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NUCLEAR
Canada drops missile on golf course
Notice served after radioactive gaskets found on Sellafield beach
India, Pakistan to establish nuclear hotline
Demolitions Raise Concern Of Nuclear Coverup in Iran
Iran to State Uranium Plan
Pressure builds on the US ahead of six-party North Korea talks
Chronology of North Korean nuclear crisis
Australia to commit to Son of Star Wars missile program
Why Running From Disaster Might Not Be a Good Idea
A Pretend Response to a Pretend Emergency
MILITARY
Sudan to Disarm Militias
Life in Congo: Another Coup, Another Crisis
Rwanda accuses Congo of massing troops
Legacy of Indonesian Reform
Blair Confronts Political Burdens of Iraq
Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears
U.S. Strike In Fallujah Kills 20
While Building Police, Iraqis Will Reduce Force
Kurds Advancing to Reclaim Land in Northern Iraq
Iraqi Leader Announces Plans to Reorganize Security Forces
Strike Aimed at Terrorists Kills 17 in Falluja
Iraq's Allawi Welcomes U.S. Strike That Killed 22
Senior officer of Fallujah Brigade disputes U.S. airstrike target
Israelis Say They Have Foiled Planned Attacks by Militants
Saudis Kill 4 Al Qaeda Militants
4 Killed After Hostage's Death Are Called Saudi Cell's Leaders
Counterterror, old spooks, bold career
Military Booted 770 in 2003 for Being Gay
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Many Ports to Miss Security Deadline
9/11: At last, the full story has been told
Analysis: Some see risk to U.S. troops from Defense Department
US 'holding thousands' in secret jails
U.S. dirty bomb attack 'all but certain'
POLITICS
Kerry: a Lighter Shade of Bush
Reports on Attacks Are Gripping, Not Dry
A Revised View of an Infamous Day
Facts vs. fiction
Academy still uneasy with claim of Cold War triumph
9/11 Panel's Findings Vault Bush Credibility To Campaign Forefront
OTHER
Walking guru offers easy way to burn fat
ACTIVISTS
A Horse and Rider With a Message of Peace
Will Michael Moore's Facts Check Out?
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Canada drops missile on golf course
June 20, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040619-051005-7769r.htm
YELLOWKNIFE, NT, Jun. 19 -- A Canadian military aircraft added an extra hazard to the Yellowknife Golf Club when it dropped a missile packed with high explosives on the course.
The Toronto Globe and Mail said the missile fell from a CF-18 and dug a new bunker in the course driving range when it hit the mostly sandy ground at 7 a.m. Friday. The missile did not explode, and no one was injured.
"It's a live missile, so it has a warhead and it has its rocket motor," said Captain Dave Muralt of Canadian Forces NORAD command in Winnipeg. "But it was not armed .... Everything has to be set for this thing to fire and for the warhead to explode."
Bob Kelly of the Northwest Territories Department of Transportation told the Globe and Mail an air traffic controller noticed something fall from the plane as it made its approach to Yellowknife airport.
Although the region's best-known golf club was evacuated, the annual midnight golf tournament played in the far north's 24-hour sunshine is expected to go on as scheduled next weekend.
-------- britain
Notice served after radioactive gaskets found on Sellafield beach
The discovery of two pieces of a radioactively contaminated rubber gasket on a beach near Sellafield, has led to a so-called Enforcement Notice being served to British Nuclear Fuels Plc, or BNFL.
Erik Martiniussen,
2004-06-20
Bellona Foundation (Russia)
http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/nuclear/sellafield/34548.html
The British Environment Agency served the enforcement notice-a legal warning to the company to more strictly guard its facilities-to BNFL on Thursday.
The enforcement notice follows an incident earlier this year when two pieces of a rubber gasket, contaminated with radioactivity, were found on a local beach outside the company's Sellafield site. BNFL operates two nuclear reprocessing plants at Sellafield, both of which discharge large amounts of radioactive wastes to the Irish Sea.
Low radiation levels Both of the two contaminated gaskets were discovered separately during routine BNFL checks of the Sellafield and Seascale beaches in January and February this year. Investigations by BNFL and the Agency have shown that the items had become detached from the diffuser at the end of one of the operational sealines (sealine 3) used by the company.
Subsequent tests revealed that the radiation levels of both gaskets were found to be low, thus presenting little potential hazard to the public. The gaskets were, however, found to be contaminated above agreed norms.
The enforcement notice was issued because of BNFL's failure to comply with a condition of their operating authorisation-which is granted by the Environment Agency-to dispose of low level radioactive waste at their Sellafield site in Cumbria. The authorisation from the Environmental Agency allows BNFL to discharge radioactively contaminated water from the Sellafield site via pipelines into the Irish Sea. However a key condition of the permit requires BNFL to maintain the systems used for the discharge of any radioactive waste in good repair.
In a statement Thursday, Andy Mayall, the Environment Agency's nuclear regulator, commented: "Although the risks to the public on this occasion were low, this type of incident is both undesirable and preventable. This will require BNFL to undertake a thorough review of its inspection and maintenance of the discharge pipelines and to make any required improvements."
The Agency will now ask for a review of Sellafield's pipeline design, with all work to be completed within an agreed timescale.
A BNFL spokesman said Friday: "The discovery of gasket material on the beach was publicly reported by us at the time of the event. Since then, we have carried out a detailed internal inquiry and are already implementing a range of improvements, including all of the work required by the Environment Agency. We are determined to learn from this event to ensure there are no repeat occurs."
Scraps have escape before
Over the last year, BNFL has been working on a £13m project to remove three redundant discharge pipelines. Known as the Sealine Recovery Project, two 10-inch steel pipelines originally laid in 1949, and an 8-inch temporary plastic pipeline, laid around 1990, would be recovered from the seabed over a twelve month period and disposed of in BNFL's onshore licensed low level waste dump at Drigg/Sellafield.
But operations have not been easy. In November last year, lengths of the plastic discharge pipe principally used for evacuating drainage water from the Sellafield site, escaped a seabed containment cage. The dismantled sections were temporarily stored in the seabed cage, waiting to be transported onshore. During stormy weather more than 170 cut pieces broke free from the containment cage and where washed ashore on different local beaches. Four sections where recovered as far away as Isle of Man. One showed slightly higher radiation than normal background levels. The cage originally held 364 lengths of pipe pieces.
-------- india / pakistan
India, Pakistan to establish nuclear hotline
Longtime rivals make move to 'prevent misunderstandings'
The Associated Press
June 20, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5253059/
NEW DELHI - India and Pakistan announced Sunday they would establish a new hotline between their foreign ministries to alert each other of potential nuclear accidents or threats, a major step forward in efforts to normalize relations between the longtime South Asian rivals.
advertisement In a joint statement at the conclusion of two days of talks in the Indian capital, officials said the dedicated secure hotline was intended to "prevent misunderstandings and reduce risks relevant to nuclear issues."
The joint statement said an existing hotline between directors general of military operations in both countries also would be upgraded and secured.
Experts from both sides, which have gone to war three times since independence from Britain in 1947, also reaffirmed their moratorium on conducting further nuclear tests, "unless, in exercise of national sovereignty, it decides that extraordinary events have jeopardized its supreme interests."
Ongoing dialogue India and Pakistan carried out nuclear tests in May 1998, provoking military and economic sanctions by the United States and its allies. International fears of a nuclear confrontation were exacerbated when the two countries fought in the Himalayas in 1999, and came close to war again in mid-2002 when India blamed Pakistan for a terrorist attack on its Parliament compound.
The talks are only the first stage in the nuclear dialogue.
A meeting on Saturday was led by top foreign ministry officials, Sheel Kant Sharma from India and Tariq Usman Haider of Pakistan.
The joint statement also said India and Pakistan would work toward concluding an agreement with "technical parameters on pre-notification of flight testing of missiles, a draft of which was handed over by the Indian side."
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.
In February 1999, 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.
The joint statement said both countries would continue bilaterial talks toward implementation of the 1999 Lahor agreement.
India's new Congress-led government is pursuing peace initiatives started by the previous government of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, ousted from power in April-May national elections.
The next round of talks will be held between the foreign secretaries on June 27-28, in which they'll take up the thorny issue of Kashmir, the disputed Himalayan province that has been the flashpoint of two wars between India and Pakistan.
-------- iran
Demolitions Raise Concern Of Nuclear Coverup in Iran
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54908-2004Jun19.html
TEHRAN, June 19 -- Construction cranes stipple the skyline of Iran's capital. A city of 10 million, Tehran has been in a building boom for years.
But in the northeast corner of this sprawling, smoggy metropolis, something was torn down a few months ago, something behind a 20-foot concrete wall.
"It was a municipal sports complex," said a grizzled man who came to the door of the guard house, shrugging and sliding into a camouflage fatigue coat without losing the ash from the cigarette clenched in his lips.
"It wasn't big enough," he said, declining to be identified. "So they demolished it, and they want to rebuild it bigger."
The yellow sign posted at the front gate -- clean and new, in contrast to the graffiti-scarred walls -- told the same story: "Sport Cultural Complex of Kowsar."
But in a few days inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency will ask to see for themselves. The now-vacant acres facing Shian 7th Alley have raised suspicions that Iran may be building nuclear weapons. Iran insists it harbors no secret weapons program, but fellow members of the IAEA board issued a resolution Friday condemning the country for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into its activities.
Satellite images of the site show that between August 2003 and March at least a half-dozen buildings were pulled down. The IAEA is investigating the images, which suggested to U.S. government analysts that Iran was concealing nuclear activities. Iranian officials have denied that claim and said inspectors are welcome to survey the site.
According to the Institute for Science and International Security, an organization based in Washington that monitors nuclear proliferation, a layer of topsoil was also carted away from the area. A machine that detects radiation, called a whole body counter, was then brought to the site, according to the institute.
"The whole body counter itself is not a clear indication of a nuclear weapons program," said David Albright, president of the institute.
But the site was not included in a list of atomic research facilities Iran was obliged to provide last year to the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, he noted. And by the time inspectors arrive, all they may be able to confirm is a vague sense of unease.
"It'll be hard to do sample work at that site," Albright said. "People will try. But these are the changes you make if you want to defeat the environmental sampling techniques of the IAEA."
Iran has pledged to continue working with the inspectors, who expect be in Iran at least through the summer. But the theocratic government appeared to be still absorbing the impact of the slap by the IAEA -- its second since March for Iran's lack of candor.
On Saturday, the state-run Tehran Times newspaper carried 10 articles on its first two pages about the nuclear issue. But at a news conference, Iran's official on the issue, Hassan Rowhani, declared that the IAEA resolution "does not have much significance."
Rowhani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, said Iran had not yet decided whether it would resume enriching uranium -- a process that produces fuel for energy or for weapons. Iran agreed last year to suspend enrichment activities after it acknowledged a nuclear program it had kept secret for 18 years.
European diplomats who insist that Iran's cooperation has been erratic have said they want Iran to give up enriching uranium permanently and back away from plans for a heavy water reactor, which could produce plutonium for a bomb.
Rowhani pledged to continue talks with France, Germany and Britain, the European countries that coaxed Iran last year to cooperate with the IAEA, but he also implied that the resolution would have unwelcome consequences.
"Since the Europeans have not met their commitment, we may take new decisions and announce them in the coming days," Rowhani said.
--------
Iran to State Uranium Plan
June 20, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/international/middleeast/20iran.html
TEHRAN, June 19 - A senior Iranian official said Saturday that Tehran would announce within days whether it would resume enriching uranium at its sites, after the country was formally rebuked for a lack of cooperation in divulging details of its nuclear program.
Hassan Rowhani, National Security Council secretary, said the earlier suspension of enrichment, a measure Iran announced in October, "was voluntary and for short term.''
"We may not want to inject gas into the centrifuges tomorrow but may decide to resume assembling or making parts," he said.
The suspension, he said, was part of a deal with Britain, Russia and France to close Iran's case at the International Atomic Energy Agency.
-------- korea
Pressure builds on the US ahead of six-party North Korea talks
BEIJING (AFP)
Jun 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040620011550.h2tatkll.html
A third round of six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons programs opens this week with Washington in the hot seat, as pressure builds for it to change tack and climb down from its hardline stance.
With presidential elections looming in November, the Bush administration has successfully managed to keep the North Korean issue on the backburner and that is the way it wants it to stay, analysts say.
The problem is that the other nations involved in the six-party format are getting restless, and splinters could appear in the talks starting in Beijing on Wednesday and scheduled to run until Saturday.
"If North Korea rises to a level of importance, Bush could be in a position where he has to concede, but there is no evidence the administration is ready to concede," said Paul Harris, an expert on US foreign policy at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
"If North Korea already has nuclear weapons and is exporting this kind of technology, then this becomes a bigger threat, a bigger threat than Saddam.
"If this idea gains traction and becomes bigger news, then the US will have to respond. So they want to keep it at a low level."
Two previous rounds of six-way talks hosted by China and also involving Japan, Russia and South Korea, have failed to narrow key differences on how to end the 20-month-old stand-off.
The impasse blew up in October 2002 when Washington said the Stalinist state had broken a 1994 nuclear freeze by launching a secret nuclear weapons program.
Washington is demanding the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of the programs, both plutonium and enriched uranium, before it will offer concessions to the impoverished state.
Pyongyang denies that it is running a uranium scheme, but has offered to freeze its plutonium facilities in return for simultaneous rewards from the United States.
Since the last round of talks in February, reclusive North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il has met face to face with counterparts from two of the participating nations -- President Hu Jintao of China and Japanese President Junichiro Koizumi.
Reports last week said he would meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in July.
On a secretive trip to China in April, Kim reaffirmed his commitment to the talks process but also made clear there could be no progress until the US changed its "hostile" policy.
Koizumi, meanwhile, returned from a rare visit to Pyongyang on May 22 saying that Kim had pledged to work for a solution to the festering standoff.
While the talks are going ahead, there is little optimism that progress can be made.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell stressed as recently as last month that all the five parties talking to North Korea were united in their stand for it to disband its nuclear programs completely, but others disagree.
Zhao Huji, a North Korea specialist at the Central Party School in Beijing, said cracks were appearing among China, South Korea, Russia and Japan, who were losing patience with Washington.
"At the beginning, all five countries tried to persuade North Korea (to make concessions). Now, the very hard line of the United States is not supported so much by the others," he said.
"The countries close to the Korean peninsula are pushing so that things advance. Only the United States does not want this to happen."
Both Zhao and Cui Yingjiu, a leading North Korean expert at Peking University, agree that North Korea wants to make reforms and open up, but will not do so without a security guarantee from Washington, a key requirement from Pyongyang before it dismantles its nuclear program.
"Kim is pushing for reform and opening but it is coming to the point where foreigners (such as the US) are not allowing this to move forward," said Cui.
"If the US can better understand what is going on it would be easier for them to work with the other countries."
According to observers, the economic reforms Kim introduced in recent years have failed and the impoverished country is struggling to cope, with food and energy aid from the international community in short supply.
Finding a solution to the nuclear issue is closely entwined with tackling these other problems.
----
Chronology of North Korean nuclear crisis
BEIJING (AFP)
Jun 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040620011712.8au26y10.html
Key dates in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear weapons drive:
2002
Oct: North Korea reportedly admits to US special envoy James Kelly that it is running a uranium enrichment program in violation of a 1994 nuclear safeguard accord.
Nov 14: The United States suspends fuel oil shipments to North Korea promised under the 1994 accord.
Dec 12: North Korea says it is reactivating nuclear facilities frozen under the accord because of power shortages.
Dec 21-25: North Korea removes seals and monitoring cameras from its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang.
Dec 27: UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors expelled from Yongbyon.
2003
Jan 10: Pyongyang withdraws from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Feb 12: The IAEA declares North Korea in violation of non-proliferation accords and refers the crisis to the UN Security Council.
Feb 26: North Korea restarts its five-megawatt nuclear reactor at Yongbyon facilities, US officials say.
April 9: UN Security Council expresses concern about the nuclear crisis but issues no condemnation of North Korea.
April 18: North Korea says it has begun reprocessing more than 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods to make weapons-grade plutonium.
April 23: The United States, North Korea and China meet for three days of talks in Beijing. North Korea admits to possessing nuclear weapons, according to the US side. Pyongyang submits a "bold proposal" for resolving the crisis.
July 16: The White House says North Korea has informed the United States of completing reprocessing of 8,000 spent fuel rods on June 30.
Aug 13: North Korea asks for a non-aggression pact with the United States to resolve the nuclear stand-off.
Aug 27-29: Six-way nuclear talks start in Beijing. North Korea threatens to conduct a nuclear test and declare itself a nuclear power.
Aug 30: North Korea says talks on nuclear crisis were "useless".
Oct 2: North Korea says it has produced enough weapons-grade plutonium for half-a-dozen atomic bombs as a step towards boosting its nuclear deterrent.
Oct 16: North Korea vows to display the "physical force" of its nuclear deterrent.
Oct 29: China's number two leader, Wu Bangguo, visits North Korea. China and North Korea agree in principle to continue six-party talks.
Nov 21: The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), an international consortium set up to build safe nuclear power reactors for North Korea, suspends the 4.6 billion dollar project for one year.
2004
Jan 1: North Korea reaffirms in a New Year message that it is ready to resolve its nuclear crisis peacefully while vowing to take "toughest" measures against any US "hardline" stance toward Pyongyang.
Jan 6: Two US non-governmental delegations visit North Korea's nuclear complex in Yongbyon.
Jan 6: North Korea offers to refrain from testing and producing nuclear weapons in a "bold concession". US Secretary of State Colin Powell says he is encouraged by the offer.
Jan 12: North Korea again offers to freeze nuclear reactors producing weapons grade plutonium if compensated by Washington.
Jan 21: Siegfried Hecker, a US scientist who toured the Yongbyon complex, says Pyongyang did not prove it had made a nuclear bomb but likely had the capacity to make weapons grade plutonium.
Jan 22: IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei says North Korea's nuclear program is the world's most dangerous non-proliferation issue.
Feb 3: North Korea agrees to hold a new round of six-way nuclear crisis talks to open on February 25 in China.
Feb 4: Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's atomic program, admits proliferating nuclear technology after two-month investigation into the leaking of nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Feb 11: Top Japanese officials arrive in Pyongyang for talks with North Korea about its nuclear arms program and the abduction of Japanese citizens.
Feb 18: Senior US envoy John Bolton says North Korea's refusal to discuss its illicit uranium enrichment program threatens chances of peaceful solution.
Feb 23: US suggests willingness to consider freeze of North Korea's nuclear program, as delegates start arriving in Beijing for six-party talks.
Feb 24: Second round of six-party talks are held in Beijing, but end without concrete progress. China says "severe" differences remain.
April 19: North Korean leader Kim Jong-il meets Chinese President Hu Jintao during a three-day visit to Beijing and vows to be flexible and patient over the nuclear issue.
May 14: North Korea says it will never accept US demands for a complete dismantling of its nuclear programs at working level six-nation talks in Beijing.
May 22: Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visits Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang and the North Korean leader says he wants a solution to the crisis.
June 20: Second session of working-level talks start.
June 23: Third round of six-party talks to get underway.
-------- missile defense
Australia to commit to Son of Star Wars missile program
CANBERRA (AFP)
Jun 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040620020328.skaa5xky.html
The Australian government has announced it will commit to joining the United States in its "Son of Star Wars" missile defence program in Washington next month despite strong opposition resistance to the project.
Defence Minister Robert Hill said the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) would formalise Australia's long-term commitment to participating in the program.
"We intend to sign the MOU at the next Australia-United States ministerial consultations planned in the US for early July," Hill said in the statement released Saturday.
But the controversial move is facing the resistance of combined opposition parties with Labor sceptical of any benefits and the minor Democrats arguing no agreement should be signed ahead of the upcoming election in which the government could lose office.
Hill said the MOU would provide a 25-year framework under which broad areas of cooperation can be agreed, before entering into more specific arrangements once individual projects were agreed to.
"This is a long-term commitment to securing our future and strengthening the alliance," he said.
The first area of cooperation would involve research, development, testing and evaluation of technologies that could be used in the missile defence program.
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.
Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said the opposition had profound reservations about the program, fearing it might prompt an arms race by countries such as China and India, and called on the government to produce evidence of its effectiveness.
"We still don't know whether missile defence systems actually work," Rudd told reporters.
"And furthermore if you seek to construct a missile defence system, does that in turn result in nuclear weapons -- countries in our region to increase their arsenal?
Australian Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett said no agreement should be signed ahead of an election the government says could be any time from August 7 to late November.
"A government that may have only months left shouldn't be signing Australia up to an expensive 25-year agreement on new weapons," he said.
The left-wing Greens slammed it as the next version of former US president Ronald Reagan's failed "Star Wars" missile defence plan of the 1980s.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
INDIAN POINT: A DIALOGUE
Why Running From Disaster Might Not Be a Good Idea
June 20, 2004
By HERSCHEL SPECTER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/opinion/opinionspecial/20WSpecter2.html
IN the recent emergency drill at the Indian Point nuclear power plants, one point seems to have been obscured: it's highly unlikely that many people would die from radiation released in a terrorist attack.
As an independent consultant who has reviewed emergency planning for Entergy, which owns Indian Point, I have had the opportunity to review many disaster scenarios. While studies come with obvious limitations, it is abundantly clear that natural forces would profoundly limit the number of early fatalities caused by a terrorist attack or some other disaster. It's also clear that the risks to people in the four surrounding counties would be quite different, with 99.9 percent of the small initial fatality risk occurring in Westchester County within about two miles of the site.
One recent Entergy-sponsored terrorist study, conducted by a group of nuclear safety scientists, was built around the following extreme assumptions: a huge hole in the containment building, destruction of all emergency equipment, no action by the security guards or the operating crew, and a reactor meltdown. Using up-to-date figures on population, weather data and traffic patterns, experts made a series of calculations to determine the health consequences from the radioactive material expected to leave the site.
These extreme assumptions were then coupled with another extreme assumption: a failed emergency plan. It was assumed that the public would be unaware of the terrorist attack for six hours and that a release of radioactive material had occurred. When the people got the news, they left the area at six miles per hour.
Under this scenario, there were fewer than 29 initial fatalities in the 10-mile emergency planning zone. Some 99.99 percent of the zone's population would survive, largely because natural forces would protect them. (These natural forces include trapping of much of the radioactive material in the containment facility and a narrow and weakening offsite radiation plume.) Only those people exposed to the plume within two miles of the reactor are at risk of becoming early fatalities. If people simply took shelter (limiting exposure to outside air, staying in a basement, etc.) and then left the area six hours later at six m.p.h., the estimated initial fatalities would drop from 29 to 12. Better yet, timely evacuation at three m.p.h. or more would result in near zero early fatalities. This means that just walking at normal speeds for a short distance from the damaged plant would bring people to a point of safety. Timely evacuation of the two miles next to the site is a preferred emergency response for Westchester, but probably superfluous in the other counties in the emergency zone.
Most people in the zone would not be at risk. These residents would do well to listen to emergency broadcasts in case there is a wind shift, at which point they might be advised to take shelter until the plume had passed. This mix of localized evacuation, sheltering and staying indoors is much simpler than large-scale evacuations and far more effective.
Indian Point is not a "soft target'' - that is, a vulnerable and undefended structure - for terrorists, because of its security systems, robust buildings and multiple safety systems. In the unlikely event of a terrorist attack, the health consequences would be small. While the loss of any life would be tragic, these studies make clear that the potential for damage is far greater when it comes to attacks on soft targets like the World Trade Center, trains in Madrid - or Westchester's dams or chlorine-based water treatment facilities. Fears about fast-breaking accidents are not scientifically supported and the release of radiation from spent fuel pools can easily be handled by the present emergency plan.
This suggests that while these Indian Point emergency planning studies should certainly be completed, we would do well to focus our attention on more vulnerable targets throughout the region.
Herschel Specter, chairman of a Department of Energy committee on emergency planning in 1984, was the federal regulator in charge of reviewing the licensing of Indian Point 3.
--------
INDIAN POINT: A DIALOGUE
A Pretend Response to a Pretend Emergency
June 20, 2004
By RICHARD L. BRODSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/opinion/opinionspecial/20wbrodsky.html
THE risk of a major release of radiation from the Indian Point nuclear power plants is small, but the consequences would be extraordinary, permanent and catastrophic. Put aside whether Indian Point is cheaper (it actually isn't - taxpayer subsidies for waste disposal, insurance, pollution controls and emergency planning merely make it seem cheaper) or how unsafe it may be. The plant's owners and defenders point to the evacuation plan as the public's ultimate protection against disaster. There is a level of intellectual and institutional dishonesty about that claim that is astonishing.
We took the first hard look at the Indian Point evacuation plan right after 9/11. It is filled with small and large idiocies that defy logic and experience. For example, the plan suggested that parents would leave their children at school to be evacuated by buses, and not seek to reunite with them or other family members. The plan assumed the roads would not immediately clog up, because people who live outside a 10-mile radius of the plant would stay put once a radiation release was announced. It assumed that schoolchildren would be evacuated before the public learned of the radiation release, and that New York City residents would not try to leave the area. The plan didn't have sufficient buses to carry out residents and it assumed that bus drivers would voluntarily return to the 10-mile zone for more evacuation trips. Perhaps what was most unbelievable was that the most likely advice given the public would be to stay home, close the windows and turn on the radio. No kidding.
It wasn't enough to simply point out that the whole thing defied common sense. As opponents of the plant, we provoked a full campaign to get local governments and the state to stop certifying the plan, which succeeded. But we ran up against the federal government - in particular the Federal Emergency Management Agency - which denied and delayed fulfilling its own legal responsibility to tell the truth. After a few essentially minor changes in the plan, we had another annual exercise in group madness earlier this month, the evacuation "drill" - a pretend emergency, and a pretend response.
There is no doubt that local officials and emergency personnel worked hard at the drill. But the sincerity of local officials is no substitute for a federal government that will first tell the truth about the impossibility of evacuating residents of Westchester and New York City and then stop protecting and subsidizing the nuclear industry. The first step is to end the drill of a hopeless plan that is closer to a cartoon than a life-saving protection. Even a good drill of a bad plan can't protect us.
There are serious questions about the future of Indian Point that need public discussion. How can we replace the energy it produces? Can we stop its pollution of the Hudson River? Why should taxpayers pay the cost of emergency evacuation and waste disposal? And in the end, is it worth the risk?
We can't rely on the plant's defenders or the federal government to help us answer these questions. And we can't hope for a rational debate when the plant's proponents still insist that a drill can protect us if the worst happens.
Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky represents New York's92nd District.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Sudan to Disarm Militias
June 20, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/international/africa/20suda.html
KHARTOUM, Sudan, June 19 (Reuters) - President Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir of Sudan on Saturday ordered "complete mobilization" to disarm all illegal armed groups, including the Arab militiamen who have been harassing African villagers in Darfur, in the west.
The order was made a day after the United States threatened to impose sanctions on Sudan to intensify pressure to help ease a crisis for civilians in Darfur that the United Nations says is the worst in the world.
The president said government agencies should mobilize "to control and pursue all outlaw groups, including rebels and Janjaweed,'' and "disarm the outlaws and present them to justice and prevent any groups from crossing into neighboring Chad.'' The Janjaweed is the local name for the Arab militias whom the Darfur rebels blame for much of the conflict in the region. The rebels say the government has backed the Janjaweed, but the government has denied that.
Mustafa Osman Ismail, the foreign minister of Sudan, told reporters that the decision meant the government would deploy additional police officers and troops to maintain order in Darfur. Asked how the decree squared with the cease-fire between the government and the rebels, he said the truce required the rebels to maintain current positions.
"Any group out of the demarcated territories , it is the responsibility of the government to deal with them,'' he said. International organizations have criticized the Sudanese government for not controlling the militias, who have driven hundreds of thousands of Africans into camps for the displaced or into exile in Chad.
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Life in Congo: Another Coup, Another Crisis
June 20, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/international/africa/20cong.html?pagewanted=all&position=
KINSHASA, Congo, June 19 - What happened here in the wee hours of June 11 had all the earmarks of a coup: Soldiers stormed into the government radio station, took over and announced over the air that they were running the country.
"We are ready to turn this city into a battlefield," threatened Maj. Eric Lenge, the ringleader, urging people to stay indoors, remain calm and wait for further instructions.
But Congolese know their coups, and few believe that this was a real effort to topple President Joseph Kabila. Rather, they say, it was subterfuge, a political game, an elaborate ploy to throw a chaotic country into even more confusion.
The government swiftly announced that it had put down the coup and that Major Lenge had fled. But some opposition newspapers suggest that an ally of Mr. Kabila may have orchestrated the whole thing to allow the president to solidify his power.
Congo has endured plenty of turmoil in the last three months. It continues to try to put down an armed rebellion in the east led by military commanders who have refused to join a national army. The damage from a recent outbreak of rioting is still visible around Kinshasa, the capital, and an armed uprising at the end of March attributed to former loyalists of the longtime dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, left residents huddled in their homes.
But what worries the battle-hardened Congolese most are the crises to come. Elections loom as early as next June, and the recent outbreaks of violence are seen as opening salvos. Dictatorship has trumped democracy for much of Congo's history, despite an active civil society that has jockeyed hard over the years for a say in the country's affairs.
"We have to expect the worst," said Jean Pierre Bosala, 42, a teacher turned street hawker who doubts the election will be held. "There are some politicians who are afraid that the elections might not go their way. Nothing would surprise me anymore."
The civil war that engulfed Congo in 1998 was finally quelled five years later. At its worst, the fighting drew in Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia on the side of the government and Uganda and Rwanda as backers of rebel forces. In all, an estimated three million people died.
Congo's government was shaken but never ousted. The signing of a peace deal in South Africa last year has ended most of the fighting but has not erased the enmity. Congo's relationship with Rwanda remains particularly tense.
For now, a transitional government is ruling Congo. Mr. Kabila, who took over in 2001 after his father was assassinated, has four vice presidents, two of whom come from rebel movements that were trying until recently to take power by force. There are 60 ministers and 620 Parliament members, representing a dozen factions. The unwieldy arrangement was intended to help the country get its footing after the long war.
Major Lenge's 2 a.m. radio broadcast was but one sign that peace remained an elusive goal. He had been assigned to the presidential guard, an elite force whose primary mission is to keep Mr. Kabila alive. Since the failed putsch, he has become a fugitive, although the government's pursuit seems halfhearted.
After his group took control of the radio station, they moved on through the streets to the power station and plunged the capital into darkness. Then he and his renegades went to a military base near the airport, near the Congo River. The government then announced that it had the base, and Major Lenge, surrounded.
But he and his few dozen followers still escaped in a convoy of jeeps. The government then announced that it had a helicopter tracking him. But Major Lenge was spotted driving through the city, always well out of reach of the pursuing soldiers.
Eventually, he got away. The government announced at one point that he was near the border with Angola. A week later, government officials said he and his followers were still in the capital and were responsible for some gunfire heard outside the American ambassador's residence.
The country's top military man, Gen. Liwanga Mata Nyamunyobo, bristles at criticism of the way the coup was handled. "You think I didn't react?" he said in an interview. "You wanted me to take a jeep with a gun and start chasing him - pop, pop, pop, pop? Is that how a general acts?"
The ham-handed pursuit is just one factor that has raised questions in the minds of many Congolese about Major Lenge's escapade. Why would a man who was so close to Mr. Kabila, who stood by his side protecting him, not just shoot him if he wanted to topple the government? Why would a mere major try to pull off such a stunt with a few dozen men in a city full of soldiers?
The theories are many. Major Lenge was known for his aggressive ways and maybe he grew angry at his patron, the president, and acted impulsively. Or, more likely in the minds of many Congolese, maybe there was somebody who put Mr. Lenge up to the venture - either a presidential loyalist who wanted to help Mr. Kabila consolidate his power, or a hard-liner who wanted to scare the president.
The renegade soldiers in eastern Congo have been much more effective in wreaking havoc. Two former commanders from a Rwanda-backed rebel movement known as the Congolese Rally for Democracy captured the town of Bukavu from government soldiers on June 2.
The rebel group has joined the government, but the commanders, Gen. Laurent Nkunda and Col. Jules Mutebusi, have amassed their own band of dissident soldiers. They say they are defending the rights of the relatively small group of ethnic Tutsi in eastern Congo, but the United Nations and Human Rights Watch have accused them of exaggerating the accounts of attacks on Tutsi. The government accuses Rwanda of being behind the aggression.
The United Nations has 10,800 peacekeepers in Congo, which is roughly the size of Western Europe, but the organization has found the country too vast and the crises too frequent to control.
If there is an encouraging sign in all of this, it is that the fragile transitional government, made up of people who were once enemies, has not collapsed. All the violence, however, has only highlighted the need to create one military out of all the armed bands that roam the country.
Until that is done, it will be too easy for anyone toting an aging Kalashnikov - a significant percentage of the population - to handle what ought to be political differences with the pull of a trigger.
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Rwanda accuses Congo of massing troops
Associated Press
Jun 20, 2004
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040620.wcongo19/BNStory/International/
Kigale - Rwanda's foreign minister said Saturday that neighbouring Congo has massed thousands of troops on the border and is preparing to attack his country.
Foreign Minister Charles Muligande said the troops include Rwandan rebels who fled to Congo after playing a central role in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
"This heavy deployment of Congolese soldiers and Rwandan rebels is a big threat to the security of our country," Mr. Muligande said. "Certainly we shall not sit back and watch these developments."
Congo's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Henry Mova Sakanyi dismissed the allegations as "fabrications" and repeated claims that Rwandan troops were in Congo in violation of a peace deal.
Earlier this month Congo accused Rwanda of backing renegade Congolese troops who seized control of the strategic eastern city of Bukavu for a week. Rwanda denied the charges.
Rwanda sent troops into Congo in August 1998 to help Congolese rebels oust then-President Laurent Kabila. Rwanda accused Mr. Kabila of supporting Rwandan insurgents involved in the slaughter of at least 500,000 minority Tutsis and political moderates from the Hutu majority.
Rwanda withdrew troops from Congo in November 2002 after Congo agreed to disarm Rwandan insurgents based in the country and hand them over to Rwandan authorities.
Rwanda has since complained that Congo has failed to keep its side of the peace agreement.
-------- asia
Legacy of Indonesian Reform
As Vote Nears, Three Democracy Activists Deal With Disappointment
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54911-2004Jun19?language=printer
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Nusron Wahid has traveled a long way since the student uprising of 1998, only to return to the gates of parliament where he helped topple President Suharto after more than three decades of dictatorial rule.
Wahid, 31, a former campus leader, is about to take his seat as a newly elected legislator. But, disillusioned with the political forces that sprang from the reform movement he once championed, Wahid now represents Suharto's own Golkar party and is campaigning for Suharto's military chief to be the country's next president.
Wahid reflects a generation of student activists who, as reformers, became heroes to their countrymen and who now embody public disappointment in the five-year democratic experiment that followed Suharto's ouster.
President Megawati Sukarnoputri, buoyed to the top of Indonesian politics as a victim of Suharto's repression, now trails badly in the polls. Analysts said she may not even win enough votes to make it past the first round of voting on July 5.
Both of Megawati's main challengers are former generals under Suharto, underscoring the public yearning for a strong figure to revive the flagging economy and crush corruption. The front-runner, Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was commander of the Jakarta garrison and then the military's chief political policymaker. The Golkar nominee, Gen. Wiranto, was commander in chief.
Wahid, short and stocky with wide eyes and a small, puckered mouth, entered the student struggle in 1996 on Megawati's behalf. Suharto had ousted Megawati as the leader of an opposition party and installed his own lackeys, backed by the military and police.
As pro-democracy demonstrators gathered outside Megawati's former headquarters in central Jakarta, Wahid said, he led a group of students from the University of Indonesia into the streets. The security forces moved against the protesters, killing five people and leaving 23 others missing.
Two years later, on a storied day in May 1998, amid the crescendo of the pro-democracy movement, Wahid shepherded 18 buses filled with students to the parliament grounds. They pushed through the iron gates of parliament, he recalled, demanding that Suharto resign and vowing to camp out until he did.
On the fourth day, Suharto conceded.
"I was so happy that I was yelling," Wahid recalled.
In the following years, Wahid became national chairman of a Muslim student organization, demanding that Golkar party officials be brought to court for their misdeeds.
But by two years ago, Wahid said, he had concluded that the new parties, including Megawati's, were little more than fan clubs for egotistical politicians. He switched sides, deciding that Indonesia's best hope lay with Golkar's established machinery. Then Golkar leaders approached Wahid about running for parliament from his home district on Indonesia's main island of Java.
His family was taken aback. His father, a rice and corn farmer, had been arrested twice under Suharto for political activities. "Are you crazy?" he recalled a family friend asking, pulling him aside during his campaign. "Don't you remember how badly your father and I were beaten during Suharto?" The man parted his hair, baring a scar.
Wahid was elected this spring, and Golkar received the largest share of seats in parliament.
"Indonesians are tired. They're confused," he said. "Before, they put their faith in elite politicians, but they don't have faith in them anymore. Indonesians have lost hope in reform."
In April, the Golkar party tapped Wiranto -- who has been indicted by a U.N.-supported tribunal for crimes against humanity during Indonesia's occupation of East Timor -- as its presidential candidate. Wahid threw his head back as he considered the notion: "I would never have imagined that I'd be supporting General Wiranto."
'Why Waste My Time?'
While Wahid crossed the lines to the party of Suharto, another former activist, Yaswin Iben Shina, abandoned politics. Like many other Indonesians, he turned his attention to making a living.
Iben Shina grew up on the same tree-lined street in central Jakarta that Suharto and his clan called home. When the presidential motorcade would pull up, Iben Shina, the son of a small-time Muslim cleric, stood at attention.
But as a teenager, he noticed that the sons of members of Suharto's inner circle drove to school in BMWs and took expensive weekend jaunts to Singapore. By the time he entered the University of Indonesia, he had become embittered by the corruption and hypocrisy of the Suharto regime.
Iben Shina moved up the ranks of student government, ultimately becoming the president of about 3,000 literature students.
In 1997, the Indonesian economy collapsed amid the financial crisis sweeping Asia. But Indonesians refrained from criticizing Suharto for the crash, cowed by the prospect of arrest. A group of about 1,000 activists, with Iben Shina as field organizer, decided to shatter the silence in February 1998 and called a pivotal news conference to demand Suharto's resignation.
"Indonesia's new generation had to have its own voice and not just repeat the lies Suharto kept telling us," recounted Iben Shina, 31. "Someone had to take a risk. We only took Indonesia to the gates of reform. We told the people, 'Now you don't have to fear. You can do it yourself.' "
Iben Shina dropped out of politics soon after Suharto stepped down, disgusted with the country's leaders. He focused on his career as a copywriter.
He said he will not vote in the July election: "No! What for? Why waste my time? I'll stay home, sleep, talk to my girlfriend. It's much better than voting."
'Best of Bad Choices'
Ahmad Wakil Kamal resolved just last month to reenter politics, although he also despairs that little will come from the presidential contest.
When Kamal arrived at Islamic University in Jakarta from the dusty island of Madura in 1993, he quickly lived up to his reputation as a Madurese: tough, brave and bull-headed. Within a month, the solidly built, broad-shouldered law student was in the streets protesting a government proposal for a lottery. Many more demonstrations followed.
"I participated in hundreds of protests, and I don't know how many times the police and military beat me up," said Kamal, 32, crinkling the corners of his eyes as he laughed.
As the national leader of Indonesia's law students, he said, he helped organize the 1998 demonstrations campus by campus. He led at least 3,000 students to the parliament and watched with amazement as Suharto resigned.
"I was happy, but I was also surprised. I never imagined Suharto would step down so fast," Kamal said, dramatically placing his hands over his heart. "One reason the reform movement has failed is that we never had a chance to discuss what would come after Suharto."
Politicians hijacked the pro-democracy movement, he lamented, and the student movement fractured into rival camps.
"I have to admit that reform died young," he said. "Indonesians don't believe in reform anymore. All they see is prices going up and life getting more difficult. It's very hard for them to earn money."
Kamal turned his back on politics, completed his studies and in 1999 began practicing law, eventually opening his own firm, litigating divorce cases and corporate disputes.
He had planned to sit out the July election. But last month, a top aide to Yudhoyono, the former Suharto general and presidential front-runner, asked him to join the campaign. Kamal met with the candidate at a five-star hotel. Unwilling to back Megawati because of her lackluster performance and unable to support Wiranto because of human rights concerns, Kamal signed on with Yudhoyono, brushing off old political ties to organize campaign rallies.
"The decision was very hard for me," Kamal said, recalling his drubbings at the hands of the military. "He is the best of bad choices."
Special correspondent Noor Huda Ismail contributed to this report.
-------- britain
Blair Confronts Political Burdens of Iraq
June 20, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/international/middleeast/20BLAI.html?pagewanted=all&position=
LONDON, June 19 - Every British prime minister faces dark hours, but for Tony Blair it seems as if time has stood still at the nadir of his political career. The slump in his popularity brought on by the war in Iraq stubbornly will not come to an end.
Mr. Blair bounded into the top floor conference room at No. 10 Downing Street this week, radiating his trademark charm and sunny disposition to 100 reporters gathered for his monthly news conference.
"Iraq has dominated the agenda over many months and there is no point pretending otherwise," Mr. Blair told them pre-emptively. "But I should say to you that I believe every bit as passionately now that rogue states, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction are indeed the security threat of the 21st century, and we have to confront them."
It was an assertion that did not carry the weight it did 16 months ago when he took the nation to war.
Though he tried valiantly in an hour of questioning to turn the national discussion back to the domestic agenda, he found himself in the familiar defensive crouch, over Iraq, over the poor showing of his party in local and European parliamentary elections and over the political malaise that grips much of the country.
Ann Treneman, who covers Parliament for The Times of London, wrote that the air was so heavy with torpor that it could have been packaged as a tranquilizer. Only Mr. Blair seemed impervious to the mood.
"He's like an aging relative who refuses to wear a hearing aid," wrote Polly Toynbee, a columnist of The Guardian. "He will lead, he will not bend, and he will do what he thinks right, even if he's the only one who thinks it."
As Britain begins to look for an exit strategy from Iraq before national elections next year, Mr. Blair, like President Bush, is struggling against strong political turbulence that has significantly undermined the sense of high purpose with which the two leaders sent their armies off to war in 2003.
It seems a strange plight for the youngest and most successful Labor prime minister in a century, who dragged the socialists, lefties and union chiefs of the old Labor Party back to the center of British politics with landslide victories in 1997 and 2001, who adopted the pro-business outlook of Margaret Thatcher, and who then planted the anchors of British foreign policy firmly between the United States and Europe.
"In British politics, it is not unusual for a government of any party to have a midterm slump in their support," said Nick Brown, a former leader in Parliament for the Labor Party. "The only government that hasn't had one is our own in the first term, so it has come more as shock to us to have a second-term slump."
Like the American president, Mr. Blair has kept tight discipline over his party to brave the onslaught of bad news about Iraq.
But where Mr. Bush's Republican base is secure, girded by conservatives, Mr. Blair's liberal base is riven with revolt. Many would like the prime minister to step aside and allow Gordon Brown, chancellor of the Exchequer and Mr. Blair's longtime political soul mate, to step up to the top job.
Iraq thus pulls like the millstone around Mr. Blair's neck, and its weight has undermined his role as the pivotal prime minister, one whose leadership in Europe was supposed to give him more leverage over the Bush administration, and whose influence in Washington was supposed to strengthen Britain's hand in Europe.
At a critical summit meeting in Brussels this week over the future of Europe, Mr. Blair spent most of his time on the defensive over the rise of anti-Europe sentiment among British voters. And Mr. Blair's most recent trip to Washington, where he endorsed the Bush approach to Middle East peace, set off a broad protest at home from former diplomats who said the American approach was "doomed to failure."
The pivotal prime minister has become the diminished prime minister, facing a summer of more uncertain news about Iraq, including a report from Lord Butler, who has been examining the failure of British intelligence in the matter of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons or their components.
Still, Mr. Blair, ever the one to make the best of it, is looking forward to the 10th anniversary of his sudden ascent, at the age of 41, to the leader's chair of the Labor Party, which put him in opposition to Prime Minister John Major and then, with a landslide victory, into office as Mr. Major's successor.
The era of a cooler and hipper Britannia seems now lost to the rancor of a thousand political battles, but most overwhelmingly to the war in Iraq.
"I think the tragedy of Tony Blair is that when he thought he was being his most morally right, that he made his most fundamental error, which has undone his entire premiership," concluded the political historian, Anthony Seldon, in a BBC documentary on the prime minister.
Mr. Blair most pointedly would not agree. Indeed, he asserted this week, "I believe we were right to take military action and remove Saddam Hussein from power, and that the judgment will increasingly be seen to have been right as time goes on."
Even Churchill had his critics, among them Lord Winterton, who complained in the midst of World War II that Britons were following Sir Winston's disastrous war policies as blindly as the Germans were following Hitler's. Nonetheless, voters here and across Europe are in a punishing mood.
On the day of the news conference, the English countryside was in the peak of bloom as gentlemen in top hats escorted well-hatted ladies to the races at Ascot, and Wimbledon's lawns were getting a final pedicure for the tennis duels just round the corner. Yet Mr. Blair's charm was incapable of lifting the cloud.
"You will no doubt want to ask me about the results," he grinned into the television lights as a way to bring up the drubbing his party took at the polls this week.
Britons had staged one of their weakest turnouts in history for local and European parliamentary elections. Those who bothered to go to the polls cast their ballots for almost anyone but the governing Labor Party candidates, who got a scant 26 percent of the vote in local elections. Of the 78 British seats up for grabs in the European Parliament, Labor won only 19.
The only solace was that the Conservative Party did little better as protest voters abandoned Labor for the Liberal Democratic Party, while others flocked to the upstart Independence camp, which captured voter hostility to Europe and to immigrants in Britain.
"No politician can afford to be deaf to the voice of the electorate," Mr. Blair said, adding, "There are clearly big challenges ahead for the country, concerns that we have to address, big arguments to be won about the future direction of policy in this country, but these are arguments that I intend to win."
The collapse of trust in Mr. Blair's government is not the result of any failure to deliver on promises to improve the national health service, schools and police effectiveness against crime - he has delivered. Poll after poll show that it is largely about going to war in Iraq for reasons that have not stood up. It is Mr. Blair's moral conviction, leading him to "the right thing to do," that has opened a debate on whether his inner compass has put the country on the right course.
Because there are no term limits in Britain, almost any crisis this late in a political career poses the risk of party revolt and a demand for leadership change. Gordon Brown has waited so long to succeed Mr. Blair that this week he set the record for longest serving chancellor since the 19th century, surpassing David Lloyd George, who finally became prime minister during World War I.
Still, the party stalwarts reached the conclusion this spring that Mr. Blair must see Iraq through to the end, so as not to render any new Labor prime minister so vulnerable that the Tories might exploit the turmoil and force an election.
At least for now, Mr. Blair will soldier on into the Labor Party conference in the fall, which will set the agenda for next year's election, and then into what is likely to be his last campaign, unless, like Churchill, the party summons him back.
Nick Brown, no relation to Gordon Brown but a close political ally, said Mr. Blair still had a chance to rescue his legacy.
"There won't be any uprising at the Labor Party conference" this fall, he said. "I don't think anyone is in any mood for that. The party is very conscious what a mess we made of ourselves in the 1970's and 80's, and there is no desire to put ourselves through that again."
Political recovery is not beyond Mr. Blair's reach, he said. "If he has big ideas and is able to come through, then clearly his position is strengthened. I think it depends very much on him."
In an interview, even Mr. Seldon, who faults Mr. Blair for profound misjudgment for failing to fight harder to keep the international coalition together over Iraq, argues that if reconstruction succeeds in Iraq, if a peaceful and democratic government emerges, if stability returns to the Middle East and Al Qaeda style terrorism declines, "then he will go down in history as the greatest prime minister since Churchill."
-------- iraq
Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears
Missed Opportunities Turned High Ideals to Harsh Realities
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54294-2004Jun19?language=printer
First of three articles
BAGHDAD -- The American occupation of Iraq will formally end this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority.
The ambitious, 15-month undertaking stumbled because of a series of mistakes that began with an inadequate commitment of resources and was aggravated by a misunderstanding of Iraqi politics, religion and society in occupied Iraq, these participants said.
"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."
Viewed from Baghdad since April 2003, the occupation has evolved from an optimistic partnership between Americans and Iraqis into a relationship riven by frustration and resentment. U.S. reconstruction specialists commonly complain of ungrateful Iraqis. Residents of a tough Baghdad neighborhood who welcomed U.S. forces with cold cans of orange soda last spring now jeer as military vehicles roll past. A few weeks ago, young men from the area danced atop a Humvee disabled by a roadside bomb, eventually torching it.
In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who come to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.
The Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. entity that has administered Iraq, cites many successes of its tenure. Nearly 2,500 schools have been repaired, 3 million children have been immunized, $5 million in loans has been distributed to small businesses and 8 million textbooks have been printed, according to the CPA. New banknotes have replaced currency with ousted president Saddam Hussein's picture. Local councils have been formed in every city and province. An interim national government promises to hold general elections next January.
But in many key quantifiable areas, the occupation has fallen far short of its goals.
The Iraqi army is one-third the size U.S. officials promised it would be by now. Seventy percent of police officers have not received training. When violence flared across the country this spring, many soldiers and policemen refused to perform their duties because U.S. forces had failed to equip them, designate competent leaders and win trust among the ranks.
About 15,000 Iraqis have been hired to work on projects funded by $18.6 billion in U.S. aid, despite promises to use the money to employ at least 250,000 Iraqis by this month. At of the beginning of June, 80 percent of the aid package, approved by Congress last fall, remained unspent.
Electricity generation remains stuck at around 4,000 megawatts, resulting in less than nine hours of power a day to most Baghdad homes, despite pledges from U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer to increase production to 6,000 megawatts by June 1.
Iraq's emerging political system is also at odds with original U.S. goals. American officials scuttled plans to remain as the occupying power until Iraqis wrote a permanent constitution and held democratic elections. Instead, Bremer will leave the Iraqis with a temporary constitution, something he repeatedly promised not to do, and an interim government with a president who was not the Bush administration's preferred choice.
The CPA, which had 3,000 employees at its peak, will dissolve on June 30, the date designated to confer sovereignty on Iraq's interim government. U.S.-led military forces -- 138,000 U.S. troops and 23,000 from other nations -- will remain, free to conduct operations without the approval of the interim government. The management of reconstruction projects and other civilian tasks will be handled by a new U.S. embassy.
Over the course of the occupation, the relationship between the CPA and the military has become increasingly bitter. Soldiers have blamed civilians for not rebuilding the country quickly enough to pacify the country, while civilians have blamed the military for not providing enough security to enable the rebuilding. In the view of several senior officials here, a shortage of U.S. troops allowed the security situation to spiral out of control last year. Attacks on U.S.-led forces and foreign civilians now average more than 40 a day, a threefold increase since January. Assassinations of Iraqi political leaders and debilitating sabotage of the country's oil and electricity infrastructure now occur routinely.
On the eve of its dissolution, the CPA has become a symbol of American failure in the eyes of most Iraqis. In a recent poll sponsored by the U.S. government, 85 percent of respondents said they lacked confidence in the CPA. The criticism is echoed by some Americans working in the occupation. They fault CPA staffers who were fervent backers of the invasion and of the Bush administration, but who lacked reconstruction skills and Middle East experience. Only a handful spoke Arabic.
Within the marble-walled palace of the CPA's headquarters inside Baghdad's protected Green Zone, there is an aching sense of a mission unaccomplished. "Did we really do what we needed to do? What we promised to do?" a senior CPA official said. "Nobody here believes that."
This account is drawn from interviews with a score of current and former CPA officials, several in senior positions, other U.S. government officials and Iraqis who work with the CPA. Most spoke on the condition they not be identified by name because of rules barring people working for the CPA from speaking to journalists without approval from CPA public affairs officials.
In an interview last week, Bremer maintained that "Iraq has been fundamentally changed for the better" by the occupation. The CPA, he said, has put Iraq on a path toward a democratic government and an open economy after more than three decades of a brutal socialist dictatorship. Among his biggest accomplishments, he said, were the lowering of Iraq's tax rate, the liberalization of foreign-investment laws and the reduction of import duties.
Bremer acknowledged he was not able to make all the changes to Iraq's political system and economy that he had envisioned, including the privatization of state-run industries. He lamented missing his goal for electricity production and the effects of the violence. In perhaps the most candid self-criticism of his tenure, he said the CPA erred in the training of Iraqi security forces by "placing too much emphasis on numbers" instead of the quality of recruits.
"When I step back, there's a lot left to be done," he said.
A 'Naive' Blueprint
Bremer said that when he arrived in Baghdad on May 12, 2003, he was shocked by what he saw.
Policemen were not at work. The capital's two antiquated power plants were barely running. Looted government buildings were smoldering. Prominent exiles who had returned with the intention of running the government were unwilling to share power with Iraqis who had lived under Hussein.
With no significant security threat to attenuate their ambition, Bremer and his staff set out trying to reconstruct Iraq from the bottom up, focusing on long-term solutions instead of short-term fixes. They announced that Iraqis would have to achieve a series of political milestones before the United States would return sovereignty.
Instead of reconstituting the Iraqi army, they decided to build a new defense force from scratch. Bremer directed his advisers to restructure government ministries. He advocated expansive free-market economic reforms. As a sign of the break with the past, Bremer issued an order banning many members of Hussein's Baath Party from participating in government.
Several current and former CPA officials contended that key decisions by Bremer favored a grandiose vision over Iraqi realities and reflected the perceived prerogatives of a military victor. Critics within the CPA also faulted Bremer for working to advance a conservative economic agenda of tax cuts and free trade instead of focusing on the delivery of basic services.
"There was this grand idea that we were going to turn Iraq into a model nation, a model democracy, with an ideal constitution and an ideal economy and an ideal military," said a State Department official who spent several months working for the CPA. "It was just naive."
Despite the scale of their plans, and Bremer's conclusion by last July that Iraq would need "several tens of billions of dollars" for reconstruction, CPA specialists had virtually no resources to fund projects on their own to create much-needed local employment in the months after the war. Instead, they relied on two U.S. firms, Halliburton Co. and Bechtel Corp., which were awarded large contracts to patch Iraq's infrastructure.
The CPA also lacked experienced staff. A few development specialists were recruited from the State Department and nongovernmental organizations. But most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of reorganizing Baghdad's stock exchange, which has not reopened, was given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White House. "It was loyalty over experience," a senior CPA official said.
By late summer, as car bombs rocked Baghdad and ambushes were on the rise, Bremer and his advisers decided to scale back their ambitions. Privatization plans were dropped. Instead of thorough screening and training for Iraqi police officers, military commanders were ordered to hire and arm as many officers as they could find. Faced with objections from Iraqi religious leaders and impatient local politicians, the White House and the CPA reversed course and promised to hand over power before a permanent constitution was written.
But Bremer remained committed to reconstruction. He went to Congress in September and pleaded for a massive aid package, arguing that rebuilding the country, an endeavor that could employ hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, would help to achieve long-term stability.
"The plan was to have Iraqis step up to protect and govern their country and leave it to the Americans to help them with reconstruction," the senior CPA official said. "It was great in theory. But in reality, it was untenable."
Economic Miscalculations
The Daura Power Plant in southern Baghdad was supposed to be a model of the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq. Bombed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and neglected by Hussein's government, the station could operate at no more than a quarter of its rated capacity, leading to prolonged blackouts in the capital.
After CPA specialists toured the decrepit facility last summer, they vowed to bring it back to life. German and Russian firms were hired to make repairs, and it was placed atop a list of priority projects intended to achieve a 6,000-megawatt goal for national electricity production. More power, Bremer hoped, would improve the economy and daily life enough to reduce violence and stabilize Iraq.
Today, the Daura plant is indeed a model -- of how the U.S. reconstruction effort has failed to meet its goals.
The German contractors fled for their safety in April. The Russians departed in late May, after two of their colleagues were shot to death by insurgents as they approached the plant in a minivan.
Inside the facility, parts are strewn on the floor, awaiting installation. Iraqi technicians in blue coveralls lounge around, smoking cigarettes and waiting for guidance. In the turbine room, graffiti on the wall reads: "Long Live the Resistance."
The CPA intended for the Daura plant to be producing more than 500 megawatts of power by June 1. But the best it can do at the moment is 100 megawatts -- half of its output of last summer.
"We were supposed to have improved," said Bashir Khallaf, the plant director. "But we have gotten worse."
The failure to fix Daura and other plants, coupled with sabotage attacks on power lines, have renewed the debilitating blackouts that plagued Iraq last summer. The situation is not much better for other services. Attempts to fix water-treatment plants and oil refineries also are far behind schedule, forcing the country -- which has the world's second-largest oil reserves and two large rivers -- to import gasoline and bottled water. Recent attacks on fuel convoys and pipelines have depleted stockpiles, resulting in lengthy gas lines.
Several CPA officials said the Bush administration has long underestimated reconstruction costs. In its war planning, the administration devoted $900 million to reconstruction despite reporting by the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations that depicted a far greater need. In the first months of the occupation, an additional $1.1 billion was committed by the White House. It was not until September that the administration asked Congress for billions more.
Although the $18.6 billion reconstruction aid package was approved by Congress in November, the Pentagon office charged with spending it has moved slowly. About $3.7 billion of this package had been spent by June 1, according to the CPA. Many projects that have received funding have slowed or stopped entirely because Western firms have withdrawn employees from Iraq in response to attacks on civilian contractors.
CPA officials contend the money should have been earmarked and spent far sooner. Had that happened, they argue, the CPA could have retained much of the goodwill that existed among Iraqis after the U.S. invasion and possibly weakened the insurgency.
"The failure to get the reconstruction effort launched early will be regarded as the most important critical failure," said one of Bremer's senior advisers. "If we could have fixed things faster, the situation would be very different today."
By starting late, the adviser said, the CPA got "caught in a security trap." More than $2 billion of the aid package will be spent hiring private guards for contractors, buying them armored vehicles and building secure housing compounds, CPA officials estimate. "If we had spent this money sooner, before things got bad, we could have spent more of it on actually helping the Iraqi people," the adviser said.
Because many of the 2,300 projects to be funded by the $18.6 billion are large construction endeavors that will involve foreign laborers instead of Iraqis, they will result in far less of a local economic boost than the CPA had promised, another senior official involved in the reconstruction said. The projects were chosen largely without input from Iraqis.
"This was supposed to be our big effort to help them -- 18 billion of our tax dollars to fix their country," the senior reconstruction official said. "But the sad reality is that this program won't have a lot of impact in it for the Iraqis. The primary beneficiaries will be American companies."
Security Miscalculations
When anti-occupation militiamen converged on the Rafidain police station on April 4, officers inside the blue-walled building sprang into action.
They grabbed their possessions and ran home.
The militiamen were members of the Mahdi Army, an untrained but well-armed force inspired by Moqtada Sadr, a firebrand Shiite Muslim cleric deemed an outlaw by the U.S. military. Incensed that U.S. troops had shut down his newspaper and arrested one of his top deputies the day before, Sadr's followers seized government buildings in Shiite holy cities south of Baghdad and in Sadr City, a Shiite slum in the capital.
The militiamen met surprisingly little resistance. Rafidain, in central Sadr City, was no exception.
"To shoot those people would have been wrong," said Sgt. Falah Hassan, a lanky veteran whose uniform consists of rolled-up jeans and a rumpled blue shirt. "If a man comes with principles and I believe in those principles, I will not shoot him."
The collapse of police and civil defense units in the face of the Sadr offensive stunned CPA officials, who had expected them to put up a fight. A few days later, the CPA was surprised again when a battalion of Iraq's new army mutinied rather than obey orders to help U.S. Marines fight Sunni Muslim insurgents in the streets of Fallujah.
Bremer and senior CPA officials concluded that the creation of new Iraqi security forces was in trouble. The decision to hire back as many former policemen as possible, even without training, had been meant to reassure Iraqis by putting more officers on the street. But it also put thousands of ill-prepared men, some with ties to the insurgency, into uniform -- a problem that the CPA long feared but did not fully grasp until the Sadr rebellion.
"Quantity overrode quality," said Douglas Brand, a British police commander who has served as a senior CPA adviser to the Iraqi police force. "We scooped up a whole lot of people who didn't meet our criteria and put them into the police force."
Of nearly 90,000 police on duty now, more than 62,000 still have not received any training.
But Iraqi political leaders and several CPA officials contend that the problems with security were more fundamental than training police. The U.S. military came to Iraq with too few soldiers to maintain order and guard the country's borders against foreign terrorists, they said. "I don't know anyone who thinks there's enough troops here," the senior adviser to Bremer said.
These officials said the troop shortage was compounded by the decision to disband the Iraqi army. Not only did it deprive the U.S. military of tens of thousands of armed and uniformed men to help restore order, but scores of unemployed soldiers joined the ranks of insurgents fighting the occupation forces.
"We should have brought them back and vetted them over time instead of saying, 'We don't want you,' " a senior U.S. military officer in Baghdad said.
Bremer said that the army fell apart after Hussein's defeat and that it was not practical to order units back into service. And as with the police, there were questions about the loyalty and competence of the soldiers.
Another major mistake, Iraqi and U.S. officials said, was the failure to provide enough equipment to the police and the Civil Defense Corps, a 40,000-member paramilitary force. At the Rafidain station, only half the 140 officers have handguns. There are only 10 AK-47 assault rifles in the armory, three pickup trucks in the parking lot and two radios in the control room. Body armor is nonexistent, save for a few U.S. military vests worn by guards at the front door.
"How can we defend ourselves if we don't have guns and radios and cars?" said Maj. Raed Kadhim, the senior officer at the station. "The Americans promised us all of these things. Where are they?"
The sympathy for Sadr today at the Rafidain station -- on Fridays, officers pin his picture to their uniforms before going to the mosque -- suggests that the odds of getting the police to resist the cleric's militia have not improved. The scope of the confrontation could have been smaller, according to several CPA officials, had U.S. forces moved against Sadr in August, when an Iraqi court issued an arrest warrant for him. Instead, they allowed him months to build support for his anti-occupation views.
By April, with the CPA's internal polling showing 80 percent of Iraqis holding positive views of Sadr, the CPA should have sought a political solution, the officials contend. At the very least, they argue, CPA strategists and military commanders should have realized that many Iraqi security officers would side with the cleric.
"The Americans misunderstood us," Kadhim said. "We will fight for Iraq. We will not fight for them."
Political Miscalculations
From the start of the occupation, the American effort to transform Iraq's political system was challenged by another Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a cleric far more established than Sadr. The CPA's inability to deal with him forced a series of compromises that will affect Iraq long after Bremer departs.
Sistani is a man in his seventies with a snowy beard who has lived in isolation for the past six years in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. With millions of followers, he is seen as the most influential leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, a man whom Shiite politicians do not want to cross.
Sistani's position was straightforward: Iraqis, not Americans, should determine the country's political future. In June 2003, he issued a religious edict calling for Iraq's constitution to be written by elected representatives -- a demand that was in direct conflict with the Bush administration's political transition plan.
Bremer and his staff initially underestimated the influence of his edict, assuming that Shiite political leaders would be able to persuade Sistani to change his position. It was not until November that Bremer concluded there was no way to sway Sistani -- whom Bremer has never met -- and that the Bush administration's plan to have a group of appointed Iraqis write a constitution would have to be scrapped.
After hurried meetings at the White House, Bremer unveiled a new transition plan on Nov. 15 that abandoned the goal of a permanent constitution and general elections before a handover of sovereignty. Instead, the Iraqi Governing Council, the 25-member body picked by Bremer, was assigned to produce a temporary constitution. An interim government would be selected through caucuses.
Nobody bothered to run the details by Sistani first. He objected a few days later, forcing another series of changes and leading President Bush to ask U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to select the interim government. In the end, Bremer did not get the president he wanted: His favored candidate, Adnan Pachachi, withdrew after Shiite politicians threatened not to work with him, prompting Brahimi to choose Ghazi Yawar, a tribal sheik with no experience in government before serving on the Governing Council.
Sistani also objected to the temporary constitution. Ethnic Kurds, who had been living in an autonomous region since 1991, had insisted on a clause that would protect their rights with veto power over the language in a permanent constitution. But because Shiites are about 60 percent of Iraq's population and Kurds make up only 20 percent, Sistani was concerned that a minority not be allowed to overrule the wishes of the majority.
Bremer did not want to budge. If the provision were expunged, the Kurds would bolt. He persuaded Shiite members of the Governing Council to sign the interim constitution, leaving Sistani's basic objections unaddressed.
Then, earlier this month, the Bush administration proposed having the U.N. Security Council include an endorsement of the interim constitution in a resolution on Iraq's future. Sistani quickly issued a statement: The interim constitution, he said, "was written by a nonelected council under occupation" and is "rejected by the majority of the Iraqi people."
But when the administration expunged the reference to the interim constitution, Kurdish leaders were incensed. Iraq's top two Kurdish officials sent a letter to Bush threatening to pull out of the interim government formed earlier this month.
The dispute means Shiites and Kurds will have to hash out their differences on their own. Among the options Shiite leaders favor is dispensing with the interim constitution and writing a new version, a potentially embarrassing outcome for the administration, which has held up the document as one of the CPA's most significant achievements.
Iraqi leaders and foreign diplomats fault the CPA for not grasping Sistani's clout soon enough. Senior CPA officials said Bremer did recognize Sistani's power, but the problem was communicating with the cleric: Because Sistani refused to meet anyone from the CPA, messages were conveyed by Shiite politicians who skewed statements to suit their interests.
Although some in the CPA say they believe it is better to let Iraqis resolve the dispute over the interim constitution after June 30, others argue that the occupation authority should have ensured it had a document supported by Sistani.
"We were supposed to leave them with a permanent constitution," a senior CPA official said. "Then we decided to leave them with a temporary constitution. Now we're leaving them with a temporary constitution that the majority dislikes."
Out of Touch
Life inside the high-security Green Zone -- what some CPA staffers jokingly call the Emerald City -- bears little resemblance to that in the rest of Baghdad. The power is always on. Shiny shuttle buses zip passengers around. Outdoor cafes stay open late into the night.
There is little effort to comply with Islamic traditions. Beer flows freely at restaurants. Women walk around in shorts. Bacon cheeseburgers are on the CPA's lunch menu.
"It's like a different planet," said an Iraqi American who has a senior position in the CPA and lives in the Green Zone but regularly ventures out to see relatives. "It's cut off from the real Iraq."
Because the earth-toned GMC Suburbans used by CPA personnel and foreign contractors have become a favored target of insurgents, traveling outside the Green Zone -- into the Red Zone that defines the rest of Iraq -- requires armored vehicles and armed escorts, which are limited to senior officials. Lower-ranking employees must either remain within the compound or sneak out without a security detail.
Although the CPA has tried to bring Iraqis into the CPA headquarters for meetings and other events -- there has even been an "Iraqi Culture Night" in the Green Zone -- the inability to mingle with Iraqis has isolated the Americans. "We don't know the outside," the senior adviser to Bremer said. "How many of us have gone out to buy a bottle of milk or a pair of socks?"
Instead of building contacts at social events in the city, CIA operatives in Baghdad drink in their own rattan-furnished bar in the Green Zone. Instead of prowling local markets, CPA employees go to the Green Zone Shopping Bazaar, where the most popular items are Saddam Hussein memorabilia.
Limited contact with Iraqis outside the Green Zone has made CPA officials reliant on the views of those chosen by Bremer to serve on the Governing Council. When Brahimi, the U.N. envoy, asked the CPA for details about several Iraqis he was considering for positions in the interim government, he told associates he was "shocked to find how little information they really had," according to an official who was present.
The CPA official who got around the most was Bremer, who travels with an entourage of private guards, most of them former Navy SEALs, equipped with helicopters and a fleet of armored vehicles.
Bremer's willingness to travel and to work 18-hour days has won him respect within the CPA. The chief criticism of his tenure within the former Hussein palace that serves as CPA headquarters was that he failed to recruit enough seasoned diplomats with experience in the Middle East.
In the final days of the CPA, many officials have succumbed to bitterness. Some blame military commanders for not asking for more troops to stabilize the country. "They had enough soldiers to ensure that Saddam's men didn't come back to power, but there were nowhere near enough to make the country safe enough for us to do our work," a CPA reconstruction specialist said.
Military officials say CPA personnel spend too much time in the 258-room headquarters. "Nobody has any idea what they do back in that palace," a senior Marine commander in Fallujah said recently. "We certainly don't see any results."
Several veterans of other reconstruction operations characterized civilian-military relations in Iraq as the worst they have encountered. "It has been poisonous," the reconstruction specialist said.
The other major conflict within the occupation bureaucracy has set the legions of young staff members chosen for their loyalty to the Bush administration against older, more liberal diplomats from the State Department and the British Foreign Office. Several of the diplomats said they regarded the young staffers as inexperienced and eager to pad their résumés during three-month tours.
These diplomats singled out the Office of Strategic Communications as unsuccessful in its efforts to disseminate information to Iraqis. Instead of creating an all-news television station that would compete with other Arab broadcasters that the CPA deemed anti-occupation, the communications office, with several employees straight from Republican staff jobs on Capitol Hill, set up a channel that aired children's programs and Egyptian cooking shows.
"It didn't put any effort into communicating with the Iraqi people," a British CPA official said. "Stratcom viewed its job as helping Bush to win his next election."
Even within the communications office, there is a sense that the occupation has not gone as well as everyone hoped. "It's a time of introspection," one press officer said. Elsewhere in the palace, the sense of regret is far more pronounced. The senior adviser to Bremer said he felt "a sense of opportunity that slipped away."
"The ambition for us was a grand one. We had great things in mind for them. We believed we could do it," he said. "But we didn't keep our promises."
NEXT: Learning the hard way
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U.S. Strike In Fallujah Kills 20
Officers Say Target Was Safe House
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54342-2004Jun19.html
BAGHDAD, June 19 -- In a bloody surprise attack, the U.S. military launched precision weapons into a poor residential neighborhood of Fallujah on Saturday to destroy what officers described as a safe house used by fighters loyal to Abu Musab Zarqawi and perhaps, at times, by the fugitive terrorist leader himself.
Residents said about 20 people were killed, including women and children, despite a cease-fire with U.S. occupation forces that has brought relative peace for the last six weeks to the rebellious city 35 miles west of Baghdad. Images from the site of the blast showed two collapsed houses, with people in white robes picking through the rubble looking for buried victims and lost property.
"This leads to nothing but more confrontation with the enemy," Abdullah Janabi, head of Fallujah's Mujaheddin Council, declared in an interview with the al-Jazeera satellite television network.
A statement issued by Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the spokesman for U.S. military forces in Iraq, said it was not known whether the elusive Zarqawi was inside the house at the time of the 9:30 a.m. attack but that "multiple confirmations of actionable intelligence" indicated that several of his operatives were present. Kimmitt said secondary explosions lasting 20 minutes pointed to the presence of a large store of munitions and explosives in the targeted building.
Zarqawi, a Jordanian national whom U.S. officials have linked with the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, has been cited by U.S. occupation authorities as one of the leaders of a relentless campaign of bombings and assassinations being waged against the occupation and Iraqis who cooperate with the U.S.-sponsored Iraqi interim government.
"Wherever and whenever we find elements of the Zarqawi network, we will attack them," Kimmitt's statement said.
A senior U.S. military official said he did not dispute the casualty toll given by Fallujah residents, who also said two dozen people were injured in the attack. The Reuters news agency reported that 22 new graves were dug at Fallujah Martyrs Cemetery.
But the official said most of those killed and wounded were inside the two buildings destroyed by the U.S. attack, suggesting that they were not bystanders, and Kimmitt's statement said U.S. planners had decided the high-quality targets were worth the risk of civilian bloodshed.
"This was not an attack on the people of Fallujah, but against a known safe house," the statement said. "It is standard operating procedure to conduct a detailed collateral damage estimate prior to approval of this type of mission. The collateral damage estimate was within permissible limits, and this operation was within standing rules of engagement."
Fallujah has been under the control of loosely organized Islamic militiamen since early May. Their authority has been largely unopposed despite the presence of the 1,700-member Fallujah Brigade, a peacekeeping force commanded by former Iraqi army officers in cooperation with Marine forces assigned to the area.
U.S. forces and Fallujah militiamen fought tough, bloody engagements through most of April, after four U.S. contractors were killed and their bodies burned and mutilated on March 31. Several hundred Iraqis were killed in the clashes, which included U.S. airstrikes that also inflicted civilian casualties. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch called for an investigation of a confrontation in which the rights group said U.S. troops fired into a crowd of protesters on April 28 and 30, 2003.
The city of 300,000, lying in the area known as the Sunni Triangle because of its predominantly Sunni Muslim population, was long known as a stronghold of former president Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and a source of tribal support for his rule.
Against that background, Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Mohammed Shehwani, who heads Iraq's new National Intelligence Service, pressed visiting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz in a meeting Friday not to renew U.S. attacks on Fallujah. As with Shiite Muslim militiamen in Najaf, 90 miles south of Baghdad, many Iraqi political figures cooperating with the U.S. occupation have urged political solutions rather than armed confrontation with anti-occupation fighters.
But U.S. military officers have been disappointed with the Fallujah Brigade's lack of control. In particular, they have complained that those responsible for killing and mutilating the U.S. contractors have not been turned over and that foreign fighters have not been arrested and handed to occupation authorities.
U.S. officials have said they believe that foreign terrorists have found refuge in Fallujah, including Zarqawi on occasion, and are helping organize the attacks against U.S. soldiers, particularly car bombs steered to their targets by suicide drivers.
"He's had a number of locations," a senior U.S. military official said of Zarqawi after the strike on Saturday. "This may have been one of the locations where he's at. . . . We just don't have any evidence."
In addition to the U.S. attack in Fallujah, U.S. troops battled insurgents near Baqubah, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, for the fourth day, the military official reported. One U.S. soldier and several Iraqis have been reported killed in those clashes.
Meanwhile, in what appeared to be a new development in the nearly 15-month-old U.S. occupation, about 500 women staged a demonstration against violence in Sadr City, a Shiite Muslim neighborhood in eastern Baghdad that has been the scene of repeated clashes between militiamen and U.S. occupation troops.
Draped in mourning veils, the women marched to the offices of Moqtada Sadr, the young cleric who has been leading the uprising against U.S. troops, and then back again through the streets of the slum neighborhood.
"The people who pay for the violence are the women," said Salama Khufaji, a former Governing Council member whose brother was assassinated by insurgents in late May. "We want a stop to the violence, the U.S. to leave the neighborhood and a reactivation of reconstruction projects like water and sewage."
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While Building Police, Iraqis Will Reduce Force
Planned Buyout Program to Cut 30,000 Officers
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54818-2004Jun19.html
The Iraqi Ministry of Interior has brought back so many of Saddam Hussein's police officers and recruited so many new ones that a $60 million buyout program is being created to cut their ranks by 25 percent, senior U.S. government officials said.
With bombings and terrorist actions occurring almost daily in Baghdad and other parts of the country, U.S. and Iraqi officials are wrestling with how to shape a new, coordinated security force out of the remnants of Hussein's army and his often corrupt police and intelligence services. But the plans are to cut by 30,000 the 120,000 officers on the government payroll.
Over the past year, a series of police and army organizations has been created by U.S. agencies including the occupation authority, which will expire at the end of this month; the coalition military forces; the State Department; and the CIA.
The security forces include provincial police departments, dignitary protection forces, a police civil intervention force, emergency response unit and highway patrol, according to a senior U.S. official involved in the process.
In addition, there are border police, customs police, riverine police, facility protection security forces and army units recruited and trained for urban counterinsurgency operations. There are also special operations forces and a coastal defense force with a base and five patrol boats. An air force is to be re-established shortly, with small reconnaissance and fixed-wing aircraft as well as helicopters.
Only 30,000 of the police officers on the government payroll have received training, and an additional 2,500 are in courses underway in Iraq, Jordan and elsewhere. By October, it is expected that police training facilities will be able to turn out about 5,000 officers every 10 weeks, the senior official said.
"The roller coaster that is Iraq is ascending, although there clearly are bumps on the tracks on a daily basis," Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus said. He has taken over the job in Baghdad of supervising the organization, training, equipping, deploying and operational mentoring of the new Iraqi army, police and other elements, in conjunction with the new interim Iraqi ministers of interior and defense.
Petraeus, in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday via videoconference from Iraq, disclosed that although the Iraq Police Service was "authorized at about 90,000, they've got 120,000 on the payroll."
"Obviously, we need to trim this," Petraeus told the legislators, "and we're going to in fact do that."
He said Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi supports the idea of using $60 million in Iraqi oil money to fund the severance payments, which will not be taken from the $3 billion in U.S.-appropriated funds allocated for Iraq security expenditures.
Petraeus, whose organization is called the Office of Security Transition, oversees about 2,000 military and civilian trainers, advisers, assistance teams and staff.
The over-recruiting of police -- and the resulting severance program -- highlights the challenges in Iraq, where frequent terrorism complicates practical economic issues.
Under the new U.S.-supported program, police salaries have been set substantially higher than they were under Hussein's government. At that time, police were notoriously corrupt, in part because of low salaries, which they supplemented by taking bribes from businessmen and blackmailing other people.
Some of those practices have continued. A February report by the International Committee of the Red Cross said that some Iraqi police were arresting Baghdad residents and threatening to turn them over to coalition forces as terrorists if they or their families did not pay them. One senior U.S. official familiar with the police program said last week that corruption, particularly among former Hussein police officers, is still a problem.
As large numbers of former police officers returned to duty, the U.S. and new Iraqi officials embarked on a major program to recruit more officers. With the new salaries, and uncertainty over retirement pay and benefits, "far fewer police have retired than would have been normal," the official said.
The severance-pay program was developed because "no one wants to force police into the ranks of the unemployed without reasonable compensation," the official said. When L. Paul Bremer took over the occupation authority last year and dissolved the army, the suddenly retired officers led violent protests, and many joined the insurgents.
Just which police will be bought out remains to be seen. The new interior ministry is working on the program in conjunction with Petraeus's team. Among the criteria will be age, fitness, and civilian and military education, the official said.
In discussing the police program with House members Thursday, Petraeus noted that "the young recruits are indeed impressive," and that that "underscores . . . the importance of using some of the [Iraqi oil] money that Prime Minister Allawi approved to in fact thank some of the very, very senior police and to offer early retirement schemes for some of them."
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Kurds Advancing to Reclaim Land in Northern Iraq
June 20, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/international/middleeast/20KURD.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
MAKHMUR, Iraq, June 17 - Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.
The Kurds are returning to lands from which they were expelled by the armies of Saddam Hussein and his predecessors in the Baath Party, who ordered thousands of Kurdish villages destroyed and sent waves of Iraqi Arabs north to fill the area with supporters.
The new movement, which began with the fall of Mr. Hussein, appears to have quickened this spring amid confusion about American policy, along with political pressure by Kurdish leaders to resettle the areas formerly held by Arabs. It is happening at a moment when Kurds are threatening to withdraw from the national government if they are not confident of having sufficient autonomy.
In Baghdad, American officials say they are struggling to keep the displaced Kurds on the north side of the Green Line, the boundary of the Kurdish autonomous region. The Americans agree that the Kurds deserve to return to their ancestral lands, but they want an orderly migration to avoid ethnic strife and political instability.
But thousands of Kurds appear to be ignoring the American orders. New Kurdish families show up every day at the camps that mark the landscape here, settling into tents and tumble-down homes as they wait to reclaim their former lands.
The Kurdish migration appears to be causing widespread misery, with Arabs complaining of expulsions and even murders at the hands of Kurdish returnees. Many of the Kurdish refugees themselves are gathered in crowded camps.
American officials say as many as 100,000 Arabs have fled their homes in north-central Iraq and are now scattered in squalid camps across the center of the country. With the anti-American insurgency raging across much of the same area, the Arab refugees appear to be receiving neither food nor shelter from the Iraqi government, relief organizations or American forces.
"The Kurds, they laughed at us, they threw tomatoes at us," said Karim Qadam, a 45-year-old father of three, now living amid the rubble of a blown-up building in Baquba, northeast of Baghdad. "They told us to get out of our homes. They told us they would kill us. They told us, `You don't own anything here anymore.' "
Ten years ago, Mr. Qadam said, Iraqi officials forced him to turn over his home in the southern city of Diwaniya and move north to the formerly Kurdish village of Khanaqaan, where he received a free parcel of farmland. Now, like the thousands of Arabs encamped in the parched plains northeast of Baghdad, Mr. Qadam, his wife and three children have no home to return to.
The push by the Kurds into the formerly Arab-held lands, while driven by the returnees themselves, appears to be backed by the Kurdish government, which has long advocated a resettlement of the disputed area. Despite an explicit prohibition in the Iraqi interim constitution, Kurdish officials are setting up offices and exercising governmental authority in the newly settled areas.
The shift in population is raising fears in Iraq that the Kurds are trying to expand their control over Iraqi territory at the same time they are suggesting that they may pull out of the Iraqi government.
American officials say they are trying to fend off pressure from Kurds to move their people back into the area. "There is a lot of pressure in the Kurdish political context to bring the people who were forced out back into their hometowns," said a senior American official in Baghdad, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "What we have tried to do so far, through moral suasion, is to get the Kurds to recognize that if they put too much pressure on Kirkuk and other places south of the Green Line, they could spark regional and national instability."
But local occupation officials appear in some areas to have accepted the flow of Kurds back to their homes. According to minutes of a recent meeting of occupation officials and relief workers in the northern city of Erbil, an American official said the Americans would no longer oppose Kurds' crossing the Green Line, as long as the areas they were moving into were uncontested.
And Kurdish and American officials say the occupation authority has been financing projects here in Makhmur, a formerly Arab area recently resettled by Kurds.
The biggest potential flash point is Kirkuk, a city contested by Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen. Kurdish leaders want to make the city, with its vast oil deposits, the Kurdish regional capital and resettle it with Kurds who were driven out in the 1980's.
To make the point, some 10,000 Kurds have gathered in a sprawling camp outside Kirkuk, where they are pressing the American authorities to let them enter the city. American military officers who control Kirkuk say they are blocking attempts to expel more Arabs from the town, for fear of igniting ethnic unrest.
"The Kurds are pushing, pushing," said Pascal Ishu Warda, the minister for displaced persons and migration. "We have to set up a system to deal with these people who have been thrown out of their homes."
To treat the burgeoning crisis, American officials last month approved spending $180 million to compensate Arab families thrown out of their homes; earlier they set up a similar program, with similar financing, for the Kurds.
The Americans have distributed handbills in Arab and Kurdish camps calling on Iraqis to file claims and produce ownership documents.
But some Iraqi and American officials say those claims could take months or even years to sort out, and will provide little immediate help to the families, Arab and Kurdish, languishing in the camps.
Some people said American officials waited too long - more than a year - to set up a mechanism to resettle displaced Iraqis. By then, they said, the Kurds, tired of waiting, took matters into their own hands.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador, who has advised the Kurdish leadership, said he recommended a claim system for Kurds and Arabs to Pentagon officials in late 2002. Nothing was put in place on the ground until last month, he said, long after the Kurds began to move south of the Green Line.
"The C.P.A. adopted a sensible idea, but it required rapid implementation," Mr. Galbraith said. "They dropped the ball, and facts were created on the ground. Of course people are going to start moving. If the political parties are encouraging this, that, too, is understandable."
Kurdish leaders say they are merely taking back land that was stolen from them over four decades. Publicly, the Kurdish leaders say that they are committed to working within the Iraqi state as long as their federal rights are assured, and that no Arabs have been forced from their homes.
But in the villages and camps where the Kurds have returned, Kurdish leaders are more boastful. They say they pushed the Arab settlers out as part of a plan to expand Kurdish control over the territory.
"We made sure there wasn't a single Arab left here who came as part of the Arabization program," said Abdul Rehman Belaf, the mayor of Makhmur, a large area in northern Iraq that was emptied of Arabs and is now being resettled by Kurds.
Mr. Belaf is a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party, one of the two main Kurdish political parties active on the other side of the Green Line; virtually all of Makhmur's officials belong to the party, too.
"We haven't stopped yet," he said. "We have more land to take back."
Before the war began in 2003, Arab settlers worked the fields in the areas surrounding Makhmur. Most of the settlers were brought north by successive waves of Mr. Hussein's campaign to populate the north with Arabs, killing or expelling tens of thousands of Kurds.
Exactly what happened when Mr. Hussein's army collapsed is disputed. Kurdish officials say the Arab settlers fled with the army. No expulsions were necessary, they said.
But some Arab families, like those who settled around Makhmur long ago, have largely been left alone.
"Saddam's people asked me to take Kurdish lands in 1987, and I said no," said Salim Sadoon al-Sabawi, a 60-year-old Arab farmer in the village where his family has lived for generations. "When the Kurds returned, they left me alone. There was no violence. We are like brothers."
Asked what the Kurds did to the Arabs who migrated into the area recently, Mr. Sabawi paused, and his son, Arkan, broke in. "They threatened people with death," Arkan said. "They told them to get out."
"Let's be honest," Mr. Sabawi told his son. "The Arabs who left all came here as part of the Arabization program. They kicked out the Kurds. It wasn't their land to begin with."
Mr. Belaf, the Kurdish mayor, said that before the war, the area around Makhmur was 80 percent Arab. A year later, he said, it is 80 percent Kurdish, as it used to be.
As hard as life is for Arabs in refugee camps, it seems to be hardly better for the Kurds displacing them.
Adnan Karim, 34, said his home was burned by the Iraqi Army in 1987. He began a life on the run after that, fighting Mr. Hussein as a pesh merga, marrying, having children and moving from one place to another. Last year he returned to an old military camp near Kirkuk, Qara Hanjir, hoping the new government would set aside some land for returnees like him. Nearly a year later, he is still waiting in a camp.
Mr. Karim said he was trying to provide for his wife and three children with a $40-a-month pesh merga pension and money from odd jobs. But much of his money is spent buying water from a truck.
Watching his children play in the dirt around him, Mr. Karim, a bedraggled man, gave in to despair.
"I have spent my whole life this way," he said, "just as you see me."
--------
Iraqi Leader Announces Plans to Reorganize Security Forces
June 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A roadside bomb exploded Sunday along a highway leading to Baghdad's airport, killing two Iraqi soldiers and wounding 11 others -- four critically -- as Iraq's interim prime minister reorganized the country's security forces to combat terrorism.
U.S. forces clashed with insurgents north of Baghdad in a battle that killed 10 Iraqis and wounded 12 others, police and hospital officials said Sunday.
Iraqi officials said the clashes occurred Saturday in Samarra, about 60 miles north of the capital in the so-called Sunni Triangle, a hotbed of anti-coalition resistance. There was no comment from the U.S. military.
Elsewhere, the U.S. military said an American Marine was killed in action Saturday in Anbar province, which includes Ramadi and Fallujah. A mortar round also injured six police officers and four Iraqis in a separate attack Sunday near the Iraqi central bank in the heart of Baghdad.
In southern Iraq, oil flowed to a port Sunday after crews completed key repairs on a pipeline sabotaged last week by insurgents, an official of the state-run Southern Oil Company said. It was unclear whether exports had yet resumed.
U.S. soldiers accompanying the Iraqis on the dicey airport road said the attackers waited for the Americans to pass and then set off the blast as Iraqi forces drove by.
American troops took the Iraqi wounded to a U.S. aid station for treatment. As they waited for news on the wounded, Iraqi soldiers wept and U.S. comrades hugged them.
``The hardcore terrorists don't care who they kill,'' said Lt. Col. Tim Ryan, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment. ``These guys are bigger targets than we are now.''
Insurgents have hammered Iraqi police and civil defense troops to undermine confidence in the interim government before the June 30 handover of power.
Faced with the mounting violence, interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi appealed Sunday for international help for his beleaguered forces and said that the government was considering ``emergency law'' in certain, unspecified regions to bring the situation under control.
Such measures could apply to the restive Sunni stronghold of Fallujah, where an American airstrike on Saturday hit a house that U.S. officials said was a suspected safehouse of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network. At least 16 people were killed in the strike.
A senior officer of the U.S.-backed Fallujah Brigade disputed that claim, saying Sunday that rescue operations uncovered no trace of foreigners in the house -- but did find the belongings of women and children.
However, the Iraqis need better equipment and support to fight back, Allawi said as he appealed for assistance until Iraqi forces ``are fully capable.''
``We will continue to need support from our friends,'' Allawi told reporters in Baghdad.
As part of the restructuring, Allawi announced creation of a ministerial-level committee for national security including among others the ministers of defense, interior, foreign, justice, and finance. He also announced establishment of a Center for Joint Operations ``to control all activities related to national security.''
Afterward, Interior Minister Falah Hassan al-Naqib told The Associated Press that the government was also considering an amnesty for insurgents who were not personally involved in killings.
Allawi's comments at a news conference came amid a surge of bloody attacks that have increased as the June 30 handover date draws near.
Many of the attacks have targeted police and other security services, who have been slowly taking over security tasks in the weeks before the transfer of sovereignty. One of the most vicious attacks occurred Thursday, when a car bomb exploded outside a military recruitment station, killing 35 and wounding 145.
Most of the victims were poor Iraqis desperate to take dangerous jobs in the Iraqi security forces because of poor employment opportunities in a country with up to 45 percent unemployment. More than 300 people have been killed in attacks on police stations and recruitment centers since September.
Al-Zarqawi is believed to be behind some of the most devastating attacks. The U.S. military launched Saturday's airstrike in Fallujah after intelligence suggested it was being used as an al-Zarqawi safehouse, U.S. officials said.
However, a senior leader in the U.S.-allied Fallujah Brigade, Col. Mohammed Awad, said his troops ``affirmed to us that the inhabitants of the houses were ordinary families including women, children and elders.''
``Some of our soldiers who participated in the rescue operation after the attack said they saw the remains of bodies apparently belonging to women and children,'' Awad said. ``Through our inspection in the ruins, we could see clothes and stuff of women and children. There was no sign that foreigners have lived in the house.''
The difference in U.S. and Iraqi assessments of the attack could strain relations between the Americans and the Iraqi security force established last month to take responsibility for law and order in Fallujah after the end of the three-week Marine siege.
Allawi said ``we welcome'' such strikes against terrorists ``anywhere in Iraq'' but added that he was told of the attack only a short time beforehand. ``This pattern will change'' after the handover of sovereignty June 30, he said.
U.S. Marines besieged Fallujah in April after four American security contractors were killed in an ambush in the city 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 the Fallujah Brigade.
--------
Strike Aimed at Terrorists Kills 17 in Falluja
June 20, 2004
By EDWARD WONG and SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/international/middleeast/20IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 19 - The American military on Saturday carried out a rare airstrike in a poor residential neighborhood in the volatile city of Falluja, firing missiles that killed at least 17 people, said residents and a doctor. An American general said the target of the assault was a terrorist safe house.
A warplane fired two missiles that reduced to rubble four homes in the Jubail district, residents said. People spent the morning and afternoon pulling bodies and body parts from the debris. They said women and children were among the dead.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces, said the strike was aimed at a safe house for fighters linked to the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom American officials accuse of being responsible for many of the spectacular suicide car bombs that have devastated Iraq.
"We know there were members of the Zarqawi network inside the house," the general said. He added that the attack was based on "actionable intelligence." But there was no evidence that Mr. Zarqawi was in the house or anywhere else in Falluja, he said.
Multiple explosions in the area showed that the targeted house was being used to store weapons and ammunition, General Kimmitt said.
The strike was the first assault by the Americans on Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad, since the Marines withdrew from the city in late April. Falluja has become one of the strongest symbols of resistance to the occupation.
After a three-week assault that month, the Marines turned over control of the city to the Falluja Brigade, a 2,000-member militia composed partly of insurgents and former members of the ruling Baath Party. But the city remains firmly under the sway of hard-line Sunni clerics and guerrilla fighters, and the Americans have expressed dissatisfaction with the performance of the brigade.
The assault on Saturday, apparently pre-empting the brigade, was the strongest indication so far that the American military will continue to carry out operations on its own after June 30, when an interim Iraqi government is scheduled to assume limited sovereignty.
A senior American military official said Saturday afternoon that Iraqis were still in no position to guarantee security in the country from internal or external threats. "It will be some period of time until Iraqis can do this independently and without the partnership of multinational forces," the official said. "We will not stay in this country one day longer than necessary, nor will we leave one day sooner than necessary."
How Iraqi soldiers will work with occupying troops remains a thorny issue. After June 30, the official said, Iraqis will no longer take orders from American commanders. It is unclear how one command structure will work with the other.
The airstrike also allowed the military to stage an attack in Falluja without sending troops into the city, avoiding the kind of pitched urban battles that resulted in the April bloodbath. Ten marines and hundreds of Iraqis were killed. This strike could be the first of a series by the Americans in a new style of offensive there.
Such airstrikes have seldom been used by the Americans since the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Researchers at Human Rights Watch concluded in a recent report that American airstrikes during this war have rarely succeeded in killing their intended targets and have mostly harmed civilians.
In the late afternoon, gunmen with straps of bullets crisscrossing their chests stood at checkpoints in Falluja. Residents of the city predicted angry reprisals. "They want to provoke the people of Falluja," said Ahmed Sabah, 36. "This is a very bad violation. It's not only Falluja people who will stand up to them, it's all of Iraq."
Fighting flared up elsewhere in the so-called Sunni Triangle, as battles continued between American soldiers and insurgents around Baquba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. It was the fourth consecutive day of heavy fighting. An American soldier died Saturday of wounds sustained the previous day.
The clashes took place in Buhritz, on the outskirts of Baquba. Residents have been forced to flee the area. Plumes of smoke have filled the sky as armored vehicles have surrounded the village.
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.
At 3 a.m. Thursday, American forces raided the home of Hussein al-Septi, suspected of being a guerrilla leader. A firefight ensued. Mr. Septi was wounded and arrested, Major O'Brien said.
In the southern city of Basra, a roadside bomb killed three Iraqis and one Portuguese contactor, who worked for a telecommunications company.
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. Guards yelled at the driver to move the car, one guard 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 detonate explosives in the car.
The rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr's budding campaign to insert himself into the mainstream political landscape continued on Saturday, with a demonstration by the women's wing of his organization in his Baghdad stronghold. Several hundred women, all shrouded in black, turned up Saturday morning under his portrait to call for the ouster of American troops from their neighborhood.
"Blow them up! Oh Mahdi Army," the women chanted, referring to the heavily armed militia led by Mr. Sadr. "All of us will sacrifice ourselves for Moktada Sadr."
Khalid W. Hassan contributed reporting from Falluja for this article.
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Iraq's Allawi Welcomes U.S. Strike That Killed 22
FALLUJA, Iraq (Reuters)
By Fadel Badran
Jun 20, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=GQSTK0TOJFY0GCRBAE0CFEY?type=topNews&storyID=5463967&pageNumber=1
- Iraq's prime minister on Sunday defended a U.S. air strike that killed 22 people in Falluja, but Iraqi officers in the town said the dead included women and children rather than foreign Muslim militants.
"We know that a house which had been used by terrorists had been hit. We welcome this hit on terrorists anywhere in Iraq," interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi told a news conference.
He said the U.S. military had informed the government before carrying out Saturday's air strike on what it said was a safe house used by militants led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian described by the Americans as al Qaeda's leader in Iraq.
However, Falluja's police chief and a senior officer in the Falluja Brigade in charge of security in the fiercely anti-U.S. town denied that foreign fighters had operated from the house.
"We inspected the damage, we looked through the bodies of the women and children and elderly. This was a family," Brigadier Nouri Aboud of the Falluja Brigade told Reuters.
"There is no sign of foreigners having lived in the house. Zarqawi and his men have no presence in Falluja."
The U.S. military allowed the Falluja Brigade, led by former Iraqi army officers, to take over security in the town under a truce last month that ended battles between U.S. Marines and insurgents in which hundreds of people were killed.
The raid shattered a lull in Falluja and fueled tensions before the formal end of Iraq's U.S.-led occupation on June 30.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt said in Baghdad the house was being used by fighters loyal to Zarqawi, accused by Washington of leading a bloody campaign of suicide bombings and of decapitating a U.S. hostage last month.
The Iraqi government says foreign militants are involved in sabotage that last week brought vital oil exports to a halt.
Iraqi technicians repaired a sabotaged southern pipeline in the searing heat of the Faw peninsula. Oil officials said they hoped exports would resume by Sunday night. Insurgents, believed to include loyalists of Saddam Hussein, Sunni nationalists and foreign militants, have sown havoc ahead of the June 30 handover to a new interim Iraqi government.
INTERIOR MINISTER'S HOUSE ATTACKED
The home of Interior Minister Faleh al-Naqib came under rocket fire in the town of Samarra, northwest of Baghdad, on Saturday night, police said. Naqib was not there at the time, but four of his bodyguards were killed.
In Saddam's hometown of Tikrit, further north, unidentified gunmen killed a local council member, Izzeddin Ibrahim Abdullah, and a bodyguard Saturday night, police said.
A bomb blast near the Central Bank in the middle of Baghdad killed a guard and wounded several bank employees Sunday morning, a bank official said.
A wave of kidnapping has accompanied attacks on U.S.-led forces, foreign contractors and Iraqi officials.
Most abducted foreigners have been released and a Lebanese official said Saturday that George Frando, the last of several Lebanese men seized last weekend, had been freed.
But at least three foreign hostages have been killed -- an Italian security guard, a Lebanese civilian and American Nick Berg, whose videotaped beheading was claimed by Zarqawi's group.
U.S. military officers said there was no sign Zarqawi himself -- who has a $10 million price on his head -- was in the house in Falluja when it was destroyed.
Last month, Marines killed around 40 Iraqis in an attack on a house in the western desert near the Syrian border. The U.S. military said the house was a staging point for foreign fighters but survivors said a wedding party had been massacred.
The Americans portray Zarqawi as a key figure linked to al Qaeda. In neighboring Saudi Arabia, security forces killed local al Qaeda leader Abdulaziz al-Muqrin just hours after his group beheaded U.S. hostage Paul Johnson in Riyadh Friday.
Zarqawi's group has also claimed responsibility for the May 17 assassination of the head of Iraq's now-dissolved Governing Council, as well as last Monday's suicide car bombing in Baghdad that killed 13 people, including five foreign contractors. (Additional reporting by Michael Georgy, Lin Noueihed and Khaled Yacoub Oweis in Baghdad, and Peg Mackey in Dubai)
-----
Senior officer of Fallujah Brigade disputes U.S. airstrike target
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP)
6/20/2004
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-06-20-iraq-airstrike_x.htm
- A senior officer of the U.S.-backed Fallujah Brigade on Sunday disputed U.S. claims that an American airstrike had hit a safehouse of terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's network.
The Health Ministry said at least 16 people were killed in the attack Saturday; witnesses put the number of dead at least 20, including women and children.
Col. Mohammed Awad said members of the Fallujah Brigade had investigated the site and "affirmed to us that the inhabitants of the houses were ordinary families including women, children and elders."
"There was no sign that foreigners have lived in the house," Awad said.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy operations chief, told reporters Saturday that multiple intelligence sources reported that the house was used by the al-Zarqawi network, which U.S. officials believe operates in Fallujah.
The discrepant versions of the attack could strain relations between the Americans and the Iraqi force established last month to take responsibility for law and order in Fallujah after the end of the three-week Marine siege.
Marines besieged Fallujah in April after four American security contractors were killed in an ambush in the city 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 the Fallujah Brigade.
Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born militant thought to have ties to al-Qaeda, has been blamed for a string of car bombs across Iraq, including a blast Thursday that killed 35 people and wounded 145 at an Iraqi military recruiting center in Baghdad.
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis Say They Have Foiled Planned Attacks by Militants
June 20, 2004
By JOSEPH BERGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/international/middleeast/20MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, June 19 - Israeli Army officials say that through a combination of aggressive and defensive tactics, they have thwarted a series of planned Palestinian attacks and have kept militant groups on the run.
Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, the chief of Israel's military intelligence, disclosed to a committee in Parliament on Wednesday that two weeks ago, Israeli forces had blocked what would have been one of the largest attacks ever by the Islamic militant group Hamas, arresting six suicide bombers who had planned to blow themselves up simultaneously.
Other recent successes in foiling Palestinian attacks also suggest that militants are still trying to strike at Israel even as the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon pushes ahead with its plans to pull out of the Gaza Strip and evacuate the 7,500 Jewish settlers living among 1.3 million Palestinians.
On Wednesday, army troops raided the homes of two teenage girls in Nablus - one of them 14 and the other 15 - and arrested the older girl, accusing her of planning to carry out a suicide attack. The troops found no explosives. The girls, according to Israeli news reports, said they had gotten cold feet, and their parents denied that their daughters were terrorists. The army said Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a militant group loyal to Yasir Arafat, had recruited the teenagers. On Tuesday, a car packed with explosives and driven by a Palestinian blew up in Gaza, which Israeli defense officials described as a thwarted car bombing.
Israeli officials credit their success in blocking such attacks to increased experience in identifying potential bombers, as well as to a separation barrier they are building all along the West Bank and the killings and arrests of militant leaders.
There has not been a major suicide bombing involving civilians since mid-March, and no Israeli civilians have been killed in any kind of Palestinian attack in six weeks.
"We're now bearing some of the fruit of our prolonged, sustained effort which began with Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002," said Capt. Jacob Dallal, an army spokesman, referring to the armored Israeli assault into several West Bank cities. "Our grip on the situation is better, and our ability to thwart attacks is better, and the fence has proven very effective."
The barrier, which is one-third complete, has almost eliminated attacks in northern Israel, he said. There were 63 deaths from bus bombings on the east-west road between Afula and Hadera in 2002, but only 3 last year after the barrier was completed there, Captain Dallal said.
From the start of the second intifada in September 2000, there have been about 150 suicide bombings in Israel. The last major bombing was on March 14 in Ashdod and killed 10 Israelis. The last bus bombing in Jerusalem was on Feb. 22, when 8 people were killed and 60 wounded. In 2003, 23 bombings killed 144 Israelis, army officials said. There have been only eight attacks so far this year, killing a total of 34 people.
The army continues its aggressive pursuit of leading militants. Just this week, an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a missile at a car carrying Khalil Marshoud, whom the army described as the Aksa Martyrs Brigades commander in the Balata refugee camp near Nablus, killing him and a second militant. The army said he had planned eight suicide attacks. On Wednesday, Israeli commandos attacked a restaurant in Jenin and killed Majed al-Saadi, a member of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
[On Saturday, three members of the British Parliament said they came under Israeli fire while visiting a Gaza refugee camp, Reuters reported. There were no injuries, and the Israeli Army said it was looking into the incident.]
Palestinian security experts say the decline in attacks and casualties is misleading. The basic cause of the violence - the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza - has yet to be remedied, they say.
"It means when there is a loophole, an opportunity, then things will happen again," said Zakaria al-Qaq, co-director of the Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information, and a Palestinian specialist in security.
Mr. Qaq, while acknowledging that the Israeli hunt for militants has reduced the number of successful attacks, suggested that the effect was a short-term one. He said Israel was always saying that it was killing militant leaders but somehow, he said, other leaders have risen up to take their place.
The fence, he said, is a stopgap measure because it deepens the feelings of oppression among Palestinians and drives more people to undertake lethal missions.
"It doesn't mean that quietness is really quiet," he said.
-------- mideast
Saudis Kill 4 Al Qaeda Militants
12 Suspects Seized In Sweeping Raids
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54780-2004Jun19?language=printer
BERLIN, June 19 -- Saudi security forces killed four al Qaeda members in a shootout and launched a dragnet in Riyadh that captured 12 others in the aftermath of the beheading of an American defense contractor, Saudi officials said Saturday.
Saudi authorities said that the four militants, who were on a list of most-wanted terrorism suspects, were killed late Friday just after the group, calling itself al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, distributed a video depicting the headless body of Paul M. Johnson Jr., 49, an employee of Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp. Johnson, who was kidnapped six days earlier, was one of three American military contractors slain in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, in the past two weeks.
In Riyadh, Saudi television aired footage of the battered bodies of the militants whom authorities said died in a shootout at a Riyadh gas station. Among them was Abdulaziz Muqrin, the leader of the al Qaeda cell.
The security operation deactivated most of the cell, which was responsible for a number of recent attacks in Saudi Arabia, the officials said. The Saudi Interior Ministry said that the militants had been involved in several terrorist attacks in the past seven months, including the Nov. 9 bombing of a foreigners' residential compound in Riyadh and the slaying of 22 people last month at another compound for foreigners in Khobar.
The ministry said police had separately seized a car used by gunmen who fatally shot a BBC cameraman and critically wounded a BBC correspondent in Riyadh on June 6. The officials also said that one of those arrested was a suspected planner of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
Saudi officials said the security operation had severely weakened the capabilities of Islamic extremists who began operations 13 months ago in the country, adding that Muqrin's group was the only known al Qaeda cell remaining in the country. But they stopped short of declaring the kingdom a safe place for the 35,000 Americans and other foreigners who work and live there, cautioning that more attacks were possible.
"We will continue our hunt for others in the kingdom who are members of this evil group or who may be supporters of this group," Adel Jubeir, foreign policy adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah, said at a news conference in Washington. "We will show no mercy."
Since March, when Muqrin declared himself the new leader of al Qaeda operations in Saudi Arabia, he had taunted the Saudi royal family for its inability to find him or his followers. In frequent statements posted on the Internet, Muqrin suggested that his group's ability to attack and kill foreigners at will was evidence of the righteousness of its cause.
Ramzi Khouri, an editorial director of the Saudi Gazette newspaper, described Muqrin as a charismatic outlaw with a flair for public relations. Muqrin took a leading role in polished video and audio files that the group posted on the Internet, offering elaborate religious justifications for the attacks on foreigners.
"Al Qaeda needs to make it very personal, to create these symbols who can become very popular with the public, like Osama bin Laden," Khouri said in a telephone interview from Jiddah. "Muqrin was one heck of a speaker. . . . He was becoming a hero to many people. If he had been able to keep going for a while, he have become another Che Guevara."
At the same time, Khouri said the al Qaeda leader's death would not end the uprising, just as the demise of several of his predecessors at the hands of Saudi forces did little to slow the pace of the attacks.
"They have not gotten rid of al Qaeda by any means," he said. "There are more people from where this cell came from."
U.S. and Saudi officials said reports that Johnson's body had been recovered were incorrect, adding late Saturday that they were still looking for his remains. But they said a video showing his decapitated corpse was genuine and that they had no doubt he was dead.
Johnson was kidnapped June 12, the same day that gunmen fatally shot Kenneth Scroggs, another American defense contractor who worked out of the same office in Riyadh.
Muqrin's group later released a video on the Internet of a blindfolded Johnson, threatening to kill him unless the Saudi government released an unspecified number of militants from prison. Saudi officials disclosed few details about how they tracked down Muqrin. At first, authorities in Riyadh said a witness had seen a car dump Johnson's body and took down the license plate number, but Jubeir and other officials later said that was not the case.
Jubeir said 15,000 Saudi security forces had swept through Riyadh block by block in their search for Johnson and his killers. Late Friday, security forces setting up a roadblock trapped Muqrin and three other militants in a car, although Jubeir said he didn't know if the confrontation occurred by happenstance or because of specific intelligence of Muqrin's whereabouts.
The gunfight lasted about two hours, Jubeir said. "The terrorists tried to shoot their way out," he added. Saudi television showed broken glass, bloodstains and other evidence of the shootout at a gas station in central Riyadh.
Al Qaeda acknowledged the death of Muqrin on the Internet, after an earlier claim that he was alive and well.
Jubeir described one of the other dead militants, Faisal Dakheel, as the "number two al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia."
Also killed were Turki Muteiri, one of three gunmen wanted for the May 29 attack in Khobar; and Ibrahim Dreihim, suspected of planning the suicide bombing at the Western compound in Riyadh last November, according to the official Saudi Press Agency.
The dozen militants who were arrested elsewhere during the sweeps in Riyadh included Rakan Saikhan, one of the Saudi government's 26 most-wanted terrorism suspects and an alleged conspirator in the attack on the Cole, a Saudi security source said. The Interior Ministry said police also confiscated large caches of weapons, including three rocket-propelled grenade launchers, computers and $30,000 in cash.
"This is a monumental blow to the cohesive operational structure of Muqrin's operation," Nawaf Obaid, a security consultant to the Saudi government, said in a telephone interview from London.
The State Department has been urging Americans to leave Saudi Arabia since April, and the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh issued an even stronger warning late Thursday, saying that Americans were being shadowed by militants.
On Saturday, U.S. Ambassador James C. Oberwetter said the security situation had improved but that the country remained a dangerous place.
"It will be some time before we achieve a comfort level that the situation returns to normal," Oberwetter said at a news conference in Riyadh. "The Saudis are doing an excellent job working on their most-wanted list and taking people off that list. . . . But not everyone has been removed from the list. Maybe there are more."
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4 Killed After Hostage's Death Are Called Saudi Cell's Leaders
June 20, 2004
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/international/middleeast/20SAUD.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
RIDDA, Saudi Arabia, June 19 - Saudi officials said Saturday that four men killed in a shootout in downtown Riyadh on Friday were top leaders of the cell of Al Qaeda that beheaded an American hostage hours earlier and carried out a string of lethal attacks against foreigners in the kingdom.
The body of the hostage, Paul M. Johnson Jr., 49, has not been found, contrary to earlier accounts, though an analysis of photographs on a Web site made clear he was dead, the Saudi officials said.
Saudi experts on militant groups said the killing of the four, along with the capture of another 12, clearly struck a significant blow against Al Qaeda in the kingdom. But they were divided on whether it would cripple the group's ability to carry out further attacks, or merely disrupt any short-term plans.
"The group has not been eliminated, but what happened is a very strong strike against it," said Abdullah Bjad al-Otaibi, a former radical turned reformist. "But they are very well organized, and they have flow of money and support from different people."
The announcement from the Interior Ministry about the death of what it termed members of a "deviant group" made clear the crucial roles that the men had played in the cell, which called itself Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.
The group is believed to be a semiofficial Qaeda franchise inspired by the goal of clearing all foreigners from the kingdom to pave the way for a pure Islamic caliphate.
The Interior Ministry has yet to clarify exactly how it caught up with such a significant group in the middle of downtown Riyadh.
At the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Adel Al-Jubeir, a senior advisor to the crown prince, discounted earlier reports that the four senior militants were discovered after they dumped the body on a darkened Riyadh street.
The security forces encountered the men at a roadblock, he told a news conference, and the ensuing gun battle with them lasted several hours. The neighborhood became a combat zone with repeated bursts of gunfire and security helicopters clattering overhead, according to television footage and accounts by witnesses. One security man was shot dead and at least two were wounded.
Saudi officials said that 15,000 men from various security services had been hunting for Mr. Johnson, including firefighters familiar with specific neighborhoods, but that they had not been able to find him despite searching hundreds of locations.
On Saturday, there was still no information about where Mr. Johnson might have been held, although Mr. Jubeir expressed optimism that security forces were getting close to the area in northern Riyadh.
The ministry statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency identified the most important of the men killed as Abdelaziz al-Muqrin, the leader of Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula and the kingdom's most wanted terrorist.
He was a veteran of numerous campaigns in Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Chechnya. His flamboyant statements claiming responsibility for a string of recent attacks often emphasized the goriest details, including the beheading of Mr. Johnson and the dragging of the body of a Westerner through the streets in Khobar, the Saudi oil center.
A statement about Mr. Johnson and a colleague killed the same day Mr. Johnson was abducted said they were singled out because they worked on Apache helicopters, vilified in the Arab world because they are used by Israelis against Palestinians and by American forces against Iraqis.
Another of the dead militants was identified as one of Mr. Muqrin's top deputies, Faisal Abdul Rahman al-Dakheel. He was on the list of Saudi Arabia's 26 most wanted terrorists and appeared on a videotape released last weekend that showed another attack on an American, in which Robert Jacobs, who worked for the Vinnell Corporation, was gunned down in his Riyadh garage.
A third was identified as Turki al-Mutairi, one of three gunmen who escaped May 30 after a shooting rampage in Khobar that left 22 people dead, 19 of them foreigners.
The Saudi statement said the fourth was Ibrahim Abdullah al-Draihem, who among other crimes had helped plan the bombing of a residential compound in Riyadh in November in which 17 people died.
On Saturday, official Saudi television displayed the blood-spattered bodies of the four, evidently to quash an announcement on an Islamist Web site that the death of Mr. Muqrin was a lie. More than 12 hours later another Web site announcement admitted the killing but said the "jihad" would continue.
The Interior Ministry said 12 men had been arrested in two hide-outs. A Saudi security official said one was Rakan al-Saikhan and identified him as a planner of the attack on the guided-missile destroyer Cole, which killed 17 American sailors in Yemen in 2000. The Saudis hope that Mr. Saikhan can provide information about how Al Qaeda cells come together in the kingdom, he said.
It remains somewhat murky what links might exist between Osama bin Laden and those operating within Saudi Arabia, which so far seem to be following his general plan rather than acting on direct orders. Mr. Muqrin was among the few leaders believed to have spent time with Mr. bin Laden at training camps in Afghanistan.
Experts on the extremists were stunned that so many senior members of the cell were moving around together at the same time. They said it appeared to be a sign that the group was smaller than had been believed.
"They were so unprofessional to have their main leaders in one place at the same time and they were all killed in one operation," said Abdel Rahman Lahem, a lawyer and expert on militant groups.
That deflates the terrifying image of the organization that had been built up in recent weeks, he said, noting that not only the leader of the cell but also his prospective successors had died.
A Saudi security official said the group was the only Qaeda cell in Saudi Arabia able to procure weapons, maintain safe houses and arrange logistics to support terrorism. He said the killing of the four leaders and the capture of the 12 other men was a severe blow to the group.
"This has really taken down the cell completely," he said. "This is the group that has been carrying out the bombings and other attacks since November."
The Interior Ministry statement described in detail a large cache of arms and explosives captured in the raids, including 3 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 10 hand grenades, machine guns, pistols, various ammunition and 16 pipe bombs, as well as numerous documents and more than $38,000 in cash.
It also said that the security forces had seized three cars, including one used in an attack on June 6 that left an Irish cameraman for the BBC dead and a British correspondent critically wounded.
Experts noted that Qaeda cells were trained to act independently, so the demise of one would not necessarily affect the others and might also make the remaining members more violent as they feel the security noose closing in around them.
Mr. Jubeir pledged continuing vigilance. "We will continue to pursue them with vigor until we eliminate them from our midst," he said.
A similar insurgency in Egypt took a decade to crush, and Egypt is considered a far easier country to control than Saudi Arabia, due to its far narrower geographic confines along the Nile river.
The American ambassador, James C. Oberwetter, commended the Saudis for their efforts to fight attacks on Westerners, but at a news conference on Saturday he said it was too soon for the United States to soften its warning in April to all its citizens to leave the kingdom.
"The Saudis are doing an excellent job on working people off their most wanted list," the ambassador said. "But not everyone who is a threat has been removed from the list, and there may be many more."
Mr. Oberwetter said that the F.B.I. branch office at the embassy was helping the Saudis with their investigations but that it was not involved in any operational matters.
"A great deal was accomplished last evening, but we also believe that much more remains to be done," he said.
Of the 26 most wanted terrorists, one has turned himself in and 9 have now been killed, and Mr. Saikhan is one, leaving 15 at large.
Abeer Allam contributed reporting from Cairo for this article, and Patrick E. Tyler from London.
-------- spies
Counterterror, old spooks, bold career
washtimes
By Joseph C. Goulden
June 20, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/books/20040619-104224-5786r.htm
A fellow across town had an odd criticism of John Weisman's Jack in the Box (William Morrow, $24.95, 322 pages). He sniffs that Mr. Weisman spends too much time discussing arcane espionage tradecraft. Oh, bosh.
I frequently find myself snorting and hurling aside thrillers involving, say, a murder in the underground parking garage at Reagan National Airport, or a woman who is killed by a blast from a 20-gauge rifle. (Mull those plot-twists; both got into print, from serious publishers.)
Thus it is refreshing to spend an afternoon with an author who writes intelligently about the new focus of intelligence - counterterrorism - and about how the CIA became a haven for cautious careerists following the Church Committee debacle of the 1970s. (Many of Mr. Weisman's characters are thinly disguised real people, especially a very sexy woman character who is easily identifiable in the Washington intel community.)
The thrust of "Jack in the Box" is a spook thriller oldie: the quest for a mole. A defrocked CIA Moscow station chief, Sam Waterman, is alerted to the return to Washington of CIA officer Edward Lee Howard, who defected to the USSR years earlier. (The novel's title derives from the pop-up device Howard used to simulate a passenger in his car, thus deceiving watching FBI agents as he tumbled off into the night.) Howard's story is that the White House knew in advance of the September 11 attacks, and that a mole kept the information from the president.
Howard then vanishes again, and Waterman is off on a mole chase made all the more interesting by Mr. Weisman's wide use of spy lore, references to actual cases, and detailed tradecraft. In the interest of literary mischief, the author even employs the occasional blacked-out word, as if his manuscript went through a security vet.
Mr. Weisman is a rare writer who has made the bestseller lists in both fiction and nonfiction categories. "Jack in the Box" bolsters his growing stature as one of the best in the thriller business.
•••
Another writer with a good feel for tradecraft is the sometime Washingtonian Charles McCarry. His aptly titled Old Boys (Overlook Press, $25.95, 480 pages) is seemingly the swansong of a man who has ranked among the titans of spy fiction for decades.
Of eight previous McCarry spy books, four featured the CIA officer Paul Christopher, a poet and a man of worldly grace and charm, one of the "old boys" who created the CIA. Christopher's forte in the earlier books was a recognition of the moral ambiguities of his profession, and of the differing ways humans behave under stress.
We find Christopher in his seventies, retired and living quietly in Georgetown after a decade of captivity in Communist China. He dines in his O Street NW home with cousin Horace Hubbard, another "old boy" to whom he gives power of attorney, and then vanishes in a cloud of ambiguity.
In due course, the Chinese embassy delivers an urn containing what it claims are Christopher's ashes but with no explanation as to how he died, supposedly in remote mountains.
Per instructions, Hubbard finds a letter left by his cousin that sets us off on a yarn I hesitate to summarize. Briefly, consider "The Da Vinci Code" meeting Osama bin Laden, and take it from there. (Can you imagine Jesus Christ as an unwitting agent of Roman intelligence, crucified because a covert operation went awry? Beyond that, I say no more.)
So what happened to Christopher? Here is where Mr. McCarry blends his rich imagination with an insider's knowledge of spook-dom. The author's insider knowledge stems from the years he spent undercover for the CIA's clandestine services in Europe, Africa and Asia. He recognizes that espionage often lacks the flash-and-dash of James Bond's exploits. Hear the musings of one of his old boys as he listens to scratchy sitar music in a New Delhi restaurant:
"I was reminded, as if an iris had opened in my brain, of the everyday boredom of a life in espionage. One is always waiting for someone who does not show up, for something that does not happen."
To help solve the mystery of Christopher's disappearance, Hubbard recruits five "white-haired old cut-throats," all old boys. "Taken as a group," Mr. McCarry writes, "they could be regarded as the all-time backfield of the old Outfit."
These rogues include a man "who knew Arabs and Arabia in the way a baseball fanatic knows batting averages," and another "who had recruited more Russians and other Soviet bloc types than there are snowflakes in Siberia . . ."
The prospect of new adventure excites the out-to-pasture officers. As one laments about the ailments of age, "The six of us were probably paying more, collectively, for pills than we had ever spent as a group on alcohol, and that's saying a lot." The core of the book is how these veteran officers go about searching for their vanished comrade.
2000 Mr. McCarry's closing chapters give one all the thunder and lightning needed for a good summer read. In due course, after the Christopher mystery is resolved, the old boys gather for a quiet reunion. Conversation is sparse, as it tends to be in their real world.
As Hubbard reflects, "There was no reason to tell one another what we already knew, which was that whatever we had done did not really matter. Our work did not exist, had never existed, in the annals of history or the memory of those who had asked us to do it.
"All of it, going back to our dewy youth, was a laugh, a prank, a game, and like any other game, the one we had just played, our last, had not really changed a thing . . .
"Or so we hoped, although we knew there would always be another bomb, another believer, another game of blindman's bluff, and one day a different outcome."
•••
And, finally, a glance at man generally acknowledged as the father of the spy thriller genre, the British writer John Buchan, renowned for his 1915 book "The Thirty-Nine Steps."
Buchan laughingly dismissed "Steps" as a "shocker" and most aficionados (myself included) know little of him beyond this single work. But the full sweep of this remarkable man's career is well told by Andrew Lownie in John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier (David A. Godine, $19.95, 364 pages, illus.).
Any professional writer must blink at Buchan's energies. In his lifetime (1875-1940) he published more than 100 books, ranging from his "shockers" to serious biographies, poetry, and children's books; during a brief stint as a lawyer he even wrote a book on international taxation.
While serving as a propaganda officer during World War I he concurrently wrote, in serial fashion, a million-word history of the conflict.
Such a workload would stagger a stout horse. But there was more. Even as he turned out as many as six books annually, Buchan was, variously, the number-two officer of a major British publisher, a war correspondent, deputy chairman of the Reuters news agency, a high official of the Presbyterian Church, a member of parliament, and, lastly, governor general of Canada. He was also, by Mr. Lownie's account, a decent husband and father.
To be truthful, the passage of a century makes much of Buchan dated reading. Nonetheless, a swirl of the cloak and a clink of the dagger for the fellow who started it all.
-------- us
Military Booted 770 in 2003 for Being Gay
June 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Military-Gays.html
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Even with concerns growing about military troop strength, 770 people were discharged for homosexuality last year under the military's ``don't ask, don't tell'' policy, a new study shows.
The figure, however, is significantly lower than the record 1,227 discharges in 2001 -- just before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Since ``don't ask, don't tell'' was adopted in 1994, nearly 10,000 military personnel have been discharged -- including linguists, nuclear warfare experts and other key specialists.
The statistics, obtained from the Defense Manpower Data Center and analyzed by the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military at the University of California, Santa Barbara, offers a detailed profile of those discharged, including job specialty, rank and years spent in the service.
``The justification for the policy is that allowing gays and lesbians to serve would undermine military readiness,'' said Aaron Belkin, author of the study, which will be released Monday. ``For the first time, we can see how it has impacted every corner of the military and goes to the heart of the military readiness argument.''
``Don't ask, don't tell'' allows gays to serve in the military as long as they keep their sexual orientation private and do not engage in homosexual acts.
The study, which analyzed discharges between 1998 and 2003, found the majority of those let go under ``don't ask, don't tell'' were active duty enlisted personnel in the early stages of their careers.
Of the nearly 6,300 people discharged during that seven-year period, only 75 were officers. Seventy-one percent of those discharged were men.
The study found that the Army, the largest of the services, was responsible for about 41 percent of all discharges. The Army has invoked ``stop-loss'' authority to keep soldiers from retiring or otherwise leaving if they are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Lawmakers' votes to increase troop strength reflected the concerns voiced by families of military personnel whose tours in Iraq keep getting extended.
About 27 percent of the discharges came from the Navy, 22 percent from the Air Force, and 9 percent from the Marines.
Hundreds of those discharged held high-level job specialties that required years of training and expertise, including 90 nuclear power engineers, 150 rocket and missile specialists and 49 nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare specialists.
Eighty-eight linguists were discharged, including at least seven Arab language specialists.
Brian Muller, an Army bomb squad team leader who had advanced training on weapons of mass destruction and served on a security detail for President Bush, said he was dismissed from duty after deciding to tell his commander he's gay.
``I didn't do it to get out of a war -- I already served in a war,'' Muller, 25, said in an interview. ``After putting my life on the line in the war, the idea that I was fighting for the freedoms of so many other people that I couldn't myself enjoy was almost unbearable.''
Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, a conservative advocacy group that opposes gays serving in the military, said the loss of gays and lesbians serving in specialized areas is irrelevant because they never should have been in those jobs in the first place.
``We need to defend the law, and the law says that homosexuality is incompatible with military service,'' Donnelly said. ``There is no shortage of people in the military, and we do not need people who identify themselves as homosexual.''
There are currently about 1.5 million people serving in active duty in the military, and another 1 million in the Reserves.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Many Ports to Miss Security Deadline
June 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Terror-Port-Security.html?pagewanted=all&position=
SANTOS, Brazil (AP) -- Thousands of trucks rumble into South America's largest port each day, hauling everything from auto parts to coffee bound for Europe, Asia and the United States. At least that's what the paperwork says, although it turned out to be wrong in one telling security breach involving about 40 containers of Brazilian coffee beans last year.
Without opening the containers, it would take an X-ray or radiation detectors to reveal what's truly inside. Those are two of several screening measures scheduled to start July 1 to prevent terrorists from shipping explosives, guns and other deadly material, although only one in 10 ports around the world has met the requirements so far.
Santos port officials say their security plan will be approved before July 1. But it will take months to implement, including constructing miles of higher fences, installing an electronic identification system for 20,000 people who pass through the port's 60 entrances daily and putting up a closed circuit monitoring system with nearly 500 cameras.
Now, small ferries motor near enormous freighters taking on stacks of containers as security guards give paperwork cursory checks. Getting inside the port and close to docked ships isn't hard, a factor that experts say could make it an inviting place for terrorists planning to hijack ships or use containers to smuggle weapons of mass destruction to overseas targets.
Failure to comply with the July 1 date imposed by the International Maritime Organization, a U.N. agency, could cause trade problems if countries like the United States turn away or perform lengthy inspections on ships calling at ports that don't meet the new security standards.
Ships heading to the United States from ports that don't comply with the code, for example, could be searched by the U.S. Coast Guard and, in the most extreme cases, be ordered back to sea.
By mid-June, only 654 of the 6,114 ports subject to the international security code -- established after pressure by the United States in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks -- were in compliance.
Chris Austen, chief executive of the British firm Maritime & Underwater Security Consultants, is working with 300 ports and many are still ordering equipment such as closed-circuit TVs and training.
``Many ports only started working on it in May,'' he said.
Complicating efforts to boost security, ports tend to be dangerous places full of questionable characters and criminal elements.
``You go there at night, and you will be beaten up by gangs,'' Austen said. ``Ports are full of scoundrels.''
More than 40 containers, each filled with 21 metric tons of Brazilian coffee, were cleared by customs officials at an inland facility in late 2002 and early 2003 and taken by trucks to Santos for shipment to New Orleans, Rotterdam and other ports. When they were opened, there was only dirt, cement or sand inside matching the weight of the purported coffee.
Police suspect truckers were involved in a scheme to steal the cargo and identified ringleaders, but failed to get convictions.
Inspectors have since stepped up spot checks of cargo leaving Santos, but are opening only about 3 percent of the containers, said Jose Carlos Ramalho, chief of the anti-contraband unit of the Santos customs office.
Security experts say it's impossible for authorities in any country to check all of the millions of containers that travel around the globe -- even with expensive scanners that can see inside containers and radiation detectors to guard against concealment of a radioactive ``dirty bomb.''
Elsewhere around the world, security upgrades are hit and miss:
--In Port Haina, the Dominican Republic's largest port, cranes and construction workers are building security buildings while technicians measure for the installation of container-sized X-ray machines.
Software experts troubleshoot a computer program that tracks goods coming in and out while security guards remind workers to show their electronic badges.
--Nigeria's main port in Lagos, the largest in West Africa, recently acquired mobile container scanners. A high wall surrounds the port -- but a reporter wasn't asked for identification before entering.
Shipments of narcotics and guns in and out of the port are common, arranged by criminals who bribe port officials, said Emeka Okoroanyanwu, editor of the Lagos-based Maritime Quarterly trade publication.
And highly organized thieves known as ``wharf rats'' have such free access to the port that more than 80 percent of the used cars brought into Nigeria on open ships are vandalized so parts can be stolen, said Chika Ezenwe, a licensed cargo clearing agent. ``The only ones that are safe are those that come inside containers,'' he said.
The head of the Nigerian Ports Authority, Adebayo Sarumi, said in a speech in March that Nigeria and neighboring countries had not done enough to meet the security code.
--In the Indonesian port of Batam, a 45-minute ferry ride from Singapore, almost anyone can walk in with a wave to unarmed guards. Motorcycle taxis roar throughout the port, and street vendors sell food from tiny stalls next to ships unloading cargo. The closest security guards are 400 yards away at the port's main entrance.
Batam did put in a higher fence to meet the security code, and guards are receiving extra training, but port director Sudirman Purwo said it's unlikely the port will meet the July 1 deadline.
Though Brazil is scrambling to make sure its 183 ports have their security plans in place, the government didn't release $32 million in funding to boost security until May.
At Santos, new moves to monitor who gets inside the port will be a significant improvement, said Mariliza Fontes Pereira, who heads the port's compliance task force. Hundreds of additional security guards will scrutinize trucks as they enter, and a radar system will eventually be installed to make sure small boats don't get too close to big ships.
``You'll never be 100 percent safe, but if there are any suspicions about a trucker or his cargo, he won't be able to go to the docks,'' she said. ``The police will be called and his cargo will be checked.''
Even before the security rules were established, Santos had tighter security than many other ports in developing countries. Vendors hawking food and international phone cards set up shop just outside the port's gates, but aren't allowed inside. Security guards with digital cameras stop trucks with containers of imports before they leave the port so the truckers can be photographed in front of their rigs' license plates.
Austen, the security expert, said the new security rules shift the emphasis from preventing theft to preventing terrorism.
``Now people are worried about the cargo leaving the port being a threat and the ships themselves being a threat,'' he said.
Efthimios Mitropoulos, the secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization, warned that shipping could be disrupted if ports don't quickly come into compliance. But security experts doubt politicians will want to be blamed for harming the delicate world economy, especially President Bush, who is in the midst of an re-election campaign.
``No one in the shipping business believes that international trade will suddenly shut down,'' said Jim Hunter, a partner with the Merlin Risks security firm advising two Brazilian ports. ``People are hoping as long as you are making a good faith effort to comply, you won't pay too high of a price for lack of performance.''
The Bush administration plans to move cautiously on enforcement.
``If we don't get it right, we end up slowing things down or shutting things down, and that's not what we want,'' said U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Jolie Shifflet.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Associated Press writers Tom Murphy in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Vivian Sequera in Brasilia, Brazil, Peter Prengaman in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Dulue Mbachu in Lagos, Nigeria, and Yeoh En Lai in Singapore contributed to this report.
On the Net:
International Maritime Organization: http://www.imo.org
--------
9/11: At last, the full story has been told
The Observer Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday June 20, 2004
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/focus/story/0,6903,1243079.html
After a week of shattering revelations, Americans now know the truth about the extraordinary plot to attack their country and the chaos that overtook their leaders on that fateful day.
Some held their heads in their hands. Others wept openly. A few stared straight ahead.
It was the end of the 11 September commission's public hearings and those in the cavernous auditorium in Washington knew that they had just heard the final, definitive account of the world-changing events 33 months before.
They had heard a story that shattered myths and provided few comforts.They had heard of the chaos in the administration and air defence systems on that fateful morning; they had heard of the failures of the security services of the most powerful state in history; they had heard from inside the terrorist cell that hatched - and successfully executed - the most ambitious attack ever. They had heard the truth at last.
For some, the proceedings brought calm. Others remain angry. 'There's an invisible wound in my heart that can only be closed with truth and by someone accepting responsibility,' said April Gallop, who survived being buried in the rubble of the Pentagon.
The commission, an independent, bipartisan panel formed by primary legislation and the reluctant signature of the President, has interviewed hundreds of officials, intelligence experts and politicians, including George Bush. It owes its existence to pressure from relatives of those who died on 11 September, 2001, and thus has the moral power to force powerful figures to testify before it. They revealed that the terrorists owed their success, at least in part, to the confusion, errors of judgment and laziness of those charged with defending America. The inquiry allows the full story of the attacks to become clear.
The story starts in Pakistan where, in the 1980s, thousands of young Arabs gathered to aid the Afghans in their war with the Soviet Union. Some, such as Osama bin Laden, tall, handsome scion of one of the Gulf's richest families, were minor celebrities. Others, such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, a tubby young Pakistani engineer, shunned the limelight.
When the Russians withdrew in 1989, many militants, including Mohammed, turned their attention to another superpower supposedly set on the domination and humiliation of Islam: America. Over the next few years Mohammed worked contacts in Pakistan and among wealthy sympathisers in the Gulf, sourcing funding and volunteers for a wide range of terrorist operations against US targets. One involved a young Pakistani called Ramzi Yousef, who in 1993 tried and failed to blow up the World Trade Centre. According to an FBI agent interviewed by the commission, it was a money transfer to Yousef to fund the strike that first brought Mohammed to the attention of American intelligence services.
But no one was paying much attention. In 1994 Mohammed moved to Manila in the Philippines, where he hooked up with Yousef again for an ambitious attempt at a long-standing pet project: the simultaneous destruction of a number of civilian passenger jets. The process that would lead to 11 September had begun.
At first things went badly wrong. A fire led police to the flat where Mohammed's team were making bombs. Yousef fled - and was caught in Pakistan. Mohammed escaped to Qatar where, sheltered by local politicians, he was able to lie low.
But the respite was short-lived. Hounded by US intelligence agents, Mohammed was forced to move on again, to Afghanistan, where the hardline Taliban militia had taken control a few months previously. Bin Laden had also recently returned to the war-racked south-west Asian state.
Mohammed still dreamed of executing his pet scheme. Bin Laden, he knew, had access to vast wealth. It was not, the commission reveals, his own money, as often previously claimed, but came from a series of wealthy donors in the Gulf and the collection boxes of several mosques in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden, who was steadily establishing control over the pre-existing infrastructure of militant training camps in Afghanistan, also had access to that most precious of terrorist commodities: skilled and motivated men.
In late 1996, according to the commission, Mohammed went to bin Laden and pitched his grand idea: to hijack 10 planes in America and crash nine into the headquarters of the CIA and the FBI, the tallest buildings on the East and West Coasts, and into nuclear power plants.
Mohammed himself would hijack one plane, kill all males on board, land it, release the women and children, then denounce American policies in the Middle East at a press conference. Bin Laden listened to the proposal but, worried by the complexity of the plans, did not commit himself. Not yet.
Bin Laden had been active, but hardly high-profile, since the end of the Afghan war. He had spent five years in Sudan after being in effect expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, farming, building roads and organising a network of militants. In 1994, according to the commission, came the only real contact with the Iraqis. First he helped Islamic militants in northern Iraq opposed to Saddam, but Khartoum ordered him to cease the support and arranged for meetings with a senior intelligence officer from Baghdad. It went nowhere. Political pressure forced the Saudi-born militant out of Sudan soon afterwards.
Bin Laden had schemes of his own. In August 1998, one came to fruition. Suicide truck bombs destroyed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Emboldened, bin Laden and his aides cast about for new projects to take the war to the Americans on their home ground. In early 1999 Mohammed was summoned to Kandahar, the southern Afghan desert city where bin Laden and the Taliban had their headquarters. His plan was on.
Following the attacks in Africa, President Bill Clinton authorised the killing of bin Laden. Three times in the next 18 months airstrikes to kill him in Afghanistan were cancelled at the last minute, despite bin Laden being 'in the cross-hairs'. Even now, according to the commission, the lead CIA official in the field believes this was the 'lost opportunity' that would have prevented 11 September.
As he prepared to leave office, Clinton tasked Richard Clarke, his counter-terrorism chief, with putting together a plan to take on al-Qaeda. It aimed to arrest members, attack its financial networks, freeze its assets, expose the network of Islamic charities funding it, insert special forces into Afghanistan and support the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Clarke presented the plan in December 2000, a month before Bush would take office in the wake of that year's nail-biting election finish.
Clarke briefed the new administration and urged his plan be adopted immediately. But, though a Senate report recommended the setting up of a 'National Homeland Security Agency' and warned 'mass casualty terrorism directed against the US homeland was of serious and growing concern', the Bush administration was more focused on a planned missile shield and Iraq. Incoming officials thought the departing 'Clintonites' were terrorism-obsessed. Contact with the Taliban, aimed at forcing them to give up bin Laden, dropped away. On 8 May, 2001, Bush announced a task force headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney to develop action on counter-terrorism. It never met.
Khaled Sheikh Mohammed had his own problems. Bin Laden had given him four experienced terror operators to complete his plan, but two were refused entry to the US. Worse, the two Saudis who had made it to San Diego were unable to speak English and unlikely to be able to complete the flight training they needed
Then came a breakthrough. Four young Arabs, who had been living in Germany, arrived in Afghanistan seeking training to fight in Chechnya. All spoke decent English and were used to the West. If they could be trained as pilots, they would be perfect. By early 2000 they were back in Hamburg with instructions to get visas, go to the US and start flying. Their targets, decided at a meeting with bin Laden himself, were to be the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the Capitol, seen as the source of America's pro-Israeli policies, and their leader, appointed personally by the terrorist mastermind, was a 30-year-old Egyptian called Mohamed Atta. By mid-2000, three of the four were in the US. With the two Saudis on the West Coast, al-Qaeda had five operatives in place, all learning to fly.
There were still many problems, however. The commission used interrogation reports of Mohammed, captured in Pakistan last year, and other members of the plot to construct a picture of al-Qaeda's inner dynamics. They found that, like the Americans, they were also riven by personality clashes, grumpy workers, overbearing bosses and arguments over strategy.
Back in Afghanistan, there were fierce arguments among the al-Qaeda high command over the advisability of attacking the US. Some were concerned by the possibility of massive reprisals. Mullah Omar, the reclusive cleric who led the Taliban, was adamantly opposed to the plan, not least because of pressure from his Pakistani allies.
Bin Laden overruled Mohammed on the targeting of the attacks, cancelling a second wave of strikes. The austere, fanatical Atta clashed with the more easygoing, extrovert Ziad al-Jarrah, a young Lebanese from a cosmopolitan background who was to be one of the pilots. Jarrah missed his young Turkish girlfriend, with whom he was very much in love, and it took persuading from senior al-Qaeda figures to keep him from withdrawing entirely from the conspiracy. When one of the Saudis went home without permission, Mohammed wanted him removed from the plot. Bin Laden overruled him
One thing went smoothly, however. The camps in Afghanistan were able to provide a trained pilot and 19 young men to provide 'muscle', all of whom arrived in America during the spring and summer of 2001. Mohammed resisted pressure from bin Laden to strike in the early summer, refusing even to pass on the al-Qaeda chief's impatience to Atta, who he knew would attack when ready.
On 10 July, 2001, Kenneth Williams, an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, sent a memo to the agency's headquarters. He was suspicious about the actions of some Middle Eastern students at a local flight school. He thought that terrorists might be trying to infiltrate the civil aviation system. His memo was ignored. But there were other clues. One of the most explosive and contentious pieces of information revealed by the commission was a secret briefing given to Bush on 6 August, 2001.
The document, declassified only after intense pressure, was titled 'Bin Laden determined to attack inside the US'. Without being specific, it warned that al-Qaeda was trying to send operatives to the US through Canada to carry out an attack using explosives, was looking at ways to hijack planes and may have had a support network in the country.
There were other warnings during that long, hot summer. On 16 August, Zacharias Moussaoui, was arrested for suspicious activity at a flight school. Moussaoui piqued the interest of the FBI after showing little interest in learning to take off or land. Incredibly, his arresting agent wrote he was the 'type of person who could fly something into the World Trade Centre'. Another FBI agent on the case speculated that a large aircraft could be used as a weapon. Still no one connected the dots.
Worse, the CIA had learnt the names of the two Saudis weeks before they had arrived in the US - but had failed to pass them on to the FBI. The agency was worried. Analysts had noticed a huge upsurge in 'chatter' - the communications between known militants.
In Afghanistan rumours were spreading of an imminent strike. According to Mohammed's interrogation, bin Laden had told recruits to pray for the souls of the 20 future martyrs before going underground for much of July. At points in the summer, camps had been evacuated, as if to escape retaliation.
On 4 September, as Washington was getting back to the business of government after the summer, Clarke held his long-awaited meeting about putting his anti-terror plan to the President. Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell decided to go ahead. But the plan would never make it to the President's desk. The terrorists would strike first.
At 8.21 the transponder aboard American Airlines Flight 11 was turned off and controllers lost touch with the plane. Atta and his team of hijackers had taken control and killed the pilot and his cockpit crew. At 8.24 came the first direct confirmation that the attacks were under way. Atta was heard from the ground. 'We have some planes, ' he said.
Four minutes later, the Federal Aviation Administration was told. Nine minutes after that, the military was informed. With a normal hijacking, such delays would probably not have mattered. With this sort of attack, they were crucial. In phone calls now released by the commission, the sense of unreality and confusion in America's attempt to deal with the crisis is evident from the beginning. When the FAA controller informed the Northeast Air Defences Sector (Neads), the military command centre, about the hijacking, he asked for fighter aircraft to be scrambled.
'Help us out,' he pleaded.
'Is this real world or exercise?' was the response.
'No, this is not an exercise, not a test,' insisted the controller.
At 8.46 two F-15 fighters were scrambled from Otis Air Force Base to intercept Flight 11. But they were 150 miles away. And too late. Atta was seconds away from plunging his jet into the north tower of the World Trade Centre. A few minutes later, Bush, visiting a school in Florida, was told a plane had hit the World Trade Centre. However, aides said it was a twin-engined craft and pilot error was suspected. He continued with his visit in an air of normality. For him, the world had not yet changed.
That was not the case at the FAA. Controllers were already frantically worried by Atta's reference to 'planes' in the plural. Did that mean more jets were under threat? At 8.47, less than 60 seconds after the first crash, the transponder on United Airlines Flight 175 blinked off. It went unnoticed until 8.51, when a controller spotted the change and ordered it switched back on. There was no response. Seven minutes later one FAA controller in New York told another: 'We might have a hijack over here, two of them.'
At 9.01, the FAA told Neads about the second plane. 'Heads up, man, it looks like another one coming in,' said another FAA official. Two minutes later, the second plane hit the south tower. Bush was informed of the disaster - in front of the full glare of the cameras - by an aide whispering in his ear that 'America is under attack'.
Just three minutes before Flight 175 hit its target, FAA officials in Indianapolis noticed that Flight 77 from Washington had disappeared from the radar. Controllers started notifying other official agencies that the craft had probably crashed. In fact, it too had its transponder switched off. The plane had turned around and was now heading right back towards America's capital
Fighter jets at Langley Air Force base were scrambled at 9.23 but, amazingly, were ordered into the air in the mistaken belief that Flight 11 was still in flight and headed in the wrong direction. At 9.32, when Flight 77 was detected on the radar again, heading for Washington, the Langley jets were too far away to help. An unarmed National Guard cargo plane was asked by the FAA to follow Flight 77. It was too late. 'It looks like that aircraft crashed into the Pentagon, sir,' reported the crew. It was 9.38 and the terrorists had scored three out of three.
But still it was not over. Ten minutes before Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, controllers in Cleveland had heard sounds of a struggle from United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark, New Jersey. Between 9.34 and 9.38, controllers moved several other aircraft out of the way as Flight 77 rose unexpectedly into the skies.
Frantic mobile phone calls from relatives and loved ones meant that the passengers were all too aware of what their fate was. Todd Breamer said a prayer with the phone operator on his mobile, then helped lead a passenger assault on the cockpit with the now famous phrase: 'Let's roll.' At 10.03, Flight 93 crashed into the ground just outside the village of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. When it crashed, the Langley jets had stopped chasing the phantom Flight 11 and were chasing the phantom Flight 77 - after it, too, had already crashed. Jets were now patrolling Manhattan, though no new attacks were to come. Incredibly the military was informed of the hijacking on Flight 93 at only 10.07, four minutes after its passengers had brought it down.
It had taken just under two hours in all. Hundreds of people were already dead. Thousands more would still die as the World Trade Centre towers crumpled and fell. The world had changed. But, for now at least, the attack was over.
It had exposed a huge inability of the American state to cope with such an assault. Time after time, actions by officials had come too late. Jets had chased after planes that had already crashed, while real hijacked planes went unnoticed. The military authorities were not informed or were given the wrong information. Cheney was to tell Rumsfeld he believed two hijacked planes had been shot down on his orders, saying: 'It is my understanding that they've already taken a couple of aircraft out.'
But it was all just rumour and speculation. Rumsfeld was surprised at Cheney's claim. 'We can't confirm that. We're told that one aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that they did it,' he replied. General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was honest in his testimony last week when he described the confusion: 'We fought many phantoms that day.'
The commission has now shown that the military had no chance of bringing down the hijacked planes. Cheney's order to fire on the jets came only after the last one had crashed. Even then, it was never issued to the fighters which had taken off from Langley. A breakdown in military command meant that senior officers were not passing on the orders to the pilots until they were clarified. The commission was brutally honest about the efforts of the FAA and Neads that day: 'They struggled under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defence against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet.' In fact, the only effective response came from the passengers of Flight 93. 'Their actions saved the lives of countless others and may have saved either the US Capitol or the White House from destruction,' the commission noted.
There were also technical problems. Bush has complained he was unable to get a secure phone line to Cheney and had to rely on a mobile phone call as he was hustled on board Air Force One. His motorcade even took a wrong turn during the evacuation and had to reverse. Bush and Cheney spoke first at 9.15 and again at 9.45, as Bush was waiting to board his plane. 'Sounds like we have a minor war going on here,' Bush told his Vice-President and close friend. 'I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war ... somebody's going to pay.' At last someone in power had got something right.
The commission will produce its final report next month. It has already released detailed interim conclusions and few real surprises are expected. However, the fallout is likely to be considerable. The intelligence services will come under heavy criticism, although some of the attacks will be defused by the recent resignation of George Tenet, the CIA chief. The administration's failure to tackle terrorism will be highlighted.
That is bad news for Bush in an election year. Since 11 September, he has defined himself as a 'war President' who can keep America safe. It is the core of his re-election strategy. Despite lagging just behind Democratic challenger John Kerry in recent polls, he always outscores his rival on issues of national security. If that position is undermined, a central part of Bush's campaign is threatened. If the commission's criticism of Bush's administration is harsh, it could be the difference between victory and defeat.
And, for surviving victims such as April Gallop, the salve for the 'open wound' they have been waiting for.
11 September myths exploded
Myth number one A strong relationship existed between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden.
Colin Powell, US Secretary of State, said in a speech to the United Nations in February 2003: 'Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan. A senior defector says Saddam sent his agents to Afghanistan some time in the mid-1990s to provide training to al-Qaeda members.'
Commission: 'In 1994 bin Laden is said to have requested [help] but Iraq never responded... There have been reports that contacts also occurred [in Afghanistan after 1996] but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship.'
Myth number two Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers, met an Iraqi agent in Prague on 9 April, 2001.
James Woolsey, the former CIA director (and a close friend of many neoconservatives), said in October 2001: 'The Czech confirmation [of the Prague meeting] seems to me very important... It is yet another lead that points toward Iraqi involvement in some sort of terrorism against the United States that ought to be followed up vigorously.'
Commission: 'Based on the evidence available - including investigations by Czech and US authorities plus detainee reporting - we do not believe that such a meeting occurred... We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda co-operated on attacks against the United States.'
Myth number three Al-Qaeda was involved in drugs trafficking.
'[Al-Qaeda] activity includes substantial exploitation of the illegal drugs trade' - a press statement issued by the British government in October 2001
Commission: 'No persuasive evidence exists that al-Qaeda relied on the drug trade as an important source of revenue.'
Minute by minute: How the 21st century's Pearl Harbor unfolded
07.58 American Airlines Flight 11 takes off from Logan airport, Boston, for LA.
08.13 After a routine instruction for Flight 11 to turn right, communication is lost.
08.14 United Airlines Flight 175 leaves Boston and begins acting erratically. This is not picked up by air traffic controllers because the controller responsible for that flight was also handling Flight 11.
08.20 American Airlines Flight 77 leaves Dulles International Airport, Washington.
08.24 The voice of Mohamed Atta confirms the flight has been hijacked.
08.37 Norad, responsible for defending North East American airspace, finally receives word of the hijacking.
08.45 American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Centre.
08.53 Two F-15 fighter jets scrambled from Otis Air Force base, 150 miles from New York.
09.00 Aviation officials realise that a second hijacked plane is heading for New York. The Federal Aviation Administration reports: 'Heads up, man, it looks like another one is coming in.'
09.03 United Airlines Flight 175 hits the south tower of the World Trade Centre.
09.05 George Bush is visiting a school in Sarasota, Florida, when he is told a second plane has hit, but he stays sitting for five minutes. He later tells the commission investigating 9/11: '[My] instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis'.
09.15 Bush moves to a holding room where he is briefed. Both he and his aides have no idea that other planes have been hijacked.
09.21 Aviation officials realise that American Airlines Flight 77 is missing.
09.32 US military air defence officials realise Flight 77 is only six miles - little more than a minute - from the White House. An unarmed National Guard C-130H cargo plane is scrambled.
09.42 All flights are halted by the Federal Aviation Administration.
09.43 American Airlines Flight 77 hits the Pentagon.
09.57 Fighter escorts for Air Force One leave their Florida base.
10.03 Another hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 93, en route from New Jersey to San Francisco, crashes in rural Pennsylvania after passengers attack hijackers.
10.05 The south tower of the World Trade Centre collapses.
10.10 F-16 fighter jets arrive over Washington, but are not cleared to fire on airliners.
10.17 Tele-conference call under way between senior aviation and administration officals.
10.20 F-15s receive authorisation to shoot down any threatening airliner. But order never passed on to the pilots.
10.28 The World Trade Centre's north tower collapses.
10.38 US pilots receive orders from General David Wherley that they can shoot down any hijacked planes.
13.44 The Pentagon deploys five warships and two aircraft carriers to protect the East Coast from further attack. Two carriers and three frigates, armed with guided missile destroyers capable of shooting down aircraft, head for the New York coast.
23.30 Before going to sleep, President Bush writes in his diary:
'The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today... We think it's Osama bin Laden.'
Research: Mark Hudson
-------- prisons / prisoners
Analysis: Some see risk to U.S. troops from Defense Department's hiding of detainee
Stars and Stripes European edition
By Sandra Jontz
June 20, 2004
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=21999&archive=true
ARLINGTON, Va. - The Defense Department's action of hiding a detainee in Iraq has jeopardized the lives of U.S. servicemembers, especially those who might be taken prisoner of war, a military law expert said.
"This involves the golden rule of reciprocity," said Eugene Fidell, involved in military law for 35 years. "How would we like it if our people fell into the wrong hands ... and were kept incommunicado and off the books?"
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admitted Thursday that he approved a request by CIA Director George Tenet to secretly hold a highly valued suspected terrorist in a U.S.-run prison in Iraq.
"I found the secretary's disclosure shocking," Fidell said.
But the terrorists already aren't playing by the rules, said Daniel Goure, vice president at the Lexington Institute think tank.
"They're slaughtering civilians, blowing up their own. I'm not sure why we have this fantasy that if we stick by the rules, so will they," he said. "They already don't adhere to the rules. I'm not worried about our servicemembers in the hands of ... terrorists. That risk is already extraordinarily high."
However, holding prisoners in secret is inconsistent both with rules set under the Geneva Conventions and with repeated statements by Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials, who have maintained that all prisoners in Iraq will be afforded Geneva Conventions status, Goure said.
"There is reason to be concerned that this type of action might erode the sanctity of the Geneva Conventions and, therefore, in future conflicts, one could argue it could increase risk to troops," Goure said.
The U.S. military should have promptly registered the prisoner, said Dan Dell'Orto, the Pentagon's principal deputy general counsel.
"The Red Cross serial number should have been registered soon, relatively soon," he said Thursday at Rumsfeld's press briefing.
Even if they had registered this detainee, the military could have denied an ICRC member access to interviews and inspection if doing so "might interrupt ... or disturb your ability to get information you need to get, particularly there and on the ground, where we had a terrorist of a known terrorist organization, of high rank," Dell'Orto said.
When asked if the Pentagon plans to suspend the practice in light of Dell'Orto's comments, a Pentagon spokesman said: "That's not something we're ready to talk about yet."
To rectify the situation, the Pentagon "has to abandon this policy," Fidell said. "The International Committee of the Red Cross attempts to work with great discretion. That is its hallmark, and is a policy that has served the ICRC very well and has served the interests of the United States.
"Where the books are being cooked, basically by the secret detentions, frustrates the ICRC's ability to perform its function," said Fidell, who also is president and co-founder of the nonpartisan National Institute of Military Justice.
For this article, he offered his own views. NIMJ has not taken a position on the issue.
The NIMJ, a nonprofit organization based in Washington that has many members who served on active duty as judges and lawyers, scrutinizes the military justice system and, when it deems necessary and appropriate, makes recommendations for change to Congress, the Pentagon or the Court of Appeals for Armed Forces, Fidell said.
Fidell also finds worrisome that there may be other cases.
Rumsfeld acknowledged to reporters that other prisoners have been held secretly.
"There are instances where that occurs," he said.
Rumsfeld said the prisoner has not been mistreated, and distanced the case from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
"He has been treated humanely," Rumsfeld said. "There's no implication of any problem. He was not at Abu Ghraib. He is not there now. He has never been there, to my knowledge. There's no question at all about whether or not he's received humane treatment."
-----
US 'holding thousands' in secret jails
Aljazeera
20 June 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/EF07FE60-A288-4814-8179-EC4716D740F2.htm
The United States is holding thousands of suspects at more than two dozen detention centres, half of which operate in secret, says a leading US human-rights group.
The revelation comes as a CIA contractor is charged with assaulting an Afghan detainee who later died of his injuries.
The secrecy surrounding the centres makes "inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely, but inevitable", said the New York-based Human Rights First in a report on Thursday.
The centres are in Iraq, Cuba, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan and on two US ships, said the human-rights group. They fail to meet obligations under US and international law on the treatment of prisoners, said the report entitled Ending Secret Detention.
It was released on the same day that US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that the occupation authority had secretly held a prisoner in Iraq and failed to register the detainee with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Rumsfeld refused to cite the reason for the secrecy, saying it was classified. However, he denied it was done to prevent international monitors from gaining access to the suspect.
"The United States government is holding prisoners in a secret system of off-shore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability or law"
Deborah Pearlstein, Director of Human Rights First's US Law and Security Programme
The report's release also followed the publication of photos of the sexual abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees at the hands of occupation soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and reports of abuse at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"The abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib cannot be addressed in isolation," said Deborah Pearlstein, director of Human Rights First's US Law and Security Programme.
"The United States government is holding prisoners in a secret system of off-shore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability or law."
Secret centres
Among the detention camps that the US government refuses to disclose but have been reported to Human Rights First by "multiple sources" are a centre in Kohat, Pakistan, near the Afghan border; al-Jafr Prison, a US Central Intelligence Agency interrogation facility in Jordan; and a facility on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.
The ships USS Bataan and USS Peleliu were also suspected detention sites, said the report by the rights group.
Secrecy makes detainee abuse 'not only likely but inevitable'
Most of the detention centres listed in the report were in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib; Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport; Camp Bucca near Basra; and nine centres run by military division or brigades.
The report said suspected sites were also in Afghanistan, including CIA interrogation facilities in Kabul and at Bagram Air Force Base.
The other sites are known, including a collection centre at Bagram; a facility in Kandahar; the Guantanamo Bay base; and a US military brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
Human Rights First called on Washington to end secret detentions; notify the families of the detainees; investigate abuses; implement preventative measures; release the location of the detention facilities; and give the Red Cross immediate access to all detainees.
The Red Cross has been given access to some detainees, most notably ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Interrogator charged
In related developments, a former Army Ranger hired by the CIA to conduct interrogations was charged with assaulting an Afghan detainee who died after two days of beatings, the first time civilian charges have been brought in the investigation of prisoner abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan.
A four-count grand jury indictment was handed up Thursday in the US state of North Carolina, against David Passaro, 38, for the 21 June 2003, killing of Abd al-Wali.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said Passaro was accused of "brutally assaulting" Wali at a US base in Asadabad, Afghanistan.
Asked why Passaro was not charged with torture or other more serious offences, Ashcroft said the indictment was based on the best evidence available. He said more serious charges could be brought if new evidence is found.
-------- terrorism
U.S. dirty bomb attack 'all but certain'
June 20, 2004,
Chicago Sun-Times
BY CHARLES J. HANLEY
http://www.suntimes.com/output/terror/cst-nws-bomb20.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 the 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 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. Al-Qaida and 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, a former Chicago gang member, planned to wrap explosives in uranium to make a dirty bomb. But uranium 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.
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. ''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.''
POTENTIAL COMPONENTS
Radioisotopes, potential fuel for a ''dirty bomb,'' serve many purposes. Here are some examples:
HIGHER RISK
IRRADIATORS: Large devices that sterilize food, medical equipment or blood for transfusion. Cobalt-60 or cesium-137.
GENERATORS: Long-term power sources for remote equipment, such as lighthouses on Russia's Arctic coast. Strontium-90 or plutonium-238.
RADIOTHERAPY: External-beam treatment or internal implanting of radioisotopes to kill cancer cells. Cobalt-60 or cesium-137.
LOWER RISK
WELL LOGGING: Devices measure subsurface characteristics of oil and other wells. Cesium-137 or americium-241.
GAUGING: Detectors that gauge density or thickness of material by measuring how much radioactivity penetrates. Cesium-137, cobalt-60 or americium-241.
SMOKE DETECTORS: Household devices in which minute radiation, when affected by smoke, sets off an alarm. Americium-241. Individual detectors pose no risk, but large stockpiles of americium at factories could.
-------- POLITICS
Kerry: a Lighter Shade of Bush
Los Angeles Times
By William M. Arkin
June 20, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes199.htm
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. - Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry got a boost last week when 27 retired U.S. diplomats, admirals and four-star generals, including a number of prominent Republican appointees from former Bush and Reagan administrations, publicly urged Americans to vote President Bush out of office.
They did not explicitly endorse Kerry, but the old warriors and insiders find themselves far more comfortable with the Massachusetts senator than with Bush when it comes to their favorite subject. Not only has Kerry firmly surrounded himself with Clinton standard-bearers on foreign policy and defense, but he has espoused his own brand of warmongering.
I would love nothing better than to see Bush out of office, but Kerry is a gloomy alternative. Worse yet, in the short term, his "me too, only better" approach to the war on terrorism could actually serve to make the United States less safe.
Kerry's defense plans might be a slam-dunk for the atherosclerotic set in the national security community, but here is the alternative that the senator offers to Democrats and people of liberal values in November:
• no plan to withdraw from Iraq, not even the kind of "secret plan" the late President Nixon offered on Vietnam, and no change in Afghanistan;
• continuation of Bush's preemption policy;
• a larger military with many more special operations units, plus accelerated spending on "transformation," which in today's defense jargon means creation of greater capability to intervene around the world on short notice;
• a new domestic intelligence agency and a vastly beefed-up homeland security program.
Kerry's defense advisors see much of this as innocuous rhetoric to protect the Democratic candidate's flanks from traditional conservative accusations of being soft on national security. At the same time, it represents a calculated strategy to "keep your head low and win."
In his stump speeches, Kerry stresses a spirited dose of alliances, the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a return to what he calls an "America that listens and leads again." He roundly criticizes the Bush administration on Iraq, Afghanistan and homeland security. He promises as commander in chief that he will never ask the troops "to fight a war without a plan to win the peace."
All that is to the good. Yet when Kerry describes the contemporary world, and the challenges that the U.S. faces, he sounds just like the president, the vice president and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Terrorism, he says, "present[s] the central national security challenge of our generation." Preventing terrorists from "gaining weapons of mass murder" is his No. 1 security goal, and Kerry says he would strike first if any attack "appears imminent." The senator promises to "use military force to protect American interests anywhere in the world, whenever necessary." On May 27 in Seattle, he promised to "take the fight to the enemy on every continent" (I guess that probably doesn't include Antarctica).
Beyond rhetoric, Kerry proposes to add 40,000 troops to the Army and to double the "Special Forces capability to fight the war on terror," presumably jumping from the current 48,000 to 96,000.
On homeland security, there isn't a constituency that Kerry doesn't pander to. National Guard, local government, police, firefighters, public health services, even AmeriCorps - the modest domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps - all should be beefed up, he says, to "protect America." He even proposes a new "community defense service" of homeland security wardens à la civil defense in the Cold War, which would surely be the looniest club that ever existed.
Even his serious proposals are problematic. The homeland security plan is defeatist and out of control. On the Army, though it sounds as if adding active-duty troops would solve the current overburden in Iraq and relieve the National Guard and reserves, the reality is that adding 40,000 to the end strength would take two or more years, according to one of Kerry's own advisors. Special Forces are even more difficult and time-consuming to manufacture.
But the biggest problem is that the basic premise of military growth is that we will continue to fight at the Bush pace. And relying more on special operations? That's the Rumsfeld doctrine: fast and light, covert and unaccountable. But anyone who is not an administration toady must recognize by now that ninja magicians can do only so much and that the cost of not having enough regular soldiers on the ground is a theme that runs from Tora Bora and the postwar insurgency in Iraq to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Special-ops troops tend to get you involved in, well, special operations. Making them a centerpiece of U.S. military planning and force structures builds a bias into the decision-making process that favors covert action and the unfortunate belief that we can prevail over terrorism by killing terrorists faster than they are recruited.
Kerry proposes these buildups because he accepts the central premise of the Bush administration: Terrorists are so threatening that we must sacrifice our liberties, change our government and military and, ultimately, our way of life in order to fight them.
In this 60th anniversary year of D-day, I find it astounding that anyone could be so callous and ahistorical as to point to the threat we faced from a Nazi foe that truly had the capacity to destroy our way of life and compare it to a few thousand or even a few tens of thousands of terrorists who, at their worst, can do no more than threaten to panic Western society with random bloodshed. It is equally absurd to compare the war on terrorism to the Cold War, when the United States could literally have been destroyed by thousands of nuclear weapons (a possibility, though not a threat, that persists today from Russian and Chinese nukes).
Challenge the Hysteria
Intelligent people, and I assume that includes Kerry, must begin to challenge the basic premise behind the post-9/11 hysteria. Terrorists may be a growing threat, and we may be unprepared to deal with the challenges they pose, but they have no hope of destroying our society. Only we can do that.
By overstating the threat and overreacting to incidents, we not only give terrorists exactly what they seek, but we seem to create a panicked environment that clouds our judgment when it comes to intelligence, propels us into military adventures abroad and distorts our priorities at home.
Americans should demand a certain level of competence and accountability from their government to protect them, but the Bush (and Kerry) approach is not securing a peaceful future. In fact, the entire war on terrorism, based on the false assumption that it is a war for our survival, seems to be feeding hatred and aggravating the fault lines.
We need to rethink this problem, pure and simple, and Kerry needs to unburden himself from the conventional wisdom.
Otherwise, for many in the Islamic world, Kerry's adoption of the Bush administration's worldview and strategies merely reinforces the idea that the United States is indeed the problem, that there is a clash of civilizations that only might can resolve and that Islam will be an American target no matter who is president. If reducing terrorist attacks is the goal, I can't imagine more dangerous perceptions to foster.
The United States would be safer with a Democratic political platform that demonstrated fundamental disagreement about our current course.
It's tough in a campaign season to stop worrying about the polling booth and start thinking afresh about national security. So here is one final argument against Kerry's muscle-bound "me-too-ism," an argument rooted in domestic, not foreign, policy concerns: For young people energized by the Howard Dean campaign, for liberals and the silent majority, Kerry's carbon-copy campaign conveys the impression that political involvement doesn't matter. Whether you back Kerry, stay home, vote for Ralph Nader or stick with the Bush team, the result will be the same.
If revitalizing American democracy and reinforcing its most precious values are our key objectives, I can't imagine a worse message for a Democratic presidential candidate to be sending.
-------- investigations
Reports on Attacks Are Gripping, Not Dry
June 20, 2004
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/politics/20panel.html
WASHINGTON, June 19 - In contrast to the plodding or self-promoting style of so many government documents, the staff reports of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have provided something truly rare in official Washington: a good read.
In 17 crisply worded reports, the commission staff laid out facts from the events that shook and marred the lives of millions. Using a style that is remarkably free of artifice, the authors achieved a high point in detail, clarity and coherence.
It is early yet to know if readability translates into influence. And staff members warn that there is still time for commissioners to clutter their prose before next month's final report and recommendation. But the reviews of the reports, including three more released this week, have been favorable.
"People are reading them," said Kristen Breitweiser, of Middletown, N.J., whose husband died in the World Trade Center. "I have been very surprised about how much interest there has been and how closely people are following along. We have received e-mails from all over the world."
A publisher, PublicAffairs, has already compiled the first 12 staff reports in a book.
"There are two points that make these reports unique," said Mark Danner, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California, Berkeley, and a contributor to The New Yorker. "One, there's a solid, clear narrative that provides a sense of drama, which makes it easier for reporters to do their jobs. Second, they not only have narrative drive, but they have official standing."
Commissions have been writing reports since government began. There are heavy tomes summing up the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Warren Commission's investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the Iran-contra scandal and the independent counsel's inquiry into the Clinton administration. But usually it has taken historians, biographers and filmmakers to make the topics come alive.
The Sept. 11 staff reports, in contrast, offer a gripping story the first time around. They are richly detailed and colorful, peppered with actual dialogue, gleaned from audiotapes, that provides an intimate view of that day's events.
The reports eavesdrop on a hijacker. ("Nobody move please. We are going back to the airport; don't try any stupid moves.") They visited an air traffic controller being pressed for a momentous decision. ("Uh, you know, everybody just left the room.") And they sat at Vice President Dick Cheney's elbow when he reported, coolly but mistakenly, that his order had downed two airplanes. ("That is correct. And it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out.")
Being presented in installments gave the reports a real-time excitement that was enhanced by the public hearings that accompanied them. For those truly steeped in the mysteries of the investigation, the incremental unveiling of the facts was akin to watching a television serial.
Peter Osnos, the publisher of PublicAffairs, said the chapter-like reports provided an unusual glimpse into an investigation still in progress.
Also rare for government documents on sensitive matters, the reports are mercifully devoid of redactions. Their language is precise, economical and highly authoritative.
For example, one report dismisses the Bush administration's assertion of an encounter in Prague between a Qaeda operative and an Iraqi intelligence official. ("We do not believe that such a meeting occurred.")
Mr. Osnos said the reports reflected the frank and nonpartisan style of the commission's chairmen, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey; and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana.
"We were fortunate to have two absolute straight-talkers in the second row," Mr. Osnos said. "They're not grandstanders."
Philip D. Zelikow, the commission's executive director, said the authors wanted their reports to be read.
"We wanted to draft material that people will want to read themselves," said Mr. Zelikow, who managed dozens of investigators researching and writing about Sept. 11. Part of the challenge, he said, was to produce a text from numerous authors and to make it uniform.
"You're both writing by committee and trying to avoid all the vices of writing by committee," he said.
Mr. Zelikow is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and a former State Department official and National Security Council staff member. He has written books based on the taped recordings of the Kennedy presidency and on German reunification.
His co-author on the second book, which is now a decade old, was Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, and that collaboration raised concern among some Sept. 11 family members about a potential conflict of interest.
Working at Mr. Zelikow's side was a deputy, Chris Kojm, a former aide to Mr. Hamilton, who was a writer and editor with the Foreign Policy Association in New York; and Daniel Marcus, the commission's general counsel, who is a former Justice Department official.
"There is no single, literary giant lurking behind our shoulders," Mr. Zelikow said.
John Files contributed reporting for this article.
--------
A Revised View of an Infamous Day
June 20, 2004
By PETER EDIDIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/weekinreview/20bigp.html
LAST week, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks released three reports, which offer a history of Al Qaeda and its planning for the attacks, as well as a description of how the authorities responded to the hijacking of four airplanes. The reports rely heavily on information provided by two top Al Qaeda members, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. They are being held in secret locations and have been subjected to highly coercive interrogations, leading some law enforcement and intelligence officials to look skeptically at their testimony. The 10-member panel is scheduled to submit its final report at the end of next month. Here are some findings disclosed last week.
The authorities were unprepared. Aviation and defense officials were completely unprepared for Sept. 11, one report concludes. Standard procedures for responding to a hijacking assumed, among other things, that the hijacked plane "would not attempt to disappear" and that the hijackers wouldn't "convert the aircraft into a guided missile." This proved false on Sept. 11, and "what ensued was the hurried attempt to created an improvised defense by officials who had never encountered or trained against the situation they faced.''
Iraq did not collaborate with Al Qaeda. The reports contradict one of President Bush's central justifications for the Iraq war: that Iraq supported Al Qaeda.
One report concluded: "Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda also occurred after bin Laden had returned to Afghanistan [from Sudan], but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.'' Mohammed Atta did not meet with Iraqi intelligence. One widely cited piece of evidence for an Iraq- Qaeda connection was a report from Czech intelligence officials that Mr. Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, met in Prague in April 2001 with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer. One report said, "We do not believe that such a meeting occurred,'' citing phone records and other evidence that Mr. Atta was in Florida at the time.
Iran may have collaborated with Al Qaeda. The reports cited evidence of ties between Al Qaeda and Iran, including "strong but indirect evidence" of possible collaboration in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia in which 19 Americans were killed. "A few years before the attack," one report said, "bin Laden's representatives and Iranian officials had discussed putting aside Shia-Sunni divisions to cooperate against the common enemy. A small group of Al Qaeda operatives subsequently traveled to Iran and Hezbollah camps in Lebanon for training in explosives, intelligence and security."
Osama bin Laden was actively involved. Mr. bin Laden had been previously depicted as relatively removed from the details of Al Qaeda's operations. In fact, prior to the defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, one report said, "bin Laden approved all Al Qaeda operations, often selecting the targets and operatives.''In the case of Sept. 11, he approved the selection of all 19 hijackers and ordered the attacks over the opposition of many of his advisers and of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader in Afghanistan.
The original attack plan was far larger. The idea for using airliners to attack the United States likely came from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who was behind the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Mr. Mohammed initially proposed "hijacking 10 planes to attack targets on both the East and West coasts of the United States. He claims that, in addition to the targets actually hit on 9/11, these hijacked plans were to be crashed into C.I.A. and F.B.I. headquarters, unidentified nuclear power plants, and the tallest buildings in California and Washington State."
Al Qaeda terrorist training was extensive. Between 1996 and Sept. 11, 2001, the commission staff estimates that thousands of men, "perhaps as many as 20,000," received training in camps supported by Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan. Only the most promising received "advanced terrorist training."
One report said: "According to a senior Al Qaeda associate, various ideas were floated by mujahedin in Afghanistan: taking over a launcher and forcing Russian scientists to fire a nuclear missile at the United States; mounting mustard gas or cyanide attacks against Jewish areas in Iran; dispensing poison gas into the air conditioning system of a targeted building; and last, but not least, hijacking an aircraft and crashing it into an airport terminal or nearby city."
The Sept. 11 attacks were cost effective. The attacks, which Mr. bin Laden believed "would reap Al Qaeda a recruiting and fund-raising bonanza,'' were estimated to cost $400,000 to $500,000 over two years. That was a fraction of Al Qaeda's annual budget at that time, which was estimated by the C.I.A., according to a commission report, at $30 million.
Al Qaeda has evolved. "Prior to 9/11, Al Qaeda was a centralized organization which used Afghanistan as a war room to strategize, plan attacks and dispatch operatives worldwide," one report said. It has since evolved into a "loose collection of regional networks, " the report continued.
--------
Facts vs. fiction
Boston Globe
By Thomas Oliphant
June 20, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/06/20/facts_vs_fiction/
WASHINGTON NOW THAT President Bush and co-president Cheney have backed themselves into a corner with statements about Iraq and terrorism that aren't credible, it's interesting to watch them squirm. ADVERTISEMENT
Bush has an entertaining habit of confusing assertion with argument. For example: "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda."
The logic here is breath-taking.
Cheney is, as ever, more elliptical. Cornered for a change, he is striking out at the press, preferring not to take on the 9/11 Commission whose evidence (more to the point, its absence of any) exposes his pre-invasion and post-invasion hype and, shall we say, misstatements.
His initial line is that the press is hateful because it is confusing an important issue -- namely, that the absence of any information linking the former Iraqi regime to the 9/11 attacks is not the same as any assertion that there was no "tie" between Osama bin Laden's murderous organization and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Confronted with the point that the 9/11 Commission's staff report last week asserts no credible evidence of a "collaborative relationship" between the two, Cheney is trapped. To escape, he says that the 9/11 Commission is wrong, he knows more secret stuff than it does but can't get into specifics.
What Bush and Cheney are doing is what they have been doing since the summer of 2002 -- confusing the concepts of war in Iraq and war on terrorism. In fact, Bush and Cheney have always made it a point to emphasize that their concept of a nation at war is defined as a war against terror -- almost never Iraq.
The result has been -- up to now at least -- an administration-created confusion between the two, resolved by many Americans in favor of a linkage. Just prior to the invasion of Iraq in March of last year, more than two-thirds of the public believed that Iraq was directly involved in the attacks on this country. I don't remember Bush or Cheney doing anything to disabuse the public of this idea, though there are several incidents where they did all they could to encourage it.
All these months later, the percentage of Americans who still believe this fiction has cracked the 50 percent barrier on the way down. In the view of Bush reelection strategists, it cannot fall much further without further undermining the views of nearly half the public that the invasion was worth its subsequent cost. The administration has already spent six months trying to accommodate the truth that, again contrary to its assertions, Iraq had no stockpiled, ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction at the time of the invasion; the political team's view is that it can't take another hit of this nature.
That is why Bush and Cheney are pushing back so hard -- and lamely -- with their assertion that there was indeed a "relationship" or a "tie" of several years' duration between Saddam and Osama.
Specifics refute the contention. Bush, programmed as he is, can only manage the silly assertion that "high-level" people from the two sides met in the Sudan. According to the 9/11 Commission, this was in 1994, at the time that terrorist-supporting state was trying to persuade Osama to stop trying to topple the secular Iraqi regime, which he despised. An Iraqi intelligence official had to make three trips to the place before he could see the terrorist, who wanted help in getting equipment, weapons, and training bases. To the day Saddam's regime crumbled there was no evidence that Iraq ever responded, and there is also no evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda ever collaborated on anything, anywhere, anytime.
Cheney's contribution has been repeated ever since a few weeks after the terrorist attacks: peddling an uncorroborated assertion by one Czech intelligence official that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta had been seen five months before meeting with an Iraqi agent in Prague. The 9/11 Commission, citing physical and documentary evidence, said the facts indicate Atta was already here by then and had never left.
Cheney feeds the opinion polls with this garbage, and then wiggles on the hook by claiming that he can spread the tale because it hasn't been refuted. I trust real decisions on security matters are not made in such a slipshod, duplicitous fashion.
Cheney and Bush are squealing so much because the unmasking of their fiction about Iraq is one more shot into the solar plexus of their diminishing credibility -- and in the president's reelection campaign, credibility is a major route to the independent-minded voters who will probably decide the election.
Cheney and Bush, in short, have been caught in a lie, and that is why they are squealing.
Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.
-------- propaganda wars
Academy still uneasy with claim of Cold War triumph
washtimes
June 20, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/books/20040619-104223-6594r.htm
A significant cadre of historians cannot abide the idea that the United States won the Cold
War. More than 70 years after Russia became a communist state and proclaimed that its goal and destiny was to vanquish all forms of capitalism, after nearly 50 years of conflict - often covert, occasionally via proxies and always ideological - during which the USSR proclaimed that its social system was the model for the rest of the world, the communist system imploded in its heartland.
To any rational observer, this looks like a pretty clear-cut result. More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet empire, however, Ellen Schrecker, a well-known scholar at Yeshiva University, gathered a group of like-minded academics to denounce Cold War triumphalism and lament "the misuse of history after the fall of communism."
The introduction and 10 essays included in this volume agree that the Cold War was morally ambiguous, unnecessary, and destructive, and that its outcome is no cause for celebration or even satisfaction.
As with any collection of articles, there are differences and nuances among the contributors. Ms. Schrecker is upset that the collapse of the USSR was hailed as "a great victory for the United States." Leo Ribuffo of George Washington University takes on the claim that America was morally superior to the USSR, suggesting that the question of whether Nikita Khrushchev was morally inferior to LBJ or Richard Nixon is not an easy one to answer.
Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago doesn't think it was much of a battle; the United States did not defeat " a worthy adversary" but "a defensive and brittle movement that aspired to essentially the same things as 'the last man' of contemporary couch-potatoism."
Michael Bernstein of the University of California, San Diego, is sure that the defeat of the USSR heralded a "stunning defeat" for the American economy, while Nelson Lichtenstein of the University of California, Santa Barbara, sees the growth of "free-market triumphalism" as the most important legacy of the end of the Cold War.
Regardless of the details, all of the contributors concur that America's victory was a hollow one - if it was a victory at all. They are in general agreement that the American claim to have been defending freedom and democracy against totalitarianism was a sham.
American foreign policy, the editor argues, was based on militarism, foreign adventurism and capitalism (which is decidedly not a virtue). The Cold War stunted economic growth, starved domestic projects, transferred political power from civilized parts of the country like the East and Midwest to the "gunbelt" - the South and California - and led to the decline of American manufacturing.
These disasters are not simply attributable to the Cold War; "racism, sexism and corporate greed shaped American institutions just as effectively."
Once again, there are nuances. Chalmers Johnson of the Japan Policy Research Institute sensibly differentiates the results of the Cold War in Europe from Asia, although his condemnation of the United States for collaborating with "corrupt, brutal and incompetent" Asian dictators in preference to being on the right side of history with such paragons of honesty, kindness and efficiency as Kim Il Sung or Mao Tse-tung might give a few readers pause.
Several writers muse about missed opportunities to avoid the Cold War. Carolyn Eisenberg of Hofstra University insists that the Soviets never imposed a complete blockade on Berlin, and that the airlift to feed the city was not about freedom but the Western desire to create a West German government in violation of the Yalta and Potsdam agreements.
She argues that the United States missed a chance to strike a deal with Joseph Stalin, who never "intended to transform all these places [Eastern European states] into mini-Soviet states or . . . expected to dominate them for very long." It was American policy that forced him into it.
Jessica Wang of the University of California, Los Angeles, laments that the United States blocked efforts aimed at "fundamentally reworking the structures of the international system, surpassing the political limitations of the nation-state system and putting an end to military conflict" by first dominating and then ignoring the United Nations, all the while pursuing "an aggressively U.S.-centered foreign policy."
Although it is a minor point, animus towards Israel makes its obligatory appearance. Ms. Wang pauses from her praise of the Bandung Non-Aligned Nations Conference of 1955 and the calls of Indonesia's Sukarno and Egypt's Gamal Abdal Nasser for respect for human rights to note that the Arab states present there especially emphasized the United Nations' "failing to uphold human rights in Palestine."
Since there was no Israeli occupation of "Palestine" at the time, and since Israel was the only democracy in the Middle East, and not one Arab state recognized its right to exist, she unintentionally demonstrates the ideological posturing that underlies this effort.
Mr. Johnson attributes the current intifada to Israel's decision to abandon "all efforts to achieve peace with the Palestinians and instead attack them with tanks and helicopter gunships," as if Yasser Arafat's determination to destroy the Oslo Accords and walk away from the peace process never happened.
And that, ultimately, is what makes reading the essays in this book so uninteresting and useless. That American foreign policy during the Cold War was sometimes mistaken or deluded is not something that any responsible "triumphalist" would deny. That aspects of Cold War culture and ideology were simplistic or mistaken or exaggerated is no doubt true.
But to ignore or minimize the fundamental moral and ideological divide between communism and democracy, or to spin fantasies about the benign intentions of mass murderers, is not to correct the misuses of history but to add to them.
In an earlier book on McCarthyism, Ellen Schrecker denounced all forms of anti-communism as species of that disease. Here, she takes to task historians who adopt a "Manichean" view of the world and denounces "misleading analogies" that distort our views of the past.
Only in the academy could the triumph of Western democracies over Soviet communism be the cause of hand-wringing and regrets, or could simplistic slogans and claims be promoted as complex and sophisticated.
Harvey Klehr is the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University.
-------- us politics
Analysis 9/11 Panel's Findings Vault Bush Credibility To Campaign Forefront
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54702-2004Jun19.html
The White House's swift and sustained reaction last week to the preliminary findings of the Sept. 11, 2001, commission showed the potential threat the 10-member panel poses to President Bush's reelection prospects.
After the commission staff released its findings Wednesday that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda -- challenging an assertion Bush and Vice President Cheney have made for the past two years -- Bush declared again that there was, in fact, a relationship.
Democratic and Republican strategists agree that many details of the controversy do not pose a grave threat to Bush's reelection chances.
The significance, rather, is whether Bush's Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), can use the commission's findings to split the Iraq war from the war on terrorism in the public's mind, and, more broadly, raise doubts about Bush's credibility and competence by building on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction and the miscalculations about the Iraqi resistance.
Bush has long sought to link the Iraq invasion to his popular war on terrorism after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With the commission's final report due on July 26 -- as the Democratic convention begins -- Kerry is already trying to use the panel's findings to his advantage to decouple the Iraq war from the post-9/11 U.S. retaliation in Afghanistan.
"The 9/11 report is just one more issue that casts doubt on the truthfulness of this White House," said Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's campaign spokeswoman. "This White House is operating under a cloud of secrecy, and the American people have lost the ability to trust them."
Late last week, commission leaders invited Cheney to provide intelligence reports that would buttress the White House's insistence that there were close ties between Hussein and al Qaeda, a commission member said. Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton told the New York Times they wanted to see any additional information in the administration's possession after Cheney said Thursday in a television interview that he "probably" knew things about Iraq's ties to terrorists that the commission did not.
The panel also wants to follow up its questioning of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and outgoing CIA Director George J. Tenet. The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that Tenet, who leaves office in July, had agreed to be re-interviewed, and the commission might submit written questions to Rice.
Many Republicans are furious about the commission -- though its members are evenly split between the two parties and it is chaired by a Republican appointed by Bush. They say that Bush was right to oppose the commission in the first place, and that House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was right this year when he unsuccessfully fought an extension of the commission's deadline.
The panel has become "a tool for partisan politics," Rep. Eric I. Cantor (Va.), a member of the House Republican leadership, charged in an interview last week. "With the latest commission finding coming out that there were allegedly no ties between Hussein and al Qaeda, I think they are totally off their mission, and I think that's indicative of the political partisanship."
Bush so far has survived challenges to his war rationale, and most Americans believe the war in Iraq was worth fighting. Still, the debate over the war, and the credibility of Bush's justifications, has kept the president's reelection campaign on the defensive and limited coverage of favorable news domestically such as a steady improvement in the economy and jobs growth. "We're challenged by the fact that there's been so much in terms of world events that we haven't gotten much out" on the economy, a senior Bush campaign aide said. "How do we fight this wave of events in a very crowded news climate?"
Indeed, the past four announcements of expanding payrolls have been overshadowed. The commission and its related disputes, said Republican pollster David Winston, are "complicating things, because this administration wants to get out information about how the economy is doing."
Bush aides have sought to blunt the Democratic offensive not by challenging the commission's findings but by arguing that Kerry and the media have mischaracterized the findings. The White House issued a 1,000-word document titled "TALKING POINTS: 9-11 Commission Staff Report Confirms Administration's Views of al-Qaeda/Iraq Ties."
"The 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion as the administration regarding ties between Iraq and al Qaeda," campaign communications director Nicolle Devenish said. She said this is Kerry's "desperate attempt to put a negative spin on what was broad consensus between the administration and the commission."
Similarly, Cheney, on CNBC, said the media had been irresponsible in reporting the commission's findings. "What they [the commission] were addressing was whether or not they [Iraq] were involved in 9/11," he said. "They did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in other areas, in other ways."
In fact, commission spokesman Al Felzenberg on Friday confirmed that the commission was addressing the broader relationship. "We found no evidence of joint operations or joint work or common operations between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government, and that's beyond 9/11," he said.
One reason for this sensitivity can be found in a poll last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. The poll found improved support for Bush and for the Iraq war -- in large part because Americans have been paying less attention to the war and more to other issues, such as the death of Ronald Reagan. The commission, however, has helped to return national attention to the disputed justifications for the Iraq war.
In particular, the poll showed that Americans are beginning to decouple the war in Iraq from the war on terrorism -- a belief that could be aided by the commission's dismissal of cooperation between Iraq and al Qaeda. Still, Andrew Kohut, who directs the poll, predicts Bush will be able to keep al Qaeda and Iraq tied in the public's mind; about half believe such a connection has been proved, various polls indicate. "So many people believe it because he's saying it," Kohut said. "Bush's hanging tough on this gives him the credibility he has."
Democrats, however, hope to gain critical mass in their effort to convince the public that Bush is untrustworthy by extending the charge that Bush has misled the country not just about al Qaeda but about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the torture of prisoners in Iraq, and even the U.S. economy. In one sign of the assault, 27 former diplomats and military commanders -- some Republicans -- issued a statement last week condemning Bush's foreign policy as "overbearing," "insensitive" and "disdainful," and urging Bush's defeat.
Jim Jordan, Kerry's former campaign manager and now coordinator of an anti-Bush advertising effort, said the commission painted "a pretty startling portrait of administration fecklessness" -- and one that Democrats think they can turn into a major campaign theme.
"The issue," Jordan said, "is trust and [Bush's] competence."
-------- OTHER
-------- health
Walking guru offers easy way to burn fat
By GAIL SCHONTZLER,
Bozeman Daily Chronicle Staff Writer,
Sunday, June 20, 2004
http://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2004/06/19/news/msubzbigs.txt
If you want to lose one pound of fat a month, there's a cheap and easy way to do it, says walking guru Robert Sweetgall.
All it takes is adding 17 minutes of walking or other physical activity to your daily routine, Sweetgall said Thursday at Montana State University.
"Walking may be the easiest, simplest activity you can do for the rest of your life," said Sweetgall, 57, a lecturer and author from McCall, Idaho.
Sweetgall is himself, "a real Forrest Gump," said Katie Bark, nutritionist with Montana Team Nutrition, part of the state school lunch program.
He has walked through all 50 states, logging more than 11,000 miles in one year, and written 17 books on wellness and walking. His talk to about 50 teachers and community members was sponsored by Montana Team Nutrition and the Montana Behavior Initiative's Summer Institute.
In the accents of his native New York, Sweetgall described how he started out as a pudgy kid nicknamed "Butterball." He graduated in chemical engineering and after college worked on plutonium projects.
But in 1981, after several family members had died of heart disease, he quit a good-paying job to start a foundation and walk across the nation in a one-man publicity campaign for healthier living.
Walking may be simple but it has far-reaching benefits, Sweetgall said. It strengthens the heart, improves metabolism, burns body fat, makes stronger bones, lowers blood pressure and stress, reduces the risk of cancer and diabetes, slows down aging and improves memory, Sweetgall said.
It can be fun, sociable, even spiritual.
"Getting out in the fresh air can help you understand the meaning of life," he said.
He cited large-scale scientific studies that found that the people who live longest and have the lowest mortality from chronic disease are those who exercise by walking five miles per day or the equivalent.
Couch potatoes have the highest death rates. People who walk one mile a day do better. Two miles is better still. And three miles provides nearly as much benefit as five miles.
Walking three miles is 6,000 steps a day.
To see if they're getting that much exercise, he urged people to use digital pedometers, which record how many steps people take a day and how many calories they burn.
Public schools are leaving children behind if they cut recess or exercise to try to raise students' test scores, Sweetgall argued. Getting kids outside for 15 to 25 minutes every morning would help them be healthier and smarter, he said.
Sweetgall also urged people to be thoughtful about food.
Burning the calories in a single M&M candy, he said, requires walking the length of an entire football field, including the end zones. A Miller beer would take 36 football fields.
His other tips for walkers: Running shoes are often better than walking shoes. Acrylic-nylon socks are much better than cotton.
"Every step in your life," Sweetgall said, "adds to your health."
-------- ACTIVISTS
A Horse and Rider With a Message of Peace
With Her Life on Hold, S.C. Woman Heading for New York Stops for Prayer
By Arielle Levin Becker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 20, 2004; Page C03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54901-2004Jun19.html
Catherine Hunter said she was not expecting the answer to her prayers.
She said she prayed for guidance in December 2002 and asked what she should do in her life. "When I got, 'Get on your horse and ride around the country to talk about peace, my response was, 'What? Who, me?' "
Hunter, 46, said she had never considered herself a peace activist, and for a few months, the Gowansville, S.C., resident wondered how she would eat, where she would stay and how she would keep her horse safe. Eventually, she said, the wondering became stressful, so she put off a book of fiction she had been writing, sold all but four pieces of furniture, her truck and a box of clothes, and wrote down what she would tell people about peace. On Oct. 25, she mounted Count of War, the 19-year-old thoroughbred she has raised since its birth, and, calling herself the Peace Rider, left for New York's Ground Zero.
After stopping for the winter near Asheville, N.C., Hunter saddled up. She completed one milestone on her journey yesterday as she rode Count of War to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the National World War II Memorial. Dressed in black, from shoes to cowboy hat and the studs with the silver peace symbols in her ears, Hunter led a prayer circle and spoke to small groups at each monument about her journey.
Hunter hopes to arrive at Ground Zero in 25 to 30 days. Afterward, she said, she will travel -- by trailer -- to North Carolina, where she plans to return to writing and teaching riding, and continue talking about peace. Hunter said Count of War was named for his ancestors Count Fleet and Man O' War
About 10 people joined Hunter on the grass behind the Vietnam Memorial yesterday. Some belonged to the D.C. Anti-War Network. Laurel Jensen of Alexandria filmed Hunter for a documentary about dissent.
Hunter, who said her lodging -- and that of Count of War -- has been taken care of by an informal network of horse people, told the group that her trip was a spiritual journey, not a political protest.
She said the Iraq war could be put in a positive light: "I see for the first time in the history of our culture, across the world, people are uniting in protest and calling for peace."
Hunter then said she believed that world peace could be achieved through inner peace and described four elements to inner peace: suspending judgment, replacing fear with faith, forgiving, and following divine guidance.
Hunter picked up more of an audience at the World War II Memorial, where passersby stopped to pet her horse or watch her speak.
She said she was particularly touched by the reaction she received from a man wearing a VFW hat, who skeptically asked her what she was doing. When she told him she was riding for peace in a spiritual mission, he said he appreciated it and asked her to say a prayer at Ground Zero for him. The people she has met along her journey have ranged from those who agree with her perspective or are fascinated by her horse to those who, like the man yesterday, seem dubious at first but become supportive when they understand her mission, Hunter said.
"I think when people realize that I'm not protesting anything and I'm just for world peace and I'm not against the war or anything like that, they're okay," she said. "Who can't get on board with world peace?"
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Will Michael Moore's Facts Check Out?
June 20, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/movies/20SHEN.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
MICHAEL MOORE is not coy about his hopes for "Fahrenheit 9/11," his blistering documentary attack on President Bush and the war in Iraq. He wants it to be remembered as the first big-audience, election-year film that helped unseat a president.
"And it's not just a hope," the Oscar-winning filmmaker said in a phone interview last week, describing focus groups in Michigan in April at which, after seeing the movie, previously undecided voters expressed eagerness to defeat Mr. Bush. "We found that if you entered the theater on the fence, you fell off it somewhere during those two hours," he said. "It ignites a fire in people who had given up."
The movie's indictment of the president is nothing if not sprawling. Mr. Moore suggests that Mr. Bush and his administration jeopardized national security in an effort to placate Bush family cronies in Saudi Arabia, that the White House helped members of Mr. bin Laden's family to flee the United States after Sept. 11 and that the administration manipulated terrorism alert levels in order to scare Americans into supporting the invasion of Iraq.
Mr. Moore's previous films generated a cottage industry of conservative commentators eager to prove sloppiness and exaggeration in his films; a handful of mainstream critics have also found flaws. But if "Fahrenheit 9/11" attracts the audience Mr. Moore and his distributors are predicting, Mr. Moore may face an onslaught of fact-checking unlike anything he - or any other documentary filmmaker - has ever experienced. After all, White House officials and the Bush family began impugning the film even before any of them had seen it.
"Outrageously false," said Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, last month when told about the film's assertion of a sinister connection between Mr. Bush and the family of Osama bin Laden. The former president George H. W. Bush was quoted in The New York Daily News calling Mr. Moore a "slime ball" and describing the documentary as "a vicious personal attack on our son."
So how will Mr. Moore's movie stand up under close examination? Is the film's depiction of Mr. Bush as a lazy and duplicitous leader, blinded by his family's financial ties to Arab moneymen and the Saudi Arabian royal family, true to fact?
Mr. Moore and his distributors have refused to circulate copies of the film and its script before the film's release this Friday; his production team said that as of last Wednesday, there was no final script because the film was still undergoing minor editing - for clarity, they said, not accuracy.
After a year spent covering the federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, I was recently allowed to attend a Hollywood screening. Based on that single viewing, and after separating out what is clearly presented as Mr. Moore's opinion from what is stated as fact, it seems safe to say that central assertions of fact in "Fahrenheit 9/11" are supported by the public record (indeed, many of them will be familiar to those who have closely followed Mr. Bush's political career).
Mr. Moore is on firm ground in arguing that the Bushes, like many prominent Texas families with oil interests, have profited handsomely from their relationships with prominent Saudis, including members of the royal family and of the large and fabulously wealthy bin Laden clan, which has insisted it long ago disowned Osama. Mr. Moore spends several minutes in the film documenting ties between the president and James R. Bath, a financial advisor to a prominent member of the bin Laden family who was an original investor in Mr. Bush's Arbusto energy company and who served with the future president in the Air National Guard in the early 1970's. The Bath friendship, which indirectly links Mr. Bush to the family of the world's most notorious terrorist, has received less attention from national news organization than it has from reporters in Texas, but it has been well documented.
Mr. Moore charges that President Bush and his aides paid too little attention to warnings in the summer of 2001 that Al Qaeda was about to attack, including a detailed Aug. 6, 2001, C.I.A. briefing that warned of terrorism within the country's borders. In its final report next month, the Sept. 11 commission can be expected to offer support to this assertion. Mr. Moore says that instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, the president spent 42 percent of his first eight months in office on vacation; the figure came not from a conspiracy-hungry Web site but from a calculation by The Washington Post.
The most valid criticisms of the film are likely to involve the artful way that Mr. Moore connects the facts, and whether he has left out others that might undermine his scalding attack. A great many statistics fly by in the movie - such as assertions that 6 percent to 7 percent of the United States is owned by Saudi Arabians, and that Saudi companies have paid more than $1.4 billion to Bush family interests. But Mr. Moore doesn't explain how he arrived at them, or what these vague interests comprise. Mr. Moore and his team say they have news reports and other evidence to back up the numbers and that it will be posted on his Web site (www.michaelmoore.com) after the film's release.
Mr. Moore may also be criticized for the way he portrays the evacuation of the extended bin Laden family from the United States after Sept. 11. As the Sept. 11 commission has found, the Saudi government was able to pull strings at senior levels of the Bush administration to help the bin Ladens leave the United States. But while the film clearly suggests that the flights occurred at a time when all air traffic was grounded immediately after the attacks ("Even Ricky Martin couldn't fly," Mr. Moore says over video of the singer wandering in an airport lobby), the Sept. 11 commission said in a report this April that there was "no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace" and that the F.B.I. had concluded that no one aboard the flights was involved in Sept. 11.
In conversation, Mr. Moore defended the scene, saying his goal was to show how the White House was eager to bend and break the rules for Saudi friends - in this case, the extended family of the terrorist who had just brought down the twin towers and attacked the Pentagon. And as reporters have found, the White House still refuses to document fully how the flights were arranged.
"I don't want to get lost in the forest because of a single tree," Mr. Moore said. "The main point I want people to go away with is that these people got special treatment because they were bin Ladens or Saudi royals, and you and I would never have been given that treatment."
Mr. Moore may also have to defend his portrayal of Mr. Bush's presidency as sinking prior to Sept. 11, citing an inability to win support for his legislation. But he fails to mention that in May, Congress agreed to Mr. Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut, the centerpiece of his legislative agenda. Mr. Moore said that his review of news coverage before Sept. 11 shows that, with or without the tax cut, the Bush presidency was floundering before the terrorist attacks. Mr. Moore said, "I've read what other people wrote and said at the time, and he was definitely on the ropes."
MR. MOORE usually revels in his role as the target of conservative attacks, and his delight in playing the mischievous, little-guy bomb-thrower has brought him fame, wealth and the devotion of fans more interested in rhetorical force than precision. But with "Fahrenheit" he has taken on his biggest and best-defended target yet, and his production staff says that on his orders they have taken no chances in checking and double-checking the film, knowing Bush supporters would pounce on factual mistakes.
Mr. Moore is readying for a conservative counterattack, saying he has created a political-style "war room" to offer an instant response to any assault on the film's credibility. He has retained Chris Lehane, a Democratic Party strategist known as a master of the black art of "oppo," or opposition research, used to discredit detractors. He also hired outside fact-checkers, led by a former general counsel of The New Yorker and a veteran member of that magazine's legendary fact-checking team, to vet the film. And he is threatening to go one step further, saying he has consulted with lawyers who can bring defamation suits against anyone who maligns the film or damages his reputation. "We want the word out," says Mr. Moore, who says he should have responded more quickly to allegations of inaccuracy in his Oscar-winning 2002 anti-gun documentary, "Bowling for Columbine." "Any attempts to libel me will be met by force," he said, not an ounce of humor in his familiar voice. "The most important thing we have is truth on our side. If they persist in telling lies, knowingly telling a lie with malice, then I'll take them to court."
As proof of its scrupulousness, the Moore team cites adjustments it made to the film's portrayal of Attorney General John Ashcroft. The film is brutal to Mr. Ashcroft, depicting him as a glassy-eyed architect of efforts to shred the Constitution, who became Attorney General only after he proved himself so unpopular in his home state of Missouri that he lost a Senate race to a former Democratic governor who died in a plane crash a month before election day. "Voters preferred the dead guy," Mr. Moore deadpans in the film, a line that drew belly laughs at recent preview screenings. (In reality, voters knew they were in effect casting ballots for the governor's widow).
An earlier version of the film, however, included a reference to a widely circulated charge, broadcast by CBS News in July 2001, that Mr. Ashcroft had received warning of threats and stopped flying on commercial airlines. Tia Lessin, supervising producer of "Fahrenheit 9/11," said the reference to the CBS report was cut after Mr. Moore's fact-checking team found evidence that Mr. Ashcroft had flown commercially at least twice that summer.
"We have gone through every single word of this film - literally every word - and verified its accuracy," said Joanne Doroshow, a public interest lawyer and filmmaker who shared in a 1993 Oscar for documentaries and who joined the fact-checking effort last month. Ms. Doroshow is responsible for preparing what she calls a "fact-checking bible," with material ranging from newspaper and magazine articles to copies of the Federal Register, that will allow the film's lawyers and publicists to provide backup for its allegations.
That said, Mr. Moore's fact-checkers does not view the film as straight reportage. "This is an Op-Ed piece, it's not a news report," said Dev Chatillon, the former general counsel for The New Yorker. "This is not The New York Times, it's not a network news report. The facts have to be right, yes, but this is an individual's view of current events. And I'm a very firm believer that it is within everybody's right to examine the actions of their government."
Besides, it may turn out that the most talked-about moments in the film are the least impeachable. Mr. Moore makes extensive use of obscure footage from White House and network-news video archives, including long scenes that capture President Bush at his least articulate. For the White House, the most devastating segment of "Fahrenheit 9/11" may be the video of a befuddled-looking President Bush staying put for nearly seven minutes at a Florida elementary school on the morning of Sept. 11, continuing to read a copy of "My Pet Goat" to schoolchildren even after an aide has told him that a second plane has struck the twin towers. Mr. Bush's slow, hesitant reaction to the disastrous news has never been a secret. But seeing the actual footage, with the minutes ticking by, may prove more damaging to the White House than all the statistics in the world.
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