Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Kyrgyz Republic Funded to Secure Uranium Waste Dumps
French firm to recycle US military plutonium for civil purposes
Police interrogate Indian 'nuclear merchant'
Nuclear word war over Iran escalates
Washington accuses Iran of razing nuclear sites
Iran hits back over nuclear rebuke
UN agency admits mistake but pushes Iran for more nuclear cooperation
Iran 'will resume nuclear programme' if rebuked by watchdog
US has not asked for Iran nuclear case to go to Security Council
Europe's 'Big Three' submit resolution on Iran nuclear program
IAEA Delegates OK Text of Iran Censure
U.N. Admits Mistake in Iran Nuclear Report
Iran Threatens to Restart Nuclear Work
Nuclear Agency Agrees on Official Rebuke of Iran
Nuclear nightmares
IAEA Admits Mistakenly Accusing Iran
Richardson Urges Shift in U.S. Tack on N. Korea
China: N. Korea Nuke Talks Will Be Hard
Senate Calls for Missile Defense Testing
AFRRI Earns Joint Meritorious Unit Award
Conspiracy threat to anti-nuke treaty
Ukraine's missing missiles
Stop developing WMD
New Nukes Win Senate Support
U.S. energy official in charge of nuclear waste cleanup resigns
Pressure's on to reform nuclear workers comp bill
Hanford cleanup enters new phase
Hanford workers have high risk of cancer, report says
U.S. Vows to Remove Waste at Weapons Sites
MILITARY
New Video Purports to Show Qaeda Training in Afghanistan
West African defence chiefs meet on regional security
Russia, China, C. Asia in Security Pact
Return of Diego Garcia islanders blocked
House Backs Security Contract for Accenture
The Ties That Blind How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
2nd in Command in Hong Kong Joins Efforts to Ease Tensions
Attack by Colombia Rebels Threatens Fragile Talks
Iraq 1917
Militants kill Iraqi oil chief, bomb pipeline
Radical Iraqi Cleric Orders His Fighters to Put Down Their Arms
2 Car Bombings in Iraq Kill at Least 35 and Wound Over 100
Iraq Car Bombs Kill 41, Wound Nearly 150
Israel Seeks Bids to Dig Deep Gaza Trench
Israel Launches Gaza Moat Plan
Guatemalans Divided 50 Years After Coup
Pakistan Targets Militant Base Near Afghan Border
Fate of scientist, other captured Iraqis unclear after handover
Rumsfeld ordered prisoner to be held off the books in Iraq: Pentagon
Human Rights Watch: Official US Policy to Blame for Torture
CIA contractor charged in prisoner's death
U.S. Sets Conditions for Detainee Transfer
Spy Work in Iraq Riddled by Failures
The Ties That Blind How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
Senate Backs Increase in Army Troop Strength
Prison Guards Dispirited by Scandal
Wolfowitz: Troops to Stay in Iraq as Long as Needed
Accused contractor at Abu Ghraib says he told guards what to do
Annan Against U.S. War Crimes Exemption
Annan: U.S. Bid to Limit New Global Court Is 'Wrong'
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Report: Andean Coca Growing Area Shrinks
Homeland Security joins weather radio network
Recent incident shows problems linger
Weather Radio to Handle Terror Alerts
Homeland Security To Remain In District
Flier Registration Program to Be Tested
US House Panel Approves Bill to Combat Spyware
Long live the King
Denver Police 'Spy Files' to Be Archived
Report Says U.S. Has 'Secret' Detention Centers
In Detail: How bin Laden Set Plan in Motion in '99
Al Qaeda Scaled Back 10-Plane Plot
POLITICS
Democrats Seek Interrogation Documents
Excerpts From Statement by Sept. 11 Commission Staff
No Evidence of Meeting With Iraqi
Panel Doubts Claim That F-16's Would Have Stopped Flight 93
Pressure at Iraqi prison detailed
Air Defenses Faltered on 9/11, Panel Finds
Bush Tells U.S. Troops 'Life Is Better' in Iraq
Bush Tried to Project Strength on 9/11
Bush Disputes Al Qaida-Saddam Conclusion
A Contractor Calls In the Big Guns
ENERGY
Calif. Sues Enron for Price Manipulation
OTHER
EPA Gives $224G Grant to Study Cluster
Shell Chief Sounds Major Climate Alarm
ACTIVISTS
Greenpeacers Arrested in Oregon Timber Sale Protest
MU alumna still held as Iraqi Ba'athist prisoner
Ithaca Saboteurs Set Free
Protesters' Morning Greeting for Mayor: Where's Our Permit?
Democrats Warm To 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- asia
Kyrgyz Republic Funded to Secure Uranium Waste Dumps
June 17, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-17-04.asp
A $6.9 million project to minimize the exposure of people and livestock to radiation from abandoned uranium mine tailings and waste rock dumps in the Kyrgyz Republic was approved by the World Bank on Tuesday.
The radioactive mine waste is located in the Mailuu-Suu area of the Central Asian country.
The project also aims to improve the effectiveness of emergency management and response by national and sub-national authorities and local communities to disaster situations, and reduce the loss of life and property in key landslide areas of the country.
"Given the problem with high external debt of the country, we are pleased that this project is grant funded," said the First Deputy Minister of Finance of the Kyrgyz Republic, Emirlan Toromyrzaev.
"The USSR's first atomic bomb was made from Mailuu-Suu's uranium," said Torgoev Isakbek Asangalievich, a scientist at Kyrgyzstan's National Academy of Science.
A pipe outlet in the Mailuu-Suu region where radioactive waste in old uranium mines is in acute danger of contaminating the Syr Darya river basin. (Photo courtesy Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Twenty years of intensive uranium mining near Mailuu-Suu could become an ecological disaster for Central Asia. Landslides and earthquakes threaten to wash huge quantities of uranium waste into the Syr Darya river basin.
The World Bank project is made up of key mitigation measures designed to isolate and protect abandoned uranium mine tailings and waste dumps from disturbance by natural processes such as landslides, floods, and from leaching and dispersal processes associated with groundwater and surface water drainage.
It will create a administered disaster management and response system; and develop and implement systems to detect and warn against active landslide movements.
The project will concentrate on Southern rural mountainous areas of the Kyrgyz Republic, including the Mailuu-Suu uranium ore mining and milling area in Jalal-Abad Oblast, where poorly maintained tailing impoundments pollute the environment and landslide activities threaten the stability of tailings.
Mailuu-Suu town is located about 60 kilometers (40 miles) northwest of Jalal-Abad and about 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the border with Uzbekistan. The town has 25,000 inhabitants and is located near to 23 uranium tailing impoundments and 13 mine waste rock deposits.
Smaller settlements are located in the valleys of the Mailuu-Suu, Kara-Agach and Aylyampa Sai Rivers. In most cases, the World Bank says, the tailings and waste rock dumps lie upstream of the communities, sometimes close to populated areas. In Kara-Agach, waste rock dumps are located in the center of the settlement.
Students at the Mailuu-Suu medical college listen to the presentation of a brochure on public safety and the dangers of radioactive waste. January 2004 (Photo courtesy Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) Hazardous substances from the tailings can migrate to local groundwater, be released downstream along the Mailuu-Suu River or be dispersed downwind by the prevailing wind as dust and radon gas.
"The project combines a mix of short and long term physical interventions as well as a number of institutional development activities," said Joop Stoutjesdijk, task team leader of the project.
"The Ministry of Ecology and Emergency Situations is pleased that a large portion of the grant funds will be used for civil works aimed at isolation and protection of abandoned uranium mine tailings and waste rock dumps in the Mailuu-Suu area from landslides and floods" said Minister Temirbek Akmataliev.
Without action, there is a high risk that uranium tailings could be displaced into the river within the next few years by earthquake, landslide, or flood events, with resulting major contamination concerns in and around Mailuu-Suu, and downstream in neighboring Uzbekistan. According to project documents filed with the World Bank, "The 'do nothing' alternative is not a viable option for the area's problems."
"It is indeed important that early measures are taken to improve the situation in Mailuu-Suu and ensure the population that the government is committed to improve the precarious situation with mine tailings." Stoutjesdijk said. "It is equally important that a start is made with warning populations against landslides that kill rural people every year."
Despite the health risks presented by radioactive waste, public awareness remains low in Mailuu-Suu. Livestock graze on contaminated sites, houses are built using radioactive material and children wander freely over poorly-marked, dangerous areas.
As the isolation projects gets underway, strict adherence to environmental regulations will be enforced to avoid or minimize harmful effects on the environment, and protect workers, and public safety, the Bank says.
Contractors are being instructed to follow guidelines and contract specifications during construction. Embankments will be built, and erosion prevention measure will be taken such as minimizing vegetation clearance as possible, backfilling of excavated areas, drainage ditches to prevent water runoffs, surfaces stabilization with stockpiled topsoil, and, re-vegetation.
To prevent soil contamination from landslides or other site works, contractors must safely dispose of waste, particularly of chemicals, fuels, and hazardous materials, are stored as necessary in specific tanks, supported by staff training in the handling of these materials.
Contractors must ensure water discharges to the Mailuu-Suu river are not contaminated, and conduct water testing to verify the absence of radiological, or heavy metal contamination, and if necessary, install a wastewater treatment plant.
In addition, buffer zones will be delineated to prevent disturbances on tailings materials, including protective structures based on detailed geo-technical studies.
Further measures should be adopted to minimize sedimentation into watercourses. Air, surface, and groundwater pollution should be minimized, covering storage sites, preventing release of hazardous materials and chemicals. Periodic inspection, and testing will be monitored, in compliance with environmental guidelines.
-------- europe
French firm to recycle US military plutonium for civil purposes
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Pakistan Daily Times / afp
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_14-6-2004_pg10_4
PARIS: Excess US military plutonium stocks are to be transformed by French nuclear group Areva into fuel under a programme 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. 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. 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.
-------- india / pakistan
Police interrogate Indian 'nuclear merchant'
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Pakistan Daily Times / ap
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_14-6-2004_pg10_4
MUMBAI: Police interrogated an Indian businessman on Sunday after he was extradited from the United Arab Emirates amid suspicions that he tried to sell nuclear secrets, a senior police officer said. Indian police took custody of Dubai-based Akhtar Hussain Ahmed, 35, on Saturday, said Satyapal Singh, joint commissioner of the Mumbai Police. Dubai authorities arrested Ahmed after he was allegedly caught trying to sell nuclear secrets to a foreign diplomatic mission, Singh said. Singh said police were investigating reports that one of Ahmed's brothers was a nuclear scientist in India. Mumbai police have asked their Dubai counterparts to send documents seized from Ahmed and other information in their possession, Singh said. The United Arab Emirates, which has an extradition treaty with India, has surrendered several people who sought refuge there after committing offenses in India.
-------- iran
Nuclear word war over Iran escalates
If agency resolution passes, nation says it would restart program
By Brian Whitmore, Globe Correspondent
June 17, 2004
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2004/06/17/nuclear_word_war_over_iran_escalates/
VIENNA -- Escalating its war of words with Washington, Iran threatened yesterday to resume its uranium enrichment program if the International Atomic Energy Agency passed a toughly worded resolution condemning Tehran for lackluster cooperation with the UN's nuclear watchdog.
The United States said in response that such tactics increase widespread suspicions that Iran is using its civilian nuclear power program as a cover to clandestinely acquire atomic weapons.
''People who are trying to produce electricity for light bulbs don't engage in this kind of behavior," Kenneth Brill, the US ambassador to the energy agency, told reporters yesterday, referring to the Iranian threat.
''The basic message that Iran is sending is that they have something to hide and they're going to use any means they have, including intimidation, to keep things from coming to light," Brill added.
Diplomats on the agency's 35-member Board of Governors yesterday continued their meetings here to resolve the dispute over the wording of a proposed resolution, which was drafted by France, Germany, and Britain and which enjoys the tacit support of the United States.
Last fall Tehran had reached a deal with the three European powers to suspend the enrichment process and open its nuclear program to unprecedented scrutiny in exchange for future economic and technological concessions.
Since then, the Europeans have become increasingly annoyed as Iran has allegedly continued to engage in activities associated with uranium enrichment, specifically the production of centrifuge parts.
Iran objects to a draft resolution, which could be voted on as early as today, diplomats said. The draft, made available to the Globe, ''deplores . . . that overall, Iran's cooperation" with the energy agency ''has not been as full, timely, and proactive as it should have been."
Using the strongest language yet on the issue from Iran, President Mohammad Khatami assailed the resolution yesterday in Tehran as ''very bad," saying it ''violates our country's rights."
''I am not saying we will do something particular," Khatami added, ''but if this resolution passes, Iran will have no moral commitment to suspend uranium enrichment."
Iran admitted late last year to covering up 18 years of atomic research and experiments, including unreported uranium enrichment and plutonium separation -- activities that could indicate a nuclear weapons program -- in clear breach of the nonproliferation treaty.
The allegations about the work in Iran first surfaced in August 2002. The IAEA agency formally began its investigation in February 2003. Last October, the foreign ministers of Germany, France, and Britain traveled to Tehran and won the concessions from Iran, which included allowing more stringent snap inspections.
Uranium enrichment is allowed under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty if it is reported to the energy agency, and Iran has maintained that its moratorium was a voluntary good-faith measure.
Hossein Mousavian, head of Iran's delegation to the agency, told reporters yesterday that Khatami's comments were ''not a threat."
''Enrichment is the legitimate right of all members of the [nonproliferation treaty]," he said. Mousavian added that Iran had voluntarily offered to suspend enriching uranium ''to create confidence."
Mousavian also said that offers of economic concessions and peaceful nuclear technology from the Europeans in exchange for Tehran's suspending uranium enrichment have yet to materialize. Meanwhile, European officials said Iran needed to first show better cooperation.
''Full compliance and cooperation with the IAEA are crucial" if Tehran hopes to forge deeper economic and political ties with Europe, EU spokeswoman Emma Udwin said yesterday in Brussels.
Iran's main objections to the resolution include a paragraph that urges Iran to ''reconsider" plans to begin construction on a heavy-water research reactor and to operate a uranium conversion plant. Tehran also objects to the use of the word ''deplores."
Diplomats close to the talks said the draft, is unlikely to be changed significantly, setting the stage for a showdown.
The United States has long sought to have Iran hauled before the UN Security Council for violating the nonproliferation treaty.
In Iran, hundreds of protesters gathered at two Iranian nuclear plants yesterday, urging their government to resist the energy agency demands. Some chanted, ''Death to America, Britain, Germany, and France," saying they would defend Iran's right to develop nuclear technology.
Material from Reuters was used in this report.
----
Washington accuses Iran of razing nuclear sites
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jun 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040617214658.7gy3j4o4.html
The United States on Thursday accused Iran of razing nuclear sites to hide banned nuclear activity.
"It's deplorable but not surprising that Iran's deception has gone to the extent of bulldozing entire sites to prevent the IAEA from discovering evidence of its nuclear weapons program," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.
"I can't give you any independent information, but commercial satellite photography shows the complete dismantling and the razing of a facility at Lavizan Shiyan.
"And that's a site that was previously disclosed as a possible Iranian weapons of mass destruction-related site," he said.
During a press conference, Boucher was asked about an ABC News report saying that Iran had torn down buildings at an industrial complex in Lavizan Shiyan, a Teheran suburb.
ABC television said the IAEA had recently received information that the site had been hidden.
The network, which did not cite sources, published two photographs, apparently of the site, taken by commercial satellites about 12 months ago and in March 2004, showing the buildings were gone and the top soil replaced.
The ABC report also said that in May 2003, the National Council of the Resistance of Iran, an Iranian opposition group, said the government had built a bacterial weapons plant at Lavizan Shiyan.
Although the United States believes the group has links with terrorism, it has in the past used the group's information on banned weapons.
"This raises serious concerns and fits a pattern, as I said, that we've seen from Iran of trying to cover up on its activities, including by trying to sanitize locations which the IAEA should be allowed to visit and inspect."
The United States accuses Iran of seeking to arm itself with nuclear weapons under the guise of a civilian nuclear program, a charge the Islamic republic denies.
The IAEA has been examining a draft resolution demanding that Tehran cooperate fully to dispel any doubts about its intentions.
----
Iran hits back over nuclear rebuke
(Agencies)
2004-06-17
China Daily
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-06/17/content_340274.htm
Iran Wednesday threatened to resume uranium enrichment, a process that could be used to make atomic bombs, if the U.N. nuclear agency passed a stern resolution rebuking it for poor cooperation.
The United States immediately accused Iran of trying to bully the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), meeting in Vienna, and said such tactics increased suspicions that Tehran was secretly making weapons.
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami answers a journalist's question after the cabinet meeting in Tehran June 16, 2004. [Reuters] "The basic message that Iran is sending is that they have something to hide and they're going to use any means they have, including intimidation, to keep things from coming to light," said Kenneth Brill, U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Vienna.
"People who are trying to produce electricity for lightbulbs don't engage in this kind of behavior," he said.
In his toughest warning to the IAEA yet, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami described as "very bad" a resolution drafted by Britain, Germany and France that "deplores" Iran's inadequate cooperation with the agency.
"If this resolution passes, Iran will have no moral commitment to suspend uranium enrichment," he told reporters.
But Khatami, aware that Washington wants its case sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, balanced his tough line with assurances that Iran's aims were peaceful and that Tehran did not plan to kick out U.N. inspectors.
"We have no intention of using nuclear technology for military use," he said. "We will continue our cooperation with the agency in the framework of the law and our rights."
Europe's "big three" circulated a newly revised draft resolution late Wednesday, but Iran's chief delegate said the changes were minor and the draft was still unacceptable.
"There are some positive changes but they are very minor," Hossein Mousavian, secretary of the foreign policy committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told Reuters. "Not much has changed, which is not at all acceptable."
Iran, which denies seeking weapons, says it wants to produce low-grade enriched uranium as fuel for nuclear power reactors. But Washington and many European states fear it could use the technology to make highly-enriched, bomb-grade uranium.
Some 900 protesters, many of them members of a hardline Islamic volunteer militia, gathered at two Iranian nuclear plants vowing to defend with their lives Iran's right to develop nuclear technology, the official IRNA news agency reported.
FAILS TO SATISFY
In Vienna, several diplomats said Europe's big three states met with board members on a new draft of the resolution they had hoped would be acceptable to the entire board -- and Iran.
Diplomats said the new draft satisfied Russia but not the non-aligned states, Iran's strongest supporters on the board.
Mousavian, Iran's chief delegate, said the main sticking point was a paragraph urging Iran to "reconsider" plans to operate a uranium conversion plant and begin construction of a heavy-water research reactor. He said the latest draft has the words "voluntarily reconsider," which was still unacceptable.
"It is important to delete this (paragraph)," he said, adding the large bloc of non-aligned countries on the board backed Iran on this.
But a Western diplomat said the reactor was a problem as it would produce little electricity but ample bomb-grade plutonium.
Iran says the resolution under discussion in Vienna has blown technical shortcomings out of proportion and is driven by an anti-Iranian political agenda in the United States.
"The IAEA resolution is very bad ... (it) violates our country's rights," Khatami said. "Iran's nuclear row is political, and there is a political will behind it to stop us accessing peaceful nuclear technology," he said.
Diplomats in Vienna say Washington had wanted a tougher resolution which would set a deadline for Iran to come clean about its nuclear plans for face the Security Council.
----
UN agency admits mistake but pushes Iran for more nuclear cooperation
VIENNA (AFP)
Jun 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040617154429.0hh1v5lp.html
The UN atomic agency admitted Thursday it made a mistake in a report on Iran's nuclear program but was still pushing for a tough resolution urging Iran to do more to answer US charges it is secretly developing nuclear weapons.
The United States accused Iran of seeking to divert attention from its slow cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, while IAEA head Mohammed ElBaradei said the omission in the June report was "not a major mistake."
A Western diplomat said the error, and the accompanying embarrassment for the IAEA, was not affecting talks on the British-French-German resolution that calls for the IAEA's 15-month-old investigation into Iran's activities to be stepped up and for Tehran to do more to help it complete the probe within a few months.
But it was "delaying things because there have to be clarifications," the diplomat said.
Other diplomats said Iran, backed by non-aligned nations, was pushing for stronger support for the right of developing nations to the peaceful use of nuclear energy, a right Tehran says justifies its atomic program.
A senior IAEA official told a meeting of the agency's 35-nation board that a private Iranian citizen interviewed in January had spoken of importing magnets for advanced P-2 centrifuges -- which can be used to make bomb-grade uranium -- a fact that was not mentioned in the June report.
Iran claims its research into P-2 technology is small-scale but has also admitted to inquiring about buying thousands of magnets for the centrifuges, which would be enough for industrial production of highly enriched uranium.
IAEA deputy director general Pierre Goldschmidt said the agency acknowledged that it failed to take notice of the statement about magnet imports but said that Iran had since claimed it was only working with Iranian-made equipment.
"The information provided by Iran has lacked the necessary clarity to allow the (agency) to fully understand the details of the P-2 program," he said.
The development comes against a backdrop of an increasingly acerbic war of words between Tehran, which insists its nuclear activities are solely for peaceful purposes, and IAEA members including the United States and Europe's so-called Big Three.
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami warned Wednesday that if the agency adopts a tough resolution the Islamic republic could back away from key commitments such as the suspension of uranium enrichment and allowing tougher inspections.
The IAEA board adjourned its plenary session until Friday 10:00 am, with diplomats locked in tense closed-door talks as Western nations seek to table the draft resolution Thursday in order to decide on it Friday.
Iranian delegation chief Seyed Hossein Mussavian, describing the magnets omission as an "innocent mistake," said Iran was still willing to work with the IAEA and would accept the investigation of its nuclear program being extended until September instead of being wrapped up in June, as Iran had previously wished.
But he called for the IAEA to "change substantially" its resolution, arguing that the "atmosphere created in the board has been that information from Iran has been contradictory and with changes."
The US ambassor to the IAEA, Kenneth Brill, accused Iran of diversionary tactics.
"I think the Iranian tactic here is to try to divert attention from the thrust and complete analysis" of IAEA reports "by finding little small red herrings that have really no substantive bearing on the issue at hand, which is that Iran continues to try to keep from coming to light information about its program."
IAEA director general Mohamed ElBaradei said: "This is not a major mistake. Iran could have corrected it."
He said the IAEA board's resolution would "reflect" the mistake but added: "this technical correction doesn't change the fact that we need more transparency from Iran."
However, Mussavian said Tehran rejected the text, especially its call for a halt to tests at a uranium conversion facility, a key step in the nuclear fuel cycle, according to a copy of the text obtained by AFP.
Mussavian said uranium conversion is not forbidden by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
----
Iran 'will resume nuclear programme' if rebuked by watchdog
By Anne Penketh Diplomatic Editor
17 June 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=532283
Iran threatened to break off co-operation with European countries yesterday and to resume uranium enrichment for its suspected nuclear weapons programme if the UN nuclear watchdog rebukes Tehran for failing to work with them.
The governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is poised to vote on a resolution that "deplores" Iran's failure to come clean on its nuclear programme. But the resolution, which could be adopted today or tomorrow, does not refer Iran to the UN Security Council for punishment.
Iran has been pressing for the draft resolution to be watered down since Monday, when the IAEA director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said Iran's compliance had been "less than satisfactory".
President Mohammad Khatami intervened in the debate in Tehran yesterday, saying: "With the ongoing trend, we have no moral commitment any more to suspend uranium enrichment. If the draft resolution proposed by the European countries is approved by the IAEA, Iran will reject it.
"If Europe has no commitment toward Iran, then Iran will not have a commitment toward Europe. We assume they are not respecting their commitments."
Kenneth Brill, the American ambassador to the IAEA, accused the Iranians of bullying the UN. "What we're seeing is intimidation by the government of Iran and its delegation here. People who are trying to produce electricity for light bulbs don't engage in this kind of behaviour." He was referring to widespread Western suspicions that Iran was developing nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian programme.
But other Western diplomats played down the significance of Mr Khatami's statement, saying it was part of the "usual brinkmanship" witnessed at each meeting of the 35-member board when it deals with Iran. Mr Khatami again insisted Iran was not building a nuclear weapon.
The draft resolution was drawn up by Britain, France and Germany, the countries that negotiated a breakthrough arrangement with Iran last October, in which they agreed to help Tehran obtain advanced nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. In return, Iran suspended uranium enrichment last year and stopped building centrifuges. It also agreed to accept a protocol permitting snap inspections of its plants and facilities.
"We want to let the Iranians know that we maintain concerns that they are not co- operating to the extent they signed up to," a British diplomat said. The Iranians "must co-operate fully and in timely fashion with the IAEA. If the IAEA is satisfied, we are."
----
US has not asked for Iran nuclear case to go to Security Council
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jun 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040617195551.yayhjs9d.html
The United States so far has not asked for the Iran nuclear case to be put before the UN Security Council so Tehran could face possible sanctions, the State Department said Thursday.
"We have not been seeking referral at this moment to the Security Council," spokesman Richard Boucher said, adding that the United States wanted to see the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency adopt a firm resolution on Iranian compliance.
"We have been pressing for a resolution that's strong, that asks Iran to meet its own commitments, that asks Iran to disclose what it has promised to disclose, that asks Iran to meet the requirements that have been put forward by its membership in the IAEA and put forward by the Board of Governors of the IAEA," Boucher said.
"The United States has felt that it's important for the IAEA to continue its pressure on Iran, to continue its investigation, its inspections, to continue finding things out about this program," he said.
"And as they have continued to do that, including in recent days, including by this revelation that we had in recent days, we think it's appropriate for the board to continue the activity that's going on now," the spokesman added.
Britain, France, and Germany submitted a resolution at the UN atomic agency Thursday calling for a 15-month-old investigation into Iran's nuclear activities to be stepped up and for Tehran to do more to help it complete the probe within a few months, agency officials said.
The United States is concerned Tehran may be seeking to develop a nuclear weapon under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, which the Islamic republic denies.
----
Europe's 'Big Three' submit resolution on Iran nuclear program
VIENNA (AFP)
Jun 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040617192358.agj2aes2.html
Britain, France, and Germany submitted a resolution at the UN atomic agency Thursday calling for a 15-month-old investigation into Iran's nuclear activities to be stepped up and for Tehran to do more to help it complete the probe within a few months, agency officials said.
Here are extracts from the draft text:
-- Reiterating its appreciation that Iran has continued to act as if its Additional Protocol were in force and noting with satisfaction that Iran has submitted to the Agency the initial declarations pursuant to that Protocol...
-- Noting... that important information about the P-2 centrifuge program has often been forthcoming only after repeated requests and in some cases has been incomplete and continues to lack the necessary clarity and also that the information provided to date relating to contamination issues has not been adequate...
-- Noting with concern that the Agency's investigations have revealed further omissions in the statements made by Iran, including in the October declaration, in particular concerning the importation of P-2 components from abroad and concerning laser enrichment tests, which have produced samples enriched up to 15 percent, and also that Agency experts have raised questions and doubts regarding the explanations provided by Iran...
-- Acknowledging the statement by the Director General on 14 June that it is essential for the integrity and credibility of the inspection process to bring these issues to a close within the next few months
-- Acknowledges that Iranian cooperation has resulted in Agency access to all requested locations, including four workshops belonging to the Defense Industries Organization
-- Deplores at the same time the fact that overall, as indicated by the Director General's written and oral reports, Iran's cooperation has not been as full, timely and proactive as it should have been, and in particular that Iran postponed until mid-April visits originally scheduled for mid-March, including visits of Agency centrifuge experts to a number of locations involved in Iran's P-2 centrifuge enrichment program, resulting in some cases in a delay in the taking of environmental samples and their analysis...
-- Calls on Iran to take all necessary steps on an urgent basis to help resolve all outstanding questions, especially that of LEU and HEU contamination found at various locations in Iran...
-- Calls on Iran as a further confidence-building measure voluntarily to reconsider its decision to begin production testing at the Uranium Conversion Facility...
-- Recalls that the full and prompt cooperation with the Agency of all third countries is essential in the clarification of certain outstanding questions, notably contamination...
----
IAEA Delegates OK Text of Iran Censure
By ANDREA DUDIKOVA
Associated Press Writer
Jun 17, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY_IRAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Delegates from the U.N. atomic watchdog agency agreed Thursday on a toughly worded censure of Tehran's lack of full cooperation with an investigation of its suspect nuclear activities, diplomats said Thursday.
The resolution would be submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency board of governors' meeting later Thursday, the diplomats told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. The conference then would debate it Friday ahead of likely passage.
Earlier Thursday, Iran forced the head of the IAEA to acknowledge that he erred at least once in a report accusing Tehran of trying to cover its tracks about its covert nuclear activities.
Still, the text remained toughly worded, with only a few minor changes calculated to appease nonaligned countries allied with Tehran.
The mistake had threatened to delay action on taking Iran to task for its spotty record on cooperating with an agency investigation into nearly two decades of covert nuclear activity that was discovered only two years ago.
The resolution text is based on a report, written by IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei, that is critical of Iran for withholding or providing contradictory information on its nuclear activities.
One instance cited in the report was the purchase of 150 magnets for P-2 centrifuges that Iran was secretly building. The report also said Iran had inquired about buying thousands of such magnets on the black market - substantially more than Tehran needed for what it said was a research program never meant to enrich uranium.
Enrichment can be used to produce power - which is what Iran says it is interested in - or bombs. The United States and its allies say Iran's nuclear activities are smoke screen for a weapons program.
In a closed meeting last week, a senior agency official told IAEA board members that Iran had inquired about "tens of thousands" of magnets that would equip thousands of centrifuges producing enough enriched uranium to make several nuclear weapons a year.
On Thursday, ElBaradei acknowledged his agency had erred in not noting one of is inspectors was informed about the purchase of 150 magnets.
But he said Iran had asked a black market supplier about the possibility of buying 100,000 magnets. "How would that square with an R and D (research and development) program?" he asked, reflecting the skepticism raised by such interest on the part of Iran.
He told reporters that the "lack of clarity" on Iran's part on its P-2 centrifuge program and other suspect actives continued to hamper his agency's inquiry.
On Iran's true nuclear ambitions, "we still have no concrete proof that this has a military dimension, but we are still are not in a position to say that this is exclusively for peaceful purposes," ElBaradei said, urging Iran for more "proactive cooperation (and) transparency."
He suggested the draft resolution reflects his views in "calling on Iran to accelerate cooperation," and in "making the point that ... we cannot continue forever."
"I need to bring ... (the Iran) issue to a close one way or another in the next few months," he said.
Delegates, who spoke separately on condition of anonymity said the omission by the agency did not affect the general feeling within the IAEA and most of the board delegations that Iran had not fully cooperated with the yearlong probe.
But Iran asserted the revelation showed Iran was honest in its dealings with the agency.
"The reality is ... that we informed the agency," said Hossein Mousavian, Iran's chief delegate. "It shows Iranian information has been full, with no contradictory ... information."
In comments to the closed board meeting made available to reporters, IAEA Deputy Director General Pierre Goldschmidt noted the error occurred because Iran neglected to include the purchases in written submissions to the agency, although one of its officials told an agency inspector about it, in a taped conversation.
ElBaradei spoke of an "oral statement with one individual whose English was not very clear to us - we did not pick it up."
"They should have told us in writing," he said. "They should have corrected this impression."
Chief U.S. delegate Kenneth Brill said the revelation did not change the fact that "the information Iran provides is contradictory" in many cases.
Since the start of the investigation, Iran has suspended its uranium enrichment program but refused to scrap it altogether. On Wednesday, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami suggested that enrichment could resume if the IAEA resolution is too harsh.
Iran says that under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it has a legitimate right to pursue a peaceful nuclear program, including enrichment.
Other than the true purpose of Iran's centrifuge program, the second main agency concern is the origins of traces of enriched uranium - some of them at the high levels used to make warheads.
Iran says those minute finds were not domestically produced but inadvertently imported in purchases through the nuclear black market.
On the Net:
International Atomic Energy Agency, http://www.iaea.org
----
U.N. Admits Mistake in Iran Nuclear Report
By REUTERS
June 17, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog was forced to make an embarrassing admission Thursday -- that it had wrongly accused Iran of withholding information about imports of potentially weapons-related technology.
Iran seized on the admission as proof that it is providing full and timely information on its atomic program, which it says is purely for generating electricity but which the United States believes is a front for developing nuclear weapons.
The disclosure was made as representatives of France, Germany and Britain continued to meet board members of the nuclear watchdog in Vienna to strike a compromise on the wording of a resolution that sharply rebukes Tehran for poor cooperation.
A non-aligned diplomat said Iran's case for softening the resolution had been strengthened by the fact that mistakes had clearly been made on both sides.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a June 1 report Iran did not declare until April that it had imported essential parts for advanced P-2 centrifuges used to purify uranium for use in atomic power plants or weapons.
But the Iranians this week produced a tape recording of an Iranian businessman who imported the parts telling an IAEA inspector verbally in January.
``This was made in an oral statement at the end of a particular meeting with one individual whose English was not very clear to us... It's a fault that we did not pick it up, it was not fed to our system,'' IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said.
A senior Iranian official said this showed the charge in IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei's June 1 report that Iran had provided changing and contradictory information was ``completely wrong.''
``This has been a big mistake,'' Hossein Mousavian, secretary of the foreign policy committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told reporters on the sidelines of an IAEA board meeting expected to rebuke Iran for patchy cooperation.
``It shows Iranian cooperation, Iranian information has been full and precise, on time, with no contradictions and no changes.''
Iran welcomed the fact that the IAEA had corrected the error, which he called an ``innocent mistake,'' but the report had tainted the whole atmosphere of the meeting.
``Unfortunately, this is late,'' Mousavian said.
He added that he hoped Britain, France and Germany would now make major changes to the draft resolution, which ``deplores'' inadequate Iranian cooperation.
TEHRAN WILL CAPITALIZE ON IAEA ERROR
IAEA inspectors have been probing Iran's atomic program for nearly two years since it was revealed that Tehran had for decades been secretly pursuing nuclear technology with potential military applications.
ElBaradei said the agency's error was a technical mistake and one that Iran could have helped to correct before it got into the report.
``You have to understand we work with thousands of papers and thousands of sites,'' ElBaradei said. ``Everybody makes mistakes.''
He said Iran had never reported the imports in writing and there remained a ``lack of clarity'' about Iran's centrifuge program, which appeared to be on a much larger scale than the tiny ``research and development'' program Iran insisted it was.
Washington dismissed the slip-up as minor and said it was suspicious that Iran had avoided giving information in writing.
``It's interesting that they only seem to give information to the agency orally and not in writing,'' U.S. ambassador to the U.N. in Vienna, Kenneth Brill, told reporters. ``Why? So they can change their story when it's convenient.''
ElBaradei said the incident did not change the overall picture and Iran still needed to make clear the full extent of its uranium enrichment program.
----
Iran Threatens to Restart Nuclear Work
June 17, 2004
By MARK LANDLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/middleeast/17nuke.html
VIENNA, June 16 - Iran threatened on Wednesday to resume its enrichment of uranium - a prerequisite for making nuclear weapons - if the International Atomic Energy Agency passed an expected resolution rebuking it for not cooperating.
Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, said his country no longer had a "moral commitment" to suspend uranium enrichment, though he added that it had not made a decision to restart such work.
"If the draft resolution proposed by the European countries is approved by the I.A.E.A., Iran will reject it," he said in Tehran. "If Europe has no commitment toward Iran, then Iran will not have a commitment toward Europe."
Mr. Khatami's statement deepened the rift between Iran and the atomic energy agency, a United Nations watchdog group, as its 35-member governing board was close to passing a toughly worded resolution deploring Tehran's lack of cooperation with its investigation of the country's nuclear program.
The United States accused Iranian officials of trying to push board members into softening the criticism.
"They're trying to intimidate the board and individual states," said the American ambassador to the agency, Kenneth C. Brill. "It really makes us question their claims that they have nothing to hide."
There had been expectations that the resolution would be proposed on Wednesday, but diplomats said they were at odds over some phrases in the introduction. They said they hoped to propose it on Thursday morning.
Representatives from Iran spent the day scrambling to delete a provision calling for the cancellation of Tehran's plans to build a heavy-water research reactor and to start operations at a uranium conversion plant.
The resolution, drafted by Britain, France and Germany, said those projects raised suspicions that Iran would not suspend uranium enrichment, as it promised last October in an agreement with the three countries.
The head of Iran's delegation here, Hossein Mousavian, insisted that the projects were outside the scope of the agreement. He also insisted that Iran had met all its obligations to the Europeans, as well as to the agency, which has been scrutinizing Iran's nuclear program for more than two years.
The resolution, Mr. Mousavian warned, would undermine relations between Iran and the agency, particularly among hard-line members of Iran's Parliament, some of whom have threatened that they will not ratify an agreement permitting unannounced inspections of its nuclear facilities.
In Tehran on Wednesday, the Iranian foreign minister noted that the Parliament, which has been controlled by conservative opponents of the government since elections last February, might be more reluctant to cooperate by ratifying the agreement.
"We have told the Europeans that the new Parliament does not think the same way as the previous Parliament, and that should be considered in their calculations," the foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, was quoted as saying by the Islamic Republic News Agency.
Despite their vitriolic tone, Iranian officials stopped short of darker threats, like refusing access to United Nations inspectors or withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, as North Korea did. Mr. Mousavian, in fact, said he saw no reason to "cut relations with the I.A.E.A."
The future of ties between Iran and Europe, he suggested, was more problematic. "Internally, a lot of people cannot trust the promises of cooperation with the Europeans," Mr. Mousavian said.
Under the terms of the deal last October between Iran and the foreign ministers of Germany, Britain, and France - at a time when the United States was urging a harder line on Iran - the Europeans offered to sell nuclear technology to the Iranians if they agreed to stop enriching uranium.
Iran, while asserting its right to enrich uranium, said it would suspend the activity.
A recent report by the agency cast doubt on Iran's claims. It said the Iranian government was continuing to make parts for centrifuges, the machines that enrich, or purify, uranium by spinning it.
The agency's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said it was "premature to make a judgment" about whether Iran's program was military.
But Dr. ElBaradei bluntly criticized Iran in a statement to the board on Monday for what he called its "changing and, at times, contradictory" stories.
--------
Nuclear Agency Agrees on Official Rebuke of Iran
June 17, 2004
By MARK LANDLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/middleeast/17CND-NUKE.html
VIENNA, June 17 - The International Atomic Energy Agency's governing board reached agreement today on a sharply worded rebuke of Iran for its lack of cooperation with the agency, leaving Tehran at odds with much of the world over its nuclear ambitions.
The resolution, which is to be ratified by the board on Friday, deplored Iran for obstructing the agency's efforts to inspect advanced centrifuge facilities, where Iran could produce weapons-grade uranium.
"Iran's cooperation has not been as full, timely, and proactive as it should have been," a final draft of the resolution said.
It also called on Iran to answer two lingering questions: What is the scope of its advanced centrifuge program, which depends heavily on imported components? And how were several of its nuclear sites contaminated with uranium, some of which is enriched to a purity suitable for weapons?
Such questions are likely to take on added urgency in the wake of a new report of possible nuclear activity at a military site in Tehran.
Officials close to the agency said they were deeply concerned by the report, which was broadcast on Wednesday by ABC News, and planned to investigate it.
"It has to be checked out," said one senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The resolution, drafted by Britain, France and Germany, came after four days of intense negotiations at the agency's headquarters in Vienna. It survived a last-minute hurdle, when the agency admitted it had erred in claiming that Iran had wrongly denied importing centrifuge parts.
Under pressure from Iran, the agency conceded it had overlooked a remark by an Iranian businessman, who said he had imported magnets for P-2 centrifuges. The admission led the board to soften a part of the statement that had criticized Iran for its "changing or contradictory information."
Now, it simply says that the information provided by Iran "continues to lack the necessary clarity."
Diplomatic nuances aside, the resolution is a setback for Iran, which has counted on the support of nonaligned countries in previous confrontations with the atomic energy agency. In this debate, it was clear that Iran had lost the support of countries like China, Russia and Pakistan.
Iran tried to put the best face on matters, noting that the resolution did not impose a deadline, as the United States had wanted. It also made a relatively muted appeal to Iran not to proceed with its plans to build a heavy-water research reactor or start production at a uranium conversion facility.
"I consider this process a victory for Iran," said the chief of Iran's delegation, Hossein Mousavian.
Mr. Mousavian said Iran would continue to work with the agency, and had no plans to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. He also suggested that Iran would not resume its enrichment of uranium, which it pledged to suspend last October as part of an agreement with Britain, France and Germany.
Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, threatened to resume enrichment if the resolution passed.
The agency's admission that it misrepresented Iran is more embarrassing than important. The Iranian man, who owns a private workshop in Iran, told agency inspectors during a meeting last January that he had bought a radial magnet used in the manufacture of P-2 centrifuges from outside the country.
Agency officials said its inspectors did not recognize the significance of the businessman's disclosure. They attributed the lapse to the man's poor English, and noted that his comment came at end of a long interview.
"We did not pick it up," said the agency's director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei. "We made a technical correction."
Dr. ElBaradei noted that Iran had several chances to correct the omission in later meetings and written submissions. "That technical correction does not change the overall picture," he said.
Iran, however, seized on the admission as evidence that the agency's investigation of its program was riddled with flaws. "This was a big mistake," Mr. Mousavian said.
The United States, which claims Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons, played down the significance of the error.
"The Iranians are trying to deflect attention from the thrust and substance of the report by pointing to little red herrings," said the American ambassador to the agency, Kenneth C. Brill.
----
Nuclear nightmares
June 17, 2004
Washington Timnes
Letters to Editor
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040616-092409-5265r.htm
Yesterday's editorial "Iran's mushrooming threat" is a clear analysis of the uncertainty the West has displayed toward Iran's nuclear plans.
In Iran, economic, social and political life is paralyzed by the fundamentalist rule of the mullahs. So far, the mullahs have succeeded in bringing economic recession, isolation and instability to the region, a factor of concern for the West. President Mohammed Khatami, although democratically elected, has little influence over the mullahs' decision to further develop the nuclear capability of the country. The mullahs' message to the United States and the West is clear: Stay out of our business or else.
The United States is seen as the great evil by the religious ruling class, most especially because of the intervention in Iraq, American policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the hegemonic ambitions the United States seems to have in the Middle East. Therefore, Iran is unlikely to renounce its nuclear plans, and the United States is too caught up in Iraq to enforce severe sanctions against Iran.
If the United States pushes the mullahs to give up their nuclear ambitions, they will put U.S. citizens and U.S. military personnel who are in Iraq and around the region in even greater danger. On the other hand, if the United States ignores Iran, the fundamentalists will develop nuclear power. So: Sanction them now and possibly endanger the U.S. situation in Iraq, or let Iran develop its nuclear capacity and deal with the threat it will pose later. It's a no-win situation.
MANUELA PARAIPAN
Arad, Romania
----
IAEA Admits Mistakenly Accusing Iran
By ANDREA DUDIKOVA
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48952-2004Jun17?language=printer
VIENNA, Austria - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency acknowledged wrongly accusing Iran of withholding information from a probe of its nuclear program but insisted Thursday that Tehran still must fully explain its suspect activities.
The issue threatened to delay action on a toughly worded resolution by the International Atomic Energy Agency rebuking Iran for its spotty record cooperating with an agency investigation of what had been nearly two decades of covert nuclear activity until revealed two years ago.
The 35-nation IAEA board ended its meeting for the day without the draft being submitted. The meeting was adjourned until Friday - the last day of the week-long session - to allow delegations to fine-tune the draft.
Iran denies being uncooperative and rejects U.S. allegations its nuclear program is a smoke screen for making weapons. It is seeking to have the resolution toned down.
The flap Thursday was over report by IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei that is critical of Iran for what it says is withheld or contradictory information about its nuclear program.
One instance cited in the report was the purchase of 150 magnets for P-2 centrifuges that Iran was found to have worked on secretly. The report also said Iran had inquired about buying thousands of such magnets on the black market - substantially more than needed for what Tehran says was a research program never meant to enrich uranium.
On Thursday, ElBaradei acknowledged his agency had erred in not noting one of its inspectors was informed about the purchase of 150 magnets.
But he said Iran actually had asked a black market supplier about the possibility of buying "100,000" magnets. "How would that square with an R and D (research and development) program?" he asked, reflecting the skepticism raised by such interest on the part of Iran.
Iran's chief delegate insisted that the admission showed his country was honest in its dealings with the agency.
"The reality is ... that we informed the agency," Hossein Mousavian said. "It shows Iranian information has been full, with no contradictory ... information."
The text, written by France, Britain and Germany and being considered at a weeklong 35-nation IAEA board of governors meeting, does not directly threaten sanctions but was meant to keep pressure on Tehran.
ElBaradei told reporters that the "lack of clarity" on Iran's part on its P-2 centrifuge program and other suspect activities continued to hamper his agency's probe.
A senior agency official told IAEA board members last week that Iran had inquired about "tens of thousands" of magnets that would equip thousands of centrifuges producing enough enriched uranium to make several nuclear weapons a year.
Enrichment can be used to produce power - which is what Iran says it is interested in - or bombs.
"We still have no concrete proof that this has a military dimension but we are still are not in a position to say that this is exclusively for peaceful purposes," ElBaradei said, calling on Iran for more "proactive cooperation (and) transparency."
He suggested the draft resolution reflects his views in "calling on Iran to accelerate cooperation," and in "making the point that ... we cannot continue forever."
"I need to bring ... (the Iran) issue to a close one way or another in the next few months," he said.
Delegates, who spoke separately on condition of anonymity, said the omission by the agency did not affect the general feeling within the IAEA and most of the board delegations that Iran had not fully cooperated with the yearlong probe.
In comments to the closed board meeting made available to reporters, IAEA Deputy Director General Pierre Goldschmidt noted the error occurred because Iran neglected to include the purchases in written submissions to the agency, although one of its official told an agency inspector about it in a tape-recorded conversation.
ElBaradei spoke of an "oral statement with one individual whose English was not very clear to us - we did not pick it up."
"They should have told us in writing," he said. "They should have corrected this impression."
Chief U.S. delegate Kenneth Brill said the revelation did not change the fact that "the information Iran provides is contradictory" in many cases.
Delegations, meanwhile, continued to fine-tune the draft. Diplomats said it would likely remain strongly worded, with key passages expressing "concern" and "serious concern" about Iran's foot-dragging - although other language could be modified.
"There might be further changes, but the key thing for Iran to know is that our eyes continue to be on them," a senior diplomat from a board member nation said.
Since the probe's start, Iran has suspended its uranium enrichment program but refused to scrap it altogether and on Wednesday, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami suggested that enrichment could resume if the IAEA resolution is too harsh.
Iran maintains that under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it has a legitimate right to pursue a peaceful nuclear program, including enrichment.
Other than the true purpose of Iran's centrifuge program the second main agency concern is the origins of traces of enriched uranium - some of them at the high levels used to make warheads.
Iran says those minute finds were not domestically produced but inadvertently imported in purchases through the nuclear black market.
On the Net:
International Atomic Energy Agency,http://www.iaea.org
-------- korea
Richardson Urges Shift in U.S. Tack on N. Korea
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47754-2004Jun16.html
TOKYO, June 16 -- Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who has maintained contacts in North Korea since he served in the Clinton administration, called Wednesday for a shift in U.S. strategy toward seeking a compromise with North Korean officials during disarmament talks next week.
Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has had frequent communications with the North Koreans and warned that without a change in the status quo, North Korea could emerge as an outlaw state armed with as many as 10 nuclear weapons. In an interview on Wednesday, Richardson said that he had been in touch with North Korean officials in Pyongyang via telephone as recently as two weeks ago.
Richardson said the six-nation framework to disarm North Korea was "in danger of failing." He expressed concern that a deal on freezing the North Korean nuclear program might not be reached after five days of talks scheduled to start Monday in Beijing.
"That allows them to keep on building and building" nuclear weapons, he said. "If we don't reach an interim agreement to suspend the processing, they could have 10 nuclear weapons, and the talks may break down by this time next year."
The Bush administration has rejected any interim agreement with North Korea without an upfront commitment to dismantle its nuclear program. But Richardson has echoed the sentiments of leading analysts who have predicted that North Korea might hold out for an agreement until after the U.S. elections in November.
Richardson was in Seoul and Tokyo this week on trade missions and to speak on North Korean policy. He said that judging from his conversations with the North Koreans, it appears "unlikely" the North Korean government will immediately agree to U.S. demands for a complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of its weapons programs without any incentives.
Richardson called for a compromise, outlining a plan similar to one being floated by South Korea, for a verifiable suspension of North Korea's nuclear programs as a first step toward achieving disarmament. In exchange, he said, the United States should offer joint security assurances to the North along with the other participants at the talks -- China, Russia, South Korea and Japan. In addition, he said, the United States should endorse a South Korean plan to ship oil to North Korea to ease its energy shortage while a broader agreement is negotiated. As part of an interim step -- which China and Russia also appear to support -- North Korea should be pressed to allow weapons inspectors back into the country and to rejoin the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The North Korean government withdrew from the treaty last year.
The Bush administration's uncompromising approach to the crisis has generated mounting frustrations among some participants in the talks, particularly the Chinese and South Koreans, Richardson said. "If you talk to the Chinese, they are especially growing frustrated by this process; they want to see results next week," he said. "If there is no clear progress, we don't know if the nations involved will stick with the framework" of six party talks.
Richardson has been flagged as a potential running mate for Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate against Bush in November. Kerry has called for bilateral talks with the North Koreans -- an option Bush has rejected. Richardson, who said he intended to "remain governor of New Mexico," also called for "serious bilateral negotiations," but within the framework of the continuing six-nation talks.
--------
China: N. Korea Nuke Talks Will Be Hard
By AUDRA ANG
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49850-2004Jun17.html
BEIJING - A third round of talks among six nations next week on North Korea's nuclear weapons program will be challenging and difficult, China said Thursday.
"It is quite a complicated issue, and along with substantive negotiations and discussions, differences will occur ... or become even more obvious," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said.
Two previous rounds of discussions involving China, North and South Korea, the United States, Japan and Russia ended without settlement. But Zhang insisted there was progress.
"In the process of settling this huge issue, difficulties and challenges still lie ahead," Zhang said at a briefing. But "the parties concerned have clarified that they will make a coordinated effort to solve the issue. I think this is very important progress."
The new round of talks is to begin next Wednesday. Lower-level meetings are to be held on Monday and Tuesday to map out the agenda.
The standoff with North Korea flared in October 2002, when the United States said North Korea admitted operating a nuclear weapons program in violation of a 1994 agreement.
At the heart of the dispute is North Korea's demand for aid in exchange for freezing its nuclear weapons development. Washington says assistance will come only if the North first commits to "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling" of its nuclear program.
Also Thursday, South Korea's foreign minister said Pyongyang must win the trust of the international community after further isolating itself by expelling U.N. nuclear inspectors, withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and restarting an idle nuclear reactor.
"International society doesn't trust North Korea," Ban Ki-moon said. "That's the problem now. North Korea has to prove that we can trust them."
Ban vowed patience in resolving the issue.
"Even if there's no progress in the third round of talks, the six-way process will not lose momentum," he said.
A resolution also hinges on the contentious issue of whether North Korea has a secret nuclear weapons program based on highly enriched uranium in addition to its plutonium-based program.
Washington insists North Korea give up both programs as part of a settlement - a condition the North rejects. Chinese diplomats have questioned whether North Korea actually has a uranium-based program, saying Washington has yet to show conclusive evidence it exists.
Zhang said the uranium program will be a topic in the upcoming talks but refused to give any other details.
"We hope these negotiations can build on the achievement of previous talks and have more in-depth discussions on substantive issues ... and narrow down differences," she said.
"The expectations for these negotiations should be rational and realistic," Zhang added.
-------- missile defense
Senate Calls for Missile Defense Testing
By KEN GUGGENHEIM
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49833-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon would be required to conduct more thorough tests on its proposed missile defense system under a measure the Senate approved Thursday.
Democrats questioned whether the testing would be objective. They wanted the evaluations to be directed by the Pentagon's chief of testing, Thomas Christie, whom they see as independent of political pressures.
But the Republican measure said the testing criteria would be set by the defense secretary, after consulting with Christie. The amendment was approved 55-44, mostly along party lines.
Missile defense is an essential part of President Bush's national security policy. Nine interceptors are expected to be deployed this year at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. Bush's 2005 budget proposal would fund 20 interceptors.
The plans have not been as politically divisive as President Reagan's more elaborate "Star Wars" program. But Democrats have complained the administration is spending billions of dollars to deploy interceptors without conducting adequate tests to see if they will work.
A report in April by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, called for more realistic testing.
Under the GOP amendment, the defense secretary would have a Feb. 1 deadline for setting criteria for "operationally realistic" tests. A test would have to be conducted by Oct. 1, 2005.
The plan, proposed by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, was added to a $447 billion defense authorization bill. The legislation includes $10.2 billion for missile defense.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., unsuccessfully pushed an amendment to have Christie oversee the testing.
"There is no more political, ideological issue than missile defense in terms of national security debate," Reed said.
Earlier, senators voted 57-42 to defeat a proposal by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., that would have limited the deployment of missile defense systems until they are proved effective.
"There is a serious problem here," Boxer said. "We have no way of knowing if these interceptor missiles will actually be able to protect us from an incoming ballistic missile attack."
Republican senators said the country would be better off using defenses that are still being developed than none at all.
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said Boxer's proposal "would mean if North Korea or some other nation were to launch a missile against us, we would be forbidden by law from trying to defend ourselves."
After it is passed, the Senate defense bill will have to be reconciled with the House version, which did not add requirements for missile defense testing.
-------- terrorism
AFRRI Earns Joint Meritorious Unit Award
by JO2 Robert Keilman
USUHS Public Affairs
June 17, 2004
dcmilitary.com
http://www.dcmilitary.com/navy/journal/9_24/national_news/29654-1.html
The Department of Defense has recognized the Armed Forces Radiological Research Institute (AFRRI) for its achievements in responses to acts of terrorism and nuclear, biological and radiological threats to the nation.
The DoD Joint Meritorious Unit Award citation, signed by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld on Feb. 17, commended AFRRI's achievements from Sept. 11, 2001 to June 20, 2003. The award was presented to the institute during an awards ceremony May 26.
"This prestigious award belongs to all institute employees, each of whom contributed to the organization's ability to respond immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and to continue to provide expert advice, training and research in support of national anti-terrorism programs," said AFRRI Director Army Col. David G. Jarrett, Medical Corps, director of AFRRI.
During the period of the award, Army Col. Robert R. Eng, Medical Service Corps, was the institute's director.
"The specifics in the citation bring back memories of adrenaline flow, 24-hour armed security guards, high-level meetings, and recognition of AFRRI as a national asset by Dr. John Marburger, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy," wrote Eng from his current assignment as the director of the Proponency Office for Preventative Medicine at the U.S. Army Medical Command at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. "The award was made possible because each and every person at AFRRI attacked the problems, did the research, and came up with rock-solid solutions for the Defense Department and the nation. I am thrilled that AFRRI has been rewarded for its accomplishments."
After Sept. 11, AFRRI provided health physics expertise and responded to requests for the institute's Medical Effects of Ionizing Radiation (MEIR) Course. The institute presented the MEIR course to the White House medical staff and to New York firemen, policemen and health department workers as well as to city government representatives in Manhattan, Long Island, and the Newark, N.J. areas. In 2002, during classroom training and meetings, the team addressed issues such as nuclear terror, biological and chemical warfare, and medical responses to radiation injuries. They briefed numerous U.S. and foreign government agencies, including military hospitals and active and reserve Navy fleet hospitals, as well as civilian universities and first-responder networks.
In addition, the institute met the increase in requests for information products, including 12,000 copies of the "Medical Management of Radiological Casualties Handbook." The institute also collaborated with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Army Medical Department Center and School to publish a pocket guide for medical service providers. AFRRI continues to provide information to the Pacific, Joint Forces, Southern, Central and Northern commands, as well as to federal agencies including the Departments of State and Health and Human Services.
According to institute officials, when anthrax-contaminated mail threatened to shut down the postal system in October 2001, AFRRI scientists, engineers, and technical and administrative staff significantly aided various federal agencies and the Office of the President of the United States to protect and decontaminate the distribution system. The institute also supported national anti-terrorism programs and military exercises and operations. For Operation Enduring Freedom in Kuwait, the institute developed emergency response plans; and for Operation Iraqi Freedom, it provided guidance on treatment of personnel with embedded depleted uranium or tungsten alloy fragments and conducted studies on the use of ionizing radiation to decontaminate human remains.
AFRRI employs about 150 military and civilian personnel, which includes scientists, healthcare professionals, managers, technicians and administrative specialists. The institute was established in 1961 as a joint agency of three military departments (Air Force, Army and Navy) and under the control of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, it is now administered by the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU).
USU was established by Congress under the Department of Defense in 1972 and has the nation's only fully accredited federal school of medicine and graduate school of nursing. With its motto "Learning to Care for Those in Harm's Way," the university has a worldwide reputation as a center of excellence for military and medical education and research.
-------- treaties
Conspiracy threat to anti-nuke treaty
17 June 04
Rob Edwards,
New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996016
The US and UK governments will this week be accused of conspiring to break the international agreement to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
The claim will be backed by detailed evidence of the large-scale collaboration by the two countries to develop their nuclear arsenals, an activity that the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) is specifically designed to prevent.
The claim comes from the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), a think tank based in London and Washington DC. Although the UK and the US cooperated on nuclear matters throughout the Cold War, the extent of their collaboration since then has never been documented.
Nuclear Arsenals
However, BASIC has managed to glean something of the scope of the collaboration from official sources. The figures show that the collaboration remains surprisingly strong, despite the commitment of both countries under the NPT to disarm.
Working groups
In 2002, over 300 scientists from the UK's Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire visited 25 sites in the US, including the national nuclear laboratories at Sandia and Lawrence Livermore in California, and at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
In the same year, 485 nuclear scientists from the US visited Aldermaston. There are at least 16 joint working groups between the two countries, covering topics such as nuclear materials, weapons engineering, warhead physics, warhead accidents and "terrorist nuclear threat response".
And Everet Beckner, the man in charge of the US nuclear weapons programme at the US Department of Energy, used to be deputy chief executive of the UK Atomic Weapons Establishment.
The exchanges of personnel, information and even nuclear materials are part of a US-UK accord known as the Mutual Defence Agreement, which is at the heart of the "special relationship" between the two governments. Signed in 1958, it allowed the two countries to exchange anything to do with nuclear weapons short of the weapons themselves.
This covered expertise, technology, bomb components and nuclear explosives such as plutonium and highly enriched uranium, but the extent of the cooperation has always been a closely guarded secret.
Moral legitimacy
The agreement was last renewed in 1994 and runs out in 2004. The US and UK are now finalising another 10-year extension, which they hope to sign within the next few days. This has prompted BASIC to challenge the legal and moral legitimacy of the renewal.
Along with another nuclear think tank, the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy in London, BASIC is seeking a legal opinion on whether renewing the agreement would breach the NPT, to which the US and the UK both say they are committed.
Nigel Chamberlain, BASIC's nuclear analyst, says that the agreement promotes just the kind of proliferation that the NPT was designed to prevent. He argues that the agreement undermines Article 1 of the NPT, which forbids countries from transferring nuclear explosive devices "directly or indirectly", and could lead to a breach of Article 6, which promises nuclear disarmament.
Miguel Marin-Bosch, Mexico's former deputy foreign minister and the country's ambassador to the 1995 NPT Conference, agrees with BASIC.
"The [Mutual Defence Agreement] is inconsistent with the spirit and letter of the NPT," he told New Scientist. Before the agreement is renewed, he suggests it ought to be referred to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Bunker-busters
Other experts, however, point out that the NPT was carefully drafted by the US and the UK in the 1960s to permit exchanges under the Mutual Defence Agreement to continue. For example, the UK's nuclear weapons system, the submarine-launched Trident missile, is well known to be the result of a substantial collaboration with the US.
According to George Bunn, a former US government lawyer who helped draft the treaty, "protecting existing arrangements with allies was a key US-UK goal".
But BASIC questions whether the renewal of a bilateral agreement should take precedence over an established international treaty, especially as many non-nuclear weapons states are now unhappy with what the US and UK are doing.
With Trident nearing the end of its life, BASIC is concerned that if the agreement runs for another 10 years, UK scientists will tap into the development of the smaller, more usable weapons like mini-nukes and bunker-busters being planned by the Bush administration.
Although the UK has not yet decided to replace its Trident missiles, it says it is keeping open a "range of options for maintaining a nuclear deterrent capability". The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, has refused to say what these options are.
Accusations of hypocrisy The UK Ministry of Defence insists that the Mutual Defence Agreement is "fully compatible" with the NPT. Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear policy expert who used to advise President Clinton, thinks that the agreement does not violate the NPT.
"However, there can be no denying that the US-UK nuclear cooperation undercuts the moral position of both as they work to prevent other countries from seeking nuclear weapons," he says.
The accusation comes at a difficult time for the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which is due to be reviewed in 2005. "The accusations of hypocrisy are harder to deflect as non-nuclear weapon states' resentment intensifies," says Chamberlain.
-------- ukraine
Ukraine's missing missiles
17 June 2004
Janes
http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jid/jid040617_1_n.shtml
Since March, Ukraine's defence minister, Yevhen Marchuk, has been searching for missing missiles and other weapons that could have fallen into terrorist hands or been sold to rogue states. JID investigates why this potentially catastrophic situation is only now being brought to light.
Marchuk raised a domestic storm when he publicly revealed that the Defence Ministry had no unified accounting system. Nor has a comprehensive inventory of military equipment in Ukraine ever been carried out. It is unknown what weapons the Defence Ministry actually possesses or what it inherited from the former Soviet Union.
When Marchuk became defence minister in June 2003 he ordered two inventories that indicated US$170m of military stock was probably missing. These results were so shocking that Marchuk ordered a new team of investigators to conduct an additional check using different methods. They uncovered that additional equipment, worth $20m, was missing.
Ukraine's officially declared revenue from the sale of military equipment is $3bn. This, according to JID's inside sources, only represents a small fraction of the real volume of Ukraine's military exports. Meanwhile, Marchuk has complained that there is no data available to him regarding the quantity of military equipment Ukraine inherited after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
The sheer scale of what appears to be missing equipment is astounding, as demonstrated by just one example. In 1990-1991, on the eve of the break up of the Soviet Union, 1,942 S-185 rockets were delivered to the Zhytomir military base, west of Kiev. These rockets were to be dismantled.
In fact, only 488 of the 1,942 rockets can actually be accounted for. The missiles could have been sold to unknown groups or countries. Or their scrap metal, gold, platinum and silver could have been sold separately with the proceeds being transferred to offshore accounts.
"We are looking for several hundred missiles. They have already been decommissioned, but we cannot find them," complained Marchuk.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Stop developing WMD
June 17, 2004
Washington Timnes
Letters to Editor
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040616-092409-5265r.htm
Frank Gaffney Jr.'s column "Empty words" (Commentary, Tuesday) supported funding research (but not deployment) of a new nuclear weapon designed as a super "bunker buster." Regardless of your posture regarding pre-emption or the war on terrorism, there is no scenario in which an American president would choose to drop a nuclear weapon in a non-nuclear exchange.
The concept of mutual assured destruction is not applicable (or palatable) in the war on terror. Why waste the money on research, suffer the public-relations opprobrium and risk proliferation of yet another weapon of mass destruction for no strategic advantage? I don't get it.
JONATHAN REESE
Hingham, Mass.
----
New Nukes Win Senate Support
June 17, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-17-09.asp#anchor4
Senate Democrats failed in a bid Tuesday to strip funding from the 2005 Defense Authorization Act defense spending bill for research of new nuclear weapons. An amendment to remove the $33.6 million earmarked for studies of low-yield and "bunker buster" nuclear weapons was defeated by a partisan vote of 55 to 42.
The funds come on the heels of a decision by Congress last year to lift a decade old ban on researching new low yield nuclear weapons. These five kiloton nuclear weapons are about half the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
Congress has also approved a Bush administration request to shorten the time required to prepare for a full-scale nuclear test from 24 months to 18 months.
The Bush administration says research into these new nuclear weapons will make the nation's nuclear arsenal into a more effective deterrent. The administration argues that these kinds of weapons could reduce the potential for causing civilian casualties and could improve the effectiveness of nuclear weapons in destroying deeply buried and hardened targets.
Republicans stressed that the funding is only for research. The administration would have to ask Congress for authority to develop the new nukes.
"It is not realistic to think we can put the nuclear genie back into the bottle," said Senator Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican. "We cannot hope that if we ignore the evolving nuclear threat that it will go away."
But critics are concerned that the Bush administration's plan blurs the line between the use of nuclear and conventional weapons and could undermine the international effort to contain the world's development of nuclear weapons.
"I strongly believe that to proceed on this path is folly because by doing so we are encouraging the very nuclear proliferation we are seeking to prevent," said California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, a coauthor of the amendment. "In other words, we are telling other countries, do not do what we do, do what we say. We are practicing the ultimate hypocrisy."
Critics say the administration's concept of modifying or developing nuclear weapons for use against deeply buried and hardened targets is not only misguided, but fundamentally flawed.
A nuclear weapon exploded just beneath the Earth's surface would create a massive crater and would throw more radioactive dirt and particles into the air than one detonated above the target, according to Sidney Drell, a nuclear physicist with Stanford University.
For fallout to be contained, even a 0.5 kiloton nuclear weapon would have to penetrate at least 150 feet into the Earth in order for fallout to be contained.
But there is no known material that could be used to encase a bomb that could penetrate more than 50 feet, Drell said, "even if we slam them in at supersonic speeds."
All 42 votes in favor of the amendment were cast by Democrats, but four Democrats crossed party lines to vote with the Senate's 51 Republicans to defeat the measure.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
U.S. energy official in charge of nuclear waste cleanup resigns
Thursday, June 17, 2004
By H. Josef Hebert,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-17/s_24981.asp
WASHINGTON - Assistant Energy Secretary Jessie Roberson, who headed the environmental cleanup program at the department's nuclear weapons sites, has resigned, citing a desire to spend more time with her family.
Roberson has been at the center of an aggressive plan by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to speed up the massive environmental cleanup the government faces from waste left over from years of nuclear bomb making.
The accelerated cleanup agenda, crafted by Roberson, has been criticized by some state officials and environmentalists as an attempt by the Energy Department to scale back cleanup standards and saddle states with more of the highly radioactive waste.
Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said Tuesday that Roberson's departure would be effective July 15.
"She wanted to spend more time with her family," said Davis. "She wanted to move on. She's done a great job."
Davis said that Abraham told Roberson that in three years at the job she had "fundamentally changed the management" of the waste cleanup effort. Roberson came to the post after working for the Energy Department's office overseeing the cleanup of the Rocky Flats nuclear site in Colorado.
The resignation is the third of a senior Energy Department official closely involved in nuclear waste cleanup or environmental management in just over two months.
Undersecretary Robert Card, the department's No. 3 official who was closely involved in nuclear waste issues, and Assistant Secretary Beverly Cook, who reported to Card and was in charge of environmental and health management at nuclear complex sites, resigned in early April after tangling with members of Congress over a worker health issue. They, too, cited a desire to spend more time with family.
Davis said "it would be wrong to draw any conclusion" that Roberson's resignation was related to those departures or that her decision to leave the department involved an issue of policy.
However, Roberson has been criticized by some lawmakers for threatening to withhold as much as $350 million in nuclear waste cleanup funds unless states with tanks of high-level radioactive waste agree to a reclassification of the waste so it would not have to be transported to Nevada for disposal.
Senators and other officials from Washington, where many of the waste tanks are located, accused the department of trying to "blackmail" the states into agreeing to the cleanup changes. Tank waste also is located at facilities in Idaho and South Carolina.
----
Pressure's on to reform nuclear workers comp bill
ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com,
L.A Monitor Assistant Editor
http://www.lamonitor.com/articles/2004/06/14/headline_news/news02.txt
Four years ago, Congress passed the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act (EEOICA), a bill that was supposed to make up for years of neglect of employees of the Department of Energy who had been exposed to serious illnesses while on dangerous jobs in nuclear facilities.
Under Subtitle B, the bill provided a lump sum payment of $150,000 and medical benefits as compensation to workers who developed certain cancers and other diseases after exposure to radiation and other toxic substances.
Since 2000, many employees covered by the bill have suffered deteriorating health and some have died. Survivors, some of whom are also entitled to compensation, have struggled on without their relatives, expecting their cases to be resolved soon.
Others, afflicted by diseases not specifically covered by the act, were shunted into 50 different state workers compensation programs, where they are often frustrated by similar or worse delays in obtaining adequate data for establishing eligibility. This program is known as Subtitle D.
Some cases have been resolved, and the energy department claims the pace of handling the claims has accelerated in the last six months.
Case in point
Jonathan Garcia of Espanola hopes things are going faster, but he's not holding his breath. Four years after the bill passed and long periods in between form letters advising him of no progress, he finally got a letter from the government saying they had data on his exposures from Los Alamos National Laboratory.
"I was a heavy equipment operator for Zia when I first started back in '75," he said. "I worked all the areas in Los Alamos, every single one I was Q-cleared for."
Garcia was diagnosed with leukemia in 1993. He endured one bone marrow transplant in 1994, and then was rescued with another experimental operation in 1996. To qualify for his lump sum compensation, a provision in the compensation act required that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health obtain his exposure records to estimate how much radiation he was exposed to.
"I buried the fuel rods from TA-18," he said. "I buried 100,000 barrels of plutonium and uranium."
Even so, he doubts that the dosage records for his exposure are complete.
"I was breathing that, crushed glove boxes and powdered graphite, loose dust around the pit, wearing only a dust mask," he said. And they didn't have any monitoring devices inside the pit. There was no dosage for me at the time. Film badges don't pick up everything."
If his claim holds, he said, his colleagues with other complications feel they may have a chance too.
"If I don't get it, with leukemia and working one of the hottest areas," he said, "then there are some real questions about this program."
Case for reform
Last month two new studies, critical of the creeping progress of the bureaucracy were published, answering some of those questions, but prompting new legislative efforts at the national level to mend what the bills' sponsors consider a broken and unresponsive system.
One of the studies, by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reported that of the 15,000-plus cases they were involved in, almost all of them were delayed by problems obtaining information from other agencies or the claimants themselves, or by problems NIOSH had in getting staffed, prepared and facilitated for the job.
Among sites listed as "not consistently providing adequate responses to data requests," is Los Alamos National Laboratory, where a NIOSH random survey found three out of ten requests for dose reconstruction efforts were inadequate.
Lab officials have acknowledged that there were problems providing NIOSH with exposure data in a format they needed, but say those problems have now been worked out.
A Government Accounting Office report released last week gave an even bleaker assessment of the over-all picture.
"During the first 2-and-a-half years of the program, ending December 31, 2003, Energy had completely processed about 6 percent of the more than 23,000 cases that had been filed," write the authors on the Subtitle D claims that are being filed under state workers compensation laws."(P)rocessing had not yet begun on nearly 60 percent of the cases."
A DOE reply, dated May 11, complains that the report does not include progress that was made since the beginning of this year, saying that more like 10 percent of the cases were complete then, and 23 percent were essentially completed.
DOE also answered that without an additional $10 million in funding, it would not be able to meet its goal "to eliminate the entire backlog of applications by the end of CY 2006."
Members of New Mexico's congressional delegation, specifically the state's two U.S. senators and Rep. Tom Udall, D-NM, have taken action in the last month toward another round of reform.
On May 19, Udall introduced a bill that would designate Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Special Exposure Cohort under the EEOICA, which would automatically entitle certain LANL workers with specific cancers to qualify for the lump sum payment even if the government can't adequately reconstruct their levels of exposure.
Visiting the state on June 4, Udall said he had been working on these problems, even before the original legislation passed in 2000.
"When we came to the public meetings in Espanola and heard the workers, the rooms were overflowing with people, and you had a sense of tremendous concern from the workers," he said.
Even with the legislation, he said, many of these people have not been served well, and since then he has worked in tandem with a bi-partisan group in the House, monitoring developments and trying to come up with a piece of legislation that would fix the problems quickly.
"I would hope to hook on to any kind of reform bill that goes through," he said. "I'm very frustrated with the way DOE has run the program."
Another tack has been taken in the Senate, where an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act proposes to shift responsibility for administering all claims to the Department of Labor. The amendment, sponsored by Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky, and co-sponsored by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, is reported to have strong bipartisan support from a number Senators in both parties.
Among them, Sen. Pete Domenici said in a statement last week, "I am pleased to be able to help fix deficiencies in the original law intended to help DOE employees receive compensation for exposure to toxic substances.
"The amendment would also create an Office of Ombudsman to work with DOL on the claims process and, among other measures, require DOE to continue gathering and providing the necessary records, Domenici said.
"My sense is that the Department of Energy has a hard problem with running these kinds of programs," Udall said. "I'm not sure their heart is really in it."
-------- washington
Hanford cleanup enters new phase
Workers digging near old reactors make interesting finds
Thursday, June 17, 2004
By SHANNON DININNY
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/178261_hanford17.html
RICHLAND -- Workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation have begun a new phase of cleaning up along the Columbia River corridor: digging up solid waste near two dormant nuclear reactors.
The chore represents the last major hurdle for soil cleanup near Hanford's B and C reactors. When completed, the B and C areas will be the first reactor sites where cleanup will be finished along the river.
But unearthing nuclear junk comes with its share of surprises. Already, there have been times workers were left scratching their heads wondering what exactly they had dug up, said Rex Miller, on-site manager for Bechtel Hanford, the contractor responsible for tearing down and cocooning Hanford's reactors and cleaning up the grounds nearby.
"You have to dig as if you expect a surprise with every bucketful," Miller said. "Every bucketful is kind of an adventure."
Both reactors at the south-central Washington nuclear reservation were closed in the late 1960s after more than two decades of producing plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal. Over the years, reactor workers buried nuclear junk and garbage, some of which could still be radioactive or contaminated by chemicals.
Liquid waste at the two reactor sites already has been removed. Removing the solid waste -- which can include everything from old files to rusty reactor parts to telephone poles and wires -- then backfilling and replanting the areas is scheduled to be completed by December 2006. Bechtel says work is ahead of schedule.
Final decisions on handling groundwater contamination in the river corridor and the future of the cocooned reactors still lie ahead.
There are about 22 waste sites to be cleaned up at the B and C reactors alone, and at least a half-dozen are expected to contain solid waste. They range in size from a few feet to larger than a football field.
More than 1 million cubic feet of material is expected to be dug up at the burial grounds. About 35 containers weighing 18 tons each are hauled away each day.
Monitors check for chemical or radiological contamination. After repeated sorting, most of the waste is hauled to an on-site landfill. Samples are sent away for laboratory testing if questions or concerns arise about the contents of any waste.
"We have unknown contaminants buried all over the place out here. We believe we've identified most," Miller said. But, "no matter how well you manage something, you can always run into things."
Case in point: While digging into a mound of dirt last month, workers heard a hissing sound and pulled out of the area after realizing they had uncovered some type of compressed gas.
No one was injured, and safety procedures at the site worked exactly as they are supposed to, said Dennis Faulk, environmental scientist for the Environmental Protection Agency.
"They never did find what actually caused the release of gas. That was just one of the surprises they can expect to encounter as they go through these sites," Faulk said.
Digging up the burial grounds near the B and C reactors also serves as an education for what to expect at the other sites, Faulk said.
"We're kind of the trailblazers since this is the first area," he said. "And hopefully the uncertainty here will remove a lot of the guessing work for a lot of the other burial grounds."
----
Hanford workers have high risk of cancer, report says
Thursday, June 17th, 2004,
By Annette Cary,
Tri-City Herald staff writer
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/tch/local/story/5201603p-5134626c.html
A report released by the Government Accountability Project concludes that the risk to Hanford workers of cancer from tank vapors is thousands of times higher than federal limits.
"The report doesn't provide data or analysis to substantiate the claims," said Erik Olds, a spokesman for the Department of Energy's Office of River Protection, after the report was released Wednesday. He also pointed out that it didn't appear to meet the conventional scientific standard of peer review.
It was prepared by Timothy Jarvis, a toxicologist who recently retired from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, a DOE national lab. He used data from two reports by the national lab to draw his conclusions.
But a lab program manager said the two reports were looking at unrelated issues.
The Government Accountability Project, or GAP, and some workers believe their health has been harmed by breathing vapors vented into the air through filters from some of Hanford's underground tanks. Hanford has 177 tanks holding 53 million gallons of radioactive waste from the production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons programs during World War II and the Cold War.
Earlier in the month, a DOE report concluded that too little is known about chemicals in the tanks to say that workers have not been exposed to harmful chemicals above legal limits. That report was prepared by the Office of Independent Oversight and Assessment.
But the analysis by the watchdog group GAP goes far beyond that statement, concluding that a worker could have a cancer risk from the vapors that is 30,000 times higher than the Environmental Protection Agency limit.
That is based on the assumption that a worker spent 40 hours around the tanks for 250 days for 25 years and that the tanks were venting gases half the time.
It also relies on data that the national lab said was collected on gas concentrations within sludge at the bottom of one tank.
The concentrations are 1,000 or 10,000 times greater than the concentration of the gas in the head space of the tank, said Tom Brouns, a program manager at the Richland national lab. The vapors that have been measured outside the tank are even more diluted, he said.
The other national lab report used in the GAP analysis never was finalized or reviewed by other scientists. It took a very conservative look at exposure to workers from a new engineering design and considered what would happen if they breathed vapors continuously directly at the tank's vent. The intent was to see if that showed some risks small enough that they could be ruled out entirely without more studies, according to the national lab.
But Jarvis said that both reports, plus the more than 100 tank farm workers who have reported being exposed over two years, "are all saying the very same thing: It's a very hazardous environment to be in."
CH2M Hill Hanford Group, which manages the tank farms, believes that releases of vapors from the tanks are sporadic and that tests are confirming they are at low levels.
But Jarvis's report said occasionally sampling the air around the tanks is "like shooting blindfolded into the sky in hopes of hitting a duck, and then concluding that ducks do not exist because you do not hit one."
Measuring just some of the chemicals or total amounts of several types of the chemicals in the vapor also is not adequate, he said. Common industrial hygiene standards consider that the more chemicals a person is exposed to at once, the amount of each that is safe is reduced.
Jarvis's report looked at the risks of 15 of the hundreds of chemicals GAP believes are in the tanks.
"A reasonable person would assume that the cancer risk is even higher than this risk assessment study reports," Jarvis wrote in his report. It also did not take into account the risk of skin problems, reproductive effects or hormonal effects, he wrote.
All tank farm workers need to be protected with supplied-air respirators, GAP concluded. Now CH2M Hill is requiring workers around the older tanks to wear supplied-air respirators until more is known about health hazards.
It also wants screening for health problems in tank farm workers, support for worker compensation claims and more thought put into how large a safety zone is needed around the tanks to protect people from drifting vapors.
Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in a prepared statement that the results of the GAP report were "appalling."
"The Department of Energy is unnecessarily putting workers at risk," she said.
-------- us nuc waste
U.S. Vows to Remove Waste at Weapons Sites
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004; 2:38 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49553-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON - The Energy Department is committed to removing 99 percent of the nuclear waste in underground tanks at weapons sites and anything less is "off the table," the head of the cleanup program told lawmakers Thursday.
Assistant Energy Secretary Jessie Roberson told a Senate hearing that she saw no chance that as much as 10 percent of the waste might be kept in the tanks even if the department is allowed to keep residual sludge at the bottom of the buried containers.
The assurance came as Roberson was pressed by senators about the cleanup of highly radioactive waste left over from decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons at the Energy Department's Hanford complex in Washington state as well as at sites in Idaho and South Carolina.
The department would like to reclassify the residual sludge that will be left at 177 buried tanks at Hanford and in dozens of similar waste tanks at the Savannah River site in South Carolina and the INEEL facility in Idaho as having a "low level" of radioactivity.
The proposal, which would require Congress to change the nuclear waste law, has been met with concern in Washington state and Idaho, where officials argue the sludge should be buried in a special repository to be built in Nevada for high-level radioactive defense waste. The department wants to mix the sludge with a cement-like grout and not remove it.
Roberson, who is leaving her job next month for personal reasons, sought to allay some of the states' concerns at a hearing by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told Roberson he had been informed that the department was considering leaving as much as 10 percent of the waste and "dangerously high" levels of radiation in the Hanford tanks.
Unless the state agrees to something different, said Roberson "99 percent is what we're living by ... I don't see any chance that we're gong to go to (disposing only) 90 percent."
Wyden said he was encouraged but not totally satisfied by the assurance and asked it in writing. And Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., also wanted a guarantee that the Energy Department would stick to the 1 percent.
"That is our commitment," said Roberson.
Some environmentalists, when asked to respond to Roberson's assurances, questioned the significance.
"One percent of what," said Tom Cochran, a nuclear waste expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He argued that a small amount of waste volume left in the tanks could have a large percentage of the radioactive intensity in a tank.
Geoff Fettus, an NRDC lawyer who brought the successful lawsuit challenging DOE's attempt to reclassify tanks waste without congressional action, said "what they plan to leave behind in the tanks has been a moving target." In court papers they said they would remove "as much as economically and technically feasible," said Fettus.
On a related issue, Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., told Roberson that, should residual radioactive sludge be allowed to be kept in the tanks, he was concerned that the Energy Department - and not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission - would determine whether the grout-sludge mixture met NRC criteria for low-level waste.
"I would feel much more comfortable if the NRC made the decision on whether its own criteria had been met," said Bingaman..
Roberson said she was confident waste left in the tanks would have a low enough radioactive intensity to classify it as low-level once mixed with the grout. "We believe we are not leaving high-level waste in the tanks," she insisted.
The DOE announced earlier this week that Roberson was resigning as head of the cleanup program, effective July 15, after three years on the job.
Asked about the resignation Thursday, she denied her departure involved policy issues, criticism by some lawmakers of the tank cleanup plan, or the recent resignation of two other senior DOE officials involved in environmental cleanup issues.
She said "a little ruffling" at a hearing would not cause her to quit. "I leave for personal reasons and they are unconnected to anyone else but my family."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
New Video Purports to Show Qaeda Training in Afghanistan
June 17, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/asia/17stan.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 16 - Al Jazeera, the Arabic-language television network based in Qatar, broadcast Wednesday what it said was a new videotape showing members of Al Qaeda receiving military training at a camp in Afghanistan.
A leading terrorism expert said the scenes appeared to be authentic, but it was more likely that training was occurring inside Pakistan's remote tribal areas.
The video, if genuine, would be the first evidence that Al Qaeda had regrouped sufficiently to carry out training operations inside Afghanistan or Pakistan since the United States toppled the Taliban in 2001. It was broadcast a day after President Bush, welcoming the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in Washington, declared that the United States had won a major victory in the war against terrorism by denying Al Qaeda a safe refuge in Afghanistan.
Peter Bergen, a terrorism analyst who teaches at Johns Hopkins University, said the video was the first he had seen emerge from Afghanistan or Pakistan since the fall of the Taliban. He said it suggested renewed confidence by the group.
"It's one thing to be cowering in a mud hut, it's another thing when you're filming training," Mr. Bergen said. "This is more like the stuff we've seen out of Iraq, where we've seen insurgents filming their operations."
Men firing weapons and performing various physical exercises were shown in one part of the video. Another part showed what was described as a nighttime attack on a government post inside Afghanistan. A third scene displayed a man in uniform who appeared to be wounded or dead. The commander of the Qaeda fighters was identified as a Libyan.
Mr. Bergen said that the nighttime attack scenes might have been faked but that he believed the training was real and probably occurring in Pakistan's remote tribal areas, near the Afghan border.
"It's hard to tell which side of the border, but I think it is more likely to be on the Pakistan side," he said. "I think the U.S. Army has a better grip on Afghanistan than the Pakistani Army has on Pakistan." A week ago, thousands of Pakistani troops began carrying out an operation in the remote tribal areas to kill or capture foreign militants believed to be conducting terrorist attacks in Pakistan and cross-border attacks in Afghanistan. Pakistani officials said Monday that they had taken control of the Shakai Valley area where Qaeda-linked terrorists had been receiving training.
Hundreds of foreign militants are believed to be hiding in the Pakistani tribal areas; there are suspicions that Osama bin Laden may be among them. Some Pakistani political analysts and Afghan officials accuse Pakistan's ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, of moving too slowly to eradicate militancy. They say the general tries to protect some militants in order to use them to put pressure on Pakistan's archrival, India.
Pakistani officials point out that militants have vowed to kill General Musharraf, who narrowly survived two assassination attempts in December, and say he is doing all he can to eradicate militancy. They say the government has taken extraordinary steps, including deploying army units in the fiercely independent tribal areas for the first time in Pakistan's history.
In an escalation of fighting on Wednesday, an estimated 70 local and foreign militants carried out a coordinated attack on a Pakistani military base in the tribal areas, killing one soldier and wounding 10 others, 6 seriously. Soldiers said the militants fired dozens of rockets and mortars during a five-hour attack on the camp in Luddah.
-------- africa
West African defence chiefs meet on regional security
ABUJA (AFP)
Jun 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040617142921.0bw4emzi.html
West African defence chiefs began a two-day meeting in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Thursday to review the security situation in their often violent and unstable region, officials said.
The meeting, the ninth in a series by the Defence and Security Commission of the 15-member ECOWAS bloc, was also attended by the commanders of the three UN peacekeeping missions in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, they said.
"We are to discuss the problem of political instability in ECOWAS member countries," Nigeria's defence chief General Alexander Ogumudia said at the start of the meeting.
He said progress made in the peace processes in Liberia and Sierra Leone, which were until recently in the grip of civil wars, should not be taken for granted because "the challenges before us are still great."
"We must evolve ways of not only supporting the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes and ensuring the final resolution of peace and stabilitity in both Sierra Leone and Liberia," he said.
He also urged regional leader to "ensure that the peace process in Ivory Coast is put permanently on course."
Commission chairman and Ghanaian defence chief General Seth Obeng urged members to work to help crisis-ridden Ivory Coast -- which has been split in two by a northern rebellion -- to find a lasting peace settlement.
ECOWAS deputy executive secretary General Cheick Diarra said the meeting would also consider the issue of a standby force for the sub-region and an "After Action Review" of the ECOWAS mission to Liberia.
-------- asia
Russia, China, C. Asia in Security Pact
By BURT HERMAN
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004; 12:56 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49326-2004Jun17.html
TASHKENT, Uzbekistan - The presidents of China, Russia and four Central Asian nations met Thursday to breathe life into a security alliance and open an anti-terrorism center, part of efforts by Beijing and Moscow to counter the U.S. military presence in the region.
The leaders were joined by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who warned terrorists have continued infiltrating Afghanistan and that eradicating terrorism is a "long-term fight."
The one-day summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, or SCO, marked what Russian President Vladimir Putin said was the start of its work to become a vital international institution. He acknowledged the group would help Russia exert its influence across the region, rich in under-exploited energy resources and a crossroads between Asia and Europe.
"The voice of Russia will be heard here," Putin told reporters after the summit.
To ensure China is also heard, President Hu Jintao offered $900 million in credit to alliance countries, which include Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The exact terms of the loans, intended to boost economic cooperation, weren't immediately disclosed.
China and Russia have pushed the SCO, originally founded in 1996 and renamed in 2001, as a means of responding to increased U.S. regional influence since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The attacks led to American troops' historic deployment in former Soviet Central Asia for operations in neighboring Afghanistan. Hundreds of U.S. forces are based in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Ahead of Thursday's talks, Russia and China signed separate bilateral agreements with Uzbekistan, Central Asia's most populous country with its strongest military. Russia's Lukoil signed a $1 billion investment deal with Uzbekistan's state oil and gas company, and Putin said energy giant Gazprom was working on similar plans.
Karzai joined the talks as a guest, and Putin called for a contact group to be established between the alliance and Afghanistan.
"By helping Afghanistan, we are helping ourselves," said Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev.
Karzai said Afghanistan was eager to cooperate with the SCO and open its borders for regional trade. "The future of your countries is strongly linked to the future of Afghanistan," he said.
The SCO anti-terror center in Tashkent will be a think tank and information clearing house for alliance countries. In a resolution, the leaders also called for close cooperation with the United Nations to address global and regional threats.
"One nation can't stand alone with the current threats," Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said.
Uzbek President Islam Karimov said anti-terrorism efforts shouldn't focus only on military action.
"We should destroy the many radical extremist centers that create the ideology of hatred, those who poison minds and turn youths into zombies," Karimov told the meeting.
Uzbek authorities say Islamic extremists trained by al-Qaida instructors carried out a wave of violence targeting police this year that killed at least 47 people, mostly alleged militants.
However, opposition critics have said the attacks were linked to domestic discontent over Karimov's repressive regime. Karimov himself acknowledged Thursday that poverty and social discord can also feed terrorism, but said its main cause was ideology imported from abroad.
Uzbekistan drew fresh criticism Thursday for alleged crackdowns ahead of the summit.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said at least two activists planning to stage peaceful protests were beaten by unidentified assailants, while other would-be demonstrators were detained along with their children or prevented from leaving their homes.
-------- britain
Return of Diego Garcia islanders blocked
Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Thursday June 17, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1240409,00.html
The British government has summarily barred thousands of Indian Ocean islanders from returning to the homes they were cheated out of more than 30 years ago to make way for a US air and naval base.
The decision to reject the right of return of residents of Diego Garcia overturns without debate a high court judgment four years ago that criticised the behaviour of previous British governments and opened the way for the islanders to go home.
At the time, the Foreign Office accepted the judge's decision and promised to embark on preparations for their return. But the Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell has now said it is not feasible for the islanders to go back and that, as a result of September 11, US defence needs have increased.
The new law disbars islanders returning not only to Diego Garcia, but to the other 64 outlying islands.
Alan Vincatassin, leader of British Indian Ocean Territory Islanders' Movement, said last night: "It is totally horrendous and unacceptable. I am very angry. This law is the most barbarous I have seen in the name of the Queen.
"It is because the US wants to have these islands empty they [the Foreign Office] have removed the right of abode."
The islanders are almost certain to mount a fresh legal challenge.
Instead of using the normal legislative process, the Foreign Office was able to change the law by use of orders in council, a remnant of the once all-powerful royal prerogative.
The new order replaces the existing constitution of the territory and "makes clear, as a principle of the constitution, that no person has the right of abode in the territory or has unrestricted access to any part of it".
Richard Gifford, the London-based lawyer for the 4,500 islanders and their descendants seeking a right to return, said: "This is an absolute stab in the back. Not since the days of King John has anyone tried to expel British citizens from the realm by executive order."
The British Indian Ocean Territory belongs to Britain, which has leased Diego Garcia to the US. The British government tricked many of the 2,000 islanders into moving out between 1967 and 1973 to make way for the US base by insisting they had not been permanent settlers, only transient. One British diplomat at the time dismissively described the inhabitants as "man Fridays" and "Tarzans".
The decision was agreed by the Privy Council last Thursday, the day of the European, mayoral and council elections.
Mr Rammell called Mr Gifford to the Foreign Office on Tuesday morning to brief him. In a written parliamentary statement, Mr Rammell said that a feasibility study suggested the islands were vulnerable to natural events that were "likely to make life difficult for a resettled population" and, in the longer term, to global warming.
"Thus resettlement is likely to become less feasible over time," he said, adding that life on the islands would be highly precarious and would need heavy underwriting by the British government.
He said the restoration of full immigration control over the islands was necessary for defence purposes, "especially in the light of recent developments in the international security climate since the November 2000 judgment".
Diego Garcia is hugely important to the US in providing a secure base for the launch of attacks and surveillance in the Middle East and Afghanistan. It was used in both Iraq wars.
Mr Vincatassin disputed the findings of the government's feasibility report. "These islands were inhabited for centuries and we cannot see why we cannot do it now," he said.
Labour MPs who have been campaigning on behalf of the islanders yesterday put down a Commons early-day motion critical of the decision. One of them, Tam Dalyell, said: "It is a matter of huge concern that an order in council can overturn the high court."
In a separate development, a court in London will today hear an appeal by the islanders against a ruling last year that they were not entitled to any further compensation for their removal.
-------- business
House Backs Security Contract for Accenture
June 17, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/business/17secure.html
WASHINGTON, June 16 (AP) - A drive to block a big federal contract awarded to Accenture for tracking visiting foreigners was all but scuttled Wednesday by the House, despite arguments that the company should be punished for avoiding some United States taxes.
The 234-to-197 vote, which was nearly along party lines, meant that language disallowing the contract, valued at up to $10 billion over the next decade, was likely to be removed this week from a $32 billion bill financing the Homeland Security Department.
The Accenture contract would benefit a wide array of subcontractors and is strongly supported by the business community and the House Republican leadership. Opponents say the company has shrunk its tax bill by moving its headquarters to Bermuda.
But they acknowledged they faced an uphill fight, and were hoping the Senate would keep the issue alive.
"These companies have an obligation to the United States of America to pay their taxes," said Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut. "If you want to feed at the public trough, you have to pay your taxes."
The vote came as Congress belatedly plunged into its budget work for 2005. Leaders hope to finish as many of the 13 annual spending bills as they can by the Oct. 1 start of the government's new fiscal year.
The Accenture vote was no surprise; similar provisions have been killed or weakened over the last two years. The bill was expected to retain language barring the Homeland Security Department from entering future contracts with companies based offshore.
Representative Jim Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, said Ms. DeLauro's amendment was intended to "score some political points" and was picking on a company that pays all the taxes it legally owes.
-------- chemical weapons
The Ties That Blind How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
CounterPunch
By NORM DIXON
June 17, 2004
http://counterpunch.org/dixon06172004.html
On August 18, 2002, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined, "Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas". Quoting anonymous US "senior military officers", the NYT "revealed" that in the 1980s, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided "critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war". The story made a brief splash in the international media, then died.
While the August 18 NYT article added new details about the extent of US military collaboration with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during Iraq's 1980-88 war with Iran, it omitted the most outrageous aspect of the scandal: not only did Ronald Reagan's Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein regime's repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iraq's Kurdish minority, but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
Nor did the NYT dwell on the extreme cynicism and hypocrisy of President George Bush II's administration's citing of those same terrible atrocities--which were disregarded at the time by Washington--and those same weapons programs--which no longer exist, having been dismantled and destroyed in the decade following the 1991 Gulf War--to justify a massive new war against the people of Iraq.
A reader of the NYT article (or the tens of thousands of other articles written after the war drive against Iraq began in earnest soon after September 11, 2001) would have looked in vain for the fact that many of the US politicians and ruling class pundits who demanded war against Hussein--in particular, the one of the most bellicose of the Bush administration's "hawks", defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld--were up to their ears in Washington's efforts to cultivate, promote and excuse Hussein in the past.
The NYT article read as though Washington's casual disregard about the use of chemical weapons by Hussein's dictatorship throughout the 1980s had never been reported before. However, it was not the first time that "Iraqgate"--as the scandal of US military and political support for Hussein in the '80s has been dubbed--has raised its embarrassing head in the corporate media, only to be quickly buried again.
One of the more comprehensive and damning accounts of Iraqgate was written by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas and published in the February 23, 1992, Los Angeles Times. Headlined, "Bush secret effort helped Iraq build its war machine", the article reported that "classified documents obtained by the LA Times show ... a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by [George Bush senior]--both as president and vice president--to support and placate the Iraqi dictator."
Even William Safire, the right-wing, war-mongering NYT columnist, on December 7, 1992, felt compelled to write that, "Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [the US, Britain and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator".
The background to Iraqgate was the January 1979 popular uprising that overthrew the cravenly pro-US Shah of Iran. The Iranian revolution threatened US imperialism's domination of the strategic oil-rich region. Other than Israel, Iran had long been Washington's key ally in the Middle East.
Washington immediately began to "cast about for ways to undermine or overthrow the Iranian revolution, or make up for the loss of the Shah. Hussein's regime put up its hand. On September 22, 1980, Iraq launched an invasion of Iran. Throughout the bloody eight-year-long war--which cost at least 1 million lives--Washington backed Iraq.
As a 1990 report prepared for the Pentagon by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US War College admitted: "Throughout the [Iran-Iraq] war the United States practised a fairly benign policy toward Iraq... [Washington and Baghdad] wanted to restore the status quo ante ... that prevailed before [the 1979 Iranian revolution] began threatening the regional balance of power. Khomeini's revolutionary appeal was anathema to both Baghdad and Washington; hence they wanted to get rid of him. United by a common interest ... the [US] began to actively assist Iraq."
At first, as Iraqi forces seemed headed for victory over Iran, official US policy was neutrality in the conflict. Not only was Hussein doing Washington's dirty work in the war with Iran, but the US rulers believed that Iraq could be lured away from its close economic and military relationship with the Soviet Union--just as Egypt's President Anwar Sadat had done in the 1970s.
In March 1981, US Secretary of State Alexander Haig excitedly told the Senate foreign relations committee that Iraq was concerned by "the behaviour of Soviet imperialism in the Middle Eastern region". The Soviet government had refused to deliver arms to Iraq as long as Baghdad continued its military offensive against Iran. Moscow was also unhappy with the Hussein's vicious repression of the Iraqi Communist Party.
Washington's support (innocuously referred to as a "tilt" at the time) for Iraq became more open after Iran succeeded in driving Iraqi forces from its territory in May 1982; in June, Iran went on the offensive against Iraq. The US scrambled to stem Iraq's military setbacks. Washington and its conservative Arab allies suddenly feared Iran might even defeat Iraq, or at least cause the collapse of Hussein's regime.
Using its allies in the Middle East, Washington funnelled huge supplies of arms to Iraq. Classified State Department cables uncovered by Frantz and Waas described covert transfers of howitzers, helicopters, bombs and other weapons to Baghdad in 1982-83 from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.
Howard Teicher, who monitored Middle East policy at the US National Security Council during the Reagan administration, told the February 23, 1992, LA Times: "There was a conscious effort to encourage third countries to ship US arms or acquiesce in shipments after the fact. It was a policy of nods and winks."
According to Mark Phythian's 1997 book Arming Iraq: How the US and Britain Secretly Built Saddam's War Machine (Northeastern University Press), in 1983 Reagan asked Italy's Prime Minister Guilo Andreotti to channel arms to Iraq.
The January 1, 1984 Washington Post reported that the US had "informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old war with Iran would be 'contrary to US interests' and has made several moves to prevent that result".
Central to these "moves" was the cementing of a military and political alliance with Saddam Hussein's repressive regime, so as to build up Iraq as a military counterweight to Iran. In 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department's list of countries that allegedly supported terrorism. On December 19-20, 1983, Reagan dispatched his Middle East envoy--none other than Donald Rumsfeld--to Baghdad with a hand-written offer of a resumption of diplomatic relations, which had been severed during the 1967 Arab-Israel war. On March 24, 1984, Rumsfeld was again in Baghdad.
On that same day, the UPI wire service reported from the UN: "Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers ... a team of UN experts has concluded ... Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, US presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with foreign minister Tariq Aziz."
The day before, Iran had accused Iraq of poisoning 600 of its soldiers with mustard gas and Tabun nerve gas.
There is no doubt that the US government knew Iraq was using chemical weapons. On March 5, 1984, the State Department had stated that "available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons". The March 30, 1984, NYT reported that US intelligence officials has "what they believe to be incontrovertible evidence that Iraq has used nerve gas in its war with Iran and has almost finished extensive sites for mass producing the lethal chemical warfare agent".
However, consistent with the pattern throughout the Iran-Iraq war and after, the use of these internationally outlawed weapons was not considered important enough by Rumsfeld and his political superiors to halt Washington's blossoming love affair with Hussein.
The March 29, 1984, NYT, reporting on the aftermath of Rumsfeld's talks in Baghdad, stated that US officials had pronounced "themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the US and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name". In November 1984, the US and Iraq officially restored diplomatic relations.
According to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, in a December 15, 1986 article, the CIA began to secretly supply Iraq with intelligence in 1984 that was used to "calibrate" mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops. Beginning in early 1985, the CIA provided Iraq with "data from sensitive US satellite reconnaissance photography ... to assist Iraqi bombing raids".
Iraqi chemical attacks on Iranian troops--and US assistance to Iraq--continued throughout the Iran-Iraq war. In a parallel program, the US defence department also provided intelligence and battle-planning assistance to Iraq.
The August 17, 2002 NYT reported that, according to "senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program", even though "senior officials of the Reagan administration publicly condemned Iraq's employment of mustard gas, sarin, VX and other poisonous agents ... President Reagan, vice president George Bush [senior] and senior national security aides never withdrew their support for the highly classified program in which more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes and bomb-damage assessments for Iraq."
Retired DIA officer Rick Francona told the NYT that Iraq's chemical weapons were used in the war's final battle in early 1988, in which Iraqi forces retook the Fao Peninsula from the Iranian army.
Another retired DIA officer, Walter Lang, told the NYT that "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern". What concerned the DIA, CIA and the Reagan administration was that Iran not break through the Fao Peninsula and spread the Islamic revolution to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Iraq's 1982 removal from Washington's official list of states that support terrorism meant that the Hussein regime was now eligible for US economic and military aid, and was able to purchase advanced US technology that could also be used for military purposes.
Conventional military sales resumed in December 1982. In 1983, the Reagan administration approved the sale of 60 Hughes helicopters to Iraq in 1983 "for civilian use". However, as Phythian pointed out, these aircraft could be "weaponised" within hours of delivery. Then US Secretary of State George Schultz and commerce secretary George Baldridge also lobbied for the delivery of Bell helicopters equipped for "crop spraying". It is believed that US-supplied choppers were used in the 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja, which killed 5000 people.
With the Reagan administration's connivance, Baghdad immediately embarked on a massive militarisation drive. This US-endorsed military spending spree began even before Iraq was delisted as a terrorist state, when the US commerce department approved the sale of Italian gas turbine engines for Iraq's naval frigates.
Soon after, the US agriculture department's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) guaranteed to repay loans--in the event of defaults by Baghdad--banks had made to Iraq to buy US-grown commodities such as wheat and rice. Under this scheme, Iraq had three years to repay the loans, and if it could not the US taxpayers would have to cough up.
Washington offered this aid initially to prevent Hussein's overthrow as the Iraqi people began to complain about the food shortages caused by the massive diversion of hard currency for the purchase of weapons and ammunition. The loan guarantees amounted to a massive US subsidy that allowed Hussein to launch his overt and covert arms buildup, one result being that the Iran-Iraq war entered a bloody five-year stalemate.
By the end of 1983, US$402 million in agriculture department loan guarantees for Iraq were approved. In 1984, this increased to $503 million and reached $1.1 billion in 1988. Between 1983 and 1990, CCC loan guarantees freed up more than $5 billion. Some $2 billion in bad loans, plus interest, ended up having to be covered by US taxpayers.
A similar taxpayer-funded, though smaller scale, scam operated under the auspices of the federal Export-Import Bank. In 1984, vice-president George Bush senior personally intervened to ensure that the bank guaranteed loans to Iraq of $500 million to build an oil pipeline. Export-Import Bank loan guarantees grew from $35 million in 1985 to $267 million by 1990.
According to William Blum, writing in the August 1998 issue of the Progressive, Sam Gejdenson, chairperson of a Congressional subcommittee investigating US exports to Iraq, disclosed that from 1985 until 1990 "the US government approved 771 licenses [only 39 were rejected] for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application ...
"The US spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted... US export control policy was directed by US foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was US foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein."
A 1994 US Senate report revealed that US companies were licenced by the commerce department to export a "witch's brew" of biological and chemical materials, including bacillus anthracis (which causes anthrax) and clostridium botulinum (the source of botulism). The American Type Culture Collection made 70 shipments of the anthrax bug and other pathogenic agents.
The report also noted that US exports to Iraq included the precursors to chemical warfare agents, plans for chemical and biological warfare facilities and chemical warhead filling equipment. US firms supplied advanced and specialised computers, lasers, testing and analysing equipment. Among the better-known companies were Hewlett Packard, Unisys, Data General and Honeywell.
Billions of dollars worth of raw materials, machinery and equipment, missile technology and other "dual-use" items were also supplied by West German, French, Italian, British, Swiss and Austrian corporations, with the approval of their governments (German firms even sold Iraq entire factories capable of mass-producing poison gas). Much of this was purchased with funds freed by the US CCC credits.
The destination of much of this equipment was Saad 16, near Mosul in northern Iraq. Western intelligence agencies had long known that the sprawling complex was Iraq's main ballistic missile development centre.
Blum reported that Washington was fully aware of the likely use of this material. In 1992, a US Senate committee learned that the commerce department had deleted references to military end-use from information it sent to Congress about 68 export licences, worth more than $1 billion.
In 1986, the US defence department's deputy undersecretary for trade security, Stephen Bryen, had objected to the export of an advanced computer, similar to those used in the US missile program, to Saad 16 because "of the high likelihood of military end use". The state and commerce departments approved the sale without conditions.
In his book, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq, Kenneth Timmerman points out that several US agencies were supposed to review US exports that may be detrimental to US "national security". However, the commerce department often did not submit exports to Hussein's Iraq for review or approved them despite objections from other government departments.
On March 16, 1988, Iraqi forces launched a poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, killing 5000 people. While that attack is today being touted by senior US officials as one of the main reasons why Hussein must now be "taken out", at the time Washington's response to the atrocity was much more relaxed.
Just four months later, Washington stood by as the US giant Bechtel corporation won the contract to build a huge petrochemical plant that would give the Hussein regime the capacity to generate chemical weapons.
On September 8, 1988, the US Senate passed the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime. Immediately, the Reagan administration announced its opposition to the bill, calling it "premature". The White House used its influence to stall the bill in the House of Representatives. When Congress did eventually pass the bill, the White House did not implement it.
Washington's political, military and economic sweetheart deals with the Iraqi dictator came under even more stress when, in August 1989, FBI agents raided the Atlanta branch of the Rome-based Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) and uncovered massive fraud involving the CCC loan guarantee scheme and billions of dollars worth of unauthorised "off-the-books" loans to Iraq.
BNL Atlanta manager Chris Drougal had used the CCC program to underwrite programs that had nothing to do with agricultural exports. Using this covert set-up, Hussein's regime tried to buy the most hard-to-get components for its nuclear weapons and missile programs on the black market.
Russ Baker, writing in the March/April 1993 Columbia Journalism Review, noted: "Elements of the US government almost certainly knew that Drougal was funnelling US-backed loans--into dual-use technology and outright military technology. The British government was fully aware of the operations of Matrix-Churchill, a British firm with an Ohio branch, which was not only at the centre of the Iraqi procurement network but was also funded by BNL Atlanta... It would be later alleged by bank executives that the Italian government, long a close US ally as well as BNL's ultimate owner, had knowledge of BNL's loan diversions."
Yet, even the public outrage generated by the Halabja massacre and the widening BNL scandal did not cool Washington's ardour towards Hussein's Iraq.
On October 2, 1989, US President George Bush senior signed the top-secret National Security Decision 26, which declared: "Normal relations between the US and Iraq would serve our long-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East. The US should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behaviour and increase our influence with Iraq... We should pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for US firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy."
As public and congressional pressure mounted on the US Agriculture Department to end Iraq's access to CCC loan guarantees, Secretary of State James Baker--armed with NSD 26--personally insisted that agriculture secretary Clayton Yeutter drop his opposition to their continuation.
In November 1989, Bush senior approved $1 billion in loan guarantees for Iraq in 1990. In April 1990, more revelations about the BNL scandal had again pushed the department of agriculture to the verge of halting Iraq's CCC loan guarantees. On May 18, national security adviser Scowcroft personally intervened to ensure the delivery of the first $500 million tranche of the CCC subsidy for 1990.
According to Frantz and Waas' February 23, 1992, LA Times article, in July 1990 "officials at the National Security Council and the State Department were pushing to deliver the second installment of the $1 billion in loan guarantees, despite the looming crisis in the region and evidence that Iraq had used the aid illegally to help finance a secret arms procurement network to obtain technology for its nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile program".
From July 18 to August 1, 1990, Bush senior's administration approved $4.8 million in advanced technology sales to Iraq. The end-users included Saad 16 and the Iraqi ministry of industry and military industrialisation. On August 1, $695,000 worth of advanced data transmission devices were approved.
"Only on August 2, 1990, did the agriculture department officially suspend the [CCC loan] guarantees to Iraq--the same day that Hussein's tanks and troops swept into Kuwait", noted Frantz and Waas.
Norm Dixon writes for Australia's Green Left Weekly.
-------- china
2nd in Command in Hong Kong Joins Efforts to Ease Tensions
June 17, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/asia/17hong.html
HONG KONG, June 16 - Democracy advocates, mainland Chinese officials and Hong Kong government leaders have begun trying to reduce tensions before a big demonstration planned for July 1, with Hong Kong's second-ranking official issuing the latest initiative on Wednesday.
The Democratic Party, the main political opposition here, pledged last week to tone down its criticism of the mainland. Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong's chief executive, has agreed to hold a rare meeting with the party's lawmakers on Friday.
Mainland officials have expressed an interest in expanding contacts with the democracy movement here, while stopping short of agreeing to a public dialogue that might suggest an official recognition of the widespread desire here for greater voting rights. The mainland's stance still represents a slight softening in what seemed earlier this year to be an increasingly intransigent opposition by China to tolerating any expansion of democracy on its soil.
Donald Tsang, the chief secretary and second most senior official after Mr. Tung in this relatively autonomous Chinese territory, said in a speech to business leaders on Wednesday that greater democracy was inevitable here, despite Beijing's moves this spring to limit general elections for at least eight years.
Mr. Tsang urged people in business to join political parties and run for local office instead of continuing to try to influence policy from behind the scenes. Loath to enter politics, local tycoons have repeatedly appealed to Beijing for help in the last year in turning back a democracy movement that has called for general elections, but also wants broader social legislation, including the introduction of a minimum wage and regulations on housing costs.
"The public is demanding greater inclusion, transparency and openness in our political development and policy making," said Mr. Tsang, who oversees a the task force working with Beijing on Hong Kong's constitutional development. "It is perfectly understandable and should be applauded as a sign of progress."
Behind the public tone of reconciliation on each side are polls showing that Beijing's allies and democracy advocates alike have lost some support, as many residents have reacted with dismay to the acrimony and name-calling this spring.
Organizers estimate that 300,000 people will show up on July 1 to protest limits on voting rights here, and the police are using the same estimate in preparing for the march. The sudden resignation of three popular radio talk show hosts in recent weeks, all of whom complained of receiving threatening calls because they advocate democratic principles, has prompted alarm here about whether freedom of the press is being eroded - something the government denies.
July 1 will be the seventh anniversary of Britain's transfer of Hong Kong to China, and is a public holiday. A protest march on the anniversary last summer drew as many as 500,000 people, when many reacted angrily to the weak economy and government plans for a stringent internal-security bill. The economy has strengthened considerably since then, and the bill was withdrawn.
For all the talk of reconciliation, many democrats are wary, and it is unclear whether any substantive understandings will be reached.
Joseph Cheng of Power for Democracy, a local activist group, pointed out that having issued official interpretations of Hong Kong's laws that will limit the scope of elections in 2007 and 2008, the mainland will limit the scope of any dialogue.
"China has already defined a small bird cage, and if you continue to talk in a small bird cage'' then the results may be restricted, he said.
-------- colombia
Attack by Colombia Rebels Threatens Fragile Talks
June 17, 2004
By JUAN FORERO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/americas/17colo.html
BOGOTÁ, Colombia, June 16 - The massacre of 34 coca farmers in northeastern Colombia on Tuesday by leftist rebels may be a sign that the guerrillas are intent on regaining territory they have lost to a right-wing paramilitary group, political analysts said Wednesday.
The paramilitaries have been engaged in informal disarmament talks with the government of President Álvaro Uribe in the last year, and had recently pulled back some of their forces from the area where the violence occurred, the analysts said.
Fighters from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a Marxist insurgency known as FARC, entered San Martín, a hamlet in the Norte de Santander province, on Tuesday morning, tied up coca farmers employed by the paramilitaries and shot them dead, said survivors, army commanders and local government officials. It was the worst mass killing in Colombia since Mr. Uribe won office two years ago.
The farmers raised coca, the prime ingredient in cocaine, for paramilitary groups that have been battling the rebels across Colombia for control of vast fields of coca.
The attack came on the same day representatives of Mr. Uribe's government met with paramilitary leaders and announced that formal talks with the group would begin July 1. But political analysts said Mr. Uribe's negotiations with the paramilitaries could lead to increased violence as the FARC tries to recover territory lost to paramilitary groups.
"You can do all the negotiating you want with the paramilitaries, but as long as the guerrillas and narco-trafficking are there, you're going to have violence like this," said Daniel García-Peña, a former government disarmament negotiator who now runs a left-leaning peace group.
Alfredo Rangel, a security analyst and former adviser to the Defense Ministry, said the massacre could mark a new stage in which the rebels embark on a brutal counteroffensive. "This massacre announced that the withdrawal of paramilitaries from some zones will lead to intense efforts by the guerrillas to bring those zones under their control," he said.
The paramilitaries, though long tied to the drug trade, began disarmament talks with the government after American officials indicted three top leaders on drug trafficking charges and sought their extradition in 2002.
But while the paramilitaries talk peace, human rights groups and foreign diplomats say, they have not completely abandoned the most important drug-producing regions, like the isolated swath of jungle near the Venezuelan border where Tuesday's attack took place.
"There is no cease-fire on the part of the paramilitaries," said Diana Sánchez, who investigates abuses for Minga, a local rights group in Bogotá. In April a paramilitary group killed 12 Wayuu Indians in Guajira province, and in May another team of paramilitaries killed 11 peasants in Arauca province. Still, there has been a drop in recent months of such mass killings.
But the guerrillas have increasingly carried out mass killings aimed at terrorizing villagers who have supported the paramilitaries.
"The paramilitaries used massacre with intensity in their fight for territory the guerrillas controlled," said Mr. Rangel. "Now there's an inverse of that in some areas. It's the guerrillas who come in where the paramilitaries are and use this instrument, the massacre, as a way to recover the territory."
Monica Trujillo contributed reporting from Bogotá for this article.
-------- iraq
Iraq 1917
NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN
By Robert Fisk
Thursday 17 June 2004
"The Independent"
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=1445
They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population. A planned handover of power proved unworkable. Britain's 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today - and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books...
On the eve of our "handover" of "full sovereignty" to Iraq, this is a story of tragedy and folly and of dark foreboding. It is about the past-made-present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. It is about that admonition of antiquity: that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005.
Yes, we are preparing to give "full sovereignty" to Iraq. That's also what the British falsely claimed more than 80 years ago. Come, then, and confront the looking glass of history, and see what America and Britain will do in the next 12 terrible months in Iraq.
Our story begins in March 1917 as 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment peels a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It is a turning point in his life. He has survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 150 miles from its capital, Constantinople. He has then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate, and enduring the grim battle for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens's attention was Maude's official "Proclamation" to the people of Baghdad, printed in English and Arabic.
That same 11in by 18in poster, now framed in black and gold, hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this story of empire and dark prophecy. Long ago, the paper was stained with damp - "foxed", as booksellers say - which may have been Private Dickens's perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times; witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall 86 years later, to its presence in his army knapsack over many months.
In a letter to me, she called this "his precious document", and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy; with the false promises of the world's greatest empire, commitments and good intentions; and with words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens's death. It reads now like a funeral dirge:
"Proclamation... Our military operations have as their object, the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators... Your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers... and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile... But you, people of Baghdad... are not to understand that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals... It is the hope and desire of the British people... that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth... Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain... so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.
(signed) F.S. Maude, Lieutenant-General, Commanding the British Forces in Iraq."
Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army - which included Iraqi soldiers - in Mesopotamia. He spoke "often and admirably," his daughter would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at 55 had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion.
But Munro's leadership did not save Dickens's sister's nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers: "My father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his 'nephew'. I don't know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years."
In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign. The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than 80 years later, Shameem Bhatia, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan, would send me an amused letter, along with a series of 12 very old postcards, which were printed by The Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms; another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him; others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab river, and the Turkish-held town of Kurna, one of its buildings shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. The ruins then looked, of course, identical to the Iraqi ruins of today. There are only so many ways in which a shell can smash through a home.
As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by "local [Arab] notables" that "we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition". But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters, ending in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle.
The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of United Nations sanctions that followed Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when spare parts for the pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague Patrick Cockburn found "tombstones... still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed... A quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage."
Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived in 1917. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets "gaped emptily. The shops were mostly closed... In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia, coffins and half-mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town [three hundred people were dying of it every day] the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves... There was no longer any life in the town."
The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. There was, of course, no "cordial" reception of British troops in Baghdad. Indeed, Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army but who "always entertained friendly ideas towards the English" were jailed - not in Abu Ghraib, but in India - and found that while in prison there they were "insulted and humiliated in every way". These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand Iraq over to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz - to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of "independence" for the Arab world if he fought alongside the Allies against the Turks - on the grounds that "some of the Holy Moslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia".
British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia (the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that) and that "clearly it is our right and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end" - which was not how Lt-Gen Maude expressed Britain's ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917.
Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that "taking Mesopotamia... means spending millions in irrigation and development". Which is precisely what President George Bush was forced to do only months after his illegal invasion in 2003.
Those who want to wallow in even more ghastly historical parallels should turn to the magnificent research of the Iraqi scholar Ghassan Attiyah, whose volume on the British occupation was published in Beirut long before Saddam's regime took over Iraq, at a time when Iraqi as well as British archives of the period were still available. Attiyah's Iraq, 1902-1921: A Socio-Political Study, written 30 years before the Anglo-American invasion, should be read by all Western "statesmen" planning to occupy Arab countries.
As Attiyah discovered, the British, once they were installed in Baghdad, decided in the winter of 1917 that Iraq would have to be governed and reconstructed by a "council" formed partly of British advisers "and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants". The copycat 2003 version of this "council" was, of course, the Interim Governing Council, supposedly the brainchild of Maude's American successor, Paul Bremer.
Later, the British thought they would like "a cabinet half of natives and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives". The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became "oriental secretary" to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion: "The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased... They can't conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it."
Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude's proclamation issued 11 months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told (which, of course, they were not) that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name, and which in fact had been written by Sir Mark Sykes - the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with F Georges-Picot for French and British control over much of the post-war Middle East.
But, by September 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain's plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. "I imagine," the correspondent for The Times wrote on 23 September, "that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination... From the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration."
Within six months, Britain was fighting a military insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. "Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression? What would happen if we withdrew?" Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to "anarchy and confusion". By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on "local political agitation, originated outside Iraq", suggesting that Syria might be involved.
Come again? Could history repeat itself so perfectly? For Lloyd George's "anarchy", read any statement from the American occupation power warning of "civil war" in the event of a Western withdrawal. For Syria - well, read Syria.
AT Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq in 1920, took a predictable line. "We cannot maintain our position... by a policy of conciliation of extremists. Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money... We must be prepared... to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions."
There was fighting in the Shia town of Kufa and a British siege of Najaf after a British official was murdered. The British demanded "the unconditional surrender of the murderers and others concerned in the plot", and the leading Shia divine, Sayed Khadum Yazdi, abstained from supporting the rebellion and shut himself up in his house. Eleven of the insurgents were executed. A local sheikh, Badr al-Rumaydh, became a target. "Badr must be killed or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out," a British political officer wrote.
The British now realised that they had made one big political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq - the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. For Badr, read Muqtada al-Sadr.
In 1920, another insurgency broke out in the area of Fallujah, where Sheikh Dhari killed a British officer, Colonel Leachman, and cut rail traffic between Fallujah and Baghdad. The British advanced towards Fallujah and inflicted "heavy punishment" on the tribe. For Fallujah, of course, read Fallujah. And the location of the heavy punishment? Today it is known as Khan Dari - and it was the scene of the first killing of a US soldier by a roadside bomb in 2003.
In desperation, the British needed "to complete the façade of the Arab government". And so, with Winston Churchill's enthusiastic support, the British gave the throne of Iraq to the Hashemite King Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein, a consolation prize for the man the French had just thrown out of Damascus. Paris was having no kings in its own mandated territory of Syria. Henceforth, the British government - deprived of reconstruction funds by an international recession, and confronted by an increasingly unwilling soldiery, which had fought during the 1914-18 war and was waiting for demobilisation - would rely on air power to impose its wishes.
There are no kings to impose on Iraq today (the former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan pulled his hat out of the ring just before the invasion), so we have installed Iyad Allawi, the former CIA "asset", as prime minister in the hope that he can provide the same sovereign wallpaper as Faisal once did. Our soldiers can hide out in the desert, hopefully unattacked, unless they are needed to shore up the tottering power of our present-day "Faisal".
And so we come to the immediate future of Iraq. How are we to "control" Iraq while claiming that we have handed over "full sovereignty"? Again, the archives come to our rescue. The Royal Air Force, again with Churchill's support, bombed rebellious villages and dissident tribesmen in Iraq. Churchill urged the employment of mustard gas, which had been used against Shia rebels in 1920.
Squadron Leader Arthur Harris, later Marshal of the Royal Air Force and the man who perfected the firestorm destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other great German cities in the Second World War, was employed to refine the bombing of Iraqi insurgents. The RAF found, he wrote much later, "that by burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we'd warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt [sic], and they soon stopped their raiding and looting..."
This was what, in its emasculation of the English language, the Pentagon would now call "war lite". But the bombing was not as surgical as Harris's official biographer would suggest. In 1924, he had admitted that "they [the Arabs and Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured".
TE Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - remarked in a 1920 letter to The Observer that "it is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions". Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers that he resigned his post as Senior Air Staff Officer Iraq because he could no longer "maintain the policy of intimidation by bomb". He had visited an Iraqi hospital to find it full of wounded tribesmen. After the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Sulaymaniyah, Charlton "knew the crowded life of these settlements and pictured with horror the arrival of a bomb, without warning, in the midst of a market gathering or in the bazaar quarter. Men, women and children would suffer equally."
Already, we have seen the use of almost indiscriminate air power by the American forces in Iraq: the destruction of homes in "dissident" villages, the bombing of mosques where weapons are allegedly concealed, the slaughter-by-air-strike of "terrorists" near the Syrian border, who turned out to be a wedding party. Much the same policy has been adopted in the already abandoned "democracy" of Afghanistan.
As for the soldiers, we couldn't ship our corpses home in the heat of the Middle East 80 years ago, so we buried them in the great North Wall Cemetery in Baghdad, where they lie to this day, most of them in their late teens and twenties. We didn't hide their coffins. Their last resting place is still there for all to see today, opposite the ruins of the suicide-bombed Turkish embassy.
As for the gravestone of Samuel Martin, it stood for years in the British war cemetery in Basra with the following inscription: "In Memory of Private Samuel Martin 24384, 8th Bn, Cheshire Regiment who died on Sunday 9 April 1916. Private Martin, son of George and Sarah Martin, of the Beech Tree Inn, Barnton, Northwich, Cheshire."
In the gales of shellfire that swept Basra during the 1980-88 war with Iran, the cemetery was destroyed and looted and many gravestones shattered beyond repair. When I visited the cemetery in the chaotic months after the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, I found wild dogs roaming between the broken headstones. Even the brass fittings of the central memorial had been stolen. Sic transit gloria.
----
Militants kill Iraqi oil chief, bomb pipeline
By Roy Eccleston,
Washington correspondent and Agencies
June 17, 2004
The Australian
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,9863902%5E2703,00.html
INSURGENTS launched a devastating strike on Iraq's oil sector yesterday, blowing up a crude pipeline in the south and assassinating a key industry official in the north.
The attack on Iraq's economic lifeblood came as tensions emerged between the interim Iraqi government and the Bush administration over the custody of Saddam Hussein.
It also followed an outbreak of violence between Sunni and Shi'ite Iraqis in the troubled town of Fallujah, raising the prospect of sectarian strife once the US transfers power to the interim government on June 30.
However in Najaf, after weeks of fighting between Shi'ite rebels and US forces, renegade Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr told those of his militiamen who were not from the holy city to "go home". Sadr had already agreed to a truce this month.
In an escalation of the militants' strategy of killing interim government officials, oil security chief Ghazi Talabani, 54, was shot dead outside his home in Kirkuk.
Mr Talabani, a cousin of Kurdish political chieftain Jalal Talabani, headed security for the Northern Oil Company, which presides over oil production in northern Iraq. Police said he was attacked by a group of gunmen and shot multiple times.
Earlier, insurgents shut down Iraq's oil exports from its main outlet by the southern port of Basra by blowing up a pipeline leading to two harbour terminals.
The blast cut a pipeline with a capacity of 50,000 barrels per hour, sending world oil prices climbing again on nervous markets jittery over whether exports from Iraq can be counted on.
Interim prime minister Iyad Allawi said Iraq had lost more than $US200 million ($287.5million) over the past seven months due to 130 separate attacks on its pipeline network.
Mr Allawi received a reminder about who is in charge in Iraq yesterday when US President George W. Bush said he would not hand Saddam over to face Iraqi justice until he was convinced the former dictator would not be able to escape.
On Tuesday, Mr Allawi said Saddam, who is being held at an undisclosed location by the US, would be handed over to Iraqis within two weeks.
"I just want to make sure that when sovereignty is transferred Saddam Hussein stays in jail," Mr Bush said.
"We want to make sure that he doesn't come back to power."
In Fallujah, Sunni guerillas killed and then mutilated seven Iraqi truck drivers. Relatives of the dead men said they were Shi'ites who had been arrested by the police then handed to self-styled mujaheddin, or holy warriors, to be killed.
--------
INSURGENTS
Radical Iraqi Cleric Orders His Fighters to Put Down Their Arms
June 17, 2004
By SOMINI SENGUPTA and EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/middleeast/17iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 16 - Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militiamen have tormented American soldiers in Iraq with ambushes and rocket attacks for nearly three months, ordered his fighters on Wednesday to put down their arms and go home.
The edict, issued at Mr. Sadr's headquarters in Najaf, a Shiite holy city, came days after he declared his intentions to enter mainstream politics as the new Iraqi government assumes full power.
In Najaf, his loyalists appeared to be heeding the order. But it did little to stanch the daily violence across the country. Two American soldiers were killed and nearly two dozen wounded in a rocket attack in Balad, 50 miles north of here. An Iraqi policeman was killed and five civilians wounded in a bomb attack in Ramadi, about 60 miles west of here.
A senior Oil Ministry official was assassinated early Wednesday in Kirkuk, in the north. And further crippling Iraqi oil exports, insurgents blasted a hole in a crucial oil pipeline near the southern city of Basra. There have been at least three such attacks in as many days, clearly intended to debilitate the country's economic engine before the transfer of limited power to an interim Iraqi government on June 30. Iraq's main oil
[A car bomb exploded Thursday near a United States and Iraqi military base in Baghdad, killing at least two people, a witness told the Reuters news agency. The bomb went off at an Iraq Army recruiting base in the city's heavily fortified Muthanna airport, where United States troops are also based.]
The violence came as a poll ordered by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority found that a majority of Iraqis believed that they would be safer without United States forces in their country and that all Americans behaved the way the guards did in the photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. The poll results, which were not released, were first reported by The Associated Press.
A coalition spokesman, Dan Senor, called the poll results understandable. "It reflects the fact that Iraqis, like most people, don't like to be occupied," he said in a CNN interview. "We don't like to be occupiers." He added, "Of course most Iraqis don't feel safe, and of course they say that it's happening under our watch."
In leaflets distributed widely in Najaf, Mr. Sadr ordered his fighters to "go back to their provinces" in keeping with a cease-fire signed on June 4 that had been regularly broken. Since then, many members of the cleric's militia, known as the Mahdi Army, have disappeared from Najaf and Kufa, a nearby Shiite holy city, but many others who live in those cities have remained.
In recent days, Mr. Sadr has taken efforts to remake himself into a player in Iraq's emerging political landscape. He has offered his conditional approval to the interim government and, through his spokesman, Qais al-Khazali, floated the idea of organizing a political party.
American administrators have issued an order banning people associated with illegal militias from taking part in elections.
An architect of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, arrived in Baghdad on Wednesday for meetings with Iraqi interim government officials, including Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. A joint statement called the talks "the beginning of a new relationship."
As part of that new relationship, American administrators will turn over civil aviation operations at Baghdad International Airport to the interim government after June 30, occupation officials said Wednesday. The military side is scheduled to be turned over by mid-August.
Virtually all American soldiers will move from the airport, the officials said. Many of them will relocate to Camp Victory, next to the airport, while the First Armored Division, which uses the airport as its headquarters, is scheduled to return home in July, after 15 months in Iraq.
Security at the airport will be provided by a foreign private contractor working with Iraqi forces, said an American adviser to the Ministry of Transportation. Bids were taken for the contract, and the winner will be announced in the next day or two, he said. Custer Battles, an American contractor, currently provides security for parts of the airport. The adviser, an aviation expert who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the transfer was a way to return a symbolic public site to the Iraqis.
Clearly, the greatest threat to the new government is the campaign against the oil industry, Iraq's main revenue source. Early Wednesday, Ghazi Talabani, security chief for the northern oil fields in Kirkuk, was killed in an ambush, an Oil Ministry official confirmed shortly after an explosion heavily damaged a northern crude oil pipeline.
Analysts have said repairs to the large southern oil export terminal could take up to 10 days, and cost up to $1 billion in revenues.
Meanwhile, the United States Army charged an American soldier with the murder of an Iraqi civilian, according to The Associated Press. Officials said the victim was wounded in a high-speed chase near the city of Kufa last month and then shot at close range by an officer in the First Armored Division. The soldier's name has not yet been released.
Also Wednesday, aides of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most powerful Shiite cleric, said he had sent a delegation to meet with Kurdish leaders. He has objected to provisions in the transitional administrative law, which is supposed to give guidance to the interim government, that essentially give Kurds veto power over a permanent constitution to be written next year. The leaders of the two main Kurdish parties objected to Ayatollah Sistani's stand and wrote a strongly worded letter to President Bush saying they would refrain from taking part in the country's government if their effective veto were removed.
In Washington, Democratic members of Congress challenged statements by administration officials on Wednesday that a collection of United Nations Security Council resolutions and letters exchanged between the United States and the new Iraqi leadership would be sufficient to define the authority and legal basis of operations for American forces in Iraq after June 30.
Absent a formal "status of forces agreement," similar to what the United States has negotiated with most nations where American forces are based, that kind of understanding "is not as strong as it needs to be," said Representative Ellen O. Tauscher, Democrat of California.
Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article.
--------
2 Car Bombings in Iraq Kill at Least 35 and Wound Over 100
June 17, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/international/middleeast/17CND-IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 17 - A suicide car bomb in central Baghdad ripped into a throng of men waiting at a recruiting station to sign up for the new Iraqi army today, killing at least 35 people and wounding at least 138, hospital officials said.
Another car bomb exploded this afternoon in front of a city council building in a village north of Baghdad, killing six members of the Iraqi security forces and wounding four others.
The bomb in Baghdad went off this morning in the upscale Mansour neighborhood and sent a thick plume of smoke over the city skyline. The explosion threw bodies into the air and scattered them across a four-lane road. Cars burst into flames. Charred shrapnel rained from the sky.
The attack was the single deadliest car bombing in Iraq in months. It came after several days of powerful bombings in Baghdad, and at a critical time for the new Iraqi Army. Many Iraqi soldiers refused to fight during the uprising in April, and the Americans are now desperately trying to recruit and train a reliable force that can begin taking over security after June 30, when the interim Iraqi government will assume limited sovereignty.
In another attack south of Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed a Hungarian soldier and wounded a civilian driver today, Reuters reported. It was the first fatality for the Hungarian contingent since it joined the American-led coalition.
"It was a hidden device, buried so deep it could not be seen," said Col. Istvan Makkai, who commands the 300-strong Hungarian transport battalion in Iraq, according to Reuters.
The explosion at the army recruiting station in Baghdad - caused by artillery shells packed into a car - raised questions about whether the Americans and Iraqi security forces could even protect men willing to sign up.
Iraq's new defense minister, Hazim al-Shaalan, promised a bloody crackdown on the insurgents. "We will cut off their hands and behead them," he said.
The deputy United States defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, who is visiting Iraq, suggested that Iraq's security forces were still far from being able to patrol the country alone and would need "substantial help" for some time, Reuters reported.
Survivors of the bombing described a scene of chaos and death.
"I just heard a loud explosion, a strong explosion," said Abdullah Shadhan, 31, who had been waiting outside the recruiting center in sweltering heat with 5 cousins and 10 friends.
"I was thrown into the air," he said. "Then I blacked out for a couple of minutes. I didn't know what was happening. When I woke up, I didn't think I was injured. But I couldn't stand up. Something was wrong with my legs."
Mr. Shadhan spoke as he coughed up blood in a bed in Yarmouk Hospital. An intravenous drip ran into his left arm. Dried blood covered his sheets. A man in a bed next to him held a white cloth over his head and moaned.
Tears welled up in Mr. Shadhan's eyes as he said that one of his cousins had been killed. He began sobbing. "I have seven children, and now what am I supposed to do?" he said.
He grabbed a bloody pink sheet from beneath his head and wiped away his tears.
The same Baghdad recruiting station was hit by a suicide car bomb last February, killing dozens of men waiting in line.
Though the front of the station was protected today by a perimeter of double-tiered sandbags, people at the scene said hundreds of recruits had been forced to stand outside for hours. Many had come to listen for their names being called over a loudspeaker, which meant they could return for interviews.
"I was outside talking with an old friend from the army, and we were talking about how we wanted to join the army again," said Hassan Jasim, 35, a thin man lying in a hospital bed with white gauze bandages swathed around his forehead. "Then we heard the explosion. Some of the people with me are dead, some are injured, some escaped."
Many of the victims complained that there was neither security nor stability in Iraq, and that the Americans were to blame.
The same mantra has been heard over and over from Iraqis following the bloody uprising in April. Hatred of the occupation is running higher than ever since the toppling of Saddam Hussein last year, and there appears to be no sign of any change of mood during this volatile summer.
A recent poll commissioned by the Coalition Provisional Authority showed that a majority of Iraqis want American soldiers to leave their country immediately.
"We were at the guard tower and saw injured people and bodies everywhere," said Ahmed Kadhum, 36, a military policeman working at the station. "There is no security. America is responsible for the lack of security here."
An hour after the Baghdad bombing, soldiers from the First Cavalry Division and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a national militia, had sealed off the area. Humvees blocked the highway running past the recruiting station. Glass and metal parts littered the roadway in front of the main gate. A blue sedan with a cracked windshield sat atop the median.
"I don't know who did this," said Lt. Col. Mike Murray, the commander of the American soldiers on the scene. "It's obviously like some other ones we've seen."
Ambulances from the Red Crescent raced back and forth along the road, their sirens wailing. Many of the dead and wounded were taken to three hospitals in the area.
At Yarmouk Hospital, a doctor opened the door of a refrigerated morgue for a reporter to look inside. Male bodies lay strewn across the floor and in metal trays stacked on shelves along the walls. Some of the men were naked and covered in blood; others died with their eyes open. White sheets covered several corpses.
In the lobby, a woman dressed in full black robes screamed for her son.
--------
Iraq Car Bombs Kill 41, Wound Nearly 150
By DANICA KIRKA
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50346-2004Jun17?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Car bombers targeted Iraq's security services Thursday, blasting Iraqis hoping to join the military in Baghdad and a civil defense post north of the capital, killing 41 people and wounding nearly 150.
Most of the victims were poor Iraqis desperate to take dangerous jobs in the Iraqi security forces because of a lack of alternatives in a country with up to 45 percent unemployment. They took their chances at the recruitment center in Baghdad even though a car bombing killed 47 people there in February.
"I have been coming for three weeks and they decided to interview us today," Abdul Wahid Shadhan, 32, said as he lay in a hospital bed coughing up blood. "I heard a big explosion, I lost sight of everything and then I found myself in the hospital."
Shadhan said he had been out of work since the Americans disbanded the Iraqi army last year. "I was obliged to work as a porter to feed my seven children," he told The Associated Press.
Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem al-Shalan promised a "house-to-house" search for anybody involved in planning the suicide attack.
"We will cut off the hands of those people, we will slit their throats if it is necessary to do so," he told reporters. "For those people who want to join the new Iraqi army, we will protect them and we will find them a safe location so they can submit their applications."
Thursday's attack near the recruitment center - the deadliest single blast since a car bombing at the same base in February - came amid a surge of violence targeting American troops and their Iraqi allies ahead of the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.
The attacks are apparently designed to shake confidence in Iraqi security forces, seen by some in the region as beholden to the Americans.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, here for talks with the Iraqi leadership, promised that American troops would support the new government after the handover because "Iraqi security forces are not ready to assume their job."
In the Baghdad attack, a white sport-utility vehicle packed with artillery shells exploded near a gate of a sprawling Iraqi security compound. The base is close to the Muthanna airport on the western side of the Tigris River.
The explosion scattered bodies, blood and debris across a four-lane highway outside the base, shared by the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and the U.S. military. No American troops were hurt.
Col. Mike Murray said 175 recruits inside the walled compound also escaped injury but many of the victims had just gotten off a bus at about 9 a.m.
At least 35 people died and 145 were wounded, and the toll was likely to increase, health ministry official Saad al-Amili said.
"We were standing waiting for our turn to register," Rafid Mudhar told the AP from his hospital bed. "All of a sudden, we heard a big explosion, and most of those standing fell on the ground, including me."
Another car bomb exploded Thursday afternoon in a village near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, killing six Iraqi Civil Defense Corps members and wounding four others, the U.S. 1st Infantry Division said. The defense corps is the main internal security force, created by U.S. administrators to battle insurgents.
That bombing came a day after a rocket slammed into a U.S. logistics base near Balad, killing three U.S. soldiers and wounding 25 other people, including two civilians.
Also Thursday, a Hungarian soldier was killed by a roadside bomb in a predominantly Shiite area south of Baghdad - Hungary's first military death in Iraq. An Iraqi police officer died in a separate explosion Wednesday near a fire station in Musayyib, a restive, religiously mixed town south of the capital, the Polish-led multinational force said.
More than 300 people have been killed in attacks on police stations and recruitment centers since September. In the most lethal attacks, five suicide bombings near police stations and a police academy in Basra killed at least 68 and wounded 200.
Despite the dangers of jobs in the military, civil defense and policy, U.S. and Iraqi officials say there is no shortage of volunteers. Jobs in the security services pay $300 to $500 a month depending on a person's rank - comparable to salaries for teachers and other civil servants.
In Mosul, Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq conflict, alluded to the problems within the Iraqi security forces, whom the Americans hope will assume ever greater responsibility for maintaining law and order after a sovereign government takes power.
Wolfowitz told reporters that the coalition's role after July 1 will be to support Iraqi security forces.
"Iraqi security forces are not ready to assume their job, and until they are, you can count on us," he said.
Iraq's interior minister, Falah Hassan al-Naqib, linked Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to the Baghdad attack and accused foreigners of being behind the 20 car bombings that have shaken the country since the start of June. He offered no new evidence.
U.S. officials suggest that the accelerated pace indicates that al-Zarqawi's network has shifted from complex, cataclysmic bombings to more frequent attacks against less protected targets.
Security at American and coalition facilities is formidable, with blast walls, earthen barricades and well targeted fields of fire. Many Iraqi facilities lack such measures.
The bombings have alarmed the people of Baghdad. Most are convinced that the attacks are carried out by outsiders - even by Americans who they say hope to weaken Islam and find a pretext to stay in this oil-rich country.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Seeks Bids to Dig Deep Gaza Trench
By KARIN LAUB
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004; 8:21 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50493-2004Jun17?language=printer
JERUSALEM - Israel published a bid Thursday for an 80-foot-deep, 2 1/2-mile-long trench between Egypt and Gaza aimed at blocking arms smuggling once Israel withdraws from the coastal strip next year.
The trench would cost millions, and military officials said it remains unclear whether more Palestinian homes would have to be demolished to make room for it.
Israel has razed hundreds of Gaza homes in recent years, including in a large offensive last month, to expose smuggling tunnels. In the Rafah refugee camp on the border with Egypt, the demolitions have displaced more than 13,000 Palestinians.
Palestinian officials denounced the trench plan, saying Israel is trying to choke Gaza on all sides. "Ditches and canals in Gaza, that's how you turn the Palestinians into prisoners in their own cities," said Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat.
The plan still needs Cabinet approval.
On Thursday, the Defense Ministry published a tender for a trench that is 2.5 miles long and 80 feet deep. Military officials said the trench would be nearly 400 feet wide and perhaps be lined with cement, but for ecological reasons would not be filled with water.
Once the bids are received in a month or two, the Defense Ministry will decide whether a trench is feasible, a military official said on condition of anonymity.
The trench would run along an Israeli military patrol road between Gaza and Egypt that is up to 200 yards wide and cuts into the Rafah camp.
One security official said Israel would have to widen the road to at least 300 yards to make room for the trench, meaning hundreds more Palestinian homes would have to be demolished. However, the military official said it would only become apparent after bids have been received whether homes will have to be razed.
In more than three years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, Palestinian militants have dug dozens of tunnels under the patrol road to smuggle weapons from Egypt to Rafah. Israel, in turn, has repeatedly raided Rafah in search of the tunnels.
The trench idea will be presented next week to Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who is mediating between Israel and the Palestinians on the Gaza withdrawal, which is to be concluded by the end of September 2005.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon refuses to negotiate directly about the pullout with the Palestinians. Suleiman will meet separately with Israeli and Palestinian leaders.
Egypt has agreed to send dozens of military advisers to Gaza to retrain the Palestinian security forces as part of a withdrawal, and there were growing signs Thursday that Cairo would also play an increasingly active role in the West Bank as well.
Palestinian officials said Egypt would run two training centers, one in Gaza and one in the West Bank town of Jericho.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Thursday he spoke to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak about an Egyptian presence in the West Bank and Gaza. "I think that this is help that is sorely needed," Annan said.
Under Sharon's plan, Israel would evacuate 7,500 Israelis from 21 settlements in Gaza and 500 more from four isolated enclaves in the West Bank.
Settler leaders have said they would not go without struggle, but up to now stopped short of openly endorsing violence.
However, a settler leader who once served as a top aide to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quoted Thursday as saying violence is legitimate.
"The uprooting of a settlement is illegal and shocking and thus justifies the refusal of orders, violence, with the exception of the use of firearms," the settler leader, Uri Elitzur, was quoted as telling the settler magazine "Besheva."
Speaking later to Channel Two TV, Elitzur said: "Every person in the world would react with force if someone came to evict him from his home." Asked whether this would happen during a Gaza withdrawal, he said: "I believe so."
Opposition leader Shimon Peres demanded that Elitzur be put on trial.
Israel is hoping to co-opt most settlers with the help of generous and timely compensation payments. Officials have also said Gaza would be closed to Israelis at some point next year to prevent hardliners from getting entrenched there.
Also Thursday, Erekat said he would meet next week with U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in Washington. Erekat said he has a long list of complaints, particularly about the separation barrier Israel is building in the West Bank.
Israel says it needs to barrier to keep out Palestinian bombers, while the Palestinians have denounced it as a land grab.
--------
Israel Launches Gaza Moat Plan
Reuters
Thursday, June 17, 2004
By Jeffrey Heller
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48915-2004Jun17.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel set in motion a plan Thursday to dig a moat along the Gaza-Egypt border, inviting contractor bids for the project meant to prevent arms reaching Palestinian militants through tunnels.
The Defense Ministry published the bid notice 11 days after the cabinet approved in principle a Gaza withdrawal plan, under which Israel would keep a narrow corridor on the Egyptian frontier pending possible security arrangements with Cairo.
Inviting bids by July 12, the ministry said the southern Gaza Strip "canal" would be 50 feet to 80 feet deep and stretch 2.5 miles.
"This is the beginning of turning the Gaza Strip into a big prison," Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said, comparing the trench to the barrier Israel is constructing in the West Bank with the declared aim of stopping suicide bombers.
The notice, in Israeli newspapers, did not give the width of the canal -- a figure crucial to determining whether any Palestinian homes along the "Philadelphi Corridor" buffer zone adjacent to Rafah refugee camp would need to be demolished.
It was not clear whether the moat would be filled with water, as Israeli military sources had suggested last month, or would be dry.
The ministry invited contractors to tour the project site and said one-year contracts would be issued, renewable for an additional 12 months.
Israel's Defense Ministry and the army declined to elaborate on the project. But Israel radio's military affairs correspondent quoted defense sources as saying the moat would be built along the Philadelphi strip.
DEMOLITIONS
The multi-million dollar plan was floated last month by the Israeli military as a way to reduce weapons smuggling into southern Gaza after 13 soldiers were killed in three ambushes.
Palestinian officials have said such a project would lead to more houses being bulldozed in the Rafah camp, the scene of a six-day Israeli army operation in May which the U.N. relief agency UNRWA said made 575 people homeless.
The army has said it found and destroyed more than 80 tunnels used by militants in the past three years and commanders have voiced fears the Palestinians could seek to bring in longer-range weapons to fire at Israeli cities.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to "disengage" from the Palestinians envisages the removal by the end of 2005 of all 21 Jewish settlements in occupied Gaza and four of the 120 Israel has built in the West Bank.
In a compromise with right-wing hard-liners in his cabinet, Sharon agreed to put off any evacuations until a further ministerial vote in nine months' time.
-------- latin america
Guatemalans Divided 50 Years After Coup
By SERGIO DE LEON
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50558-2004Jun17?language=printer
GUATEMALA CITY - The CIA-directed overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz happened 50 years ago Thursday, yet Guatemalans are still at odds over whether it prevented the Central American country from becoming "the first Cuba in America" or destroyed a "position of dignity and sovereignty against the new imperialism."
The coup and its consequences were "the beginning of a polarization that lasted up until recently," historian Ruben Lopez said.
Some, including Arbenz's economy secretary, Alfonso Bauer Paiz, say the coup brought to an end a proud and independent era.
"In the history of Guatemala, with no exaggeration, there has never been a period that can compare to 1944-1954, because it began with attacking the vestiges of semi-feudalism ... and maintained a position of dignity and sovereignty against the new imperialism," Bauer told The Associated Press.
But Lionel Sisniega Otero, one of the coup leaders, referred to Arbenz's ouster as a "liberation," because he said communism was a real threat to the country.
"It's definite that if we had continued on the same path we were headed in ... Guatemala would have been the first Cuba in America," he said.
In the 1950s, Guatemala found itself caught in the middle of the Cold War during which the United States and its allies launched anti-communist campaigns throughout the world.
Guatemala posed no threat to the United States, but U.S. leaders at the time feared the country risked becoming a bastion of communism in the Americas, said Jorge Lujan, professor of history at the Guatemala Valley University.
The CIA began its operation to overthrow Arbenz, dubbed PB Success, in 1954. The agency broadcast propaganda from Honduras through clandestine transmissions of "Liberation Radio" and helped military opposition figure Carlos Castillo Armas lead an invasion of Guatemala on June 17.
The Americans flew planes overhead and distributed arms and propaganda inviting people to join in "the liberation."
Sisniega, who was director and announcer of Liberation Radio, contends that the only support the CIA gave were arms and two airplanes.
"Nobody told us what to say or how to manage things," he said.
Ten days after the invasion, Arbenz resigned and Castillo Armas took his place.
Arbenz's government was followed by a half-century of military regimes and fraudulent elections that unleashed a 36-year civil war in Guatemala in which 200,000 people, mostly civilians, died.
The war ended in 1996 with the signing of a peace accord between rebels and the government.
The coup was provoked in part by Arbenz's openly critical stance against the United States, his favorable opinion of communism, and his expropriation of land from the U.S.-owned United Fruit Company.
But Bauer said the communist threat was overstated.
"Some communists had influence but the country was never communist," he said.
Arbenz succeeded Juan Jose Arevalo, who himself took office in a coup that ended the 10-year dictatorship of President Jorge Ubico. The presidencies of both Arbenz and Arevalo are commemorated every year on Oct. 20, the date that Ubico was forced out.
But the anniversary of Arbenz's overthrow was never marked by either protest or remembrance under the repressive military regimes. The scarce recognition given to June 17 persists today.
Many questions linger over the events 50 years ago. One is why the army didn't stop the advance of the invading troops.
Bauer, the former economy secretary, contends the Americans bribed and corrupted the military leadership, but Arbenz also suffered a depression that may have spurred his resignation.
Questions remain, because Arbenz never wrote about his experience, Lujan, the history professor, said.
"His widow said that it was unfair to judge her husband, but I believe that he was unfair himself for never explaining what happened," he said.
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Targets Militant Base Near Afghan Border
Reuters
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48244-2004Jun17.html
WANA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani security forces backed by helicopter gunships launched a fresh assault on al Qaeda-linked militants on Thursday in rugged mountains bordering Afghanistan, witnesses and officials said.
Dozens of transport and gunship helicopters headed toward the mountains near Angor Adda, 60 km (38 miles) west of South Waziristan's main town of Wana, to hunt foreign militants and their local supporters, they said.
"It is the continuation of the operation which started last week in response to the attack on our security forces," military spokesman Major-General Shaukat Sultan told Reuters in Islamabad.
"Wherever we find a hideout or base of militants we will knock it out," he said, declining to give further details.
But witnesses in Angor Adda said they heard helicopters fire rockets at suspected militant hideouts.
Since early Thursday morning, many helicopters had been seen flying in the direction of Angor Adda, residents in Wana added.
Pakistan's military ended a five-day crackdown on militants on Sunday in the Shakai area, 17 km (11 miles) west of Wana and some 400 km (250 miles) southwest of the capital Islamabad.
More than 55 militants, most of them foreigners, and 17 security personnel were killed in fierce clashes, and at least 10 militants were arrested.
In a separate incident, militants fired three rockets at a Pakistani security post around 40 km (25 miles) north of Wana in a pre-dawn raid, but there were no reports of casualties, witnesses said.
Pakistan says that up to 600 foreign militants, including Arabs, Chechens and Uzbeks linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, have been hiding out in tribal areas protected by Pakistani tribesmen.
In neighboring Afghanistan, the U.S. military leads about 20,000 soldiers in a hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban militants believed to be hiding near the Pakistan border.
The Americans want to create a "hammer and anvil" effect along the border to crush insurgents blamed for escalating violence in Afghanistan ahead of elections in September.
-------- prisoners of war
Fate of scientist, other captured Iraqis unclear after handover
BY DEBORAH HORAN,
June 17, 2004
Chicago Tribune
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news/world/8944989.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq - (KRT) - Ahmed al-Obeidi tied the blindfold over his eyes and a U.S. military officer tugged at the cloth to make sure it was tight.
For the next 10 minutes, the 52-year-old Iraqi mathematician recalled, he sat in darkness next to his 70-year-old mother-in-law, also blindfolded, on the way to a high-security prison to see his wife. She wasn't just any prisoner: Huda Ammash was the notorious five of hearts in the deck of cards used by soldiers to hunt down the 55 most wanted members of Saddam Hussein's regime.
"She still had her sharpness, that's all," al-Obeidi said, recounting the elaborate September visit to the secretive detention center near Baghdad International Airport. "When it comes to her health, it's deteriorating."
Ammash's legal status hasn't fared much better. Since her arrest in May 2003, the woman known as "Mrs. Anthrax" for her alleged role in building Iraq's biological weapons program has been held as a prisoner of war, captured on Iraqi soil, held prisoner in foreign custody in a country without a sovereign government.
No one yet knows what will happen to her or the other high-value targets captured by U.S. forces in the wake of the war and kept at a military prison in sunless, solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, according to a February Red Cross report.
Their fate is being worked out. But a question remains: When the U.S.-led coalition transfers limited sovereignty to Iraq's new interim government June 30, what will become of the high-ranking Baathists being held by the coalition?
"It's not entirely clear how the issue will be resolved," said Feisal Istrabadi, a legal adviser to a member of Iraq's recently dissolved Governing Council who helped draft the country's interim constitution.
Since his wife's capture, al-Obeidi has tried to persuade authorities to put her under house arrest. Ammash is a cancer survivor, he said, who suffers from many other medical ills.
So far he has been unsuccessful.
"There isn't any person in charge you can talk to and get an answer," al-Obeidi said one recent evening in his backyard garden on the banks of the Tigris River.
The prison where al-Obeidi said Ammash is being kept is considered so sensitive that U.S. military authorities in Baghdad are reluctant to acknowledge its existence. In answer to queries about Ammash, a military spokesman refused to confirm that she was being held near the airport or whether she had received visitors there.
When Ammash was captured, U.S. officials viewed her detention as a giant step toward finding Saddam's hidden weapons of mass destruction. They assumed the U.S.-educated biologist - sought for years for questioning by U.N. weapons inspectors - would be able to reveal the whereabouts of the alleged weapons programs.
A year later, no significant weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.
"The whole thing started with a lie, the lie of WMD," al-Obeidi said.
Iraqis working on a special tribunal created to try high-ranking Baathists - including Saddam - say they expect the high-level detainees to be transferred to Iraqi custody as soon as the country's fledgling security forces have the means to keep them detained.
"The plan is to issue arrest warrants very soon and then begin the process of taking control of the individuals," said Salem Chalabi, a Northwestern University Law School graduate who is executive director of the Iraqi Special Tribunal.
Chalabi said he has hired investigative judges and prosecutors to collect evidence against roughly 100 detainees, including the 55 named in the deck of cards. That number may rise or fall depending on the evidence that is gathered and the outcome of any plea bargaining, he said.
Once evidence is collected, the judges will issue indictments against the detainees, Chalabi said. Until then, they could remain held without charge as POWs under the control either of Iraqis or coalition forces.
Chalabi said the detainees could be indicted under an international law called "command responsibility," which holds high commanders responsible for abuses that occur under their authority.
When Ammash was captured she was a member of the Baath Party Regional Command, the country's top policy-making body. The position could make her eligible for prosecution under the "command responsibility" law.
It also has tainted her in the eyes of many Iraqis, who associate her with the highest tier of a hated regime.
"There's no sympathy for her," said Ismael Zayer, editor of the Iraqi daily Al-Sabbah Al-Jadeed.
Ammash was particularly disliked because she climbed the ranks of Saddam's regime even after the dictator reportedly ordered her father to be poisoned in 1983, Zayer said. Salih Magdi Ammash, a former vice president and defense minister in Saddam's government, died in Finland, where he was serving as Iraq's ambassador.
"She accepted that," Zayer said. "She acted like a Baathist. She was pro-Saddam. It was very, very nasty."
Similarly, Iraq's Shiite Muslims and Kurds, two groups killed by the thousands by Saddam's regime during the 1980s and '90s, have no pity for Baath Party leaders now in coalition custody.
"People want them to be tried," said Safeen Dizayee, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Democratic Party. He said Ammash is "as guilty as the president of the state. She was known as a strong supporter of the policies of the regime."
Ammash was not, however, a member of the Baath Party Regional Command until 2001, long after most of the alleged crimes of Saddam's regime had been committed, a fact that could work in her favor as prosecutors investigate her case.
Her supporters paint her as a positive force for women's rights in Iraq and point to her many accomplishments in biology, particularly her work studying the effects of depleted uranium. She has written extensively on the subject.
"She's extremely articulate, poised, a very attractive woman," said Sara Flounders, a member of a New York-based antiwar group, the International Action Center. She said she met Ammash in Baghdad a year before the U.S.-led invasion to topple Saddam.
"She had enormous respect in Iraq, and she has done a great deal to promote the role of women in science and technical fields," Flounders said.
Three weeks after Saddam's regime fell, U.S. soldiers surrounded the scientist's Baghdad home overlooking the Tigris, al-Obeidi said. Two tanks parked across the street while soldiers stormed inside.
Al-Obeidi had just left the house with a relative when the soldiers arrived, he said. He watched them surround the house from across the street and then drove away without identifying himself. His wife was not inside. She knew soldiers would come searching for the stern-faced woman pictured saluting and draped in a loose green head scarf on the five of hearts.
When al-Obeidi returned 30 minutes later the soldiers were gone, he said. They had carted away computers, a printer and documents and turned the house upside down. Other family possessions were missing - small silver daggers, a Buddha statue, four kerosene lamps, photo albums and memorabilia.
A week later, Ammash surrendered.
Al-Obeidi appealed to tribal leaders to secure his wife's release. They put him in contact with a U.S. military official, he said.
On a clear day in September, he met the official at the Republican Palace, which had become the epicenter of coalition operations. He brought his mother-in-law and two headscarves to serve as blindfolds. They rode in a sport utility vehicle toward the airport, stopping along the road to put on the blindfolds.
When the blindfolds were removed, al-Obeidi was standing in a pleasant room filled with sofas, a dining table and chairs. He visited Ammash for two hours, eating hamburgers with ketchup and french fries while she inquired about the health of various family members within earshot of an Iraqi translator stationed in the room.
"She said, `I tried to do the right thing for my family. I never thought something like this would happen,'" al-Obeidi recalled.
He repeated the trip in February, this time bringing his son, daughter, granddaughter and his wife's sister as well as his mother-in-law to the meeting. All of them were blindfolded before they reached the prison.
She was 25 pounds lighter, he said, after months spent locked up in solitary confinement. She had been to see doctors while in prison but still suffered from kidney problems and chronic arthritis.
"She can hardly move," al-Obeidi said.
He has given up attempts to persuade authorities to put her under house arrest until after June 30, he said.
But he hasn't given up hope.
"We are trying our best to get her out," al-Obeidi said. "It's criminal to keep her, a woman in her health. She's not well. Either there is a case against her or there's not."
----
Rumsfeld ordered prisoner to be held off the books in Iraq: Pentagon
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jun 17, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040617175846.fv04ys8j.html
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, acting at the request of the CIA, ordered that a suspected Iraqi insurgent leader be detained off the books to conceal his identity from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Pentagon confirmed Thursday.
CIA Director George Tenet requested in writing in late October that the prisoner, a suspected military planner for the Kurdish militant group Ansar al Islam, be held by the military in a way that he "not be assigned for the purpose of access to the ICRC," Larry DiRita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, told AFP.
Rumsfeld approved the request and issued the order the same day, he said.
"He was asked to do that. He did," DiRita said.
The prisoner then languished in secret military custody until late May, when Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, decided to return him to the general prison population, he said.
An investigation by Major General Antonio Taguba had noted in March the practice of keeping certain "ghost detainees" off the rolls at Abu Ghraib prison, denouncing them as "deceptive, contrary to army doctrine and in violation of international law."
DiRita said the Geneva Conventions allow prisoners to be held secretly for reasons of "military necessity" for a period of time.
He acknowledged, however, that "nobody believes those provisions allow you to do this for seven months."
A US intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the CIA had been holding the prisoner, who was captured in northern Iraq in June, at an undisclosed location outside Iraq since July.
But after receiving legal guidance that as an Iraqi he should be returned to Iraq, Tenet asked the military to take custody of him without registering him, he said.
"He was believed to be a combatant engaged in hostilities or supporting a force hostile to the United States. He was actively planning operations specifically targeting US forces both inside and outside of Iraq," the official said.
Yet neither the CIA nor the US military followed up by questioning the prisoner after he was back in custody in Iraq.
"Now, in January, officials inquired about him to the military. They were unable to locate him. Frankly, it's a case where people lost track of him," the intelligence official said.
"The normal review procedures that would kick into play didn't in this instance. And it fell between the cracks," he said.
DiRita disputed that the military lost track of the prisoner after taking custody of him but admitted that neither the CIA nor the Defense Department took further action despite periodic questions about his status from those holding him.
"The question is, did the CIA then come back to us and say, 'We want this guy back'? The answer is no," said DiRita.
"Did the CIA then determine further disposition and tell us, 'Keep him, or we'll take him'? The answer is no," he said.
"Did people lose track of him? The answer is also no. Because the people who had custody of him, by all indications, two or three times came back up the chain of command and said, 'We still have this guy. Will somebody tell us (what to do with him)?'"
The prisoner, who has not been identified, was held at Camp Cropper, a detention facility for high-value prisoners near the Baghdad International Airport.
"The people who were holding him basically did all they should have done," DiRita said.
"What didn't happen was that, at a higher level between this department and the CIA, further disposition of his case was never made, until finally it got to the attention of intelligence professionals in both departments," he said.
Meanwhile, the army announced that General Paul Kern has been appointed to oversee an investigation into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, replacing Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, who recused himself.
----
Human Rights Watch: Official US Policy to Blame for Torture
by Pranjal Tiwari
The New Standard,
June 17, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/tiwari.php?articleid=2831
A recently released report from New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) places the blame for torture by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other locations around the world firmly on the policies of the Bush administration.
In the 38-page report titled The Road to Abu Ghraib, HRW describes the pattern of official policy decisions the group says encouraged the use of torture and prisoner abuse by U.S. soldiers, as well as subsequent "cover-ups" to quash any allegations of abuse. HRW's conclusions provide more evidence to counter statements by U.S. officials that instances of torture resulted from a lack of discipline among frontline troops.
"The only exceptional aspect of the abuse at Abu Ghraib may have been that it was photographed," the report's introduction explains.
Kenneth Roth, executive director of HRW, a privately funded non-governmental organization, said in a press statement last week: "The horrors of Abu Ghraib were not simply the acts of individual soldiers. Abu Ghraib resulted from decisions made by the Bush administration to cast the rules aside."
Among these decisions, HRW highlights as pivotal the post-September 11, 2001, moves by members of the Pentagon, Justice Department, and White House Counsel's Office to provide legal arguments suggesting the U.S. was not bound by international law. According to HRW, officials rejected international regulations by labeling prisoners in the so-called "war on terror" as "enemy combatants" and subsequently detaining them in "off-shore, off-limits" prisons such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. These moves, the report says, constituted "a policy to evade international law."
HRW cites comments from Cofer Black, former director of the CIA's counterterrorism unit, who testified to Congress that "after 9/11 the gloves came off." Secretary of Defense Donald Donald Rumsfeld is also cited in the report as having justified the torture of prisoners. He is quoted as falsely claiming captives "do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention" as long as they are labeled under a new term, "unlawful combatants," instead of the traditional "prisoners of war."
Also mentioned are memos from officials, including one from White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to President Bush, that point to official involvement at the highest level in encouraging or covering up acts of torture.
"Even after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke," the report says, "Secretary Rumsfeld continued to take a loose view of the applicability of the Geneva Conventions. On May 5, 2004, he told a television interviewer the Geneva Conventions 'did not apply precisely' in Iraq but were 'basic rules' for handling prisoners." According to international human rights groups, however, as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, the United States is bound by their rules.
In the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, soldiers systematically "softened up" detainees by limiting their food, reversing sleep patterns, shackling them in so-called "stress positions," and interrogating them in sessions of up to twenty hours. HRW cites a 2003 story in the Washington Post, which said that the use of such techniques had to be deemed "militarily necessary," thus requiring the approval of Pentagon officials. Until the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib were released, HRW says this policy was enforced by a "see no evil, hear no evil" approach from officials.
A similar situation was observed in the post-invasion scenarios of Afghanistan and Iraq, where U.S. troops were found by HRW to have been given "impunity for systematic abuse." In the former case, the report notes that U.S. troops have arrested and detained "tens of thousands of Afghans and other nationals" and employed interrogation methods that include "sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and forcing detainees to sit or stand in painful positions for extended periods of time."
Referring specifically to Iraq - where it estimates 12,000 people have been taken into custody and detained for "weeks or months" - the report notes that torture is not limited to isolated incidents, and is used to fulfill part of the function of a military occupation that is facing armed opposition.
"What is clear is that abusive treatment used after September 11 on suspects in the 'war on terror' came to be considered permissible as well in an armed conflict to suppress resistance to a military occupation," the report says. "Procedures used in Afghanistan and Guantánamo were imported to Iraq, including the use of 'stress and duress' tactics and the use of prison guards to set the conditions for the interrogation of detainees."
Particularly worrying, writes HRW, were episodes of deaths in custody, and "disappearances" of certain prisoners, who were being held at "undisclosed locations" with no oversight of their conditions and "in most cases no acknowledgement they are even being held." HRW currently estimates that there are thirteen such "disappeared" detainees, taken into custody in various countries, including Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. Such "disappearances" in custody were possibly "unprecedented in U.S. history," according to the report.
"The Bush administration apparently believed that the new wars it was fighting could not be won if it was constrained by 'old' rules," says the report. "Ironically, the administration is now finding that it may be losing the war for hearts and minds around the world precisely because it threw those rules out."
----
CIA contractor charged in prisoner's death
By Toni Locy,
USA TODAY
6/17/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-06-17-abuse-charges_x.htm
WASHINGTON - A contractor for the CIA was charged Thursday in connection with the beating death of a prisoner in Afghanistan. It is the first criminal case brought in civilian courts in the scandal over alleged mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. military custody in Afghanistan or Iraq.
A federal grand jury in Raleigh, N.C., charged David Passaro, 38, of Lillington, N.C., with four counts of assault in the June 21, 2003, death of an Afghan man who turned himself in at the front gate of a U.S. military base. (Related:Full coverage of the abuse probe)
According to the indictment, the Afghan, Abdul Wali, was suspected of participating in rocket attacks on the Asadabad base in Kunar province, where al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters remain active.
Passaro, a former Army Special Forces medic, allegedly began interrogating Wali on June 19. Over the next two days, the grand jury said, Passaro used his hands, feet and a large flashlight to beat Wali.
Attorney General John Ashcroft called Passaro's alleged actions "criminal acts of brutality" that "run counter to our values."
CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield stressed that the agency responded quickly to the allegations. "We take allegations of wrongdoing very seriously," he said. "The CIA does not support or condone unlawful activities of any sort."
The charges against Passaro are the latest development in the scandal over the military's treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Seven Army reservists have been charged with abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad last fall.
Wali's death is one of three that the CIA has asked the Justice Department to investigate. The other two occurred in Iraq. The Defense Department has asked Justice officials to investigate a fourth case involving allegations of abuse of a prisoner by a civilian contractor.
The Army has investigated the deaths of 37 prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and is focusing on eight of them as "suspicious."
Passaro was arrested at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where he is a civilian medical specialist in the Army surgeon's office. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted. On Thursday, U.S. Magistrate Judge William Webb ordered Passaro held without bail until a hearing Tuesday.
Passaro took leave without pay from his job at Fort Bragg from May to August 2003, said Walt Sokalski, a spokesman for the Army's Special Operations Command.
In May 2003, Passaro went to Afghanistan as an independent contractor for the CIA, a relationship begun in December 2002. He then went to Asadabad to assist in intelligence collection.
The grand jury said Passaro worked "on behalf of the CIA, engaging in paramilitary activities in support of U.S. military personnel."
Ashcroft said the CIA's inspector general investigated Wali's death and referred the case to the Justice Department in November.
The Justice Department has the authority to prosecute U.S. civilians accused of crimes overseas if they are not under military jurisdiction.
--------
U.S. Sets Conditions for Detainee Transfer
Concerns Over Safety, Rights Cited
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47749-2004Jun16.html
BAGHDAD, June 16 -- The United States will turn over detainees to Iraqi authorities as soon after June 30 as U.S. officials determine that they can be held safely and in compliance with international human rights norms, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Wednesday.
The U.S. position was delivered during the opening round of high-level security consultations between Iraq's new interim leadership and a delegation led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and his British counterpart, Kevin Tebbit. The talks are intended to help pave the way for the scheduled transfer of limited sovereignty to Iraq at the end of the month and the arrival in the next few weeks of a new set of top U.S. diplomatic and military authorities, who U.S. officials said plan to pursue more detailed discussions on managing the next phase of U.S.-Iraqi relations.
A senior U.S. defense official who participated in the talks said the status of former president Saddam Hussein was not raised. Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, has said he expects to take custody of Hussein with the transfer of power. The discussions Wednesday dealt more broadly with the fate of about 40 detainees from Hussein's ousted government that the United States has classified as "high value."
Georges Sada, a spokesman for Allawi, said after the talks that Iraqi officials agreed to the U.S. position on detainees. He said that a timetable for the turnover was not set but that they would remain in U.S. hands. "We are trying to do our best to fulfill our requirements for the Americans," Sada said.
U.S. officials in Wolfowitz's delegation cited concerns about the ability of Iraq's fledgling security forces to guard the prisoners and were also skeptical about the slowness with which a special Iraqi tribunal has taken shape. The officials left open the possibility that legal custody of Hussein and other detainees could be technically transferred to Iraqi authorities if an existing criminal court issued the appropriate warrants. They said that physical custody of Hussein would remain with U.S. forces but that provisions would be made to give Iraqi investigators access to him.
With members of the U.S. military under investigation for the mistreatment of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and at other detention facilities in Iraq, U.S. officials also proposed setting up a joint consultative commission that would give Iraqis some say in detention operations.
"Both sides agreed it was a sound idea," said the senior U.S. defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "This could allow Iraqi sunshine into the system so that they could take part."
A joint statement issued after the meeting referred to the talks as "just the beginning of a new relationship between the government of Iraq and the members of the coalition" and described the atmosphere as "constructive and positive." But the senior U.S. defense official reported that differences arose over how to deal with persistent insurgencies in the cities of Fallujah and Najaf. Strong resistance from Iraqi political and religious leaders to the use of force against anti-occupation fighters has prompted U.S. military commanders to accede to compromise arrangements in both cities.
U.S. officials also expressed misgivings about a proposal by Allawi to revive several divisions of the old Iraqi army, disbanded after the invasion last year, as a way to quickly expand the Iraqi security services. Pentagon officials have said they are concerned that the cost of such a the plan would divert funds from other security projects that they consider more important.
Army Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, the top tactical commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, confirmed that he had issued orders in the past week for U.S. troops to put greater emphasis on protecting the new Iraqi leaders and building up the country's security forces. As a result, Metz said, fewer troops might be available for combat operations.
Correspondent Edward Cody contributed to this report.
-------- spies
Spy Work in Iraq Riddled by Failures
Informers' accounts were not properly vetted and electronic data were misread, officials say
By Bob Drogin,
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer,
June 17, 2004
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-intel17jun17,1,3393285.story?coll=la-headlines-world
WASHINGTON - A pair of British-recruited spies in Iraq, whose alarming reports of Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons were rushed to the White House shortly before the U.S.-led invasion last year, were never interviewed by the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable, current and former U.S. intelligence officials say.
The CIA's reliance on the two Iraqis, who were recruited by Britain's MI6 in late 2002 and thought to have access to Hussein's inner circle, is the latest example to come to light of the failures in human intelligence gathering in Iraq. U.S. agencies were also beset by broader, more systemic problems that included failures in analyzing communications intercepts and spy satellite images, the officials interviewed by The Times said.
U.S. experts, for example, still have not been able to determine the meaning of three secretly taped conversations that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell played to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 in making the case for war. Investigators have been unable to identify who was speaking on the tapes or precisely what they were talking about.
U.S. analysts also erred in their analysis of high-altitude satellite photos, repeatedly confusing Scud missile storage places with the short, half-cylindrical sheds typically used to house poultry in Iraq. As a result, as the war neared, two teams of U.N. weapons experts acting on U.S. intelligence scrambled to search chicken coops for missiles that were not there.
"We inspected a lot of chicken farms," said a former inspector who asked not to be identified because he now works with U.S. intelligence. His U.N. team printed "Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team" on 20 gray T-shirts to mark the futile hunt.
The problems the U.S. experienced in gathering and analyzing intelligence mirrored difficulties experienced by other Western intelligence agencies. Investigations of intelligence agencies in at least four countries have found the misjudgments of Iraq's weapons were founded on circumstantial evidence, unverified secondhand accounts, false assumptions, old intelligence and shoddy tradecraft.
Senate Report Due
In Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee is poised to issue a verdict on what most experts describe as a sweeping intelligence failure by U.S. agencies.
Officials said the committee's still-secret report, based on interviews with 200 intelligence analysts and officials, details major mistakes and misjudgments in collection and analysis by the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Officials portray the 400-page report as an unparalleled effort to gauge how America's $40-billion-a-year intelligence system performed against a critical target during the Clinton and Bush administrations, including the post-Hussein period.
"We can see what worked and what didn't," said a senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the report remains classified. "Mostly, it didn't."
Officials said the report criticizes the Pentagon's creation of an independent intelligence "cell" called the Office of Special Plans to review raw intelligence about Baghdad's alleged ties to the Al Qaeda terrorist network, and to funnel its analysis to the White House without going through normal channels.
It also reviews the CIA's insistence before the war that Iraq's attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes - using websites and faxes - was proof that Iraq was seeking to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. Evidence found since the war confirms that, as Iraqi officials had insisted, the tubes were designed for conventional artillery rockets.
The CIA and the committee are negotiating how much of the report to release to the public.
But independent of the report, current and former intelligence officials, plus outside experts, have detailed extensive problems in accumulating and analyzing data.
Most important, they say, was the fact that the CIA was unable to recruit a spy in or close to Hussein's inner circle before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. The lack of access was especially glaring because U.S. intelligence had made Iraq a priority target since the 1980s.
"We had zilch in terms of direct sources," said David Kay, who led the search for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq last year as special advisor to CIA director George J. Tenet.
CIA leaders refused to accept Kay's stark assessment when he returned from Iraq last December that most prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons were wrong. Kay was assigned a tiny office far from the executive suites, without a working computer or secure telephone.
"I heard about meetings after the fact," Kay recalled. "It was like a bad novel."
After several weeks of isolation, Kay quit and went public with his concerns.
U.N. inspectors who scoured Iraq for four months before the war and U.S.-led teams who have investigated for the last 15 months have found no arsenals of poison gases or germ weapons and no resurgent nuclear program, contrary to CIA predictions.
The CIA's record in Iraq was never strong. The agency not only failed to predict Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, but then could not evacuate its operatives from Baghdad. Poland's spy service ultimately got them out under cover of a Polish industrial project in Iraq, officials said.
Discredited Claims
After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the CIA and other Western spy services infiltrated U.N. teams sent to disarm Iraq, and used the cover to spy on the regime. MI6, in particular, recruited low-level informants from Iraq's military, intelligence, security service and secret police.
"All were given code names starting with 'black,' as in 'Black Star' and 'Black Horse,' " recalled Scott Ritter, who served as the U.N. inspectors' liaison to intelligence agencies. "They were very good. We could send questions in. They had real access."
Some of the MI6 informants came from the Iraqi National Accord, a London-based exile group run by Iyad Allawi, now Iraq's interim prime minister. In 1995, the CIA station chief in London took over the INA account from British intelligence. And in June 1996, the CIA backed an attempted INA coup in Baghdad that ended in mass arrests and executions.
Most remaining Western spying networks and collection efforts were crippled in December 1998, when U.N. teams were ordered out of Iraq. At that point, the CIA and other groups increasingly turned to defectors presented by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, another London-based exile group that was working to overthrow the Baghdad regime.
A stream of defectors were debriefed at safe houses outside London, a German castle east of Berlin, a Thai resort south of Bangkok, a Dutch government office in The Hague and elsewhere.
The Times first reported in March that an INC defector code-named "Curveball," who defected to Germany after 1998, was the chief source of now-discredited claims by the Bush administration that Iraq had modified trucks and railway cars to produce lethal germ agents.
Classified CIA reports after 2000 similarly cited details about Iraq's supposed germ weapons factories from another defector, codenamed "Red River." His account, which previously has not been disclosed, is also now viewed as inaccurate and possibly fabricated, intelligence officials said.
Information from other defectors turned out to be equally inaccurate.
Gary Dillion, who headed the Iraq action team at the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1997 to 1999, interviewed about six Iraqi defectors who had been vetted by U.S., British or other intelligence authorities. All insisted that Iraq was secretly rebuilding a nuclear weapons program.
"In no instance did we get anything that was credible," Dillion said. "There were some very wild stories. One gentleman told me that Saddam was hiding thin sheets of plutonium under ... the roof of a mosque."
Political 'Hangers-On'
Help seemed to arrive in late 2002, as the Bush administration prepared for war, when MI6 recruited two Iraqi spies in Baghdad and gave them specially encrypted satellite phones to protect secret communications, officials said. In a Feb. 5 speech at Georgetown University defending the CIA's prewar performance, Tenet paid tribute to the two spies, who he said had been "characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable."
The first source, Tenet said, had "direct access to Saddam and his inner circle." According to Tenet, the source said that the Baghdad regime "was aggressively and covertly developing" a nuclear weapon and "stockpiling chemical weapons," and that equipment to produce pesticides "had been diverted to chemical weapons production."
The second source, Tenet said, had "access to senior Iraqi officials" and "believed" that Iraq was producing chemical and biological weapons and had "an elaborate plan" to deceive U.N. weapons inspectors. "Now, did this information make any difference in my thinking? You bet it did," Tenet said.
The reports "solidified and reinforced" the CIA's earlier judgments about the growing danger from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, he said. "I conveyed this view to our nation's leaders," he added.
Tenet, however, did not disclose in the Georgetown speech that both spies are now viewed as highly suspect and that no evidence has been found to support their major claims.
"It's all fallen apart," said a former CIA official, who asked not to be identified because the case remains classified. "Neither one had direct knowledge. They were describing what they had heard. They claimed to have knowledge, but they didn't. They were hangers-on in the corridors of power, not insiders."
A senior CIA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said it is "unresolved at this point as to whether their information was true."
The CIA official said the two spies may have "believed things that might well not have been true. The question" is whether other Iraqi officials were attempting to deceive the spies, or to mislead Washington in hopes of deterring a U.S. attack.
The official confirmed that the CIA never interviewed either spy, although agency operatives were listening when one was debriefed outside Iraq.
"We knew for a fact that's what he was saying," said a senior U.S. official. "The other guy was reported to us by a reliable foreign service. We had to take their word for it."
High-Tech Intelligence
America's high-tech collection of communications intelligence and imagery from satellites and sensors is also under fire.
Experts say the NSA's powerful eavesdropping equipment netted hints of illicit activities in intercepted e-mails, telephone calls and military messages. In many cases, however, intelligence analysts were unable to identify who was talking to whom, or even about what, according to officials.
Powell played three such tapes to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. He said all were recent electronic intercepts of officers or commanders of Iraq's elite Republican Guard. Citing U.S. intelligence analysis, he argued that they proved Iraq's army was hiding banned weapons.
"We tried to figure those out and never got anywhere," Kay, the former head of U.S. weapons hunters in Iraq, said of the tapes. "We really had no idea who it was, or the location. All we knew is someone was hiding something somewhere and saying, 'Don't talk about it.' "
Corruption under Hussein's rule added to the challenge of unraveling Iraqi subterfuge. The regime's efforts to circumvent U.N. trade sanctions spawned such rampant smuggling and corruption that normal commercial transactions and government dealings often were conducted under a cloak of secrecy and suspicion.
Other frustrating intelligence came from the constellation of U.S. spy satellites and other high-altitude surveillance systems.
Between March and May 2002, for example, senior CIA officials paid close attention to a stream of photos of heavily guarded truck convoys in Iraq's western desert, officials said. Similar trucks had hauled chemical weapons in the 1980s. But the orbiting satellites couldn't track the convoys, and their cargo and destination were never identified.
Other pictures, from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, also caused concern. Before the war, U.S. photo analysts repeatedly spotted what they thought were "Samarra" trucks, Japanese-built vehicles used to decontaminate people or equipment from chemical exposure. They said the trucks were a clear "signature" that chemical weapons were produced or stored nearby.
But U.N. and, later, U.S. weapons hunters who searched the suspect sites never found a Samarra truck. They instead found water tankers and other fire suppression vehicles.
"It's scandalous," said Sharon Squassoni, an intelligence expert at the Congressional Research Service. "The satellite analysts couldn't tell the trucks were red."
Foreign Complications
The CIA's reliance on foreign spy services was problematic on several fronts. In recent months, parliamentary inquiries in Britain, Australia, Denmark and Israel have publicly identified problems similar to those that beset the CIA.
The reports show the spy services all relied on sketchy, speculative evidence and, in some cases, exaggerated or misrepresented their findings. They thus reinforced collective misjudgments.
In Israel, the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee concluded in March that the Mossad intelligence agency and Israeli military intelligence "magnified" the Iraqi threat as the war approached. Over a period of months, official estimates of the number of Iraqi ballistic missiles able to hit Israel inexplicably surged "from several to tens" and finally to between 50 and 100.
The Knesset committee blamed, in part, Israel's exchange of secrets with other spy services, "particularly with those of the U.S., with whom the cooperation very much tightened as the war approached."
The result "was a vicious cycle of sorts, in the form of reciprocal feedback that at times was more damaging than beneficial," the committee found. In some cases, unconfirmed data were passed to Washington, then relayed back in another form, creating the impression of "validation by a reliable source."
Layers of secrecy within the CIA compounded the problem.
"We have found cases in which a single source has different source descriptions, increasing the potential for an analyst to believe [there was] a corroborating source," Jami A. Miscik, deputy director of intelligence, said in a speech to CIA analysts in February.
In other cases, analysts weren't told that information came from secondary sources "about whom we know little," Miscik said.
Several mysteries remain concerning the prewar intelligence.
Still unexplained is Britain's claim, cited by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech, that Baghdad recently had sought to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger. Some experts speculate that British intelligence misinterpreted or misrepresented Iraq's rejection of an unsolicited and perhaps bogus offer. U.S. officials said a document found in the basement of Iraq's intelligence headquarters, for example, showed Baghdad had received a similar offer for uranium, cobalt and other minerals from a Congolese businessman in Nairobi, Kenya. A note attached to the document shows that an Iraqi official declined the deal.
David Albright, a former U.N. nuclear inspector, said Iraqi officials told him they received numerous such offers in the late 1990s.
"They said not a week goes by when they don't get an offer for nuclear weapons, uranium, red mercury, or something," he said. "Everything was sent back to Baghdad, where the general policy was to turn it down. It could be fundamentalists, it could be a scam, it could be an intelligence dangle. They didn't turn everything down. But their general reaction was, 'Forget it.' "
--------
The Ties That Blind How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
counterpunch
By NORM DIXON
June 17, 2004
http://counterpunch.org/dixon06172004.html
On August 18, 2002, the New York Times carried a front-page story headlined, "Officers say U.S. aided Iraq despite the use of gas". Quoting anonymous US "senior military officers", the NYT "revealed" that in the 1980s, the administration of US President Ronald Reagan covertly provided "critical battle planning assistance at a time when American intelligence knew that Iraqi commanders would employ chemical weapons in waging the decisive battles of the Iran-Iraq war". The story made a brief splash in the international media, then died.
While the August 18 NYT article added new details about the extent of US military collaboration with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during Iraq's 1980-88 war with Iran, it omitted the most outrageous aspect of the scandal: not only did Ronald Reagan's Washington turn a blind-eye to the Hussein regime's repeated use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and Iraq's Kurdish minority, but the US helped Iraq develop its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.
Nor did the NYT dwell on the extreme cynicism and hypocrisy of President George Bush II's administration's citing of those same terrible atrocities--which were disregarded at the time by Washington--and those same weapons programs--which no longer exist, having been dismantled and destroyed in the decade following the 1991 Gulf War--to justify a massive new war against the people of Iraq.
A reader of the NYT article (or the tens of thousands of other articles written after the war drive against Iraq began in earnest soon after September 11, 2001) would have looked in vain for the fact that many of the US politicians and ruling class pundits who demanded war against Hussein--in particular, the one of the most bellicose of the Bush administration's "hawks", defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld--were up to their ears in Washington's efforts to cultivate, promote and excuse Hussein in the past.
The NYT article read as though Washington's casual disregard about the use of chemical weapons by Hussein's dictatorship throughout the 1980s had never been reported before. However, it was not the first time that "Iraqgate"--as the scandal of US military and political support for Hussein in the '80s has been dubbed--has raised its embarrassing head in the corporate media, only to be quickly buried again.
One of the more comprehensive and damning accounts of Iraqgate was written by Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas and published in the February 23, 1992, Los Angeles Times. Headlined, "Bush secret effort helped Iraq build its war machine", the article reported that "classified documents obtained by the LA Times show ... a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by [George Bush senior]--both as president and vice president--to support and placate the Iraqi dictator."
Even William Safire, the right-wing, war-mongering NYT columnist, on December 7, 1992, felt compelled to write that, "Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal about the systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three democratic nations [the US, Britain and Italy] to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator".
The background to Iraqgate was the January 1979 popular uprising that overthrew the cravenly pro-US Shah of Iran. The Iranian revolution threatened US imperialism's domination of the strategic oil-rich region. Other than Israel, Iran had long been Washington's key ally in the Middle East.
Washington immediately began to "cast about for ways to undermine or overthrow the Iranian revolution, or make up for the loss of the Shah. Hussein's regime put up its hand. On September 22, 1980, Iraq launched an invasion of Iran. Throughout the bloody eight-year-long war--which cost at least 1 million lives--Washington backed Iraq.
As a 1990 report prepared for the Pentagon by the Strategic Studies Institute of the US War College admitted: "Throughout the [Iran-Iraq] war the United States practised a fairly benign policy toward Iraq... [Washington and Baghdad] wanted to restore the status quo ante ... that prevailed before [the 1979 Iranian revolution] began threatening the regional balance of power. Khomeini's revolutionary appeal was anathema to both Baghdad and Washington; hence they wanted to get rid of him. United by a common interest ... the [US] began to actively assist Iraq."
At first, as Iraqi forces seemed headed for victory over Iran, official US policy was neutrality in the conflict. Not only was Hussein doing Washington's dirty work in the war with Iran, but the US rulers believed that Iraq could be lured away from its close economic and military relationship with the Soviet Union--just as Egypt's President Anwar Sadat had done in the 1970s.
In March 1981, US Secretary of State Alexander Haig excitedly told the Senate foreign relations committee that Iraq was concerned by "the behaviour of Soviet imperialism in the Middle Eastern region". The Soviet government had refused to deliver arms to Iraq as long as Baghdad continued its military offensive against Iran. Moscow was also unhappy with the Hussein's vicious repression of the Iraqi Communist Party.
Washington's support (innocuously referred to as a "tilt" at the time) for Iraq became more open after Iran succeeded in driving Iraqi forces from its territory in May 1982; in June, Iran went on the offensive against Iraq. The US scrambled to stem Iraq's military setbacks. Washington and its conservative Arab allies suddenly feared Iran might even defeat Iraq, or at least cause the collapse of Hussein's regime.
Using its allies in the Middle East, Washington funnelled huge supplies of arms to Iraq. Classified State Department cables uncovered by Frantz and Waas described covert transfers of howitzers, helicopters, bombs and other weapons to Baghdad in 1982-83 from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.
Howard Teicher, who monitored Middle East policy at the US National Security Council during the Reagan administration, told the February 23, 1992, LA Times: "There was a conscious effort to encourage third countries to ship US arms or acquiesce in shipments after the fact. It was a policy of nods and winks."
According to Mark Phythian's 1997 book Arming Iraq: How the US and Britain Secretly Built Saddam's War Machine (Northeastern University Press), in 1983 Reagan asked Italy's Prime Minister Guilo Andreotti to channel arms to Iraq.
The January 1, 1984 Washington Post reported that the US had "informed friendly Persian Gulf nations that the defeat of Iraq in the three-year-old war with Iran would be 'contrary to US interests' and has made several moves to prevent that result".
Central to these "moves" was the cementing of a military and political alliance with Saddam Hussein's repressive regime, so as to build up Iraq as a military counterweight to Iran. In 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from the State Department's list of countries that allegedly supported terrorism. On December 19-20, 1983, Reagan dispatched his Middle East envoy--none other than Donald Rumsfeld--to Baghdad with a hand-written offer of a resumption of diplomatic relations, which had been severed during the 1967 Arab-Israel war. On March 24, 1984, Rumsfeld was again in Baghdad.
On that same day, the UPI wire service reported from the UN: "Mustard gas laced with a nerve agent has been used on Iranian soldiers ... a team of UN experts has concluded ... Meanwhile, in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, US presidential envoy Donald Rumsfeld held talks with foreign minister Tariq Aziz."
The day before, Iran had accused Iraq of poisoning 600 of its soldiers with mustard gas and Tabun nerve gas.
There is no doubt that the US government knew Iraq was using chemical weapons. On March 5, 1984, the State Department had stated that "available evidence indicates that Iraq has used lethal chemical weapons". The March 30, 1984, NYT reported that US intelligence officials has "what they believe to be incontrovertible evidence that Iraq has used nerve gas in its war with Iran and has almost finished extensive sites for mass producing the lethal chemical warfare agent".
However, consistent with the pattern throughout the Iran-Iraq war and after, the use of these internationally outlawed weapons was not considered important enough by Rumsfeld and his political superiors to halt Washington's blossoming love affair with Hussein.
The March 29, 1984, NYT, reporting on the aftermath of Rumsfeld's talks in Baghdad, stated that US officials had pronounced "themselves satisfied with relations between Iraq and the US and suggest that normal diplomatic ties have been restored in all but name". In November 1984, the US and Iraq officially restored diplomatic relations.
According to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, in a December 15, 1986 article, the CIA began to secretly supply Iraq with intelligence in 1984 that was used to "calibrate" mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops. Beginning in early 1985, the CIA provided Iraq with "data from sensitive US satellite reconnaissance photography ... to assist Iraqi bombing raids".
Iraqi chemical attacks on Iranian troops--and US assistance to Iraq--continued throughout the Iran-Iraq war. In a parallel program, the US defence department also provided intelligence and battle-planning assistance to Iraq.
The August 17, 2002 NYT reported that, according to "senior military officers with direct knowledge of the program", even though "senior officials of the Reagan administration publicly condemned Iraq's employment of mustard gas, sarin, VX and other poisonous agents ... President Reagan, vice president George Bush [senior] and senior national security aides never withdrew their support for the highly classified program in which more than 60 officers of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) were secretly providing detailed information on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes and bomb-damage assessments for Iraq."
Retired DIA officer Rick Francona told the NYT that Iraq's chemical weapons were used in the war's final battle in early 1988, in which Iraqi forces retook the Fao Peninsula from the Iranian army.
Another retired DIA officer, Walter Lang, told the NYT that "the use of gas on the battlefield by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern". What concerned the DIA, CIA and the Reagan administration was that Iran not break through the Fao Peninsula and spread the Islamic revolution to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Iraq's 1982 removal from Washington's official list of states that support terrorism meant that the Hussein regime was now eligible for US economic and military aid, and was able to purchase advanced US technology that could also be used for military purposes.
Conventional military sales resumed in December 1982. In 1983, the Reagan administration approved the sale of 60 Hughes helicopters to Iraq in 1983 "for civilian use". However, as Phythian pointed out, these aircraft could be "weaponised" within hours of delivery. Then US Secretary of State George Schultz and commerce secretary George Baldridge also lobbied for the delivery of Bell helicopters equipped for "crop spraying". It is believed that US-supplied choppers were used in the 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja, which killed 5000 people.
With the Reagan administration's connivance, Baghdad immediately embarked on a massive militarisation drive. This US-endorsed military spending spree began even before Iraq was delisted as a terrorist state, when the US commerce department approved the sale of Italian gas turbine engines for Iraq's naval frigates.
Soon after, the US agriculture department's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) guaranteed to repay loans--in the event of defaults by Baghdad--banks had made to Iraq to buy US-grown commodities such as wheat and rice. Under this scheme, Iraq had three years to repay the loans, and if it could not the US taxpayers would have to cough up.
Washington offered this aid initially to prevent Hussein's overthrow as the Iraqi people began to complain about the food shortages caused by the massive diversion of hard currency for the purchase of weapons and ammunition. The loan guarantees amounted to a massive US subsidy that allowed Hussein to launch his overt and covert arms buildup, one result being that the Iran-Iraq war entered a bloody five-year stalemate.
By the end of 1983, US$402 million in agriculture department loan guarantees for Iraq were approved. In 1984, this increased to $503 million and reached $1.1 billion in 1988. Between 1983 and 1990, CCC loan guarantees freed up more than $5 billion. Some $2 billion in bad loans, plus interest, ended up having to be covered by US taxpayers.
A similar taxpayer-funded, though smaller scale, scam operated under the auspices of the federal Export-Import Bank. In 1984, vice-president George Bush senior personally intervened to ensure that the bank guaranteed loans to Iraq of $500 million to build an oil pipeline. Export-Import Bank loan guarantees grew from $35 million in 1985 to $267 million by 1990.
According to William Blum, writing in the August 1998 issue of the Progressive, Sam Gejdenson, chairperson of a Congressional subcommittee investigating US exports to Iraq, disclosed that from 1985 until 1990 "the US government approved 771 licenses [only 39 were rejected] for the export to Iraq of $1.5 billion worth of biological agents and high-tech equipment with military application ...
"The US spent virtually an entire decade making sure that Saddam Hussein had almost whatever he wanted... US export control policy was directed by US foreign policy as formulated by the State Department, and it was US foreign policy to assist the regime of Saddam Hussein."
A 1994 US Senate report revealed that US companies were licenced by the commerce department to export a "witch's brew" of biological and chemical materials, including bacillus anthracis (which causes anthrax) and clostridium botulinum (the source of botulism). The American Type Culture Collection made 70 shipments of the anthrax bug and other pathogenic agents.
The report also noted that US exports to Iraq included the precursors to chemical warfare agents, plans for chemical and biological warfare facilities and chemical warhead filling equipment. US firms supplied advanced and specialised computers, lasers, testing and analysing equipment. Among the better-known companies were Hewlett Packard, Unisys, Data General and Honeywell.
Billions of dollars worth of raw materials, machinery and equipment, missile technology and other "dual-use" items were also supplied by West German, French, Italian, British, Swiss and Austrian corporations, with the approval of their governments (German firms even sold Iraq entire factories capable of mass-producing poison gas). Much of this was purchased with funds freed by the US CCC credits.
The destination of much of this equipment was Saad 16, near Mosul in northern Iraq. Western intelligence agencies had long known that the sprawling complex was Iraq's main ballistic missile development centre.
Blum reported that Washington was fully aware of the likely use of this material. In 1992, a US Senate committee learned that the commerce department had deleted references to military end-use from information it sent to Congress about 68 export licences, worth more than $1 billion.
In 1986, the US defence department's deputy undersecretary for trade security, Stephen Bryen, had objected to the export of an advanced computer, similar to those used in the US missile program, to Saad 16 because "of the high likelihood of military end use". The state and commerce departments approved the sale without conditions.
In his book, The Death Lobby: How the West Armed Iraq, Kenneth Timmerman points out that several US agencies were supposed to review US exports that may be detrimental to US "national security". However, the commerce department often did not submit exports to Hussein's Iraq for review or approved them despite objections from other government departments.
On March 16, 1988, Iraqi forces launched a poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish village of Halabja, killing 5000 people. While that attack is today being touted by senior US officials as one of the main reasons why Hussein must now be "taken out", at the time Washington's response to the atrocity was much more relaxed.
Just four months later, Washington stood by as the US giant Bechtel corporation won the contract to build a huge petrochemical plant that would give the Hussein regime the capacity to generate chemical weapons.
On September 8, 1988, the US Senate passed the Prevention of Genocide Act, which would have imposed sanctions on the Hussein regime. Immediately, the Reagan administration announced its opposition to the bill, calling it "premature". The White House used its influence to stall the bill in the House of Representatives. When Congress did eventually pass the bill, the White House did not implement it.
Washington's political, military and economic sweetheart deals with the Iraqi dictator came under even more stress when, in August 1989, FBI agents raided the Atlanta branch of the Rome-based Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) and uncovered massive fraud involving the CCC loan guarantee scheme and billions of dollars worth of unauthorised "off-the-books" loans to Iraq.
BNL Atlanta manager Chris Drougal had used the CCC program to underwrite programs that had nothing to do with agricultural exports. Using this covert set-up, Hussein's regime tried to buy the most hard-to-get components for its nuclear weapons and missile programs on the black market.
Russ Baker, writing in the March/April 1993 Columbia Journalism Review, noted: "Elements of the US government almost certainly knew that Drougal was funnelling US-backed loans--into dual-use technology and outright military technology. The British government was fully aware of the operations of Matrix-Churchill, a British firm with an Ohio branch, which was not only at the centre of the Iraqi procurement network but was also funded by BNL Atlanta... It would be later alleged by bank executives that the Italian government, long a close US ally as well as BNL's ultimate owner, had knowledge of BNL's loan diversions."
Yet, even the public outrage generated by the Halabja massacre and the widening BNL scandal did not cool Washington's ardour towards Hussein's Iraq.
On October 2, 1989, US President George Bush senior signed the top-secret National Security Decision 26, which declared: "Normal relations between the US and Iraq would serve our long-term interests and promote stability in both the Gulf and the Middle East. The US should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behaviour and increase our influence with Iraq... We should pursue, and seek to facilitate, opportunities for US firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy."
As public and congressional pressure mounted on the US Agriculture Department to end Iraq's access to CCC loan guarantees, Secretary of State James Baker--armed with NSD 26--personally insisted that agriculture secretary Clayton Yeutter drop his opposition to their continuation.
In November 1989, Bush senior approved $1 billion in loan guarantees for Iraq in 1990. In April 1990, more revelations about the BNL scandal had again pushed the department of agriculture to the verge of halting Iraq's CCC loan guarantees. On May 18, national security adviser Scowcroft personally intervened to ensure the delivery of the first $500 million tranche of the CCC subsidy for 1990.
According to Frantz and Waas' February 23, 1992, LA Times article, in July 1990 "officials at the National Security Council and the State Department were pushing to deliver the second installment of the $1 billion in loan guarantees, despite the looming crisis in the region and evidence that Iraq had used the aid illegally to help finance a secret arms procurement network to obtain technology for its nuclear weapons and ballistic-missile program".
From July 18 to August 1, 1990, Bush senior's administration approved $4.8 million in advanced technology sales to Iraq. The end-users included Saad 16 and the Iraqi ministry of industry and military industrialisation. On August 1, $695,000 worth of advanced data transmission devices were approved.
"Only on August 2, 1990, did the agriculture department officially suspend the [CCC loan] guarantees to Iraq--the same day that Hussein's tanks and troops swept into Kuwait", noted Frantz and Waas.
Norm Dixon writes for Australia's Green Left Weekly.
-------- us
Senate Backs Increase in Army Troop Strength
Reuters
Thursday, June 17, 2004
By Vicki Allen
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50606-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Despite resistance from the Pentagon, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to boost the Army by 20,000 troops to relieve stress on soldiers forced into extended duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I regret that we're here on the floor having to force an increase in the size of the Army," said Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who blasted the Bush administration for "a fundamental error" of not fielding sufficient troops in Iraq.
The Senate action echoed the House of Representatives, which last month passed a bill authorizing defense programs that expands the Army by 30,000 and the Marines by 9,000 over three years and is moving a spending bill to pay for that.
In other votes on the Senate's $447 billion bill authorizing defense programs for next year, Republicans agreed to require more stringent testing by the Pentagon of a ballistic missile interception system President Bush plans to field later this year.
But they defeated attempts by Democrats to require independent testing and delay deployment of a system the White House says could be a safeguard against an attack by North Korea or Iran, a terrorist group, or an errant missile launched inadvertently.
On a 93-4 vote, the Senate backed the measure that would pay for 20,000 additional forces in one year -- the amount the Army said it could absorb -- from emergency funds for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has opposed calls in Congress for a long-term increase in troop strength, saying it would impose unnecessary costs and that he could use emergency authority to field sufficient forces.
With this power, the Army is in the process of temporarily boosting its forces by 30,000 over the 482,000 limit authorized by Congress with "stop movement" and "stop loss" powers to extend deployments and block people from leaving the military when their commitments expire.
MISSILE DEFENSE
McCain called that "a form of conscription" that "basically penalizes those people who volunteered."
"Our responsibility now is to give the military, particularly the Army, sufficient resources, sufficient personnel, to do the job we're asking them to do," said Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat.
In other action, the Senate rejected a Democratic measure to delay fielding a system to intercept incoming ballistic missiles -- and hold up the $3.7 billion budgeted for that -- until it has been fully tested by an independent agency.
Bush has made deploying a missile defense system a priority, with plans to put ground-based interceptors on alert later this year at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
The Senate also deflected an amendment that called for independent testing after the system was deployed. Senators set an October 2005 target for operational testing, but said the criteria would be set by the defense secretary.
Democrats contend that, in its rush for bragging rights on missile defense, the administration may be spending billions to produce an ineffective shield.
"I don't want a make-believe system. I don't want a Wizard of Oz system," said Sen. Barbara Boxer of California.
But Republicans accused Democrats of trying to stall or derail the program.
"Rather than trying to come up with the perfect system that will defeat any kind of offensive system that might be thrown against us, we understand we need to start with something that will be rudimentary," said Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona.
--------
Prison Guards Dispirited by Scandal
MPs in Iraq Describe Anger Over Abuse by Predecessors
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47810-2004Jun16.html
BAGHDAD -- Sgt. Adam Baker never imagined that when he shipped out to Iraq it would be to a prison camp 300 miles south of the capital in the middle of a desert of blowing white sand.
Baker was trained as a forward observer in a National Guard field artillery unit. Rather than scouting enemy troop positions, he stands guard over security detainees at Camp Bucca, a U.S. military holding facility for more than 2,000 prisoners. He said his job has been made more difficult by the abuse scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad.
"I can't tell you the anguish you go through," said Baker, 22, a short, baby-faced soldier from Pittsburgh. "All this goes down at Abu Ghraib. You can't do anything about it, and you feel" miserable.
The larger implications of the scandal -- eroding the credibility of U.S. military policy in Iraq and raising questions about the chain of command -- means little to Baker, who sat in the heat of his Humvee one recent afternoon watching over detainees in an isolation compound at Bucca.
"After Abu Ghraib, some of the detainees would taunt you," said Baker, who finished the work for a chemistry degree from the University of Pittsburgh while in Iraq. "They'd point to you and say in Arabic, 'No good, no good.' It was bad."
Dozens of military police officers interviewed during the past two weeks at Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib described feelings of anger, resentment and frustration about being caught up in a scandal that they had no part in, feelings shared by other soldiers who were here when the abuse took place.
"Morale is a tough issue right now," said Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Kauffman, a military guard at Camp Bucca from Dothan, Ala.
Units are stretched thin. Soldiers are working 12-hour shifts at both prisons. Some work 6, 9 or 15 days without a day off. Most of them are Army reservists and National Guard soldiers, called up from their civilian jobs to serve a year in Iraq to do what some described as a tedious, boring job. Although most of the personnel pulling guard duty were trained as military police officers, others are field artillery or Marine expeditionary forces, filling the gap because there are not enough military police.
Their job is to guard the more than 5,000 civilians accused of crimes against the occupation authority, from owning an illegal weapon to killing soldiers.
On Monday morning, as she guided a group of prisoners onto a bus bound for the northern city of Tikrit, where they would be released, Pfc. Angie Kerns, 34, of Leavenworth, Kan., said she has to forget that the detainees don't see her as human.
"I'd shoot them if I had to," said Kerns, a military police officer with the 1st Infantry Division. "But I pray every morning when I leave the gate that I don't have to."
Sgt. Maj. Jeff Butler, of the 16th Military Police Brigade, said he got wind of a possible abuse scandal when he arrived in Iraq in January, and warned other arriving troops that it would cause problems for them.
"We let them know this was coming," said Butler, whose unit oversees soldiers at Camp Bucca and Abu Ghraib. "We told them that they were going to be the face on Army Times, on every cover." He added that he knew the scandal would have to become public.
The Pentagon has launched multiple investigations of the abuse, and seven military police officers have been charged with criminal offenses for their roles in it. One has been sentenced to a year in prison; three others face pretrial hearings next week.
But military police commanders who arrived right after the abuse came to light said it was clear to them what had gone wrong.
"Soldiers were walking around out of uniform, mixing civilian and military clothes, stuff written on their helmets," Butler said. "The leadership was just not paying attention to the basic standards. Nobody was making them do the basic soldier things."
At Abu Ghraib, 1st Sgt. Martin Grooms, 35, an Army reservist with the 384th Military Police Battalion, said he made sure that soldiers were following strict standards, even if their living and working conditions were less than ideal.
The soldiers assigned to Abu Ghraib live in cellblocks that have been converted into dormitories. They sleep three to a cell, in tight quarters crammed with their trunks and gear. Many have constructed plywood lofts to make better use of the space.
On a visit earlier this week to one of the quarters, Grooms, who in civilian life is a police officer in Fort Wayne, Ind., joked with three soldiers who had just gotten off duty. But as he turned to leave the room, the smile disappeared. "Clean this mess up," he ordered.
"I try to impress on my soldiers that just because we're in a war zone in Iraq, there's no Army regulation that says you act any differently than you do at home," he said.
Military commanders said that MPs in Iraq are now operating in a completely different environment than those who were here last year. Standard operating procedures are posted, along with signs urging soldiers to report suspected abuse. Soldiers also undergo more extensive training on how to interact with detainees.
The commanders expressed confidence that the problems had been fixed and that there is no abuse going on under their watch.
Sgt. Nathan Chase, of Tampa, an Army reservist who in civilian life is a special agent for the Federal Aviation Administration, was standing duty on one beastly hot morning outside a compound of white tents at Camp Bucca.
Although Chase has been a military police officer for 10 years, he never stood guard at a prison. He said he understood how aggravating the detainees could be at times, particularly when they did not obey orders. "But even if you're really mad at someone," he said, "it never crosses your mind to beat them."
On Sunday night in an Abu Ghraib guard tower, Spec. Eric Anderson, 21, a college student from Houlton, Maine, and Spec. Duwayne Moore, 23, a telecommunications technician from Rockford, Ill., watched over two detention compounds.
Anderson said that when his unit arrived at Abu Ghraib in February, the detainees threw food at them. But relations between the guards and detainees have since improved, he said. Guards exchanged greetings with detainees, bantered with those who came to the wire to talk and brought bread when they asked.
"There's a level of respect now," Anderson said.
--------
Wolfowitz: Troops to Stay in Iraq as Long as Needed
Reuters
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48626-2004Jun17.html
MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. troops will remain in Iraq as long as necessary until Iraqi forces can handle security on their own, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said on Thursday during a visit to northern Iraq.
"The role of the coalition forces after July 1 is to support the Iraqi security forces as much as they need help. For some time to come they will need some substantial help, and to help them is the mission we would like to accomplish," Wolfowitz told a news conference in Mosul, 240 miles north of Baghdad.
The U.S.-led administration hands over sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30, but some 150,000 foreign soldiers will still be in Iraq, generating controversy over what level of control the Iraqi government should have over the troops.
"Our relationship with the new government of Iraq after July 1 will be one of a partnership. We approach the security issues from a common perspective and we will be consulting with this government on a daily basis," Wolfowitz said.
"A great effort is now going on to strengthen the Iraqi security forces. Iraqi security forces are not ready to assume their job, and until they are, you can count on us."
Wolfowitz was accompanied by Gen. George Casey, who has been nominated to take over from Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez as commander of the multinational force in Iraq.
-------- war crimes
Accused contractor at Abu Ghraib says he told guards what to do
WASHINGTON (AP)
June 17, 2004
http://www.wokr13.tv/news/national/story.aspx?content_id=4191F986-B822-456C-A8E8-33E7A81A915A
- In testimony that conflicts with some generals' accounts, a private interrogator accused of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison told investigators that he and military intelligence operatives directed prison guards to keep Iraqi prisoners awake for as much as 20 hours a day.
Steven A. Stefanowicz also said he may have heard, but did not see, some military police physically abusing a prisoner. Otherwise, he said, he did not see any abuses inside Abu Ghraib like those documented in photos that became public this spring.
Stefanowicz, whose own veracity has been questioned in the official prison investigation, told Army investigators in a sworn statement that Col. Thomas Pappas, the military intelligence chief at Abu Ghraib, personally approved of the sleep deprivation tactics.
Prison guards were given copies of written interrogation plans for each inmate, which were prepared by three-person teams comprised of contractors or military intelligence soldiers, Stefanowicz said in the sworn statement obtained by The Associated Press.
Those plans specifically placed one detainee on a "sleep/meal management program" that involved letting the prisoner sleep only in small blocks of time totaling no more than four hours out of every 24, up to a total of three days. The prisoner then would be allowed 12 hours' sleep, Stefanowicz told investigators.
"The MPs are allowed to do what is necessary to keep the detainee awake in the allotted period of time as long as it adheres to approved rules of engagement and proper treatment of the detainee," Stefanowicz said, adding he never ordered MPs to assault a prisoner.
Stefanowicz' statement conflicts with congressional testimony by some top generals and statements by Stefanowicz' employer, CACI International Inc., that private contractors and military intelligence operatives never gave guards orders to take actions that would assist interrogations.
Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, now in charge of U.S. prisons in Iraq, and former Iraq commander Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, have said their orders allowed military police to offer information to help interrogators, but they were forbidden to take active roles, such as denying sleep.
CACI president and CEO J.P. "Jack" London has said CACI's contract did not allow its workers to tell MPs or any other soldiers what to do. London has said Army officials have praised Stefanowicz' work and never complained about him.
"In connection with inquiries into our operations in Iraq, we have been assured that our employees had no involvement in any inappropriate activity," CACI said in a news release Sunday.
A Pentagon spokesman did not immediately return a telephone message seeking comment Monday night.
Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the investigation that documented the abuses at Abu Ghraib, had access to Stefanowicz's statement before writing his report. Taguba agreed with the assertion that military intelligence officials directed the prison guards on activities but disputed Stefanowicz on the issue of whether he saw, engaged in or encouraged abuses. "He clearly knew his instructions equated to physical abuse," Taguba said of Stefanowicz.
Stefanowicz' lawyer, Henry Hockeimer Jr., said Monday that his client is innocent of wrongdoing and he has gotten no indication his client will face criminal charges.
Six enlisted military police soldiers are facing charges for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Another has pleaded guilty. Photos from the prison show prisoners being beaten, stripped naked, sexually humiliated and intimidated by dogs.
A 2002 Justice Department memo from Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee told the White House that techniques such as sleep deprivation and isolation "may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" but don't meet the legal definition of torture.
In his sworn statement to Army investigators, Stefanowicz described one possible instance of abuse on Dec. 20, after he, a military intelligence sergeant and private interpreter John B. Israel interrogated a prisoner in a stairwell. The Taguba report also names Israel, an Iraqi native and naturalized U.S. citizen who worked for a subcontractor to Titan Corp., as possibly being involved in abuses.
Stefanowicz said he walked ahead of two MPs as they took the prisoner back to his isolation cell. When the guards put the prisoner in the "segregation hole," Stefanowicz said, "the sound of the detainee falling or possibly being struck was heard."
Stefanowicz said he and the other interrogation team members confronted the MPs when they returned to an office. One of the MPs was unhappy and agitated when questioned if abuse had occurred, he said.
--------
Annan Against U.S. War Crimes Exemption
By EDITH M. LEDERER
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004; 8:21 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50485-2004Jun17.html
UNITED NATIONS - Defying the United States, Secretary-General Kofi Annan urged the U.N. Security Council on Thursday to stop shielding American peacekeepers from international prosecution for war crimes.
Annan cited the U.S. prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq in opposing a U.S. resolution calling for the blanket exemption for a third straight year.
The United States introduced the resolution last month but has delayed calling for a vote. Despite intensive lobbying, Washington doesn't have the minimum nine "yes" votes on the 15-member council to approve a new exemption, council diplomats said.
The current exemption expires June 30.
The Bush administration argues that the International Criminal Court - which started operating last year - could be used for frivolous or politically motivated prosecutions of American troops.
The 94 countries that have ratified the 1998 Rome Treaty establishing the court maintain it contains enough safeguards to prevent frivolous prosecutions.
This year, human rights groups argue that another U.S. exemption is unjustified in the wake of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal. And council nations that support the court say nobody should be exempt.
Annan supported both arguments.
"For the past two years, I have spoken quite strongly against the exemption, and I think it would be unfortunate for one to press for such an exemption, given the prisoner abuse in Iraq," he told reporters Thursday.
"It would be even more unwise on the part of the Security Council to grant it. It would discredit the council and the United Nations that stands for rule of law and the primacy of rule of law," Annan said. "Blanket exemption is wrong. It is of dubious judicial value, and I don't think it should be encouraged by the council."
Besides seeking another year's exemption from arrest or prosecution of U.S. peacekeepers, Washington has signed bilateral agreements with 89 countries that bar any prosecution of American officials by the court and is seeking more such treaties.
The International Criminal Court can prosecute cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed after it was established on July 1, 2002, but will step in only when countries are unwilling or unable to dispense justice themselves. It is the culmination of a campaign for a permanent war crimes tribunal that began with the Nuremberg trials after World War II.
The court has no jurisdiction over the events in Iraq, first because neither the United States nor Iraq have ratified the Rome Treaty, and second because of the U.N. exemption.
When the court was established, the United States threatened to end its involvement in far-flung peacekeeping operations established or authorized by the United Nations if it didn't get an exemption for American peacekeepers.
After contentious negotiations, the council initially approved a one-year exemption. In 2003, the resolution to exempt U.S. peacekeepers was renewed for another year by a vote of 12-0 with three abstentions - France, Germany and Syria.
This year, France, Germany, Spain and Brazil have said they will abstain on a new extension. China, Romania, Chile and Benin are also reported to be on the list of probable abstentions, council diplomats said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
British Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell said his country strongly supports the court but is prepared to consider extending the U.S. exemption because of "the impact on peacekeeping operations."
--------
Annan: U.S. Bid to Limit New Global Court Is 'Wrong'
Reuters
Thursday, June 17, 2004
By Evelyn Leopold
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49720-2004Jun17.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan sharply criticized the United States on Thursday for seeking another exemption from the International Criminal Court, particularly in light of the Iraqi prisoner scandal.
"The blanket exemption is wrong. It is of dubious judicial value and I don't think it should be encouraged by the council," Annan told reporters.
The Bush administration, for the third year, is seeking to renew a Security Council resolution that would exempt from the court's prosecution military and civilian personnel "related to a UN-authorized operation" such as that in Iraq.
The immunity is extended to all nations not among the 94 countries that have ratified a treaty establishing the new court. The resolution expires by the end of the month.
"It would be unfortunate for one to press for such an exemption, given the prisoner abuse in Iraq, " Annan said. "It would discredit the council and the United Nations that stands for rule of law."
The United States is investigating abuse, including sexual humiliation, of prisoners by the U.S. military in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Security Council envoys say Washington does not yet have enough support or will barely reach the required nine "yes" votes needed for the resolution to pass in the 15-nation body.
Among the 15 council members, Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Benin and Romania, are expected to abstain. But some, like Romania, are reluctant to be responsible for failure of the resolution, if it dies by one vote.
Crucial is whether China, which has criticized the resolution, casts an abstention. Diplomats say Beijing is seeking some concessions from Washington on Taiwan, although China's U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, denies this.
The resolution is opposed by European nations, except for Britain, which says Washington would veto U.N. peacekeeping missions as it did on one operation three years ago, although U.S. officials have not made that threat yet this year.
Asked whether this might be the last time Washington was seeking a renewal, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said he knew of no changes.
"I'm not trying to change anything at this moment," Boucher said in Washington. "I'm saying we're talking with others about how to proceed. "
WAR CRIMES
The council voted unanimously last week on a measure endorsing the new Baghdad interim government and U.S. troops to keep order. But that unity could be shattered by the court exemption issue at a time when the Bush administration is searching for peacekeepers in Iraq.
The court, the first permanent global war crimes tribunal, was set up to prosecute the world's worst atrocities, such as genocide, mass war crimes and systematic human rights abuses.
Based in The Hague, Netherlands, it is a court of last resort. Analysts say it would not, for example, interfere in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners as long as a country's judicial system probed the allegations.
The Bush administration is opposed in principle to an international court having any jurisdiction over American soldiers abroad and has signed bilateral agreements with dozens of nations to exempt any American officials.
"Our concern about the court being fundamentally flawed in no way reflects our lack of determination to ensure that the perpetrators of these abhorrent crimes (in Iraq) are fully prosecuted," said Richard Grenell, spokesman for U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- drug war
Report: Andean Coca Growing Area Shrinks
By GEORGE GEDDA
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50784-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON - Land under cultivation for coca, the raw material for cocaine, has declined 20 percent since 1998 in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, a United Nations report says.
It reached a 14-year low of 163,800 hectares, the report by the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime released Thursday said.
The three Andean countries are the world's biggest source of coca, the raw material for cocaine.
The estimate for Colombia - 86,000 hectares - represented a decline of 16 percent in one year and 47 percent since 2000, the report said.
Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, said at a news conference at the Organization of American States that Colombia's figures were the most encouraging result of this year's coca survey.
John Walters, head of the U.S. National Drug Control Policy, said in a statement that the report shows that "when democracy, stability and security flourish in drug-producing nations, progress can be made against the narco-terrorists who threaten our way of life."
The coca cultivation area in Peru was 44,200 hectares, a 13 percent decline since 1998, the study said.
In Bolivia, the figure was 23,800 hectares, a slight increase compared 2003 but only half the levels estimated in the early to mid-1990's.
Assistant Secretary of State Robert Charles offered an optimistic view Thursday of the overall counternarcotics situation in Colombia.
In remarks prepared for the House Government Reform Committee, Charles said: "Drug production is down in Colombia; traffickers are being arrested and extradited and their proceeds are being taken; drug seizures are up; legitimate jobs are being created; Colombian institutions are stronger; and the rule of law expanded."
Joint U.S.-Colombian spraying activities last year eradicated 116,000 hectares of coca, he said.
With U.S. help, Colombian forces were able to interdict 145 metric tons of cocaine and coca base in 2003, Charles said.
"If sold on U.S. streets, we estimate an additional 1.75 billion dollars would have reached drug traffickers and the narcoterrorism they support," he said.
-------- homeland security
Homeland Security joins weather radio network
6/17/2004
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/news/2004-06-17-dhs-noaaradio_x.htm
WASHINGTON - Emergency alerts for everything from tornadoes to missing children and terror warnings will get out to the public through an expanded weather radio network, the government announced Thursday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's network already makes emergency weather warnings available to 97% of the country and has added alerts for missing children and other hazards in recent years. (Related: More on NOAA weather radio)
The addition of the Homeland Security Department to the system will allow terror alerts and warnings to be distributed automatically through the same way.
"This agreement is an example of interagency cooperation that ... can be applied to protect the homeland from both man-made and natural disasters," said Frank Libutti, undersecretary for information analysis and infrastructure protection at Homeland Security.
Added NOAA Administrator Conrad C. Lautenbacher: "Today, radios, televisions and other devices are equipped to sound the alarm when danger threatens. Warnings and alerts can also be sent to cell phones, pagers and computers, ensuring that these vital messages can reach every corner of America."
Special radios that automatically turn on and sound an alarm when it is received are popular in areas subject to tornado, hurricane and other weather threats. The devices are in use in many public places.
Lautenbacher noted that the system encodes messages to a specific area where a threat occurs.
NOAA also cooperates with the Emergency Alert System, operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which sends alerts to local radio and television stations and cable systems.
Beginning more than three decades ago with weather warnings over special radios, the NOAA system has become an all-hazards network. It covers natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanoes; serious accidents, such as chemical releases; nuclear power plant emergencies; train derailments; maritime concerns; and 911 outages.
--------
Recent incident shows problems linger
USA TODAY
By Alan Levin
6/17/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-06-17-air-problems_x.htm
The unidentified plane headed toward Manhattan at a high rate of speed, prompting an alert at a New York air-traffic-control center. Confusion followed about what steps to take next.
But this isn't a story from Sept. 11. It happened two weeks ago. The story was recounted Thursday to the commission investigating the 2001 attacks as an example of the problems in the nation's air defense that still need to be fixed.
The manager of the air traffic facility, Ben Sliney, told the commission that an official from the military telephoned him to ask whether he wanted a fighter jet to escort the suspicious flight. Sliney said he had never been told he had such power.
"I don't believe the lines of communication are as clear as they should be," Sliney told the commission. His attempts to clear up the misunderstanding took several minutes, long enough for the plane to pass over New York, he said. The plane turned out to be on a harmless mission to take photos and was unidentified due to a mix-up.
After the confusion that plagued the aviation system and the military during the terrorist attacks, incidents such as the one two weeks ago are supposed to be handled under new rules that speed information to key officials and clarify who is in charge. Commission Chairman Thomas Kean said Sliney's story gave him the "jitters" - particularly on a day when many of the Sept. 11 failings were recounted to the commission.
Although the Federal Aviation Administration and NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, received kudos from the commission for shutting down the aviation system safely after the terror attacks, many questions remain.
An in-depth report on the response to the four hijacked flights, three of which struck targets in New York City and Washington, detailed numerous instances in which poor communication between the FAA and NORAD hurt their efforts to defend the country.
For instance, fighter jets were sent in pursuit of a "phantom" hijacked jet that had already exploded into the World Trade Center, leaving Washington, D.C., unguarded. Meanwhile, American Airlines Flight 77, which had disappeared from radar after it was hijacked, flew undetected toward Washington for 36 minutes.
Also, the commission found that the FAA did not notify NORAD about two of the hijacked flights - American Flight 77 and United Airlines Flight 93, which went down in Pennsylvania after passengers revolted - until after they had already crashed.
"This whole story is a failure of communication," Kean said. "You find it here, and you find it in a lot of other areas."
Should aviation officials and Air Force generals have been better prepared for the Sept. 11 attacks? Kean was asked. They could not have anticipated the "ingenious" al-Qaeda plan to bomb buildings with suicide hijackers, he said.
But then he added: "Should they have been more ready for something like this? Yes."
Veteran controllers and aviation experts have said publicly that much of the confusion that day was due to the nature of the air-traffic system. It is complex, with hundreds of radars and computer systems operating simultaneously. And its power is diffuse: At any given time, as many as several thousand controllers are in charge of their own small piece of the sky.
Another lapse involved the fate of Flight 11. At 9:21 a.m. on Sept. 11, an FAA official telephoned NORAD to warn the military that the flight had flown past New York and was headed toward Washington. NORAD responded by trying to send jets to Baltimore to intercept the flight. In fact, Flight 11 had been the first jet to hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m.
The confusion was likely because hijackers had deliberately shut off the jet's transponder, the device that makes it prominently visible to radar. Controllers had difficulty following Flight 11's ghostly image on radar screens. FAA managers told USA TODAY in 2002 that no one was sure initially whether it had crashed into the towers.
NORAD's awkward response is also understandable, military officials said Thursday. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said NORAD had been created to fight a war against the Soviet Union and wasn't prepared for an attack inside the United States. Even fighter pilots assumed that the destruction they saw below them came from abroad. "I reverted to the Russian threat," one pilot told the commission. "I'm thinking cruise missile threat from the sea."
Why information about Flights 77 and 93 did not reach NORAD in a timely fashion is less clear.
Monte Belger, acting assistant administrator of the FAA on Sept. 11, told the commission that well before both of those jets went down, he directed the agency to share information with the military by teleconference. He assumed the military knew everything the FAA did about the flights.
He said he learned later that morning that the military was no longer on the teleconference line.
"I was not happy," he said.
-------
Weather Radio to Handle Terror Alerts
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49685-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON - Emergency alerts for everything from tornadoes to missing children and terror warnings will get out to the public through an expanded weather radio network, the government announced Thursday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's network already makes emergency weather warnings available to 97 percent of the country and has added alerts for missing children and other hazards in recent years.
The addition of the Homeland Security Department to the system will allow terror alerts and warnings to be distributed automatically through the same way.
"This agreement is an example of interagency cooperation that ... can be applied to protect the homeland from both man-made and natural disasters," said Frank Libutti, undersecretary for information analysis and infrastructure protection at Homeland Security.
Added NOAA Administrator Conrad C. Lautenbacher: "Today, radios, televisions and other devices are equipped to sound the alarm when danger threatens. Warnings and alerts can also be sent to cell phones, pagers and computers, ensuring that these vital messages can reach every corner of America."
Special radios that automatically turn on and sound an alarm when it is received are popular in areas subject to tornado, hurricane and other weather threats. The devices are in use in many public places, stores.
Lautenbacher noted that the system encodes messages to a specific area where a threat occurs.
NOAA also cooperates with the Emergency Alert System, operated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which sends alerts to local radio and television stations and cable systems.
Beginning more than three decades ago with weather warnings over special radios, the NOAA system has become an all-hazards network. It covers natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanoes; serious accidents, such as chemical releases; nuclear power plant emergencies; train derailments; maritime concerns; and 911 outages.
On the Net:
NOAA Weather Radio:http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr
All-Hazards Emergency Messages:http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/allhazard.htm
--------
Homeland Security To Remain In District
Decision Called Victory For City's Economy
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47755-2004Jun16.html
The Department of Homeland Security will keep its permanent headquarters in Northwest Washington for at least five years and possibly longer while it consolidates operations now spread across 5 million square feet of office space throughout the region, Bush administration officials said yesterday.
District officials hailed the decision and related legislation as an economic victory that will keep thousands of federal jobs in the city. Real estate analysts said the department's plans will shape the market across the Washington area, particularly in areas where large commercial spaces are available, such as Silver Spring and Dulles.
Homeland Security, which has 180,000 workers across the country, plans to roughly double the number of top employees -- currently about 2,000 people -- who are based at the Nebraska Avenue Naval Complex, and spend $75 million on technological upgrades over five years. The Navy will move out 1,147 workers by January, many to sites in Virginia, Maryland and the District, said a spokesman for the Naval District of Washington.
"We are pleased that Congress appears ready to meet our requirements to have the Department of Homeland Security headquarters located at the Nebraska Avenue Complex for the foreseeable future," said Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.
Another senior department official cautioned against seeing the decision as only "a short-term fix."
"It doesn't rule this place out from being the headquarters 10 years from now," the official said. "This is a serious step for us to have a consolidated headquarters, and then to take a look at what we have in the national capital region to see what the strategy going forward will be."
The Senate was set to approve, as early as last night, legislation sought by the Bush administration that requires the Navy to give up control of the 38-acre complex by Jan. 1. The site, which served as an electronic warfare center during the Cold War, has been used as Homeland Security headquarters since the agency was created in March 2003.
The House passed similar legislation Monday. The bill directs that the Navy be compensated for its costs, about $25 million, and that it turn over the land to the General Services Administration, the agency that serves as the federal landlord.
This summer, the GSA expects to complete an inventory of all Washington area real estate occupied by the 22 agencies that are part of Homeland Security. The aim is to produce a "long-term housing strategy" for what is now the federal government's largest Cabinet department, GSA capital area spokesman Mike McGill said.
Ridge's top aides and GSA Administrator Stephen A. Perry urged Congress to keep the headquarters because of the location, security and recent improvements, including a $14 million national 24-hour emergency operations center. Homeland Security officials said the move would allow them to keep top aides in close contact with the White House and Congress.
"We've tried to build one Department of Homeland Security culture. It's hard to do that when you're split up in all these places," said the senior department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of reorganizing the department among constituent agencies and Congress, which pays the bills.
"We need the information to see where we can foster efficiency and consolidation," the official said. "Obviously we're talking about a lot of taxpayer funds."
Homeland Security's office space, while about double that of the Justice Department, is a fraction of the region's 360 million-square-foot commercial market. Greg Leisch, chief executive of Delta Associates, a real estate firm advising GSA on some homeland security-related issues, said the suburbs could gain if the department centralizes blocs of 2,000 to 3,000 workers in eight or so locations in the short-term.
"It can have a positive influence in certain pockets," Leisch said. "There are only so many places that have that scale of space available."
The Homeland Security complex, at Nebraska and Massachusetts avenues NW, is on one of Washington's highest points, about five miles from the White House and one mile from the vice president's residence. The site, a former women's seminary that was commandeered at the start of World War II, consists of 33 Georgian brick buildings dating to the 1920s and 556,000 square feet of office space.
Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had pressed for the department to be based in Northern Virginia but deferred to Ridge, Warner's spokesman said.
"My top priority is to protect our homeland; and this is another step in that direction, which Virginians will support," Warner said. He said he welcomed consideration by Navy Secretary Gordon R. England to relocate as many workers as possible to Virginia bases.
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said the District is the big winner, noting that a relocation of headquarters could have lost the city more than $171 million over five years. Norton said the agency is now in the District for good.
"It was unthinkable that such an important Cabinet department would be located outside the city," Norton said.
Staff writer Neil Irwin contributed to this report.
--------
Flier Registration Program to Be Tested
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47854-2004Jun16.html
Travelers who fly regularly out of five major U.S. airports including Reagan National will be able to apply for a quick pass through security lines this summer in an experimental program announced yesterday by the Transportation Security Administration.
In return for being able to use a special security lane, avoiding the slower standard checkpoints, travelers will have to provide the agency with their name, address, phone number, date of birth, digital fingerprint and iris scan.
The so-called registered traveler program aims to identify passengers who pose less of a security threat to airlines and to move them swiftly through security. With those travelers out of the way, the TSA said security screeners can focus on other travelers who might pose more of a risk.
The experimental program will be offered in mid-August jointly by the TSA and American Airlines to an estimated 3,000 members of American's frequent flier program who travel at least once a week out of National. American will also offer the program at Boston's Logan International Airport.
Northwest, United and Continental airlines will begin offering the program in July and August at airports in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Houston. The TSA plans to evaluate the program after 90 days and decide whether to expand it nationwide for all travelers, not just frequent fliers.
The program's debut is a reversal for the agency created after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The TSA's first leader, John W. Magaw, said he opposed the creation of the program, then called trusted traveler, for fear that terrorists could join and become a "trusted" part of the system to take advantage of the limited screening.
Yesterday, TSA's acting administrator, David M. Stone, said the program would still check every passenger and his or her belongings with an X-ray machine and metal detector. "TSA approached this pilot with the firm idea that security could not and would not be compromised," Stone said in a written statement yesterday.
Travelers will likely be invited to join the experimental program through an e-mail from their airline. They will be asked to visit an enrollment station at the airport, where they will provide their personal information.
Using the data, the TSA will perform a background check. Approved registered travelers will be able to skip the more thorough pat-down searches that are sometimes conducted randomly or are triggered by a computer designation. If the registered traveler sets off the alarm, however, the passenger must undergo the more extensive check with a hand-held metal detector, the TSA said.
Department of Homeland Security officials said that if the program is expanded, travelers may have to pay less than $100 a year to be registered, though participants in the pilot will join for free. The fee would cover the expense of the required background check.
Travelers yesterday were skeptical about whether the program would work. "It's hard for the average traveler to make an assessment whether it's worth their time to go through this process," said frequent flier David Beatty of Ashburn. "I'm not quite sure what I get to bypass. If my shoes rang, I'd still have to take my shoes off." Beatty also expressed some concern about the government's collection of his travel information.
Kevin P. Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition, said the program might actually create longer lines at some airports, such as National, which are heavily used by business travelers. "What good is it going to do you at 5:30 p.m. at Reagan National airport?" Mitchell asked.
The TSA said it will kick off the test project in early July with Northwest Airlines frequent fliers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. In late July, United Airlines will begin the program with its customers at Los Angeles International Airport. In early August, Continental Airlines will offer its customers the program out of George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.
Unisys Corp. of Reston won a $2.47 million contract to manage and operate the test program in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Houston. The agency awarded Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Herndon $1.31 million for 180 days to manage the program in Boston and Washington.
-------- internet
US House Panel Approves Bill to Combat Spyware
Reuters
Thursday, June 17, 2004; 2:34 PM
By Peter Kaplan
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49546-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A key U.S. congressional panel on Thursday endorsed a bill designed to crack down on deceptive "spyware" that hides in users' computers and secretly monitors their activities.
Lawmakers on a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee voted unanimously for a bill that would require purveyors of spyware on the Internet to notify people before loading new software on their machines.
Rep. Joe Barton, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the full committee, predicted the bill would proceed quickly through the House and "sometime this year become public law."
The bill, introduced by Reps. Mary Bono, a California Republican, and Ed Towns, a New York Democrat, also would allow the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to seek millions of dollars in fines for some of the practices lawmakers consider most egregious, such as logging users' keystrokes or stealing their identities.
It also would require that spyware be made easily removable.
"We continue to meet people who have had their Web pages hijacked, their browsers corrupted, and in some cases their children exposed to inappropriate material via nefarious programs lurking on their hard drives," said subcommittee chairman Rep. Cliff Stearns, a Florida Republican.
Spyware can sap computing power, crash machines and bury users under a blizzard of unwanted ads. It can capture passwords, credit-card numbers and other sensitive data.
While popular among lawmakers, the proposed legislation has not been embraced by the FTC.
FTC officials have told lawmakers they already have the laws they need to combat the spread of spyware. And they fear the new spyware law could end up being a problem for sellers of legitimate software -- some of which uses the same technology as spyware but helps computer users navigate the Internet.
Backers of the spyware bill said it has been modified to address those concerns.
"Our goal was to produce a bill that was not overly prescriptive, specifically directed at egregious practices, and which also preserved legitimate uses of the technology," Stearns said.
-------- justice
Long live the King
workingforchange.com
06.17.04
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=17139
On last week's test case of the PATRIOT Act -- in which a jury resoundingly vindicated a University of Idaho student, but only after our government destroyed his life
Last week, at the same time that John Ashcroft was busy in D.C. declaring to Congress that the President was above the law, a jury in Idaho did its best to rein in the excesses of the PATRIOT Act.
And failed.
The case in question was that of Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a University of Idaho graduate student and Saudi national accused of terrorism under the PATRIOT Act. Last year, in February 2003, an FBI SWAT team descended on the sleepy college town of Moscow, Idaho, raiding Al-Hussayen's home and hauling him off. Al-Hussayen was charged with three counts of terrorism, four counts of making false statements, and seven counts of visa fraud.
Al-Hussayen, the son of a former Saudi education minister, was a Ph.D. candidate who had studied in the US for nine years. A husband and father, he hardly fit the profile of terrorist, and the town rallied behind him -- particularly when the details of his case emerged. He had volunteered his time to a Michigan-based group, the Islamic Assembly of North America, to set up a website that promoted the study of Islam. The website contained a link to another website set up by a group the US government had listed as a terrorist organization. Another link pointed to a site that, among a huge volume of postings, contained four short documents written by radical clerics discussing the war in Chechnya and the conflict in Palestine. One of these documents sanctioned suicide attacks and mentioned flying airplanes into buildings.
That was it. Al-Hussayen was charged as a tertiary "terrorist" -- giving help to a group whose web site linked to a group that published, among its library of documents, writings that advocated terror. Al-Husaayen's case did not even amount to an assault on freedom of speech, because he hadn't been the one speaking; indeed, he didn't even know the links and documents were on the site. The visa violations and false statement charges against Al-Hussayen involved his work with a nonprofit organization; his visa lists him as a student, and the government claimed that a student visa did not allow volunteer "work."
Al-Hussayen's case was a major test of a provision in the USA PATRIOT Act that targets so-called "secondary players" in the war on terrorism -- those who give aid to groups or individuals who later carry out terrorist attacks.
Even under such provisions, the case against Al-Hussayen was exceedingly tenuous. It didn't matter. He spent nearly a year and a half in jail before being acquitted by a federal jury last week. The case against him was so thin that his lawyers called only one witness, former CIA Near East division chief Frank Anderson, who testified about terrorist recruitment methods and questioned the FBI's notion that people give up their jobs and family connections to go join a jihad in Chechnya or Palestine after simply reading a few postings on the Internet.
After Al-Hussayen's acquittal, Anderson said, "I take satisfaction in the verdict. But I am embarrassed and ashamed that our government has kept a decent and innocent man in jail for a very long time."
But it was a little more than that. A major test case of the PATRIOT Act was rebuffed, but the government accomplished what it wanted: destroying a life as an example to other foreign nationals in the U.S. Al-Hussayen's wife and children have been deported, his studies interrupted, his friends and associates alienated, and his liberty and sense of personal security taken completely away from him. How many other foreign nationals, living or studying or working in the U.S., will take comfort from the fact that he was acquitted -- and how many will take this and other cases as a warning to step very, very carefully in The Land of the Free?
In all likelihood, Al-Hussayen himself will return to Saudi Arabia, to rejoin his wife and children and rebuild his life. And in all likelihood, John Ashcroft's men will prosecute more PATRIOT Act cases with little or no substance in the future -- secure in the knowledge that, just as they consider their Commander-in-Chief above the law, the law itself can be used to harass innocent people, and nothing will be lost.
Nothing, that is, except our tax dollars, a few innocent lives, and the notion of liberty that we're supposedly defending in our War On Terror. A jury struck down a PATRIOT Act prosecution, resoundingly, but the government won anyway. The king is dead. Long live the king.
-------- police
Denver Police 'Spy Files' to Be Archived
By P. SOLOMON BANDA
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004; 8:24 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50494-2004Jun17.html
DENVER - Thousands of "spy files" kept by Denver police on members of peaceful protest groups will be archived so the subjects of the files can view information gathered about them over the past half-century.
Mayor John Hickenlooper apologized Thursday for the creation of the files, blaming "a general lack of oversight." He said police need to keep intelligence files on criminals but not on protest groups.
"Somehow we lost our way. There was no legitimate reason to collect some of this information," Hickenlooper said.
Subjects of the files included a 74-year-old Franciscan nun, Amnesty International and more than 100 public-school students. The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado said the files contain records of more than 10,000 individuals and about 1,000 groups.
The ACLU sued to stop the Denver Intelligence Bureau, a division of the police department, from collecting such information without a clear law enforcement reason, saying it had a chilling effect on First Amendment rights.
Through depositions and other court filings, it was discovered that police had kept intelligence files on peaceful groups since 1953, with commanders making up their own rules on which groups to watch and classify as "criminal extremist."
After reaching a settlement with the city last year, the ACLU had asked the city to preserve the files.
"There's a very legitimate interest for historical purposes for preserving these records, in what we hope is a now closed episode in this city's history," ACLU-Colorado legal director Mark Silverstein said.
Hickenlooper said the 21 boxes of pictures, fliers, membership rosters and notes written by investigators on individuals and groups, as well as computer files, will be kept in a nonpublic area of the Denver Public Library.
Portions of the files, such as newspaper clippings, fliers and posters, will be public as soon as they are processed, City Librarian Rick Ashton said. Files containing personal information can be viewed by those named within the documents, but will not become public for 50 years.
City Attorney Cole Finegan said he hopes a judge will formally dismiss the lawsuit this year. As part of the settlement, police no longer gather information on groups or individuals based solely on political, social, religious views, race, gender, age, ethnicity or their support for unpopular causes.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Report Says U.S. Has 'Secret' Detention Centers
Reuters
Thursday, June 17, 2004; 3:44 PM
By Sue Pleming
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49734-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is holding terrorism suspects in more than two dozen detention centers worldwide and about half of these operate in total secrecy, said a human rights report released on Thursday.
Human Rights First, formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said in a report that secrecy surrounding these facilities made "inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely but inevitable."
"The abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib cannot be addressed in isolation," said Deborah Pearlstein, director of the group's U.S. Law and Security program, referring to the U.S. Naval base prison in Cuba and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where abuses are being investigated.
"This is all about secrecy, accountability and the law," Pearlstein told a news conference.
The report coincided with news that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered military officials to hold a suspect in a prison near Baghdad without telling the Red Cross. Pearlstein said this would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions and Defense Department directives.
She said thousands of security detainees were being held by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as locations elsewhere which the military refused to disclose.
"The U.S. government is holding prisoners in a secret system of off-shore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability of law," said the report.
LIST OF DETENTION CENTERS
Pearlstein said multiple sources reported U.S. detention centers in, among other places, Kohat in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and at Al Jafr prison in Jordan, where the group said the CIA had an interrogation facility.
Prisoners are also being held at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and others were suspected of being held on U.S. warships.
A defense department spokesman told Reuters he would comment when he had more information about the report.
Pearlstein called for the U.S. authorities to end "secret detentions," provide a list of prisoners, investigate abuses and allow the International Committee of the Red Cross unfettered access to detainees.
U.S. treatment of detainees came under the spotlight after disturbing photos were leaked to the media showing U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners.
The United States is conducting several investigations into these abuses but Pearlstein said these were not enough and a full court of inquiry should be ordered.
Families of suspects detained by U.S. authorities have complained strongly about the lack of information about detainees held by U.S. authorities since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against the United States.
Pakistani Farhat Paracha said via a telephone link-up at the news conference that she tried for weeks to find her husband, Saifullah Paracha, who disappeared last June when he took a business trip from Pakistan to Thailand.
Paracha said she asked the U.S. and Pakistani governments to track him down and only learned about his whereabouts when the Red Cross contacted her six weeks later to say her husband was being held at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.
"I feel disgusted. It makes my heart sink. I feel so powerless and so helpless," said Paracha.
-------- terrorism
THE HIJACKERS
In Detail: How bin Laden Set Plan in Motion in '99
June 17, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/politics/17plot.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 16 - In early 1999, Osama bin Laden summoned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to his well-guarded compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to confide to the lieutenant that his long-discussed proposal to use aircraft as terror weapons against the United States had the full support of Al Qaeda.
That meeting, described for the first time by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, set in motion an extraordinary series of events. But the path from Kandahar to the World Trade Center was anything but a straight line.
Described in vivid detail by two captured Qaeda operatives who helped plan the attacks, the plot was more troubled and improvisational than had been previously understood.
As late as August 2001, one commission report says, Mr. Mohammed fretted about infighting between Mohamed Atta, the mission leader, and a Lebanese pilot, Ziad al-Jarrah. With his frosted hair and his fondness for Beirut nightclubs, Mr. Jarrah seemed so close to choosing a girlfriend over Al Qaeda that the plotters scrambled to line up a replacement pilot. But in the end, Mr. Jarrah was at the controls of United Flight 93 when it crashed in Pennsylvania.
Of the four Qaeda operatives first assigned to the plot in 1999, only two ended up among the final 19 hijackers who carried out the attacks. Both of them - Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi - washed out as student pilots and were relegated to lesser roles. To take their place as pilots, Mr. Mohammed turned to other recruits spotted at the camps in Afghanistan.
Mr. Atta, the Egyptian pilot who was at the center of the core group, did not join the team until after the plot was well under way. The lineup of hijackers was changing throughout the two years of preparations. Meanwhile, an impatient Mr. bin Laden began pressing for an attack as early as 2000, even if it meant using untrained pilots to crash into the ground instead of into buildings.
At the start, though, Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Mohammed envisioned attacks even more audacious than the one that was ultimately carried out, the report said.
Mr. Mohammed, the American-educated Kuwaiti from Pakistan who emerges in the commission's account as a main partner of Mr. bin Laden, at one point planned an attack involving 10 planes. Mr. Mohammed wanted to hijack the last plane himself, then kill every man on board and land to deliver an anti-American diatribe. Another version, scrapped in 2000, envisioned near-simultaneous attacks involving aircraft in Southeast Asia and the United States. Still another, discarded only in the summer of 2001, conceived of a second wave of strikes, after those in Washington and New York, that would target skyscrapers in California and Washington State.
The date of the attacks was not settled until mid-August, the report says, and even in the final days, Mr. Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another top Qaeda lieutenant, had not decided whether the fourth plane, the one piloted by Mr. Jarrah, should aim at the Capitol or the White House.
"In the end," the report said, "the plot proved sufficiently flexible to adapt and evolve as challenges arose."
The Training and the Targets
Mr. Mohammed first presented his plan to use airliners in suicide attacks to Mr. bin Laden in 1996. Then, the Qaeda leader listened, but did not commit himself.
The proposal sketched out an aerial suicide plot that seemed to come straight from a 1995 plan by Mr. Mohammed and others in Manila to blow up 12 American commercial jets over the Pacific Ocean.
Three years later, at their meeting in Kandahar, Mr. bin Laden said the plan now had Al Qaeda's full support. Mr. Mohammed and Mr. bin Laden chose an initial list of targets. Mr. bin Laden wanted to hit the White House and the Pentagon. Mr. Mohammed wanted to strike the World Trade Center. To that list they added the Capitol, one commission report said.
Mr. bin Laden quickly supplied Mr. Mohammed with four recruits to carry out the scheme, drawing from the thousands of young men who trained in his camps a few especially ardent followers he had singled out for martyrdom missions.
The four men were Mr. Alhazmi; Mr. Midhar; Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, known as Khallad; and Abu Bara al-Taizi. Only Mr. Alhazmi and Mr. Midhar stayed to the end.
Intensive training began in the fall of 1999. The recruits took part in an elite course at the Mes Aynak camp in Afghanistan. Mr. Mohammed, who had attended college in North Carolina, taught the men English phrases, showed them how to read a telephone book, make flight reservations, use the Internet and encode communications. They played flight simulator games and sifted through airline schedules to determine which flights would be in the air at the same time.
At first, Mr. Mohammed ordered Khallad and Mr. Taizi to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to study airport security and conduct surveillance of American airlines in preparation for a smaller version of the Manila plot. But Mr. bin Laden canceled the Southeast Asia plan. Khallad and Mr. Taizi dropped out; instead, Khallad became the mastermind of the October 2000 attack in Yemen on the Navy destroyer Cole. Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi were the first hijackers to enter the United States, arriving on Jan. 15, 2000.
Separately, in 1999, a group of four other young extremists were making their way from Hamburg, Germany, where they met, to the Afghan camps, as an alternative to an earlier plan to fight against the Russians in Chechnya. The four, Mr. Atta, Mr. Jarrah, Mr. bin al-Shibh and Marwan al-Shehhi, seemed ideal for Mr. bin Laden. They were Western educated and held extreme anti-American views. All except Mr. bin al-Shibh died in the attacks.
In Afghanistan, Mr. Atta quickly achieved high status, pledging "bayat" or allegiance to Mr. bin Laden, who made him the operation's leader. The two men discussed targets for the attack. One commission report, based on the interrogation of Mr. bin al-Shibh, said the two men identified "the World Trade Center, which represented the U.S. economy; the Pentagon, a symbol of the U.S. military and the U.S. Capitol, the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel."
By March 2000, the four Qaeda recruits were back in Germany researching flight schools. After learning that training was cheaper and easier in the United States, Mr. Atta, Mr. Shehhi and Mr. Jarrah left for America. Mr. bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni who tried but failed to enter the country, stayed behind as a link between Mr. Mohammed and Mr. Atta.
By the fall of 2000, the recruits were training at different aviation schools around the country. But Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi, the first two hijackers to enter the country, proved to be poor pilots.
Al Qaeda proved adaptable. In place of the two men, Mr. bin Laden's scouts recommended Hani Hanjour, who had studied in the United States and had taken flight training in Arizona. He was chosen for the plot in 2000 after he arrived at Al Faruq camp in Afghanistan. That December, Mr. Hanjour flew to California.
With his arrival, the pilots of the four planes used in the attacks were safely in the United States.
The Team Takes Shape
As 2001 dawned, all was not well among the pilots.
Mr. Jarrah was headed abroad, on the second and third of what would be five foreign trips in 10 months, to see his girlfriend in Germany and his family in Lebanon. Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi also left the United States around the New Year, but it was Mr. Jarrah, from a wealthy Lebanese family, who seemed to be having second thoughts about the plot.
The report says Mr. Jarrah "studied at private, Christian schools" in Lebanon, "knew the best nightclubs and discos in Beirut, and partied with fellow students in Germany, even drinking beer - a clear taboo for any religious Muslim." He was different from the more pious Mr. Atta and other pilots, the report says, and in his months of training in the United States, he lived separately and felt isolated.
By late July, when Mr. Jarrah headed to Germany again, on a one-way ticket bought by his girlfriend, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, Mr. Mohammed and Mr. bin al-Shibh discussed the possibility of replacing him with another man, Zacarias Moussaoui. Only after an emotional conversation in Germany in early August, in which Mr. bin al-Shibh encouraged him "to see the plan through," did Mr. Jarrah return to the United States and the team.
In fits and starts, the final lineup for the attacks began taking shape. At one time or another, at least nine candidate hijackers, all Saudis, had been dropped from the plan, the report says. But by late April, the 15 recruits who would serve in supporting roles in the hijackings had begun arriving in the United States. Most were short, slender and 20 to 28. They would serve as the "muscle" to subdue the crew and passengers.
Still, Mr. bin Laden was impatient. As early as 2000, just as the pilots were beginning to arrive in the United States, he had been pressing Mr. Mohammed to carry out the attacks, to protest harsh treatment by Israel of the Palestinians. It would be sufficient, the Qaeda leader told Mr. Mohammed, if the planes were just crashed into the ground.
At least twice in 2001, Mr. bin Laden encouraged attacks as early as May, but Mr. Mohammed deflected those requests, the report says, saying the hijackers needed more time. In the summer, Mr. Mohammed set aside his vision of attacks in California and Washington State, that would follow those in the East; he was too busy preparing for the main onslaught.
At a meeting in Spain in mid-July, Mr. Atta told Mr. bin al-Shibh that he would need another six weeks to carry out those strikes, the report said. Not until mid-August did Mr. Atta settle on the Sept. 11 date.
Since 1999, when Mr. bin Laden gave the go-ahead to the plot, the target list had been whittled down, albeit after much debate. From Boston, two hijacked planes would strike the World Trade Center, a target long favored by Mr. Mohammed. From Dulles airport outside Washington, a third plane would hit the Pentagon, a favorite of Mr. bin Laden.
But what of the Capitol and the White House? Both had been on the preliminary list, and Mr. bin Laden preferred the White House, a message conveyed to Mr. Atta. But the chief hijacker resisted. In the center of Washington, the White House might be difficult to strike; he wanted to hold the Capitol in reserve. The fourth aircraft, hijacked after takeoff from Newark, was headed toward Washington but it crashed into the Pennsylvania field. "As late as Sept. 9, two days before the attacks," one commission report says, "the conspirators may still have been uncertain about which Washington target they would strike."
In Afghanistan, some of Mr. bin Laden's most senior advisers were anxious, the report says. They were concerned that the attack could provoke an armed American response and would also anger Taliban leaders and the Pakistani government, whose good graces had permitted Al Qaeda to use Afghanistan as a refuge. But in a dispute over whether to go forward, Mr. bin Laden prevailed.
"In his thinking," the report says, "the more Al Qaeda did, the more support it would gain."
--------
Al Qaeda Scaled Back 10-Plane Plot
Attacks Evolved Amid Infighting, 9/11 Panel Reports
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45853-2004Jun16?language=printer
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were originally envisioned as an even more audacious assault involving 10 hijacked jetliners on the East and West coasts, but the plan was scaled back and later plagued by conflicts among al Qaeda's leaders and some of the hijackers themselves, according to a report issued yesterday by the panel investigating the attacks.
The date for the attacks was uncertain until about three weeks before they were carried out, and there is evidence that as late as Sept. 9 ringleader Mohamed Atta had not decided whether one aircraft would target the U.S. Capitol or the White House, according to the report. Atta finally chose a date after the first week of September, the report says, "so that the United States Congress would be in session."
The 20-page document represents the most vivid, detailed and authoritative account of the plot to emerge since the 19 hijackers killed nearly 3,000 people by crashing four jetliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside. The document, brimming with new details, features a revealing examination of the thinking and actions of al Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, and demonstrates how relentlessly the terrorists pursued the plan to its deadly ends.
It also provides the most extensive view so far of what has been learned from secret interrogations of al Qaeda operatives now in U.S. custody, particularly Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of the attacks, and Ramzi Binalshibh, the would-be hijacker who could not gain entry to the United States and became the coordinator of the plot from Germany.
The narrative portrays bin Laden as a micromanager deeply involved in planning the strikes. He chose all 19 hijackers himself and constantly pushed to move up the attacks, seeking to carry them out as early as the middle of 2000.
Mohammed, the document shows, was the overeager lieutenant who first proposed using airplanes as missiles, but whose grandiose plans were curtailed several times in the face of logistical obstacles. The entire plot, from start to finish, cost al Qaeda only $400,000 to $500,000, the investigation found.
At the same time, the report reveals serious rifts among the hijackers and within the upper ranks of al Qaeda. One of the pilots crucial to the hijack plan, Ziad Samir Jarrah, nearly abandoned the plot and probably would have been replaced by alleged conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person in the United States charged in connection with the attacks, the report concludes.
But bin Laden's fervor persisted despite opposition from some of his closest aides, who urged him to abandon the plan as it neared completion in the summer of 2001.
Bin Laden believed "that an attack against the United States would reap al Qaeda a recruiting and fundraising bonanza," the report concludes. "In his thinking, the more al Qaeda did, the more support it would gain. Although he faced opposition from many of his most senior advisers . . . bin Laden effectively overruled their objections, and the attacks went forward."
The findings were contained in one of two reports issued yesterday as part of the last round of public hearings held by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The panel, which is to issue a set of conclusions on the nation's air defense system today, is scheduled to complete its wide-ranging final report by next month.
Commission members and witnesses also warned yesterday of the continuing danger posed by al Qaeda, despite the United States' aggressive campaign to thwart it. FBI counterterrorism chief John S. Pistole said that counterterrorism officials have "probably prevented a few aviation attacks" in the United States but that some of the operatives in those plots remain at large.
Al Qaeda "is actively pooling whatever resources it has left at its disposal and, in a very centralized and methodical way, we believe that it is plotting an attack and moving an attack forward using what capabilities it has left to attack the homeland in the next few months," Pistole said.
In their account of the Sept. 11 plot, the panel's staff investigators generally concur with the FBI that there is little evidence that knowing accomplices in the United States aided the plot. The report rules out terrorist connections to a Saudi national who helped two of the hijackers find an apartment in San Diego and found no evidence that the Saudi royal family or government funded the plot. A previous investigation by a joint House-Senate inquiry raised questions about possible complicity by other Saudis besides the 15 hijackers from the desert kingdom.
But the commission raises new questions about a handful of other individuals connected to the hijacking teams, including a man recently deported to Yemen who allegedly bragged to a cellmate about helping two of the hijackers.
The panel identifies 10 candidates besides Binalshibh who were considered for inclusion in the attacks but backed out or were removed by al Qaeda leaders. One was a Tunisian named Abderraouf Jdey, who may have been part of the Sept. 11 plot or a later attack and is now the subject of a global FBI manhunt.
Al Qaeda originally envisioned 25 to 26 hijackers taking part, as many as seven hijackers on each plane, Mohammed said. One investigator said that even late in the game, Mohammed would have tried to arrange the hijacking of as many as six jetliners if he had recruited enough pilots.
As the plot evolved, however, so did the participants and the potential targets, according to the report. Bin Laden approved and then abandoned a plan for simultaneous jetliner hijackings in the United States and Southeast Asia, and he and Mohammed would later curtail the plan again, eliminating the West Coast component. Bin Laden also discarded Mohammed's wish to personally commandeer one aircraft and use it as a platform to denounce U.S. policies on the Middle East.
"The centerpiece of his original proposal was the tenth plane, which [Mohammed] would have piloted himself," the report notes. Instead of crashing it in a suicide attack, Mohammed would have killed every adult male passenger on the plane, contacted the media while airborne and landed at a U.S. airport. There he wanted to deliver his speech before releasing all the women and children, the report says.
Planning for the assaults began in earnest in 1999. The targets considered over the next two years included not only those hit on Sept. 11, but also the headquarters of the CIA and the FBI; nuclear power plants; and the "tallest buildings in California and Washington State," according to the report. Bin Laden was intent on striking the White House, while Atta and Mohammed argued that the Capitol was an easier target.
Atta told Binalshibh he would try to hit the White House but reserved the option to have Jarrah divert toward the Capitol if that proved impossible. As late as Sept. 9, 2001, the report indicates, the fourth target may still have remained uncertain.
The evidence is mixed on whether al Qaeda had a practical plan for a "second wave" of attacks, the report shows. Mohammed told his interrogators that Moussaoui was part of such a plan, which also included Jdey and another operative named Zaini Zakaria. But the latter two had backed out by the summer of 2001, according to the report, and Mohammed said that by that time "he was too busy with the 9/11 plot to plan the second wave attacks."
The investigators indicate that plan was beset by garden-variety organizational problems and personality conflicts, concluding that "internal disagreement among the 9/11 plotters may have posed the greatest potential vulnerability for the plot." Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, the plot's first volunteers, were unable to complete either English language or pilot training after entering the United States in January 2000. Mohammed would have removed them altogether if bin Laden had not favored them, the report says.
But perhaps the most serious conflict is the one that developed between Atta -- the plot's "emir," or leader -- and Jarrah, a trained pilot who would help commandeer Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. In a coded message, Mohammed referred to the two as an unhappy couple on the cusp of divorce.
Jarrah was more gregarious and seemingly westernized than his accomplices, and he pined for his girlfriend. He had married her in an Islamic ceremony not recognized by German law, and called her almost daily. The breaking point appears to have come in July 2001, when Atta took Jarrah to the Miami airport for a one-way flight to Germany.
Although Jarrah would rejoin the plot the next month after an "emotional conversation" with Binalshibh, the panel concludes that there is significant evidence that Mohammed was preparing Moussaoui to take Jarrah's place.
The panel also portrays an ongoing high-level argument among bin Laden, Mohammed, Atta and others over the timing of the attacks. Bin Laden, the report says, "had been pressuring [Mohammed] for months to advance the attack date," asking that the attacks occur as early as mid-2000 after Ariel Sharon, then an Israeli cabinet minister, visited a Jerusalem site sacred to both Muslims and Jews. In 2001, Mohammed said, bin Laden pushed for a May 12 attack date -- exactly seven months after the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen -- and later for June or July, to coincide with a visit by Sharon to the White House.
"In both instances," the report says, Mohammed "insisted that the hijacker teams were not yet ready. Other al Qaeda detainees also confirm that the 9/11 attacks were delayed during the summer of 2001, despite bin Laden's wishes."
Israeli Embassy spokesman Mark Regev said: "This is the first I've heard of any targeting of Sharon. I do know that on 9/11 our embassy was evacuated, a very rare move. Obviously, there was a perception that the embassy was a possible target."
Bin Laden also had to wrestle with demands by Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who provided al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan, to avoid direct attacks on the United States. Many of bin Laden's own advisers sided with Omar and urged him to call off the plot, the report shows.
The document also mentions a long controversial intelligence tip received by the CIA in June 2001 that Mohammed was sending operatives to the United States for a mission. Democratic commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a former Indiana congressman, sharply questioned FBI and CIA officials yesterday about that information, demanding to know why it did not prompt more investigation.
The report notes that Mohammed "was widely known within al Qaeda to be planning some kind of operation against the United States." In the companion report also released yesterday, investigators say that bin Laden was intent on carrying out attacks on the United States as early as 1992, but U.S. officials were not aware of the plans or knowledgeable about his organization until four years later.
As al Qaeda developed, its terrorist training camps in Afghanistan provided fertile ground for its operatives "to think creatively about ways to commit mass murder," the investigators said. The ideas included "taking over a launcher and forcing Russian scientists to fire a nuclear missile at the United States; mounting mustard gas or cyanide attacks against Jewish areas in Iran; dispensing poison gas into the air conditioning system of a targeted building; and last, but not least, hijacking an aircraft and crashing it into an airport terminal or nearby city."
Staff writers Susan Schmidt and William Branigin contributed to this report.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Democrats Seek Interrogation Documents
By JIM ABRAMS
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49502-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON - Republicans on Thursday lined up to defeat an attempt by Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats to subpoena Justice Department memos on the use of torture in the interrogations of suspected terrorists.
But Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the committee, and other Republicans said the administration must be more forthcoming on policies that could have contributed to prisoner abuse in Iraq. Hatch said he had talked to White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez earlier in the day and been promised cooperation.
The Democratic subpoena attempt grew out of a hearing last week at which Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to give the committee copies of department memos on anti-torture laws that Democrats said could have laid the groundwork for the abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in the war on terrorism.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., top Democrat on the panel and sponsor of the subpoena, said he applauded President Bush's pledge to get to the bottom of the abuse scandal, but "you can't get to the bottom when the top stonewalls."
Democrats were particularly critical of Ashcroft, a former Senate colleague. Sen Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said Ashcroft, in his testimony, "essentially thumbed his nose at us."
Feinstein offered to change the subpoena language to give Ashcroft until June 24 to provide some 23 documents, or advance reasons why they should not be released, before the subpoena would go into effect. But the subpoena proposal was still defeated on a party-line vote, 10-9.
One of the memos being sought, cited in a March 2003 Pentagon policy paper, stated that the president's broad wartime national security authority could override anti-torture laws, including the Geneva Conventions, in certain circumstances.
In an angry exchange, Hatch said Democrats were trying to "score cheap political points" and said voting on a subpoena was "a dumb-ass thing to do."
He said the subpoena was too broad and the White House would refuse to comply, resulting in drawn-out litigation.
Hatch added that, in addition to talking to Gonzalez, he had had discussions with Ashcroft who had asserted that he didn't have the authority to release the requested documents but would talk to the White House about providing them to the committee.
Democrats argued that without subpoena authority the administration would not voluntarily turn over incriminating or embarrassing documents. "Hiding these documents from view is the brazen sign of a cover-up, not of cooperation," Leahy said.
But Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., also a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he had talked Wednesday to Pentagon General Counsel William Haynes, recipient of several of the memos on Al-Qaida and Taliban detainees, and been told the Defense Department would supply Armed Services with several of the sought-after memos.
Still, several Republicans left open the possibility of subpoenas at a later date if the administration didn't voluntarily come forth with the memos. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., said he agreed with Democrats that "no one has been as unartful as Attorney General Ashcroft" in denying documents to the committee.
He said that while he was voting against the Leahy proposal, he was "prepared to bite the bullet nonetheless (and support a subpoena) if we don't get a fair disclosure."
On the Net:
Senate Judiciary Committee:http://judiciary.senate.gov/
--------
Excerpts From Statement by Sept. 11 Commission Staff
June 17, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/politics/17ptext.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Following are excerpts from Staff Statement No. 16 prepared for the Commission on Terrorist Attacks. Subheadings are from the original.
Origins of the 9/11 Attacks
The idea for the Sept. 11 attacks appears to have originated with a veteran jihadist named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (K.S.M.). A Kuwaiti from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan, K.S.M. grew up in a religious family and claims to have joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 16. After attending college in the United States, he went to Afghanistan to participate in the anti-Soviet jihad. Following the war, he helped run a nongovernmental organization in Pakistan assisting the Afghan mujahidin.
K.S.M. first came to the attention of U.S. authorities as a result of the terrorist activity of his nephew Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. K.S.M. provided a small amount of funding for that attack. The following year, he joined Yousef in the Philippines to plan what would become known as the "Bojinka" operation, the intended bombing of 12 U.S. commercial jets over the Pacific in a two-day period. That plot unraveled, however, when the Philippine authorities discovered Yousef's bomb-making equipment in Manila in January 1995. During the course of 1995, Yousef and two of his co-conspirators in the Bojinka plot were arrested overseas and were brought to the United States for trial, but K.S.M. managed to elude capture following his January 1996 indictment for his role in the plot.
By the middle of 1996, according to his account, K.S.M. was back in Afghanistan. He had met Usama Bin Laden there in the 1980s. Now, in mid-1996, K.S.M. sought to renew that acquaintance, at a point when Bin Ladin had just moved to Afghanistan from the Sudan. At a meeting with Bin Ladin and Mohamed Atef, al Qaeda's chief of operations, K.S.M. presented several ideas for attacks against the United States. One of the operations he pitched, according to K.S.M., was a scaled-up version of what would become the attacks of Sept. 11. Bin Laden listened, but did not yet commit himself.
Bin Laden Approves the Plan
According to K.S.M., the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings demonstrated to him that Bin Ladin was willing to attack the United States. In early 1999, Bin Ladin summoned K.S.M. to Kandahar to tell him that his proposal to use aircraft as weapons now had al Qaeda's full support. K.S.M. met again with Bin Ladin and Atef at Kandahar in the spring of 1999 to develop an initial list of targets. The list included the White House and the Pentagon, which Bin Ladin wanted; the U.S. Capitol; and the World Trade Center, a target favored by K.S.M.
Bin Laden quickly provided K.S.M. with four potential suicide operatives: Nawaf al Hazmi; Khalid al Mihdhar; Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, also known as Khallad; and Abu Bara al Taizi. Hazmi and Mihdhar were both Saudi nationals - although Mihdhar was actually of Yemeni origin - and experienced mujahidin, having fought in Bosnia together. They were so eager to participate in attacks against the United States that they already held U.S. visas. Khallad and Abu Bara, being Yemeni nationals, would have trouble getting U.S. visas compared to Saudis. Therefore, K.S.M. decided to split the operation into two parts. Hazmi and Mihdhar would go to the United States, and the Yemeni operatives would go to Southeast Asia to carry out a smaller version of the Bojinka plot.
In the fall of 1999, training for the attacks began. Hazmi, Mihdhar, Khallad and Abu Bara participated in an elite training course at the Mes Aynak camp in Afghanistan. Afterward, K.S.M. taught three of these operatives basic English words and phrases and showed them how to read a phone book, make travel reservations, use the Internet and encode communications. They also used flight simulator computer games and analyzed airline schedules to figure out flights that would be in the air at the same time.
Kuala Lumpur
Following the training, all four operatives for the operation traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Khallad and Abu Bara were directed to study airport security and conduct surveillance on U.S. carriers, and Hazmi and Mihdhar were to switch passports in Kuala Lumpur before going on to the United States. Khallad - who traveled to Kuala Lumpur ahead of Hazmi and Mihdhar - attended a prosthesis clinic in Kuala Lumpur. He then flew to Hong Kong aboard a U.S. airliner and was able to carry a box cutter, concealed in his toiletries bag, onto the flight. He returned to Kuala Lumpur, where Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived during the first week in January 2000. The al Qaeda operatives were hosted in Kuala Lumpur by Jemaah Islamiah members Hambali and Yazid Sufaat, among others. When Khallad headed next to a meeting in Bangkok, Hazmi and Mihdhar decided to join him to enhance their cover as tourists.
Khallad had his meetings in Bangkok and returned to Kandahar. Khallad and Abu Bara would not take part in a planes operation; in the spring of 2000, Bin Ladin canceled the Southeast Asia part of the operation because it was too difficult to coordinate with the U.S. part. Hazmi and Mihdhar spent a few days in Bangkok and then headed for Los Angeles, where they would become the first 9/11 operatives to enter the United States on Jan. 15, 2000.
Four Students in Hamburg
While K.S.M. was deploying his initial operatives for the 9/11 attacks to Kuala Lumpur, a group of four Western-educated men who would prove ideal for the attacks were making their way to the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. The four were Mohamed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah and Ramzi Binalshibh. Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah would become pilots for the 9/11 attacks, while Binalshibh would act as a key coordinator for the plot.
Atta, the oldest of the group, was born in Egypt in 1968 and moved to Germany to study in 1992 after graduating from Cairo University. Shehhi was from the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) and entered Germany in 1996 through a U.A.E. military scholarship program. Jarrah was from a wealthy family in Lebanon and went to Germany after high school to study at the University of Greifswald. Finally, Binalshibh, a Yemeni, arrived in Germany in 1995.
Atta and Binalshibh were the first of the four to meet, at a mosque in Hamburg in 1995. In 1998, Atta and Binalshibh moved into a Hamburg apartment with Shehhi, who had been studying in Bonn; after several months, the trio moved to 54 Marienstrasse, also in Hamburg. How Shehhi came to know Atta and Binalshibh is not clear. It is also unknown just how and when Jarrah, who was living in Greifswald, first encountered the group, but we do know that he moved to Hamburg in late 1997.
By the time Atta, Shehhi, and Binalshibh were living together in Hamburg, they and Jarrah were well known among Muslims in Hamburg and, with a few other like-minded students, were holding extremely anti-American discussions. Atta, the leader of the group, denounced what he described as a global Jewish movement centered in New York City which, he claimed, controlled the financial world and the media. As time passed, the group became more extreme and secretive. According to Binalshibh, by sometime in 1999, the four had decided to act on their beliefs and to pursue jihad against the Russians in Chechnya.
California
While the Hamburg operatives were just joining the 9/11 plot, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar were already living in the United States, having arrived in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000. It has not been established where they stayed during the first two weeks after their arrival. They appear to have frequented the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, possibly staying in an apartment nearby. Much remains unknown about their activities and associates while in Los Angeles and our investigation of this period of the conspiracy is continuing.
K.S.M. contends that he directed the two to settle in San Diego after learning from a phone book about language and flight schools there. Recognizing that neither Hazmi nor Mihdhar spoke English or was familiar with Western culture, K.S.M. instructed these operatives to seek help from the local Muslim community.
As of Feb. 1, 2000, Hazmi and Mihdhar were still in Los Angeles, however. That day, the two al Qaeda operatives met a Saudi named Omar al Bayoumi. Bayoumi told them that he lived in San Diego and could help them if they decided to move there. Within a few days, Hazmi and Mihdhar traveled to San Diego. They found Bayoumi at the Islamic Center and took him up on his offer to help them find an apartment. On Feb. 5, Hazmi and Mihdhar moved into a unit they rented in Bayoumi's apartment complex in San Diego. While it is clear that Bayoumi helped them settle in San Diego, we have not uncovered evidence that he did so knowing that they were terrorists, or that he believed in violent extremism.
Hazmi and Mihdhar also received assistance from various other individuals in the Muslim community in San Diego. Several of their new friends were foreign students in their early 20's who worshiped at the Rabat Mosque in La Mesa. One of them, an illegal immigrant named Mohdar Abdullah, became particularly close to Hazmi and Mihdhar and helped them obtain drivers' licenses and enroll in schools. When interviewed by the F.B.I. after 9/11, Abdullah denied knowing about the operatives' terrorist plans. Before his recent deportation to Yemen, however, Abdullah allegedly made various claims to individuals incarcerated with him about having advance knowledge of the operatives' 9/11 mission, going so far as to tell one inmate that he had received instructions to pick up the operatives at Los Angeles International Airport and had driven them from Los Angeles to San Diego. Abdullah and others in his circle appear to have held extremist sympathies.
While in San Diego, Hazmi and Mihdhar also established a relationship with Anwar Aulaqi, an imam at the Rabat Mosque. Aulaqi reappears in our story later.
Another San Diego resident rented Hazmi and Mihdhar a room in his house. An apparently law-abiding citizen with close contacts among local police and F.B.I. personnel, the operatives' housemate saw nothing in their behavior to arouse suspicion. Nor did his law-enforcement contacts ask him for information about his tenants.
Hazmi and Mihdhar were supposed to learn English and then enroll in flight schools, but they made only cursory attempts at both. Mihdhar paid for an English class that Hazmi took for about a month. The two al Qaeda operatives also took a few short flying lessons. According to their flight instructors, they were interested in learning to fly jets and did not realize that they had to start training on small planes. In June 2000, Mihdhar abruptly returned to his family in Yemen, apparently without permission. K.S.M. was very displeased and wanted to remove him from the operation, but Bin Ladin interceded, and Mihdhar remained part of the plot.
The Fourth Pilot: Hani Hanjour
By this point, in the fall of 2000, three 9/11 pilots were progressing in their training. It was clear, though, that the first two assigned to the operation, Hazmi and Mihdhar, would not learn to fly aircraft. It proved unnecessary to scale back the operation, however, because a young Saudi with special credentials arrived at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.
Hani Hanjour had studied in the United States intermittently since 1991, and had undergone enough flight training in Arizona to obtain his commercial pilot certificate in April 1999. His friends there included individuals with ties to Islamic extremism. Reportedly a devout Muslim all his life, Hanjour worked for a relief agency in Afghanistan in the 1980s. By 2000, he was back in Afghanistan, where he was identified among al Qaeda recruits at the al Faruq camp as a trained pilot who should be sent to K.S.M. for inclusion in the plot.
After receiving several days of training from K.S.M. in Karachi, Hanjour returned to Saudi Arabia on June 20, 2000. There he obtained a U.S. student visa on Sept. 25, before traveling to the U.A.E. to receive funds for the operation from K.S.M.'s nephew, a conspirator named Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. On Dec. 8, 2000, Hanjour traveled to San Diego to join Nawaf al Hazmi, who had been alone since Mihdhar's departure six months earlier.
Once Hanjour arrived in San Diego and joined Hazmi, the two quickly relocated to Arizona, where Hanjour had spent most of his previous time in the United States. On Dec. 12, 2000, they were settling in Mesa, Ariz., and Hanjour was ready to brush up on his flight training. By early 2001, he was using a Boeing 737 simulator. Because his performance struck his flight instructors as substandard, they discouraged Hanjour from continuing, but he persisted. He and Hazmi then left the Southwest at the end of March, driving across the country in Hazmi's car. There is some evidence indicating that Hanjour may have returned to Arizona in June of 2001 to obtain additional flight training with some of his associates in the area.
Summer of Preparations
In addition to assisting the newly arrived muscle hijackers, the pilots busied themselves during the summer of 2001 with cross-country surveillance flights and additional flight training. Shehhi took the first cross-country flight, from New York to San Francisco and on to Las Vegas, on May 24. Jarrah was next, traveling from Baltimore to Los Angeles and on to Las Vegas on June 7. Then, on June 28, Atta flew from Boston to San Francisco and on to Las Vegas. Each flew first class, in the same type of aircraft he would pilot on Sept. 11.
In addition to the test flights, some of the operatives obtained additional training. In early June, Jarrah sought to fly the "Hudson Corridor," a low altitude "hallway" along the Hudson River that passed several New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center. Hanjour made the same request at a flight school in New Jersey.
The 9/11 operatives were now split between two locations: southern Florida and Paterson, N.J. Atta had to coordinate the two groups, especially with Nawaf al Hazmi, who was considered Atta's second-in-command for the entire operation. Their first in-person meeting probably took place in June, when Hazmi flew round-trip between Newark and Miami.
The next step for Atta was a mid-July status meeting with Binalshibh at a small resort town in Spain. According to Binalshibh, the two discussed the progress of the plot, and Atta disclosed that he would still need about five or six weeks before he would be able to provide the date for the attacks. Atta also reported that he, Shehhi, and Jarrah had been able to carry box cutters onto their test flights; they had determined that the best time to storm the cockpit would be about 10-15 minutes after takeoff, when they noticed that cockpit doors were typically opened for the first time. Atta also said that the conspirators planned to crash their planes into the ground if they could not strike their targets. Atta himself planned to crash his aircraft into the streets of New York if he could not hit the World Trade Center. After the meeting, Binalshibh left to report the progress to the al Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan, and Atta returned to Florida on July 19.
In early August, Atta spent a day waiting at the Orlando airport for one additional muscle hijacker intended for the operation, Mohamed al Kahtani. As noted in Staff Statement No. 1, Kahtani was turned away by U.S. immigration officials and failed to join the operation. On Aug. 13, another in-person meeting of key players in the plot apparently took place, as Atta, Nawaf al Hazmi, and Hanjour gathered one last time in Las Vegas. Two days later, the F.B.I. learned about the strange behavior of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was now training on flight simulators in Minneapolis.
The Final Days
In addition to their last test flights and Las Vegas trips, the conspirators had other final preparations to make. Some of the pilots took practice flights on small rented aircraft, and the muscle hijackers trained at gyms. The operatives also purchased a variety of small knives that they may have used during the attacks. While we can't know for sure, some of the knives the terrorists bought may have been these, which were recovered from the Flight 93 crash site. On Aug. 22, Jarrah attempted to buy four Global Positioning System (G.P.S.) units from a pilot shop in Miami. Only one unit was available, and Jarrah purchased it along with three aeronautical charts.
Just over two weeks before the attacks, the conspirators purchased their flight tickets. Between Aug. 26 and Sept. 5, they bought tickets on the Internet, by phone and in person. Once the ticket purchases were made, the conspirators returned excess funds to al Qaeda. During the first week in September, they made a series of wire transfers to Mustafa al Hawsawi in the U.A.E., totaling about $26,000. Nawaf al Hazmi attempted to send Hawsawi the debit card for Mihdhar's bank account, which still contained approximately $10,000. (The package containing the card would be intercepted after the F.B.I. found the Express Mail receipt for it in Hazmi's car at Dulles Airport on 9/11.)
The last step was to travel to the departure points for the attacks. The operatives for American Airlines Flight 77, which would depart from Dulles and crash into the Pentagon, gathered in Laurel, Md., about 20 miles from Washington, D.C. The Flight 77 team stayed at a motel in Laurel during the first week of September and spent time working out at a nearby gym. On the final night before the attacks, they stayed at a hotel in Herndon, Va., close to Dulles Airport. Further north, the operatives for United Airlines Flight 93, which would depart from Newark and crash in Stony Creek Township, Pa., gathered in Newark. Just after midnight on Sept. 9, Jarrah received this speeding ticket as he headed north through Maryland along Interstate 95, towards his team's staging point in New Jersey.
Atta continued to coordinate the teams until the very end. On Sept. 7, he flew from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore, presumably to meet with the Flight 77 team in Laurel, Md. On Sept. 9, he flew from Baltimore to Boston. By this time, Marwan al Shehhi and his team for Flight 175 had arrived in Boston, and Atta was seen with Shehhi at his hotel. The next day, Atta picked up Abdul Aziz al Omari, one of the Flight 11 muscle hijackers, from his Boston hotel and drove to Portland, Me. For reasons that remain unknown, Atta and Omari took a commuter flight to Boston during the early hours of Sept. 11 to connect to Flight 11. As shown here, they cleared security at the airport in Portland and boarded the flight that would allow them to join the rest of their team at Logan Airport.
The Portland detour almost prevented Atta and Omari from making Flight 11 out of Boston. In fact, the luggage they checked in Portland failed to make it onto the plane. Seized after the Sept. 11 crashes, Atta and Omari's luggage turned out to contain a number of telling items, including: correspondence from the university Atta attended in Egypt; Omari's international driver's license and passport; a videocassette for a Boeing 757 flight simulator; and this folding knife and pepper spray, presumably extra weapons the two conspirators decided they didn't need.
On the morning of Sept. 11, after years of planning and many months of intensive preparation, all four terrorist teams were in place to execute the attacks of that day.
Given the catastrophic results of the 9/11 attacks, it is tempting to depict the plot as a set plan executed to near perfection. This would be a mistake. The 9/11 conspirators confronted operational difficulties, internal disagreements and even dissenting opinions within the leadership of al Qaeda. In the end, the plot proved sufficiently flexible to adapt and evolve as challenges arose.
Initial Changes in the Plot
As originally envisioned, the 9/11 plot involved even more extensive attacks than those carried out on Sept. 11. K.S.M. maintains that his initial proposal involved hijacking 10 planes to attack targets on both the East and West Coasts of the United States. He claims that, in addition to the targets actually hit on 9/11, these hijacked planes were to be crashed into C.I.A. and F.B.I. headquarters, unidentified nuclear power plants and the tallest buildings in California and Washington State. The centerpiece of his original proposal was the 10th plane, which he would have piloted himself. Rather than crashing the plane into a target, he would have killed every adult male passenger, contacted the media from the air and landed the aircraft at a U.S. airport. He says he then would have made a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East before releasing all of the women and children passengers.
K.S.M. concedes that this ambitious proposal initially received only a lukewarm response from the al Qaeda leadership in view of the proposal's scale and complexity. When Bin Ladin finally approved the operation, he scrapped the idea of using one of the hijacked planes to make a public statement but provided K.S.M. with four operatives, only two of whom ultimately would participate in the 9/11 attacks. Those two operatives, Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar, had already acquired U.S. visas in their Saudi passports by the time they were picked for the operation.
It soon became clear to K.S.M. that the other two operatives, Khallad bin Attash and Abu Bara al Taizi - both of whom had Yemeni, not Saudi, documentation - would not be able to obtain U.S. visas. Khallad, in fact, had already been turned down in April 1999, at about the same time that Hazmi and Mihdhar acquired their U.S. visas in Saudi Arabia.
Although he recognized that Yemeni operatives would not be able to travel to the United States as readily as Saudis like Hazmi and Mihdhar, K.S.M. wanted Khallad and Abu Bara to take part in the operation. Accordingly, by mid-1999, K.S.M. made his first major adjustment, splitting the plot into two parts so that Yemeni operatives could participate without having to obtain U.S. visas. He focused in particular on Southeast Asia because he believed it would be easier for Yemenis to travel there than to the United States.
The first part of the operation would remain as originally planned - operatives including Hazmi and Mihdhar would hijack commercial flights and crash them into U.S. targets. The second part, however, would now involve using Yemeni operatives in a modified version of the Bojinka plot: operatives would hijack U.S. commercial planes flying Pacific routes from Southeast Asia and explode them in midair instead of crashing them into particular targets. (An alternate scenario, according to K.S.M., involved flying planes into U.S. targets in Japan, Singapore or Korea.) All planes in the United States and in Southeast Asia, however, were to be crashed or exploded more or less simultaneously, to maximize the psychological impact of the attacks.
Khallad has admitted casing a flight between Bangkok and Hong Kong in early January 2000 in preparation for the revised operation. According to his account, he reported the results from this mission to Bin Ladin and K.S.M. By April or May 2000, however, Bin Ladin had decided to cancel the Southeast Asia part of the planes operation because he believed it would be too difficult to synchronize the hijacking and crashing of flights on opposite sides of the globe. Deprived of the opportunity to become a suicide operative, Khallad was redeployed, first helping K.S.M. communicate with Hazmi in California and later assisting in the Cole bombing, much as Binalshibh was assigned to assist the Hamburg pilots after failing to obtain a visa himself.
Hazmi and Mihdhar were particularly ill prepared to stage an operation in the United States. Neither had any significant exposure to Western culture; Hazmi barely spoke English, and Mihdhar spoke none. Given this background, K.S.M. had real concerns about whether they would be able to fulfill their mission. In fact, he maintains that the only reason the two operatives were included in the 9/11 plot was their prior acquisition of visas and Bin Ladin's personal interest in having them participate.
According to their flight instructors, Hazmi and Mihdhar said they wanted to learn how to control an aircraft in flight, but took no interest in takeoffs or landings. One Arabic-speaking flight instructor has recalled that the two were keen on learning to fly large jets, particularly Boeing aircraft. When the instructor informed them that, like all students, they would have to begin training on single-engine aircraft before learning to fly jets, they expressed such disappointment that the instructor thought they were either joking or dreaming.
K.S.M. says now that he was surprised by the failure of Hazmi and Mihdhar to become pilots. This failure, however, had little impact on the plot. The setback occurred early enough to permit further adjustment. Al Qaeda's discovery of new operatives -men with English language skills, higher education, exposure to the West and, in the case of Hani Hanjour, prior flight training - soon remedied the problem.
Internal Disagreement:
Atta, Jarrah, and Moussaoui
Internal disagreement among the 9/11 plotters may have posed the greatest potential vulnerability for the plot. It appears that, during the summer of 2001, friction developed between Atta and Jarrah - two of the three Hamburg pilots - and that Jarrah may even have considered dropping out of the operation. What is more, it appears as if K.S.M. may have been preparing another al Qaeda operative, Zacarias Moussaoui, to take Jarrah's place.
Jarrah was different from the other Hamburg pilots, Atta and Shehhi. Given his background and personality, Jarrah seemed a relatively unlikely candidate to become an al Qaeda suicide operative. From an affluent family, he studied at private, Christian schools in Lebanon before deciding to study abroad in Germany. He knew the best nightclubs and discos in Beirut, and partied with fellow students in Germany, even drinking beer - a clear taboo for any religious Muslim. His serious involvement with his girlfriend, Aysel Senguen, and close family ties resulted in almost daily telephone conversations with them while he was in the United States. He took five overseas trips within a 10-month span before Sept. 11.
Jarrah also appears to have projected a friendly, engaging personality while in the United States. Here he is, hair frosted, proudly displaying the pilot's certificate he received during his flight training in Florida. Yet, this is the same person who, only a year earlier, had journeyed from Hamburg to Afghanistan and pledged to become one of Bin Ladin's suicide operatives.
Both K.S.M. and Binalshibh have reported that Atta and Jarrah clashed over the extent of Jarrah's autonomy and involvement in planning the operation. Binalshibh believes the dispute stemmed, at least in part, from Jarrah's frequent visits to and contact with his girlfriend and his family. Further, unlike Atta and Shehhi - who had attended flight school together - Jarrah spent much of his time in the United States alone. Binalshibh was supposed to have trained with Jarrah but failed to obtain a U.S. visa. As a result, according to Binalshibh, Jarrah felt isolated and excluded from decision making. Binalshibh claims he had to mediate between Atta and Jarrah.
Jarrah's final trip to see his girlfriend, from July 25 to Aug. 5, 2001, is of particular interest. In contrast to his prior trips, this time Senguen bought him a one-way ticket to Germany. Moreover, it appears that Atta drove him to the airport in Miami, another unusual circumstance suggesting that something may have been amiss. Finally, according to Binalshibh, who met Jarrah at the airport in Düsseldorf, Jarrah said he needed to see Senguen right away. When he had time to meet with Binalshibh a few days later, the two of them had an emotional conversation during which Binalshibh encouraged Jarrah to see the plan through.
Perhaps the most significant evidence that Jarrah was reconsidering his participation in the 9/11 plot resides in communications that took place between K.S.M. and Binalshibh in mid-July 2001. During the spring and summer of 2001, K.S.M. had a number of conversations that appear to have concerned the 9/11 plot. Both K.S.M. and Binalshibh confirm discussing the plot during their mid-July conversation, which occurred just a few days before Jarrah embarked on his last trip to Germany. At this point, Binalshibh had just returned from his meeting with Atta in Spain and was now reporting to K.S.M. on the status of the plot. Concerned that Jarrah might drop out of the operation, K.S.M. emphasized to Binalshibh the importance of ensuring peace between Jarrah and Atta. In the course of discussing this concern and the potential delay of the plot, moreover, K.S.M. instructed Binalshibh to send "the skirts" to "Sally" - a coded reference instructing Binalshibh to send funds to Zacarias Moussaoui. Atta and Jarrah were referred to as an unhappy couple. K.S.M. warned that if Jarrah "asks for a divorce, it is going to cost a lot of money."
There is good reason to believe that K.S.M. wanted money sent to Moussaoui to prepare him as a potential substitute pilot in the event Jarrah dropped out. Moussaoui attended al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Sent to Malaysia in September 2000 by Bin Ladin and K.S.M. to obtain pilot training, Moussaoui told terrorist associates there about his plans to crash a plane into the White House. He came to the United States in Feb. 2001 - armed with the fruits of Atta's flight school research - and started taking flight lessons at the Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., but stopped that training by early June. Shortly after he received $14,000 from Binalshibh in early August, however, Moussaoui rushed into an intensive flight simulator course at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minn. At about this same time, he also purchased two knives and inquired of two G.P.S. manufacturers whether their units could be converted for aeronautical use - actions that closely resembled those of the 9/11 hijackers during their final preparations for the attacks. Moussaoui's Aug. 16, 2001, arrest ended his simulator training and may have prevented him from joining the 9/11 operation.
The reports of the interrogations of Binalshibh and K.S.M. regarding Moussaoui are not entirely consistent. According to Binalshibh, he understood that K.S.M. was instructing him to send the money to Moussaoui in July 2001 as part of the 9/11 plot. Moreover, recounting a post-9/11 discussion he had with K.S.M. in Kandahar, Binalshibh says K.S.M. referred to Moussaoui as if he had been part of the 9/11 plot, noting that Moussaoui was arrested because he was not sufficiently discreet and had been an exception to Bin Ladin's strong overall record of choosing the right operatives for the plot.
K.S.M., on the other hand, denies that Moussaoui was ever intended to be part of the 9/11 operation and was slated instead to participate in a so-called "second wave" of attacks on the West Coast after Sept. 11. K.S.M. also claims that Moussaoui never had any contact with Atta in the United States, and we have seen nothing to the contrary. Notably, however, K.S.M. also claims that by the summer of 2001 he was too busy with the 9/11 plot to plan the second wave attacks. Moreover, he admits that only three potential pilots were recruited for the alleged second wave, Moussaoui; Abderraouf Jdey, also known as Faruq al Tunisi (a Canadian-passport holder); and Zaini Zakaria, also known as Mussa. By the summer of 2001, both Jdey and Zaini already had backed out of the operation. The case of Jdey holds particular interest, as some evidence indicates that he may have been selected for the planes operation at the same time as the Hamburg group.
In any event, Moussaoui's arrest did not cause the plot any difficulty. Jarrah returned to the United States on Aug. 5 and, as subsequent events would demonstrate, clearly was resolved to complete the operation.
Timing and Targets
The conspirators' selection of both the date and the targets for the attacks provides another opportunity to examine the plot from within. Although Atta enjoyed wide discretion as tactical commander, Bin Ladin had strong opinions regarding both issues. The date of the attacks apparently was not chosen much more than three weeks before Sept. 11. According to Binalshibh, when he met with Atta in Spain in mid-July, Atta could do no more than estimate that he would still need five to six weeks before he could pick a date. Then, in a mid-August phone call to Binalshibh, Atta conveyed the date for the attacks, which Binalshibh dutifully passed up his chain of command in a message personally delivered to Afghanistan by Hamburg associate Zakariya Essabar in late August.
Bin Laden had been pressuring K.S.M. for months to advance the attack date. According to K.S.M., Bin Ladin had even asked that the attacks occur as early as mid-2000, after Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon caused an outcry in the Middle East by visiting a sensitive and contested holy site in Jerusalem that is sacred to both Muslims and Jews. Although Bin Ladin recognized that Atta and the other pilots had only just arrived in the United States to begin their flight training, the al Qaeda leader wanted to punish the United States for supporting Israel. He allegedly told K.S.M. it would be sufficient simply to down the planes and not hit specific targets. K.S.M. withstood this pressure, arguing that the operation would not be successful unless the pilots were fully trained and the hijacking teams were larger.
In 2001, Bin Ladin apparently pressured K.S.M. twice more for an earlier date. According to K.S.M., Bin Ladin first requested a date of May 12, 2001, the seven-month anniversary of the Cole bombing. Then, when Bin Ladin learned from the media that Sharon would be visiting the White House in June or July 2001, he attempted once more to accelerate the operation. In both instances, K.S.M. insisted that the hijacker teams were not yet ready.
Other al Qaeda detainees also confirm that the 9/11 attacks were delayed during the summer of 2001, despite Bin Ladin's wishes. According to one operative, Khalid al Mihdhar disclosed that attacks had been delayed from May until July, and later from July until September. According to another al Qaeda member in Kandahar that summer, a general warning - much like the alert issued in the camps two weeks before the Cole bombing and 10 days before the eventual 9/11 attacks - was issued in July or early August of 2001. As a result of this warning, many al Qaeda members dispersed with their families, internal security was increased, and Bin Ladin dropped out of sight for about 30 days until the alert was canceled.
K.S.M. claims he did not inform Atta or the other conspirators that Bin Ladin wanted to advance the date because he knew they would move forward when they were ready. Atta was very busy organizing the late-arriving operatives, coordinating the flight teams and finalizing the targets. In fact, target selection appears to have influenced the timing of the attacks. As revealed by an Atta-Binalshibh communication at this time, recovered later from a computer captured with K.S.M., Atta selected a date after the first week of September so that the United States Congress would be in session.
According to K.S.M., the U.S. Capitol was indeed on the preliminary target list he had initially developed with Bin Ladin and Atef in the spring of 1999. That preliminary list also included the White House, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. K.S.M. claims that while everyone agreed on the Capitol, he wanted to hit the World Trade Center whereas Bin Ladin favored the Pentagon and the White House.
Binalshibh confirms that Bin Ladin preferred the White House over the Capitol, a preference he made sure to convey to Atta when they met in Spain in the summer of 2001. Atta responded that he believed the White House posed too difficult a target, but that he was waiting for Hani Hanjour and Nawaf al Hazmi to assess its feasibility. On July 20, Hanjour - likely accompanied by Hazmi - rented a plane and took a practice flight from Fairfield, N.J., to Gaithersburg, Md., a route that would have allowed them to fly near Washington, D.C. When Binalshibh pressed Atta to retain the White House as a target during one of their communications in early August, Atta agreed but said he would hold the Capitol in reserve as an alternate target, in case the White House proved impossible. Based on another exchange between Atta and Binalshibh, as late as Sept. 9 - two days before the attacks - the conspirators may still have been uncertain about which Washington target they would strike.
--------
THE CZECH CONNECTION
No Evidence of Meeting With Iraqi
June 17, 2004
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/politics/17prag.html
WASHINGTON, June 16 - A report of a clandestine meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer first surfaced shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. And even though serious doubt was cast on the report, it was repeatedly cited by some Bush administration officials and others as evidence of a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.
But on Wednesday, the Sept. 11 commission said its investigation had found that the meeting never took place.
In its report on the Sept. 11 plot, the commission staff disclosed for the first time F.B.I. evidence that strongly suggested that Mr. Atta was in the United States at the time of the supposed Prague meeting.
The report cited a photograph taken by a bank surveillance camera in Virginia showing Mr. Atta withdrawing money on April 4, 2001, a few days before the supposed Prague meeting on April 9, and records showing his cellphone was used on April 6, 9, 10 and 11 in Florida.
The supposed meeting in Prague by Mr. Atta, who flew one of the hijacked jets on Sept. 11, was a centerpiece of early efforts by the Bush administration and its conservative allies to link Iraq with the attacks as the administration sought to justify a war to topple Saddam Hussein.
The Sept. 11 commission report also forcefully dismissed the broader notion that there was a terrorist alliance between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
The report said there might have been contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda after Osama bin Laden moved to Afghanistan in 1996, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."
In effect, the commission report endorsed the views of officials at the C.I.A. and F.B.I., who have long been dismissive of a supposed Prague meeting and of the administration's broader assertions concerning an Iraq-Qaeda alliance.
The panel's findings effectively rebuke the Pentagon's civilian leadership, which set up a small intelligence unit after the Sept. 11 attacks to hunt for links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. This team briefed senior policy makers at the Pentagon and the White House, saying that the C.I.A. had ignored evidence of such connections.
The C.I.A.'s evidence of contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq dates to the early 1990's, when Mr. bin Laden was living in Sudan. The debate within the government was over their meaning.
The C.I.A. concluded that the contacts never translated into joint operational activity on terrorist plots; the Pentagon believed that the C.I.A. was understating the likelihood of a deeper relationship.
The staff report cited evidence that Mr. bin Laden explored the possibility of cooperation with Iraq in the early and mid-1990's, despite a deep antipathy for Saddam Hussein's secular regime.
The report said Sudanese officials, who at the time had close ties with Iraq, tried to persuade Mr. bin Laden to end his support for anti-Hussein Islamic militants operating in the Kurdish-controlled region of northern Iraq, and sought to arrange contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence.
A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly visited Sudan three times and met Mr. bin Laden there in 1994. Mr. bin Laden reportedly requested space in Iraq to establish terrorist training camps as well as assistance in acquiring weapons, "but Iraq apparently never responded," the commission report stated.
The staff report added that two senior Qaeda operatives, previously identified as Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, "adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq."
Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, Czech officials said they had received reports that Mr. Atta had met in April 2001 with Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer stationed in Prague.
But the C.I.A. and F.B.I., and some top Czech officials, quickly began to cast doubt on the story, and Czech security officials were never able to corroborate the initial report, which was based on a single source. That source made the report after the Sept. 11 attacks, when Mr. Atta's photograph was published worldwide, and after it had already been reported that Czech border records showed Mr. Atta had visited Prague a year earlier, in 2000.
The evidence concerning Mr. Atta's whereabouts in Virginia and Florida in early April 2001, at the time of the purported Prague meeting, severely weakens the case for it.
The staff report's findings on the Prague meeting were also based in part on reporting from unidentified detainees in United States custody. One is Mr. Ani, who was captured and taken into American custody after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Under questioning, he has denied that the meeting ever happened, American officials have said.
--------
Panel Doubts Claim That F-16's Would Have Stopped Flight 93
June 17, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/politics/17CND-REPO.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 17 - The doomed passengers who fought with terrorist hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 probably saved "countless" other lives and might well have prevented an attack on the White House or the Capitol, the staff of the commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said today.
The heroism of the passengers was vital because - contrary to some earlier official statements and impressions - the pilots of F-16 fighters that had been scrambled to protect Washington did not have the authority to shoot down a hijacked aircraft, the report said.
Noting that officials of the North American Aerospace Defense Command have maintained that they would have intercepted and shot down Flight 93, which crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania, had it reached Washington, the staff of the 9/11 commission differed.
"We are not so sure," the report said of Norad's assertions. "We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93. Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction."
The staff report was presented at the final round of public hearings by the Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, as the independent, bipartisan commission is formally known. It is to present an all-encompassing final report of its findings on the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people by July 26.
President Bush singled out one finding of the commission staff today when he asserted that "there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," even though the staff reported finding no credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had any role in the Sept. 11 attacks.
The staff said in a report on Wednesday that there had been "numerous contacts" between Osama bin Laden and the Baghdad dictatorship, but that nothing had come of them. Mr. Bush embraced the first part of that finding today, asserting that Mr. Hussein had "not only Al Qaeda connections but other connections to terrorist organizations."
As for the events of Sept. 11, the heroism of some of the approximately 40 passengers on Flight 93, which crashed in Stony Creek Township, Pa., at 10:03 a.m., 1 hour and 21 minutes after taking off from Newark International Airport bound for San Francisco, has been widely acknowledged before.
But the importance of the passengers' contributions in fighting off their four hijackers, apparently causing the Boeing 757 to fly erratically and ultimately plunge to earth, emerged in far greater detail today.
What also became starkly clear today is that even many months afterward, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were still not fully understood by Norad officials. In May 2003, the staff report said, Norad officials gave incorrect accounts of how Norad's Northeast Air Defense Sector tracked Flight 93 and the other three jetliners hijacked that day, American Airlines Flights 11 and 77 and United Airlines Flight 175.
American Airlines Flight 11 and United Flight 175, both Boeing 767's, took off from Boston and were bound for Los Angeles. They were flown into the World Trade Center, destroying the Twin Towers. (Fighters were scrambled from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod, Mass., after it became clear that hijackings were under way, but the fighters were miles away from New York by the time the towers were hit.) American Flight 77 departed from Dulles Airport near Washington bound for Los Angeles but was flown into the Pentagon.
Had Flight 93 not crashed in Pennsylvania, it would have arrived in the Washington area 10 to 20 minutes later, the staff report said.
"There was only one set of fighters orbiting Washington, D.C., during this time frame," the report said, referring to a pair of F-16's from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. "They were armed and under Norad's control."
But they had not been told that they were authorized to shoot down an aircraft, contrary to what Vice President Dick Cheney thought at that time. In fact, the report noted, "the Langley pilots were never briefed about the reason they were scrambled" and did not know that the vice president had ordered that a Washington-bound hijacked jet be shot down.
The F-16 pilots understood their mission as "to identify and divert aircraft flying within a certain radius of Washington, but did not know that the threat came from hijacked commercial airliners," the report noted.
As the lead pilot F-16 recalled later, "I reverted to the Russian threat...I'm thinking cruise missile threat from the sea."
The confusion was illustrated in a telephone exchange between Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that began at 10:30 a.m., almost an hour after the Pentagon was struck and, although they did not know it, 27 minutes after Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania.
Mr. Cheney said he had given authorization for hijacked airliners to be shot down.
"Has that directive been transmitted to the aircraft?" Mr. Rumsfeld asked.
"Yes, it has," Mr. Cheney replied, unaware that the fighter pilots from Langley had not been so instructed. A moment later, Mr. Cheney said, "it's my understanding they've already taken a couple aircraft out."
"We can't confirm that," Mr. Rumsfeld replied.
By 10:45 a.m., another pair of F-16's was over the capital. These were part of an Air National Guard wing based on Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The pilots of these F-16's did understand that they had the authority to shoot down a hijacked airliner, since the wing commander was in telephone contact with the Secret Service and the Vice President.
But the F-16's from Andrews would almost surely have been too late to shoot down Flight 93 had it not crashed in Pennsylvania.
"We learned there was great chaos that morning," Thomas H. Kean, the former governor of New Jersey, who heads the commission, said after today's session. "This whole story is one of a failure of communication."
And "a failure of imagination," added Lee H. Hamilton, the former Indiana Democratic congressman, who is vice chairman. "Our policy people simply were not able to imagine using an airplane as a weapon."
Nearly two years after the hijackings, there was still confusion among high-level officials about the movements of the four hijacked aircraft and about exactly what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. That became obvious when officials of the North American Aerospace Defense Command testified before the commission in May 2003.
The officials said that Norad's Northeast sector was notified by the Federal Aviation Administration at 9:16 a.m. that Flight 93 had been hijacked.
"This statement was incorrect," the staff report said. "United 93 was proceeding normally at that time."
In the same testimony, the Norad officials said their Northeast sector was notified at 9:24 of the hijacking of Flight 77. "This statement was also incorrect," the report said. Rather, the Northeast sector had been told, wrongly, that Flight 11 was headed for Washington. In fact, Flight 11 had struck one of the Twin Towers 39 minutes earlier.
In their testimony and in other public statements, Norad officials maintained that the fighters from Langley were responding to reports that American Flight 77 and United Flight 93 had been hijacked. "These statements were incorrect as well," the staff report said.
In fact, the fighters had been scrambled at Langley because of the erroneous report that American Flight 11 was headed to Washington - "a phantom aircraft," as the report put it.
Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before the commission today that "we fought many phantoms that day," an allusion to the numerous false and conflicting reports that swirled that morning.
The staff report presented many details of miscommunications and misunderstandings on Sept. 11, 2001, but it did not condemn military or civilian officials. It noted that people were dealing with unprecedented, fast-breaking events.
One bright spot was what happened when all aircraft over the United States were told to land at the nearest airport as soon as possible. "This was a totally unprecedented order," the report said. "The air traffic control system handled it with great skill, as about 4,500 commercial and general aviation aircraft soon landed without incident."
--------
Pressure at Iraqi prison detailed
USA TODAY
By Blake Morrison and John Diamond
6/17/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-06-17-prison-cover_x.htm
WASHINGTON - The officer who oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad testified that he was under intense "pressure" from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last fall to get better information from detainees, pressure that he said included a visit to the prison by an aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, in a sworn statement to Army investigators obtained by USA TODAY, said he was told last September that White House staffers wanted to "pull the intelligence out" of the interrogations being conducted at Abu Ghraib. The pressure stemmed from growing concern about the increasingly violent Iraqi insurgency that was claiming American lives daily. It came before and during a string of abuses of Iraqi prisoners in October, November and December of 2003.
Jordan, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, described "instances where I feel that there was additional pressure" to get information from detainees, including a visit to the prison last fall by an aide to Rice that was "purely on detainee operations and reporting." And he said he was reminded of the need to improve the intelligence output of the prison "many, many, many times."
Rice staffer Fran Townsend said Thursday that she spent about two hours at Abu Ghraib last November and recalls that Jordan was her guide. Townsend, then deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, said she did not discuss interrogation techniques or the need to obtain more information from detainees, and neither witnessed nor heard about abuse of detainees.
Townsend said in an interview that she was in Iraq to learn more about the nature of the anti-U.S. insurgency and was particularly concerned about ensuring that whatever information was collected by various agencies there could be shared effectively. Townsend said she spent about 15 minutes in the detention areas at Abu Ghraib and remembers that her guide was "exceptionally polite." But she said that if his implication was that she was pressuring him to extract more information from detainees, that's "ridiculous."
Examination of Jordan's statement and other internal Army documents provides new insights into the intensity of the demands on commanders at Abu Ghraib to deliver useful intelligence, and the relative lack of emphasis on treating prisoners in accord with international standards. While the documents obtained by USA TODAY do not answer questions about how high approval of the abuses went, they show there was intense interest in the Abu Ghraib operations at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House staff.
Jordan said his immediate superior, Army Col. Thomas Pappas, told him at least twice "that some of the (intelligence) reporting was getting read by (Secretary of Defense Donald) Rumsfeld, folks out at Langley (CIA headquarters in Virginia), some very senior folks." Jordan testified that Pappas said pressure came from superiors "at the very beginning," well before the fall of 2003, when the documented abuses occurred.
Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday that he recalled imploring, " 'Help, intelligence community and CIA. Give us more information.' Certainly that's a fairly typical thing in a conflict." He said he could not recall "any specific conversations" about improving intelligence results at Abu Ghraib.
The Defense secretary also acknowledged that, at CIA Director George Tenet's request, he ordered an Iraqi terror suspect held for seven months without registering him on prison rolls or notifying the Red Cross, as is customary. The move delayed access by Red Cross inspectors to the detainee, a suspected member of the terror group Ansar al-Islam. But Rumsfeld said "there is no question at all" that the suspect was treated humanely. The terror suspect was never held at Abu Ghraib, but the incident illustrates the involvement by high-level administration officials in prisoner handling.
Jordan does not emerge from the documents as an entirely credible witness. Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who headed an investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses, suggested Jordan be reassigned for lying to investigators when he denied witnessing prisoner abuses, since several other witnesses put him at the scene. Even so, Jordan's testimony is undisputed on some key points, and the statements of Jordan and others dramatize the pressures and conflicting agendas surrounding the handling of Iraqi prisoners at an understaffed, overcrowded prison that was under frequent attack by militants outside.
Among the key points that emerge from the documents:
• The message from the Bush administration reaching military intelligence officials at Abu Ghraib was to gain more information from interrogations about attacks on U.S. soldiers and to learn more about foreign terrorists in Iraq. There is no indication in the documents that officials in Washington were actively reminding prison officials to treat inmates humanely.
• The guards and interrogators at Abu Ghraib lacked adequate body armor, armored vehicles and manpower to cope with a surging inmate population and the threat of armed inmate revolt.
• Inmates at Abu Ghraib did produce some highly valuable intelligence. One female detainee, for example, provided detailed information on the disguises and whereabouts of ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
How much the White House knew - or wanted to know - about the interrogation techniques being used at Abu Ghraib remains unclear. The documents reveal no explicit approval by Bush administration officials of harsh treatment. Administration officials have said they knew nothing of the behavior of prison guards who beat prisoners, forced them into sexually humiliating positions and took photos of them.
The Army next week begins prosecuting four of the seven reservists, all enlisted personnel, accused of abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. One has already pleaded guilty. Pentagon officials have said they expect more charges in the Abu Ghraib abuse cases, and investigations continue into prisoner deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hunting Saddam
There was valuable intelligence to be gleaned from detainees at Abu Ghraib. That much became clear within weeks of Jordan's arrival at Abu Ghraib on Sept. 17. A female inmate at the prison told U.S. military intelligence that her family had ties with "Black List One," the military's code name for Saddam when he was a fugitive.
The woman told one of the interrogators that Saddam "had a big white beard, that he was basically living in a hole, that he was driving a taxi," Jordan testified. The woman gave a general location for Saddam and said the ousted Iraqi dictator was driving around in a cab. Jordan thought the account far-fetched but soon learned that other Iraqis were providing similar information. In fact, Saddam was found hiding in a hole and wearing a long, gray beard. A taxi was found near his hiding place.
Yet the disarray at Abu Ghraib, a prison under frequent small-arms and mortar attack from hostile Iraqis in the area 20 miles west of Baghdad, comes through in another incident linked to Saddam.
Sometime in November, Jordan said, Army officers told him they were prepared "to do an operation on Black List One, Saddam." Superiors told Jordan that they wanted to have on call a team of four interrogators and four civilian linguists. The team would be sent quickly to an interrogation site once Saddam was in custody.
But despite the high priority, neither the prison staff nor Army headquarters was able to muster the armored vehicles necessary to safely transport this team out of Abu Ghraib through a feared gauntlet of hostile fire. It appears from his testimony that the team never was sent and did not become involved in the interrogation of Saddam. Saddam was captured Dec. 13. Jordan's last day at Abu Ghraib was Dec. 22
Before coming to Abu Ghraib, Jordan had amassed a long résumé of sensitive intelligence assignments, including electronic warfare, communications intercepts and analysis of satellite photos. He was expert at "exploitation," or gleaning valuable information from raw intelligence reports, such as prisoner interrogations. What he said his résumé lacked was anything beyond a "passing familiarity" with the rules and laws governing prisoner treatment.
While he reported to Pappas, it was Army Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, head of military intelligence in Iraq, who assigned Jordan to Abu Ghraib. He arrived Sept. 17, weeks before the rash of prisoner mistreatment. Some of the guards who testified said they were told to abuse prisoners by military intelligence officers under Jordan, and Jordan was aware of the abuse.
Though he acknowledged he was at Abu Ghraib "24-7" from Sept. 17 until he was reassigned Dec. 22, Jordan insisted under questioning by Taguba that he had seen interrogations only occasionally. And he said he witnessed no abuse. Taguba strongly and repeatedly questioned those assertions.
Jordan, an Army reservist from Fredericksburg, Va., who is still assigned to Iraq, has declined repeated requests for interviews. He told Taguba that he handled reports of abuse, including the stripping of detainees, and once told military police serving as guards at the prison to stop covering the heads of prisoners with sandbags with messages on them such as "kick me," "I'm stupid" and "I don't play well with others."
But Jordan pleaded ignorance to abuses that Red Cross inspectors readily uncovered in early October. His main mission, he testified, was bringing some order to what had been a chaotic intelligence reporting system. The pressure from "higher headquarters" was palpable, Jordan said. In addition to the visit from Rice's staffer and reports that the CIA and Rumsfeld were keenly interested in Abu Ghraib interrogation results, Jordan said Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, was pressing for intelligence that would help combat the rash of attacks on U.S. forces that summer and fall.
"I know Gen. Sanchez was in our knickers," Jordan said, "to get more information from detainees."
Although Jordan had not been disciplined or accused of any crime in connection with abuse, the documents make clear that his veracity is in question. While Jordan says he did not supervise interrogations, Army Capt. Donald Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company at Abu Ghraib, told investigators that Jordan "was very involved with the interrogation process and the day-to-day activities that occurred" at Abu Ghraib. When Reese raised concerns about keeping detainees nude, threatening them with dogs and depriving them of sleep, Jordan replied that "this was an interrogation method and it was something they used," Reese testified.
Pappas, Jordan's immediate superior, said his understanding was that the military intelligence mission at Abu Ghraib was force protection, including securing the prison from attack from outside and revolt from within. He said nothing in his testimony about pressure from Washington, though Taguba didn't ask about it. Pappas complained that Jordan was "a loner who freelances," and though he did not discipline him, he requested that he be reassigned from Abu Ghraib in December.
Jordan, for his part, accused Pappas of being too lenient in at least one case in which a prisoner was stripped to his underwear during an interrogation on Nov. 15 and then forced to walk outside, back to his cell, on a cold night. Jordan said that when he suggested serious disciplinary action in the matter, "I was told to stay in my lane" by Pappas, and that Pappas refused to start even an administrative disciplinary action.
But while many aspects of the prisoner-abuse case are unclear, there is no question that senior commanders were desperate to get a clearer intelligence picture of the burgeoning insurgency that was claiming a growing number of American lives.
Chaos at Abu Ghraib
Some of the U.S. casualties were occurring within the walls of Abu Ghraib. On Sept. 20, a barrage of mortar rounds killed two Army soldiers, narrowly missed Jordan, and injured 13 U.S. personnel and 67 Iraqi prisoners. On Oct. 26, another mortar attack killed an Army policewoman.
Guards at Abu Ghraib gradually realized they had a security problem among Iraqi police who sometimes brought weapons into the prison to inmate friends. Jordan witnessed one incident in which a prisoner opened fire, wounding a guard, and was then shot and wounded.
The picture of life at the prison that emerges is of a dirty, overcrowded complex under frequent attack by Iraqi militants outside the walls as guards struggled to maintain order within against hostile, sometimes violent inmates. Discipline was poor among guards. The documents describe military police in guard towers whiling away hours with Gameboy computers, and officers and enlistees regularly out of uniform and neglecting to salute. Jordan reported that on one inspection he encountered "apparent hookers there living with a couple of the MPs."
The disarray extended to the intelligence-gathering portion of the Abu Ghraib operation. Some units doing interrogations weren't sharing their information, Jordan said. Representatives of "other government agencies," or OGA, a euphemism for the CIA, along with special operations forces searching for high-level Iraqis, were behaving in a "cowboyish" fashion and not sharing intelligence, Jordan said.
A joint intelligence-special forces group called Task Force 121 was in the habit of capturing suspected insurgents, driving to the prison gates and "just dropping them off and leaving," Jordan said.
Seeking to shape up the intelligence-gathering at Abu Ghraib, the Bush administration ordered Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, commander of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to examine the prison in Iraq.
Miller, who would later be put in charge of detainee operations in Iraq, recommended that some of the same techniques used to break al-Qaeda fighters at Guantanamo be applied to prisoners in Iraq.
The problem was that under Bush administration policy, Guantanamo prisoners did not enjoy the protections of the Geneva Conventions, while prisoners in Iraq, other than terrorist detainees, did. Miller has vehemently denied encouraging abusive treatment.
But the report he produced from his initial tour of the Iraqi prison makes clear he wanted guards and military intelligence officers to work together on inmates in a coordinated fashion to maximize the results of interrogations.
Regardless of Miller's intended impact on Abu Ghraib, two facts emerge from the documents: Discipline did not improve in the fall of 2003; if anything, it deteriorated. And harsh treatment of a limited number of inmates became a regular occurrence.
Jordan described a "joint venture" he had worked out with CIA interrogators to hide "ghost detainees" from Red Cross inspectors who inspected Abu Ghraib in October. Five or six inmates brought in by the "other government agency," or CIA team, had not been entered on the books. On Pappas' orders, Jordan said, they were moved so they would not be found by the Red Cross inspectors.
Jordan said Pappas and CIA counterparts also reached an understanding in which military intelligence would provide translators and interrogators even though these ghost detainees were not on the rolls.
One of these detainees died under questioning, a death that has become subject of an internal CIA investigation. Jordan said Pappas was concerned about such a development and demanded a memorandum of understanding with the agency. Jordan quoted Pappas as saying, "Well, if I go down, I'm not going down alone. The guys from Langley are going with me."
This story was reported by Blake Morrison, John Diamond, Toni Locy, Donna Leinwand, Dave Moniz and Tom Squitieri and written by Morrison and Diamond.
--------
Air Defenses Faltered on 9/11, Panel Finds
Report Documents Command and Communication Errors
By Dan Eggen and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48471-2004Jun17?language=printer
The chief of U.S. air defenses testified today that if his command had been notified immediately of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings and ordered to intervene, U.S. fighter jets would have been able to shoot down all four of the airliners that were seized by terrorists and that ultimately crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart, commander of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), told the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that had the Federal Aviation Administration conveyed word of the hijackings as soon it knew of them, "yes, we could shoot down the airplanes."
The chairman and vice chairman of the commission later expressed surprise about Eberhart's claim, and a report by the panel's staff said it was uncertain that any of the hijacked planes could have been shot down.
Eberhart, who has headed NORAD since February 2000, assured the commission that if the Sept. 11 plot were carried out today, the command's planes would be able to shoot down all four planes with time to spare, because of improvements implemented since the attacks. But he warned that NORAD should always be considered a "force of last resort."
According to the commission's new staff report, Vice President Cheney did not issue orders to shoot down hostile aircraft on Sept. 11, 2001, until long after the last hijacked airliner had already crashed, and that the order was never passed along to military fighter pilots searching for errant aircraft that morning.
A painstaking recreation of the faltering and confused response by military and aviation officials on Sept. 11 also shows that the fighter jets that were scrambled that day never had a chance to intercept any of the doomed airliners, in part because they had been sent to intercept a plane, American Airlines 11, that had already crashed into the World Trade Center.
The jets also would probably not have been able to stop the last airplane, United Airlines Flight 93, from barreling into the White House or U.S. Capitol if it had not crashed in Pennsylvania, according to the report.
"We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93," the report's authors wrote, referring to an apparent insurrection that foiled the hijackers' plans. "Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction."
The stark conclusions come as part of the last interim report to be issued by the staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which is racing to complete a final book-length report by the end of next month. The 10-member bipartisan panel will hear its last public testimony from military and aviation officials today.
Among the new information contained in the latest report is a detailed reconstruction of the reactions of President Bush, Cheney and other top government leaders that morning, including a recitation of a call between the two at 9:45 a.m. after the Pentagon had been hit.
"Sounds like we have a minor war going on here," Bush tells Cheney, according to notes of the call. "I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war. . . . Somebody's going to pay."
During the presentation of the report this morning, commission staffers played recordings of hijackers' voices in radio transmissions that were picked up by air traffic controllers.
"We have some planes," an unidentified hijacker said in accented English from American Airlines flight 11 at 8:24 a.m. "Just stay quiet, and you'll be okay. We are returning to the airport."
A few seconds later, the hijacker was heard saying, "Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet." At 8:34 a.m., he said again, "We're going back to the airport. Don't try to make any stupid moves."
Twelve minutes later, the plane struck the World Trade Center's North Tower.
The commission staff concluded that NORAD had received notice of the hijacking nine minutes before Flight 77 hit the North Tower.
"The nine minutes notice was the most the military would receive that morning of any of the four hijackings," the report says.
The report also documents a succession of mistakes, wrong assumptions and puzzling errors made on the morning of Sept. 11 by air defense and aviation employees, who often did not communicate with each other when they should have and frequently seemed unsure of how to respond to the unprecedented assault by the al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.
Panel investigators also tersely conclude that authorities with NORAD repeatedly misinformed the commission in testimony last fall about its scrambling of fighters from Langley Air Force Base just north of Hampton, Va. NORAD officials indicated at the time that the jets were responding to either United 93 or American Airlines 77, which struck the Pentagon.
In fact, they were chasing "a phantom aircraft," American 11, which had already struck the World Trade Center, the panel found.
Air defense agencies "were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001," the report concludes. "They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet."
Among the breakdowns cited in the report was that American Airlines Flight 77, which was hijacked after taking off from Dulles International Airport, flew undetected by anyone for 36 minutes as it turned and headed back east toward the Pentagon.
The FAA never asked for any military assistance or notified the military about either Flight 77 or United Airlines Flight 93 before they crashed, the panel's staff found.
Nor did the FAA's command center issue an order to implement cockpit security measures in other planes that were in flight or on the ground after the hijackings became known, the investigators reported.
The new account essentially shifts the terms of the debate about air-defense response that day, because it indicates that none of the jetliners likely could have been intercepted given the time available. But the report also suggests that time to respond might have been lengthened if the status of the flights had been communicated more quickly to and among military and Federal Aviation Administration officials.
Commission investigators, based on private interviews with both Bush and Cheney and other witnesses, reported that a telephone conversation occurred between the two leaders shortly before 10:10 a.m. or 10:15 a.m. in which Bush authorized Cheney to order jet pilots to shoot down hostile aircraft.
Within a few minutes, Cheney issued the first shoot-down order, based on reports from the Secret Service of an aircraft -- United 93 -- headed toward Washington. But the reports were based on trajectory estimates; Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania at 10:03 a.m. The vice president issued a similar order at around 10:30 a.m. in response to another report of a hijacked plane.
"Eventually," the report notes, "the shelter received word that the alleged hijacker five miles away had been a Medevac helicopter."
Cheney's general shoot-down orders were issued to NORAD at 10:31 a.m., but clear instructions were never passed along to pilots in the air.
"In short," the report says, "while leaders in Washington believed the fighters circling above them had been instructed to 'take out' hostile aircraft, the only orders actually conveyed to the Langley pilots were to 'ID type and tail.' "
The Langley pilots were also never told why they were scrambled or that hijacked commercial airliners were a threat, the commission's staff found.
At one point, Cheney mistakenly informed Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that U.S. fighters had shot down a couple of hijacked aircraft on his orders.
Bush, who was visiting an elementary school in Florida at the time of the hijackings, was first informed that something was amiss when senior adviser Karl Rove told him that a small, twin-engine plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, the report says.
"The president's reaction was that the incident must have been caused by pilot error," the report says.
Shortly afterward, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who was at the White House, informed Bush that the plane was a commercial flight.
While Bush was seated in a classroom of second-graders, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. whispered to him, "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack," the report says.
"The president told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis," the 29-page document continues. Bush saw the phones and pagers of reporters starting to ring as they stood behind the children in the classroom and "felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening," the report says.
It was after he had left the school that Bush told Cheney, "We're at war."
Faced with advice from Cheney and the Secret Service that he not return to Washington immediately, Bush reluctantly agreed to board Air Force One and fly to a destination that had not yet been determined.
"All witnesses agreed that the president strongly wanted to return to Washington and only grudgingly agreed to go elsewhere," the report says.
Interviewed on CNN before today's hearing began, commission member John F. Lehman, a Republican former secretary of the Navy, said that "there was considerable breakdown in command and control" on Sept. 11 in the air defense effort.
"It's a picture of lack of preparation between the FAA and the Air Force," he said. But he said the question of whether better coordination would have saved lives is still an open one.
"I think had they been better trained and organized to cooperate that it is possible that [flight] 77 might have been intercepted, but it would have been a very, very close call even in the best of cooperation."
In his testimony before the commission, Eberhart said NORAD's ability to respond in such a situation today "is much better."
But he said he felt compelled to add, "NORAD is not the right way to work this problem. It is the force of last resort. . . . If we have to take action, it takes a bad situation from getting worse, because everyone on that airplane will die."
Shooting down a hijacked airliner "is a stopgap final measure," Eberhart said. "But where we really need to focus is destroying these terrorist networks, not allowing them into our country. Don't allow them into our airports. Don't allow them in our aircraft, and if they get in our aircraft, don't let them take control of the airplane."
He also stressed that before shooting down a hijacked airliner, "it's important for us to see a hostile act" -- a sign of intent to use the plane as a weapon -- because it may turn out to be a "traditional hijacking," or control of the airliner may have been wrested back by "brave souls" on board.
After the hearing, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana and the panel's vice chairman, said he was surprised by Eberhart's "extraordinary statement" that U.S. fighters could have shot down the hijacked planes on Sept. 11 if NORAD had been promptly notified. "He's making a lot of assumptions there about almost instantaneous communications," Hamilton said.
Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who chairs the commission, said Eberhart "believes that if such an event happened today, they would be capable of taking out all four planes, and I hope he's right."
During the hearing, commission members reserved some of their toughest questions for senior FAA officials who testified after Eberhart and other top military officers.
Lehman pointed to "very identifiable" failures by FAA headquarters on the day of the terrorist attacks, including the failure of the agency to issue a broad early notification of multiple hijackings and to notify the military of that Flight 93 was heading toward Washington.
"I think [FAA] headquarters blew it," said commission member Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic governor and senator from Nebraska.
Monte Belger, the acting deputy administration of the FAA at the time of the attacks, said his attention on Sept. 11 quickly became focused entirely on getting the 4,500 planes that were airborne that morning safely on the ground.
He said he never received some of the key intelligence that was available on the prospect of terrorist hijackings, notably a CIA briefing paper that said al Qaeda was determined to strike inside the United States and pointed to signs of hijacking preparations. Nor was he informed, Belger said, of an FBI report that a terrorist suspect, Zacarias Moussaoui, had been arrested while undergoing flight training.
Asked after the hearing if he were satisfied with the FAA officials' answers, Kean, the commission chairman, answered, "No." He added that that in view of warnings over the years, the FAA should have been better prepared for a catastrophic act of terrorism.
Hamilton said, "One of the failures . . . is the failure of imagination. Our policy people simply were not able to imagine using an airplane as a weapon." Because of that failure, he said, FAA officials were placed in an "extremely difficult and unprecedented" position.
-------- propaganda wars
Bush Tells U.S. Troops 'Life Is Better' in Iraq
June 17, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/politics/17bush.html
MacDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., June 16 - Two weeks before the handover of sovereignty to a new Iraqi government, President Bush told thousands of American troops here and around the world on Wednesday that "a democratic, free Iraq is on the way" and insisted that despite the daily toll of the insurgency the country's economy was growing and "life is better."
Mr. Bush's speech here at the headquarters of the United States Central Command, which oversees operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, came only a day after a poll of Iraqis commissioned by the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority painted a very different picture, one in which the occupation is overwhelmingly unpopular and sentiment is rising for American troops to leave the country.
Yet to the cheers of troops here, and others connected via a video link in Bagram, Afghanistan, and a hangar at the Baghdad airport, Mr. Bush insisted that over the long run Iraqis would be grateful for the occupation, which he likened to the American reconstruction of postwar Germany. After the handover of power on June 30, he said, American troops will take on the role of "supporting" Iraqi forces, and he insisted it would become clear that the insurgents were "not fighting foreign forces, they're fighting the Iraqi people."
Mr. Bush has repeatedly returned to Florida, a state that he narrowly won in 2000 and that is widely viewed as up for grabs this year, to drive home the major themes of his re-election campaign. So it was no surprise he chose Centcom, as it is known, for another of his speeches explaining his goals in Iraq.
Local television coverage was heavy, and Air Force One was parked as a backdrop outside the hangar where he spoke. His welcome was overwhelming, as it often is when he visits military bases, though this time he referred to the strain that long deployments were creating among families here.
Mr. Bush's aides are increasingly apprehensive about the drop in his approval ratings that polls indicate are largely attributable to his handling of Iraq and the prisoner abuse scandal. Publicly, they express confidence that those numbers will recover once Iraq settles down. Privately, they say, they are uncertain it will settle down in time for the election.
On Wednesday, Mr. Bush focused on the best news he could find in the 14 days before the handover. He said that thousands of schools had reopened and that electricity had been restored, not mentioning that electricity was being generated far below the levels his own administration set as a goal. He described the country as a thriving start-up venture in democratic capitalism.
"Markets are beginning to thrive, new businesses have opened, a stable new currency is in place, dozens of political parties are organizing, hundreds of courts of law are opening across the country," he said. "Today in Iraq more than 170 newspapers are being published."
Of the violence in Iraq, he pledged that "the traitors will be defeated."
"Their greatest fear is an Iraqi government of, by and for the Iraqi people,'' Mr. Bush said. "And no matter what the terrorists plan, no matter what they attempt, a democratic, free Iraq is on the way."
Mr. Bush's probable Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry, shot back with a critique of the war. "The U.S. should never go to war because it wants to," Mr. Kerry said. "The U.S. should only go to war because it has to. This president failed the test in Iraq."
Mr. Bush's speech came only an hour or so before the 9/11 commission declared that there had been no cooperation between Al Qaeda and the now-deposed government of Saddam Hussein. That alleged collaboration, and the prospect that the two could share weapons of mass destruction, was an argument the administration marshaled last year to lend a sense of urgency to confronting Mr. Hussein. And in his talk to the troops, Mr. Bush melded the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq into a single, broader struggle against "terrorists in distant lands."
His effort on Wednesday to merge those conflicts under the umbrella of a war on terror led to an immediate response from two of Mr. Kerry's top national security advisers, former Defense Secretary William Perry and Senator Bob Graham, Democrat of Florida.
Mr. Graham, who has spent years on the Senate Intelligence Committee and is considered a vice-presidential contender, said Mr. Bush had "essentially ignored the war on terror" in Afghanistan once he began to divert troops to Iraq, a country that Mr. Graham argued posed no terror threat to the United States until the fall of Mr. Hussein made it a haven for terrorism.
Mr. Perry, who has been informally advising Mr. Kerry, told reporters in a conference call that "the reality is that we do not have enough boots on the ground in Iraq to maintain security in a country as large as Iraq in the face of insurgent operation.''
--------
Bush Tried to Project Strength on 9/11
By TERENCE HUNT
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50500-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON - Told America was under attack, President Bush decided he needed to project strength and calm and not bolt from a Florida classroom where he was reading to children as crisis and confusion began to spread on Sept. 11, 2001, an independent commission said Thursday.
Initially Bush was advised by an aide that a small plane had hit the World Trade Center. As the real dimensions of the attack became clear with terrorist strikes in New York and Washington, the commission said Bush told Vice President Dick Cheney: "Sounds like we have a minor war going on here. I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war ... somebody's going to pay."
Cheney, in a White House bunker, issued several orders for U.S. fighter jets to shoot down threatening aircraft - unaware that all four hijacked planes had already crashed.
Cheney at one point believed incorrectly that his orders had resulted in the shoot-down of aircraft.
Details of Bush's and Cheney's reactions and their decisions were contained in a report from the bipartisan commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. Based on interviews, notes and documents, the report offers the most complete picture yet of how national leaders dealt with the nation's worst terrorist attack.
Bush lingered in the classroom for five to seven minutes as the children read. The Secret Service was anxious to move him to a safer location "but did not think it imperative for him to run out the door."
"The president told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis," the report said. "The national press corps was standing behind the children in the classroom; he saw their phones and pagers start to ring. The president felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening."
Thirty minutes after he walked into the classroom, Bush was in a motorcade rushing to the airport, and officials were undecided where he should go. As Air Force One climbed into the sky, the report said, the objective "was to get up in the air - as fast and as high as possible - and then decide where to go."
After two hijacked airliners hit the World Trade Center, the Secret Service tightened White House security. Cheney was rushed to an underground tunnel leading to a shelter.
Cheney and Bush held a series of telephone calls. The vice president asked what instructions should be given to the pilots of combat planes being scrambled over Washington. Bush said he authorized that hijacked planes be shot down.
Cheney's command post received word at 10:02 a.m. that a plane, presumably hijacked, was heading for Washington. It was United Flight 93 which crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside at 10:03 a.m.
The White House was unaware of the crash and was told the plane was still bearing down on Washington.
Sometime between 10:10 a.m. and 10:15 a.m., a military aide said the aircraft was 80 miles out and Cheney was asked for authority to shoot down the plane. He issued the order, the commission said. Minutes later, the military aide reported that the plane was 60 miles out and Cheney again was asked for authorization. Again, he said yes.
White House deputy chief of staff Joshua Bolten, at the conference table with Cheney, suggested that the vice president contact Bush and confirm his authorization. Cheney called the president and got the confirmation, the commission said. Cheney's group received word that a plane was down in Pennsylvania, and people in the conference room wondered if it had been shot down at Cheney's direction.
About 10:30 a.m., officials with Cheney began receiving reports of another hijacked plane, five to 10 miles out. Cheney issued yet another order to engage the aircraft but it turned out to be a Medevac helicopter and was not fired upon.
In most cases, the commission said, the chain of command in authorizing the use of force runs from the president to the secretary of defense and from the secretary to military commanders. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was briefed by Cheney at 10:39 a.m. that he had been authorized by Bush to instruct fighters to shoot down hijacked planes.
"And it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out," Cheney told Rumsfeld, according to the commission. Rumsfeld replied, "We can't confirm that. We're told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that they did it."
--------
Bush Disputes Al Qaida-Saddam Conclusion
By DEB RIECHMANN
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49470-2004Jun17.html
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Thursday disputed the Sept. 11 commission's finding that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaida terrorist network responsible for the attacks.
"There was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida," Bush insisted following a meeting with his Cabinet at the White House.
"This administration never said that the 9-11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaida," he said.
"We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, for example, Iraqi intelligence agents met with (Osama) bin Laden, the head of al-Qaida in the Sudan."
The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said Wednesday that no evidence exists that al-Qaida had strong ties to Saddam Hussein - a central justification the Bush administration had for toppling the former Iraqi regime. Bush also argued that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, which have not been found, and that he ruled his country by with an iron fist and tortured political opponents.
Senior members of the commission seemed eager to minimize any disagreement.
"What we have found is, were there contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq, yes. Some of them were shadowy but they were there," said Tom Kean, the Republican former governor of New Jersey who is chairman.
Like Bush, he said there was no evidence that Iraq aided in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, the Democratic vice chairman of the panel, said media reports of a conflict between the administration and the commission were "not that apparent to me."
Although bin Laden asked for help from Iraq in the mid-1990s, Saddam's government never responded, according to a report by the commission staff based on interviews with government intelligence and law enforcement officials. "There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship," the report said. "Two senior Bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al-Qaida and Iraq."
Bush said Saddam was a threat because he had not only ties to al-Qaida, but to other terrorist networks as well.
"He was a threat because he provided safe haven for a terrorist like al-Zarqawi who is still killing innocents inside Iraq," he said, referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is considered the most dangerous foreign fighter in Iraq and one of the world's top terrorists.
Attention on al-Zarqawi has increased in recent months as he became a more vocal terror figure, due in part to three recordings released on the Internet, including the video showing the beheading of American businessman Nicholas Berg. The State Department and other agencies that handle counterterrorism are considering raising the reward for al-Zarqawi from $10 million to $25 million, putting him on par with two al-Qaida leaders and Saddam, now jailed.
"The world is better off and America is more secure without Saddam Hussein in power," Bush told reporters in the Cabinet Room where he met with his advisers to discuss Iraq and the economy.
It was Bush's 25th meeting with the Cabinet since the start of his presidency in January 2001.
Bush said he told Cabinet members that he continues to have a "firm resolve" in Iraq, the scene of escalating violence less than two weeks before the handoff of political power to the interim Iraqi government.
On Thursday, a sport utility vehicle packed with artillery shells blew up in a crowd of people waiting to volunteer for the Iraqi military, killing dozens and wounding over a hundred. Another car bomb north of the capital killed several members of the Iraqi security forces.
"We fully understand terrorists who try to shake our will, who try to shake our confidence to try to get us to withdraw from commitments we have made in places like Afghanistan and Iraq," Bush said. "They won't succeed. Iraq will be free. And a free Iraq is in our nation's interest."
Asked whether he was disappointed that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had improperly held an Iraqi prisoner in secret for more than seven months in violation of the Geneva Conventions, Bush replied: "The secretary and I discussed that for the first time this morning. ... I'm never disappointed in my secretary of defense. He's doing a fabulous job and America's lucky to have him in the position he's in."
-------- us politics
A Contractor Calls In the Big Guns
By Judy Sarasohn
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47807-2004Jun16.html
CACI International Inc. has turned to a high-powered group of Washington lobbyists to help it deal with an investigation by the General Services Administration into whether the company violated federal contracting rules and should be banned from future government work.
The GSA could be a serious problem, since most of CACI's work is with the federal government.
CACI chief executive J.P. "Jack" London told analysts late last month that the GSA is looking into how the company used an information technology contract to supply the Army with civilian interrogators in Iraq. One of CACI's interrogators has been implicated in an Army investigation into abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.
Other inquiries into CACI's involvement at the prison are being conducted by the Army inspector general, the Defense Contract Audit Agency and the Interior Department inspector general.
London said that if there were any contracting mistakes, they were inadvertent and the company will correct them.
The Clark & Weinstock lobby shop recently registered to lobby on behalf of CACI on "General Services Administration contract issues" and "House and Senate issues." One of the lobbyists said their job is to "help them work through this."
The lobbyists on the bipartisan team include former representatives Vin Weber (R-Minn.) and Vic Fazio (D-Calif.) ; David Berteau, director of national security studies at Syracuse University; Edward Kutler, an aide to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.); and Sandra K. Stuart, assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs in the Clinton administration.
-------- ENERGY
-------- energy
Calif. Sues Enron for Price Manipulation
By ALEX VEIGA
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50519-2004Jun17?language=printer
SANTA MONICA, Calif. - California Attorney General Bill Lockyer filed suit Thursday against Enron Corp. and several subsidiaries for allegedly manipulating market prices during the state's 2000-01 energy crisis and costing Californians billions of dollars.
The suit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, seeks restitution and unspecified damages from the Houston-based energy giant whose trading practices are under investigation by the Justice Department.
Three former Enron traders have been charged with wire fraud involving price manipulation in California. Two have pleaded guilty and a third awaits trial in October.
"The evidence, we think, is very, very compelling that California rate payers should be entitled to well in excess of a billion dollars - probably closer to 2 billion dollars - in profits that Enron took that were illegal," Lockyer told reporters at a news conference in Santa Monica.
A message seeking comment left with an Enron spokeswoman was not immediately returned.
The lawsuit comes amid a series of developments in the case of Enron, the once high-flying energy company that declared bankruptcy in 2001 amid revelations of hidden debt and inflated profits.
Profanity-laced tape recordings released earlier this month revealed Enron traders openly gloating about manipulating California's power market and boasting they would bring the state to its knees.
In excerpts of the calls, some of which Lockyer played Thursday, the traders bragged about ripping off California "to the tune of" a million dollars a day and of stealing money from "Grandma Millie."
"Grandma Millie is California. I am her lawyer and she seeks justice," Lockyer declared.
The filing comes amid the attorney general's ongoing battle with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to collect as much as $9 billion in refunds from energy wholesalers that officials say the state is owed to cover overcharges it paid during the energy crisis. FERC has estimated the overcharges at around $3 billion and has collected less than $100 million to date.
"If FERC had been aggressive from the beginning we wouldn't have to file these lawsuits" against Enron and other companies, Lockyer said.
The attorney general is also attempting to reverse a decision by FERC last month requiring that California refund Enron and other energy companies nearly $270 million in overcharges from power the state sold during the energy crisis.
The sales took place after the state stepped in to buy power on behalf of three nearly bankrupt California utilities to ensure an adequate supply.
The lawsuit filed Thursday contends that between 1998 and 2001 Enron violated California's commodities and unfair competition laws by engaging in "a number of unlawful, unfair, fraudulent and manipulative trading schemes" to artificially boost energy prices and the company's profits.
Each violation of the state's unfair competition law is punishable by a fine of up to $2,500, while breaches of the state's commodities law can be punishable by up to $25,000 per incident.
The suit, the first filed against Enron by the state, accuses the company of deliberately causing congestion along power transmission lines, then reaping extra revenue for taking action to relieve the bogus congestion. The company also allegedly misrepresented out-of-market energy sales so it could sell power back to the state at a higher price.
"While the state reeled from the combined impact of sky-high power prices, supply shortages and rolling blackouts, the Enron defendants enjoyed massive, unprecedented profits and extracted millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains from utilities and their customers through a variety of fraudulent schemes," according to the 20-page complaint.
By bringing the case to state court, Lockyer said he is hopeful California can get its hands on some of Enron's assets before the company's plans to emerge from bankruptcy reorganization are completed.
"I want to get Enron and its executives before a California jury ... and let them make judgments," he said.
On the Net:
California attorney general:http://www.ag.ca.gov
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
EPA Gives $224G Grant to Study Cluster
The Associated Press
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50765-2004Jun17.html
FALLON, Nev. - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded $224,000 to an Arkansas research institute to study a leukemia cluster found among the town's children.
The Arkansas Children's Hospital Research Institute will use the funding to evaluate whether certain factors, including genetics, the environment and diet, may have played a role in the cancer cluster.
The University of Nevada, Reno, will provide administrative support for the study.
Sixteen Fallon children have been diagnosed with leukemia since 2000. The cause of the cluster is unknown despite exhaustive studies, including one by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Researchers with the Little Rock-based institute plan to build on the results of the CDC study, which identified several contaminants in the Fallon area, including arsenic, antimony, cobalt, tungsten and uranium, said Jill James, a professor with the institute's pediatrics department who will head the study.
"We remain hopeful that this research will provide us with vital information to understand the leukemia cases in Fallon," said Alexis Strauss, director of the EPA's water division for the agency's Pacific Southwest office.
The CDC concluded there was no single exposure that caused the leukemia in the town's children, she said.
"What we're saying is that it may not be a single metal, but maybe cumulatively, the exposure reached a threshold that precipitated the leukemia," James said.
Researchers will take blood samples from families in which a child was afflicted by the disease and from families in which no child had leukemia.
The study, which is expected to begin by the end of the summer, will also focus on the mothers of the children who had the disease.
"When a cancer occurs that early in a child's life, it's likely that there was a maternal exposure, that there was damage when the mother was pregnant," James said.
Senator Harry Reid, D-Nev., helped secure the funding for the study.
"It is critically important to harness the expertise of outside specialists to investigate the cluster, and the retention of Dr. James is an important step in this effort," Reid said. "The families deserve no less than the most skilled of eyes to find clues to the cause of the cluster."
--------
Shell Chief Sounds Major Climate Alarm
Oil chief: my fears for planet
Shell boss's 'confession' shocks industry
The Guardian (U.K.),
June 17, 2004
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=4702&method=full
The head of one of the world's biggest oil companies has admitted that the threat of climate change makes him "really very worried for the planet".
In an interview in today's Guardian Life section, Ron Oxburgh, chairman of Shell, says we urgently need to capture emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which scientists think contribute to global warming, and store them underground - a technique called carbon sequestration.
"Sequestration is difficult, but if we don't have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world," said Lord Oxburgh. "No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present ... with consequences that we really can't predict but are probably not good."
His comments will enrage many in the oil industry, which is targeted by climate change campaigners because the use of its products spews out huge quantities of carbon dioxide, most visibly from vehicle exhausts.
His words follow those of the government's chief science adviser, David King, who said in January that climate change posed a bigger threat to the world than terrorism.
"You can't slip a piece of paper between David King and me on this position," said Lord Oxburgh, a respected geologist who replaced the disgraced Philip Watts as chairman of the British arm of the oil giant in March.
Companies including Shell and BP have previously acknowledged the problem of climate change and pledged to reduce their own emissions, but the issue remains sensitive, and carefully worded public statements often emphasise uncertainties over risks.
Robin Oakley, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace, said: "This is an important statement to make but it does have to come with a commitment to follow through, and that means making the case to his peers in the oil industry who are still sceptical of climate change."
Mr Oakley said a gulf was opening between more progressive oil companies such as Shell, which invests in alternative energy sources including wind and solar power, and ExxonMobil, the biggest and most influential producer, particularly in the US.
In June 2002 ExxonMobil's chairman, Lee Raymond, said: "We in ExxonMobil do not believe that the science required to establish this linkage between fossil fuels and warming has been demonstrated."
Lord Oxburgh's words will also fuel arguments over sequestration. Supporters say it will allow a smoother transition to reduced emissions by allowing us to burn coal, oil and gas for longer. Critics argue that the idea is an expensive and probably unworkable smokescreen for continued reliance on fossil fuels.
Last year the Guardian revealed that ministers were considering plans for a national network of pipelines to carry millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide from power stations to be buried under the North sea.
"You probably have to put it under the sea but there are other possibilities. You may be able to trap it in solids or something like that," said Lord Oxburgh, who claimed even vehicle emissions could be trapped and disposed of. "The timescale might be impossible, in which case I'm really very worried for the planet because I don't see any other approach."
According to a 3,000m (about 10,000ft) ice core from Antarctica revealing the Earth's climate history, carbon dioxide levels are the highest for at least 440,000 years.
Lord Oxburgh said the situation is particularly urgent because many developing countries, including India and China, are sitting on huge untapped stocks of coal, probably the most polluting fossil fuel. "If they choose to burn their coal, we in the west are not in a very good position to tell them not to, because it's exactly what we did in our industrial revolution."
Bryony Worthington, a climate campaigner with Friends of the Earth, said: "It isn't a responsible attitude to say we're going to pledge to do sequestration but if the plans don't work out then the world's messed up. He's done quite a clever job by making it clear he's concerned but at the same time not pledging to do anything about it."
She called for tougher emission standards for new vehicles, as well as greater investment in energy efficiency measures and renewable sources.
A former non-executive director with Shell, Lord Oxburgh was catapulted into the chairman's role after the company was forced to reveal it had overstated the extent of its reserves. He was widely viewed as a safe pair of hands.
He followed his long-standing academic career with spells as chief science adviser to the Ministry of Defence and rector of Imperial College, London. A crossbench life peer, he still chairs the Lords science and technology select committee, although he must retire from Shell next year.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Greenpeacers Arrested in Oregon Timber Sale Protest
June 17, 2004
GLENDALE, Oregon, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-17-09.asp#anchor4
Three Greenpeace activists were arrested Tuesday after blocking a road leading to a U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) timber sale.
A three ton cargo container with two people locked to the inside and one attached to the outside was placed between chainsaws and 236 acres of old growth forest designated for the Soukow timber sale about five miles west of Glendale.
Jennifer Kirby of Washington, DC; Kingman Lim of Berkeley, California; and Anthony Villagomez of Northern Oregon locked themselves to the container at dawn. They were charged with disorderly conduct after the locks were cut off by Douglas County sheriffs.
Greenpeace is calling for a moratorium on commercial logging on public lands, and for increased protection of forests and restoration efforts. Earlier this month, Greenpeace opened its first U.S. Forest Rescue Station in Oregon. The station, on the Kelsey Whiskey timber sales 20 miles west of Galice, is open to the public. It is one of a string of similar stations that Greenpeace plans to open in endangered forests across the country.
The protest came the day after BLM officials signed an agreement with Greenpeace that was supposed to avoid conflict and illegal activity.
Joan Resnick, acting manager of the Glendale Resource Area, said the protest breached the signed agreement, but Greenpeace campaigns director Bill Richardson said the agreement applied only to the forest rescue station, and any protests are a separate issue.
"These beautiful, old trees are our national treasures and the lungs of the planet. But instead of protecting the last remaining forests, the Bush administration is attempting to destroy them," said Richardson. "If Bush continues to ignore the public's wishes to keep their forests healthy, it will be up to the American people to rescue our public forests from this imminent danger."
The BLM and other federal agencies have allowed extensive logging and road building in ancient forests across the nation destroying forests and key fish habitats and costing taxpayers billions of dollars in net losses and direct subsidies to logging corporations, Greenpeace says.
Despite U.S. Forest Service findings that recreation on public lands generates more revenue and creates millions of jobs, timber sales like the one in Oregon threaten forests on public lands across the Pacific Northwest and around the country, the organization says.
The Soukow sale, covers two million board feet of timber, is on the BLM's Glendale Resource Area. It was purchased by the Swanson Group in 2001 for the appraised price of $232,377.
----
MU alumna still held as Iraqi Ba'athist prisoner
Chicago Tribune
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.columbiatribune.com/2004/Jun/20040617News020.asp
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Ahmed al-Obeidi tied the blindfold over his eyes, and a U.S. military officer tugged at the cloth to make sure it was tight.
For the next 10 minutes, the 52-year-old Iraqi mathematician recalled, he sat in darkness next to his 70-year-old mother-in-law, also blindfolded, on the way to a high-security prison to see his wife. She wasn't just any prisoner: Huda Amash was the notorious five of hearts in the deck of cards used by soldiers to hunt down the 55 most wanted members of Saddam Hussein's regime.
"She still had her sharpness, that's all," al-Obeidi said, recounting the elaborate September visit to the secretive detention center near Baghdad International Airport. "When it comes to her health, it's deteriorating."
Amash's legal status hasn't fared much better. Since her arrest in May 2003, the woman known as "Mrs. Anthrax" for her alleged role in building Iraq's biological weapons program has been held as a prisoner of war, captured on Iraqi soil, held prisoner in foreign custody in a country without a sovereign government.
No one yet knows what will happen to her or the other high-value targets captured by U.S. forces in the wake of the war and kept at a military prison in sunless, solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, according to a February Red Cross report.
Their fate is being worked out. But a question remains: When the U.S.-led coalition transfers limited sovereignty to Iraq's new interim government June 30, what will become of the high-ranking Ba'athists being held by the coalition? "It's not entirely clear how the issue will be resolved," said Feisal Istrabadi, a legal adviser to a member of Iraq's recently dissolved Governing Council who helped draft the country's interim constitution.
Since his wife's capture, al-Obeidi has tried to persuade authorities to put her under house arrest. Amash is a cancer survivor, he said, who suffers from many other medical ills. So far he has been unsuccessful.
"There isn't any person in charge you can talk to and get an answer," al-Obeidi said one recent evening in his backyard garden on the banks of the Tigris River.
The prison where al-Obeidi said Amash is being kept is considered so sensitive that U.S. military authorities in Baghdad are reluctant to acknowledge its existence. In answer to queries about Amash, a military spokesman refused to confirm she was being held near the airport or whether she had received visitors there.
When Amash was captured, U.S. officials viewed her detention as a giant step toward finding Saddam's hidden weapons of mass destruction. They assumed the University of Missouri-Columbia graduate - sought for years for questioning by U.N. weapons inspectors - would be able to reveal the whereabouts of the alleged weapons programs.
A year later, no significant weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. "The whole thing started with a lie, the lie of WMD," al-Obeidi said.
Iraqis working on a special tribunal created to try high-ranking Ba'athists - including Saddam - say they expect the high-level detainees to be transferred to Iraqi custody as soon as the country's fledgling security forces have the means to keep them detained. "The plan is to issue arrest warrants very soon and then begin the process of taking control of the individuals," said Salem Chalabi , a Northwestern University Law School graduate who is executive director of the Iraqi Special Tribunal.
Chalabi said he has hired investigative judges and prosecutors to collect evidence against roughly 100 detainees, including the 55 named in the deck of cards. That number might rise or fall depending on the evidence gathered and the outcome of any plea bargaining, he said.
Once evidence is collected, the judges will issue indictments against the detainees, Chalabi said. Until then, they could remain held without charge as POWs under the control either of Iraqis or coalition forces.
Chalabi said the detainees could be indicted under an international law called "command responsibility," which holds high commanders responsible for abuses that occur under their authority.
When Amash was captured, she was a member of the Ba'ath Party Regional Command, the country's top policy-making body. The position could make her eligible for prosecution under the "command responsibility" law.
It also has tainted her in the eyes of many Iraqis, who associate her with the highest tier of a hated regime.
Her supporters paint her as a positive force for women's rights in Iraq and point to her many accomplishments in biology, particularly her work studying the effects of depleted uranium. She has written extensively on the subject.
Al-Obeidi has appealed to tribal leaders to secure his wife's release, he said. They put him in contact with a U.S. military official. On a clear day in September, he met the official at the Republican Palace, which had become the epicenter of coalition operations. He brought his mother-in-law and two headscarves to serve as blindfolds. They rode in a sport utility vehicle toward the airport, stopping along the road to put on the blindfolds.
When the blindfolds were removed, al-Obeidi was standing in a pleasant room filled with sofas, a dining table and chairs. He visited Amash for two hours, eating hamburgers with ketchup and french fries while she inquired about the health of various family members within earshot of an Iraqi translator stationed in the room.
"She said, 'I tried to do the right thing for my family. I never thought something like this would happen,' " al-Obeidi recalled.
He repeated the trip in February, this time bringing his son, daughter, granddaughter and his wife's sister as well as his mother-in-law to the meeting. She was 25 pounds lighter, he said, after months spent locked up in solitary confinement. She had been to see doctors while in prison but still suffered from kidney problems and chronic arthritis. "She can hardly move," al-Obeidi said.
----
Ithaca Saboteurs Set Free
By Joe Sabia
FrontPageMagazine.com
June 17, 2004
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13805
A jury in upstate
New York has set a group of militant anti-war activists free. Ignoring the evidence of multiple crimes, jurors decided to engage in jury nullification so as to express their contempt for the United States military and the war in Iraq.
In March 2003, four members of the militant Marxist organization "Ithaca Catholic Worker" vandalized a military recruiting center. As reported in FrontPage Magazine last year, an eyewitness to the crime stated:
"[Members of the Catholic Worker] entered the Cayuga military recruiting office with jars filled with human blood which they poured upon the walls, door, bay window, on the flag, on the stand-up cut-outs of smiling military recruits, and over a body bag which they had brought representing the American soldiers who may die."
The facts of the case are incontrovertible. Teresa B. Grady, 38, Clare Grady, Peter De Mott, 57, and Daniel Burns, 43 admit their crimes. In fact, Clare Grady is quite brazen in her admission of guilt, telling the Ithaca Journal, "We are willing to testify to what we know and what we've done, any place at any time."
The defendants were confident as they sat in the Tompkins County Courthouse, knowing that a jury of their peers - peaceniks, communists, and America-haters - would never vote to convict them. As expected, the trial ended with a hung jury. Tompkins County's impotent District Attorney, George Dentes, announced that he was dismissing all charges against the defendants.
To his credit, Dentes is handing the case off to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York, who has agreed to begin federal prosecution. In announcing his judgment, Dentes admitted to the Ithaca Journal, "If we used the same evidence, and had the same rulings, during a trial in Tompkins County Court, we'd probably end up with another hung jury." However, with a federal trial, the jury will be comprised of residents outside of Ithaca, where citizens actually care about enforcing the law.
The anti-war criminals are being aided by Loyola University law professor Bill Quigley, who hopes that troubles in Iraq will continue so as to increase sympathy for the defendants. Gleefully, Quigley told the press, "I think the situation in Iraq is less popular now than it was two months ago."
The rule of law is under assault in Ithaca because this city is a hotbed of vile anti-Americanism. This hatred has intensified in recent years, with little opposition from fair-minded Democrats. For example, Ithaca community leader Peter Demott had this vile reaction to the September 11 attacks:
"The plane that crashed into the Pentagon - and presumably the other three airplanes also - had depleted uranium on them that was being used as ballast. And when those planes crashed, of course, that depleted uranium was dispersed into the air and soil and water and into the fire that resulted...And once again, it is kind of an example to me of how the airline industry and how this Corporate America is always interested in putting profit ahead of the people, ahead of the health of human family."
And an associate of the Ithaca Catholic Worker, identified only as Maryann on a publicity video, announced:
"My 21-year-old son understands that what has happened at the Trade Centers is in response to many, many years of very severe U.S. policy that has affected those in other countries--citizens who have felt the brunt of our oppression, of our military build-up, of our military strikes against innocent people who are angry because of what we have done for many years."
In this context, it is quite easy to see why anti-war criminals cannot be convicted in Ithaca. The city has been poisoned. The mayor, Carolyn Peterson, is a socialist dimwit, laughed at by both Republicans and Democrats alike. The city council is comprised entirely of kooky far-leftists who publicly opposed the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, and any action taken by the United States military generally.
While conservatives rightly shy away from federal involvement in local affairs, the situation in Ithaca is approaching that of the stubborn southern cities that refused to enforce the Civil Rights Act in the late 1960s. If local leaders cannot enforce the law of the land because of a depraved citizenry, the state and federal governments must step in to do it for them.
Ithaca has given its stamp of approval to individuals who break into military recruiting offices, soak the American flag in human blood, and destroy private property. The time for passivity has passed.
Not only should the feds see to it that the four criminals are convicted at trial, but the Justice Department should consider prosecuting the Ithaca Catholic Worker under the RICO statute. This criminal enterprise must be dismantled not only to prevent further Ithaca Catholic Worker crimes, but to put the fear of God into the next violent anti-war group: We're coming for you next.
--------
Protesters' Morning Greeting for Mayor: Where's Our Permit?
June 17, 2004
By WINNIE HU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/17/nyregion/17protest.html
When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg arrived at City Hall yesterday morning, he breezed by the usual array of police officers, lobbyists and government aides gathered outside. But one group was not so ready to let him pass by.
Several members of United for Peace and Justice, a protest group that has been battling the Bloomberg administration for the right to hold a rally in Central Park during the Republican National Convention, seized the opportunity to ask the mayor when they would receive a permit. The mayor said, "All you've got to do is apply."
But a few people called out that they had indeed already applied, about a year ago. The mayor then responded, "All you've got to do is wait."
The mayor added that the Police Department would now look at the applications and find a way to accommodate protesters. The city had asked groups to apply for permits by June 15, but is now saying they can submit applications until a month before the convention, which begins on Aug. 30; applications from a dozen groups have already been received, officials said.
"Until we get them all, we just can't do that," the mayor told the protesters, referring to when the permits would be issued. "You're asking something unreasonable. Now we have them, and we will give everybody a permit so that they can express themselves."
But the mayor's answer did not satisfy Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice. Her group's original application for a permit in Central Park was denied by city officials, and the group is fighting that decision.
As the mayor walked away, she continued to call after him. Afterward, she complained to reporters, "I guess that's the mayor's idea of a conversation: he talks to us, then he turns his back and walks away."
The exchange between the mayor and the protesters came just before the issue was taken up by the City Council's Governmental Operations Committee. More than 75 people filled the hearing room, and a sergeant-at-arms turned away latecomers at the door.
During the three-hour hearing, the committee voted to approve a resolution calling on Mayor Bloomberg and his administration to uphold civil liberties, expedite the permit process, ban the excessive use of police barricades and allow demonstrators to protest close to Madison Square Garden, the site of the convention.
-------
Democrats Warm To 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
By Tina Brown
Thursday, June 17, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48059-2004Jun16.html
After more than a week of round-the-clock Reaganolotry, New York was so ready for the rollout of Michael Moore's Bush-bashing movie. I mean really, really ready. There was such demand to get into a small screening at the Beekman Theatre on Monday night that executive producer and host Harvey Weinstein moved the celebrity crowd to the thousand-seat Ziegfeld Theatre. This was a canny PR move. There was only a one-week frenzy window between Gippermania and the pending Clinton memoir, and Weinstein flew right through it.
Disney's refusal to distribute "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a perfect ploy to dramatize one of Moore's favorite themes, the suffocating power of big media. Attempted suppression is a promotional must these days. Bill O'Reilly's lawsuit put Al Franken on the bestseller list. The distributors who ran away from Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" made him a miracle worker at the box office. Now we have the Moore/Disney psychodrama. We have gone from the marketing Calvary of Christ to Michael Moore's Messiah complex.
The buzz is deafening. Weinstein had the wheeze of screening "Fahrenheit 9/11" with a different celebrity host virtually every night this week and next before the movie opens wide on June 25 in 700 theaters. Monday night's co-host with the Weinstein Brothers was legal eagle David Boies, and a backup cast including Richard Gere, Leonardo DiCaprio, Spike Lee, Tim Robbins, Philip Seymour Hoffman -- all the cool dudes. Tonight it's Viacom's new co-president, Tom Freston, along with Showtime boss Matt Blank. Next week, Blackstone Chairman Pete Peterson and his wife, Joan Ganz Cooney, corral the Park Avenue power players. If these screenings were scenes in a Michael Moore movie, the filmmaker would be hanging around outside with a camera crew trying for ambush interviews.
It speaks to how desperate New York Democrats feel that a New York premiere audience filled not just with credulous movie stars but top-of-the-line editors, First Amendment lawyers and sober-suited Wall Street donors was so forgiving of Moore's raucous cartoon history. The blase crowd that usually races out as the credits roll listened in respectful silence as Moore lumbered to the stage in that damn Michigan State University baseball cap and hackneyed leather jacket to pontificate on the importance of getting out the vote.
Nobody raised a question about his film's wacky insinuations that Bush let Taliban thugs escape because of some previously concocted deal in Texas or let Osama bin Laden get away because of deep Bush connections to the bin Laden family. In Moore's version of Iraq nobody was hanging from a meat hook in Saddam Hussein's jails. Baghdad was a happy city where children frolicked in the streets until boom! we blew them away. The invasion of Afghanistan? That was just a cover for running an oil pipeline across the country. You can argue that conspiracy theories are redundant since the Bush administration's malfeasance on the war is all there right on the surface, but, hey, this crowd feels that they're entitled to some lefty exuberance after biting their tongues through a week of Republican mythmaking. Their Bush-loathing is so intense there is a pent-up longing for excess, a desire to be swept with emotions the cautious Democratic nominee can't arouse. They were so jazzed by Moore's ripsnorting assault, the discussion on the sidewalk afterward was about just one thing: Will it help with the swing vote?
Probably not, but it will certainly pump the base. The movie has such big, noisy energy that it roars right over its own potholes with unforgettable video epiphanies. Who could not be grateful to Moore for the stolen eve-of-war footage of Paul Wolfowitz spitting on his comb before running it through his hair? Political attacks are all about the defining details. We will remember Wolfowitz grooming himself for a TV moment long after his geopolitical game plan to remake the Middle East has sunk into the mists of history.
Ditto the unforgettable camcorder scene of Bush on the morning of 9/11. Moore was able to get from the Florida Elementary School the video nobody else had bothered to ask for of the president sitting frozen in the classroom reading a book to the kiddies. And continuing to sit with a catatonic stare for a full seven minutes under the ticking clock after Andy Card enters and whispers to him the news of the attacks. Our commander in chief is paralyzed -- by what? Fear? Indecision? Panic? An unbreakable interest in the plot of "My Pet Goat"? Our conjecture about what must be going through his mind as his eyes dart from side to side at this epic moment (Dick Clarke's neglected terrorism memo?) is fueled by all the instant histories riding the bestseller list.
The usual arguments against Moore -- that he's intellectually dishonest, that he's a master of the cheap shot, that he's a loudmouthed neo-Marxist boor -- are beside the point against the power of such moments. After the weapons of mass destruction fallacy and the Saddam-did-9/11 fictions, it's payback time. The left can have a Rush Limbaugh, too.
Those squeamish about Michael Moore's methodology, however, should check out the other documentary that opened last night, "The Hunting of the President," produced by Clinton friend Harry Thomason. It tracks the network of Arkansas dirt-diggers who peddled Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Whitewater to the manipulative right-wing fringe. Thomason's movie, with its revelations of how Susan McDougal was pressured to lie to incriminate Hillary Clinton, is substantively more damning than "Fahrenheit 9/11." Moore fans can say his prosecution of Bush only employs the same paranoid technique of reasoning by juxtaposition that the Vince-Foster-was-murdered brigade used to torture the Clintons all those years. That is true, but it doesn't appeal to the Democrats less emotionally overwrought than Leonardo DiCaprio.
Hollywood agent and Kerry supporter Tom Baer told me, "Kerry should flee Moore's movie. It's Goebbels all over again." And former Clinton speechwriter Mark Katz put it this way: "I hold my guys to a higher standard," he said quietly. "That's why they're my guys."
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.