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NUCLEAR
Workers exposed to radiation at Nev. base
India, Pakistan Discuss Nuke Flare-Up Risk
India, Pakistan to release prisoners
India, Pakistan Discuss Cutting Nuclear War Risk
India and Pakistan Kick Off Nuclear Talks
Iran backs away from threat to resume uranium enrichment
U.N. Agency Rebukes Iran on Nuclear Activity
Iran Weighs Restarting Uranium Enrichment
Iran Says to Review Uranium Enrichment Suspension
Pyongyang may still see reason
MISSILE DEFENCE AGREEMENT TO BE SIGNED IN US NEXT MONTH
Nuclear attack by 'dirty bomb' likely
Workers Exposed to Radiation at Nev. Base
MILITARY
Taliban Attack Afghan Government Office
Anatomy of two arms dealers
Tension Persists in Hong Kong
EU leaders face hard sell on constitution
EU Leaders Frame First Constitution
Leaders Reach Agreement on a European Constitution
A U.S. Airstrike Kills at Least 22 in Falluja
At Least 20 Said Killed in Falluja Airstrike
Iraqi officials ponder use of harsh Saddam-era laws
Marshall Law in Iraq
Hamas Scrambles for Role in Running Gaza
Israeli Copters Strike Gaza Metal Workshop
Islamic Radicals Behead American In Saudi Arabia
Acting on Threat, Saudi Militant Group Kills Captive American
No Saudi Payment to Qaeda Is Found
High-Profile Attacks Force Pakistan to Confront Extremists
Russia Warned U.S. About Iraq, Putin Says
Putin Says U.S. Was Alerted to Possible Attacks by Iraq
A Man of Violence, or Just '110 Percent' Gung-Ho?
The Cold War's Classified Skyhook Program
Marine Commander Admits Iraqi Unit Has Been Erratic
China Won't Support U.S. On Exemption From Court
Annan Against U.S. Peacekeeper Immunity
U.S. Charges Man in Afghan Death
US Lacks Votes for Immunity from War Crimes Court
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. being forced to transfer some units
Capitol Plane Scare Blamed On Lack of Communication
House Rejects Extra Security Aid to High-Risk Cities
Experts Say 'Dirty Bomb' Attack Likely
Terrorist Who Left a Trail of Bloodshed Is Reportedly Killed
9/11 Plot Reportedly Hatched in 1996
POLITICS
Bush Adviser Toured Abu Ghraib
Bush Aide Testifies in Leak Probe
Chief White House Lawyer Gives Testimony in Leak Case
9/11 Panel Invites Cheney to Give Evidence
Marshall Law in Iraq
9/11 Reporter Reviews Facts in Michael Moore Film
Democratic Governors Criticize Bush
ACTIVISTS
One injured in Turkish demo against upcoming NATO summit
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Workers exposed to radiation at Nev. base
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Saturday, June 19, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=Radiation%20Exposure
FALLON, Nev. -- At least two Boeing Co. workers have been exposed to potentially harmful doses of radiation at the Fallon Naval Air Station, company officials confirmed.
The two men were exposed over a three-month period while working around an X-ray machine used to check for metal fatigue on Navy fighter jets. The machine was staying on when it appeared to be turned off, Boeing officials said Thursday.
Base and company officials were still trying to determine how the malfunction happened and the exact amount of radiation each man received. Meanwhile, officials have stopped X-raying aircraft at the base.
"We are working closely with the Navy in investigating this incident, as well as providing the necessary health care for those employees involved," Boeing spokesman Paul Guse told the Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle Standard.
An official at the Navy Radiological Affairs Support Office declined to comment.
The problem was detected in late May, more than two months after radiation badges showing high levels of exposure were sent to a private lab, base spokesman Zip Upham said.
Guse said four employees were exposed to radiation but only two workers received high enough doses to cause physical symptoms. The two men have been examined at a California hospital and allowed to return to work, but the full health effects of the exposure are not yet known, he said.
The machine is owned and maintained by the Navy but operated by the civilian employees. About 200 Boeing employees maintain the jets at the base, about 60 miles east of Reno.
-------- india / pakistan
India, Pakistan Discuss Nuke Flare-Up Risk
By NIRMALA GEORGE
Associated Press
June 19, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/INDIA_PAKISTAN?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
NEW DELHI (AP) -- India and Pakistan opened negotiations Saturday to reduce the risk of an accidental nuclear conflict, six years after the neighboring rivals, which have gone to war three times since 1947, conducted atomic tests and raised fears of a South Asian conflagration.
Experts from both sides focused on a ban on further tests and preventing the accidental or non-authorized use of nuclear weapons, an Indian official said on condition of anonymity.
"The two delegations discussed how to formulate a joint strategy as a result of which the possibility of a nuclear conflict or nuclear crisis is reduced," Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan told private Geo television network in an interview.
India and Pakistan carried out nuclear tests in May 1998, provoking military and economic sanctions by the United States and its allies. International fears for a nuclear confrontation were exacerbated when the two countries' forces fought in the Himalayas in 1999, and came close to war again in mid-2002.
The talks are only the first stage in the nuclear dialogue.
Saturday's meeting was led by top foreign ministry officials, Sheel Kant Sharma from India and Tariq Usman Haider of Pakistan.
The two delegations "exchanged views on their respective security concepts and nuclear doctrines," and agreed to "work toward confidence building measures," Navtej Sarna, India's external affairs ministry spokesman, said in a statement.
The statement said both sides were upbeat and determined to produce results. The talks will conclude on Sunday.
India's new government is seen as pursuing peace initiatives started by the previous government of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, ousted from power in April-May national elections.
Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesman Khan said results of the talks would be forwarded to foreign secretaries of the two countries meeting later this month in New Delhi.
Currently, the two countries have conflicting nuclear policies.
India - which enjoys a substantial advantage in conventional weapons over Pakistan - says it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons. Pakistan has not committed to a no-first-strike doctrine.
The talks are being held less than five months after Abdul Qadeer Khan - long regarded as a national hero for helping Pakistan obtain a nuclear deterrent against rival India - confessed to transferring sensitive nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.
He received a pardon from Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Pakistan, a key U.S. ally. Pakistan denies any official involvement in nuclear proliferation, although doubts remain over how top military and government officials remained in the dark for years over Khan's activities.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars, two of them over control of the Himalayan territory of Kashmir since their independence from Britain in 1947.
In February 1999, India's then Prime Minister Vajpayee visited the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore, where the two sides signed a preliminary agreement to pursue a reduction of nuclear risks through a series of confidence-building steps.
These included advance notification of missile tests, an agreement both sides have adhered to.
But plans to hold further nuclear talks were thwarted as relations deteriorated after an attack on the Indian Parliament in December 2001, which New Delhi blamed on Pakistan's spy agency and Pakistan-based militant groups. Both the agency and the militant groups denied the charge.
----
India, Pakistan to release prisoners
June 19, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040619-122510-2030r.htm
Lahore, Pakistan, Jun. 19 -- Pakistan and India agreed Saturday to release prisoners who have completed their terms but are still in jails.
Officials said most of the prisoners are civilians who mistakenly crossed the border that separates the two countries.
Senior military officials from the two neighboring states met in the Pakistani border town of Wagah Saturday and exchanged a list of such prisoners.
India said it was willing to release 14 Pakistanis, while Pakistan agreed to release eight Indians.
The two sides also agreed to release within 48 hours women, children and mentally disturbed people found on the wrong side of the border.
At some places the border is not marked and villagers who live in the area often cross the border by mistake. If discovered, they are arrested and sentenced to imprisonment for visa violations.
India and Pakistan have taken several steps to improve bilateral relations since January, when they agreed to resolve their differences through talks.
----
India, Pakistan Discuss Cutting Nuclear War Risk
June 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-southasia.html
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India and Pakistan are due Sunday to wrap up their first talks about easing the risk of nuclear war since becoming nuclear powers in 1998, and two years after almost going to war over Kashmir.
Following the first of two days of meetings in New Delhi, the Pakistani team also called on Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh Saturday, the highest level meeting since India's Communist-backed Congress coalition came to power last month.
In brief comments, Indian officials, who took no questions, told reporters the two sides wanted results and that their talks included the different nuclear and security policies of India and Pakistan, as well as ``areas of convergence.''
But the officials gave no details.
The groundbreaking talks set the scene for a planned first meeting between Singh and Pakistani counterpart Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri in China Monday, where they will discuss a range of issues on the sidelines of a regional conference.
And the chief bureaucrats of both foreign ministries are due to meet next Sunday to talk about key disputes, including the row over Kashmir that has triggered two of the neighbors' three wars and brought them close to another in mid-2002.
``It is very important to understand each other'svocabulary and thinking,'' Amitabh Mattoo, an academic and former member of the National Security Advisory Board, told Reuters.
``The very act of sharing ideas leads to learning about each others' misconceptions and what each side construes as a (nuclear) threat.''
The eight-member Pakistani delegation is headed by senior Pakistan foreign ministry official Tariq Osman Hyder and India's team by Sheel Kant Sharma from the ministry of external affairs.
This weekend's talks are part of a series of meetings over the next few weeks, some planned before the election, in which India's new government, seen by some as conservative on foreign policy, will seek to improve ties with Pakistan, China and the United States.
India and Pakistan, which have an arsenal of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, came within a breath of war in mid-2002 after a tense military standoff triggered by a bloody attack on India's parliament blamed on Pakistan-based Kashmiri militants.
Both sides have limited nuclear command and control structures and analysts say the talks are crucial for building understanding and communication.
--------
India and Pakistan Kick Off Nuclear Talks
June 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-southasia-talks.html
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India and Pakistan began their first ever talks on Saturday on how to reduce the risk of nuclear war, six years after each successfully tested nuclear bombs.
The two days of meetings in New Delhi come a week before broader high-level talks.
``Both sides approached the talks in a positive framework, aimed at taking the process forward, and making them result- oriented,'' India's Foreign Ministry said in a brief statement after the first day's session.
``They (India and Pakistan) also exchanged views on their respective security concepts and nuclear doctrines,'' it said.
New Delhi's stated nuclear policy is not to strike first with nuclear weapons, but Pakistan, worried about India's growing conventional military superiority, has made no such pledge.
``The differences in these two doctrines is a major obstacle that must be dealt with in these and future talks,'' said Pran Chopra, South Asian analyst and commentator.
The two sides were also are expected to discuss the establishment of a hotline to prevent any sudden nuclear escalation.
Pakistan's acting foreign secretary, Tariq Osman Hyder, is leading an eight-member team with senior Indian Foreign Ministry official Sheel Kant Sharma and other officials. The delegations also paid a courtesy call on Indian Foreign Minister Natwar Singh and National Security Adviser Jyotindra Nath Dixit.
The nuclear talks were delayed a month by India's elections. They precede discussions next Sunday between the civil servants in charge of foreign ministries on issues including disputed Kashmir.
The conflict in the scenic Himalayan region has delayed the nuclear talks for six years.
``Nuclear trust is so important. It will create a better atmosphere and form a stronger basis for proceeding on other issues including Kashmir,'' Chopra said.
NO QUICK BREAKTHROUGH
``The aim of the (nuclear) talks is to agree on the broad agenda for future talks. It is unrealistic to expect a quick breakthrough. It took the superpowers over 30 years to break their nuclear impasse,'' defense analyst Jasjit Singh said.
``But whether now or later, both sides will have to talk about reducing armed conflict across its full spectrum to decrease the risk of a nuclear clash.''
India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir, where Muslim militants are fighting New Delhi's forces in the portion held by India.
In the latest violence, Indian soldiers gunned down five Muslim rebels overnight who were trying to sneak into Indian Kashmir from Pakistan through the Line of Control (LoC) or cease-fire line, an army spokesman said. The LoC divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
Elsewhere in the region, five people, including two Indian army officers, were wounded in two separate insurgent attacks.
The two country's armies fought heavy clashes in Kashmir in 1999 and came close to war in mid-2002 after insurgents based in Pakistan attacked India's parliament, triggering international fears of a nuclear exchange.
But an offer of peace last year by Atal Behari Vajpayee, then India's prime minister, drew an encouraging response from Islamabad. Transport links and full diplomatic ties were restored and the aging leader met Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in January in Pakistan.
More high-level diplomatic contact takes place on Monday when Singh meets his Pakistani counterpart Kursheed Mehmood Kasuri for the first time on the sidelines of a regional conference in China.
-------- iran
Iran backs away from threat to resume uranium enrichment
TEHRAN (AFP)
Jun 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040619152530.da1lyds4.html
Iran's top national security official Saturday backed off from his earlier threat to resume uranium enrichment, saying the Islamic republic had no intention of doing so "for the time being".
"We do not want to carry out enrichment for the time being and no decision has yet been taken to resume it, but we will reconsider the suspension of other activities," Hassan Rowhani told the official IRNA news agency. The new comments were a revision of Rowhani's statement to the foreign and local press earlier Saturday, in which he had said: "In the next few days, Iran is going to reconsider its decision to suspend enrichment."
The suspension of uranium enrichment is a key demand of the UN nuclear watchdog -- the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) -- while it continues to investigate allegations that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons.
The official news agency said Rowhani's new comments meant that "Iran will apparently resume the production of centrifuge components" rather than resume enrichment itself.
IRNA did not explain Rowhani's changed stance, although the revision of public statements from top officials is common practice here and often leads to confusion.
Suspending uranium enrichment was part of a package of "confidence-building measures" brokered last October by Britain, France and Germany, which also included Iran allowing tougher inspections by signing the additional protocol to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Although enrichment is permitted under the NPT, the IAEA had called for Iran to cease such activities while it sought to account for traces of highly enriched uranium found by inspectors here and complete its evaluation of the Iranian programme.
Rowhani had earlier complained that the European Union's "big three" had failed to keep their side of the bargain by seeing that pressure on Iran is eased, and had instead pushed through a critical resolution at the IAEA on Friday.
In his latest remarks, Rowhani suggested that Iran and the European states could have fresh talks in July, and he said Iran "will give this chance to them".
--------
U.N. Agency Rebukes Iran on Nuclear Activity
Broken Promises on Disclosure Cited
By Peter Slevin and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A51396-2004Jun18?language=printer
Frustrated by evidence that Iran is still hiding elements of its nuclear program, the International Atomic Energy Agency rebuked the Tehran government yesterday for failing to cooperate fully with international investigators.
The United Nations agency's 35-member board declared unanimously that Iranian authorities had broken their promises of complete disclosure and called on Iran to act "on an urgent basis" to answer questions about its atomic ambitions and achievements.
Bush administration officials, convinced that Iran is developing nuclear weapons in defiance of international demands, claimed the sharply worded IAEA resolution as a victory. The measure does not, however, provide for any penalties, deadlines or guarantees that the matter will be referred to the U.N. Security Council, as the White House had wished.
Instead, the resolution comes amid growing doubts among U.S. officials and foreign allies about their ability to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Diplomats and U.S. officials say that without a workable military option or an international consensus to punish Iran, their goal is to slow Iran's progress while searching for a change in Tehran's thinking.
A senior White House official, asked this week whether the administration can realistically expect to halt Iran's nuclear program, said, "I don't think we know the answer." The official declined to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the issue.
"We want Iran to renounce its nuclear ambitions," said a European diplomat who focuses on Iran. "We're all equally clear that there's no prospect of that happening, at least in the near term."
Such sentiment contrasts with the assertions of President Bush, who said as recently as April that "the development of a nuclear weapon in Iran is intolerable." He promised that a recalcitrant Iran "will be dealt with, starting through the United Nations."
The Iranians contend their nuclear experiments and their acquisition of sophisticated supplies are intended for peaceful atomic energy projects, not for building weapons. They point out that the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty permits nations to develop uranium-enrichment technology.
The Vienna-based IAEA has taken the lead in testing Iran's assertions, but the U.N. monitoring agency has said it cannot be certain what Iran intends.
In the past 18 months, inspectors have uncovered an escalating series of contradictions in Iranian statements, along with evidence that nuclear experts consider strongly suggestive of a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
"The Iranians are serious about this nuclear weapons program," Robert Einhorn, a Clinton administration proliferation specialist, said yesterday. "They've been at it over 18 years. They've expended a vast amount of energy and financial resources to make it work. They're not going to abandon it lightly."
IAEA inspectors contend that Iran has repeatedly misstated details about its nuclear program and pursued enrichment technology in violation of pledges made to European foreign ministers in October. They accused Iran of offering contradictory evidence and often admitting details only when presented with undeniable evidence.
Even as the board met, the IAEA was investigating satellite images that suggested to U.S. government analysts that Iran was concealing nuclear activities in Tehran. U.S. diplomats, who favor a harder line than other countries, said the latest report showed Iran violating international obligations.
The IAEA board used strong words in the diplomatic world, saying it "deplores" the limits of Iran's cooperation. Iranian cooperation, the board said, had not been "as full, timely and proactive as it should have been."
The vote represents a rejection of Iranian protests of unfair treatment and a strong endorsement of inspections designed to expose Iran's remaining nuclear mysteries.
Important figures in Iran quickly decried the vote, insisting that Iran was being targeted by a U.S.-led cabal. The resolution was introduced by France, Germany and Britain.
"We believe the agency acted based on the pressure from some of the political centers, particularly America," Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told state television. An influential cleric, Ayatollah Mohammad Emamiv Kashani, said in a sermon broadcast on state radio that outsiders were overreacting.
"The West's political commotion about Iran's peaceful nuclear program is baseless," Kashani said.
The European diplomat described a "working assumption" abroad that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons and not forswear them, as the Libyans did in December, in return for U.S. and British assurances of improved economic and diplomatic ties.
"I don't think anyone expects them to do a Libya," he said.
The Bush administration inherited economic sanctions on Iran and continued a diplomatic freeze, with the exception of logistical discussions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The president himself labeled Iran a member of an "axis of evil."
Faced with the challenge of halting Iran's nuclear progress, however, U.S. officials describe their options as limited. They also say their ability to see inside Iran is extremely limited.
"The really hard problem with secretive states that are trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction is that you never know how much of the picture you're seeing. . . ," the senior White House official said. "You try to get as much international pressure as you can for a process that is really thorough and that is rigorous and has things like spot inspections."
Unlike Libya, Iran has developed an indigenous capacity to build key uranium-enrichment components. Experts say its range of suppliers is also greater than Libya's.
European foreign ministers tried to entice Iran into suspending its uranium-enrichment program last year, offering inducements in return for verifiable, if vague, steps. The agreement quickly stalled. The Europeans, backed by the IAEA, said Iran cheated; Iranian leaders said the Europeans reneged.
The Bush administration believes Iran's behavior merits forwarding the Iran case to the Security Council. Speaking Tuesday in Baltimore, Assistant Secretary of State John Wolf summed up the U.S. view: "While it proclaims fealty to the [Non-Proliferation Treaty], Iran is an active nuclear weapons wannabe."
One proliferation expert inside the administration said that referring the matter to the council in September would be unlikely to result in a strong punitive resolution, given the reluctance of the Russians and Chinese, among others. But it could help shame Iran and chill some foreign companies and governments from doing business there.
Yet pushing the matter to the Security Council so close to the U.S. presidential election would pose political risks and might not deter the Iranians, who see their nuclear effort as a point of national pride.
In a private meeting at the Brookings Institution in early May, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Javad Zarif, delivered a sharp message to influential Republicans and Democrats: We can make life easier for you in Iraq if you give Iran's nuclear program a pass.
Zarif's suggestion took several participants by surprise. It also demonstrated Iran's belief that it has greater leverage now that the United States is preoccupied with Iraq, home to Muslim Shiites with close ties to Iran.
The ever-shifting political firmament in Tehran is a factor in U.S. and European calculations -- and a ray of cautious hope.
Although some Iranian moderates are among the voices calling for Iran to develop a defensive nuclear option, policymakers abroad believe the desire of moderates for a greater opening to the West could deter Iran from building such weapons.
In this view, the best hope may be to slow Iran's program long enough for the hard-line religious leaders who run the country to pass from the scene. There is no indication yet, however, that the moderates are close to a triumph. In fact, their power has been steadily eroding.
Staff writer Glenn Kessler contributed to this report.
--------
Iran Weighs Restarting Uranium Enrichment
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran will resume some nuclear activities it suspended under world pressure and is considering restarting the uranium enrichment, its top nuclear official said Saturday, defying a resolution from the U.N. nuclear watchdog that rebuked Iran for past cover-ups in its nuclear program.
Iran also rejected demands by the U.N. group to stop building a heavy water nuclear reactor and halt operations of a nuclear conversion facility in central Iran.
``Iran will reconsider its decision about suspension and will do some uranium activity in the coming days,'' Iran's top nuclear negotiator Hasan Rowhani said.
Rowhani did not say what activities would be resumed. Chief among the suspended activities was the building of parts for centrifuges used in the enrichment process.
Resuming uranium enrichment could spark a crisis in international attempts to resolve questions of Iran's nuclear program. The United States accuses Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons, while Iran insists its program is peaceful, aiming only to produce energy.
On Friday, the IAEA passed a resolution rebuking Iran for not cooperating enough in the probe into its nuclear program.
The European-drafted resolution said the IAEA ``deplores'' that ``Iran's cooperation has not been as full, timely and proactive as it should have been'' -- angering Tehran.
Rowhani said Iran would continue to work with the IAEA and allow inspections of its facilities.
``If they (the IAEA) have any ambiguities, problems or want to visit sites, they can raise it with us and we will solve it,'' he said. ``We won't lose our patience toward inspections. The more they inspect, the more the world will learn Iran has not diverted from a peaceful nuclear path.''
He said Iran would inform the agency on any resumption of activities.
``Whether we are going to resume enrichment -- meaning injecting gas into centrifuges -- we haven't decided yet,'' he said. ``Perhaps we will continue suspension of injecting gas into centrifuges for some time, but we will end suspension of some other measures in the coming days.''
Last year, under IAEA pressure, Iran suspended enrichment and some other activities and opened facilities to inspections. In a deal for the suspension, Britain, Germany and France promised to make it easier for Iran to obtain advanced nuclear technology.
Rowhani accused those countries of breaking what he said was their promise to help close the Iranian nuclear issue at the IAEA.
In February, according to Rowhani, the three European powers promised to work toward closure by June if Iran stopped making centrifuges, as it did in April.
``The promise was broken by the Europeans. Therefore, we can't be committed to our promise,'' he said.
A top lawmaker said Saturday that the Iranian parliament may not approve unfettered inspection of Iranian facilities by IAEA.
``IAEA's continued negative stance ... would give the parliament extra reason not to approve the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,'' the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted the head of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee Alaeddin Boroujerdi as saying.
Under the protocol, Iran has to agree to unfettered inspection of its nuclear facilities without prior notice. Iran's government has approved it, but it cannot become law without parliament's approval.
The IAEA said Iran still needs to answer questions relating to the sources of enriched uranium, including weapons-grade samples, found in Iran and the scope of Iran's centrifuge program.
The IAEA has also questioned work at the Iranian nuclear plants at Arak and Isfahan.
``The work at Isfahan and Arak is not up for bargaining,'' Rowhani said. ``Iran has already made its decision about Isfahan and Arak and the work will continue.''
Iran is building a heavy water reactor at Arak, and its plant at Isfahan, which has already been opened, has a nuclear conversion facility to process yellow cake uranium into gas.
Rowhani dismissed accusations that Iran had been running and then razing parts of an undisclosed site next to a military complex in a Tehran suburb.
``Excluding from the sites we have openly declared (to IAEA) ..., Iran has no other places for enriching uranium,'' Rowhani said.
He was referring to satellite photos showed that several buildings had been destroyed and topsoil had been removed from a site at Lavizan Shiyan and U.S. accusations that Iran was running a secret enrichment program there.
--------
Iran Says to Review Uranium Enrichment Suspension
June 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran said on Saturday it would decide in coming days whether to resume uranium enrichment activities after a tough U.N. resolution sharply rebuked Tehran for not cooperating fully with nuclear inspectors.
Enrichment, a process of purifying uranium for nuclear power plants, can also be used to make atomic weapons. A resumption of enrichment would fuel U.S. accusations that Iran wants a nuclear weapons capability and could provoke a major crisis.
Tehran, which says its nuclear program is merely geared to generating electricity, was angered by a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which passed a resolution on Friday criticizing its cooperation and transparency.
``Iran will review its decision regarding suspension and we will announce our decision in the coming days,'' Hassan Rohani, secretary-general of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, told a news conference.
An Iranian reaction to the IAEA resolution had been expected. Tehran retaliated following the last IAEA board meeting in March, which also criticized its cooperation, by suspending inspection visits for nearly a month.
Iran agreed to suspend enrichment last October, saying it was a voluntary and temporary measure aimed at restoring international confidence following revelations that it had kept secret sensitive nuclear research for nearly two decades.
Rohani stressed, however, that Iran would probably not resume pumping uranium hexafluoride gas into centrifuges which spin at high speed to produce enriched uranium.
``I should underline that our decision might not be resuming enrichment itself, it might be other activities such as building parts... Probably we will continue not to inject gas into centrifuges for a while,'' he added.
STILL BUILDING CENTRIFUGE PARTS
Britain, France and Germany, the three countries which brokered the enrichment suspension last October, have expressed annoyance that Iran continues to make centrifuge parts at private workshops. Friday's IAEA resolution again urged Iran to desist from this work.
A spokeswoman for the IAEA declined comment on Rohani's statements.
U.S. envoy to the IAEA Kenneth Brill said on Friday a resumption of enrichment activities ``would be another demonstration of (Iran's) true colors.''
``They are determined to have an enrichment program and one that goes well beyond the needs of a power program, that underscores their desire to pursue military purposes for their nuclear program,'' he told reporters.
While ``deploring'' what it said was Iran's poor cooperation with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the IAEA resolution did not set any new deadlines for Iran or contain a trigger mechanism for its case to be sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, as Washington wanted.
Rohani said Iran was keen to resolve all outstanding questions about its nuclear activities.
``Iran is ready to cooperate and work with the agency...and will continue to implement the Additional Protocol,'' allowing snap inspections of nuclear sites, he said.
He dismissed accusations Iran had an undisclosed site in north Tehran, as Washington alleges from satellite photographs.
``I am saying openly that Iran, apart from the sites it has openly declared...has no other places for enriching uranium,'' he said.
-------- korea
Pyongyang may still see reason
June 19, 2004
The Auge (Australia)
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/06/18/1087245105888.html?from=storyrhs&oneclick=true
The US has signalled it is not prepared to live indefinitely with North Korea's nuclear threat, writes Tony Parkinson.
The third round of talks aimed at defusing the North Korean nuclear threat will begin in Beijing this week, but nobody in Washington is holding their breath in expectation of a breakthrough.
Progress in the international diplomatic effort to wean Kim Jong-il's regime off its dangerous reliance on the politics of extortion is measured in increments. But, however glacial the process, there is some solace in the fact that Pyongyang remains locked in this dialogue, hemmed in by the US and Japan on one hand and China and Russia on the other.
As a senior Bush Administration official conceded readily in a conversation this week, the alternatives could only be ugly.
The six-party talks constitute more than a strategy of containment. It is containment plus. The superpower has signalled it is not prepared to live indefinitely with the threat levels inherent in the status quo. Advertisement Advertisement
North Korea has developed a three-stage long-range missile and may have up to eight nuclear warheads. Given the regime's peculiarities, and its reputation as a major player in the black-market trade in doomsday technology, Washington is applying a multi-faceted squeeze-play in the hope of forcing a behaviour change in Pyongyang.
This works at two levels. Diplomatically, the US has been the driver of a new multilateral forum in north-east Asia, in which all the region's major powers sit down with the two Koreas. The priority in dampening tensions on the peninsula is to persuade Pyongyang of the need to abandon its obsession with weapons of mass destruction.
At the same time, Washington leads the Proliferation Security Initiative - a cumbersome title for what appears to be emerging as a highly efficient intervention in the global arms trade. A mix of conventional law enforcement and intelligence with the added ingredient of naval firepower, the PSI has tightened international co-operation in blocking weapons exports, especially missile sales. It began with 13 nations, including Australia, and has expanded to almost 80.
We have to close the box, and then show them the door they can open to get out. - US official
This has hurt North Korea badly, as it relies on the illicit exports of drugs, arms and missile components as sources of hard currency for an otherwise bankrupt economy. According to a top-ranking official in Washington, "Their customer base is really drying up. Sometimes, merely the mention of the PSI seems to be enough."
This income loss is creating unusual pressures. Although he represses opponents ruthlessly, and while a failed collectivist economy has denied most North Koreans adequate food and medicine, Kim has always had enough revenue to maintain in relative comfort his core supporters in the military and party hierarchy.
But today the little reliable intelligence available to the outside world suggests he is struggling to keep his elites in the style to which they are accustomed.
For now, Kim is holding to his hardline negotiating position. He desperately wants a direct bilateral dialogue with President George Bush (which Kim will not get, having cheated the Americans once before) culminating in a formal security guarantee. He wants money from Japan, and fuel from China. For this, he has offered to freeze plutonium production.
The US will not play on these terms. It wants the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of all of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. No ifs, no buts, and no upfront payments until that commitment is extracted. Although there is always the risk of Pyongyang escalating the crisis - for example, with another round of missile tests - the belief in Washington is that as long as China and Russia are at least halfway onside, the US has the upper hand in the test of nerves.
"We have built the box, and they are in it," said a senior official. "Now we have to close the box, and then show them the door they can open to get out."
It does not make for a short-term fix. But with patient, realistic and co-ordinated diplomacy, while at the same time stoking up the external pressures, this process might - just might - prod Pyongyang to look for an exit strategy.
-------- missile defense
MISSILE DEFENCE AGREEMENT TO BE SIGNED IN US NEXT MONTH
19 Jun 2004
Senator the Hon. Robert Hill,
Minister for Defence
Leader of the Government in the Senate
http://www.minister.defence.gov.au/Hilltpl.cfm?CurrentId=3925
Australia and the United States intend to sign a Memorandum of Understanding on cooperation in missile defence next month, Defence Minister Robert Hill announced today.
Senator Hill said the MOU would formalise Australia's long-term commitment to participate in the US missile defence program.
"We intend to sign the MOU at the next Australia-United States Ministerial Consultations planned in the US for early July," Senator Hill said.
"The MOU will provide a 25-year framework under which broad areas of cooperation can be agreed. We will then enter into more specific arrangements as we agree on individual projects that will be involved in the program.
"This is a long-term commitment to securing our future and strengthening the alliance. It is unfortunate Labor cannot see the benefits in working with the world's only superpower to provide greater global, regional and Australian security by offering improved protection from missile attack and dissuading nations from acquiring or developing such weapons."
Senator Hill said the first area of cooperation would involve research, development, test and evaluation of technologies that could be used in the missile defence program.
"This will not only be in our strategic defence interests by further developing our intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, but also provide maximum opportunities for Australian industry," Senator Hill said.
A key initial project would be to jointly undertake some exploratory cooperative research and development activities to investigate the potential for Australia's world-leading over-the-horizon-radar technology to be used in missile defence.
Other potential areas for participation in the program included greater cooperation in ballistic early missile warning through ship-based and ground-based sensors.
"Our new Air Warfare Destroyers will be equipped with radars capable not only of detecting aircraft and anti-ship missiles but also ballistic missiles," Senator Hill.
"This information could comprise part of the missile defence network to provide early warning of an impending attack."
Australia has had a long involvement in missile defence through hosting a ballistic missile early warning ground station for 29 years as the Joint Defence Facility Nurrungar and now as the relay ground station at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory.
---
The Missile Technology Control Regime
http://www.mtcr.info/english/
The Missile Technology Control Regime is an informal and voluntary association of countries which share the goals of non-proliferation of unmanned delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction, and which seek to coordinate national export licensing efforts aimed at preventing their proliferation. The MTCR was formed in 1987 by Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Since that time, the MTCR has grown to include thirty-three countries, all of which have equal standing within the Regime.
The MTCR was initiated partly in response to the increasing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), i.e., nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The risk of proliferation of WMD is well recognized as a threat to international peace and security, including by the UN Security Council in its Summit Meeting Declaration of January 31, 1992. One way to counter this threat is to maintain vigilance over the transfer of missile equipment, material, and related technologies usable for systems capable of delivering WMD.
National export licensing measures on these technologies make the task of countries seeking to achieve capability to acquire and produce unmanned WMD means of delivery much more difficult. As a result, many countries, including all MTCR partners, have chosen voluntarily to introduce export licensing measures on ballistic missiles and other unmanned air vehicle delivery systems or related equipment, material and technology.
The current Chairman of the Regime is Ambassador Carlos Sersale di Cerisano of Argentina, Director of International Security, Nuclear and Space Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He can be contacted at "Dirección de Seguridad Internacional, Asuntos Nucleares y Espaciales, Esmeralda 1212 - Piso 11 (1007), C.A. de Buenos Aires, Argentina", or by e-mail at rcs@mrecic.gov.ar. Additional contacts are "Mrs. Moira Wilkinson (smw@mrecic.gov.ar) and Ms. María Paula Mac Loughlin (lmp@mrecic.gov.ar)."
-------- terrorism
Nuclear attack by 'dirty bomb' likely
Study shows materials too hard to track
By Charles J. Hanley
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sat, Jun. 19, 2004
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/democrat/news/nation/8961077.htm
Terrorists are "all but certain" to set off a radiological weapon in the United States, since it will take authorities too many years to track and secure the radioactive materials of such "dirty bombs," a team of nuclear researchers has concluded.
The United States and other key governments took an important step on controls this month, agreeing at the G-8 summit to tighten restraints on international trade in highly radioactive materials by the end of 2005.
But thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of high-risk radioactive sources are already in use worldwide with few accurate registries for tracing them, the scientists say. They cite Iraq, where an undetermined number of such sources have gone missing in the postwar chaos.
The findings are being published in a 300-page book, "The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism," the result of a two-year study by the authoritative Center for Nonproliferation Studies, or CNS, of California's Monterey Institute of International Studies.
The team also examined the potential for terrorists to steal or build an actual nuclear weapon but found that less likely than the construction of a radiological dispersal device, or dirty bomb.
Unlike warheads designed to kill and destroy through a huge nuclear blast and heat, these radiation weapons - which thus far no one has employed - would rely on conventional explosives to blow radioactive material far and wide. A successful bomb could make a section of a city uninhabitable for years.
The fear of such weapons grew in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. Al-Qaida and Russia's Chechen rebels have shown an interest in highly radioactive material.
Misunderstandings persist about the threat. This month, for example, the Justice Department said al-Qaida-linked detainee Jose Padilla planned to wrap explosives in uranium to make a dirty bomb. But uranium would add nothing; it has minimal radioactivity.
Instead, specialists who study the threat focus on isotopes with millions of times more radioactivity than uranium - such as cesium-137, cobalt-60 and iridium-192. These nuclear reactor byproducts have uses ranging from radiation treatment of cancer, to sterilizing food and medical equipment, to gauging thicknesses.
The CNS study notes steps taken by the U.S. government, including:
- An order quietly sent to operators of sterilizing irradiators last year, instructing them to strengthen security against theft and attack. These large, powerful devices hold immense amounts of lethal radioisotopes.
- Research to develop a substitute for cesium chloride, a talc-like powder that could spread deadly radioactivity widely and insidiously in a blast. Experts consider it the most worrisome material in use.
- Approval of sale of Prussian blue, a drug that counteracts ingested cesium. The U.S. military is "fast-tracking" research into drugs to treat a broader array of radioactive poisons.
The United States alone has an estimated 2 million licensed radioactive sources, thousands of them high-risk materials, the CNS reports. Because of disjointed licensing by federal and state agencies, no complete registry exists. Transfers are not always noted, and sources go astray.
The Energy Department says it has already collected and secured 7,500 "disused" sources and expects to handle thousands more in the next few years.
The CNS researchers highlighted a major loophole in radioactive commerce: the United States and other exporters can ship high-risk sources abroad without a government review of the end user, including to such turmoil-ridden lands as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Colombia.
Commercial rivalries have slowed moves to close that loophole, the study says. At the recent summit, however, the United States and seven other major industrial nations agreed to seek "effective controls" on end users before 2006.
In many "end user" countries, the regulation of radiological sources is "fragmentary" at best, the study says.
"So many potent radioactive sources are now used in medicine, industry and research around the world, and so many have fallen outside regulatory control that it will be many years, if ever, before secure custody of these items can be achieved," it concludes.
As a result, it says, "a radiological attack appears to be all but certain within the coming years."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Workers Exposed to Radiation at Nev. Base
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Radiation-Exposure.html
FALLON, Nev. (AP) -- At least two Boeing Co. workers have been exposed to potentially harmful doses of radiation at the Fallon Naval Air Station, company officials confirmed.
The two men were exposed over a three-month period while working around an X-ray machine used to check for metal fatigue on Navy fighter jets. The machine was staying on when it appeared to be turned off, Boeing officials said Thursday.
Base and company officials were still trying to determine how the malfunction happened and the exact amount of radiation each man received. Meanwhile, officials have stopped X-raying aircraft at the base.
``We are working closely with the Navy in investigating this incident, as well as providing the necessary health care for those employees involved,'' Boeing spokesman Paul Guse told the Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle Standard.
An official at the Navy Radiological Affairs Support Office declined to comment.
The problem was detected in late May, more than two months after radiation badges showing high levels of exposure were sent to a private lab, base spokesman Zip Upham said.
Guse said four employees were exposed to radiation but only two workers received high enough doses to cause physical symptoms. The two men have been examined at a California hospital and allowed to return to work, but the full health effects of the exposure are not yet known, he said.
The machine is owned and maintained by the Navy but operated by the civilian employees. About 200 Boeing employees maintain the jets at the base, about 60 miles east of Reno.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Taliban Attack Afghan Government Office
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Fighting.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) -- Taliban insurgents attacked a government office in southern Afghanistan, sparking a gunfight with Afghan troops that killed seven people, police said Saturday.
Just to the north, the U.S. military said two American soldiers were wounded and their Afghan interpreter killed when their vehicle hit a mine.
Meanwhile, President Hamid Karzai sent troops to the town of Chagcharan in Ghor province, some 350 miles west of Kabul, which was overrun Thursday by a group of local warlords, forcing out the governor and the provincial security chiefs.
The gunfight in southern Afghanistan occurred late Friday when 60 Taliban attacked a government office in Mizan, a town in Zabul province some 230 miles southwest of the capital, Kabul, Zabul deputy police chief Ghulam Jailiani said.
Five attackers and two Afghan soldiers died in the two-hour clash, which ended when a U.S. helicopter appeared and drove the Taliban away, Jailiani said.
Three Afghan soldiers were wounded and taken to an American base for treatment. The three wounded were part of the force of 50 Afghan soldiers defending the office.
Jailiani said authorities had recovered a satellite telephone, walkie-talkies and weapons left behind by the Taliban, who retreated on foot to nearby mountains.
The two American soldiers were wounded Thursday night when their vehicle struck a mine about 30 miles north of Qalat, Zabul's capital, U.S. military spokesman Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager said.
``It did result in an interpreter being killed and two soldiers wounded,'' Mansager said.
The soldiers were in stable condition at the U.S. base in the southern city of Kandahar, he said.
He didn't identify any of the three victims.
The attacks showed that militants are still operating in the Zabul region of southern Afghanistan, despite U.S. claims of killing more than 80 rebels since May 25.
The military has claimed that the operation, led by a 2,000-strong contingent of U.S. Marines, is helping stabilize the region so that voters can register for national elections due in September.
But U.N. registration teams have yet to enter many remote parts of the south and east. Two British contractors for the United Nations were killed in May, the deadliest in a string of attacks on election workers.
Meanwhile, some 200 troops were on their way to Chagcharan by road from the western city of Herat, and another 500 would follow shortly, Defense Ministry spokesman Mohammed Zahir Azimi said.
Ousted officials have said at least 10 people were killed when Chagcharan was overrun, but authorities in Kabul said they knew of no confirmed casualties. The U.S. military sent a B1-B bomber over the city to calm the fighting while it evacuated beleaguered U.N. staff by helicopter.
The town was quiet Saturday, Azimi said, adding that the troops were dispatched for fear of ``more problems in the future.''
The fighting was the culmination of weeks of tension between the Kabul-appointed military and police chiefs and rival commanders over the distribution of power between rival tribes within the local government.
-------- arms
Anatomy of two arms dealers
Asia Times
By David Isenberg
Jun 19, 2004
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FF19Aa01.html
In a globalized world, free trade rules. And to facilitate that trade one must have dealers, or what polite society calls brokers. They might broker energy futures for Enron, stock trades for Martha Stewart, drugs for rock musicians - or they might broker weapons.
For example, consider two of the arms dealers who have been in the news in the past few years for their role in facilitating small arms and light weapons sales. Their role is a vital but unappreciated one. Without them many, if not most deals would never be consummated. They perform numerous services, including bringing together buyer and seller, providing consultation and technical advice, actual procurement of weapons, contract negotiation, arrange financing and payment collection, obtain necessary authorization, and organized transportation.
Pierre Joseph Falcone
Falcone is of Algerian-French origin, though he ceased being a French resident in 1977. He was born in 1954 in Algeria, which was then under French rule. His father, Pierre Sr, was the mayor of a town called Bou-Haroun-Alger, ran a fishing fleet and, according to the French newspaper Le Monde, was involved in the arms trade. After the Algerian revolution of 1962, the family moved to France, where Falcone lived until he was 22.
Falcone was taken into custody on the night of December 2, 2000, per the internment order of a French special prosecutor. He was initially charged with illegal arms dealing because he allegedly brokered sales of Russian-origin weapons to Angola in 1993 and 1994 without authorization from the French government agency that reviews weapons exports.
Reportedly, in 1993, Falcone, along with his Russian associate Arcadi Gaydamak, helped arrange the sale of small arms to Angola worth US$47 million. In 1994, they reportedly arranged a second deal for $563 million worth of weapons, including tanks and helicopters. But prosecutors later dropped that count due to a legal technicality. He was placed under investigation again in April 2002 for illegal arms trading in the post-1994 period.
News reports indicate that this stems from years earlier, when, on December 12, 1996 about 100 tax authority employees and judiciary police officers searched the offices of Falcone and later those of Gaydamak.
The National Tax Investigation Office launched the operation that led to two criminal indictments. The first indictment, handed down in April 1999, dealt with Gaydamak's personal property; the second, in June 2000, took on the ZTS-Osos company, which was co-managed by Falcone and Gaydamak. This is the company that exported weapons to Angola.
The Angolan government officially turned to Russia in 1993 after the UNITA rebellious group renewed its struggle against it. They agreed on arms deliveries to be repaid by Angola with oil.
Prior to his arrest, Falcone headed the group of companies under the umbrella "Brenco International" and simultaneously was a broker for the part-private, part-French government-run agency Societe Francaise d'Exportation de Materiels et Services du Ministere de l'Interieur (French Company for the Export of Goods, Systems & Services - SOFREMI), controlled by the French Interior Ministry then headed by Charles Pasqua. Pasqua was interior minister - effectively the country's top law enforcer - from 1986 to 1988 and again between 1993 and 1995.
French judicial officials found that Brenco made payments to a number of his associates. Jean-Christophe Mitterand, son of former French president Francois Mitterand, acknowledges receiving $1.8 million into his numbered Swiss bank account, but says that the money was for consulting work unrelated to Angolan arms sales.
According to The Washington Post, Falcone's company, Brenco International, brokered arms deals involving the sale of surplus Russian military equipment to the Angolan government. The first deal was worth approximately $47 million and took place on November 7, 1993, while a second deal, worth some $563 million, took place in 1994. In both cases, the weapons purchases were reportedly paid for with Angolan proceeds from oil sales - with Sonangol, Angola's state oil company, for example, paying some of the money for the 1994 transaction to French bank accounts controlled by a Czech firm, ZTS OSOS, which provided some of the weapons. By late 1994, according to Le Monde, Falcone had been involved in the selling of weapons to Angola worth some $633 million.
Gaydamak said that he had been told to contact the Slovak ZTS OSOS Company, which existed since the late 1940s and was a licensed arms exporter. About 44% of the company is owned by the Russian Kurganmash Company and the Russian state-owned arms exporting Rosoboronexport.
Given all the fuss over the weapons shipments, it is ironic that it is not clear that the weapons represented a great deal for Angola. The issue of arms supplies to Angola in the 1990s was dogged by claims of low quality. Some claims report the delivery of tanks and of other heavy equipment, of such low quality that they had to be removed from their delivery vessels by chains, whereupon they were transported to "tank graveyards" outside the capital Luanda.
After being in jail for a year from December 1, 2000, Falcone was let out of prison. Since then the government of Angola appointed him their ambassador to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. When he is not hobnobbing with other UN functionaries or running one of his other businesses, he lives in his luxury home in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
Leonid Efimovich Minin
Think what you will of Falcone, but at least he had some class, even if it is the kind that you buy at Tiffany's. That's more than you can say for some of his arms brokering peers. Consider, for example, Leonid Efimovich Minin.
On August 5, 2000, Italian police raided the Hotel Europa near Milan and arrested Leonid Minin, a 52-year-old Israeli industrialist on drug charges. He was found in bed with four prostitutes and 58 grams of cocaine. Minin is, in fact, an Israeli citizen with a real Israeli passport, but also has passports from the former Soviet Union, Russia, Germany and Bolivia. He was born December 14, 1947.
Minin's story begins in his native Odessa. He emigrated to Israel in the 1970s as part of a large local exodus, but when he went into business after the Soviet Union's collapse, making his first millions from trading oil out of Russia, he used his Odessa contacts. Minin was an associate of Alexander Angert, nicknamed The Angel, a notoriously violent Odessa godfather who now lives in London. Angert helped run the port's lucrative oil business and extortion rackets and served 12 years of a 15-year term for murder in the Ukraine.
By 1993, Minin was based in Italy before establishing a timber business registered in Zug in Switzerland and opening offices in Monrovia and Tel Aviv. By 1998, he was immersed in the guns and gems trade.
When Minin was arrested police found a briefcase with 1,500 pages of documents that revealed his role in supplying Ukrainian weapons to Liberia, despite an arms embargo which had been imposed by the United Nations in 1992 and was subsequently tightened in March 2001 to stop arms from reaching Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in Sierra Leone, which is also subject to such an embargo. The documents - which included fake End-User Certificates, copies of money transfers, copies of fax messages, and correspondence - all pointed to his heavy involvement in illegal arms trafficking to Africa; specifically arming the RUF in Sierra Leone through Liberia and also Liberia itself.
In 2000, Minin was subsequently tried and convicted in Italy and sentenced to two years in prison for possession of drugs. After Minin's appeal failed, Walter Mapelli, the public prosecutor, turned his attention to investigating the documents found in Minin's luggage that threw light on his arms sales. Minin owned Limad, the Monaco-based company, that apparently exported oil from Odessa, Ukraine and the aircraft that ferried the weapons in 1999 from Burkina Faso to Liberia.
On March 13, 1999, a Ukrainian Antonov 124, one of the world's largest aircraft, landed in Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso. A smaller aircraft bearing the logo of the Seattle Supersonics basketball team arrived and started offloading and ferrying away the Antonov's cargo, which included anti-tank weapons, surface-to-air missiles, rocket-propelled grenades and their launchers, 715 boxes of guns and cartridges and 408 boxes of cartridge powder.
More cargo was loaded on to trucks and driven to a nearby town, where witnesses saw the same Supersonics aircraft come and, load by load, ferry the cargo away. In nearby Liberia, others saw the same aircraft repeatedly land and unload. In Monrovia, the capital, the aircraft was a common sight.
It did not take long for diplomats in west Africa to figure out what was happening: a sanctions-busting delivery of weapons to the RUF, the rebel army fighting a brutal war for control of Sierra Leone's diamond mines. Liberia's support for the RUF despite a UN arms embargo was already well known.
Queried by the UN in April 1999, Ukraine's government admitted the Antonov had been loaded with Ukrainian weapons. But Ukrainian officials insisted they had made a legal sale to Burkina Faso's defense ministry; Burkina Faso officials claimed they still had the weapons in their possession.
A UN panel of experts was able to trace the aircraft with the Supersonics logo. It had been retired by the sports team, sold and resold, ending up in the ownership of Limad, a Monaco company that apparently exported oil from Odessa, Ukraine.
On July 15, 2000 - while the UN investigation continued - another Antonov 124 landed in west Africa, this time in Abidjan, capital of Ivory Coast. As UN investigators would later establish, the aircraft carried 113 tons of 7.62-millimetre cartridges, used for AK-47s, destined for Liberia.
The 2000 shipment involved another trafficker, the Indian-Kenyan-British Sanjivan Ruprah. It was one of his companies, West Africa Air Services, planes that carried the ammo. The cargo plane, rented by Kiev's Antonov Design Bureau, left Gostomel, in the Ukraine, on July 14, 2000. According to the UN panel of experts:
"In November 1999 Ruprah was authorized by the Liberian Minister of Transport to act as the 'Global Civil Aviation agent worldwide' for the Liberian Civil Aviation Regulatory Authority, and to 'investigate and regularize the ... Liberian Civil Aviation register'. During its visit to Liberia the panel asked the Transport Ministry, the Ministry of Justice and police authorities about Ruprah and his work, but was told that he was not known to them. Ruprah is, in fact, a well-known arms dealer. He travels using a Liberian diplomatic passport in the name of Samir M Nasr, and carries additional authorization from the Liberian International Ship and Corporate Registry."
On June 4, 2001, Ruprah was listed as one of 130 persons (a list which has since been revised by the UN with some original names and key players being dropped) banned by the UN Security Council for their role in fueling the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone.
Valery Cherny, a Russian arms broker, who ran a business called Aviatrend and brokered the buying of weapons for the Ivory Coast deal was a partner of Minin. He had purchased the bullets from Ukraine and chartered the Antonov 124. The bullets were ferried to Liberia in an Ilyushin 18 leased by Liberia from the Moldovan air cargo company Renan, which had previously worked for Russian arms trader Victor Bout.
Among the bank accounts used to pay for the weapons was one at Budapest's Central European International Bank, the Hungarian branch of the Italian BCI of the Banca Intesa Group. The account bears the name of the Engineering and Technical Company (ETC), and is managed by two Bulgarians: Alexandar Tudorov and Nadia Petkova. Included among the ETC beneficiaries were Zimbabwe Defense Industry, connected with the army of Zimbabwe, a country presently under a EU embargo, ZDIits general manager Dube, the wife of the former Interior Minister of Harare, Zodwa Dagengwa, Arsenal, the controversial Bulgarian company, Air Foyle, which is linked to Bout, and Vab Impex, the company implicated in the Falcone/Gaydamak arms shipment to Angola scandal.
The Ukrainian government claimed that they broke no laws as they had no knowledge that arms were being diverted from their intended destination. And insofar as their claim that they followed procedure is concerned the Ukrainian government is correct. In an interview with the television program Frontline UN arms trade experts Johan Peleman said the following in an interview:
"In Ukraine, government officials told us that, from their perspective, Ukraine did everything legally required regarding the arms Minin exported to Liberia. I would fully agree with that ... Even more than that, they followed the international procedures for an arms deal. They went beyond it, sending someone with the plane. They even went beyond that, having a document signed by the client, in this case Cote d'Ivoire, that the ammunition would be used ... within the terms of the embargo or the moratorium on small arms in West Africa. So this was an additional guarantee. Strictly speaking, they followed the right procedures."
As detailed in a report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), on June 20, 2001, Minin was charged with weapons trafficking, and for delivering a hundred tons of weapons, spare parts, ammunition and explosives to the Revolutionary United Front. Minin was charged with using false end-user certificates, and for delivering 68 tons of weaponry from Eastern Europe supposedly destined for Burkina Faso, whose military does not use ex-Warsaw Pact weaponry, and 113 tons marked for the Ivory Coast, to Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The United Nations, which was also investigating Minin's involvement in arms trading, provided background that helped Italian authorities make sense of Minin's role in two operations alluded to in Minin's documents. In December 2000, a panel of UN experts determined that there was "conclusive evidence of supply lines to Liberia through Burkina Faso". Their report noted, "Weapons supplied to Burkina Faso by governments or private arms merchants have been systematically diverted for use in the conflict in Sierra Leone. For example, a shipment of 68 tons of weapons arrived at Ouagadougou on March 12, 1999. They were temporarily off-loaded in Ouagadougou and some were trucked to Bobo Dioulasso. The bulk of them were trans-shipped within a matter of days to Liberia. Most were flown aboard a BAC-111 owned by an Israeli businessman of Ukranian origin, Leonid Minin."
According to the documents provided by the Ukranian government, the weapons were transported from Kiev to Ouagadougou aboard flight ADB1737, an Antonov-124 (registration UR-82008). The deal included 3,000 AKM (Kalashnikov) assault rifles, fifty machine guns, 25 rocket-propelled grenade launchers (RPGs), five Strela-3 (also known as SA-7) missiles, and five Metis anti-tank guided missile systems, as well as ammunition for these weapons.
Most were flown aboard a plane owned by Minin. In late 1998, Minin turned over his personal jet to Liberian president Charles Taylor for use as his presidential plane. The aircraft - a $2 million, 27-seat BAC 1-11 that Minin bought through an Orlando, Florida-based firm called Cortran International - had previously served as the team plane for the NBA's Seattle Supersonics. Taylor was so anxious to use it that he never bothered to paint over the club's insignia on the tail.
The aircraft flew from Ibiza in Spain to Robertsfield in Liberia on March 8, 1999. On March 15, two days after the arrival of the Ukrainian weapons in Ouagadougou, the plane flew from Monrovia to Ouagadougou. On March 15, the plane was loaded with weapons and flew back to Liberia. On the 17th it returned to Ouagadougou. After a flight to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast, the plane flew again from Ouagadougou to Liberia with weapons on the 19th. On the 25th the plane flew again from Liberia to Ouagadougou and returned on the same day with weapons. On the 27th the plane flew again to Ouagadougou and from there to Bobo Dioulasso for the weapons that had been trucked there. The aircraft made three flights over the next three days between Bobo Dioulasso and Liberia. On March 31 the plane flew back to Spain. Because the plane had a VIP configuration, it had only limited cargo capacity, which is why so many flights were necessary.
Minin's plane was used for an earlier shipment of weapons and related equipment from Niamey Airport in Niger to Monrovia. This was in December 1998, shortly after Minin purchased the plane and started to operate it in the region. On December 22, 1998 the plane made two trips from Niamey to Monrovia. On the second trip, it took a consignment of weapons, probably from existing stocks of the armed forces of Niger. The weapons were off-loaded into vehicles of the Liberian military. A few days after these events, the RUF rebels started a major offensive that eventually resulted in a destructive January 1999 raid on Freetown, the capitol of Sierra Leone.
Those shipments violated international sanctions. In 1992, the United Nations slapped a less than effective arms embargo on the RUF. Arms continued to reach the movement through Liberia, which led the United Nations to put that country under an embargo in 1992 with the intention of preventing the arms trafficking to the RUF.
Documentation provided by the Ukraine government to the United Nations shows that the weapons were part of a contract between a Gibraltar-based company representing the Ministry of Defense of Burkina Faso and the Ukrainian State-owned company Ukrspetsexport. An aircraft of the British company Air Foyle, acting as an agent for the Ukrainian air carrier Antonov Design Bureau, shipped the cargo, under a contract with the Gibraltar-based company, Chartered Engineering and Technical Services. A Ukrainian license for sale of the weaponry was granted after Ukrspetsexport had received an end-user certificate (EUC) from the Ministry of Defense of Burkina Faso.
The EUC was dated February 10, 1999. It authorized the Gibraltar-based company to purchase the weapons for sole use of the Ministry of Defense of Burkina Faso. The document also certified that Burkina Faso would be the final destination of the cargo and the end-user of the weaponry.
But the arms did not remain in Burkina Faso. At first, Burkina Faso denied to the United Nations that the weapons were meant for Liberia, but later admitted the truth to the UN investigators.
According to the non-governmental organization Global Witness Iin early 2000 Minin also brokered an arms deal between former Russian test pilot Valery Cherny's Moscow-based company Aviatrend, and then president General Robert Guei of Cote d'Ivoire, which included 10,500 AK47 assault rifles, RPG-26 rocket launchers, and over 8 million rounds of assorted ammunition.
Guei, fearful of the elections results set for September, ordered, via Aviatrend, 113 tons of arms from the Ukrainian State Company "Spetsehnoexport". The goods were delivered on July 12 in Minin's plane.
According to this, on May 26, 1999, Guei authorized the following to be bought in his name: 5 million rounds of 76 2x39mm Ball ammunition; 50 M93 30mm grenade launchers; 10,000 30mm bombs for M93 launcher; and 20 thermal image binoculars.
Minin was released in September 2002.
-------- china
Tension Persists in Hong Kong
Split Meeting Before July 1 Democracy Rally Resolves Nothing
By K.C. Ng and Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53347-2004Jun18.html
HONG KONG, June 18 -- Beijing's chief executive in Hong Kong, Tung Chee-hwa, and members of the pro-democracy opposition met on Friday for the first time in eight months, in an attempt to resolve differences before a major demonstration scheduled for July 1 to demand elections in this former British colony.
But Tung said afterward that the Chinese leadership, which in April ruled out expanding elections in Hong Kong for at least eight years, would not open direct talks with the democrats any time soon. "It takes more than a single cold day for the river to freeze three feet deep," he said, quoting a Chinese saying.
Opposition leaders expressed disappointment and urged residents to continue pressing for democratic reform by joining the July 1 march. More than 500,000 people participated in a protest on the same date last year, stunning China's ruling Communist Party and leading Tung to withdraw a stringent internal security bill backed by Beijing.
Organizers have told police they expect at least 300,000 people to take part in this year's demonstration. Pro-democracy activists are demanding elections to choose Tung's successor in 2007 and all of the territory's lawmakers in 2008, and they have accused the Chinese government of violating the high degree of autonomy it promised Hong Kong by refusing to allow the elections.
They have also accused Beijing of trying to intimidate the public. Three popular radio talk-show hosts who supported democratic reform quit their jobs recently, saying they had received threats from people with ties to the Chinese government. Exacerbating fears of mainland interference, authorities on Friday announced the arrest of at least two Chinese police officers in Hong Kong under suspicious circumstances.
The government said seven mainland men, including two identified as officers from neighboring Guangdong province, were arrested for loitering in a wealthy neighborhood after residents reported they were acting suspiciously. The men told police they were tracking a suspect and were released on bail, the authorities said.
Mainland police are prohibited from operating in Hong Kong, and opposition lawmakers called for an immediate investigation. In an unusually strong statement, Tung also expressed "serious concern" and said it was "absolutely unacceptable" for mainland officers to conduct investigations in the territory.
Tung met Friday with leaders of the Democratic Party, the largest opposition group here, and a lawyers organization that also supports political reform, after prominent pro-democracy figures said last week they were willing to step back and seek reconciliation with the Chinese leadership.
Speaking to reporters afterward, Tung said the sessions were useful, and he promised to continue meeting with opposition leaders and try to persuade Beijing to meet with them, too. He also pledged to help pro-democracy activists barred from entering the mainland since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre to obtain permission to visit relatives there.
But Tung, who was appointed by Beijing after the territory's return to Chinese rule in 1997, said the problem could not be resolved immediately. While mainland officials have welcomed "enhanced communications," they have also shown no willingness to compromise, insisting that their decision to rule out elections is final and that the democrats must accept China's one-party political system before any dialogue with them is possible.
"The remarks about three-foot-deep ice by Mr. Tung showed that he was not sincere," said Szeto Wah, a pro-democracy lawmaker who met with Tung and the leader of a group that organized a vigil to mark the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. "Was he suggesting that our relations with the central government are like frozen ice? . . . That is not much different from telling us to come clean or else we shall be frozen forever."
Audrey Eu, a member of the lawyers group that met with Tung, said the chief executive refused to lay out a timetable for political reform.
But leaders of pro-Beijing political parties said the meetings could be a good start. "It will ease social tension if China and the democrats can meet to talk," said James Tien, chairman of the pro-business Liberal Party. "Mr. Tung may try to arrange meetings between the central government and the milder members of the Democratic Party first."
Ivan Choy, a politics lecturer at Chinese University, said the meeting was an attempt by Tung to ease tensions before the march. "But the lack of concrete promises, without any action plan, means people will not be satisfied," he said.
Pan reported from Beijing.
-------- europe
EU leaders face hard sell on constitution
By ROBERT WIELAARD
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Saturday, June 19, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apeurope_story.asp?category=1103&slug=EU%20Way%20Forward
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, left front shares a word with Luxembourg counterpart Jean-Claude Juncker during a group photo at an EU summit in Brussels, Friday June 18, 2004. Seeking to project a new spirit of unity, European Union leaders returned Friday to a key summit expressing determination to adopt a historic constitution for a united post-Cold War Europe. (AP Photo/Jerome Delay) BRUSSELS, Belgium -- Getting agreement on its first constitution took three years of wrangling. Now the European Union may face an even tougher fight in selling the charter on the streets and in the parliaments of Europe amid growing skepticism about the wisdom of more integration.
The historic deal, reached Friday night after two days of contentious talks, now must be ratified by each of the 25 member nations either by referendum or parliamentary vote - and reaction in some countries suggested just how hard the pitch will be.
"Blair sells out to EU," the British newspaper The Sun declared on its front page Saturday in lambasting Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Daily Telegraph said Blair had committed the "worst blunder of his premiership."
Spain's conservative Popular Party criticized the Socialist government for agreeing to a deal that it said would lessen Spain's voting clout in the EU. Spain "is no longer in the group of important countries," said Angel Acebes, a former interior minister.
The treaty includes a 50-article charter of fundamental rights, including the right to free speech and religion as well as shelter, education and fair working conditions.
It also retains a requirement for unanimous votes on foreign and defense policy, social security, taxation and culture.
But to streamline decision making, the charter would end national vetoes in some 50 new policy areas, including judicial and police cooperation, education and economic policy. That's what alarms people worried about the EU evolving into a federal "superstore" that would erode national sovereignty.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who as chairman of the summit was credited with clinching the agreement, said he was convinced Europeans will embrace the charter.
"This is a great achievement for Europe and for all Europeans," he said. He said that the treaty would help safeguard human rights and democracy and that its promise to promote peace "will resonate with all decent people."
But while EU leaders toasted their deal with champagne, they also had to admit they failed to select a new head of the European Commission, the EU's executive body. At least eight candidates were considered, including several prime ministers, but none could muster sufficient support.
Opposition to the constitution is strongest in Britain, where a "Euro-skeptic" party came in a strong third in this month's elections to the European Parliament and Blair's Labour Party turned in the worst electoral performance by a governing party in decades.
The European Parliament elections also revealed Euro-skeptic sentiment in some countries that joined the EU on May 1 after decades of living under communist rule. Euro-skeptic candidates did well in Lithuania, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Poland, signaling governments there will face fights over the constitution's ratification.
Britain and at least seven other nations will hold referendums on the charter.
Addressing worries about the danger of an EU superstate, Blair suggested the bloc's 10 new members are already helping to blunt the long campaign by France and Germany to bring ever closer integration.
"The truth is that in the new Europe taking shape there are allies that share our perspective. It is a new Europe. You can see the difference with these new countries coming into Europe and sitting round the table. They are our allies," Blair said.
French President Jacques Chirac said he had wanted more powers ceded to the EU. "We, it's true, would have liked to have gone further still down the road of harmonization in social and fiscal areas, but of course we had to take everyone's opinions into account," he said.
The final text resolved one of the most bitter disputes of the three years of negotiations - the voting system.
The charter provides that at least 15 countries representing 65 percent of the EU's 455 million people would be required for a measure to pass, a safeguard to prevent the most populous countries from dominating. In another safeguard, at least four countries with 35 percent of the population would be needed to block any measure.
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EU Leaders Frame First Constitution
Agreement Reached Despite Divisions; No Accord on New Commission Head
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A51619-2004Jun18.html
PARIS, June 18 -- European Union leaders meeting in Brussels tonight agreed on a historic constitution -- the first ever forged for the 25-nation, 450 million-person bloc -- ending two contentious days of negotiations that exposed deep divisions and clouded prospects for future cooperation.
The mood of success was tempered by the reality that the constitution still faces formidable hurdles. Many EU nations have announced they will hold referendums on its adoption, and rejection by one country would sink it. Chances for passage look particularly problematic in Britain, where a small anti-Europe party recently made election gains, and in Denmark, which has a history of rejecting European treaties.
The EU operates under a complex web of treaties, and proponents of the constitution say it would streamline decision-making and, by creating a permanent president and foreign minister, give the union greater standing in world affairs.
Joy was also muted because the leaders failed to agree on a replacement for Romano Prodi of Italy as president of the European Commission, the EU's executive arm. Faced with a deadlock and no candidate acceptable to all the countries, the leaders agreed to postpone the choice until a future meeting.
Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, who holds the EU's six-month rotating presidency and chaired the meeting, worked feverishly to secure language that allowed agreement on the constitution and received a standing ovation for his efforts. The most vexing question was how to apportion voting power among countries of vastly different sizes -- the same question that torpedoed hopes for a constitution when the leaders met in December.
A deal was secured when small countries dropped their insistence on more voting power, Britain won agreement to preserve its veto over such sensitive areas as taxation and foreign policy and Roman Catholic countries led by Poland dropped their demand that the constitution include a reference to God and Europe's Christian heritage.
Despite the last-minute agreement, this meeting, coming after a six-month cooling-off period, seemed more acrimonious than last December's session. Relations seemed particularly strained between British Prime Minister Tony Blair on one side and French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on the other.
Having each suffered a severe rebuke from voters in European parliamentary elections Sunday, all three leaders appeared in no mood to compromise, analysts and diplomats said.
Blair's official spokesman told reporters, "We are operating in a Europe of 25, not six, or two, or one" -- a clear broadside directed against France and Germany, which often fashion themselves as the engine behind EU integration.
Chirac was equally combative, telling the gathering, "From now on, there are limits that cannot be overstepped," according to his spokeswoman, Catherine Colona. Signaling that France was tired of making concessions to Blair, Chirac said, according to Colona, "We will not accept any further retreat from what has been proposed by the Irish presidency."
"The problem now is the personality clash between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, because both have to look as tough as they can before their own voters," said Heather Grabbe, a researcher at the London-based Center for European Reform. Blair and Chirac, she said, "seem to be going toe-to-toe."
The battle over finding a new president of the European Commission proved even more contentious than the fight over the constitution, exposing anew many divisions that first came to light during the Iraq war.
Britain, the United States' main ally in Iraq, blocked appointment of Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, the preferred candidate of France and Germany, because he was seen as too vocal in opposing the war. In return, France vetoed the nomination of a Briton, Chris Patten, the current EU external affairs minister, saying the next commission president should come from a country that uses the common currency, the euro, and is inside Europe's open-borders zone. A Briton would be disqualified on both counts.
Originally, the new EU president was supposed to be chosen Thursday, after a working dinner of the 25 heads of state. But that dinner was described as acrimonious, with no country giving ground and no compromise candidate emerging.
"Both sides have toughened their stances," said Marco Incerti, a researcher with the Brussels-based Center for European Policy Studies. "The British have said never Verhofstadt, and the French said, okay, never Patten. . . . . It doesn't help to have this kind of confrontational language."
Special correspondent Stina Lunden contributed to this report.
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Leaders Reach Agreement on a European Constitution
June 19, 2004
By THOMAS FULLER and KATRIN BENNHOLD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/international/europe/19euro.html
BRUSSELS, June 18 - European leaders said Friday that they had struck a deal on a European constitution, the latest step in the gradual but creaking process toward a more united Continent.
Under the agreement, for the first time, the Continent - at least as represented by the 25-nation European Union - would have a president, a foreign minister and a single rule book to replace the web of treaties that govern the complex relationships among the union's member countries.
But the constitution still faces a hard test: ratification by all 25 members, which could be exceedingly difficult in the face of strong skepticism in some countries and voter apathy. At least seven of the member nations have decided to ratify the pact by referendum.
Though the leaders toasted their success with Champagne, the past two days were marked by dogged and at times polarized talks that ended in compromises many participants strongly criticized.
Many of the compromises limited the scope of decision-making in sensitive areas like taxation and social issues.
Negotiators inserted what they called "emergency brakes" for countries worried about retaining their national prerogatives, notably Britain.
"We have to move at the pace of the slowest camel in the train," said John Palmer, director of the European Policy Center in Brussels.
The constitution is a legalistic document of nearly 350 articles - perhaps not what leaders had envisioned when they called for a "more democratic, more transparent and more efficient" system at a meeting two and a half years ago in Brussels.
But it contains a string of innovations. Among them is the creation of a European public prosecutor, a sort of nascent federal attorney general who would be responsible for investigating and bringing to trial cases where the European Union's financial interests are at stake.
According to officials, these cases could involve crimes like fraud in the European Union budget or counterfeiting of euro notes and coins. Ultimately, the prosecutor could also be responsible for prosecuting "serious crime having a cross-border dimension."
There are also provisions for countries in the union to take part in special combat units if they choose, an issue closely watched by Washington; and for closer cooperation on military procurement.
"This is definitely a step forward," said Marco Incerti, research fellow at the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. "They have increased transparency and simplified the institutions to some extent."
With its demands to keep a national veto on a wide range of issues including taxation and foreign policy, Britain was pitted against France and Germany, whose delegations were grinding their teeth at what they saw as their neighbor's intransigence.
After President Jacques Chirac of France publicly attacked the British position, a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair fired back Friday, pointing out that "we're operating in a Europe of 25, not a Europe of six. Or two. Or one." Meanwhile, the union's smallest members insisted on protections against their big neighbors pushing through decisions. They also fought over the European Union's budget rules with the Germans and French, who have breached them for three years. It will take legal experts about two months to draw up an official treaty in the union's 20 languages based on the Friday agreement, before leaders will reconvene to sign it.
Then the text needs to be ratified in each country, a process that could take at least six months, officials estimate. The earliest the constitution could come into effect is next spring.
In a measure of how compartmentalized European political systems are, leaders have rejected the idea of having the referendums on the same day.
Among those countries holding referendums are Denmark, Ireland and Britain, three countries where there is much skepticism of European integration. In Denmark, a referendum on adopting the euro single currency was unexpectedly lost in 1998, and Irish voters defeated the previous European Union voting system agreed to by leaders in Nice, France, in 2000, before narrowly passing it in a second try.
Still, Pat Cox, president of the European Parliament, displayed optimism. "If we can agree it, we can sell it," he said.
Among the innovations in the constitution that helped reconcile the interests of large and small countries is a "double-majority" voting system that takes account of the number of countries backing an initiative as well as the population they represent.
A deadlock was broken Friday over the threshold necessary for a yes vote on a piece of legislation when Irish negotiators raised the minimum needed to 15 countries representing 65 percent of the population. The threshold is even higher under special circumstances.
Under the constitution, the union would have a foreign minister to conduct "common foreign and security policy" and operate a nascent European diplomatic corps.
-------- iraq
A U.S. Airstrike Kills at Least 22 in Falluja
June 19, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/international/20CND-IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 19 - The American military on Saturday morning carried out an airstrike on a residential area in the volatile city of Falluja, firing missiles that killed at least 22 people, residents and a police chief in the area said.
A warplane launched two missiles that reduced to rubble at least two homes and damaged at least two others in the impoverished Jubail district, they said, according to several news agency reports. The attack took place around 9 or 10 a.m., the reports said. People at the site spent the morning and afternoon pulling bodies and body parts from the debris. sv29,2if,,v29 It was unclear who or what was the target of the attack, and the American military said it had no immediate comment. Residents said civilians, including women and children, were among the dead.
``The number of casualties is so high because after the first missile, we jumped to rescue the victims,'' Wissam Ali Hamad, a resident, told The Associated Press. ``The second missile killed those trying to carry out the rescue.''
The strike is the first assault by the Americans on Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad, since the Marines withdrew from the city in late April. It could mean the start of a new American offensive in what has become the single most problematic city for the occupation forces. On April 5, the Marines encircled Falluja and began an invasion that left 10 marines and hundreds of Iraqis dead and transformed the city into a rallying cry for anti-American sentiments throughout the Middle East.
Faced with the possibility of a huge political reaction in the Arab world if the invasion continued, the White House ordered a halt to those operations. The Marines surrendered control of Falluja to an Iraqi militia of 2,000 men that call themselves the Falluja Brigade. The brigade is headed by Muhammad Latif, a former official of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party who had a falling out with Mr. Hussein.
The brigade, partly composed of insurgents who were fighting the Marines, has failed to clamp down on the guerrillas, and American military officials have expressed disappointment at the results. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the spokesman for the occupation forces, has said that Falluja had a ``mixed report card'' and that the military was not satisfied with the results.
None of the insurgents have turned in their arms. The people who ambushed and killed four American security contractors - followed by the mutilation of their bodies by a raging crowd - remain at large. Military officials say they believe the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has used Falluja as a base at various points.
On Saturday, residents of Falluja brought the dead to the martyr's cemetery to be buried in a row of 22 graves, Reuters reported.
Fighting flared up elsewhere in the so-called Sunni Triangle, as battles continued between American soldiers and insurgents around the city of Baquba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. It was the fourth day in a row of heavy fighting.
The clashes have been in the village of Buhritz, on the outskirts of Baquba. Residents have been forced to flee the area. Plumes of smoke have filled the sky in the past couple of days as armored vehicles have surrounded the village.
American forces discovered roadside bombs in Baquba on Saturday.
The battles began Wednesday, when American soldiers visiting the mayor's office came under fire from guerrillas armed with AK-47's and rocket-propelled grenades, said Maj. Neal E. O'Brien, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division. The soldiers searched the area and then left.
At 3 a.m. Thursday, American forces raided the home of Hussein al-Septi, who is suspected of being a guerrilla leader. A firefight ensued. Mr. Septi was injured and arrested, Major O'Brien said.
In the southern city of Basra, a roadside bomb exploded next to a civilian car, killing three Iraqis and one Portuguese contactor. The contractor worked for a telecommunications company. Police officers were among the Iraqis killed.
In the afternoon, Iraqi security guards discovered a white Chevrolet Caprice believed to be loaded with explosives parked near the Basra headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The car appeared heavy, and guards yelled at the driver to move it, one of the guards said. The driver sprinted from the car and jumped into a BMW that raced from the scene.
British forces then sealed off the area and used a robot to check out the car. Explosives were discovered inside, and the robot detonated them. A huge blast rocked the area. A second robot was used to detonate some explosives that had failed to blow up.
In central Baghdad, hundreds of women marched in the morning to call for an end to the occupation and to protest the war.
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At Least 20 Said Killed in Falluja Airstrike
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Fallujah.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A U.S. military plane fired missiles Saturday into a residential neighborhood in Falluja, killing at least 20 and leveling houses in the restive Sunni Muslim city, police and residents said. The U.S. military declined comment.
Residents said at least 20 bodies were taken for burial soon afterward in the city's ``martyrs' cemetery,'' in accordance with Islamic custom to bury dead quickly. At least three women and five children were among the dead.
U.S. Marines declined comment and referred queries to the U.S. command, which said it had no comment.
``At 9:30 a.m., a U.S. plane shot two missiles on this residential area,'' said the Falluja police chief, Sabbar al-Janabi, as he surveyed the wreckage. ``Scores were killed and injured. This picture speaks for itself.''
Rescue workers combed the scene looking for other victims. At least two houses were destroyed and six others were damaged in the poor residential area. Slabs of concrete and steel reinforcing bars were upended and twisted skyward in the damage, Associated Press Television News footage showed.
Water pooled from 20-foot crater in front of one of the destroyed houses, apparently from where one of the missiles struck. One man displayed several Qurans burned in the strikes.
Outraged residents accused the Americans of trying to inflict maximum damaged by firing two strikes -- one first to attack and another to kill the rescuers.
``The number of casualties is so high because after the first missile we jumped to rescue the victims,'' said Wissam Ali Hamad. ``The second missile killed those trying to carry out the rescue.''
U.S. Marines pulled back from Falluja in late April after three weeks of fighting touched off when four American security contractors were killed in an ambush and their bodies mutilated.
Ten Marines and hundreds of Iraqis, many of them civilians, died before the siege was lifted and security was handed over to an Iraqi volunteer force, the Falluja Brigade.
U.S. officials have said Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be hiding in the city. Al-Zarqawi has been blamed for the string of car bombs across Iraq, including the Thursday that killed 35 people and wounded 145 at an Iraqi military recruiting center in Baghdad.
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Iraqi officials ponder use of harsh Saddam-era laws
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Borzou Daragahi
June 19, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040618-105217-1767r.htm
BAGHDAD - Iraq's interim government yesterday said it was considering reviving emergency martial law powers from the Saddam Hussein era to combat a wave of violence that has killed nearly 200 people and paralyzed oil exports.
Malik Dohan al-Hassan, justice minister in the caretaker Iraqi government, said authorities may resort to "exceptional" laws imposed by the former dictator after it takes power on June 30.
"The idea of imposing exceptional laws is under study," he said, adding that there were no legal hurdles.
Defense Minister Hazem Shalan al-Khuzaei and Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib also warned that the new government may impose martial law to control what Mr. al-Naqib called "terrorist acts" after 41 persons were killed in two car bombings Thursday.
Such a move would be welcome by Col. Haydar Abdul Rasool, an officer in the fledgling Iraqi Civil Defense Corps.
Given the country's mounting security woes, Col. Rasool said he would recommend closing the nation's borders and giving police and soldiers a much freer hand to deal with wrongdoers on the street.
If Iraqi leaders follow through with the martial law idea, he just might get his way.
"Right now we can only open fire on people if they threaten us," the burly commander of 1,300 soldiers said in an interview. "We should have more freedom to act. We must have more brutal laws. The American laws are weak laws."
After a grisly month in which terrorists set off 17 car bombs in 18 days, Iraqi leaders are publicly pondering the idea of imposing harsh measures to combat a wave of lawlessness and violence.
Since the toppling of Saddam last year, Iraqi officials have been eager to take more authority over the country's security from the U.S.-led occupation force, which is set to hand control of the country to Iraqis on June 30.
Mr. al-Khuzaei, the defense minister, vowed this week that his government would track down insurgents "from house to house and from street to street, by all means available."
"We will cut off the hands of those people; we will cut their necks if it is necessary to do so," he told reporters.
Under martial law, soldiers are given broad powers to arrest lawbreakers and impose order at the barrel of a gun. It also often has meant a suspension of civil liberties and political activity.
The latest attacks, against a recruitment center for the new Iraqi army in Baghdad and against members of Col. Rasool's Iraqi Civil Defense Corps in the central Iraqi city of Balad, killed at least 41 and wounded 150 Iraqis, many of them poor young men seeking jobs with Iraq's new security forces.
Iraqis have grown tired of the carnage and chaos in their streets.
In Baghdad, homicide rates have skyrocketed to twice that of Bogota, Colombia, and kidnappings for ransom have become epidemic. The car bombings have filled up emergency rooms and morgues with mangled bodies and weeping relatives.
Many of Iraq's newly established security forces concede they simply do not have the tools to combat this level of violence.
"We cannot defend against car bombs," said Fares Ibrahim, a member of the Iraqi military police. "It's like trying to predict when a jug of gasoline left out in the sun will explode."
Col. Rasool, a no-nonsense military leader who was an officer during Saddam's rule, said he was looking forward to the day when he can set up checkpoints and dispatch patrols without coordinating with American troops or abiding by the Americans' rules of engagement.
"The looter, the kidnapper or thief - we take him and put him in prison [but] he's out in a month," he said. "The Americans don't know who the criminals are. We know."
Given a free hand, he said, the military would all but close down Iraq's borders and impose tighter passport controls on all those entering and exiting the country. He said he would purge his own ranks of many unqualified recruits brought in by the Americans.
"A lot of them are not tough enough to be soldiers," he said.
He said the coalition had begun supplying the new troops with new weapons, bulletproof jackets and vehicles.
Sometime in the next few weeks, he said, his civil defense corpsmen are scheduled to put on a massive show of strength throughout the capital, flooding the streets with at least 100 men per neighborhood.
"That will show people that we're in charge," said Col. Rasool, who said he lost about 35 men over the last year. "Once the Americans pull back to their bases, we'll have more freedom to act."
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Marshall Law in Iraq
LewRockwell.com
by Richard Cummings
June 19, 2004
http://www.lewrockwell.com/cummings/cummings37.html
Because of increased episodes of violence in Iraq, the new Iraqi government, in conjunction with its American counterpart, has brought Marshall Law to Iraq. Marshall Law, Marshall Law III, actually, has been dispatched as President Bush's new envoy, replacing Paul Bremer, who has become the head waiter at Le Circe 2000 in anticipation of its closing, a continuation of his career path. Mr. Law, a graduate of Yale (what else?) will assume his duties immediately and will continue to function in Iraq after the arrival of Ambassador John Negroponte to head the seventeen thousand person delegation assigned to the new American embassy in Baghdad. The embassy, under construction by Bechtel, will be larger than the Pentagon. Halliburton will provide food services.
Judith Miller conducted Mr. Law's interview with a new Iraqi newspaper, the Baghdad Times, edited by Howell Raines, who finally found a job after being fired by the parent company of the Baghdad Times, the New York Times.
Ms. Miller. Was your presence in Iraq inevitable?
Marshall Law: Not really. It took a lot of work to make this possible.
Ms. Miller: Such as?
Marshall Law: First, you had to alienate the entire population. That took some doing. But we had Paul Wolfowitz come over here first to get it going. Now the new poll, conducted by the Coalition itself, shows that America and Americans are not only distrusted but also detested. The average Iraqi says he would be safer if all foreign troops packed up and left.
Ms. Miller: Is it fair to say, then that Marshall Law has been imposed on Iraq.
Marshall Law: Everyone is saying that. It's a nice little joke, but the fact is someone has to put his foot down and restore order.
Ms. Miller: But isn't this kind of policy in direct contrast to the stated goal of creating democracy in Iraq so it could be a model for other Arab countries?
Marshall Law: Not really. How many people remember that this all started with Jeanne Kirkpatrick, when she wrote that there was a difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes? We could impose authoritarian regimes as a temporary measure, even if that meant it lasted for half a century, so a totalitarian regime, that is, one not favorable to the United States, could not come to power.
Ms. Miller: Are you saying that the democracy is going to have to wait in Iraq until it looks as if all opposition to America is crushed?
Marshall Law: That's about it. Call a spade a spade, I always say. Once we have crushed all dissent, then maybe these jerks will be ready to consider governing themselves, at least as acceptable puppets. If they elect a government hostile to us, we're just going to have to come in and overthrow it. What else is new?
Ms. Miller: I gather that there are terrorists at work in Iraq now, some of whom have ties to Al Queda.
Marshall Law: That's true. They weren't here before, but they are here now. So I have become an absolute necessity. What we are going to have to do is suspend the constitution before it is even written. Look, without order you simply can't have self-government.
Ms. Miller: Let's be honest. This is sounding more and more like Saddam Hussein's regime.
Marshall Law: Well, in case you have forgotten, our guys at CIA hired Saddam Hussein and trained him to be an assassin to bump off Kassim the Commie. He messed up and made that famous swim to escape. Then our guys sat by (well, we gave a little nudge here and there) while he knocked off all his enemies and took power. Only then did the CIA find out that his role model was Joseph Stalin. You have to hand it to the Agency. It got the Batistas to flee Cuba so Castro could come down from the mountains and the sugar crop would get harvested. No one believed he was a Communist. He was some romantic figure who could be bought off like all the phony dictators of Latin America, at least that's what they thought. Now, he acknowledges that his role model has always been Adolph Hitler. But stuff like this gives people like me a chance to have a career cleaning up the mess we made ourselves. It goes on forever. Hey, Osama bin Laden was one of our guys in Afghanistan, Bill Casey's boy. What a mistake! We'll be paying for that one for decades.
Ms. Miller: Lets cut to the chase. Was the war a mistake?
Marshall Law: What's the point of living in the past? And who will ever really know? What we know now is that we are there and there is no getting out. Wolfowitz has just said our troops will be there "as long as necessary." You know as well as I do that this means they will be there until the next century.
Ms. Miller: Let me plead mea culpa and ask if you think the media played a role in all of this.
Marshall Law: Well, I think it's fair to say that the stupidity had been spread around pretty equally. You believed all the nonsense and reported it because you wanted to believe it. That's what is means to be part of the GARC, the Great American Ruling Class. The GARC doesn't think; it just reacts. It's a great amorphous mass of idiocy with almost total power. It's like you puffed up Johnny Apple until he was as big as the moon, as though he were not big enough as it is. Then, you would have it, more or less. Ask the GARC to have a thought and it will sit there and pontificate without saying anything concrete. It has no ideas and cannot recognize facts. It huffs and puffs like Lyndon Johnson, or grins at your benignly like Ronald Reagan. And when the GARC has totally messed up in the outposts of the empire, it imposes me, Marshall Law. It's Pinochet all over again.
Ms Miller: Would things get better with John Kerry?
Marshall Law: That turkey IS the GARC. Are you kidding? I'll have lots of work with him.
Ms. Miller: Is there no hope, then?
Marshall Law: It all depends on who is getting paid. For Marshall Law, there is lots of hope. Otherwise to paraphrase Kafka, hope is infinite but not for you.
Richard Cummings [send him mail] taught international law at the Haile Selassie I University and before that, was Attorney-Advisor with the Office of General Counsel of the Near East South Asia region of U.S.A.I.D, where he was responsible for the legal work pertaining to the aid program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author of a new novel, The Immortalists, as well as The Pied Piper - Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, and the comedy, Soccer Moms From Hell. He holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University and is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He is writing a new book, The Road To Baghdad - The Money Trail Behind The War In Iraq. He is a contribution editor for The American Conservative.
-------- israel / palestine
Hamas Scrambles for Role in Running Gaza
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Running-Gaza.html
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- The Islamic militant group Hamas is seeking a role in running the Gaza Strip once Israel withdraws, lobbying for posts in the education and health ministries as well as the security forces, Palestinian officials told The Associated Press.
Analysts say a stake in the system might make Hamas less likely to attack Israelis, to avoid provoking a reoccupation. But its leaders say -- at least in public -- that they have no intention of halting attacks.
Palestinians officials said it is too early to say whether Hamas can work within an administrative structure with other factions. But Hamas and another extremist group, Islamic Jihad, have begun drafting an agreement with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority on how to run the Gaza Strip jointly after Israel's pullout, officials said Friday.
``We in Hamas, as well as all the (other) factions, insist on the right to participate in Palestinian decision-making after the comprehensive withdrawal,'' Ismail Haniyeh, a Hamas leader, told AP.
That is a sharp about-face for Hamas, which has been Arafat's biggest political rival. It insisted in recent years that it wanted nothing to do with Arafat's Palestinian Authority, a creation of the 1994 interim peace accords with Israel that Hamas and other militants staunchly oppose.
However, with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon determined to pull Israeli settlers and soldiers out of Gaza by the end of 2005, the lure of power has strengthened. Hamas and other hardline groups can justify an interest in governance by arguing the Israeli pullout marks the end of the interim deals.
In dealing with his opponents, Arafat has always vacillated between seeking to intimidate them and trying to win them over. But he has resisted intense pressure from the United States and Israel to dismantle groups like Hamas, which has staged dozens of suicide bombings that have killed hundreds of Israelis.
A deal with the Palestinian Authority could lead to a moderated Hamas focused on governmental responsibility, Palestinian officials said. Ziad Abu Amr, one official involved in the talks, said attacks on Israelis would have to stop because Hamas would ``be part of a binding agreement.''
But Haniyeh, whose group says its goal is the destruction of Israel, insisted that ``no single Palestinian is going to grant Israel any security commitment in return for its one-sided withdrawal from the strip.''
Still, Hamas has shown a pragmatic side in the past, and such talk might be largely intended to save face. It has been hit by a series of Israeli assassinations of its leaders and the planned pullout could open new opportunities.
``There is a crisis of leadership, which has been cut off from the grass roots,'' said Mahdi Abdel Hadi, head of the Jerusalem-based think tank Passia.
Mahmoud Zahar, who is thought to be Hamas leader in Gaza since the April 17 assassination of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, asked Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia last week to invite Hamas members into Gaza's education, health and public works ministries once Israel pulls out, said two Palestinian officials who were present at the meeting.
Zahar also asked for a Hamas role in Gaza's security forces, said the officials, who spoke on condition they not be quoted by name because they didn't want it known they had revealed details of the sensitive talks.
In a statement on Hamas' Web site, Zahar said the group seeks ``to establish an army and national security services which include all the political factions.''
It's no coincidence Hamas is asking to participate in ministries dealing with public welfare. It has won wide popularity in Gaza with a string of charities.
Getting governmental jobs for its doctors and teachers could be an important source of income with Hamas in financial straits. Driven underground by Israeli offensives, the group can no longer stage public rallies to raise funds and donations from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states have been cut drastically, Palestinian and Israeli officials say.
Militancy thrives in the strip, a fenced-in, poverty-stricken territory where only a tiny portion of the 1.3 million people have jobs and where Israeli military raids are a daily fact of life.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zohri said that even if Israel withdraws from Gaza, the Palestinians will continue to resist Israeli occupation ``in every corner of Palestine'' -- including inside Israel's pre-1967 borders.
Reflecting the uncertainties for Hamas officials amid Israel's assassination campaign, Zohri insisted on meeting an AP reporter for an interview on a public street in Gaza City, perhaps seeking the safety of numbers by standing near dozens of workers staging a protest rally.
Associated Press reporter Ibrahim Barzak in Gaza City contributed to this report.
--------
Israeli Copters Strike Gaza Metal Workshop
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Gaza.html
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Israeli helicopters fired three missiles at an empty metal workshop in the central Gaza Strip on Saturday night, and no one was injured, Palestinian officials said.
The army said the workshop was used by the militant group Hamas to make weapons.
Ambulances and fire engines raced to the scene of the attack in the area of Mughazi, about four miles south of Gaza City. The strike sparked a small fire, Palestinian security sources said.
Israeli Apache helicopters continued to circle overhead after the strike.
The strike came a day after Israeli helicopters attacked two empty metal workshops in Gaza City. The army said those workshops also were used by militants to make weapons.
Three people were slightly injured in those attacks.
-------- mideast
Islamic Radicals Behead American In Saudi Arabia
Kidnap Victim's Body Is Found Near Capital
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A52166-2004Jun18?language=printer
BERLIN, June 18 -- Islamic radicals in Saudi Arabia on Friday beheaded an American contractor whom they kidnapped six days earlier, and in a defiant statement on the Internet pledged more attacks on Americans. Hours later, Saudi security forces reported they had shot dead the leader of the group that asserted responsibility for the abduction.
The decapitated corpse of Paul M. Johnson Jr., an employee of Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp., was found on the outskirts of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Friday, after the group calling itself al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula announced his death and posted photos of his remains on a Web site.
Johnson was the third American in less than two weeks to meet a violent death in Riyadh. His kidnapping, the first of a Westerner in Saudi Arabia, and the manner of his killing marked a new kind of assault on the American presence in the oil-producing kingdom. "The infidel got his fair treatment," the group said in a statement.
Radicals say that vengeance for the occupation of Iraq is part of the reason for the campaign, which has led many Americans to leave the country and made those who remain fearful of streets they once found safe. The ultimate goals, the groups say, are to drive foreigners out of the kingdom and overthrow the House of Saud royal family.
Saudi officials reported Friday that one of three men killed in a shootout with security forces about an hour after the announcement of Johnson's death appeared to be Abdulaziz Muqrin, leader of the al Qaeda group. The Saudi government has said that Muqrin's death or capture would be key to suppressing the group; DNA testing was planned.
President Bush denounced the killers as "barbaric people" trying to intimidate Americans. "The murder of Paul shows the evil nature of the enemy we face," Bush said in Fort Lewis, Wash. "They're trying to shake our will. They're trying to get us to retreat from the world. . . . America will not be intimidated by these kinds of extremist thugs."
Johnson was reported missing by his family last Saturday, the same day that another American contractor who worked out of Johnson's office, Kenneth Scroggs, was killed by gunmen as he drove into his garage in Riyadh.
Last weekend, the group announced it was holding Johnson and said he would be treated as Muslim detainees were treated in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, scene of abuse by U.S. jailers, and Guantanamo Bay.
On Tuesday, Muqrin's group released a short video showing a blindfolded Johnson. A masked man, identified in a caption as Muqrin, threatened to execute him within 72 hours unless Saudi officials released an unspecified number of fellow jihadists from prison. The Saudi government refused and launched an effort to find and rescue Johnson.
According to Saudi spokesmen, the operation drew on 15,000 security personnel, including fire departments familiar with streets and neighborhoods. More than 1,200 homes had been searched by Thursday night.
In addition, the U.S. government dispatched 20 FBI agents to Saudi Arabia to assist in the search. The presence of American agents on Saudi soil was a sensitive subject for Saudi government officials, who played down the U.S. role and bristled at the suggestion that they were unable to control the insurgency.
Prince Nayef, the Saudi interior minister, said in an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro that the Saudi government did not need outside assistance. He noted that the United States has had difficulty finding terrorist suspects elsewhere, singling out Abu Musab Zarqawi, a radical who has eluded capture in Iraq despite a $25 million reward offer. Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for beheading another American, Nicholas Berg, in a kidnapping in Iraq this year.
In the days leading up to the deadline, Johnson's relatives and friends made emotional appeals on television for his release, telling the kidnappers that he was a friend of Muslims and deeply interested in their culture.
"Please release my father," Johnson's son, Paul Johnson III, told al-Arabiya television a few hours before the station reported the execution. "He is an innocent man. He loves Muslims. Saudi Arabia was his home." Johnson's wife, Thanom, made a similar plea in television interviews.
On Friday, the kidnappers posted a statement on an Islamic Web site announcing his death and included three photos of his remains.
Johnson worked on Apache attack helicopter systems for the Saudi government. His kidnappers said he was singled out for that reason. "Let him taste something of what Muslims have long tasted from Apache helicopter fire and missiles," they said in a statement posted on the site. "The infidel got his fair treatment."
"To the Americans and whoever is their ally in the infidel and criminal world and their allies in the war against Islam, this action is punishment to them and a lesson for them to know that whoever steps foot in our country, this decisive action will be his fate," the statement said.
James C. Oberwetter, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, confirmed Johnson's death. "The inhumanity of the crime exceeds all boundaries of civilized peoples," he said in a statement.
On Thursday, the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh issued a fresh warning to Americans in Saudi Arabia, saying that there was "credible information indicating that extremists are planning further attacks against U.S. and Western interests." The warning added that Americans living in private residences -- as opposed to the guarded compounds that house many expatriates -- were being "specifically targeted."
On April 15, the State Department urged all Americans to leave the kingdom and has ordered the evacuation of all non-essential embassy personnel. For the past two months, all Americans remaining in Saudi Arabia have been asked to register their presence with the embassy.
American workers, most of them with the oil industry, and dependents used to number close to 35,000. Embassy officials said on Friday they did not know how many had left.
Lockheed began evacuating employees' family members from the country in April after the State Department issued its warning. Lockheed, the Pentagon's largest contractor, declined to say how many of its workers remained in Saudi Arabia or to discuss what security precautions it was taking.
"Paul bravely carried out his duties, and the news of his sudden loss is a shock to everyone in the Lockheed Martin family," the firm's two top executives, Chairman and CEO Vance Coffman and President Robert J. Stevens, said in a memo to employees. "We grieve along with his family."
Lockheed employees have sent 700 e-mails and letters to Johnson's family during the last week expressing remorse and condolences, according to company spokesman Tom Jurkowsky. "It's a different mood around here. It's numbing," Jurkowsky said.
Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and the leading financial backer of conservative Islamic causes around the world. From the late 1970s until 2001, an estimated 15,000 Saudis trained at camps in Afghanistan and helped fuel religious warfare across the Middle East and northern Africa.
While many militant leaders, including bin Laden, have labeled the Saudi royal family corrupt for years and called for its ouster, until last year the kingdom was largely spared attacks from within. Violence picked up last May, when local groups allied with al Qaeda mounted a car bomb attack on a Western residential compound in Riyadh, killing 35 and sparking a limited but open revolt against the government.
Saudi security officials said they have arrested more than 300 militants since then and broken up the biggest terror cells, but have not been able to contain the violence. The attacks helped drive oil prices to historic highs and raised speculation that the House of Saud's hold on power might be slipping.
Muqrin's group is believed to have been behind a hostage-taking attack on a Western residential compound in Khobar last month that left 22 dead, as well as a suicide bombing in Riyadh last November that killed 17 and wounded more than 120.
Since then, the radicals have changed their tactics and have opted to target individual, unprotected Westerners rather than attempting to inflict mass casualties.
Mustafa Alani, a Middle East security analyst at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said the group wanted to avoid harming Muslims for fear of creating a backlash in the region. He also said that more kidnappings were likely.
"This sort of operation is easy to execute," he said in a telephone interview. "It's also cheap and very effective. How hard is it to shoot or grab somebody on the street? Look at all this television coverage they've gotten in the U.S. They've now discovered this cheap and easy way to get publicity."
Staff writer Renae Merle in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
Acting on Threat, Saudi Militant Group Kills Captive American
June 19, 2004
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/international/middleeast/19SAUD.html?pagewanted=all&position=
CAIRO, June 18 - A Saudi militant group said Friday that it had carried out its threat to execute a kidnapped American engineer, posting three grisly pictures of his beheaded corpse on a Web site before leaving the body in a remote neighborhood of the capital, Riyadh.
Within hours, Abdelaziz al-Muqrin, the leader of the group - an offshoot of Al Qaeda that claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and a string of recent attacks on expatriates - was killed in a firefight with Saudi security forces in downtown Riyadh, local press reports said.
The gruesome slaying of the engineer, Paul M. Johnson Jr., 49, underscored the steady ratcheting up of bloodshed in the kingdom over the past two months and sent shock waves through its large expatriate community.
In Washington, the killing brought swift criticism from President Bush, who called it a "barbaric" act.
"The murder of Paul shows the evil nature of the enemy we face," President Bush said. "There's no justification whatsoever for his murder, and yet they killed him in cold blood. And it should remind us that we must pursue these people, and bring them to justice before they hurt other Americans."
There was no immediate reaction from the Saudi ruling family, but at the embassy in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, speaking for the government, said, "The people of Saudi Arabia are outraged by the cruel and cold-blooded murder of this innocent man."
[Saudi Arabia's security forces arrested 10 supporters of Mr. Muqrin's, Al Arabiya television reported on Saturday, according to Reuters. Al Arabiya, quoting security sources, said the arrests took place on Friday night in Riyadh. It said the 10 people seized were believed to be part of the same cell as Mr. Muqrin.]
The statement accompanying the beheading pictures said that Mr. Johnson's killing was revenge for all the Muslims killed by Americans and their weapons in Palestine, Afghanistan and various other conflicts around the world. Mr. Johnson, an employee of Lockheed Martin, specialized in working on the targeting and night vision systems of Apache helicopters in more than a decade spent in the kingdom.
"He tasted what thousands of Muslims taste every day because of the fire from the American Apache, its rockets and its flames that tortured Muslims," the statement from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula said.
The Saudi government did not immediately confirm that its security forces had killed the militant leader, Mr. Muqrin, and two others. But reports on the Arab satellite channel Al Arabiya and other local press reports said that the police, apparently acting on a tip that reportedly came from the house where Mr. Johnson's body was found, followed three cars bearing the militants and eventually opened fire on them at a gas station.
[The Associated Press, quoting Saudi officials in Washington, reported that five Saudi security officers were killed in the gunbattle. Four militants in addition to Mr. Muqrin were also killed, it said: Turki al-Sahaid, Faisal Abdulrahman Abdullah al-Dakheel, Rakan al-Sakhain and Ibrahim al-Drhaim.]
Mr. Muqrin's death would remove the source of much of the recent bloodshed, with no obvious replacement. "Al-Muqrin is the last well-known leader of Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia," said Mushairy al-Zaidy, a journalist and specialist in extremist groups, speaking on Al Arabiya. He noted that two other leaders had been killed in the past three months, leaving Mr. Muqrin the most prominent of the 18 wanted terrorists still at large. "There is no one as important to replace him," he said.
Two of those killed with Mr. Muqrin, the brothers Faisal and Bandar al-Dakheel, were also on the most-wanted list, Al Arabiya said.
The United States Embassy in Riyadh confirmed that the pictures on the Web site showed Mr. Johnson's severed head and that his body had been found later in eastern Riyadh.
The most detailed photograph showed the head on the back of Mr. Johnson's body with a knife leaning against its forehead and blood splashed all over and around the orange jumpsuit he was wearing. Another showed a hand lifting up the head and a third, more grainy shot showed the body from a different angle.
Mr. Johnson was kidnapped while driving home from work last Saturday around the time that another American who worked with him was shot dead in his driveway in what seemed to be a carefully planned attack. In a videotaped threat Tuesday, Mr. Muqrin said Mr. Johnson would be executed by Friday unless all mujahedeen fighters linked to Al Qaeda were released. Roughly 1,000 militants or their sympathizers are believed to be held in Saudi jails.
There was never really any chance of their release, and Saudi analysts saw the kidnapping as both a means of prolonging the attention paid to the militant group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and a way to draw parallels with the treatment of Arab prisoners in Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
On the videotape Mr. Johnson was shown blindfolded and wearing what his death photos revealed to be an orange jumpsuit similar to the prisoner garb at Guantánamo and elsewhere.
The statement that accompanied his death photos said the group was determined to humiliate all "polytheists until we establish a country of Islamic law and justice." This was a reference to their goal of driving all non-Muslims out of the Arabian peninsula and to undermining the ruling al-Saud dynasty.
The statement threatened all Americans and their allies with a similar fate, saying the killing was a lesson for those in the kingdom.
Mr. Jubeir, the Saudi spokesman, said that 15,000 security personnel were involved in looking for Mr. Johnson, with thousands of locations searched. "It is a terrible lie that the cowards who committed this inhumane act claim to be Muslim," Mr. Jubeir said.
Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation's largest military contractor, said in a statement that the death of Mr. Johnson was "a shock to everyone in the Lockheed Martin family."
"Paul was a valued and respected employee who bravely carried out his duties," the company said. "We grieve along with his family, and we will do everything we can to support them in their hour of need."
After the murder, discussion raged on Islamist Web sites whether such acts fell within accepted behavior in the religion. The country's senior clerics used their pulpits on Friday to condemn the violence, while other imams said it was a Muslim's duty to drive the infidels from the country.
The quick succession of attacks prompted numerous expatriates, especially the highly trained Westerners working in the more technical aspects of oil exploration and development or in finance, to consider leaving the kingdom. For many the first kidnapping and murder of an American could well prove the last straw.
"This has shaken people," said an American who has worked for Aramco for many years, not wanting to be identified further. He noted that while previous attacks against Western residential compounds came every few months, since May 1 there had been an attack on a project office in Yanbu that left six Western engineers dead, a residential compound breached in Khobar with 22 killed, two Americans gunned down in their driveways in Riyadh and two other Westerners killed elsewhere around the capital.
He said there were unconfirmed reports that more than 100 American families alone were planning to leave Aramco, not counting other nationalities.
The United States Embassy in Riyadh said the violence was evidently prompting all Americans to reconsider whether to stay in the kingdom. Diplomats said that June in general marks the start of a long summer exodus of at least two months. While some families were ready to leave for good, others were planning to see how the situation develops over the summer before deciding whether to return. "I think people are very upset; it's a little bit cumulative," said Carol R. Kalin, the spokeswoman for the American Embassy. "There are many Americans making plans to leave either temporarily or permanently."
The United States ambassador issued a statement urging the kingdom to focus on the safety of expatriates.
"This has been a rough year for Americans in Saudi Arabia." said the ambassador, James C. Oberwetter. "It has been tough on Saudis, too." Noting the long history of Americans' working to help develop the kingdom, he said, "Those from abroad who are guests of Saudi Arabia must rely on both its leadership and the average citizen for protection, so that good relations can exist between the two nations."
Leslie Wayne contributed reporting from New York for this article.
-------
No Saudi Payment to Qaeda Is Found
June 19, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/politics/19QAED.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 18 - The staff of the Sept. 11 commission has put forward what amounts to a major revision of a widely held perception in Washington that top Saudi officials gave money to Al Qaeda.
The new account, based on 19 months of staff work, asserts flatly that there is "no evidence" that the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials financed the group, which is led by Osama bin Laden.
In 2002, a joint Congressional committee was reported to have concluded the opposite in a classified study that was then the most extensive on the issue.
Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat and co-chairman of the committee that issued the report, said at the time, "In my judgment there is compelling evidence that a foreign government provided direct support through officials and agents of that government to some of the Sept. 11 hijackers."
Although he did not name the Saudi government, those familiar with the committee's report at the time said it focused on Saudi Arabia.
The intensity of feelings in Washington about Saudi Arabia and the difficulty of tracking the flow of money mean that the issue will almost certainly remain contentious.
At a minimum, the emphatic tone of the staff report and the extent of work on which it was apparently based pose a major challenge to the view that Saudi Arabia and its royal family somehow financed the Sept. 11 attacks.
In the new report, the presidential commission on Sept. 11 did acknowledge that Al Qaeda had "found fertile fund-raising ground" in Saudi Arabia, where "extreme religious views are common, and charitable giving is essential to the culture and, until recently, subjected to very limited oversight."
Still, it said, "There is no convincing evidence that any government financially supported Al Qaeda before 9/11." It added, "Saudi Arabia has long been considered the primary source of Al Qaeda funding, but we found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior officials within the Saudi government funded Al Qaeda."
The effort to dispel the idea that the Saudi government played a role in supporting Al Qaeda occurred 17 months after the Congressional committee finished its work on a report that many contended reached a very different conclusion.
The latest report is based on a broader range of interviews and much greater access to classified documents than the Congressional report, people with knowledge of both operations said.
In addition, members of the presidential commission traveled to Saudi Arabia twice in the inquiry, officials from Saudi Arabia and from the commission said.
Adel al-Jubeir, a senior adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, said the Sept. 11 commission's findings "vindicate what we have been saying all along - that Saudi officials, the Saudi government, the royal family, had no role in funding whatsoever."
"One by one, the myths are being dispelled," he said.
At the time of the Congressional report, the Saudi government asked that the report be made public. People who had read the report said it described senior Saudi officials as having funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable groups and operatives who may have helped finance the attacks.
The revised account was detailed in a staff report that also sought to correct what it described as other widespread misperceptions involving Al Qaeda. It said that contrary to many accounts, Mr. bin Laden, who comes from a wealthy Saudi family, never inherited vast sums of money and obtained the $30 million a year needed to sustain Al Qaeda from financial facilitators who "raised money from witting and unwitting donors, primarily in the Gulf countries, and particularly in Saudi Arabia."
The section of the report by the joint Congressional inquiry that addressed the role of Saudi Arabia was deleted from a nearly 900-page report that was made public last July, more than seven months after the panel finished the classified report.
The chapter focused on the role foreign governments played in the hijackings, but concentrates almost entirely on Saudi Arabia, people who have seen the section said.
The new staff report by the commission also asserts that a 1996 terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, understood to have been carried out by a Saudi Shiite group operating with help from Iran, may also have involved support from Al Qaeda. On Friday, however, senior intelligence officials said they knew of no evidence to support such a claim.
The report said the panel had seen "strong but indirect evidence" that Mr. bin Laden's organization "did in fact, play some as yet unknown role" in the attacks on the complex, in which 24 people were killed, including 19 American airmen. But United States officials have publicly stated that the attack was carried out by members of a pro-Iranian group known as Saudi Hezbollah, and the United States government has made those charges in federal court.
With highly classified documents previously inaccessible to those outside the government, the commission's staff painted a picture of Al Qaeda that differs in other important ways from what have been widespread perceptions.
It said there was "no persuasive evidence" that Al Qaeda relied on the drug trade as an important source of revenue, or raised money by trafficking in diamonds in the chaotic nations of West Africa.
Mr. bin Laden has less personal wealth than has been widely believed, the report says. Though he is a member of a wealthy family and received about $1 million a year until he was cut off in 1994, Mr. bin Laden never received the $300 million inheritance that has become the stuff of folklore, the report said.
"Contrary to popular understanding, bin Laden did not fund al Qaeda through a personal fortune and a network of businesses," the report said. "Instead, Al Qaeda relied primarily on a fund-raising network developed over time."
It said that Mr. bin Laden himself was only a small contributor to Al Qaeda. But it said that the organization spent an estimated $30 million a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, with as much as $20 million going to the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which provided Al Qaeda with a haven.
But like George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and other top government officials, the staff said it had no doubt that Al Qaeda was still "actively striving" to attack the United States, despite the blows it had suffered since Sept. 11. The group's objective, the staff said, remains to inflict casualties even greater than the nearly 3,000 people killed on Sept. 11, and it "remains extremely interested in conducting chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attacks."
"The Intelligence Community expects that the trend toward attacks intended to cause ever-higher casualties will continue," the commission said in the report titled "overview of the enemy."
The report said that Mr. bin Laden had first set his sights on attacks on the United States in 1992. But it casts doubt on the idea that he and his organization played any role in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center or the thwarted 1995 plot in Manila to blow up a dozen American airliners.
-------- pakistan / india
High-Profile Attacks Force Pakistan to Confront Extremists
Groups Were Once Considered Allies
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53348-2004Jun18?language=printer
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Recent high-profile attacks by Islamic militants on government targets, including a nearly successful assassination attempt on a senior army general last week, are pushing security forces into an escalating confrontation with extremist groups they once embraced as instruments of state policy, according to diplomats and analysts.
Until recently, Pakistani militants have avoided direct confrontation with the army, whose Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, has a long history of association with radical groups. The militants have seemed to distinguish between security forces and President Pervez Musharraf, an army general and supporter of the U.S.-led war on terrorism whom they twice tried to kill last December.
Over the past few months, however, some Islamic extremists now are seen to be broadening their anti-government campaign, according to the sources, staging frequent ambushes of army troops in the rugged borderlands near Afghanistan. In one high-profile attack on the morning of June 10, assailants sprayed automatic-weapons fire at the motorcade of Lt. Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hayat as he commuted to his office in downtown Karachi.
Ten Pakistanis, including the alleged ringleader, have been arrested in connection with that attempt, which was described by a Western diplomat as a "qualitative step up" in the nature of extremist violence in Pakistan.
At least in some instances, the army has apparently responded in kind, the sources said. After repeated attempts to persuade foreign militants and their local supporters in the remote tribal region of South Waziristan to surrender in exchange for amnesty, Musharraf and his generals last week ran out of patience, according to the diplomats and analysts. The military ordered a full-scale assault on fortified mountain compounds that for the first time included the use of airstrikes on targets inside Pakistan. Security officials claim to have killed more than 50 militants, mostly from Uzbekistan, in a four-day campaign in which 17 soldiers also died.
In subsequent fighting overnight Thursday, government troops who fired mortars at a mud brick fortress near the town of Wana in South Waziristan killed a prominent local tribesman and former Taliban fighter, Nek Mohammed, who was a key ally of the foreign militants, Pakistani officials said Friday. Mohammed, 27, had been the target of an intense manhunt since last week, when Pakistani authorities accused him of reneging on an agreement to hand over the militants.
The escalating bloodshed has prompted speculation among diplomats and analysts about the possibility of an irrevocable breach between the security services and home-grown radical groups -- some linked to al Qaeda -- that Pakistan has long employed as a kind of irregular army. They were used first to help drive Soviet troops from Afghanistan and more recently to bleed Indian forces in the disputed Himalayan province of Kashmir.
The assassination attempt last week in Karachi, said Rifaat Hussain, who chairs the department of strategic studies at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, "was an attack on a symbol of the authority of the state itself." He added, "Whoever planned it, the idea was not just to kill a person but to bring home the realization that the state itself was vulnerable and a legitimate target. . . . It was a kind of blowback."
Apparently, some senior security officials have reached the same conclusion.
"The fact of the matter is that almost all of the major terrorist incidents reported in the country recently were traced back to local militants who at one time or another had rubbed shoulders" with Pakistani intelligence agencies, said a senior intelligence official who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. The official cited major attacks by such groups, including the killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in February 2003. "Be it the murder of Daniel Pearl, assassination attempts on General Musharraf or a classic guerrilla-style attack against the corps commander in Karachi, the jihadis are directly involved."
Consistent with recent peace talks between India and Pakistan, Indian officials say that Musharraf seems to be honoring his pledge to prevent the use of Pakistani territory as a base for militant attacks on Indian forces in Kashmir. "There has not been much infiltration, to be honest," acknowledged an Indian intelligence official in New Delhi whose agency does not permit him to be named. "The overt help of the Pakistani army in infiltration is not happening."
At the same time, the official said, the "infrastructure" used by fighters from groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba "has not been totally dismantled." The official alleged that militants have started to reoccupy tent camps in a forest near the city of Muzzafarabad that has traditionally served as a jumping-off point for incursions across the cease-fire line that separates Indian and Pakistan forces in the divided province.
Pakistani officials deny such camps exist. But they acknowledge some reluctance to move too quickly or harshly against the home-grown groups, especially at a time of rising public anger toward the United States.
"It's a long haul, frankly," said a senior official who meets regularly with Musharraf and spoke on condition he not be named. "One has to move with tact. Unfortunately, the policies in Iraq, the policies in Palestine, have generated a sentiment against the U.S. among the average Muslim, which has been exploited by these groups."
But Pakistani officials no longer attempt to deny the internal threat posed by groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-i-Muhammad, which was founded with the government's blessing in 2000 to support the Kashmir insurgency and also has provided help for the Taliban, according to Western diplomats and analysts.
For example, Jamil Ahmad, a Jaish member from Pakistan-held Kashmir who fought against U.S.-led coalition forces in Afghanistan, was captured by pro-American Afghan forces and later handed over to Pakistani authorities, according to Pakistani security officials. Ahmad was then released. He has since been identified as one of two suicide bombers who tried to ram explosive-laden pickup trucks into Musharraf's armored limousine on Dec. 25, 2003.
Ataur Rahman, the alleged mastermind of last week's attack on Hayat, the corps commander in Karachi, has also fought in Kashmir and with the Taliban in Afghanistan, said police and intelligence officials. About 30 years old, Rahman comes from a middle-class neighborhood in Karachi, speaks good English and holds a master's degree in statistics from Karachi University, the officials said.
As they described the assassination attempt, Rahman and his co-plotters spent about a month watching Hayat's comings and goings before they finally made their move, firing on his motorcade and detonating a roadside bomb as the army general traveled from home to office on his customary route.
Hayat, who commands one of Pakistan's nine army corps, survived the attack only because his driver, though fatally wounded in the head, managed to stamp on the accelerator while an aide reached over the back seat and steered the general's bullet-riddled Toyota passenger car out of the line of fire, according to police and intelligence officials who insisted on anonymity because the matter is still under investigation. A bystander and nine security personnel, including Hayat's driver, were killed.
Police subsequently found and defused a second bomb, which was equipped with a trigger made from a cell phone. They arrested Rahman and his alleged accomplices over the next two days after tracing the origin of a call to the cell phone that apparently had been intended to detonate the device.
An investigator who was present for Rahman's interrogation said the accused man showed no remorse. "For us, the army is now the target," the investigator quoted Rahman as saying. Rahman, who allegedly received training at a militant camp in South Waziristan, explained that he and his associates now consider it an obligation "to wage war against the Pakistani army for siding with infidel forces such as the United States," the investigator said.
Western diplomats also cite evidence that the army is becoming more aggressive in South Waziristan, long regarded as a possible refuge for Osama bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda figures. During the recent campaign there, Pakistani F-16s dropped precision-guided bombs on compounds thought to have been used by foreign militants in the Shakai Valley. Commandos from the army's elite Special Services Group completed the job on the ground.
By some reckonings, the militants' attack on the corps commander might have marked a turning point. "It represents a qualitative step up in the terror effort," said a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Actually taking on the army as an institution may be the one thing that provokes a more robust backlash."
Special correspondents Kamran Khan in Karachi and Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi contributed to this report.
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Russia Warned U.S. About Iraq, Putin Says
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53096-2004Jun18.html
Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that his intelligence service had warned the Bush administration before the U.S. invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein's government was planning attacks against U.S. targets both inside and outside the country.
Putin, who opposed Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, did not go into detail about the information that was forwarded, and said Russia had no evidence that Hussein was involved in any attacks.
"After Sept. 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, the Russian special services, the intelligence service, received information that officials from Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside it against the U.S. military and other interests," Putin said, according to RIA Novosti, the Russian news agency. "American President George Bush had an opportunity to personally thank the head of one of the Russian special services for this information, which he regarded as very important," the Russian president told an interviewer while in Astana, capital of Kazakhstan.
A senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday that Russia has provided helpful information in the war on terrorism, but that he was "not aware of any specific threat information we were told" about Iraqi activities before the March 2003 invasion.
Putin's statement came as Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials are defending their statements -- made before the war and as recently as this week -- that Hussein's government had a relationship with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. Earlier this week, the staff of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said there were contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, "but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."
The question of Hussein's role in terrorism beyond Iraq's borders has become a sensitive issue for the Bush administration. The allegation that Hussein's Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, and the concern that it would give them to al Qaeda, were among the chief justifications cited by the administration for attacking Iraq. At the White House yesterday, National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said he would not comment on Putin's statement because it involves intelligence matters.
In January and February 2003, as U.S. and coalition forces massed in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf area, the Bush administration asked countries including Russia to keep close surveillance on Iraq intelligence officers in their countries to make certain they were not preparing terrorist attacks against U.S. facilities. The warning was based on what had occurred in 1991, when Iraqi intelligence attempted attacks on U.S. embassies in Indonesia and elsewhere as the Persian Gulf War began.
Administration officials last year said their requests resulted in intelligence from countries across the Middle East and Europe, as well as in parts of Asia and Africa where Iraqis or anti-Western terrorist groups were believed to be active. The intelligence-gathering operation was not in response to specific threats but was based on U.S. estimates that Hussein might respond to a U.S. invasion by ordering attacks against U.S. targets in the United States or in other countries.
Also immediately before the war, the FBI searched for several thousand illegal Iraqi immigrants who had disappeared while visiting the United States, officials said. Although most Iraqi immigrants were viewed as being sympathetic to the United States, authorities feared some could have been Iraqi agents or allies of terrorist groups.
After the March 19, 2003, invasion, authorities in Yemen and Jordan broke up plots by Iraqis who were preparing to bomb Western targets in those nations, and U.S. intelligence warned 10 other countries that small groups of Iraqi intelligence agents were readying similar attacks against Americans and other Westerners, according to U.S. government officials.
In his interview yesterday, Putin said: "It is one thing to have information that Hussein's regime was preparing acts of terrorism -- we did have this information, and we handed it over. . . . But we did not have information that they were involved in any terrorist acts whatsoever and, after all, these are two different things."
Two years ago, in an interview with British documentary makers after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Putin said he had personally warned Bush a day or two before the assaults that some kind of terrorist operation seemed to be in the works.
In that interview, as in his latest one, Putin did not specify where or when an attack was to have taken place. U.S. officials have said that the information provided by the Russians was not detailed enough for action to be taken.
Correspondent Peter Baker in Moscow contributed to this report.
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INTELLIGENCE REPORTS
Putin Says U.S. Was Alerted to Possible Attacks by Iraq
June 19, 2004
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/international/europe/19RUSS.html
MOSCOW, June 18 - President Vladimir V. Putin said Friday that Russia gave intelligence reports to the Bush administration suggesting that Saddam Hussein's government was preparing terrorist attacks in the United States or against American targets overseas.
But officials at the State Department expressed surprise, saying they knew of no such information from Russia, Reuters reported.
Mr. Putin said Russia's intelligence services received and passed along the information after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and before the American-led invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. He did not give details of the nature of the intelligence or the type of attacks reportedly being prepared.
Mr. Putin added, however, that Russia had no information that anyone in Iraq carried out the plans for attacks. And he emphasized that the intelligence did not change Russia's opposition to President Bush's decision to go to war, in part because of administration assertions of Iraq's support for terrorism. Mr. Putin said the criteria for resorting to military force were clearly defined and "were not observed" in the American-led war to overthrow Mr. Hussein.
"It is one thing to have information that Saddam's regime is preparing terrorist attacks, but we did not have information that it was involved in any terrorist acts," Mr. Putin said in remarks from Kazakhstan that were carried by official news agencies and broadcast on state television. "These are two different things."
A State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, told reporters he did not know anything about the information that Mr. Putin said Russia had passed on. No such information was communicated from Russia through the State Department, he said.
"Everybody's scratching their heads," one State Department official told Reuters.
Mr. Putin, who has cultivated a warm relationship with Mr. Bush despite sharp differences over the war, made his remarks a day after the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported in Washington that there was no clear evidence that Iraq had a relationship with Al Qaeda. That called into question a central rationale to the war, although Mr. Bush disputed the finding.
It was not clear why Mr. Putin addressed the issue on Friday, although he did so in response to a question about articles in the Russian media on the intelligence sharing that cited unidentified officials in the intelligence and security services.
Mr. Putin's remarks could be interpreted as lending credence to the Bush administration's concerns over Iraq and whether it supported terrorism in the months before the war, but it was impossible to say how credible the Russian intelligence reports were.
Mr. Putin said Russian "special services" had received information about plans for terrorist attacks "more than once." He said that Mr. Bush had "personally thanked the chief of one of the Russian special services for that information, which he considered very important."
A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, declined to elaborate on Mr. Putin's remarks, but said that intelligence reports alone could not justify the use of force against another country.
"If we all start wars based on intelligence," Mr. Peskov said, "then it will be the end of the world."
-------- spies
A Man of Violence, or Just '110 Percent' Gung-Ho?
June 19, 2004
By JAMES DAO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/national/19DETA.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1087704035-hikSDa+0QVxPbdHchdaf9g&pagewanted=all&position=
LILLINGTON, N.C., June 18 - It hardly surprised David A. Passaro's neighbors or a former wife that he should be arrested for beating an Afghan man in custody last year, becoming the first civilian charged in the American military's widening prisoner abuse scandal.
His first wife said Mr. Passaro, a former Army Special Forces soldier who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan, hit her when he drank too much. His second wife, who is now separated from him, recently filed court papers asserting Mr. Passaro had been "verbally abusive and threatening" to her. His neighbors in Lillington said that after a dispute over their dogs Mr. Passaro fired a bullet through the window of their empty car while their children played nearby.
And in 1990, Mr. Passaro was fired from the police force in Hartford, Conn., after he was arrested for beating a man in a parking lot brawl, officials and relatives said. He later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and paid a $100 fine.
Mr. Passaro now stands accused of beating an Afghan detainee, Abdul Wali, with his hands and feet and a large flashlight inside a northern Afghan prison last June 19 and 20. Mr. Wali died the next day, apparently of a heart attack, officials have said. Mr. Passaro was charged on Thursday with four counts of assault and if convicted faces 40 years in prison.
But his family and lawyer argue that Mr. Passaro, 38, is not violent. They say the complaints from his current and former wives were made in the heat of divorce battles and are exaggerated or false. They say another man provoked the fight that got him fired from the Hartford Police Department. And they say he never fired his gun at his neighbors' car.
"You're going to hear that David has a gung-ho and high-charging, butt-kicking side to him," his younger brother, Stephen Passaro, said. "It doesn't mean you're bad or you're wrong; it's just how you're perceived. Unfortunately, David has this high-charging side, and I have it, too. Everything we do we put in 110 percent."
Mr. Passaro's supporters also say he deserves special credit for serving the United States in dangerous hot spots around the world. During that time, Mr. Passaro, both while working with the military and the C.I.A., was repeatedly granted clearances to handle secret information.
"That generally doesn't happen unless you have a pretty spotless record," Gerald Beaver, Mr. Passaro's lawyer, said. "He has had numerous background checks by the government, and there has been nothing that has reflected badly on him or caused him any difficulties."
Indeed, the C.I.A. conducted a background check of Mr. Passaro late last year while he was working as a civilian medical planner for the Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, N.C. The examiners concluded that his marital problems and firing from the Hartford Police Department were not serious enough to warrant rejecting his job application.
He was granted security clearance and given a contract by the C.I.A. in December 2002 to help in paramilitary operations in Afghanistan, where he worked in June and July last year. His contract with the C.I.A. ran out last September, and he returned to work in his civilian job for the Army, officials said.
Yet for all his security clearances, people who have come into conflict with Mr. Passaro contend he is anything but the sort of mature, cool-under-fire type of person that the Special Forces try to recruit.
"He's got a Napoleon complex," said Paul Rodriguez, 28, the neighbor who accused Mr. Passaro of shooting out his windshield last year. "He's short, fiery and always popping off. He's one of those military guys who's always got to be showing he's in charge."
Kerry Passaro, his former wife, said, "I don't know, with his violent history, why they'd hire him to do a job like that."
In Afghanistan, the governor of Kunar Province, where Mr. Wali was held, said on Friday that he was concerned that the news would turn the Afghan people against the American military presence in their country and play into the hands of Taliban, Al Qaeda and other militant groups opposed to the presence of foreign troops.
The governor, Fazel Akbar, said he had visited the base at the time and was shown the body of Mr. Wali, a well-known commander who had fought against the Soviet army in the 1980's. He said American officers had told him that Mr. Wali died of a heart attack.
"I understood that he died of a heart attack, that he had a heart condition," Mr. Akbar said in an interview by satellite telephone from Asadabad, the provincial capital.
Mr. Akbar said he knew Mr. Wali well and had persuaded him to give himself up when the American forces in Asadabad said a local informer had accused him of being behind several rocket attacks.
Mr. Passaro lived in several Southern states as a child because his father was in the military, Stephen Passaro said. The family moved to Connecticut where the father later took a job with the Hartford Insurance Group. David graduated in 1984 from Tolland High School.
Patricia Fox, the owner of a pizzeria where Mr. Passaro washed dishes during high school, said she remembered him as cheerful and hard working.
. "When I saw Ashcroft talking about him on television, I said, `What? That can't be the kid I knew,' " Ms. Fox said.
After working for a time on a farm and for the United Parcel Service, Mr. Passaro attended the Hartford Police Academy in 1990, earning a reputation for his toughness. Though standing only about 5-foot-4, he weighed 170 pounds, sporting a muscular, fire-plug build.
"He used to chew glass, literally," said Sgt. David Kardys of the Hartford Police Department, who attended the academy with Mr. Passaro. "He was a tough kid."
Just months after graduating from the academy, Mr. Passaro was arrested on felony assault charges following a fight in a parking lot. Though accounts of who started the fight differ, it seems clear that Mr. Passaro badly pummeled another man and the department fired him. Several months later, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of breach of peace.
Mr. Passaro had already married Kerry and was helping to raise her two children. He joined the Army, eventually joining the Rangers and then training to become a medic. Kerry Passaro called this the best period of their marriage.
By the late 1990's, however, the marriage was falling apart, and the couple separated in 2000. They were granted a divorce in February 2001, but remained locked in a legal battle over alimony and assets for another year, court records show. While she accused him of hitting her, he accused her of cheating on him and stealing his money, according to records and interviews. She said she never filed charges against him for striking her.
A month after his divorce became final, Mr. Passaro had a son, Anthony, with another woman, Tamara Bond, court records show. The couple married a year later, in March 2002, and lived in a farm house on several acres of wooded land near Lillington.
They cleared pine trees to create a riding area and built a barn to house Tamara's three horses. To some neighbors, they seemed like a happy couple. But in March 2003, Tamara was arrested for hitting David with a binder. They separated a month later, and she filed for divorce earlier this year, court records show.
Stephen Passaro, 35, said his brother had become a gentler, more religious man in recent years.
"David has a good heart," the brother said. "He has changed a lot. I'm proud of him. I'm proud of the man he has become."
James Dao reported from Lillington, N.C.; Ariel Hart contributed reporting from Atlanta, Stacey Stowe from Connecticut, and Carlotta Gall from Kabul, Afghanistan.
-------- us
The Cold War's Classified Skyhook Program
A Participant's Revelations
B.D. Gildenberg
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-05/skyhook.html
Classified high-altitude, long-duration flights of huge Skyhook balloons, which often returned their secret payloads to the surface, began in 1947 and continued for several decades.
This secret Cold War program was the likely progenitor of many key aspects of UFO mythology.
I was busy calibrating instrumentation for top-secret Project Mogul in the spring of 1947. In retrospect, I was totally unaware of the project's actual identity. My security clearance was for the lower rating of confidential. I was unaware of the project title for another forty-eight years, until 1995.
Welcome to the arcane world of classified Skyhook programs and Cold War intrigue. In this review, I hope to reveal many of those once-classified programs, how they generated UFO mythology, and why that relationship has not been fully addressed.
I write from a thirty-five-year professional career as a Skyhook balloon specialist and direct experience with most of the programs in these revelations. I was also an investigator for a special Project Blue Office and years later worked on the Pentagon Roswell report.
A Skyhook balloon provides constant-level performance at a predetermined altitude. It is usually constructed of special plastics and can lift tons of payload for durations of days or longer. The latter capability was once highly classified. Skyhook balloons were huge. The average size of those discussed in this article was double the six million cubic feet of the Hindenberg. Their diameters were about 300 feet with a flaccid length of 430 feet. Primarily cruising in the stratosphere, the balloons change color at high altitudes during sunrises and sunsets, while the Earth below is almost dark. These characteristics equate to a superb UFO generator.
It is therefore more than a coincidence that the birth of this vehicle in 1947 coincided with the origin of the twentieth century UFO epidemic. That epidemic was highlighted by the Roswell incident, with Project Mogul the prime seed. That relationship has already been detailed in a number of Skeptical Inquirer articles (for example, Thomas 1995). The Skyhook Program
The prime launch site for Project Mogul was Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico, west and therefore upwind of Roswell. The 1947 launches were in June and July, but there were initial UFO reports around the East Coast prior to the summer (Brookesmith 1995). These were preliminary test launches from New Jersey and Long Island.
There were also sightings in the summer of 1947 in the western and northwestern United States. A 1949 Air Force investigation (Trakowski 1949) could not correlate those sightings with Project Mogul, but the Air Force was unaware of a Navy program launching cluster balloons in Colorado that same summer. Coordination between branches of the military was limited in the years just following World War II. Accordingly, the dilemma of that 1949 report added fuel to a developing UFO mythology.
Clusters of weather balloons launched from both New Mexico and Colorado triggered reports of flying saucers sighted in formations throughout the West. They briefly preceded plastic Skyhook balloons, but their performance as constant-level vehicles was marginal.
An initial government coverup for Project Mogul saw an assembled crew not associated with the project launching a similar configuration, but without the classified payload. Newspapers were invited to the launch again at Alamogordo Air Base. Years later, as the Roswell legend resurfaced, UFO proponents denounced Project Mogul as a cover-up for their alien event.
At Alamogordo AFB headquarters, Mogul was listed as a guided-missile program. That represented a further cover-up procedure. The actual purpose of the project was stratospheric detection of distant nuclear bomb tests. Unknown to Roswell enthusiasts were classified programs that operated for decades afterward, based on Project Mogul technology.
One unclassified derivative was Project Blue Book, the Air Force investigation of UFOs. An initial sponsor was the Air Material Command, headquarters for Project Mogul. Blue Book originated in January, 1948, under the title Project Sign. Project Mogul prompted the initial development of a USAF Skyhook facility at Alamogordo AFB (today Holloman AFB). It was eventually governed by the Cambridge Research Laboratories in Massachusetts and became the prime USAF Skyhook launch site, still active today. Project Blue Book had outlying reporting offices throughout the country. Their function was to gather UFO reports and send them to the Blue Book main office at Wright Field, Ohio.
At Holloman AFB, the Blue Book office was situated in our Skyhook Balloon building. That choice was biased by the significant percent of reports generated by our relatively new vehicle. This office was also unique in that it, like the Wright Field Center, analyzed reports. I joined the Holloman Skyhook group in 1951 for a thirty-year tour and immediately became involved with Project Blue Book.
There was a more discrete reason for this special Blue Book role. In 1951, we became the primary center for unclassified Project Moby Dick. In at least one pro-Roswell book that project was erroneously dated 1947 and classified as secret (Randle 1994). Such misinformation contributes to the mythology of government cover-ups. Rumors and Cover-ups
Project Moby Dick's stated purpose was to study stratosphere wind trajectories, as defined via three-day Skyhook flights. After training for over a year at our location, crews and equipment moved to three West Coast sites for the operational phase. Although the announced purpose did result in final reports containing those stratospheric trajectories, there was actually a secretive phase. Moby Dick was in fact a cover-up for top-secret project WS-119L.
Beside the alphanumeric title, secret projects have secret names that vary for different phases. This program was called Project Gopher at our Alamogordo AFB launch site. It later accumulated titles including Grayback, Moby Dick Hi, Gentrix, and Grandson.
Even the WS prefix was a cover-up, since it was not a weapon system. The actual project goal was balloon reconnaissance of the Soviet Union. The entire subject is extensively covered in an excellent book by historian Curtis Peebles (Peebles 1991). Project Moby Dick was actually gathering trajectory data for Project Gopher, although the information also generated unclassified data for meteorological applications.
We flew five Gopher (WS-119L) test flights in 1951 and 1952 from our Air Force Skyhook Center. The payload was kept in a hanger during flight preparation under continuous armed guard. Outsiders noticed this and ensuing rumors eventually generated tales including a secret Project Aquarius. In Randle's UFO Casebook (Randle 1989) he notes, "a possible Project Aquarius; Headquarters may be in Alamogordo with an important Branch in Montana." In fact, we did have an auxiliary training camp in Montana. The mythology of Project Aquarius is nebulous but has something to do with an MJ-12 committee maintaining communications with Roswell aliens.
All this intrigue came to a head when the CIA suddenly showed up at our office and at launches. UFO reports peaked in 1952, as our local Skyhook activity increased from ninety-two hours the previous year to 694 hours aloft. Moreover, launches from the Moby Dick West Coast sites were commencing. Eventually they, along with additional sites in Missouri and Georgia, contributed 640 flights.
The CIA requested that we not identify most of those sharply increasing Skyhook reports. The strategy was to generate a UFO outbreak over the USA extending to the USSR when our WS-119L Skyhooks arrived there. Ironically, the ploy initially worked, since the Soviet Air Force could not intercept the first wave. They allowed their public to play our UFO game. The strategy ended after a few leaking Skyhooks were shot down and the payloads were exhibited, along with protests, to President Eisenhower.
Thus, complex interplay of Moby Dick, WS-119L, and UFO reports defined the unique role of our Blue Book office in that era. Since top-secret WS-119L was not declassified until more than thirty years later, that intrigue can only now be addressed.
Although initial phases of WS-119L were launched from Europe and Turkey, a final phase, WS-461L, was launched from the Pacific. There was a direct parallel to Moby Dick, where unclassified Project White Cloud launched Pacific flights to obtain trajectory data for WS-461L. In the April 1994 issue of Omni magazine, a retired airman proclaimed solid proof of UFO activity. He had glimpsed logs from the European NATO Command Center for 1958. They reported UFOs coming out of the USSR at 100,000 foot altitudes. That nicely described WS-461L flights cruising in from the Pacific Ocean launches.
The entire Skyhook reconnaissance program produced marginal data, but its recovery techniques phased into satellite programs. Moreover, the Soviets were so impressed they actually developed several high-altitude aircraft dedicated to intercepting our Skyhooks! In the 1960s, Premier Khrushchev developed a habit of banging his shoe on the table in protest at the UN. In one such case, he exhibited a WS-119L payload, perhaps with some of our trainees' initials on it.
Pre-flight preparation of four-ton reconnaissance camera launched by a Skyhook balloon.
Late in 1952, I spent a month at Edwards AFB, California, to forecast three-day trajectories for Moby Dick flights, as specified in my travel orders. Forty years later, I discovered from Peebles's The Moby Dick Project (Peebles 1991) that I actually had been working on a top-secret program called Flying Cloud, WS-124A!
Skyhooks were to be evaluated as a balloon bomber in the event of an actual war. Proposed payloads included nuclear warheads, but the program was abandoned as intercontinental ballistic missiles became viable. UFO Mythology
There were a number of peripheral events associated with these programs. At Alamogordo AFB in 1952, we dispatched F-86 jet aircraft to see if they could intercept our Skyhooks at various altitudes. The exercise was designed to evaluate what Soviet interceptors might experience when our reconnaissance balloons arrived. The event was described in Timothy Good's Above Top Secret (Good 1988), published thirty-six years later. It represents a classic example of how portrayals of classified military testing can become transformed over decades into something out of this world. Date and aircraft type were correct but the latter were described as trying to intercept an evasive UFO that featured hovering and accelerations up to 700 mph. Alamogordo Air Force Base was renamed Holloman AFB in 1953. On October 27 of that year, we launched an unclassified payload. It failed to terminate at the scheduled twelve-hour flight duration, and, six days later, it was detected by the Royal Air Force over the Atlantic headed for London! This of course generated UFO hysteria (Good 1988). Newspapers announced it could not be a Skyhook since there was presently no such activity in Europe, but altitude and performance reports agreed with our vehicle's capabilities. Ironically, British intelligence officers also knew that but would not disclose the object's identity. They too were involved with the WS-119L program, and test flights were to be launched from Scotland. Yet this incident is still highlighted in UFO literature as a classic case for their cause.
We flew a few classified programs in the late 1950s and 1960s which included special flares at night from twenty-mile altitudes. That was a predictable UFO generator.
Philip Corso's book The Day after Roswell (Corso 1997) contained many significant errors including movements of some of Wernher von Braun's German scientists, who shared our building at Holloman AFB. Sixty pages were dedicated to a once-secret U.S. Army project for a lunar base called Project Horizon. Plans were initiated in 1959 but were finally cancelled because Project Apollo had exhausted space funds. The story was suspiciously infused with hints of alien activity on the Moon. That was interesting because that same year my Skyhook Center was flying a classified Army project, code named . . . Project Horizon! It had nothing to do with lunar bases and involved photographic studies of the horizon. The purpose was to obtain calibration information for guided missiles.
In 1967 and 1969, we flew ever more advanced, classified reconnaissance cameras. These cameras were huge, weighing from 6,000 to 8,000 pounds, and encased in ten-foot cylinders. They were tracked by several helicopters carrying armed military police to surround the payload after landing. With Roswell often downwind, this very likely contributed to that UFO story line, and time compaction is a vital ingredient in creating such myths and legends.
Skyhook incidents near to or on the ground, like this previous case, provoked more UFO tales than balloons at an altitude. There was a cluster of this type of event in the 1960s (Peebles 1994), which evoked much media coverage. It persists today as a hallmark UFO case, and features the most detailed witness descriptions.
One of those events had serious overtones, involving sensitive military sites, with no obvious revelations to this date. It is noted in Good's book, Above Top Secret (Good 1988). "A metallic disc-shaped UFO with bright flashing lights moving slowly over the site. It stopped and hovered at 500 feet then the UFO climbed vertically and disappeared at high speed" (this was in March, 1967). The location was a Minuteman missile site at Minot, North Dakota. I became suspicious after reading this, aware of a top-secret Skyhook program in that era, with one launch site in the Dakotas. There were other descriptions that rather precisely identified the program, despite scattered inclusions of media mythology.
The program was Project Grab Bag, also called Sky Dipper or Cold Ash. Again, there was a cover-up unclassified program, Program Ash Can. Both programs involved sampling radioactive fallout debris in the stratosphere. After a brief Navy test sequence, Grab Bag, now under the USAF, became operational in 1956, extending briefly into the 1970s. Its highly classified signature was due to the fact that a final product involved establishing details of Soviet plutonium production. Even our Project Ash Can attracted more than the usual Skyhook attention, since parachute and payload were snatched in midair by USAF cargo aircraft. That prompted stories of aircraft being attacked by a UFO while the mother ship (the Skyhook) hovered high above.
Grab Bag was a special UFO generator. After stratospheric sampling, lifting gas was partially released through a valve in the apex of the Skyhook. The entire ensemble was thus lowered to within a few thousand feet of the ground. Then it released a parachute with the payload while the under-loaded balloon rocketed upward to eventually shatter. Since most of these activities occurred at night, Grab Bag generated probably the most detailed UFO events in the literature. For instance, "A conical shaped object descended from the sky. It hovered at an estimated 3,000 feet. A smaller UFO landed within fifty feet" (Brookesmith 1995).
That is a precise description of the basic Grab Bag profile. The Minuteman case with a UFO climbing vertically to disappear at high speed sounds very much like the under-loaded balloon zooming skyward to disappear as it self-destructed.
Project tracking included three helicopters. If the winds were light, the entire ensemble would be valved to the surface. Again, UFO reports clearly identified the process. "Floating red lights which moved over a highway and into a field at night. It appeared like a two-story building, with other lights grouped around it. The latter sometimes hover around the central object" (Fawcett and Greenwood 1984).
The payload did indeed have red lights. The other hovering lights were the helicopters. Just before landing the sample would be transferred to another container via a powerful centrifugal blower. That noise amplified the mystery. Occasionally the tracking crew would transfer the sample into metal cylinders, engendering even more strange noises in the dark. Other activity was also reported: "Radiation fields and other forms of energy have appeared to be directly connected with a hovering or landed UFO" (Brookesmith 1995). The radioactivity, although slight, was from the sample being transferred by recovery personnel to another container.
Readers may wonder why, after recovery, Grab Bag personnel would not have notified local authorities without disclosing classification. The answer is that proceedings were so classified that they could not identify their mission under any circumstance. The program was a natural for engendering mystery and a treasury of lucrative narratives for UFO folklore. Meanwhile, at our Holloman AFB Skyhook Center, we continued to launch a variety of classified reconnaissance cameras, now with loads up to five tons. Again, there were tracking helicopters with armed military police (MPs). People in southern New Mexico were used to seeing military helicopters on various missions. However, we flew a number of reconnaissance camera missions in 1975 in northeastern New Mexico where military helicopters were seldom seen. This created some suspicion. "Unidentified helicopters" had also helped to amplify Grab Bag as a UFO generator, triggering later myths involving military helicopters.
There was an outbreak of mutilated cattle stories in Colorado and northeastern New Mexico in 1975. Strange helicopters were part of the scenario. The Albuquerque Journal reported "ghost copters" buzzing ranches (Peebles 1994). The presence of armed MPs onboard added to the frenzy. The FAA Area Coordinator announced an investigation of this outbreak but never revealed what it had found. The FBI also became involved with similar results. Both agencies had quickly discovered it was our highly classified program. Their "case closed" reaction is still highlighted today in government cover-up tales.
Clearly, secret Skyhook balloon programs magnified government cover-ups and engendered numerous UFO stories, sightings, and myths. Classified aircraft also contributed to UFO folklore during the Cold War. The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft followed WS-119L operations over the USSR. It triggered similar UFO reports, even while training in the U.S. However, unlike supersonic aircraft, Skyhooks remained within sight for long durations, landing with strange payloads, far from their origin.
It is important that all this activity be revealed. Project Grab Bag generated the most detailed descriptions of UFOs in the literature. Even relatively skeptical individuals might have wondered about those sightings, believing them to be too complex to dismiss. I hope these revelations provide a vital insight into what was "behind the looking glass" of secret Cold War activities.
The Pentagon published the first two detailed reports in 1995 (Weaver and McAndrew 1995), demonstrating how top-secret Project Mogul became the initial trigger for the Roswell mystery. Readers may wonder why that effort has not been repeated for once-classified events detailed in this article. Actually, it was only at the urging of a congressman, the late Steve Schiff of New Mexico, that the Pentagon began work on the Roswell affair. Having participated in the preparation of the final report (McAndrew 1997), I can reveal there was substantial resistance to the whole process. A number of times we thought the enterprise would be cancelled. It was only via last-minute intervention by the Secretary of the Air Force that the report was finally published. Many Pentagon authorities believed that the Roswell and UFO investigations in general were not worthy of distraction from more pressing matters of national importance.
Despite providing accurate hardware descriptions of the programs we have covered, some reports included stories of onboard aliens and other typical elements of UFO mythology such as stalled cars and skin burns. They were imitating numerous UFO witnesses with a tendency to repeat stories that preceded their own sightings.
We can deplore or marvel at the persistent thirst for otherworldly fantasies, but a sage in Elizabethan England had an apt comment that can categorize even contemporary mythology:
So full of shapes is fancy, that it alone is high fantastical. - Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene 1
References
Brookesmith, Peter. 1995. UFO: The Complete Sightings. New York: Barnes & Noble: 37, 83, 39.
Corso, Philip. 1997. The Day After Roswell. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Fawcett, Lawrence, and Barry Greenwood. 1984. The UFO Cover-Up. New York: Simon & Schuster: 19.
Good, Timothy. 1988. Above Top Secret. New York: William Morrow: 35, 272, 300.
McAndrew, James. 1997. The Roswell Report: Case Closed. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
Peebles, Curtis. 1991. The Moby Dick Project. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press: 128.
-----. 1994. Watch the Skies. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press: 153-154, 216.
Randle, Kevin, and Donald Schmitt. 1994. The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell. New York: Avon Books: 154.
Randle, Kevin. 1989. The UFO Casebook. New York: Warner Books: 175.
Thomas, David. 1995. Recollections of Project Mogul. Skeptical Inquirer 19 (4) July/August: 15-18.
Trakowski, Captain. 1949. Letter to Air Material Command. April 18.
Weaver, Richard, and James McAndrew. 1995. The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
B.D. Gildenberg has had thirty-five years of continuous experience with Skyhook operations and an additional twenty-two years as a consultant. He has authored or co-authored articles in many skeptical magazines. His other background experiences include cryptography in the World War II Pentagon, work on the Pentagon Roswell reports, and involvement in astronaut tests prior to NASA. E-mail: hmnbb@wayfarer1.com.
--------
Marine Commander Admits Iraqi Unit Has Been Erratic
U.S. Was Tempted to 'Pull the Plug' on Fallujah Brigade
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53311-2004Jun18.html
FALLUJAH, Iraq, June 18 -- A senior U.S. military commander acknowledged Friday that he almost abandoned efforts several times to have an Iraqi security force led by former Iraqi army officers safeguard this city but decided to persevere when the group known as the Fallujah Brigade showed signs that it might succeed.
"We've been prepared to pull the plug three or four times, but each time we are, we detect a faint heartbeat," the commander said in remarks made to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz during a briefing at the headquarters of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. The commander could not be identified under the terms by which reporters traveling with Wolfowitz were permitted to attend the briefing.
The commander's remarks reflected deep frustration among U.S. officials over partnering with Iraqi soldiers.
The Fallujah Brigade was established last month after several weeks of fighting between insurgents and the U.S. Marines responsible for securing this volatile region west of Baghdad, in the Sunni Triangle. As the Marines withdrew to the outskirts of the city, the all-Iraqi unit -- led by officers who served under former president Saddam Hussein and comprising some of the same guerrillas who had fought U.S. forces here -- was given the task of bringing peace to Fallujah and meeting several other U.S. demands.
Some hailed the approach as a model for making security in Iraq a "shared responsibility," as President Bush put it at the time. Others decried it as a poorly devised compromise cobbled together largely at the behest of Sunni Muslims on the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council. Those council members strongly opposed more aggressive U.S. military action in Fallujah.
While attacks on the Marines have dropped off, masked insurgents have returned to the streets of the city. Not only has the brigade failed to disarm the militants, it has made little evident progress in capturing foreign guerrillas known to have taken refuge in the city or in apprehending the killers of four American security contractors whose bodies were burned and mutilated in March. U.S. authorities worry that Fallujah remains a sanctuary for bombmaking and other insurgent activity.
"The Fallujah Brigade was a Band-Aid to create a cease-fire," said a senior official in Wolfowitz's delegation. "It has to be viewed as a temporary fix."
But Marine commanders, who negotiated the deal, have been reluctant to declare it over, noting a lack of good alternatives.
"Every time we're at our wits' end" with the brigade, the senior commander told Wolfowitz, it makes a "small step forward." As long as that continues, he added, "we're willing to give it a chance."
Among the encouraging signs, a senior Marine officer said, were a series of sustained firefights over the past few nights in which members of the Fallujah Brigade engaged insurgents in the city.
In an interview, Wolfowitz said the commander's reference to pulling the plug was not meant as a possible return to U.S. military action in Fallujah but as some kind of nonmilitary move that would demonstrate U.S. displeasure with the brigade.
"We're making progress," Wolfowitz said. "I think at least for the time being, that's a good thing."
Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed Shehwani, who heads Iraq's National Intelligence Service, assured Wolfowitz during a separate meeting here Friday that the brigade would move to rid Fallujah of foreign fighters within two weeks. He strongly advised against renewed U.S. military attacks in Fallujah.
"We succeed in Fallujah," Shehwani said in somewhat halting English. "I think they should make this solution" a model for other Iraqi cities.
Wolfowitz asked what Shehwani knew about the whereabouts of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian with links to al Qaeda whom U.S. officials suspect of masterminding recent attacks in Iraq, including some of the violence in Fallujah.
Shehwani said Zarqawi was no longer in Fallujah and mentioned several other cities that he said the Jordanian had visited in recent days. "Today, we hear he's in Kirkuk," the general said. U.S. officials said they were skeptical about the statement.
According to an official in Wolfowitz's delegation, U.S. authorities narrowly missed capturing Zarqawi about a month ago at a safe house in western Iraq used by the country's former secret police.
As problematic as Fallujah remains for U.S. authorities, Marine commanders said they were more concerned about the worsening security situation in Ramadi, the provincial capital, where Iraqis have been assassinated with increasing frequency. The slayings are viewed as part of a nationwide campaign by insurgents to unnerve Iraqis before the planned transfer of limited power at the end of the month and the move to elections next year.
[In other developments, the Reuters news agency reported that a mortar attack on a U.S. base in Baghdad killed an American soldier and wounded a contractor working for Kellogg Brown & Root on Friday, the U.S. military said on Saturday.
-------- war crimes
China Won't Support U.S. On Exemption From Court
Reuters
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53305-2004Jun18.html
UNITED NATIONS, June 18 -- China said Friday that it will abstain on a resolution exempting U.S. personnel serving in U.N.-approved peacekeeping missions from prosecution before the International Criminal Court, a decision that may leave Washington short of votes to pass the resolution.
"I said to my colleagues we will abstain," Wang Guangya, Beijing's ambassador to the United Nations, told Reuters after a luncheon among the 15 Security Council members and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Wang said earlier that the resolution would send a wrong signal in light of the prisoner-abuse scandal in Iraq.
China's abstention could deprive the Bush administration of the nine "yes" votes required to adopt a resolution. So far Britain, Russia, Angola and the Philippines are considered sure votes in favor.
All other members are contemplating an abstention or are undecided. On Thursday, Annan said the resolution is "wrong" and would "discredit the council."
The United States, for the third year, is seeking to renew a Security Council resolution that exempts from the court's prosecution military and civilian personnel "related to a U.N.-authorized operation," such as that in Iraq. The immunity would extend to all nations not among the 94 that have ratified a treaty establishing the court.
------
Annan Against U.S. Peacekeeper Immunity
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-International-Court.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan stepped up his campaign against a U.S. bid to renew American peacekeepers' immunity from war crimes prosecution, and Security Council opposition to the measure appeared to be growing.
Annan delivered a written note to Security Council ambassadors at their monthly luncheon Friday that raised ``serious doubts'' about the legality of an exemption and warning against dividing the Security Council.
The note, obtained by The Associated Press, ``strongly urges the council not to renew this measure.'' It also stressed that a new exemption ``would be a very unfortunate signal to send at any time -- but particularly at this time.''
On Thursday, Annan urged the council not to shield American peacekeepers, citing the recent abuse of Iraq prisoners by U.S. forces.
Despite intensive lobbying, council diplomats said Washington does not have the minimum nine votes of support on the 15-member council to approve the resolution, which would renew American immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court for a third year.
France, Germany, Spain, Brazil and Chile already said they would abstain on a new exemption, and Romania and Benin indicated they were likely to join them, council diplomats said.
China's U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya said Friday that Beijing also will abstain. Algeria's U.N. Ambassador Abdallah Baali said his country -- which was considered to be in the U.S. camp -- was reconsidering its position.
Russia, also considered a U.S. supporter, called Friday for a compromise.
Annan said after the luncheon, ``We have some very difficult challenges ahead of us and the council needs to be able to work together and speak with one voice.''
Earlier, the deputy U.S. ambassador, Stuart Holliday, noted that the exemption was an issue for the council -- the diplomatic way of saying the United States was unhappy about Annan's pronouncements.
But after the luncheon, Holliday was more conciliatory.
``The secretary-general shared his view and I think he expressed his concern for the unity of the council,'' Holliday said. ``We're taking that on board.''
The current exemption expires on June 30. The United States introduced a resolution authorizing a one-year extension last month, but has delayed calling for a vote.
Asked whether Washington was going to put the resolution to a vote, Holliday said that between now and Tuesday ``we're going to talk to our Security Council colleagues about that very question.''
Germany's U.N. Ambassador Gunter Pleuger strongly backed Annan and expressed hope that other council members ``will see it the same way.''
The International Criminal Court can prosecute cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed after it was established July 1, 2002, but it will step in only when countries are unwilling or unable to dispense justice themselves.
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.
Besides seeking another year's exemption, Washington has signed bilateral agreements with 89 countries barring any prosecution of American officials by the court and is seeking more such treaties.
The 94 countries that ratified the 1998 Rome Treaty establishing the court maintain it contains enough safeguards to prevent frivolous prosecutions.
Human rights groups and supporters of the court argue that nobody should be exempt from prosecution for war crimes.
--------
U.S. Charges Man in Afghan Death
Associated Press
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53353-2004Jun18.html
RALEIGH, N.C., June 18 -- A lawyer for the former CIA contractor accused of beating an Afghan detainee said Friday that the prisoner died from a heart attack while in custody.
The contractor and former Army Special Forces soldier, David A. Passaro, 37, of Lillington, N.C., was charged Thursday with two counts each of assault and assault with a dangerous weapon -- a flashlight. He has a detention hearing scheduled Tuesday morning in U.S. District Court in Raleigh.
Passaro was charged in the June 21, 2003, death of Abdul Wali. Wali had gone to a U.S. base in Afghanistan to surrender because authorities wanted to talk to him about rocket attacks against the base. He died three days after he arrived at the base.
The arrest was the first time civilian charges have been brought in the investigation of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. If convicted, Passaro faces as many as 40 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
Civilian lawyer H. Gerald Beaver of Fayetteville, N.C., said he has a transcript of an Islamic radio broadcast from June 27, 2003, in which an Afghan official said an examination showed Wali died of a heart attack.
The report on Mashhad Radio in Iran quoted the governor of Kunar province where the prison is located and said there were no signs of assault on the body.
The Justice Department said Thursday that no autopsy was performed to establish a cause of death.
--------
US Lacks Votes for Immunity from War Crimes Court
Jun 19, 2004
Reuters
By Evelyn Leopold
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=574&e=3&u=/nm/20040619/wl_nm/un_court_usa_dc_12
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Secretary-General Kofi Annan and key U.N. Security Council members intensified their opposition to a U.S. draft resolution that would renew the exemption of American soldiers from international prosecution.
Consequently, the Bush administration on Friday still lacked the required nine votes to renew the measure that would give U.S. troops immunity from the new International Criminal Court. The previous resolution expires on June 30.
"We're going to be coming back to the council by Tuesday with a final plan -- with our position in terms of next steps," U.S. representative Stuart Holliday.
The resolution was first approved in 2002 after the United States vetoed a U.N. peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, and threatened to oppose others, one by one.
The immunity would be extended to all nations not among the 94 countries that have ratified a treaty establishing the court, set up to prosecute the world's worst atrocities -- genocide, mass war crimes and systematic human rights abuses.
But this year the abuse by U.S. troops of prisoners in Iraq is largely responsible for opposition among the 15 council members, diplomats said. The court steps only in when a nation refuses or cannot carry out its own probe, making it highly unlikely U.S. citizens would ever appear before the tribunal.
No council member is expected to veto the resolution but a significant number of abstentions would kill the measure.
China's U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya told Reuters on Friday he decided to abstain, adding his voice to Germany, France, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Benin and Romania.
The only sure "yes" votes at the moment come from Britain, Russia, Angola, the Philippines as well as the United States. Pakistan and Algeria were undecided, council sources said.
ANNAN STEPS UP OPPOSITION
Annan appealed for the second consecutive day to council members to oppose the resolution, distributing a memo at their monthly luncheon on Friday. He said the measure undermined international law and sent an "unfortunate signal any time -- but particularly at this time."
The memo, obtained by Reuters, "strongly urges the council not to renew this measure."
After the lunch, Annan told reporters the resolution would shatter the unity achieved in the council when it last week endorsed a new interim Iraqi government and a U.S.-led multinational force. He noted the council was "hopelessly divided" last year, refusing to authorize the war in Iraq.
The Bush administration is opposed in principle to an international court having any jurisdiction over American soldiers abroad and fears politically motivated prosecutions.
Its resolution would exempt from the court's prosecution military and civilian personnel "related to a U.N.-authorized operation." This includes U.N. peacekeeping operations as well as those endorsed by the council, such as U.S. troops in Iraq.
China's position is unusual because Beijing has not signed or ratified the court's treaty. Diplomats believe it is related to disputes with Washington over Taiwan, although Chinese envoys said the prisoner scandal was the reason.
Algerian Ambassador Abdalla Baali, who had been expected to back the United States, said he was now undecided.
"Obviously the Americans don't have the nine votes," said Baali, the only Arab envoy on the council. "The secretary-general's statement was quite strong and apparently the Abu Ghraib situation had an impact."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- drug war
U.S. being forced to transfer some units
UNION-TRIBUNE
By James W. Crawley
June 19, 2004
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20040619-9999-7m19seals.html
More than a dozen sailors, including eight SEALs, are being investigated after testing positive for illegal drug use, the Navy confirmed yesterday.
Seven sailors assigned to the Naval Special Warfare Command, including five SEALs, failed drug tests in early May while they were on a training exercise in Thailand.
Other sailors reported seeing the commandos using drugs in Pattaya, a Thai beach resort.
That was enough for Rear Adm. Joseph Maguire, the Naval Special Warfare commander, to order a drug-testing sweep of 3,300 of the 4,600 men and women under his command.
The only people not tested were those deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries and those on leave or on temporary duty.
In the sweep, six more sailors tested positive, including three SEALs, one student and two support personnel.
Some of those who failed the drug tests are assigned to units based at Coronado's Naval Amphibious Base. Others are from units in Little Creek, Va.
The episode is forcing the early replacement of two SEAL platoons overseas by two stateside units and has embarrassed units that have been used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan in the war on terrorism.
"We identified the problem," said Navy spokesman Cmdr. Jeff Bender yesterday. "We investigated the problem, and we'll hold those accountable for their actions."
The investigations are being conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and could result in criminal or administrative action. No charges have been filed.
The Navy has a zero-tolerance drug policy, and sailors caught using drugs usually are discharged. "This is something that's not taken lightly. One is too many," Bender said.
The sweeps come as the Navy is trying to increase its number of SEALs. The war on terrorism has increased the need for special operations forces such as the SEALs, Green Berets and Army Rangers.
Training SEALs is time-consuming and costly. Each two-year training process includes the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL class and advanced weapons and tactics training. It costs several hundred thousand dollars to train each commando.
The SEALs and special warfare crewmen were in Thailand for Cobra Gold, an annual multinational training exercise.
After other sailors reported the possible drug use, 10 sailors were asked to take drug urinalysis tests. Nine volunteered and the 10th was ordered to take the urine test, Bender said.
Seven sailors, five SEALs and two combatant crewmen tested positive. They were flown back to their units in San Diego and Little Creek. Navy law enforcement agents searched barracks and buildings used by the sailors in Guam and Singapore but found no drugs. Their stateside units were not revealed.
The two SEAL platoons, each with 16 commandos, will be replaced this month with two similar units from the United States, Bender said.
No operations or exercises were affected by the suspected drug use or testing, he added.
"This did not affect our readiness," he said, pointing out that only one-fifth of 1 percent of the drug tests were positive. "We have not missed a beat."
Drug use by such forces is worrisome, said defense analyst Ivan Eland, because the small units, often working in hostile territory, require teamwork.
"They are endangering their own lives but also the colleagues in their units," said Eland, senior fellow of The Independent Institute in Oakland.
Last year, 21 special warfare sailors were discharged after failing drug tests. In 2002, positive tests forced out 32 sailors assigned to Naval Special Warfare.
Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, has called for a 25 percent reduction in drug use this year.
-------- homeland security
Capitol Plane Scare Blamed On Lack of Communication
TSA Findings Echo Those of 9/11 Commission
By Spencer S. Hsu and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53309-2004Jun18?language=printer
Authorities evacuated the U.S. Capitol on June 9 because of a communication failure between Federal Aviation Administration flight controllers and Washington air defense officials tracking a plane carrying Kentucky Gov. Ernie Fletcher (R) to Ronald Reagan's funeral, a government review has concluded.
Officials from the Defense and Homeland Security departments ordered two F-15 fighter jets and a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter to intercept Fletcher's aircraft at 4:25 p.m. without knowing that FAA controllers had been in radio contact with the plane for at least 40 minutes and had determined it was not hostile, according to interviews and a preliminary report by the Transportation Security Administration that was obtained by The Washington Post.
The Kentucky State Police aircraft, whose identification transmitter was broken, had properly notified civilian flight controllers of its status throughout its flight. But the FAA's regional control center never relayed the information to a Washington air defense center in Herndon -- formally known as the National Capital Region Coordination Center (NCRCC) -- until after U.S. Capitol Police made the emergency decision at 4:31 p.m. to evacuate the Capitol, according to the "after-action" report.
The order sent hundreds of assembled dignitaries and lawmakers and thousands of staff members running from the Capitol in a frantic exodus.
The review was disclosed one day after the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks recounted similar communication breakdowns between FAA and military officials on the day of the terrorist attacks. The head of U.S. air defenses testified Thursday that fighter jets could have intercepted all four hijacked airliners before they struck their targets if the FAA had notified them quickly.
FAA officials held a news conference yesterday to highlight the improvements made to the nation's air security in the past 33 months, but last week's incident provided some evidence that problems remain.
The Kentucky aircraft "should not have been permitted to enter [Washington airspace] without advance coordination with the NCRCC," the TSA report said. The report added that a regional FAA air controller "did not notify the NCRCC that the [target] was identified."
Two government officials said the controller has been dismissed. FAA spokesman Greg Martin said the agency would not comment on personnel matters.
Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, and Rep. Jim Turner (D-Tex.), the ranking minority member, called for an investigation into what they said appeared to be "miscommunication and technological shortcomings" during the Kentucky flight.
The episode "raises serious concerns about the government's ability to guard not only the U.S. Capitol but the entire region in the event of another airborne attack," Turner said in a statement yesterday. Cox said that "we want to protect the capital region and to make sure the procedures in place work to do that."
Washington and New York remain the U.S. cities most likely to be attacked by terrorists, government officials say. Intelligence officials say al Qaeda continues to plot strikes on this country involving hijacked jets used as missiles.
TSA spokesman Mark O. Hatfield Jr. said a thorough review is underway. The FAA and the U.S. Capitol Police Board have also launched internal investigations as participants in TSA's Herndon joint air control center, which includes the Pentagon, the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Martin acknowledged "communication and coordination" problems, saying, "The FAA tracked and was in close communication with the Kentucky State Police aircraft during its entire flight to Washington, D.C., and was fully aware of the aircraft's transponder failure."
According to the TSA report, the Kentucky plane was authorized to enter restricted Washington airspace and its pilot properly telephoned air defense controllers the morning of its estimated 3 p.m. takeoff and planned 4 p.m. arrival.
At 3:45 p.m., at least 25 minutes after takeoff, the pilot notified the FAA's Washington Center that his identification transponder was not working properly. FAA regional controllers then manually entered the aircraft's flight identification number and type on an electronic "data tag" visible on FAA computer displays, FAA officials said.
But the information was not given to the Herndon defense center, whose Internet-based air control display showed only an unidentified target approaching the center of the city, officials said. When the aircraft entered the D.C. Air Defense Identification Zone about 50 miles west of Washington at 4:24 p.m., traveling at 240 mph, air defense officials ordered the fighter jets and helicopter to intercept it one minute later.
FAA ground controllers realized their error at 4:34 p.m., three minutes after the Capitol evacuation was ordered, with the aircraft about 11 miles, or three minutes, away. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement helicopter and a Cessna Citation lifted off as the Kentucky plane was on final approach to Reagan National Airport.
The communications glitch lasted five to seven minutes but occurred at the worst possible time, with Homeland Security forces at high alert and numerous aircraft aloft in the region, Martin said. A military spokesman and U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer said, however, that the interception of the airplane and the evacuation of the Capitol were conducted effectively and appropriately.
But Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle noted: "Anytime you move thousands of people from a place, there's a potential for harm. There's also a potential for harm for the people inside the aircraft if the military had had to intervene in some capacity."
Fletcher's chief of staff, Daniel Groves, said last night that no one aboard the governor's twin-engine propeller-driven Beech Kingair 200 saw anything amiss or heard from air controllers that there was a problem.
"All indications are that our pilots did nothing wrong. They were following the exact directions given by air traffic controllers," Groves said.
The FAA yesterday issued a notice to aviators reiterating that aircraft must have an operating transponder before entering restricted Washington airspace. The agency will also install direct radar feeds from the regional FAA traffic control station to the Herndon center "within the next few weeks" so that both civilian and security air controllers have identical display information.
At yesterday's news conference, held to respond to the Sept. 11 commission report, FAA Administrator Marion C. Blakey and aides said the agency has integrated its long-range radar into the radar system used by the North American Aerospace Defense Command, whose jets are responsible for defending the continental United States and Canada. NORAD now has the ability to view air traffic across the continental United States, they said.
Staff writer Griff Witte contributed to this report.
--------
House Rejects Extra Security Aid to High-Risk Cities
June 19, 2004
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/nyregion/19aid.html
WASHINGTON, June 18 - In a blow to the New York metropolitan region's antiterrorism efforts, the House rejected a move Friday to provide nearly $500 million to pay for security initiatives in cities believed to be at greatest risk of attack.
By a vote of 237 to 171 that largely split lawmakers along regional lines, the House rejected an amendment that sought to shift $446 million from a nationwide antiterrorism program to one specifically aimed at New York City and other high-risk cities.
The action brought swift condemnation from New York officials, who have long complained that the federal government gives out millions of dollars in security money to every state, regardless of its vulnerability, in pork-barrel fashion.
The harshest criticism came from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, a Republican who announced that New York City was canceling its membership in the National Association of Counties to protest the group's opposition to the measure.
"We are not getting our fair share of Homeland Security money," Mr. Bloomberg said. "To say it's a disgrace is being too charitable."
"The fact of the matter is that when you catch a terrorist with a map in their pocket, the map is of New York City," the mayor said. In Albany, Gov. George E. Pataki, also a Republican, expressed his disappointment with the vote, noting that New York was far more vulnerable to a terrorist attack than other parts of the country.
"To allocate funding across the board to states as opposed to on a threat-based analysis is wrong," Mr. Pataki told reporters.
The battle over money for high-risk cities now moves to the Senate, where members of both parties have been more evenhanded in determining how aid is distributed.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, did not rule out offering an amendment seeking additional money for high-risk cities when the matter comes to the floor in the Senate.
"I'm going to continue to explore every legislative option we have in order to provide an adequate level of funding for New York's security needs," Mrs. Clinton said.
The measure defeated in the House was advanced by a group of New York lawmakers who spent days trying to round up support. Its two chief sponsors were Representative John E. Sweeney, a Republican from the Albany area, and Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, a Democrat from Manhattan.
If the votes are any indication, the dispute is more complicated than a mere partisan fight. Seventy Republicans - many of them from large urbanized states like California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and Pennsylvania- joined with 101 Democrats to support the measure. But 89 Democrats - many of them from heavily rural states - joined 147 Republicans to reject it.
The measure seeking the additional $446 million for high-risk cities was offered as an amendment to a bill that calls for providing $33 billion for the Homeland Security Department next year. The House later on Friday approved the overall $33 billion Homeland Security spending plan by an overwhelming 400 to 5.
The additional $446 million would have been squeezed out of roughly $1.2 billion set aside for emergency workers in communities across the nation, no matter their size or their vulnerability.
In all, the Homeland Security bill the House considered calls for providing slightly over $1 billion for cities believed to be at the greatest risk of an attack. The Senate version of the bill sets aside $1.2 billion for high-risk urban areas.
The issue is crucial to New York City officials. The city spends as much as $1 billion a year on antiterrorism measures, and the Bloomberg administration is seeking $400 million in federal security aid for the budget the mayor proposed for the fiscal year that begins in July.
In his comments on Friday, Mr. Bloomberg seized on the House vote as an opportunity to emphasize his concerns about the way Washington apportions security money.
He said "the political pressures" in Congress had turned the allocation of security money into a pork-barrel program in which small states received far more dollars per person than those states at greater risk, like New York.
The mayor said that New York, for example, gets about $5.47 a person in antiterrorism financing, while Wyoming receives $38 a person and Vermont receives $31.
In rambling comments that reflected his frustration and dismay, Mr. Bloomberg also criticized officials from largely agricultural states who have argued that they, too, desperately need federal money to protect the nation's food supply.
"Everybody can always say, 'Well, we have security issues,' " he said. "You know, one guy said to me that, 'Yeah, the corn and soybean crops are our food supply and therefore this country needs a food supply, we've got to protect it.' You know, I've never seen a terrorist with a map of a cornfield in his pocket. Come on. Let's get serious to what this is about, why this money should be going to places like New York City."
--------
Experts Say 'Dirty Bomb' Attack Likely
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Dirty-Bomb-Threat.html
Terrorists are ``all but certain'' to set off a radiological weapon in the United States, since it will take authorities too many years to track and secure the radioactive materials of such ``dirty bombs,'' a team of nuclear researchers has concluded.
The U.S. and other key governments took an important step on controls this month, agreeing at the G-8 summit to tighten -- by the end of 2005 -- restraints on international trade in highly radioactive materials.
But thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of high-risk radioactive sources are already in use worldwide, with few accurate registries for tracing them, the scientists say. They cite Iraq, where an undetermined number of such sources have gone missing in the postwar chaos.
The findings are being published in a 300-page book, ``The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism,'' the result of a two-year study by the authoritative Center for Nonproliferation Studies, or CNS, of California's Monterey Institute of International Studies.
The team also examined the potential for terrorists to steal or build an actual nuclear weapon, but found that less likely than the construction of a radiological dispersal device, or dirty bomb.
Unlike warheads designed to kill and destroy through a huge nuclear blast and heat, these radiation weapons -- which thus far no one has employed -- would rely on conventional explosives to blow radioactive material far and wide. A successful bomb could make a section of a city uninhabitable for years.
The fear of such weapons grew in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. Al-Qaida and Russia's Chechen rebels have shown an interest in highly radioactive material.
Misunderstandings persist about the threat. This month, for example, the Justice Department said al-Qaida-linked detainee Jose Padilla planned to wrap explosives in uranium to make a dirty bomb. But uranium would add nothing; it has minimal radioactivity.
Instead, specialists who study the threat focus on isotopes with millions of times more radioactivity than uranium -- such as cesium-137, cobalt-60 and iridium-192. These nuclear reactor byproducts have uses ranging from radiation treatment of cancer, to sterilizing food and medical equipment, to gauging thicknesses.
The CNS study notes steps taken by the U.S. government, including:
-- An order quietly sent to operators of sterilizing irradiators last year, instructing them to strengthen security against theft and attack. These large, powerful devices hold immense amounts of lethal radioisotopes.
-- Research to develop a substitute for cesium chloride, a talc-like powder that could spread deadly radioactivity widely and insidiously in a blast. Experts consider it the most worrisome material in use.
-- Approval of sale of Prussian blue, a drug that counteracts ingested cesium. The U.S. military is ``fast-tracking'' research into drugs to treat a broader array of radioactive poisons.
The United States alone has an estimated 2 million licensed radioactive sources, thousands of them high-risk materials, the CNS reports. Because of disjointed licensing by federal and state agencies, no complete registry exists. Transfers are not always noted, and sources go astray.
The Energy Department says it has already collected and secured 7,500 ``disused'' sources, and expects to handle thousands more in the next few years.
The CNS researchers highlighted a major loophole in radioactive commerce: U.S. and other exporters can ship high-risk sources abroad without a government review of the end user, including to such turmoil-ridden lands as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Colombia.
Commercial rivalries have slowed moves to close that loophole, the study says. At the recent summit, however, the United States and seven other major industrial nations agreed to seek ``effective controls'' on end users before 2006.
Physicist Charles Ferguson, a lead author of the CNS book, was cautious in praising the G-8 move. ``The devil is in the details,'' he said in an interview. ``The bureaucracies will have to stay on top of this to get it done.''
In many ``end user'' countries, the domestic regulation of radiological sources is ``fragmentary'' at best, the study says.
``So many potent radioactive sources are now used in medicine, industry, and research around the world, and so many have fallen outside regulatory control, that it will be many years, if ever, before secure custody of these items can be achieved,'' it concludes.
As a result, it says, ``a radiological attack appears to be all but certain within the coming years.''
-------- terrorism
Terrorist Who Left a Trail of Bloodshed Is Reportedly Killed
June 19, 2004
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/international/middleeast/19ARAB.html
CAIRO, June 18 - In the months that he served as the leader of Al Qaeda's operations in Saudi Arabia, Abdelaziz Issa Abdul-Mohsen al-Muqrin cut a swath of alarming bloodshed.
The most wanted of Saudi Arabia's hunted terrorists, his violent spree end abruptly on Friday when he was reportedly gunned down along with two of the kingdom's other most wanted in a firefight at a gas station in downtown Riyadh.
His died just hours after the group he led, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, splashed gruesome pictures of the beheading of its latest victim, Paul M. Johnson Jr., a 49-year-old American engineer, across the Internet.
A recent profile of Mr. Muqrin in the London-based newspaper Sharq Al Awsat said the extremist, who was in his early 30's and was known by the code name Abu Hajar, followed a fairly standard path of fighters seeking to spend their life in jihad.
Raised in the Riyadh neighborhood of Suweidi, home to many of the country's current crop of religious radicals, he apparently quit high school at age 17 to fight in Afghanistan.
He married at age 19 and had a daughter, now 10, from that marriage, but his wife sued for divorce on the grounds of desertion.
His fighting skills were such that he was promoted to chief trainer in the Afghanistan camp where he enrolled, spending much of 1990 to 1994 there. His next stop was Algeria, where he fought with the Islamic Front in the brutal civil war and was assigned to smuggling weapons from Spain via Morocco.
From there he moved to the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and then to Somalia and Ethiopia, where he was ultimately detained and extradited to Saudi Arabia.
Sentenced to four years in jail, Mr. Muqrin proved an exemplary inmate, spending his time memorizing the entire Koran. He was freed after just two years. He was reportedly subjected to fierce torture, however, which further enraged him against the government, and he returned to Afghanistan for more training.
"Somewhere along the line he might have been directly working with Osama bin Laden," one Western analyst said. Yet Mr. Muqrin's group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, is viewed as more of a franchise operation than a subsidiary of Mr. bin Laden's operations. While the group was inspired by the Qaeda goal of toppling the Saudi royal family and fighting the West, analysts said it was not acting under Mr. bin Laden's direct orders.
Mr. Muqrin had a fairly low profile until he took over the group in March after his two immediate predecessors died in firefights with the security police. Although initially concentrating on car bombings, he was stung by criticism that he was killing Muslims and stymied by the fact that security forces captured numerous booby-trapped vehicles.
He also seemed to be having trouble recruiting, putting a how-to manual of urban warfare on the Internet and suggesting that anyone who hated the government use it to carry out attacks.
But on May 1, another Qaeda-inspired group acting in the port of Yanbu killed six foreigners and one Saudi by making a direct assault on a foreign petrochemical project office. That is believed to have inspired Mr. Muqrin to carry out the attack in Khobar and a string of killings in Riyadh.
He seemed to take delight in publicity, especially in showing the gory details of his operations in videotapes, in which he appeared in a black ski mask.
In his absence, the group's future strength is in question. While Saudi Arabia does not lack Qaeda sympathizers, the number of organizers and active fighters is unknown. Analysts believe there are no figures left with the same kind of experience.
"The threat from them is not infinite, but it is not clear how big it really is," the Western analyst said.
--------
9/11 Plot Reportedly Hatched in 1996
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sept-11-Five-Year-Plot.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Five years before the worst terror attack in American history, a U.S.-educated Kuwaiti pitched an outlandish idea to Osama bin Laden. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, now a U.S. captive, concedes his apocalyptic vision of 10 planes steered into nuclear power plants, skyscrapers and other American targets received only a lukewarm response from the al-Qaida kingpin.
The meeting in Afghanistan in mid-1996, however, apparently was the genesis of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. Three reports issued this week by the Sept. 11 commission provide the fullest picture yet of how Mohammed's idea evolved from wild scheme to unfathomable reality -- and the government's chaotic response.
Mohammed had targeted U.S. airliners before. He was indicted in the United States earlier in 1996 for plotting to bomb 12 flights over the Pacific Ocean, but he wasn't captured. Mohammed, born in Kuwait and a 1986 graduate from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, also wanted to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.
His new plan needed bin Laden's money and his muscle.
Between May 1996, when bin Laden moved to Afghanistan from Sudan, and the Sept. 11 attacks, more than 20,000 men trained at his terror camps. They learned to be soldiers and, the Sept. 11 commission said, ``to think creatively about ways to commit mass murder.''
They floated ideas: take over a Russian launch site and fire a nuclear missile at the United States, pump poison gas into a building's air conditioning, hijack a plane to attack a city.
Advanced terrorism training was given to only the most promising recruits, among them the Sept. 11 hijackers. Early in 1999, bin Laden gave the go-ahead for a scaled-down version of Mohammed's proposal three years earlier.
According to Mohammed, the two drew up a list of potential targets:
--the Capitol, perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel;
--the White House and Pentagon, both advocated by bin Laden as potent American symbols;
--the World Trade Center, favored by Mohammed, whose nephew Yousef was in prison for the 1993 bombing of the towers that represented America's financial might.
Bin Laden selected potential suicide hijackers. The first two arrived in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000. During the next 18 months, 17 more followed, some entering the country on fraudulent visas. Four, including ringleader Mohammed Atta, attended U.S. flight schools.
FBI agents in Arizona and Minnesota were suspicious of the flight students, but their alarms went unheeded by higher-ups.
The summer of 2001 was a time of intensive preparation by the hijackers. They rode cross-country flights for surveillance, brought boxcutters onto planes as tests, practiced flying rented planes and honed their strength at gyms.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, senior al-Qaida leaders were under pressure from the Taliban not to attack inside America's borders. Some feared U.S. military retaliation. Despite the pressure, bin Laden prodded Atta to get on with it.
In mid-August, Atta settled on the date of Sept. 11, choosing a week when Congress would be back from summer break. Bin Laden wanted to strike the White House; Atta preferred the Capitol as an easier target. The commission said it has been unable to determine definitely which was the intended target on Sept. 11.
The hijackers bought their flight tickets in late August and early September. Then, ever loyal, they took care of a final detail -- sending back to al-Qaida $36,000 they didn't need.
At the airports early on Sept. 11, nine of the hijackers were pulled aside for extra security screenings, but all were allowed to proceed, some with hidden knives and boxcutters.
At 8 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 took off from Boston, with five hijackers aboard. Within 45 minutes, the other 14 hijackers were airborne: on flights out of Boston at 8:14, from Dulles airport near Washington at 8:20, from Newark, N.J., at 8:42.
On the ground, the first sign of trouble came when air traffic control lost contact with Flight 11 about 8:13 a.m. Minutes later, air traffic controllers heard an ominous transmission from the cockpit:
``We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you'll be OK. We are returning to the airport.''
The Boston controller wasn't sure what he had just heard. Then came a second transmission, believed to have been the voice of Atta, the plane's pilot, addressing the passengers: ``Nobody move. Everything will be OK. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane.''
It was a hijacking.
Air controllers first tried to call a military alert site in Atlantic City, N.J., unaware it had been closed. It was the start of a cascade of communications errors that morning that undermined any chance of stopping the attacks.
At 8:37 a.m., controllers reached the Northeast sector of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and urged them to scramble fighter jets because a hijacked plane was headed for New York.
``Is this real-world or exercise?'' responded an incredulous military official.
``No, this is not an exercise, not a test,'' the FAA said.
Nine minutes later, Flight 11 flew into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
Those nine minutes were the most notice the military would receive of any of the four hijackings.
Confusion turned to chaos during the next hour, as the Federal Aviation Administration struggled with ``an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet,'' the commission wrote.
Just before 9 a.m., President Bush stood outside a Sarasota, Fla., elementary school classroom, preparing to read to second-graders. Aides told him a small plane had struck the World Trade Center. He assumed it was a tragic accident, though the FAA and air defense officials already knew otherwise.
Air traffic controllers in New York were looking frantically for another plane that had disappeared from their screens. The hijackers had turned off its transponder, a tracking device.
``It's escalating big, big time,'' a New York manager warned the FAA command center in Herndon, Va. Two minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 from Boston crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered in the president's ear: ``A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.''
Bush stayed in the classroom another five minutes or so, listening to children read. He later said he was trying to project calm.
Bush wanted to return to the White House, but his aides and the Secret Service advised it was too dangerous. Air Force One took off about 9:55 a.m., its destination undecided.
The Secret Service just wanted to get him off the ground quick -- on a day when death came from the air, the skies offered refuge.
Before Air Force One could lift off, the Pentagon was in flames from the crash of American Airlines Flight 77.
That plane, which had taken off from Dulles, deviated from its flight pattern, then disappeared from radar at 8:54 a.m. A controller in Indianapolis, who had been tracking it, was unaware of the first two hijackings and believed it might have crashed.
A half-hour later, air traffic personnel at Dulles airport spotted the plane moving east at an extremely high speed. An unarmed National Guard cargo plane, already in the air, was tasked to follow it.
Minutes later, at 9:38 a.m., came his report: ``Looks like that aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, sir.''
Bush reacted to the news by calling Vice President Dick Cheney from the air: ``Sounds like we have a minor war going on here. I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war. ... Somebody's going to pay.''
Meanwhile, air traffic control in Cleveland heard transmissions that sounded like screams and a struggle. Then a voice from United Flight 93: ``Keep remaining sitting. We have a bomb on board.''
The plane turned toward Washington.
As FAA higher-ups discussed whether military jets should be scrambled, the passengers and flight attendants took things into their own hands, improvising an assault on the hijackers.
In the White House's underground shelter, with reports of a jet closing in, Cheney authorized the Air Force to shoot down hijacked planes. Cheney said Bush earlier had given him the authority to do so.
The order, which came minutes after Flight 93 had crashed in a Pennsylvania field, never was passed on to the fighters circling Washington and New York.
The same National Guard pilot who witnessed the Pentagon crash, then resumed his flight to Minnesota, was the first to report ``black smoke'' on the ground in Pennsylvania.
Two hours after it began, an attack five years in the making was over. The last plane had been downed short of its target, not because of government action, but at the hands of its passengers.
``We are sure that the nation owes a debt to the passengers of United 93,'' the commission wrote. ``Their actions saved the lives of countless others, and may have saved either the U.S. Capitol or the White House from destruction.''
On the Net:
Transcripts and documents form the Sept. 11 panel are available at: http://wid.ap.org/transcripts/front.html
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States:
http://www.9-11commission.gov
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Bush Adviser Toured Abu Ghraib
Visit Was Seen as Sign White House Wanted Better Intelligence
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53434-2004Jun18.html
A deputy national security adviser to President Bush toured Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison last November to review procedures for intelligence sharing among officials there and elsewhere in Iraq, prompting a senior prison official to conclude the White House wanted more and better information from interrogations, according to government officials and the official's sworn testimony.
Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, an Army Reservist who ran the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib, told Army investigators early this year that the visit by Fran Townsend -- then Bush's top counterterrorism adviser -- was among the pressures he felt to intensify intelligence-gathering efforts in the prison.
Townsend's visit occurred during a period when attacks on U.S. and Western officials in Iraq were rising sharply, and also when prisoners at Abu Ghraib were being questioned aggressively and sometimes humiliated by military police and intelligence officers. That included being deprived of clothing or forced to wear women's underwear, according to testimony by prison officials and an internal Army report on abuses there.
Jordan reported being told many times that the intelligence must be improved because of the widening attacks, according to an account published first in USA Today and confirmed by several government officials. Adding to the pressures to perform was a statement by a superior military officer at the prison that intelligence derived from the prison interrogations was read closely by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and by other senior officials in Washington, Jordan was quoted as saying.
The Washington Post previously reported that in February, Jordan told Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba -- appointed by the Army to investigate prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib -- that "White House staff" had requested better intelligence from the prison about "anti-coalition issues, foreign fighters, and terrorist issues."
But Townsend, a former Justice Department official and a specialist in intelligence issues, said in an interview yesterday that she did not discuss interrogations during her visit to Abu Ghraib, and placed no pressures on anyone there. She said she spent only 15 minutes touring detention cells during a prison visit that lasted two hours and occurred shortly before Thanksgiving.
Her visit was provoked by a concern -- after high-profile bombings at the Jordanian Embassy, the U.N. mission and a police barracks run by Italian soldiers -- that not enough was being done to assess "what was behind the violence," she said. Officials in Washington and Iraq alike were unsure whether it was caused by insurgents, foreign fighters or traditional terrorist groups, and Townsend said she wanted to help ensure that information was being shared properly among the analysts who could help resolve this question.
She said, for example, that the FBI was responsible for collecting fingerprints from debris at bombing sites, but the prints were not then being compared to those of prison detainees. The systems used for recording the prints "were incompatible," Townsend said, explaining that she wanted assurances that "they were not releasing people that we had fingerprint evidence on."
She said she also sought to ensure that the CIA -- which organized her trip to Iraq -- was getting access to information held by others stationed in Iraq so that its analysts could do their work "quicker and more efficiently."
Those were "the kinds of issues I was looking at . . . how to take the best information and pull it all together and make the best use of it," Townsend said.
Townsend, who was accompanied by an official of the CIA's operations directorate and by Brian Parr, a Secret Service official detailed to her personal staff, met with Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top military intelligence officer in Iraq, and with members of the CIA station.
But "I was there to understand. I did not have the cause to characterize my assumptions about their work. . . . I just wanted to learn," she said.
Townsend said she saw no abuse and was unaware of complaints made in October and November by the International Committee of the Red Cross about the repeated stripping of clothing from prisoners or other problems. She said she did not recall whether officials there told her about a major riot on Nov. 24 in which nine U.S. soldiers were injured, three detainees were killed by military police, and nine other detainees were wounded.
According to Taguba's report and testimony by many prison officials, some of the worst documented abuses unfolded at Abu Ghraib in the weeks before and after Townsend's visit, including the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners and the piling up of naked detainees. A government official who has been following the scandal said that any pressure for better intelligence "would have moved right down to people conducting the interrogations."
A Defense Department official said that, contrary to Jordan's impression, Rumsfeld did not see intelligence reports that were marked as coming from interrogations at Abu Ghraib. "What the secretary sees is synthesized, not raw reports," the defense official said. "It would be all-source intelligence" without a specified origin.
--------
Bush Aide Testifies in Leak Probe
Gonzales Appears Before Grand Jury
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 19, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53351-2004Jun18.html
White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales testified yesterday before a federal grand jury investigating whether administration officials illegally disclosed the name of a covert CIA officer last summer.
Gonzales was summoned before a grand jury that has been meeting for six months, taking testimony in an inquiry led by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan confirmed Gonzales's appearance before the panel but said he had no information about why Gonzales was called or what he was asked. "The judge was pleased to do his part to cooperate," McClellan said about the appearance.
Gonzales has coordinated the White House's response to subpoenas and document requests from Fitzgerald's office. McClellan said he did not know whether Gonzales was summoned to answer questions about the custody and production of documents.
Fitzgerald is investigating whether administration officials leaked Valerie Plame's name to syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak.
Plame is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Bush administration who contends that his wife's identity as an undercover CIA officer was leaked as retaliation for his criticism. Wilson was asked by the CIA in 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had sought to buy "yellowcake" uranium in the African country of Niger, and last year he said publicly that he found no evidence to support the contentions.
The prosecutor has sought records -- including phone records, calendars and e-mails -- that would reflect any contact between White House aides and reporters concerning Wilson, his trip to Africa or Plame.
Vice President Cheney was recently interviewed by Fitzgerald's staff, and President Bush has consulted with a private lawyer in the event he is questioned about the Plame disclosure.
In recent weeks, Fitzgerald has subpoenaed journalist Tim Russert of NBC and Time reporter Matt Cooper as part of the investigation. News organizations have gone to court seeking to quash the subpoenas.
McClellan said he did not know of any other White House aides who were called before the panel in recent weeks.
--------
Chief White House Lawyer Gives Testimony in Leak Case
June 19, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/19/politics/19leak.html
WASHINGTON, June 18 - Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, was questioned Friday by the federal grand jury trying to determine who leaked the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer to the syndicated columnist Robert Novak.
Mr. Gonzales became one of the administration's highest-ranking officials to testify in the politically charged case.
Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, confirmed to The Associated Press that Mr. Gonzales, a former justice of the Texas Supreme Court, had appeared before the grand jury.
"The president directed the White House to cooperate fully, and Judge Gonzales was just doing his part to cooperate," Mr. McClellan said.
No details of Mr. Gonzales's appearance were made public by the White House. A spokeswoman who said she knew nothing of that appearance referred calls to the Justice Department. A spokesman there, Bryan Sierra, declined to comment, saying it would be illegal to do so on any matter involving a grand jury.
The C.I.A. operative whose name was disclosed is Valerie Plame, whose husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, had publicly criticized President Bush over the president's claim that Saddam Hussein had once tried to obtain uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons for Iraq.
Mr. Novak wrote last summer of Ms. Plame's work for the C.I.A., a week after Mr. Wilson had questioned the African connection in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times.
Mr. Wilson suggested in his recently published book that the information had been provided to Mr. Novak by Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
The White House has denied that Mr. Libby or any other senior aides to Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney disclosed Ms. Plame's name, suggesting a political motivation for the claim by Mr. Wilson, who has worked as a foreign policy adviser to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Mr. Bush's likely Democratic opponent this year.
While neither the president nor the vice president is thought to be a focus of the grand jury investigation, both have spoken with lawyers in case they are called to testify. Mr. Cheney was recently interviewed by federal prosecutors, who asked him whether he was aware of anyone at the White House who had disclosed Ms. Plame's identity, according to people involved with discussions about the case.
And President Bush recently confirmed that he had met with a private lawyer, James E. Sharp, to discuss the possibility of representation if the grand jury calls him to testify. As the top White House lawyer, Mr. Gonzales can represent Mr. Bush only in matters related to official duties.
--------
9/11 Panel Invites Cheney to Give Evidence
June 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sept-11-Commission.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nearing the end of its work, the Sept. 11 commission is inviting Vice President Dick Cheney to provide any evidence he has that would show links between al-Qaida and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, a panel member said Saturday.
He said the panel also wants to follow up its questioning of President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and CIA Director George Tenet.
The Cheney request culminates a week in which the commission said it found no evidence of collaboration between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaida, while the White House stuck by its position that the two had significant links.
Cheney told the CNBC network that there probably were things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission members did not learn during their 14-month investigation.
After hearing the vice president's comment, commission members said they would like to see any intelligence reports that Cheney is referring to.
``We would certainly welcome any information bearing on the issue of assistance or collaboration with al-Qaida by any government including Iraq,'' said commission member Richard Ben-Veniste. Commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton made similar comments to The New York Times.
The Bush administration used the assertion of collaboration between al-Qaida and Saddam's regime as one of its reasons for invading Iraq.
Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said the commission is not making another formal request for documents from the White House.
``We have made an extensive document request of the administration, and they have responded to our requests,'' said Felzenberg. The panel is saying, he added: ``If the vice president or anybody else has any information on this subject that they would like the commission to examine, the commission would very much like to see it.''
Regarding additional questioning of witnesses, Ben-Veniste said, ``We are following up on interviews and other investigative leads at the same time we begin finalizing the factual accounts which will be contained in the final report.''
``Following up with Dr. Rice and George Tenet are two obvious areas of interest.''
The Los Angeles Times first reported the panel's desire for further questioning of Bush's national security adviser and the CIA director. The Times said Tenet, who leaves office in July, had agreed to be re-interviewed, and the commission might submit written questions to Rice.
Without addressing whether the commission wants to question Rice and Tenet again, Felzenberg said, ``It is not unusual to go back to someone with more questions.''
The commission has a July 26 deadline for completing its final report.
On the Net:
Sept. 11 panel: http://www.9-11commission.gov
-------- propaganda wars
Marshall Law in Iraq
lewrockwell.com
by Richard Cummings
June 19, 2004
http://www.lewrockwell.com/cummings/cummings37.html
Because of increased episodes of violence in Iraq, the new Iraqi government, in conjunction with its American counterpart, has brought Marshall Law to Iraq. Marshall Law, Marshall Law III, actually, has been dispatched as President Bush's new envoy, replacing Paul Bremer, who has become the head waiter at Le Circe 2000 in anticipation of its closing, a continuation of his career path. Mr. Law, a graduate of Yale (what else?) will assume his duties immediately and will continue to function in Iraq after the arrival of Ambassador John Negroponte to head the seventeen thousand person delegation assigned to the new American embassy in Baghdad. The embassy, under construction by Bechtel, will be larger than the Pentagon. Halliburton will provide food services.
Judith Miller conducted Mr. Law's interview with a new Iraqi newspaper, the Baghdad Times, edited by Howell Raines, who finally found a job after being fired by the parent company of the Baghdad Times, the New York Times.
Ms. Miller. Was your presence in Iraq inevitable?
Marshall Law: Not really. It took a lot of work to make this possible.
Ms. Miller: Such as?
Marshall Law: First, you had to alienate the entire population. That took some doing. But we had Paul Wolfowitz come over here first to get it going. Now the new poll, conducted by the Coalition itself, shows that America and Americans are not only distrusted but also detested. The average Iraqi says he would be safer if all foreign troops packed up and left.
Ms. Miller: Is it fair to say, then that Marshall Law has been imposed on Iraq.
Marshall Law: Everyone is saying that. It's a nice little joke, but the fact is someone has to put his foot down and restore order.
Ms. Miller: But isn't this kind of policy in direct contrast to the stated goal of creating democracy in Iraq so it could be a model for other Arab countries?
Marshall Law: Not really. How many people remember that this all started with Jeanne Kirkpatrick, when she wrote that there was a difference between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes? We could impose authoritarian regimes as a temporary measure, even if that meant it lasted for half a century, so a totalitarian regime, that is, one not favorable to the United States, could not come to power.
Ms. Miller: Are you saying that the democracy is going to have to wait in Iraq until it looks as if all opposition to America is crushed?
Marshall Law: That's about it. Call a spade a spade, I always say. Once we have crushed all dissent, then maybe these jerks will be ready to consider governing themselves, at least as acceptable puppets. If they elect a government hostile to us, we're just going to have to come in and overthrow it. What else is new?
Ms. Miller: I gather that there are terrorists at work in Iraq now, some of whom have ties to Al Queda.
Marshall Law: That's true. They weren't here before, but they are here now. So I have become an absolute necessity. What we are going to have to do is suspend the constitution before it is even written. Look, without order you simply can't have self-government.
Ms. Miller: Let's be honest. This is sounding more and more like Saddam Hussein's regime.
Marshall Law: Well, in case you have forgotten, our guys at CIA hired Saddam Hussein and trained him to be an assassin to bump off Kassim the Commie. He messed up and made that famous swim to escape. Then our guys sat by (well, we gave a little nudge here and there) while he knocked off all his enemies and took power. Only then did the CIA find out that his role model was Joseph Stalin. You have to hand it to the Agency. It got the Batistas to flee Cuba so Castro could come down from the mountains and the sugar crop would get harvested. No one believed he was a Communist. He was some romantic figure who could be bought off like all the phony dictators of Latin America, at least that's what they thought. Now, he acknowledges that his role model has always been Adolph Hitler. But stuff like this gives people like me a chance to have a career cleaning up the mess we made ourselves. It goes on forever. Hey, Osama bin Laden was one of our guys in Afghanistan, Bill Casey's boy. What a mistake! We'll be paying for that one for decades.
Ms. Miller: Lets cut to the chase. Was the war a mistake?
Marshall Law: What's the point of living in the past? And who will ever really know? What we know now is that we are there and there is no getting out. Wolfowitz has just said our troops will be there "as long as necessary." You know as well as I do that this means they will be there until the next century.
Ms. Miller: Let me plead mea culpa and ask if you think the media played a role in all of this.
Marshall Law: Well, I think it's fair to say that the stupidity had been spread around pretty equally. You believed all the nonsense and reported it because you wanted to believe it. That's what is means to be part of the GARC, the Great American Ruling Class. The GARC doesn't think; it just reacts. It's a great amorphous mass of idiocy with almost total power. It's like you puffed up Johnny Apple until he was as big as the moon, as though he were not big enough as it is. Then, you would have it, more or less. Ask the GARC to have a thought and it will sit there and pontificate without saying anything concrete. It has no ideas and cannot recognize facts. It huffs and puffs like Lyndon Johnson, or grins at your benignly like Ronald Reagan. And when the GARC has totally messed up in the outposts of the empire, it imposes me, Marshall Law. It's Pinochet all over again.
Ms Miller: Would things get better with John Kerry?
Marshall Law: That turkey IS the GARC. Are you kidding? I'll have lots of work with him.
Ms. Miller: Is there no hope, then?
Marshall Law: It all depends on who is getting paid. For Marshall Law, there is lots of hope. Otherwise to paraphrase Kafka, hope is infinite but not for you.
June 19, 2004
Richard Cummings [send him mail] taught international law at the Haile Selassie I University and before that, was Attorney-Advisor with the Office of General Counsel of the Near East South Asia region of U.S.A.I.D, where he was responsible for the legal work pertaining to the aid program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He is the author of a new novel, The Immortalists, as well as The Pied Piper - Allard K. Lowenstein and the Liberal Dream, and the comedy, Soccer Moms From Hell. He holds a Ph.D. in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University and is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He is writing a new book, The Road To Baghdad - The Money Trail Behind The War In Iraq. He is a contribution editor for The American Conservative.
-----
9/11 Reporter Reviews Facts in Michael Moore Film
editorandpublisher
By Greg Mitchell
June 19, 2004
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000536074
NEW YORK We had Ronald Reagan Week in the press, and Bill Clinton Week will pass in a few days, and then Michael Moore Week will surely arrive. The New York Times gets a jump on it in tomorrow's Arts & Leisure section with a lengthy appraisal of the facts and opinions in Moore's controversial film "Fahrenheit 9/11" which will be released on Friday.
The author of the piece, reporter Philip Shenon (who has covered the federal 9/11 commission for the past year) predicts that Moore "may face an onslaught of fact-checking" unlike any a documentary film-maker has faced before. Shenon's verdict: "It seems safe to say that central assertions of fact in 'Fahrenherit 9/11' are supported by the public record...."
He also quotes Moore telling him, "without an ounce of humor," that attempts to libel him "will be met by force." He reveals that Moore has readied a "war room" to offer instant rebuttal to conservative critics; hired Democratic activist Chris Lehane; and has a team of lawyers ready to bring defamation suits.
Shenon says Moore "is on firm ground" in arguing that the Bushes have profited handsomely from their relationships with the Saudis, including the bin Laden family and the Saudi rulers. He also notes that Moore is safe in charging that Bush paid too little attention to terrorism before 9/11, and suggests he is accurate when he claims that during Bush's first eight months in office he spent 42% of his time on vacation (the source being The Washington Post.
And he predicts that perhaps more "damaging to the White House" than any statistics in the film is its unedited replaying of the seven minutes Bush spent reading the book "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren in Florida after hearing the news of the second attack on the World Trade Center.
But Shenon adds: "The most valid criticism of the film are likely to involve the artful way that Mr. Moore connects the facts, and whether has had left out others that might undermine his scalding attack." Shenon cites one unproven assertion that Saudis own 6 to 7 percent of the United States. Despite criticism, he reveals, Moore has left in the film dark claims that the bin Laden family was allowed to fly out of the U.S. before air space was open to anyone else.
Shenon also reveals, however, that Moore has deleted his claims that Attorney General Ashcroft did not take any commercial flights in the summer before 9/11, after finding that he had done so "at least twice."
-------- us politics
Democratic Governors Criticize Bush
June 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Democratic-Governors.html
SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) -- The Bush administration's talk of a rebounding economy doesn't reflect what's going on in households around America, Democratic governors attending a policy conference said Saturday.
Job and retirement worries, rising health care costs and higher tuition rates are eating at middle-class families, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack contended.
As to administration officials' recent statements about the robust economy, ``Well, I don't know where they're buying gas,'' said Vilsack, chairman of the Democratic Governors' Association.
A spokesman for President Bush's re-election campaign countered that the governors had picked up ``the doom-and-gloom mantra of the Kerry campaign.''
Nationwide, 1.4 million jobs have been created in the last nine months, nearly 1 million of those in the last three months, said Danny Diaz, a spokesman for Bush-Cheney '04.
``This is part of a national trend that is creating more opportunities for American families and businesses,'' he said in a telephone interview.
Vilsack and Govs. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and Jim Doyle of Wisconsin accused Bush of not providing leadership on economic issues, leaving governors to grapple with jobs creation and other problems even as they beg the federal government for ``a few little scraps.''
``I think all of us feel like we're on our own at this point, with this administration,'' Sebelius said.
The governors held a news conference following a morning meeting at which they discussed energy, telecommunications and transportation issues.
Santa Fe also is the site of another governors' conclave; the Western Governors' Association annual meeting begins Sunday.
The Democratic governors' comments echoed the campaign-trail statements of Sen. John Kerry, Bush's presidential rival, whom the president is seeking to portray as a pessimist.
Vilsack -- who's on a list of possible vice-presidential picks checked out by the Kerry campaign -- said Kerry is ``speaking directly to the concerns and anxieties that I hear on Main Street ... offering them some hope ... a very concrete vision of how this country can be better.''
Wisconsin's Doyle said his state, which is second in the percentage of workers employed in manufacturing, has lost 80,000 manufacturing jobs over the past three years.
Fairer trade practices must be enacted and the federal government must provide more help in training workers, he said.
``We need to have leadership and vision in where the manufacturing economy and the economy of this country in general is going,'' Doyle said.
Diaz, the Bush campaign spokesman, said it was ironic that the Democratic governors criticized Bush the day after it was announced that 2,800 new jobs were created in May in New Mexico, where the unemployment rate has dropped to 5.5 percent from 6.3 percent a year ago.
Richardson, who has pushed tax cuts and vigorous investment strategies, took the credit for the improved numbers.
``The job growth in New Mexico is because of this governor -- in spite of federal policies, in spite of the administration,'' he said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
One injured in Turkish demo against upcoming NATO summit
ANKARA (AFP)
Jun 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040619140839.vaol1exh.html
One person was slightly injured when paramilitary troops used truncheons against stone-throwing protestors demonstrating in southern Turkey against an upcoming NATO summit in Istanbul, the Anatolia news agency reported.
The protestors were barred from approaching a strategic air base in Incirlik town, once used by US and British jets to patrol a no-fly zone over northern Iraq from the time of the Gulf War in 1991 until the invasion of Iraq last March.
A brief scuffle ensued when demonstrators pelted security forces with stones and paramilitary troops intervened against the group, Anatolia said.
One demonstrator sustained slight facial injuries, it added.
In a press statement, the protestors called for the closure of the Incirlik base and the cancellation of the NATO summit which will take place in Istanbul on June 28-29.
There are almost daily protests in Turkey against the NATO summit and authorities have warned that they will not tolerate demonstrations held outside officially-designated areas.
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