics making common cause with conservative evangelical Protestants on social issues like opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion. But Mr. Bush is also a born-again Methodist who is likely to face a Roman Catholic opponent, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts. And the pope and other Catholic officials have repeatedly criticized the Bush administration over the war in Iraq.
In the last six months, a handful of Catholic bishops in the United States have already weighed in on the presidential race by threatening to withhold communion from Catholic politicians who disagree with the church's stance on abortion, a group that includes Senator Kerry.
Other bishops, however, have said that threatening to withhold communion goes too far, and the pope has warned of "the formation of factions within the church" in the United States. The bishops are expected to take up the matter at a closed-door conference this week in Colorado.
Pope John Paul II praised Mr. Bush last week for "the promotion of moral values" but reminded the president of the pope's "unequivocal position" on Iraq.
Jason Horowitz contributed reporting from Rome for this article.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Activists Protest World Economic Forum
By SANG-HUN CHOE
Associated Press Writer
Jun 13
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/ASIA_ECONOMIC_FORUM?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- More than 9,000 activists shouting "No to globalization!" marched through downtown Seoul on Sunday to protest a meeting of the World Economic Forum, which they accused of protecting the rich and increasing poverty.
Scuffles erupted a block from the forum's venue about 40 South Korean students hurled rocks and water bottles at police. They traded kicks and punches with police and hurled balloons containing red, blue and yellow dye.
Police beat them back with plastic batons and after about six hours, the protesters dispersed.
At least two demonstrators were rushed to a hospital with their heads bleeding, Seoul's all news cable channel YTN reported.
Police, who estimated the crowd at 9,300, stopped the march a block from the posh hotel where the Geneva-based WEF opened its two-day meeting. Authorities parked buses across the eight-lane road leading to the hotel.
Officers holding plastic shields crowded on the roofs of the bus barricade to prevent demonstrators from climbing over.
Pumping clenched fists into the sky, protesters chanted, "Police go away!"
"We oppose the WEF, which exploits the poor!" the protesters chanted, while marching in sweltering summer heat. They also carried banners and placards that said, "Asia is not for sale!"
WEF officials said the Seoul meeting will discuss ensuring Asia's future competitiveness in areas such as financial services, natural resources, education and innovation.
"The demonstrators seem to be misinformed about the nature of this international meeting," the forum said in a statement. "(The forum) exists to develop regional and international cooperation for the good of the people and to promote prosperity, security and peace."
Protest organizers called the WEF an "exclusive forum of the ruling elites of the world," and accused it of "deteriorating the rights of Asian workers and peoples."
Most of the activists were South Korean labor and farm protesters, who were joined by 170 foreigners from Japan, the Philippines and a dozen other Asian countries, the organizers said in a statement.
It said the WEF's Seoul meeting would discuss ways for "the United States and its imperialist allies" to expand "military control over the Asian region" and "protect the profit of capital."
Demonstrators also demanded that South Korea retract its decision to send 3,600 troops to Iraq.
The country is expected to announce details of the long-delayed military dispatch next week. Local media reported South Korea will send the troops to the Kurdish town of Irbil in August.
----
Ellsberg: Still Ahead of the Curve
Kathleen Herd Masser,
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Santa Monica Mirror contributing writer
http://www.smmirror.com/volume5/issue52/ellsberg_still_ahead.asp
Last week, Daniel Ellsberg returned to the scene of what the U.S. government once called a crime, to deliver an address at Santa Monica College, just a mile from his former employer, the RAND Corporation.
David Burak, the history instructor who brought Ellsberg to the campus, introduced the lecturer, writer and activist as "a shape shifter. He went from a man once highly commended by [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger to being called the most dangerous man in America."
Ellsberg started with RAND in 1959 as a strategic analyst and consultant to the Department of Defense and the White House. His specialty was nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. From 1964-67, he worked for the departments of defense and state.
"August 1, 1964 was my first day as a full-time employee at the Pentagon," he recalls. "A courier ran in with a cable from the commander of a flotilla in the South China Sea, saying they were under torpedo attack."
Throughout the morning, cables came in "every 10 minutes," claiming as many as 21 torpedoes had been fired. President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara "were picking retaliation targets."
"At 1:30, a cable arrived saying 'stop. All torpedo accounts except the first are suspect.' The sonar man was 'mistaken.' There weren't 21 torpedoes. Actually, there were none."
But McNamara kept preparing to retaliate anyway. He knew what the rest of the world didn't: just the night before, the U.S. had covertly attacked North Vietnam.
On August 9th, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, authorizing the president to "take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force" to counter "a deliberate and systematic campaign of aggression."
Ellsberg is still tormented by what he feels was his own failure to act. "What should I have done with the information I had on August 4th or 5th? Should I have gone to the press? That's what I should have done, what I wished I'd done. Instead, I went on learning my job. It's the worst thing I've ever done."
(During a pause in his speech, Ellsberg's microphone spewed feedback, prompting him to remark, "Silence has consequences.")
Returning to RAND in 1967, Ellsberg worked on a top-secret study called "U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68." In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page document and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Two years passed, and in 1971, Ellsberg turned over to the press what would become known as the Pentagon Papers.
"I did it," he explains, "because I met young people who were doing what they could. I asked myself, what can I do to end the war if I'm willing to give up my career and go to jail?"
The government charged Ellsberg with 12 felony counts that could have meant 115 years in prison. "I was the only person since Nathan Hale to be prosecuted for leaking information to the press."
"Daniel Ellsberg put his life on the line just as much as we did," says Daniel Cano, SMC English professor and a former paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division. "He revealed the truth about the Vietnam War that the Nixon administration didn't want the public to know."
Ellsberg pointed out similarities in the Vietnam and Iraq wars, calling the Tonkin Gulf Resolution "the model for the Iraq Resolution."
"The Tonkin Gulf Resolution was based on lies. 'It was an unprovoked attack. We have unequivocal evidence. These are not beliefs, they are facts.' [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld said 'we know they have missiles and we know where they are.' He's either psychotic or he's lying."
And for CIA chief George Tenet "to [present] a national intelligence estimate that he knew was distorted was an inexcusable crime and dereliction of duty. He used his ability and institution to lie the public into a war." (Tenet announced his resignation just hours before Ellsberg's appearance.)
"War is very complicated," observed Cano. "I'm glad we have men like Daniel Ellsberg to sort it out for us."
"This war is going to be very hard to end," Ellsberg cautions. "A colleague who is still at RAND thinks it will go on for 20 years. We got out of Vietnam in 10 years. There wasn't any oil in Vietnam."
Ellsberg On The Issues
Terrorism: "The U.S. took Special Forces out of Afghanistan where they were pursuing Al Qaeda. Iraq has no connection to terrorism, but the invasion is sure to create recruits for Bin Laden."
Ahmed Chalabi: "He may have been the greatest secret agent in Iran's history of spying."
Richard Clarke: "Clark recognized [the Bush administration's] determination to acquire Iraq as a territory for oil, although it would certainly increase terrorism. I'm glad he didn't wait until after [President Bush and Vice President Cheney] were re-elected to tell us."
Prisoner photos: "The photos created no sensation in Iraq. The people there already knew what was going on." If not for Joseph Darby, the young soldier who exposed the abuse at Abu Ghraib, "The investigation would still be classified top secret."
Prisoner abuse: "If you think that your brothers, sisters, your fathers and sons could have not have 'softened up' prisoners at Abu Ghraib, you are mistaken. The order to set aside the Geneva Convention came from the top and was approved by the president. It's a long-standing policy that was used in Nicaragua and elsewhere, by our proxies."
Congress: "People put too much pressure on the president and not enough on congress. Almost nobody brought to the press's attention how badly they were doing. Thousands have died because of patriarchal, militaristic attitudes that we are trained to think is part of being a man," including Democrats who "are afraid of being called cowards, unmanly, or weak on terror."
The "outing" of CIA agent Valerie Plame: "Plame was tracking the proliferation of nuclear materials around the world. [Vice President Dick] Cheney was probably involved in the leak. We could lose a president over this." (This last comment was met with a spirited round of applause.)
New Patriot Act: "It will make Patriot Act I look like the Bill of Rights." Ellsberg also predicts a more authoritarian Secrets Act will crop up "after the next terror attack, to go after reporter sources."
Military draft: "We have involuntary service now, through the extended tours, and troops are understandably enraged. We shouldn't be putting more troops into Iraq. It gives the Defense Department too many men and women to play with." Draft backlash: "A draft will create an anti-war movement. We'll have to do better than we did last time."
The Bush administration: "Bush and his entire cabinet are indictable at The Hague. I'd like to see Congress say 'these crimes must be investigated.' They deserve impeachment. I'd do anything nonviolent and truthful to get this gang out of power. It will take a lot of people taking risks and showing courage."
----
Nukes, Rumsfeld, Medflies
Global thinking not new to S.C. council
By DAN WHITE SANTA CRUZ
Sentinel staff writer,
June 13, 2004
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2004/June/13/local/stories/03local.htm
Long before it sought to dump President Bush and roll back the Patriot Act, the globally thinking Santa Cruz City Council sounded off on everything from Burmese repression to radioactive space junk.
More recent overtures, like last week's drop-kicking of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, grab press attention. But the council has been drafting controversial, and sometimes irreverent, resolutions for more than a decade.
Some consider these resolutions a good way to amplify Santa Cruz's activist voices and lend support to grassroots movements nationwide. Others call them arrogant, polarizing puffery.
But do they make a difference?
The short answer seems to be no; the majority of council resolutions do not achieve their intended goal. Bush, for example, wasn't impeached and an invasion was carried out in Iraq, regardless of council opposition.
But some say there are other ways to gauge success. Councilman Tim Fitzmaurice said resolutions are about more than enacting change.
"It's part of the culture of the place," he said. "It has something to do with the fact that we really believe there's a strong connection between the local and global." As for the fact that national media uses "wacky" resolutions to make light of Santa Cruz, Fitzmaurice shrugged it off.
"There's an old saying in progressive politics: 'I don't know if I am going to change the world, but I don't want the rest of the world to change me.' That is the reason why you take stands that are sometimes ignored or disrespected."
Others continue to insist these resolutions resonate with a thud.
"The council is elected to do what it wants to do," said Sen. Bruce McPherson, R-Santa Cruz. "But I really don't think (resolutions) have much of an impact. There is no real reverberation, at least not in Sacramento."
Make no mistake. If you go to a council meeting expecting nothing but wacky pronouncements, you will be disappointed.
Aside from the occasional lunacy of the public comment period - including a biweekly tirade from a man who claims the council murdered his dog - the overwhelming bulk of a council meeting consists of bureaucratic decisions that could take place anywhere.
Still, the small portion of council discussion devoted to resolutions draws a large reaction while "real" issues of water, land use and urban planning often play out before a tiny audience or no audience at all. And resolutions draw far more national press than any day-to-day business item.
Following is a list of some colorful council resolutions from the past decade.
No war in Iraq: During the past two years, the council passed several resolutions about the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
In September 2002, six months before the war began, the council became the first such body to oppose a U.S. attack.
A year later the council voted 6-1 to send a letter to Congress, asking it to consider the impeachment of Bush on grounds that he misled the American people about the justification for war. The result was more publicity than any previous council resolution, including a derisive snippet on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show."
This month the council passed a resolution asking for an investigation into prison abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons and supporting a campaign to impeach Donald Rumsfeld if he's found responsible for the abuses.
Arf, who goes there: In April 2001, the City Council considered - but voted down - a request to rewrite the city's animal control ordinance so local pet owners would be deemed "pet guardians."
Supporters called it a symbolic and awareness-raising expression of animal rights.
At the time, Councilman Mark Primack derided the "guardian" idea.
"I'm the guardian of my child," he said at the time. "I can't spay or neuter my child. If my child hurts another child, I can't put my child down. I can't sell my child."
"Frankencorn": The council, in January 2000, passed a resolution opposing genetically modified foods and called for a moratorium on their production.
Halting hate: In the winter of 2000, activists failed to get enough signatures to push a "Hate Free Zone" ballot initiative that would have, among other things, required the posting of "Hate Free" signs at the city limits.
The initiative failed but the council vowed to redouble its efforts against hate speech and hate crime.
Medical pot: The council, in January 1998, drafted a resolution backing the local Wo/Men's Alliance For Medical Marijuana in its battle against federal law enforcement agencies. Similar resolutions would follow.
Nuclear space junk: The council, in September 1997, passed a resolution opposing the launching of a NASA space probe because its instruments were powered with plutonium.
Councilman Mike Rotkin said at the time that the council had to take a stand because "there are certain things that are so outrageous and the risk involved so extreme."
Rotkin and others feared that if the Saturn-exploring probe crashed, it could cause a rain of radioactive particles, causing millions of cancer deaths. The resolution included a letter to then President Bill Clinton.
Burma ban: In July 1997, the council passed a resolution restricting the city from entering into business relations with the nation of Burma.
A man in the audience named Theikdi, who experienced repression by a military dictatorship in Burma, was part of the cheering audience.
The resolution also called for a list of U.S. businesses involved with Burma.
Free Mumia: In April 1997, the City Council unanimously passed a resolution asking for a new trial for death-row inmate and convicted murderer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
The resolution stated that his trial was unfair because witnesses were coerced to testify against Abu-Jamal, convicted of killing 25-year-old Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner in the 1980s, and that several later recanted.
The resolution drew applause from UC Santa Cruz students and death penalty opponents who said Mumia was the victim of racism. It also prompted angry recriminations from Faulkner's widow, Maureen.
"Did they independently investigate this?" she said after the resolution was passed. "These council members signed their names to something they know nothing about."
No Nukes: In September 1996, the council approved a resolution banning radioactive waste in Santa Cruz and placed, on record, the city's opposition to having its roads used to transport nuclear fuel "or high-level radioactive waste."
Persian Gulf blood: In October 1994, the council unanimously passed a "nonbinding resolution" discouraging the donations of blood and organs from Gulf War veterans.
Council members said it was an awareness-raising measure in response to reports of viral and bacterial infections suffered by troops overseas.
This measure was proposed by a chapter of Veterans of Foreign Wars, which said that troops were being exposed to diseases in the Persian Gulf, and that they could spread through blood donations.
Goodbye Columbus: In September 1994, the council deemed that Columbus Day would be celebrated as "Indigenous Peoples' Day" in Santa Cruz. In the words of an activist who pressed for the name change, the day marked the cruelty and "near genocide" that Native Americans faced after the arrival of Columbus.
At the time, Councilman Mike Rotkin said, "There's no way we can undo history. But these small symbolic gestures at least signal our concern."
Columbus Day has special significance for Italian Americans, who were so incensed about the Santa Cruz resolution that they threatened to boycott the city. In response, the council insisted the new holiday was not an attempt to do away with Columbus Day, and that both days could co-exist peacefully.
Buzz kill: In May 1994 the council adopted a resolution decrying a Medfly eradication program involving the pesticide malathion.
At the time the resolution was passed, there were no immediate plans to spray the area for the Medfly, the abbreviated name for the voracious Mediterranean fruit fly.
Stifling stench: In October 1993, the City Council passed a recommendation asking people to refrain from wearing perfume at city events, public meetings or city-sponsored events - out of sensitivity to acute sufferers of environmental illness. It passed 6-1.
The dissenter was Louis Rittenhouse, who said that "environmental illness is not recognized by the medical community" and therefore "one would have to conclude you're dealing with mental illness."
The looks law: Council, in the winter of 1992, passed an anti-bias rule, banning discrimination in employment and housing based on appearance.
Contact Dan White at dwhite@santacruzsentinel.com.
----
Documentarian kept quiet after filming U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqis
Ruthe Stein,
San Francisco Chronicle Senior Movie Writer
Sunday, June 13, 2004
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/06/13/MNG2K75D7S1.DTL
Filmmaker Michael Moore said Friday he wasn't sure he did the right thing by saving footage of U.S. American soldiers' cruelty toward Iraqis for his controversial documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11,'' instead of releasing the evidence earlier when it might have helped halt such abuse.
"I had it months before the story broke on '60 Minutes,' and I really struggled with what to do with it,'' Moore said in a telephone interview with The Chronicle. "I wanted to come out with it sooner, but I thought I'd be accused of just putting this out for publicity for my movie. That prevented me from making maybe the right decision.''
The footage, eerily similar to film of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, shows GIs laughing as they snap photos of each other putting hoods over Iraqi detainees.
In the same scene from "Fahrenheit 9/11,'' which opens Friday at Bay Area theaters, an American soldier fondles a prisoner's genitals through a blanket.
"The stuff with the detainees in my movie is even more shocking than what we saw in that prison because it happens outdoors and is more commonplace,'' Moore said.
The documentary links President Bush to the family of Osama bin Laden and other oil-rich Saudis and takes the president to task for his response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The film, which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival last month, became the center of a corporate spat between Disney and its subsidiary Miramax when Disney Chairman Michael Eisner said he wouldn't allow the film to be distributed. Later, Disney sold the film to Miramax co-Chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein. The film is now being distributed by Lions Gate Films, IFC Films and the Fellowship Adventure Group, the latter specifically set up by the Weinsteins to handle Moore's documentary.
Had Miramax released the film as originally planned, it most likely would have played in art houses, the traditional home of documentaries. But because of the intense interest in "Fahrenheit" fueled by the distribution controversy, the film will now open simultaneously at multiplexes around the country.
"It will be in 700 theaters," Moore said. "It's the largest opening I've had, four times the number of screens that 'Columbine,' was on." Moore won the Oscar for best documentary for his 2002 "Bowling for Columbine."
"Fahrenheit'' comes down hard on Bush for starting a war the filmmaker clearly sees as folly. But the most disturbing images are of America's fighting forces in Iraq appearing as dazed and confused as soldiers portrayed in the Vietnam movie, "Platoon.''
"The situation is like Vietnam. The conditions in Iraq are just terrible, '' Moore said. "The soldiers know they are over there for a bull -- reason. .. . Bush has created an atmosphere for those who serve under him to also behave in immoral ways.''
Moore said he has received more than 1,500 letters from American soldiers expressing opposition to the war and said he is considering compiling the letters into a book.
E-mail Ruthe Stein at rstein@sfchronicle.com.
--------
Documentarian kept quiet after filming U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqis
sfgate
Ruthe Stein
June 13, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/06/13/MNG2K75D7S1.DTL&type=printable
Filmmaker Michael Moore said Friday he wasn't sure he did the right thing by saving footage of U.S. American soldiers' cruelty toward Iraqis for his controversial documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11,'' instead of releasing the evidence earlier when it might have helped halt such abuse.
"I had it months before the story broke on '60 Minutes,' and I really struggled with what to do with it,'' Moore said in a telephone interview with The Chronicle. "I wanted to come out with it sooner, but I thought I'd be accused of just putting this out for publicity for my movie. That prevented me from making maybe the right decision.''
The footage, eerily similar to film of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison, shows GIs laughing as they snap photos of each other putting hoods over Iraqi detainees.
In the same scene from "Fahrenheit 9/11,'' which opens Friday at Bay Area theaters, an American soldier fondles a prisoner's genitals through a blanket.
"The stuff with the detainees in my movie is even more shocking than what we saw in that prison because it happens outdoors and is more commonplace,'' Moore said.
The documentary links President Bush to the family of Osama bin Laden and other oil-rich Saudis and takes the president to task for his response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The film, which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival last month, became the center of a corporate spat between Disney and its subsidiary Miramax when Disney Chairman Michael Eisner said he wouldn't allow the film to be distributed. Later, Disney sold the film to Miramax co-Chairmen Harvey and Bob Weinstein. The film is now being distributed by Lions Gate Films, IFC Films and the Fellowship Adventure Group, the latter specifically set up by the Weinsteins to handle Moore's documentary.
Had Miramax released the film as originally planned, it most likely would have played in art houses, the traditional home of documentaries. But because of the intense interest in "Fahrenheit'' fueled by the distribution controversy, the film will now open simultaneously at multiplexes around the country.
"It will be in 700 theaters," Moore said. "It's the largest opening I've had, four times the number of screens that 'Columbine,' was on." Moore won the Oscar for best documentary for his 2002 "Bowling for Columbine."
"Fahrenheit'' comes down hard on Bush for starting a war the filmmaker clearly sees as folly. But the most disturbing images are of America's fighting forces in Iraq appearing as dazed and confused as soldiers portrayed in the Vietnam movie, "Platoon.''
"The situation is like Vietnam. The conditions in Iraq are just terrible, '' Moore said. "The soldiers know they are over there for a bull -- reason. .. . Bush has created an atmosphere for those who serve under him to also behave in immoral ways.''
Moore said he has received more than 1,500 letters from American soldiers expressing opposition to the war and said he is considering compiling the letters into a book.
E-mail Ruthe Stein at rstein@sfchronicle.com.
--------
Activists Protest World Economic Forum
By SANG-HUN CHOE
The Associated Press
Sunday, June 13, 2004; 9:59 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38205-2004Jun13.html
SEOUL, South Korea - More than 9,000 activists shouting "No to globalization!" marched through downtown Seoul on Sunday to protest a meeting of the World Economic Forum, which they accused of protecting the rich and increasing poverty.
Scuffles erupted a block from the forum's venue about 40 South Korean students hurled rocks and water bottles at police. They traded kicks and punches with police and hurled balloons containing red, blue and yellow dye.
Police beat them back with plastic batons and after about six hours, the protesters dispersed.
At least two demonstrators were rushed to a hospital with their heads bleeding, Seoul's all news cable channel YTN reported.
Police, who estimated the crowd at 9,300, stopped the march a block from the posh hotel where the Geneva-based WEF opened its two-day meeting. Authorities parked buses across the eight-lane road leading to the hotel.
Officers holding plastic shields crowded on the roofs of the bus barricade to prevent demonstrators from climbing over.
Pumping clenched fists into the sky, protesters chanted, "Police go away!"
"We oppose the WEF, which exploits the poor!" the protesters chanted, while marching in sweltering summer heat. They also carried banners and placards that said, "Asia is not for sale!"
WEF officials said the Seoul meeting will discuss ensuring Asia's future competitiveness in areas such as financial services, natural resources, education and innovation.
"The demonstrators seem to be misinformed about the nature of this international meeting," the forum said in a statement. "(The forum) exists to develop regional and international cooperation for the good of the people and to promote prosperity, security and peace."
Protest organizers called the WEF an "exclusive forum of the ruling elites of the world," and accused it of "deteriorating the rights of Asian workers and peoples."
Most of the activists were South Korean labor and farm protesters, who were joined by 170 foreigners from Japan, the Philippines and a dozen other Asian countries, the organizers said in a statement.
It said the WEF's Seoul meeting would discuss ways for "the United States and its imperialist allies" to expand "military control over the Asian region" and "protect the profit of capital."
Demonstrators also demanded that South Korea retract its decision to send 3,600 troops to Iraq.
The country is expected to announce details of the long-delayed military dispatch next week. Local media reported South Korea will send the troops to the Kurdish town of Irbil in August.
--------
'Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Those Old Protest Tactics Have to Go'
June 13, 2004
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/politics/campaign/13convention.html?pagewanted=all&position=
When protesters descend on the Republican convention this summer, Christian Herold will be there with bells on. Then, he will ring them.
Mr. Herold has ordered hundreds of one-inch, gold-plated bells - the kind that could easily adorn a Christmas tree - that he plans to distribute to any takers. He will call participants in his Ring Out project to surround ground zero - as close as they can - and raise a cacophony to "ring out the Republicans" shortly before the convention opens on Aug. 30.
"The bell stands for different emotions - anger, alarm - and it's emblematic of the Liberty Bell," Mr. Herold, 47, said the other night as he and three companions readied dozens of bells to show at a meeting of protest groups.
Mr. Herold is hardly alone in making somewhat unorthodox plans to greet the Republicans, who will hold their convention for the first time in New York, from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2 at Madison Square Garden.
Luke Kuhn, 38, a self-described radical who lives near Washington, has sent out e-mail pleas seeking a suitable kiln to melt a brass ring, about the size of a large wedding band, inscribed with Bush Über Alles, at the start of the convention. Axis of Eve, a protest group formed in January to focus on women's rights, is selling underwear adorned with anti-Bush slogans and is organizing 100 women to flash them during the convention (The underwear will be worn over body suits or leotards to keep it legal.)
Zoe Strauss, a Philadelphia photographer, is urging people to wear red bandannas en masse as a symbol of protest and plans to bring 10,000 to the convention to hand out. Wendy Tremayne, a performance artist, is recruiting volunteers for a Vomitorium, a re-enactment of a Roman orgy that she plans to stage as a protest against imperialism, consumerism and gluttony.
Just what approach to take is debated among prospective demonstrators, in meetings and Internet chat groups, where calls to shut down the Republican gathering and confront the police are mixed with pleadings to march peacefully and in large numbers.
Some organizers favor something in between, maybe not as confrontational as the anarchists' approach but an alternative to mass marches in which large groups, typically kept behind metal barricades, hold signs and chant familiar refrains: "Hey hey, ho ho (insert objectionable entity here) has got to go" and the like. Some 15 organizations have applied to the Police Department for permits for large street demonstrations just before or during the convention.
"There is an element among protesters who feel that classical tactics are stale," said Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University who was a leader of antiwar protests in the 1960's and has studied protest movements. "I think it is built into the protest process that especially younger people come along and want to stake a claim to novelty."
That was part of the motivation for Axis of Eve, organized by a group of young women to get disaffected voters, particularly young women, excited about politics and the possibility of defeating President Bush.
"We wanted to think of some unique, creative way to engage people in a different way, to reach out to people who weren't politically engaged," said Zazel Loven, 33, a founder of the group, who is known as Eve Angel. "I had been to marches but I wanted to go beyond that."
Street theater has long been a part of demonstrations. But along with the drumming and mask-making - and there is a group, Theater Against War, ready to help with that - some see a growing role for humorous, irreverent, thought-provoking ways to draw attention to their messages.
In apartments, over the Internet and, in the case of the Ring Out project, the back room of a West Village cafe, they are plotting.
"This brings up memories of the 60's when you saw this kind of thing all the time," said Joshua Spahn, a 49-year-old software programmer who is part of the Ring Out project. "I think it's an exciting new way to energize people. It piques people's curiosity rather than hit them over the head with a political message."
The organizational sophistication varies.
Billionaires for Bush, one of the better known of the theatrical protest groups, whose members dress to the nines and picket Republican events shouting slogans like "Blood for oil" and "Corporations are people too," lists on its Web site more than 50 chapters in the United States and France, Korea , Australia and Germany. It sells T-shirts, CD's and "fashion kits" with top hats.
By contrast, Mr. Kuhn, an unemployed bike messenger who wants to melt the protest ring, seems long on ambition but short on resources.
Inspired by the "Lord of the Rings," the ring "makes a point that Bush is a dark lord," Mr. Kuhn said. Therefore, it must be destroyed, as in the book and movies, but Mr. Kuhn is not sure how to do it: maybe using a barbecue grill with coals fanned by a hair dryer.
"I can make a bellows, if nobody has a hair dryer, from salvaged wood that day, if necessary," he wrote on an electronic bulletin board. "I can easily rig the grill to be an improvised 'forge,' as a blacksmith would know it, and that will easily handle the destruction.''
Others have faith that the grass-roots spirit among protesters - and the wide reach of the Internet - will help their ideas catch on.
After posting her red bandanna idea on a protest group e-mail list, Ms. Strauss, 34, received a "deluge'' of support, she said, as well as messages from a few dissenters who objected to the idea because it smacked of a dress code.
She said she chose red bandannas after reading that striking coal miners in the 19th century wore them as a sign of solidarity. It should make a powerful, "all-American" unifying emblem, she said.
"It is very important to have a grass-roots symbol people can connect to and people can see," she said. "When Republicans come they can see a much bigger opposition."
Likewise, the organizers of the Ring Out project searched for a unifying symbol with patriotic overtones: the Liberty Bell.
Mr. Herold, an adjunct drama professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, has bought nearly 800 of the little bells - a packet of three is 99 cents - and is aiming to corral enough supporters to deploy 50,000 bell ringers.
The bells will be attached to ribbons and pinned to clothing, along with small cards of explanation. For more vigorous protesting, they can easily be taken off and rattled.
Last week Mr. Herold and Mr. Spahn sat with other supporters, a lawyer and a fund-raiser for nonprofit organizations.
Amid the jingle of the bells they discussed everything from the history of bells to their future: whether bell ringing would run afoul of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's campaign to reduce annoying noise in the city.
Mr. Spahn wondered aloud if people would understand the intent of the bells.
"How do we make the message real clear to people, to innocent bystanders?" he asked.
Mr. Herold replied that such symbols tend to catch on quickly.
"Look at the branding of the AIDS ribbons," he said.
When the discussion turned to how far removed protesters would likely be from the convention site, Mr. Spahn sounded optimistic.
"Nice thing about a bell," he said, "is you have hundreds of people with a bell like that, even a half-mile away they will be heard."
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