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NUCLEAR
World's nuclear powers decried as hypocrites
Transformer Fire Shuts Down Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant
Ex-Hunt Valve manager charged with defrauding government
DR Congo sends reinforcements to volatile east: official
Radioactive mud dumped in The Hague
Ranks breaking over North Korea
Conference hears of nuclear terrorism threats
Yucca nuclear dump funding plan draws industry ire
MILITARY
BBC takes radio news lead in Iraq
Security firm's $293m deal under scrutiny
Plan puts Colombia on offensive
Colombia's opportunity
British Sailors to Face Charges, Iran TV Says
In Iran, Terrorism Remains A Matter of Perspective
Three British Patrol Boats, Eight Sailors Held by Iran
Iran Seizes 3 British Navy Boats and Detains 8 Sailors
In Iran, Terrorism Remains A Matter of Perspective
U.S. Official Cites 'Progress' but Sees G.I.'s in Iraq for Years
Death Stalks An Experiment In Democracy
'Bush Is a Great Actor'
U.S. Envoy Wants Israel Settlement Freeze
Israel's Intelligence Scandal
Palestinians Wary of Egypt's Role in Gaza
Four die in crash of two Bolivian air force planes
Slovakia's new president opposes troop withdrawal from Iraq
Ukrainian parliament approves military reform
Russia, NATO, hold joint antiterrorist wargame in Kaliningrad enclave
Bomb wounds Turkish officer
Pakistan military starts month-long war games
Rules on Prisoners Seen as Sending Mixed Messages to G.I.'s
U.S. Approved Use of Dogs Against Prisoners
Armed clashes erupt in Russian republic near Chechnya
Rebel Raid Near Chechnya Is Said to Kill at Least 75 People
Starship Private Enterprise
Manned Private Craft Reaches Space in a Milestone for Flight
Developing a 'robust space industry'
Bush Considers Replacing C.I.A. Chief More Quickly
International Man of Mystery
Pentagon: Methods were OKd
NATO Tries Ads, Again, to Capture War Suspect
Will the World Give US War Crimes Immunity?
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Refusing to Give Name a Crime
Justices Uphold a Nevada Law Requiring Citizens to Identify
Accused of Aiding Terror Plot, Lawyer Braces for Fight of Her Life
Court backs police on showing of ID
A Scenario Where Questions Linger
Fairfax orders Patriot Act impact study
House Bill Would Enforce Patriot Act Secrecy Clause
US FBI director wants anti-terror alliance along the lines of NATO
Egyptian Man to Remain Jailed
State Dept. to Release Revised Terror Report
POLITICS
Judge Says Generals Can Be Questioned In Abu Ghraib Case
Top Commanders in Iraq Will Testify in Abuse Cases
White House Plans to Release Interrogation Documents Today
Board Upholds R Rating for 'Fahrenheit'
Senate Backs Ban on Photos of G.I. Coffins
Bill Clinton Loses His Cool in Democracy Now!
Bush Loses Advantage in War on Terrorism
Nader Picks Green Party Running Mate
Nader picks Camejo as running mate
ENERGY
What incentives are there for homeowners and businesses
Port of Los Angeles opens green shipping terminal
OTHER
Kerry Voices Support for Stem Cell Funding
Kerry Vows to Lift Bush Limits on Stem-Cell Research
U.N. Agency Says Africa on Brink of Massive Polio Outbreak
ACTIVISTS
Hostage Video Ignites Protest in S. Korea
-------- NUCLEAR
World's nuclear powers decried as hypocrites
UN agency chief says reliance cripples push to halt proliferation
By Bryan Bender,
Boston Globe Staff,
June 22, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2004/06/22/worlds_nuclear_powers_decried_as_hypocrites/
WASHINGTON -- The world's nuclear powers have failed to reduce their reliance on atomic weapons, creating a double standard that plagues international efforts to reduce their spread, the United Nations top nuclear watchdog said yesterday.
With the growing availability of weapons of mass destruction materials and expertise to states and terrorist groups, one of the largest obstacles to countering nuclear proliferation is the hypocrisy at the heart of global nuclear policy, said Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The nuclear powers pressuring countries like Iran and North Korea to forgo nuclear arms are clinging to the weapons as the centerpiece of their own security, despite pledges more than 30 years ago to reduce their dependence on them, he said.
The time is long overdue to "abandon the unworkable notion that it is morally reprehensible for some countries to pursue nuclear weapons but morally acceptable for others to rely on them," ElBaradei said in a speech to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
ElBaradei's agency is responsible for verifying that nuclear treaties are followed, and has received high marks from around the world for his dogged efforts to rein in Iran and Libya's programs. He is awaiting the outcome of six-party talks with North Korea to restart inspections there.
But he said recent attempts to keep nations from developing nuclear weapons are seriously hampered by the fact that the very countries pressuring them are themselves no closer -- and possibly even further -- from reversing their own nuclear ambitions.
He called on the international community to establish a new strategy for "verified, irreversible nuclear disarmament."
Such a goal is required by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty signed more than three decades ago that called on the declared nuclear states -- the United States, Russia, China, Britain, and France -- to take immediate steps toward full nuclear disarmament.
Many government officials and specialists say such a lofty goal is unrealistic. There are currently more than 30,000 useable nuclear weapons around the globe, according to UN estimates.
ElBaradei said the United States' search for a new class of nuclear weapons is a prime example of this double standard, which some specialists say deepens desires by other countries to join the club of nuclear powers.
"If such efforts proceed, it is hard to understand how we can continue to ask the nuclear have-nots to accept additional nonproliferation obligations and to renounce any sensitive nuclear capability as being adverse to their security," he said at a conference of international nonproliferation specialists.
Taking steps to reduce the US reliance on these weapons will be a primary focus of a speech today by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. Kennedy, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, will call on the Bush administration to end its work on developing a bunker-busting "mininuke" in making a series of proposals to beef up international nonproliferation efforts.
"They don't strengthen our military options, and they send precisely the wrong signal to the world about America's nuclear intentions," the senator will say, according to a draft of his speech.
These activities have also made it more difficult to persuade undeclared nuclear powers such as India, Pakistan, and Israel to come to the negotiating table, according to ElBaradei.
ElBaradei described an international community that, despite the nature of the nuclear threat, has taken a haphazard approach to dealing with the problem.
"The trend has been toward inaction or late action on the part of the international community, selective invocation of norms and treaties, and unilateral and self-help solutions on the part of individual states or group of states," he said. "Against this background of insecurity and instability, it should not come as a surprise to witness the continued interest . . . in the acquisition of nuclear weapons."
Bryan Bender can be reached atbender@globe.com.
-------- accidents and safety
Transformer Fire Shuts Down Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant
June 22, 2004
VERNON, Vermont, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-22-09.asp#anchor3
Nuclear inspectors are still working to determine what caused two fires at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant that forced a hot shutdown of the plant and an emergency declaration on Friday. The power plant is still out of service.
On Friday at 6:50 am, an unusual event was declared at Vermont Yankee due to a fire in the electrical conduits leading to the main transformer, which is located outside the plant in an area adjacent to the turbine building. There was also a small fire inside the turbine building that was quickly extinguished. Plant systems responded as designed and the reactor was safely shut down, said the plant operator, Entergy.
An unusual event is the lowest level of emergency as defined by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. NRC regulations require that an unusual event be declared at any nuclear plant where there is a fire that lasts longer than 10 minutes.
The transformer fire was extinguished at 7:17 am with no injuries and "no release of radiation to the environment," Entergy said.
The plant's emergency responders were the first firefighters on the scene. Fire departments from Vernon, Guilford and Brattleboro, Vermont and the town of Northfield, Massachusetts also responded. The unusual event was terminated at 12:45 pm.
The NRC reported, "All emergency core cooling systems and their emergency diesel generators are fully operable if needed. Reactor vessel water level is being maintained at its proper level."
A representative from the state fire marshal's office was at Vermont Yankee Friday working with the plant's emergency responders to determine the cause of the fire. Plant management is conducting a root-cause analysis of the event and assessing damage. At present there are no estimates of when the plant will come back on-line.
As a result of the fire, between 10 and 20 gallons of transformer oil entered the Connecticut River through a storm drain near the plant. Vermont Yankee has placed protective booms in the river to contain the materials, which have formed a thin sheen on the surface of the water in the immediate vicinity of the plant, Entergy said.
Clean Harbors, a company that specializes in cleaning up oil and chemicals spills, is on-site and performing remedial actions, including cleaning oil from the rocks on the river bank where the storm drain enters the river.
The environmental engineering firm of Normandeau Associates was called to the scene and found no damage to fish or other wildlife near the plant. Normandeau will monitor any environmental impacts on the river over the next several weeks.
Entergy Vermont Yankee Site Vice President Jay Thayer said, ''The most important issue is that there have been no injuries or threats to the public health or safety as a result of today's fire,'' he said Friday. ''We will spend the next few days determining the cause of the fire and assessing the damage, and we will get the plant back on-line as soon as is safely possible.''
----
Ex-Hunt Valve manager charged with defrauding government
By RYAN GILLIS
6/22/2004
Pittsburgh Morning Journal News
http://www.morningjournalnews.com/story.asp?ID=29016
SALEM - A former quality assurance manager at the Hunt Valve Co. has been charged by federal authorities with one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States and obtain money by means of false or fraudulent representations.
Wayne Aldrich, 50, of Auburn, N.Y., is accused of providing the government with false certifications and non-conforming valves for use on United States Navy surface ships and submarines, as well as use on Department of Energy (DOE) containers used to transport and store radioactive materials.
Information on the charges was contained in a U.S. Department of Justice statement issued Monday by Gregory A. White, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.
According to the charges, Aldrich, working in Hunt Valve's military and commercial division, and unnamed co-conspirators allowed for the delivery of valves to the Navy and DOE which did not conform to the physical or contractual requirements mandated by the government.
Those requirements were set specifically for Navy ships and containers used in the storage and transportation of uranium hexafluoride and depleted uranium hexafluoride.
The alleged offenses took place between April 1992 and Sept. 2001. On Sept. 17, 2001, federal agents closed down the East State Street facility while executing a search warrant on the premises. Agents could be seen loading boxes of documents into rental trucks parked outside the building.
The charge filed against Aldrich maintains the valves provided by Hunt Valve during that time were "manufactured or repaired using unapproved and improper techniques and procedures. Aldrich also is accused of creating false documentation showing the proper techniques and procedures had been used.
Non-certificated Hunt Valve employees, including the janitor and machine operator, allegedly were allowed to perform dye penetrant inspections on parts supplied to the Navy and DOE, when certified level 1, 2 and 3 inspectors are required to perform those tests.
The government also accuses Aldrich of altering vendor certifications by adding results to the documents when no tests were performed, then faxing the altered documents from one machine to another inside the building to "make the document appear 'fuzzy' in an attempt to conceal the falsification."
He also is alleged to have falsified signatures by scanning certifications into a computer, then cutting signatures from other documents and pasting them onto the scanned certifications.
Various tests, according to the government's information, were represented as being performed, when, in fact, the individuals claimed to have performed them were either off-site or out of the country at the time.
The Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) began a review of the materials supplied by Hunt Valve after receiving notification of the charges in 2001. NAVSEA determined there were no hardware deficiencies which would have adversely affected equipment or safety in valves supplied by Hunt Valve.
If Aldrich is convicted, he could face five years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine. Assistant United States Attorney Richard H. Blake will be prosecuting the case for the government. rgillis@mojonews.com
------- africa
DR Congo sends reinforcements to volatile east: official
KINSHASA (AFP)
Jun 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040622210542.eawaq3fp.html
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) announced on Tuesday that it was strengthening its military presence in the east of the country to "protect the population and neutralise armed groups" there.
In a statement read on national television, President Joseph Kabila said the move was intended to "support the action of MONUC", the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country.
It was also meant to help the repatriation of the former Rwandan armed forces from before the genocide of 1994, the statement said.
The government will take "all necessary measures to bring about peace and stability" Kabila said, while welcoming news that the DRC armed forces had retaken the eastern towns of Kamanyola and Bukavu from renegade troops.
Forces loyal to a dissident DRC general earlier this month captured the eastern towns, sparking fighting which, together with two apparent attempted coups in three months, has shaken the fragile peace process.
Most of the dissident troops are drawn from the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), a former rebel group which Rwandan troops backed during DRC's 1998-2003 war and which is now in a unity government.
The DRC has already dispatched 10,000 troop reinforcements to the region bordering Rwanda, drawing protests from Kigali which considers the troops a threat to its security.
Kinshasa accuses the Tutsi leadership in Kigali of backing the Congolese dissidents, also Tutsis, a charge the Rwandan government denies.
Colonel Jules Mutebusi, one of two officers who has led the dissident campaign in the DRC, crossed into Rwanda on Monday night with a company of 300 men, where he is is being treated as a "military refugee", according to officials in Kigali.
-------- europe
Radioactive mud dumped in The Hague
22 June 2004
Dutch Expatica News
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=19&story_id=8784
AMSTERDAM - Greenpeace activists placed a barrel of radioactive mud from the French town La Hague on the Plein near the Dutch Parliament in The Hague on Tuesday.
The mud became radioactive due to discharges from the reprocessing industry in La Hague for Dutch nuclear waste. The environmental activist group is demanding that MPs oppose the extension of Dutch-French reprocessing contract.
The reprocessing of nuclear waste from, for example, the Borssele nuclear plant, uranium and plutonium is obtained from the waste.
But Greenpeace claims international treaties "obligate" nuclear waste to de stored directly without reprocessing because reprocessing occurs simultaneously with radioactive discharges.
Dutch energy company Essent NV - as the largest shareholder of EPZ, the Borssele nuclear plant - re-signed a reprocessing contract with the French Cogema.
Greenpeace is demanding that the Lower House of Parliament intervene and force Essent to store nuclear waste with reprocessing, such as now occurs in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland.
-------- korea
Ranks breaking over North Korea
South Korea and China move away from the US negotiating position as six-party talks reconvene Wednesday in Beijing
By Robert Marquand and Donald Kirk
June 22, 2004
Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0622/p01s04-woap.html
Map: http://www.csmonitor.com/images/maps/nKoreaNukes_map.gif
BEIJING AND SEOUL - Since confronting the Kim Jong Il regime with evidence of a secret uranium nuclear program two years ago, the White House has demanded a "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement" of all nuclear activity in North Korea. Known by the acronym "CVID," and hewed to by the Bush team closely for a year of multiparty talks, the US position requires a full-scale retreat by Pyongyang before it can expect to receive loans, aid, and security guarantees.
Yet Wednesday, as the next round of six-nation talks on Korea's nuclear crisis commences in Beijing, Chinese and South Korean delegates are expected to break ranks, join forces, and politely challenge the practicality of American insistence on CVID.
As the states closest to North Korea both geographically and diplomatically, China and South Korea will ask the US to rethink what one high-level source in Beijing calls an "unrealistic" position. Both Beijing and Seoul are even prepared to discuss allowing Kim Jong Il to pursue a nuclear-energy program that is "peaceful," sources say.
"We agree with CVID in principle, but we question whether it will allow talks to be productive," says Jin Linbo, director of Asia-Pacific Studies at the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing. "China feels that CVID is a final goal, not something that needs to be complete right now."
Since February, differences between China and the US have widened in the nuclear-talks process, sources in both Washington and Beijing confirm. Last month China's deputy foreign minister suggested for the first time that Beijing had no convincing evidence that North Korea had or is pursuing the uranium program that sparked the nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula. The claim has been made at times in South Korea as well, to the frustration of US officials.
Some Korean affairs experts both in Asia and the US have said for months that the "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement" formula is problematic. North Korea has never accepted the principle of CVID and has always balked at agreeing to that as a solution, including in the first round of six-nation talks last August. It has been clear for months that Kim Jong Il is waiting for the outcome of US elections in November before deciding what strategy to pursue, experts say.
Some analysts say the new request to Washington by Seoul and Beijing is mainly aimed at keeping the highly sensitive Kim engaged as the process waits for the elections. The move ensures that Kim is not "ganged up on in the talks" until the next diplomatic round, as a Beijing source put it. In exchange for the US backing off its CVID demand, the Beijing-Seoul plan would secure a freeze by the North on its nuclear weapons program, and a promise to allow inspections of the Yongbyon nuclear facility.
Monday a preliminary "working group" convened in Beijing prior to Wednesday's opening of talks.
South Korea's new approach emerged in talks and seminars over the past week, marking the fourth anniversary of the inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang between North Korea's Kim, and Kim Dae Jung, then president of South Korea.
"We hope the talks in Beijing will make a breakthrough," says Moon Jung In, the Yonsei University political science professor who organized the Korean conference.
"The United States should allow the peaceful use of atomic energy," says Mr. Moon. The formula, he said, would be "a freeze" on North Korea's program for developing nuclear warheads and "inspection of all nuclear weapons."
Moon's views summarize the ambition of an increasingly influential liberal elite in South Korea to get the US to tone down its insistence on CVID while accepting the notion of a freeze as an interim step on the way to that final goal.
The Bush administration's position is intended to end what it sees as the North's perpetual use of the diplomatic process to gain money and attention.
The Korean nuclear crisis emerged in Oct. 2002 when US envoy James Kelley, in Pyongyang, confronted North Korean officials with evidence of a secret highly enriched uranium program, or HEU.
North Korea at the end of 2002 expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency from Yongbyon where some 8,000 spent plutonium fuel rods were sealed and under video surveillance as part of the 1994 Geneva framework agreement negotiated by the Clinton administration. In early 2003 the North removed those nuclear rods from the Yongbyon cooling pond and restarted the five-megawatt experimental reactor there. That reactor is suspected to have produced one or two warheads before the 1994 agreement was signed. US intelligence analysts believe the North may have fabricated several more warheads over the past year.
North Korea, having acknowledged the HEU program to Mr. Kelley, has since steadfastly denied its existence. The denials contradict evidence of North Korean transactions with Pakistan as well as the word of Abdul Qadeer Khan, "father" of the Pakistan atomic bomb, who has said he saw facilities for HEU development during a visit to North Korea.
Chinese questioning of the existence of HEU, which broke in an interview in the New York Times last month, is thought to be mainly a public position. China insists that it has not received enough evidence from the US to make a conclusive determination on the existence of a uranium program in the North. But this does not mean Chinese officials have ruled out a uranium program by Kim. When pressed, a senior Chinese source in Beijing pointed out that "we don't have complete belief in what North Korea has said. They [North Korean officials] have made a great deal of contradictory statements."
Along with the US, North and South Korea, and China, the six-party talks hosted include Russia and Japan. They are expected to last from three to five days and to be resumed next fall. While the North Korean crisis burned hotly in 2003, the US presidential election and events in the Middle East have drawn attention from the issue. Little intelligence is available on how or whether Kim has continued to reprocess the plutonium fuel rods.
The Asian partners of the six-party talks, particularly South Korea and China, insist that the talks will continue regardless of whether or not the current round yields any breakthroughs.
-------- terrorism
Conference hears of nuclear terrorism threats
BBC
June 22, 2004.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200406/s1137375.htm
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, has warned there is a race against time to stop terrorists getting their hands on nuclear material.
At a conference in Washington, Dr ElBaradei warned of the risk of uranium or plutonium falling into the wrong hands.
According to United States Senator Sam Nunn, nuclear terrorism is one of the most dangerous threats facing the world.
It sounds like the stuff of post-Cold War thrillers - poorly guarded installations, highly-motivated terrorists and fissile materials available to the highest bidder.
But he believes that the threat is real enough.
Along with his Republican colleague, Senator Richard Lugar, he has been instrumental in ensuring that US taxpayers dollars have gone to help safeguard and secure nuclear materials in Russia.
He says more money is needed, but the situation is so grave that much more needs to be done.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Yucca nuclear dump funding plan draws industry ire
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
By Chris Baltimore,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-22/s_25097.asp
WASHINGTON - A plan by Sen. Pete Domenici to tack a $446 million surcharge on utility customers to pay for a Nevada nuclear waste site drew the ire of nuclear power plant owners Monday.
New Mexico Republican Domenici, a long-time nuclear industry ally, has drawn rare industry criticism for his plan to raise fees paid by utility customers by 60 percent in fiscal 2005, which starts Oct. 1.
Domenici aides say the move is needed to deflect an attempt by Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada and others to choke off funding for the massive Yucca Mountain storage facility planned in the desert about 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Slated to open in 2010, the underground facility would hold 77,000 tons of waste from the nation's 103 nuclear power plants for 10,000 years.
The Bush administration says it will take $880 million in 2005 to proceed with a plan to obtain a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct the repository.
But a House Appropriations Committee panel that oversees Yucca Mountain funding has proposed $131 million in funding for the 2005 fiscal year, far short of the administration request.
Industry officials called the proposed fees excessive on top of the $22 billion utility customers have already paid into a construction fund. Domenici's staff was to brief the utility industry on the proposal later on Monday.
"We definitely don't believe that imposing additional fees at this time ... can be justified," said a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying arm.
But deferring action could stop the project in its tracks, because funding at the lower level will require the government to lay off about 70 percent of 2,400 site contractors, a Domenici aide said.
"The alternative is that we in effect declare we will not proceed with Yucca Mountain," the aide said. "I think industry would be more concerned about that alternative."
Reid, the Senate's second-ranking Democrat, said Yucca funds should come from New Mexico research labs rather than taxpayers.
"Pete Domenici is acting on behalf of a desperate administration and the big nuclear and energy utilities to which they are beholden," Reid said in a statement.
The industry says it has already borne its share of costs.
Since 1983, utility customers have paid a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour to a fund that holds about $15 billion earmarked to develop and build the Yucca facility, which would be the first permanent U.S. nuclear waste repository.
Domenici, chairman of a Senate Appropriations Committee panel that oversees Yucca Mountain funding, is expected to propose his plan as part of a $28 billion 2005 energy and water appropriations bill set for panel consideration in early July.
-------- MILITARY
-------- business
BBC takes radio news lead in Iraq
BBC
22 June, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3825701.stm
The launch of FM broadcasts in Baghdad, Basra and other major cities gained a weekly audience of 1.8 million, latest figures showed.
The figures, released on Monday, also showed a 60% weekly reach in the Afghanistan capital of Kabul.
Globally, there were 146m weekly World Service listeners in 2004, down from 150m in 2003.
Short wave decline
BBC World Service attributed the global audience decline to a significant drop in short wave radio listening year-on-year, which has been partly offset by a rise in FM audiences.
"Short wave listening is in long-term decline as audiences demand better audibility," BBC World Service's Acting Director Nigel Chapman said.
"It is sometimes difficult to find suitable FM partners in some countries or to overcome regulatory obstacles, like bans on international news broadcasting on local FMs," he added. Despite the decline, the World Service still has about 50% more listeners than comparable broadcasters.
A selection of 16 surveys from key markets showed that BBC World Service was the most trusted and objective international broadcaster.
Rapid online increase
A survey earlier this year of the audience in Iraq provisionally indicated an increased audience of 3.3m in the country, and revealed that one in four people listen to the BBC World Service in Baghdad.
"Taken as a whole, the use of the BBC World Service - both on radio and online - remains broadly constant," said Nigel Chapman.
The service has extended its reach with rapid growth in online usage, particularly among younger audiences.
Monthly page impressions rose from 228m in March 2003 - a high figure due to the Iraq war - to a record 279m a year later.
This equates to over 16m individual monthly users, many of them young people who would not be attracted to short wave listening.
It also represents a doubling of unique users from February 2003, when the figure stood at 8.5m monthly users.
--------
Security firm's $293m deal under scrutiny
Boston Globe
By Charles M. Sennott
June 22, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2004/06/22/security_firms_293m_deal_under_scrutiny?pg=2
LONDON -- A private British firm that won a $293 million contract from the Pentagon for coordinating security in Iraq is headed by a retired British commando with a reputation for illicit arms deals in Africa and for commanding a murderous military unit in Northern Ireland, human rights activists and security analysts said yesterday.
The contract -- the largest single piece of the private-security pie in Iraq so far handed out by Washington -- was awarded to the London-based Aegis Defense Services.
The CEO of the company, Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, a former commando turned warrior-for-hire, has been linked to an arms sale to Sierra Leone that violated a 1998 United Nations embargo, and he served as commanding officer over two British soldiers convicted of murdering an unarmed Catholic teenager in North Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1992.
The contract, which was awarded last month but made public only last week, comes amid heated debates in Washington over the role of private security companies and their involvement in recent scandals over physical abuse of detainees and financial corruption in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Spicer is known for his role in the 1998 Sandline Affair in which a company he founded violated a UN-imposed arms embargo by shipping 30 tons of arms to Sierra Leone. When the scandal erupted in the British media, Spicer told the press that the British government had encouraged the operation, touching off a storm that for weeks involved the office of Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Spicer also figured prominently in a 1997 military coup in Papua New Guinea. When that country's army learned that he had received a $36 million contract from the government to brutally suppress a rebellion, the army toppled the sitting government and arrested Spicer, later releasing him.
In 1992, , two soldiers in the Scots Guard unit commanded by Spicer were convicted of murdering an 18-year-old Catholic named Peter McBride in North Belfast.
For years, even after leaving military service, Spicer has defied court rulings and defended the actions of his soldiers. He has led a campaign to free them and reportedly worked toward their promotion in the military upon their release.
The first pretrial hearings on prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, which began yesterday, are likely to highlight the role of private contractors in the alleged systematic abuse of inmates during interrogations there.
Last week, a private contractor hired by the CIA was indicted by a federal grand jury in North Carolina for the two-day beating of a prisoner who had surrendered in Afghanistan. The prisoner subsequently died.
Human rights activists and security specialists in London and Washington are questioning the wisdom of awarding such a large security contract to a controversial figure like Spicer.
''This contract is a case study in what not to do," said Peter Singer, a national security analyst for The Brookings Institution who has researched the Aegis deal.
''The Army never even bothered to Google this guy to find out that he was involved in political scandal, that he was the source of parliamentary investigations and the owner of failed businesses," said Singer.
Singer said the US Army's apparent ignorance of the firm's history and of Spicer occurred in the context of a chaotic and often skewed methodology for rewarding such contracts. And this systemic failure, he said, was one of the core issues surrounding the privately contracted interrogators linked to the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
He noted that the Aegis deal was awarded by the Army transportation command in Fort Eustis, Va., which he said has no apparent experience in dealing with private security firms.
The public affairs office at Fort Eustis said the decision to award the contract was made by the Northeast Region Contracting Command, and referred calls to the Pentagon.
Under the terms of the three-year ''cost-plus" contract, Aegis is responsible for serving as the coordinator of 50 other private security companies and providing up to 75 ''close protection teams" to guard employees of the US Project Management Office in Iraq. The cost-plus formula, which guarantees profits for a firm even if costs escalate, has been sharply criticized by government watchdog groups as wasteful and prone to corruption, particularly in relation to the larger multibillion dollar contracts held by firms such as Halliburton.
An Army spokeswoman in Washington said Aegis and Spicer submitted all the information required under federal rules. When asked specifically about Spicer's controversial past, she said the company's disclosure ''gave no further details."
Observers insist the Pentagon should have conducted a more thorough background check on Spicer and the company for such an important contract.
''This is an embarrassment for the military. . . . We ended up hiring one of the most notorious individuals in the industry with a record not for success, but failure and controversy," added Singer, author of ''Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry."
Among his fellow Britons, Spicer's reputation is that of a well-known soldier and former expert in covert operations with a knack for finding trouble and the attention that comes with being at the center of political scandal.
At the Aegis office in London, an employee who did not identify himself said Spicer was ''out of the country." Citing ''security reasons," he declined to say whether Spicer was in Iraq. The employee declined further comment.
Paul O'Connor, a spokesman for the Belfast-based Pat Finucane Center for Human Rights and Social Change, said Spicer remains a controversial figure in Northern Ireland. ''He has refused to accept the court's ruling that two soldiers under his command committed murder of an unarmed civilian," O'Connor said. ''Someone like that should never be given any kind of command responsibility."
-------- colombia
Plan puts Colombia on offensive
Christian Science Monitor
June 22, 2004
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0622/p06s02-woam.html
Top US officials asked Congress last week to increase the cap on troops allowed in Colombia. By Rachel Van Dongen | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor BOGOTá, COLOMBIA - Back in February, 30 Colombian special-forces commandos silently descended on the jungle home of "Comandante Sonia," a top leader of the rebel army known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
The commandos captured "Sonia," along with her valuable computer hard drive which detailed key FARC drug and weapons connections, without a single shot being fired. In doing so, they netted perhaps the biggest fish in the FARC chain of command since President Alvaro Uribe took office almost two years ago. "Sonia," whose real name is Nayibe Rojas Valderama, is one of several top FARC leaders wanted by the US on charges of drug trafficking, along with Simon Trinidad, who was nabbed in January in an operation in Ecuador.
The two captures are part of a bold new initiative by the Colombian government and armed forces. In the past year, they have gone aggressively on the offensive in a military push known as Plan Patriot, which seeks to turn the tide of the 40-year war against the FARC. With US tactical and logistical support, about 15,000 Colombian troops have been dispatched into the FARC stronghold of southern Colombia, in an effort to decapitate the 17,000-strong rebel army.
The results will determine the future of the Colombian conflict, whether the FARC will continue as a potent guerrilla movement fueled by drug money, or be forced to come to the negotiating table for good.
"It is the largest military campaign that the Army has launched against the FARC since Operation Marquetalia in 1964," says independent Colombian defense expert Alfredo Rangel, referring to the military offensive against 100 communist rebels that resulted in the formation of the FARC 40 years ago.
Plan Patriot, which aims to capture or kill members of the country's rebel groups and take back the land they have claimed, apparently began last June with the first efforts to eliminate the terrorist network surrounding the capital, Bogotá. Then last fall, in an operation called Liberty One, which many officials point to as the real beginning of the plan, the Army felled five FARC commanders and captured at least four others, virtually eliminating the FARC presence around the capital.
Before Liberty One, officials note that the rebels had succeeded in drawing a noose around Bogotá, preventing its 7 million citizens from traveling far outside it. Now that threat has been lifted.
Though the Colombian government is quiet on the plan's details and cost, US assistance comes from the same resources used for the $3.2 billion antidrug effort called Plan Colombia, which began in 2000. With this new initiative, US officials are pushing for an increase in the four-year-old cap on troops and contractors that currently limits to 400 each the number of military and civilian personnel permitted in Colombia at any one time. The Bush administration wants to double the troop cap to 800 and raise the ceiling on civilian contractors to 600.
In Congressional testimony last Thursday, Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega called the existing caps "too restrictive" and said they were damaging the implementation of new and existing US-funded programs. The House Armed Services committee has raised the troop cap to 500, but that number could change when a vote goes before the full Congress.
Defense Minister Jorge Alberto Uribe describes Plan Patriot as a series of operations that will yield small victories, like seizing weapons caches or getting rebels to defect, over the next few years. "Plan Patriot is not a great military operation, it is a jigsaw puzzle," he says. "This is going to last a long time. There is not going to be one great battle."
He says the plan is a continuation of the government's "democratic security" policy that has seen sharp decreases in homicides, kidnappings, and overall terrorist activities. The unusual calm was broken earlier this month when 34 peasants were massacred, allegedly by the FARC, while tending to coca crops in the Norte de Santander region.
Defense experts like Mr. Rangel caution that the government, despite its effort to lower expectations, might be setting itself up for failure by trying to nab elusive FARC commanders.
He notes that instead of confronting the Army head on, FARC rebels were disintegrating into smaller bands and making a tactical decision to retreat deep into the Colombian jungle where capturing them could prove impossible.
Instead, Rangel argues that the Army should focus on more practical goals like dismantling the urban terror networks outside major cities. When attempting to penetrate the FARC's strongholds, Rangel warns that it should only be done with special commando units and not with a noisy deployment of regular troops. "They've already lost the element of surprise," he notes.
But the Colombian Army has radically improved its capabilities and tactics in recent years, thanks largely to US training and resources under Plan Colombia. According to US officials, the US has trained new commando units to operate behind enemy lines deep in the Colombian jungle. US helicopters, which are being freed up from antidrug tasks as the amount of coca sharply decreases, were used to dispatch 1,000 soldiers to the front lines.
--------
Colombia's opportunity
washtimes
June 22, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040621-095850-8283r.htm
Colombia's peace process is losing pace at a critical juncture. A defector from the FARC guerrilla group, who met last week with editors of The Washington Times, believes the acute illness of the group's leader presents Colombian President Alvaro Uribe with a timely opportunity. This assessment is generally backed by experts on Colombia.
The FARC is Colombia's most brutal, implacable and powerful guerrilla group. It is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups. It has massacred civilians (as recently as June 15) and is involved in the drug trade. Its leader, known as Manuel Marulanda, is very sick, the defector said.
FARC's 35 top commanders will have to elect a new leader relatively soon, the defector said, and the government should create the right conditions for a less bellicose leader to emerge. In order to do this, the government should ratchet up the pressure on the FARC, while increasing basic services.
Mark Schneider, director of the Washington office of the International Crisis Group, said that potential for change at the FARC probably won't emerge until the FARC's ailing leader dies. At that point, contention within the top ranks of the group could emerge and lead to a weakening of the group, or it could lead to the emergence of a leader more receptive to negotiations with the government.
The Uribe government has had some success in pressuring the FARC. It recently captured one of its senior commanders, Ricardo Palmera, and has been able to reduce significantly coca cultivation, an important source of revenue for the FARC and paramilitary groups. Also, the FARC defector noted that the government's efforts to decommission guerrilla fighters have been better publicized than past initiatives.
On rural development, the government's record is not as strong, although the FARC does make this task as difficult as possible. The FARC defector said he himself successfully participated in "convincing" more than 20 mayors to retire. This kind of tactic limits the state's range of action, yet there are areas where the effort is lacking. The defector mentioned, for example, the government's failure to distribute expropriated coca farms to the rural poor. Basic services, such as potable water, health care and education, are nonexistent in some areas.
The Uribe government and its supporters, including the U.S. government, should approach the distribution of services as an integral part of the counter-insurgency effort. The Uribe administration also should prevent any further delays in its attempts to decommission the 14,000-strong AUC paramilitary group and try to get some momentum behind its promising talks with the ELN guerrilla group.
Those and other moves will help strengthen the government's ideological battle against the FARC. The illness of FARC's leader, meanwhile, could be Colombia's opportunity. Colombia and its supporters must exploit that opportunity.
-------- iran
British Sailors to Face Charges, Iran TV Says
June 22, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/international/middleeast/22CND-IRAN.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1087927084-YoAD6FFWOCA/EkG1YuyVtQ
TEHRAN, Iran, June 22 - Iran will prosecute the eight British sailors who were arrested Monday morning and accused of being in Iranian waters without permission, a state-run television station reported today.
"They are going to be prosecuted for illegally entering Iranian territorial waters," a military official told the Arabic-language station, Al Alam.
In London, Tehran's ambassador was called to an urgent meeting today at the Foreign Office, where officials demanded the crew members' release and asked for full consular access to them, Reuters quoted a spokesman as saying.
Also today, the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, discussed the incident by telephone with his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi.
"What we are concentrating on now is contacts with the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and trying to gain access," a diplomat at the British Embassy in Tehran said.
"Obviously we are hoping for a swift solution to the situation," the diplomat said. "We are in the midst of normal diplomatic contacts and it has been a bit slow."
Three small Royal Navy boats were seized Monday morning on the Shatt al Arab, a stretch of water that marks the southern border between Iran and Iraq.
The seized crew members have confessed to being about a half-mile inside Iranian waters, the station reported.
The British government emphasized that the boats were "very small," a spokesman in London said, and were not outfitted with weapons, although the crew was armed with its personal weapons.
The British military controls areas in southern Iraq around the city of Basra and routinely patrols Shatt al Arab. The navy was delivering the three boats to the Iraqi Riverine Patrol Service when the sailors from the navy training team were stopped by the Iranian military.
The Iranian television channel showed the crew members dressed in military fatigues sitting at an undisclosed location.
The British Embassy here said it had requested to meet with the detained men.
Relations between Iran and Britain have been strained in the past few weeks, mostly over the war in Iraq and Iran's nuclear capacity. Britain drafted a resolution last week along with France and Germany denouncing what it said was Iran's lack of cooperation with the United Nations nuclear agency.
The embassy in Tehran also faced a series of demonstrations over accusations that British forces abused Iraqi prisoners and desecrated Shiite holy cities in Iraq.
--------
In Iran, Terrorism Remains A Matter of Perspective
Tehran Tries to Shed Radical Image as 'Army of Martyrs' Forms
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58891-2004Jun21?language=printer
ALAMUT, Iran -- One man's terrorist is another man's herbalist, Ali Reza Safari said, leaning against a wall of the ancient castle that illustrates his point.
From the daunting fortification that looms over the valley here, a ruler named Hassan Sabah 900 years ago dispatched young men who believed so ardently in his vision of Islam that they gave up their own lives in order to snuff out those of their enemies. Hassan Sabah's sect first defined the word "assassin."
But in recent years, scholars have seized on the way Hassan Sabah managed to make fear a weapon in itself. Using stealth, discipline and patience, his small group of fanatics spooked governments into restricting the entry of camel caravans, among other immigration barriers.
"They may well be the world's first terrorists," wrote Bernard Lewis, a Middle East scholar and Princeton University professor emeritus.
"I am illiterate," said Safari, 75, gazing diplomatically at the ground before him. "I haven't read any books. What I know I heard from my father and grandfather.
"Hassan Sabah was a good man," he declared. "He helped the poor. He planted herb gardens. And because he was a saint, he could make the medicine himself. He treated everybody."
When it comes to terrorism, perspective is almost everything in Iran.
The Islamic government that rules this country routinely rates as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism in the State Department annual report. Iran rejects the label and insists the organizations that it supports, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, are resistance groups.
And if that distinction often ends up lost in the bloody debris, in recent years Iran has nonetheless taken conspicuous pains to shed its radical image. It arrested al Qaeda operatives from neighboring Afghanistan who had found refuge here, discontinued attacks on U.S. targets and, earlier this year, erased from street signs the name of the man who assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981.
So heads turned this month when the Army of Martyrs of the International Islamic Movement made its public debut.
The group, which claims to be private, began gathering the signatures of Iranians who would be willing to become suicide bombers. So far, the group says, 15,000 people have completed a one-page form headed "Preliminary Registration for Martyrdom Operations." The form has space for a phone number and asks applicants to indicate whether they would prefer to explode themselves against U.S. forces in sacred Shiite Muslim cities in Iraq or Israeli forces in the Palestinian territories, or to kill Salman Rushdie, the author who went into hiding for years after a religious edict demanded his death for mocking Islam in his book "The Satanic Verses."
Mohammad Ali Samadi, the group's spokesman, said he believed the number of volunteers "could rise to a million, and we have serious concerns about our capacity to support that many people."
The gravity of this threat is widely questioned here.
Diplomats, Iranian analysts and -- when pressed -- even Samadi acknowledge that the Army of Martyrs movement exists chiefly for public relations. The group solicited news coverage when U.S. troops were pursuing insurgents in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, the two most sacred cities in Shiite Islam, the official religion of Iran. But as the troops receded, so did what Samadi called the "sensitivity" of the Iranian public.
"By threatening them, we wanted to remind the Americans of the potential we have against them," Samadi said from behind a desk in Tehran where he was, at times, clearly bored to be giving yet another interview. Three young associates sat in, occasionally suggesting talking points.
"The core of this organization," Sadami said, "is writers."
Still, the group's public emergence was widely noted in Iranian political circles, where it was taken as particularly vivid evidence that religious conservatives were in firm control once again.
"There's no way this could have happened six months ago," said Saeed Laylaz, a reform economist and analyst.
Since reformist candidates were disqualified from parliamentary elections last February and hard-liners swept to power, the only question has been how hard of a line they will adopt. The Army of Martyrs is seen as a sign, having thrust itself onto a public stage already featuring a revival of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Revolutionary Guard has long been the primary bastion and incubator of hard-line resolve here. Formed by the Muslim clerics who came to power in the 1979 Islamic revolution distrusting the army left behind by the monarchy, it has its own divisions, intelligence branch, prisons and responsibilities ranging from disaster response to, according to diplomats here, supervision of Iran's shadowy nuclear program.
It is also increasingly visible in politics.
Several dozen former pasdaran, as the Revolutionary Guards are known in the Persian language, were sworn into parliament last month on the slate approved by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who as supreme leader holds ultimate authority in Iran's theocratic system. Khamenei recently named a retired Revolutionary Guard chief to head state television and radio, one of the most powerful positions in government.
Last month, the Revolutionary Guard took over a new international airport near Tehran only hours after it opened. A public statement had called the hiring of a Turkish firm to operate Imam Khomeini International Airport a threat to "the security of the country as well as its dignity." The airport has remained shuttered.
"I think the airport thing was very significant," a foreign diplomat here said. "It had the form of a coup. I think it was the IRGC saying publicly, 'We can do what we want.' . . . The question is whether they're pressing their own agenda or doing Khamenei's bidding."
Others are more sanguine. Calling the Revolutionary Guard a "maturing" organization, another diplomat noted the restraint it had shown in Iraq, where it is the lead Iranian agency. But at a June 2 public conference, a brigadier in the guards lauded the effectiveness of "martyrdom operations," citing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States as tactical operations that produced far-reaching strategic results, according to Iranian media accounts. But any formal link between the Revolutionary Guard and the Army of Martyrs is denied by both the government and Samadi.
Samadi said the Army of Martyrs was formed to protest a visible slackening in revolutionary zeal. A photo of flag-draped U.S. coffins decorates his office wall, beside a portrait of a Palestinian suicide bomber and her infant daughter. A third photo shows Khaled Eslamboli firing an automatic weapon at Sadat's reviewing stand during a military parade on Oct. 6, 1981. Samadi said the group's first act was a protest against dropping Eslamboli's name from street signs.
"We realized this was the initial step toward creating a gap between the revolutionary Iranians and other Muslims in other parts of the world, especially those fighting the Israelis in Palestine," he said.
Like many Islamic militants, Samadi describes suicide bombings as asymmetrical warfare, a military tactic that levels the battlefield between a technologically superior army and an oppressed population. He lamented that Iran is rarely credited with pioneering the form by sending car and truck bombs against the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon in the early 1980s. When a reporter observed that Iran appeared to have forsaken the practice since a truck bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996 was traced to Iranian agents, the spokesman smiled.
"The U.S. has not really recognized that we have successfully transferred a good method of resistance to other countries," he said. "We do not have to mount foreign operations ourselves."
And yet, he said, Osama bin Laden threatens to give martyrdom operations a bad name. "What's the point of blowing up a civilian train in Spain, or the U.S. embassies in Africa where a lot of Africans are killed?"
The Army of Martyrs wants nothing to do with Hassan Sabah's Assassins, either. "The nature of the things they did is quite in line with what Osama bin Laden is carrying out," Samadi said.
No such talk is heard in Alamut, northwest of Tehran. "If Hassan Sabah was the ruler, it would be excellent," Safari said. "God bless him.
"Really. God bless him."
--------
Three British Patrol Boats, Eight Sailors Held by Iran
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57311-2004Jun21.html
ISTANBUL , June 21 -- Iran detained three British military vessels and eight crew members near its boundary with Iraq in the Shatt al Arab waterway on Monday, Iranian state television said. Officials in Tehran alleged that the boats had intruded into Iranian waters.
In London, a spokesman for the Foreign Office confirmed that the Royal Navy had lost contact with three small river patrol vessels early Monday morning in the Shatt al Arab. The British military patrols the southern reaches of Iraq as part of the U.S.-led occupation force, including the waterway that forms part of the border with Iran.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which secures Iran's borders, has repeatedly issued public warnings against violating international boundaries. But Iranian officials have also acknowledged ignoring several violations of the country's airspace by U.S. military aircraft operating in Iraq during the war to depose former president Saddam Hussein, who was a bitter enemy of Iran.
Monday's incident came at a time of strained relations between Tehran and London, leading to speculation that the seizure was intended to remind the coalition that Iran's cooperation on Iraq is not to be taken for granted. British officials said they were seeking to clarify with Iranian authorities the situation of the boats and crew members.
While Britain is the key U.S. partner in Iraq, Iran accuses the British of betraying Iranian trust in a continuing dispute with the International Atomic Energy Agency. Britain was a sponsor of an IAEA resolution Friday in which the U.N. organization said it "deplores" Iran's erratic cooperation with nuclear inspectors.
Government-sponsored demonstrators have gathered outside the British Embassy in downtown Tehran each Friday afternoon for several weeks, chanting slogans and throwing rocks through chancery windows.
The Revolutionary Guard has increased its prominence in Iranian public issues recently. The elite corps, long considered the bastion of hardliners in the conservative forces that dominate the government, abruptly closed Tehran's new international airport early last month, calling a contract with a Turkish firm to operate the facility a security risk and insult to national pride.
"I wouldn't rule anything out," said one diplomat in Tehran, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The guard "has been going through a reactive phase, and the Iranians do have a way of building patterns.
"But it could be what it says it is: It could well be that on a very windy day on the Shatt al Arab, three British boats ended up on the wrong side" of the waterway.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told Iran's main Persian language TV channel that "interrogation of those detained will continue until the matter is clarified," according to the Associated Press.
The British Defense Ministry said the three vessels were being delivered by a Royal Navy training team to the Iraqi Riverine Patrol Service.
Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Monday repeated assurances that Iran is not seeking nuclear weapons. Khamenei, who wields ultimate authority under Iran's theocratic system, said both Islam and common sense argue against atomic weapons.
"Iran does not need nuclear arms," Khamenei told an audience of university officials, in remarks quoted by the state news agency IRNA. "Without nuclear arms, Iran has managed to defeat enemies of the nation, including the U.S., in the past."
"The former Soviet Union had stockpiles of nuclear arms," he said, but "it collapsed. The Zionist regime has several hundred warheads, but it has been driven to desperation by the stone-throwing Palestinian campaigners. Nuclear arms cannot work."
Khamenei said Iran would insist on developing atomic power for electricity, despite its vast oil and gas reserves.
"Enemies of the nation are looking for a day when Iranian oil reserves will be depleted and the nation will stretch its hands to them for help," he said. "It is unacceptable."
Correspondent Glenn Frankel in London contributed to this report.
--------
MILITARY
Iran Seizes 3 British Navy Boats and Detains 8 Sailors in a Territorial Dispute on Iraqi Border
June 22, 2004
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/international/middleeast/22TEHR.html
LONDON, June 21 - Iran seized three small British Royal Navy boats and arrested all eight sailors on board on Monday, its Foreign Ministry announced, saying the boats had entered Iranian waters without permission.
The British Ministry of Defense confirmed that the Iranian government had seized the boats and detained the sailors after they entered Iranian waters.
The navy was delivering the three boats to the Iraqi Riverine Patrol Service when the sailors from the navy training team were stopped on the Shatt al Arab, a stretch of water that marks the southern boundary between Iran and Iraq. The British military controls areas in southern Iraq around the city of Basra.
The British government emphasized that the boats were "very small," a spokesman said, and were not outfitted with weapons, although the military personnel on board were armed. British military officials said the boats were two Boston Whalers and a British Army combat supply boat. The Ministry of Defense said it lost contact with the boats on Monday morning. The sailors on board were assigned to train Iraqis to use the boats, a navy spokesman said.
British forces routinely patrol the Shatt al Arab, which is often used as a smuggling route for Iraqi contraband oil and as an entry point for militants, so the sailors' presence on the river was not unusual.
As the only water route into the Persian Gulf, the Shatt al Arab is strategically valued by both Iraq and Iran and has long been a source of conflict between the countries. Tension over navigational rights to the river, which is about one mile across, was one reason that the two countries went to war in 1980.
The arrests come during a time of strained relations between Iran and Britain, mostly over the war in Iraq and Iran's nuclear capacity. The British Embassy in Tehran has faced a series of demonstrations over accusations that British troops abused Iraqi prisoners and desecrated Iraqi holy Shiite cities. Britain also recently sponsored with France and Germany a resolution at the International Atomic Energy Agency condemning Iran's lack of cooperation with nuclear arms inspectors.
Still, British officials sought to play down the boat incident as relatively minor.
Hamid Reza Asefi, a spokesman for Iran's foreign minister, said the sailors were being questioned by the Iranian Navy and had admitted that they entered Iranian territory.
"The crews are under investigation in order to clarify the issue," Mr. Asefi said.
He gave no indication of when, or if, the sailors and ships would be released. An Iranian military spokesman told the British Broadcasting Corporation that if the investigation turned up no malicious intent, the sailors would be freed.
The Iranian state television's Arabic-language channel, Al Alam, said Iranian military personnel had found assault rifles, pistols, cameras, maps of the Iran-Iraq border and global navigation devices on the boats.
The Royal Navy spokesman disputed that the boats and military personnel aboard posed a threat, saying that although the sailors were armed, as is customary, the small boats were not outfitted with weapons and are used to conduct patrols along the river.
Massoud Jazaeri, a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guards, a branch of Iran's armed services, told Reuters that Iran would not hesitate to protect its borders.
"Anyone from any nationality entering our waters will face the same response," Mr. Jazaeri said.
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article, and James Glanz from Basra.
--------
In Iran, Terrorism Remains A Matter of Perspective
Tehran Tries to Shed Radical Image as 'Army of Martyrs' Forms
Washington Post Foreign Service
By Karl Vick
June 22, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58891-2004Jun21?language=printer
ALAMUT, Iran -- One man's terrorist is another man's herbalist, Ali Reza Safari said, leaning against a wall of the ancient castle that illustrates his point.
From the daunting fortification that looms over the valley here, a ruler named Hassan Sabah 900 years ago dispatched young men who believed so ardently in his vision of Islam that they gave up their own lives in order to snuff out those of their enemies. Hassan Sabah's sect first defined the word "assassin."
But in recent years, scholars have seized on the way Hassan Sabah managed to make fear a weapon in itself. Using stealth, discipline and patience, his small group of fanatics spooked governments into restricting the entry of camel caravans, among other immigration barriers.
"They may well be the world's first terrorists," wrote Bernard Lewis, a Middle East scholar and Princeton University professor emeritus.
"I am illiterate," said Safari, 75, gazing diplomatically at the ground before him. "I haven't read any books. What I know I heard from my father and grandfather.
"Hassan Sabah was a good man," he declared. "He helped the poor. He planted herb gardens. And because he was a saint, he could make the medicine himself. He treated everybody."
When it comes to terrorism, perspective is almost everything in Iran.
The Islamic government that rules this country routinely rates as the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism in the State Department annual report. Iran rejects the label and insists the organizations that it supports, including Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories, are resistance groups.
And if that distinction often ends up lost in the bloody debris, in recent years Iran has nonetheless taken conspicuous pains to shed its radical image. It arrested al Qaeda operatives from neighboring Afghanistan who had found refuge here, discontinued attacks on U.S. targets and, earlier this year, erased from street signs the name of the man who assassinated President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1981.
So heads turned this month when the Army of Martyrs of the International Islamic Movement made its public debut.
The group, which claims to be private, began gathering the signatures of Iranians who would be willing to become suicide bombers. So far, the group says, 15,000 people have completed a one-page form headed "Preliminary Registration for Martyrdom Operations." The form has space for a phone number and asks applicants to indicate whether they would prefer to explode themselves against U.S. forces in sacred Shiite Muslim cities in Iraq or Israeli forces in the Palestinian territories, or to kill Salman Rushdie, the author who went into hiding for years after a religious edict demanded his death for mocking Islam in his book "The Satanic Verses."
Mohammad Ali Samadi, the group's spokesman, said he believed the number of volunteers "could rise to a million, and we have serious concerns about our capacity to support that many people."
The gravity of this threat is widely questioned here.
Diplomats, Iranian analysts and -- when pressed -- even Samadi acknowledge that the Army of Martyrs movement exists chiefly for public relations. The group solicited news coverage when U.S. troops were pursuing insurgents in the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, the two most sacred cities in Shiite Islam, the official religion of Iran. But as the troops receded, so did what Samadi called the "sensitivity" of the Iranian public.
"By threatening them, we wanted to remind the Americans of the potential we have against them," Samadi said from behind a desk in Tehran where he was, at times, clearly bored to be giving yet another interview. Three young associates sat in, occasionally suggesting talking points.
"The core of this organization," Sadami said, "is writers."
Still, the group's public emergence was widely noted in Iranian political circles, where it was taken as particularly vivid evidence that religious conservatives were in firm control once again.
"There's no way this could have happened six months ago," said Saeed Laylaz, a reform economist and analyst.
Since reformist candidates were disqualified from parliamentary elections last February and hard-liners swept to power, the only question has been how hard of a line they will adopt. The Army of Martyrs is seen as a sign, having thrust itself onto a public stage already featuring a revival of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Revolutionary Guard has long been the primary bastion and incubator of hard-line resolve here. Formed by the Muslim clerics who came to power in the 1979 Islamic revolution distrusting the army left behind by the monarchy, it has its own divisions, intelligence branch, prisons and responsibilities ranging from disaster response to, according to diplomats here, supervision of Iran's shadowy nuclear program.
It is also increasingly visible in politics.
Several dozen former pasdaran, as the Revolutionary Guards are known in the Persian language, were sworn into parliament last month on the slate approved by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who as supreme leader holds ultimate authority in Iran's theocratic system. Khamenei recently named a retired Revolutionary Guard chief to head state television and radio, one of the most powerful positions in government.
Last month, the Revolutionary Guard took over a new international airport near Tehran only hours after it opened. A public statement had called the hiring of a Turkish firm to operate Imam Khomeini International Airport a threat to "the security of the country as well as its dignity." The airport has remained shuttered.
"I think the airport thing was very significant," a foreign diplomat here said. "It had the form of a coup. I think it was the IRGC saying publicly, 'We can do what we want.' . . . The question is whether they're pressing their own agenda or doing Khamenei's bidding."
Others are more sanguine. Calling the Revolutionary Guard a "maturing" organization, another diplomat noted the restraint it had shown in Iraq, where it is the lead Iranian agency. But at a June 2 public conference, a brigadier in the guards lauded the effectiveness of "martyrdom operations," citing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States as tactical operations that produced far-reaching strategic results, according to Iranian media accounts. But any formal link between the Revolutionary Guard and the Army of Martyrs is denied by both the government and Samadi.
Samadi said the Army of Martyrs was formed to protest a visible slackening in revolutionary zeal. A photo of flag-draped U.S. coffins decorates his office wall, beside a portrait of a Palestinian suicide bomber and her infant daughter. A third photo shows Khaled Eslamboli firing an automatic weapon at Sadat's reviewing stand during a military parade on Oct. 6, 1981. Samadi said the group's first act was a protest against dropping Eslamboli's name from street signs.
"We realized this was the initial step toward creating a gap between the revolutionary Iranians and other Muslims in other parts of the world, especially those fighting the Israelis in Palestine," he said.
Like many Islamic militants, Samadi describes suicide bombings as asymmetrical warfare, a military tactic that levels the battlefield between a technologically superior army and an oppressed population. He lamented that Iran is rarely credited with pioneering the form by sending car and truck bombs against the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon in the early 1980s. When a reporter observed that Iran appeared to have forsaken the practice since a truck bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996 was traced to Iranian agents, the spokesman smiled.
"The U.S. has not really recognized that we have successfully transferred a good method of resistance to other countries," he said. "We do not have to mount foreign operations ourselves."
And yet, he said, Osama bin Laden threatens to give martyrdom operations a bad name. "What's the point of blowing up a civilian train in Spain, or the U.S. embassies in Africa where a lot of Africans are killed?"
The Army of Martyrs wants nothing to do with Hassan Sabah's Assassins, either. "The nature of the things they did is quite in line with what Osama bin Laden is carrying out," Samadi said.
No such talk is heard in Alamut, northwest of Tehran. "If Hassan Sabah was the ruler, it would be excellent," Safari said. "God bless him.
"Really. God bless him."
-------- iraq
U.S. Official Cites 'Progress' but Sees G.I.'s in Iraq for Years
June 22, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/politics/22CND-PENT.html
WASHINGTON, June 22 - The United States may have to keep troops in Iraq for years to come despite the "enormous progress" in bringing peace to that country, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said today.
Mr. Wolfowitz's prediction, coupled with a high-ranking general's warning that "we should expect more violence, not less," in the near future, highlighted a sometimes contentious hearing of the House Armed Services Committee.
Mr. Wolfowitz, who returned recently from a tour of Iraq, said he heard military people from the United States and their allies say again and again that the people back home just do not realize how much progress is being achieved in Iraq as it moves toward sovereignty on June 30.
"It's something we heard almost everywhere - from Iraqis, from Americans, from a British general down in Basra," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "What doesn't get through in all the reporting on problems is, there's also been enormous progress."
But Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the panel's ranking Democrat, was not persuaded. Conceding that much had been accomplished in Iraq, he asserted that progress had been slowed by "the security quagmire" that exists there now.
"I see, Mr. Secretary, two Iraqs," Mr. Skelton said. "One is the optimistic Iraq that you describe, and we thank you for your testimony. And the other Iraq is the one that I see every morning, with the violence, the death of soldiers and marines. I must tell you, it breaks my heart a little bit more every day."
When Mr. Skelton asked Mr. Wolfowitz what lessons he had absorbed in the past 15 months, or roughly since all-out war ended and the mopping up and peace-keeping began, the Pentagon official responded at length about the evils of Saddam Hussein, his henchmen and their followers.
"Mr. Secretary, let me interrupt if I may," Mr. Skelton broke in. "My question is, what lessons we have learned, you have learned in the last 15 months."
Mr. Wolfowitz replied that military planners may have underestimated how persistent the anti-American forces might be even after the several dozen leaders of the Baghdad regime were killed or captured. And he said that the Iraqis themselves must eventually impose security on their country, not just to stabilize the government but to allow ordinary Iraqis to go about their lives.
Mr. Skelton then asked, "You think we might be there, then, a good number of years?"
"I think it's entirely possible," Mr. Wolfowitz replied. "But what I think is also nearly certain is the more they step up, and they will be doing so more and more each month, the less and less we will have to do."
"As they take over more responsibility," Mr. Wolfowitz added, "we will be able to let them be in the front lines and us be in a supporting position."
The United States has about 138,000 soldiers and marines in Iraq now. President Bush has said repeatedly that United States forces will remain there as long as necessary, and not a day longer.
Gen. Peter Pace, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said about 226,000 Iraqis are being trained right now for security positions, as against the 250,000 that will probably be required. Other countries are helping with that training, the Marine Corps general said.
But General Pace offered this sober assessment. "What I really wanted to say most, was that we should expect more violence, not less, in the immediate weeks ahead, as our enemies understand that the Iraqi people are about to do what our enemies most fear, which is to take control of their own government."
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Death Stalks An Experiment In Democracy
Fearful Baghdad Council Keeps Public Locked Out
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58888-2004Jun21?language=printer
Last of three articles
BAGHDAD -- The weekly meeting of the Rashid district council began last Wednesday with a prayer for two of the group's 33 members. One was in critical condition at a U.S. military hospital after being shot seven times in an assassination attempt. Another was in hiding after gunmen attacked her house and killed her brother.
"Let us remember our martyrs," Sami Ahmed Sharif, the council chairman, intoned as his fellow members stood, turned their palms to the ceiling and bowed their heads.
There were no other residents of the Rashid district to observe the moment of silence or the rest of the proceedings. Council members voted to close the meeting to the public because of fears that assassins would slip in and mark members for death. To enforce the decision, U.S. and Iraqi soldiers surrounded the council building and stationed snipers on the roof.
The nascent political institutions designed to replace the U.S. administration of Iraq are beset by challenges to their popular legitimacy and effectiveness, and by grave risks to Iraqis who have joined the experiment in representative government. As Iraqis prepare for their country to regain sovereignty, it is uncertain how much their political future will be shaped by the $700 million program in democracy-building that has been at the core of the U.S. occupation.
Inside the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority, which will dissolve with the handover on June 30, some officials express doubts that Iraq's political system will conform to the American blueprints. "Will this develop the way we hope it will?" a CPA official involved in promoting democracy said. "Probably not."
New political institutions to replace Saddam Hussein's Baath Party dictatorship are among the chief legacies of the U.S. occupation. Every city and province has a local council. New mayors, provincial governors and national cabinet ministers have been chosen. The Shiite Muslim majority, shut out of power in Hussein's government, is widely represented, as are religious minorities and women. Hundreds of political parties have formed, and thousands of people have participated in seminars on democracy.
But Iraqis criticize the local councils and the interim national government as illegitimate because their members were not elected. The country's top Shiite cleric has repudiated the interim constitution drafted by the U.S.-appointed Governing Council. In several recent meetings about the country's political future, Iraqis who favor a Western-style democracy have been drowned out by calls for a system governed by Islamic law.
The cabinet, appointed by a U.N. envoy three weeks ago, has had little time to prepare to govern. Local councils, whose authority had been restricted for months by U.S. military commanders, are also stepping into uncharted areas, uncertain about their responsibilities and powers under a system whose inauguration is a week away.
Yet these uncertainties are overshadowed by the imminent threat of violence. Local council members who once welcomed constituents into their homes now keep armed guards at the front gate. Leaders of the national government travel in armored vehicles and work inside Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, an area off-limits to ordinary Iraqis. Many foreign contractors hired by the U.S. government to promote democracy have either relocated to Kuwait or hunkered down in protected compounds.
Despite those precautions, more than 100 Iraqi government officials have been killed during the occupation, including two members of the Governing Council. Over the past two weeks, the deputy foreign minister and a senior official in the Education Ministry have been assassinated. On Sunday, masked gunmen shot and killed the council chairman of Baghdad's Rusafa district and his deputy as they sat in a cafe.
Teaching Iraqis about democracy has also been risky. Scott Erwin, a 22-year-old CPA staff member, was critically wounded in an ambush this month as he drove away from a Baghdad university where he was teaching a class on democracy. Two CPA employees who worked on civic education initiatives, Fern Holland and Robert Zangas, were shot to death in March near the city of Hilla.
"Iraq may get to a semi-democratic outcome. But the more-democratic outcomes that were possible a year ago are much more difficult to imagine now because of the security situation," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who worked on democracy issues for the CPA before leaving Iraq this spring, in part because of concerns about safety. "This is the biggest tragedy of Iraq."
The Central Mission
The transformation of Iraq from dictatorship to democracy was the central mission of the CPA. Everything else -- the efforts to rebuild infrastructure, train police, revise the school curriculum -- was aimed at building a democratic government that would be a model for the rest of the Middle East.
The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, initially planned to supervise the entire process. He wanted the CPA to oversee the drafting of a constitution and the convening of general elections. Bremer insisted last summer that the United States would relinquish sovereignty only to a stable, independent, democratically elected Iraqi government.
When escalating violence and dissent by Iraqis led the Bush administration to abandon that plan in November and accelerate the handover, Bremer ordered the CPA to advance democratic goals as far as possible by June 30. He promulgated an interim constitution that included a bill of rights and a commitment to hold elections by January. Local councils whose members had been chosen by the military were authorized to select new members through caucuses. Bremer augmented the $30 million set aside by Congress for democracy promotion with another $700 million to fund political parties, nongovernmental organizations and civics programs to advocate such political values as the separation of church and state, women's rights and federalism.
A key component of the U.S. strategy, starting at the beginning of the occupation, was to create effective grass-roots government. When Hussein was in power, governors, mayors and even municipal police chiefs were appointed by Baghdad. The CPA wanted to change that, starting in the capital city.
The CPA's plan for Baghdad envisioned three tiers of local government: a city council, eight district councils and dozens of neighborhood councils. The councils were limited to advising U.S. officials about reconstruction needs in the city. They had neither the power to enact legislation nor budgets for municipal improvements.
Despite calls from Iraqi politicians for the participants to be chosen by popular vote, the CPA deemed municipal elections too risky last summer. They worried that religious extremists and Baathists would manipulate the process. Instead, the CPA asked the Research Triangle Institute, which had a U.S. government contract to promote democracy in Iraq, to organize neighborhood caucuses to select the councils.
Participants in the caucuses were screened by Americans who supervised the entire process. As a result, the councils were filled with people who owed their jobs more to the CPA than to the public. "The community saw us as tools of the Americans," said Ali Aziz, the secretary of the Rashid council. "It was the beginning of our problems."
Nurturing New Leaders
American officials hope local council members, almost all of whom lived in Iraq while Hussein was in power, will emerge as prominent political figures and potential challengers to the clique of national politicians who opposed Hussein from exile.
"The councils have been a very successful experiment in democracy," said Andrew Morrison, a U.S. diplomat who speaks Arabic and has served as the CPA's governance coordinator for Baghdad.
The composition of the Rashid district council would seem to bear out that assessment. The council, responsible for a large swath of Shiite-dominated southern Baghdad, includes several members with doctoral degrees. Others have important tribal and business connections. Four of the 33 members are women.
Despite their aspirations to seek an elective seat in an eventual national parliament, several council members said that the CPA's limits on their authority had kept them from building the respect they needed to earn the trust and respect of their constituents.
"How can we win the support of the people if we have no money?" said Sharif, the council chairman, a voluble real-estate broker who was encouraged to participate in politics by his friends and neighbors. "If we cannot help them, they will not support us."
When not focused on security, the council's meetings are devoted to discussing work they want the Americans to perform, instead of work they can accomplish themselves. Although they will shed their advisory status to the Americans after June 30, members worry that their limited influence could weaken because there will be fewer U.S.-funded projects and they will have no budget of their own. Over the past four months, the CPA has consulted with the council in allocating more than $56 million for public works projects in the district.
Members faulted the CPA for not keeping a commitment to give a large share of power to local officials. The Rashid council has no control over police officers or many other government employees because they report to national ministries.
Morrison said the division of power between national and local officials would be decided when Iraqis write a permanent constitution. "The Iraqis are going to debate this out over the course of the next year," he said. "We tried to give them the building blocks, but it's one area I'm not sure where it's going to come out."
Among the things the Rashid council plans to do after June 30 is assert its independence from its American sponsors. It has politely disinvited U.S. civilian and military officials, who have attended every council meeting so far, from sessions after that date.
Council members said they envisioned a democracy different from what they have read about the United States, suggesting that many of the concepts Americans have been preaching here have not been accepted. For instance, many said that a separation between religion and the state makes little sense in Iraq.
"We can't act this way," insisted Murthada Younis, the deputy chairman. Outside the room in which he was speaking, several photocopied pictures of a deceased Shiite cleric were taped to the wall. "Religion is part of our life and it should be part of government," he said.
Men on the council said they supported allowing women to vote and hold elective office, but several scoffed at the notion of giving women the same personal freedoms they enjoy outside the Arab world. "In the West, women have absolute freedom to do what they want," said Abbas Taie, an X-ray technician who has attended several U.S.-sponsored democracy workshops. "The Iraqi women refuse such kinds of freedom."
Sharif, the Rashid chairman, said one of the most important items before the council after June 30 will be scheduling local elections. "Right now, many people do not think we are legitimate," he said. "That would change if we were elected by the people."
But Sharif said he recognized that holding an election before the end of the year would be impossible because of the security situation. Campaigning for a January national election will be hard enough, he said. Right now, he said, only a fool would attempt to go door to door or hold a community meeting to meet with constituents. "It's far too dangerous," he said.
Asked who he thought his chief rival would be, he did not pause.
"Terrorism," he said.
'We Need Protection'
After the prayer and the approval of the previous week's minutes, the Rashid council got down to work. The first order of business was to hand out military permits to each member allowing them to carry handguns.
"Our lives are in jeopardy," Sharif said as he distributed the laminated cards.
The U.S. Army had given council members .38-caliber pistols for their protection. But the licenses had expired on April 30, exposing members to arrest if they were searched at a military checkpoint. Sharif said he had continued to pack his pistol, as well as carrying two unlicensed AK-47 assault rifles in his car.
"I'm the chairman, but I violate the law so I can protect myself," he said.
For months, the Rashid district council avoided the violence that had plagued other groups. In the district as a whole, five neighborhood council members have been assassinated this year. In Sadr City, a large Shiite slum, the chairman of the district council was killed and strung from a pole. A sign hanging from his neck accused him of being an American spy.
Rashid council members learned to live with threats and close calls. Yacoub Youssef, the chairman of the education committee, said he had received 14 threats, some written and others by telephone, accusing him of collaborating with U.S. forces. Younis, the deputy chairman, said he was almost gunned down on his way to work last month. "We had been very lucky," he said.
This month, the luck ran out. On June 5, gunmen opened fire on council member Ali Ameri, a professor at Baghdad University, as he drove to work, killing two of his bodyguards and leaving him near death. On June 11, assailants sprayed bullets into the house of a colleague, biologist Nisreen Haider, killing her brother and forcing her into seclusion.
"Serving on this council has become very risky," said Adel Fahdil, a contractor. Although Fahdil insisted he was not worried because he had 20 guards, all armed with AK-47s, other members were not as confident. Most cannot afford a large security detail and are forced to rely on one or two relatives with weapons. They have asked for protection, but U.S. officials answered that they did not have the resources to guard more than 1,200 district and neighborhood councilors across the capital.
"We need someone to help us," said council member Majid Mamouri, who said he could not pay for guards with his salary as a professor of veterinary science. "We need bodyguards. We need protection."
At Wednesday's meeting -- held at a former hunting lodge once run by Hussein's son, Qusay -- only 18 of the council's 33 members were in attendance.
Reached in hiding, Haider said in a telephone interview that she had no intention of returning to the council. "I will not work there anymore," she said. "The people do not deserve to be served."
She said she could no longer live in the Rashid district and planned to move elsewhere in Iraq. "They are watching me, and I expect to be killed," she said.
Ideals and Necessities
Despite the threats, some council members said they were uneasy about excluding the public from their meetings.
"We're working in the name of the citizens," said Youssef, who also serves as a senior official in the Education Ministry. "The public should be able to attend even if we're afraid of them. The citizens have a right to hear what we're doing. We should not be having secret meetings."
But Sharif, a trim man with close-cropped hair and large glasses, argued that the safety of the members was more important. "We must protect the council," he said. "This is not ideal but it is necessary."
These days, he said, "we must do what is necessary for democracy, not what is ideal."
Sharif said he expected the threats to abate after June 30, when the occupation ends and the council assumes greater authority in southern Baghdad. He said he hoped residents and the insurgents would change their opinions of the members when they are working without Americans in the room.
"I don't have any trust in the Americans anymore," Younis said. "I trust my nation to achieve democracy despite terrorism. People know what they want."
While the threats and attacks have scared off some members, they have strengthened the resolve of at least a quorum on the council. With the CPA dissolving and U.S. troops assuming a lower profile, they regard themselves as front-line fighters for democracy.
"If we quit now, the terrorists win," said Youssef, who has been threatened 14 times and was shot at on his way to work last month. Each attempt at intimidation, he said, "gives me the strength to be more determined."
Special correspondent Huda Ahmed Lazim contributed to this report.
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'Bush Is a Great Actor'
The NewStandard.
by Dahr Jamail
June 22, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=2852
The floor of my hotel rumbled as yet another bomb detonated in central Baghdad at 8:55 a.m. today. My colleague down the hall showed up and asked, "Did you feel that?" I responded, "Yeah, Abu Talat is scheduled to show at nine so we can go to work ... get your stuff."
As usual, Abu Talat was right on time and we were off into the heat and traffic, inching our way toward the blast sight near the Central Bank.
The usual crowd milled about a crumbled area of curb where the small bomb had turned a nearby iron gate into a tortured metal jungle-gym. Fragments of concrete lay strewn about the street as anxious security guards wearing black flak jackets nervously directed the traffic that creeps by.
"It is the Americans and Israelis who are planting these bombs," said Hammad Hussan, who is a security guard at the nearby bank. His hysteria is not uncommon here in Baghdad, where a day without an IED or car bomb has become an oddity. The four Iraqis wounded by the blast had already been evacuated. Hammad and several of the other guards believed the attack was meant to destabilize the banking system, as it occurred at the time when money is usually deposited at the bank.
One of the cars which was ripped up from the blast sat nearby - looters already propping bricks under it while taking the wheels off under the supervision of bank security guards.
At a nearby tea stall the owner, Hussein Ali openly expressed his grievances toward the occupation. Being an ex-Iraqi Army captain, he refuses to join the new army. "I don't like the defense minister, and nobody knows who these people [the new government] are," he said while sweat beaded on his forehead. The mornings don't start off too hot, but by 10 a.m. it was already 90 degrees.
Another man sitting nearby as we drank tea jumped in, "There is no security here, and this is why we have no jobs." He continued, "The Americans can never bring security here, everyday we have these bombs killing Iraqis, for what?" Despite so many people having grown weary of the fighting, bloodshed and bombs, Iraqis' anger toward the occupation is rising along with the stifling summer temperatures here.
I continued my ongoing hospital research after the lively tea discussion over at Yarmouk Hospital. The Assistant Manager, Dr. Hayder Al-Safar told me how there were no problems there, that if they ever have shortages of any medicines, he calls the U.S.-funded Ministry of Health and within days they are provided.
I stared at him blankly, while making it a point not to ask him the question in my mind, which was, "So doctor, how much, exactly, do they pay you to lie?"
See, it was just weeks earlier that I'd visited Yarmouk Hospital.
At that time, Dr. Namin Rashid, the chief resident, stated that the only medical help his hospital had received lately had been a load of medical supplies from Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani.
He complained that the Ministry of Health consistently failed to give them enough supplies, and his hospital currently only had 100 sets of IVs and blood transfusion equipment. Yarmouk serves 5,000 patients each day.
He stated then, "We are getting less medical supplies now than we were during the sanctions!"
He said his hospital is receiving only one half as many supplies as it was prior to the invasion.
He stated, "The Ministry [of Health] talks a lot, but they do no action for us." He said that people are getting injured or killed on their way to the hospital because of the dismal security situation. He said, "Bremer came here and talked a lot at the beginning of the occupation, but nothing has changed."
His anger and frustration was palpable when he discussed how many gunshot victims he treated who are shot at U.S. checkpoints, and said that he too was afraid to even leave his hospital.
He was outraged at the fact that his hospital treats 10-20 gunshot victims each day, whereas before the invasion they treated an average of one per week, sometimes only one per month.
But it had been a little while since Dr. Rashid had told me these things, so Abu Talat, my friend Tareq and I decided to go get a second opinion about what Dr. Al-Safar had just told us.
Abu Talat, who is like a guided missile when it comes to gathering information for my stories, insisted we go straight to the supply room of the hospital.
There we met Dr. Um Mohammed at her desk. She is responsible for assisting in running the supply distribution for the hospital. At first reluctant to talk with me about supply shortages, I let her know Dr. Al-Safar had told me everything was great.
"He says these things but he knows better," she said while sitting very still. "We tell him what we need, and he says that he asks the Ministry of Health but they don't give it to him, so why bother?"
She has grown weary of the broken promises from the coalition, scattered like useless debris over the wreckage of her shattered country.
"This is just like Afghanistan," she said while beginning to open up more about things that she has obviously been internalizing. "We lack everything here."
Her talk went straight to those responsible for the lack of supplies - those funding and controlling the Ministry of Health: the U.S.-led CPA.
"They've destroyed the foundations of Iraq. What do you think we can do with no foundations," she asked, her eyes looking deeply into mine as I wrote furiously on my note pad while maintaining eye contact. "Even if the Americans stay here 15 years, there will be no security."
Her dark eyes were like lasers as her focused discussion seared into one topic after another. She was on fire.
"The West knows what is happening here but nobody can stand up to the colonial superpower America. Look at this hospital! Anything they do or build is superficial, not fundamental," she stated firmly. "Bush is a great actor while he speaks of freedom."
She shifted to the prison scandal. "Abu Ghraib attacked the dignity of the Iraqi people. America didn't become barbarians from killing Indians, Vietnamese, Central Americans, Afghanis, and bombing us and our young children, who now have psychological scars?"
"I never liked Saddam, nor did I support him, but at least under the dictator there was order and some basic services," she continued vehemently, her eyes becoming more intense after I'd thought that impossible. "Now there is no order, no electricity, no fundamental stability."
Abu Talat suggested that she be careful, speaking so sternly about the failure of the occupation. She looked piercingly at him and said, "I am afraid, but not for myself. I'm not afraid to tell the truth, I'm only afraid for my family."
Nevertheless, she continued with this chance to express her anger.
"So many Iraqis said the Americans would treat them better than Saddam, but when they saw the Americans stealing and killing, the Iraqis started to think differently about them."
Though the topic is dancing about, the passion of her feelings links it all together. "The bad side of the Americans has been exposed to Iraqis now, and this is what we are seeing," she said, referencing the indiscriminate street killings, Abu Ghraib and the wedding party massacre. "Me and my husband used to want to go to America," she said before taking a long pause without looking away.
The next words were from her eyes, and she said, "Now ... never."
She told us a story of a truck that was turning around near a U.S. tank and was shot because it was too close. Everyone in it was severely injured; many had lost their eyes from the shrapnel. She was the doctor who wrote up the report, and had written "occupying forces" for those responsible for destroying the truck. She said the administrator of Yarmouk Hospital crossed out "occupying," then crossed out "forces" from the report.
"So the truck just exploded on its own?" she asked.
Several seconds were allowed to pass to drive home her point.
She then told of a car full of medications for the hospital that was traveling from the airport when it was shot by a passing tank. "And the tank did not even stop," she added.
Her anger from being on the front lines, treating the casualties churned out on a daily basis by the occupation forces was palpable.
"Some Iraqis still believe the Americans are here to help them," she said in disbelief.
"I pray that God shows them what the Americans are like," she said unmoving, her eyes unwavering. "I pray that God sics the Americans on them so they will see for themselves."
She asked us if the occupation forces suffer from psychological problems, because she doesn't think it is possible for anyone to do and say the things they do in Iraq and still be healthy.
She looked even deeper into my eyes and said, "Don't imagine that the U.S. has come here to do us any good."
Abu Talat asked her who her husband is, wondering if her strong opinions have been influenced by him.
She looked directly at him and said, "These are MY thoughts and emotions! Who my husband might be is irrelevant to my beliefs."
We thanked her and walked out of the hospital to find several Humvees out front, en route to what a security guard told us was yet another bombing.
-------- israel / palestine
U.S. Envoy Wants Israel Settlement Freeze
June 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-US.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should dismantle settlement outposts and freeze building in other Jewish settlements in keeping with commitments he gave the United States, the U.S. ambassador to Israel said Tuesday.
Daniel Kurtzer's comments were a rare public criticism of Sharon, who has enjoyed strong U.S. support in his three year campaign to crack down on Palestinian militants and isolate Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Kurtzer told Army Radio that Sharon and one of his close advisers had promised U.S. President George W. Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to remove scores of unauthorized settlement outposts that dot hilltops throughout the West Bank. Sharon also discussed freezing new building in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, he said.
Palestinians view the West Bank settlements as encroachment on land they claim for a future state.
Kurtzer said that the United States wanted to see Sharon's commitments honored.
``These are commitments undertaken by Israel,'' he said. ``They're not as a result of any pressure from our side, so this is something that Israel undertook to do, and therefore, sure, we expect them to be fulfilled.''
A senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Israel would fulfill all the promises it made on the settlement outposts. He attributed any delays to Israeli courts holding up demolition orders.
Under the U.S.-backed ``road map'' peace plan, Israel is required to dismantle dozens of unauthorized outposts and freeze construction in veteran settlements. It has continued settlement building. and the Israeli settlement watchdog, Peace Now, says it has taken down only a handful of outposts, leaving more than 100 standing.
On Monday Israel's Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order against an army decision to dismantle Givat Haroeh, one of the largest West Bank outposts. A court spokeswoman said justices would meet within a week to consider the issue.
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Israel's Intelligence Scandal
Antiwar.com
by Uri Avnery
June 22, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/avnery.php?articleid=2848
Two weeks ago, the international community made a shocking declaration.
Giving in to a demand by George Bush, the "Quartet" accepted the "Revised Disengagement Plan" of Ariel Sharon. This means that the United Nations, the European Union, the Russian Federation and the United States confirmed this document. I wonder if any one of the honorable diplomats has read the document with their own eyes.
In the first paragraph of the "plan," the following words appear: "Israel has come to the conclusion that at present, there is no Palestinian partner with whom it is possible to make progress on a bilateral peace process."
That is to say, the international community has confirmed that the Palestinian people have no right to take part in the determination of their own fates. Everything will be decided by the Government of Israel alone, with the backing of the United States, whose position will be automatically accepted by the other partners of the "Quartet."
The European Union with its 25 member-states, the government of the Russian Federation and the organization that represents the entire world have humbly accepted the edict of Bush, the dictator of the world, who is himself a captive of Sharon. Sharon decided long ago that the elected president of the Palestinian people is "irrelevant," together with the whole Palestinian leadership.
The Palestinian people have been eliminated from the list of decision-makers, thereby also abolishing in practice all the agreements signed with them, from Oslo to the Road Map.
This is a scandalous step, unprecedented in its dimensions, and it passed without comment. Apart from Sharon and his minions, nobody noticed the implications. The big boot of the international community trod on the Palestinian people without even noticing it, as if on an ant.
That is the culmination of a process that began with the return of the then-prime minister, Ehud Barak, from the 2000 Camp David summit. After the failure of that meeting, he coined the mantra that has since become the cornerstone of the policy of successive Israeli governments: "I have turned every stone on the way to peace / I have offered the Palestinians more generous proposals than any of my predecessors / The Palestinians have rejected all my offers / Arafat wants to throw us into the sea / We have no partner for peace."
This mantra is based on a series of lies that have been exploded long ago. American eyewitnesses like Rober Malley, President Clinton's advisor at Camp David, as well as some of the Israeli participants and international researchers have published detailed reports that prove that Barak himself was responsible for the failure at least as much as Arafat - in fact, far more.
And as if by coincidence, just when the international community absentmindedly accepted that the Palestinian people are not a partner for peace, in Israel itself things are happening that turn everything upside down.
The High Priest of the "We Have No Partner" creed is General (res.) Amos Gilad, who at the crucial time was chief of the research section (and as such the No. 2) of the Army Intelligence Department. Since army intelligence is the department solely responsible for the "national security assessment," it has a decisive influence on the formation of national policy.
The army intelligence man reports directly to the Prime Minister and takes part in cabinet meetings. No minister would dare to question his assessments, which are the guiding star of the entire state. The research chief of the intelligence department is supposed to submit a professional summary of the huge amount of data amassed by the intelligence community. Most ministers are forbidden to read the written report, and even the few who can are allowed only to glance at it. Therefore, the oral summary presented by the chief of research to the Prime Minister and the cabinet is of paramount importance.
Amos Gilad went even further: he appeared almost daily in the media, commenting on almost every political and security event. He was not only the "national assessor," but also the "national explainer," as he was commonly called in the media.
Who is this man, who has had a greater influence than any other person on the policies of Israel over the last few crucial years, and whose kontsepsia (Hebrew for "conception") is still directing the path of the state? This is the very same Amos Gilad who some days ago claimed for himself the benefits due to disabled army veterans. He was not wounded in battle, God forbid, but claimed that the stress caused by his difficult job has inflicted on him irreversible mental damage.
This claim involves a considerable amount of chutzpah, if not worse. But it also raises the question: This mental damage, when did it start? When were the first symptoms observed? Was it when he started endlessly repeating that Arafat wants to throw us into the sea? Or was this declaration, perhaps, itself a symptom of his mental problem? And how can he continue to fulfill his present duties?
The last two weeks, Israel witnessed a stormy debate that should have shaken the very foundations of the state.
The former chief of Army Intelligence, General (res.) Amos Malka, who was the direct superior of Gilad, broke his silence of many years and published a thunderous accusation: that Amos Gilad arrived at his kontseptsia without any intelligence basis whatsoever. On the contrary, the huge amount of information collected by the intelligence department indicated the very opposite. That is to say, Gilad freely invented his intelligence reports, based on his political views and/or on the desire to please his political bosses, Barak and Sharon.
This grave accusation raised a storm in professional circles. Intelligence operatives of undoubted integrity emerged from their anonymity in order to support Malka publicly. They were headed by the man who, at the relevant time, was in charge of the Army Intelligence section for Palestinian affairs, Colonel Ephraim Lavie, who was then responsible for the collection of all intelligence material about the Palestinian leadership. There is no doubt that in the professional confrontation between Amos and Amos, Amos Malka emerged as the victor.
This means, in simple words: there was no intelligence material at all backing the assertion that Arafat is working for the destruction of the State of Israel, that Arafat had broken off the peace process in order to start a terror campaign, that Arafat is not ready for a reasonable compromise. All these assertions, uttered by diverse Israeli politicians and generals, were based on the "assessment" of one man who, while appearing to represent the intelligence department, was actually suppressing the considered professional reports of his own department, as well as of the General Security Service (Shabak).
When the debate heated up, the orientalist Matti Steinberg, a former advisor on Palestinian affairs to the chief of the Shabak, joined the fray. Steinberg not only confirmed that Gilad's kontseptsia was completely false and contradicted the intelligence material assembled by his own people, but he also asserted that Gilad's conception "fulfilled its own prophecy."
Since Israel is immeasurably stronger than the Palestinians, its actions create reality. The acts guided by Gilad's kontseptsia created results that suited it. Much as the kontseptsia of Eli Za'ira, the intelligence chief at the time of the Yom Kippur war, resulted in catastrophe, thus the kontseptsia of Amos Gilad caused - and is still causing - the disasters of the present intifada.
(The 1973 intelligence conception was that Egypt would not dare to attack Israel, causing all the glaringly obvious signs to the contrary to be ignored, thus preventing adequate preparations and resulting in the death of 3000 Israeli soldiers. Since then the Hebrew word kontseptsia has assumed an almost obscene connotation in Israel.)
As of now, Gilad's immediate superior (Malka) and his immediate subordinate (Lavie) both accuse him of presenting his personal opinions, which were unsupported by any intelligence backing, as if they were the official assessment of the intelligence services.
Gilad has caused irreversible damage. His mantra was accepted by the vast majority of Israelis, as well as a large part of international public opinion. Its exposure in professional circles will not alter this fact. Indeed, the recent decision of the "Quartet" shows how deeply entrenched this lie has become throughout the world.
By the way, these revelations show that the secret assessment of the highest professional echelons of the Army Intelligence Department and Shabak were practically identical with the assessments published at the time by Gush Shalom, which were met with total disbelief by the media and the public, including a large part of the "peace camp." To wit, that the Palestinian leadership, headed by Arafat, has never wavered from its readiness to make peace with Israel based on the creation of a Palestinian state on 97% of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (which together make 22% of historic Palestine), with territorial compensation for the remaining 3% and sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the Haram-al-Sharif ("Temple Mount"). The refugee problem would be solved by agreement with Israel (meaning: Israel will have a veto on any solution).
The experts of army intelligence and the security service, too, agree that Arafat has not wavered from this position. On this basis, peace can be achieved even now, as Arafat himself confirmed this week in a fascinating interview with the new editor of Ha'aretz, David Landau.
Ariel Sharon denies this, of course, because he is not ready for peace on these terms. He wants to annex at least 55% of the West Bank, hoping that the life of the Palestinians in the remaining 45% will become so impossible that they will leave the country of their own accord. Shimon Peres is eager to help him in the realization of this design.
For that, Sharon needs the "We Have No Partner" mantra. Amos Gilad delivered the goods. Now the "Quartet" has accepted it, bringing shame on itself and obstructing the search for peace.
--------
Palestinians Wary of Egypt's Role in Gaza
Associated Press Writer
By RAVI NESSMAN
Jun 22, 2004 http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
JERUSALEM (AP) -- On the eve of a visit by an Egyptian mediator, Palestinian officials sent conflicting signals Tuesday on how much involvement they will accept from their neighbor after an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Egypt and the Palestinians have a historically uneasy relationship, and Egypt's proposed role in securing Gaza - once ruled by Cairo - has many Palestinians worried they'll be replacing one occupation with another.
Egypt demands that in preparation for an Israeli withdrawal, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat restructure his tangled security forces and relinquish some control over them. It also wants to send 200 military advisers to Gaza to retrain Palestinian security forces.
Palestinians are wary. An Arafat ally said Tuesday that Egypt shouldn't meddle or press for security reform, and Palestinian militants angrily rejected any planned Egyptian security role in Gaza. Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath tried to soften the rare criticism by saying Cairo's help is welcome.
Complicating matters further, Israel is resisting an Egyptian demand that it halt military activities in Gaza after the advisers arrive there, an Israeli official said on condition of anonymity. However, Israel expects to be able to reach a compromise on the matter, the official said.
With Israel shunning the Palestinians as unreliable negotiating partners, Egypt - fearing chaos on its border with Gaza - has been trying to ensure order there after a pullout, planned for next year. The latest dispute threatens those efforts and leaves Gaza's future uncertain.
Egypt has a rocky history with the Palestinians. It took little responsibility for the Palestinians in Gaza when it ruled the region before Israel captured it in 1967 and worked to keep Palestinian refugees out of the country. That did not prevent Egyptian leaders from using the Palestinian cause to try to galvanize the Arab world behind its leadership.
But as the most influential Arab country at peace with Israel, it is now a key broker in the region.
Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman was to hold talks Wednesday in Jerusalem with Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. Afterward, he was to go to Ramallah to meet with Arafat.
Arafat has resisted past reform demands, and analysts say the Egyptian requirements have put him in a difficult position: If he accedes, he will give up a major source of his power, but if he resists, he could lose one of his few remaining allies.
"Arafat will not relinquish his power over the security forces unless he felt that his relationship with the Egyptians was threatened," Palestinian analyst Khalil Shikaki said.
With the Palestinians preparing for Suleiman's visit, Arafat ally Sakher Habash criticized the proposed Egyptian role in Gaza. "We don't want to be cut off from Egypt, and at the same time we don't want Egyptian interference," said Habash, a member of the ruling Fatah movement's influential Central Committee.
"As far as Fatah is concerned, demands that Arafat relinquish some of his powers are unacceptable and the Egyptians are well aware of this," he said. At best, Habash said, there would be increased cooperation between the security branches, but under Arafat's control.
The Egyptian efforts have also come under fire from Palestinian militant groups that met late Monday in Damascus, Syria. The groups, which included Hamas and Islamic Jihad, issued a statement indirectly criticizing Egypt and Jordan, which is considering a security role in the West Bank.
"We express our dismay and surprise over a security role for certain Arab parties in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank," the statement said.
The militants appeared concerned that Egypt is planning to retake control of Gaza.
Israeli officials say they hope for a strong Egyptian role in Gaza.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said he believes that regardless of the militants' statement, the Palestinians will accept the Egyptian advisers.
"I know the Palestinian people appreciate the role played by Egypt (and) I don't believe any Palestinian can ever consider attacking any member of an Egyptian group that is going to be sent to Palestine," said Maher, adding that Israel and Palestinian militants had to agree to a cease-fire before the advisers could be sent.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath said the Palestinian Authority was pleased with Egypt's involvement and suggested that perhaps some of the militants misunderstood the Egyptian role. "They are coming as advisers and as experts, not as rulers," Shaath said.
Shaath reiterated that Arafat has accepted the Egyptian security proposals in general, but he gave no evidence that a plan had been prepared. Arafat was to present a plan on security reform to Suleiman on Wednesday.
Gaza's top security chief, Maj. Gen. Abdel Razek Majaidie, said Tuesday the Palestinian security forces are ready to take control of Gaza after an Israeli withdrawal, and added that the various security agencies had been incorporated under his command. It was unclear whether the changes would meet Egypt's demands.
In new Gaza violence Tuesday, Israeli troops killed two Palestinians. The army said it had fired at two gunmen who approached its soldiers in the northern Gaza Strip.
Palestinian security forces said the military moved into the area in the morning and sent bulldozers to raze several farms to build a road. The Palestinians said the two were killed and six others wounded when the army fired a tank shell toward a group of people.
Also Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer said Israel must live up to promises to dismantle dozens of West Bank outposts and freeze settlement building. "This is something that Israel undertook to do, and therefore, sure, we expect them to be fulfilled," Kurtzer told Israel Army Radio.
An Israeli official said Israel was trying to remove outposts, but was slowed by court appeals by settlers. Israel never stopped building in the veteran settlements, even after its acceptance last year of the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan, which calls for a halt to construction.
-------- latin america
Four die in crash of two Bolivian air force planes
LA PAZ (AFP)
Jun 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040622175318.qbnquzgd.html
Two Bolivian air force training aircraft collided in mid-air Tuesday, killing four crew members, according to the military.
The planes were on a routine training mission near Cochabamba, in central Bolivia, 400 kilometers (250 miles) southeast of La Paz, military spokesman Teofilo Medina said.
Six planes took part in the exercise of flying in formation, according to local media. Two planes collided for unknown reasons and crashed on the runway of the military airbase, Medina said.
-------- nato
Slovakia's new president opposes troop withdrawal from Iraq
BRATISLAVA (AFP)
Jun 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040622152440.8zutn1r8.html
Slovakia's new president Ivan Gasparovic on Tuesday reiterated his opposition to a withdrawal of his country's troops from Iraq despite casualties suffered earlier this month.
"I think it's not possible to leave Iraq from one day to the next," he told a joint press conference with Defense Minister Juraj Liska.
Three Slovakian soldiers were killed in a blast during a mine-clearing operation south of Baghdad June 8.
Gasparovic however welcomed a call by Slovakian lawmakers for a government report on the situation in Iraq and their upcoming debate on the mandate of the Slovakian contingent in that country.
"No, we are not considering pulling our troops ouf of Iraq," said Liska.
He also said Bratislava had no plan to boost its military presence in Afghanistan where the success of NATO's mission is hampered by a lack of troops and equipment.
A unit of 82 Slovakian army engineers is operating in southern Iraq under Polish command. The unit, based near Hilla, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Baghdad, is responsible for mine-clearing operations. Some 20 members of Slovakian special forces have also been assigned to protecting the engineering unit.
Slovakia, which joined NATO in late March, also has a 40-man sapper unit serving with US-led forces in Afghanistan since 2002. The sappers are helping fix up the Bagram air base, 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Kabul. Sixteen other Slovakian soldiers are serving in Afghanistan under NATO command.
Gasparovic, 63, was elected president in April after a second round run-off with his former ally, Slovakia's former authoritarian leader Vladimir Meciar.
-----
Ukrainian parliament approves military reform
KIEV (AFP)
Jun 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040622140130.2x353sx7.html
The Ukrainian parliament voted to amend a law on Tuesday, allowing the nation to restructure its armed forces.
The former Soviet country is expected to reduce the size of its army by 70,000 by the end of the year, a move that has been long-awaited by NATO.
Although lawmakers had rejected the proposal at the beginning of the month, 238 members of parliament voted in favour on Tuesday; 226 votes had been needed for the changes to be approved.
The reduction is now expected to be completed by December 30 rather than next year and will bring the size of one of Europe's largest armies down to 285,000 from its current 355,000 personnel, 210,000 of them troops.
Ukraine's decision to reduce the number of its troops is part of a huge restructuring project for its armed forces, who are currently in a difficult situation due to a lack of funding.
Restructuring is set to continue until 2015.
In order to join NATO, the country of 48 million needs to modernize its army, a project which is being seen in a very negative light by its more powerful northern neighbour, Russia.
Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma has been invited to attend a NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey at the end of the month.
--------
Russia, NATO, hold joint antiterrorist wargame in Kaliningrad enclave
SVETLOGORSK, Russia (AFP)
Jun 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040622201952.wvthwm4c.html
Russia and NATO late Tuesday launched joint military exercices aimed at coordinating a response to potential terror strikes in Svetlogorsk, in the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad surrounded by European Union member states, officials said.
The four-day drill, code-named "Rescuers Without Borders" and staged by the US-led alliance and the Russian emergencies ministry, simulates a terrorist attack on an oil rig in the Baltic Sea.
Eight hundred rescuers, including 80 Poles and Lithuanians, whose countries are EU and NATO members and surround the Kaliningrad enclave, will take part in the exercises, as well as 10 ships and eight aircraft, said emergencies ministry official Yury Sushkov.
In the drill's scenario, "a terrorist group seizes an oil rig and 70 hostages, while making political demands to the Russian government. After two days of negotiations, security forces storm the rig, but terrorists blow it up," Sushkov said.
"40 people are wounded, and up to 500 tons of oil flow into the sea," he added.
The main goal of the exercises "is to display Russian rescue techniques, as well as techniques used in Lithuania and Poland," said deputy Russian emergencies minister general Gennadi Korotkin.
Such a scenario never actually occurred, "but we think such a situation is very likely to happen and can actually occur," said a NATO official, Stephen Orosz.
Russia, which has ruled out joining NATO and has watched the alliance's expansion up to its border with unease, is a member of the Partnership for Peace program between the US-led alliance and eastern and southern European states.
The program envisages regular military exercises between its member states. Russia and NATO held their first joint anti-terrorist exercise in 2002 in Bogorodsk, near Moscow.
-----
Bomb wounds Turkish officer
Device attached to anti-NATO poster ahead of summit
ISTANBUL, Turkey (CNN)
June 22, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/06/22/turkey.bomb/index.html
-- A small bomb attached to an anti-NATO banner injured a policeman in Istanbul Tuesday, less than a week before a NATO summit meeting begins in the city.
The bomb was attached to the banner on a bridge in the Incirli district. The policeman, a member of the bomb disposal unit, suffered minor injuries to his arm.
In early May, Turkish authorities arrested 24 suspected terrorists and later said some had confessed to a plot to kill world leaders at the June 28-30 summit.
U.S. President George W. Bush is scheduled to arrive in the capital Ankara on Saturday before traveling to Istanbul for the summit.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac also are among the alliance leaders scheduled to attend the summit, The Associated Press reported.
Also in May, a bomb destroyed two vehicles outside a McDonald's restaurant in Istanbul, but no one was hurt.
Small bombs also were detonated around the city on Friday, and during Blair's visit in May, also with no injuries.
In November, suicide bombers killed more than 60 people in attacks on the British consulate, the British-owned HSCB Bank and two synagogues.
Turkey, a predominately secular but Muslim nation, is a member of NATO.
CNN Correspondent Alphonso Van Marsh contributed to this report
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan military starts month-long war games
ISLAMABAD (AFP)
Jun 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040622123812.rct8fpt7.html
Pakistan's armed forces have started month-long war games aimed at updating their preparedness to meet any security threat, military officials said Tuesday.
The army, air force and navy were participating in the exercise codenamed Sabit Qadam (steadfast) III that began on Monday behind closed doors involving top commanders from the three services.
A military spokesman said they were routine exercise.
President Pervez Musharraf, who witnessed the opening day's proceedings, had expressed satisfaction with the operational preparedness of the the armed forces, a military statement said.
-------- prisoners of war
DETAINEE TREATMENT
Rules on Prisoners Seen as Sending Mixed Messages to G.I.'s
June 22, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/politics/22ABUS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
The following article was reported by Douglas Jehl, Eric Schmitt and Kate Zernike and was written by Mr. Jehl.
WASHINGTON, June 21 - Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration's new rules governing treatment of foreign prisoners have been contradictory and have sent mixed messages to American soldiers, according to military personnel and documents.
Six investigations are under way into abuses of detainees; none are expected to produce any conclusions soon. A close review of recently disclosed documents and interviews with soldiers, officers and government officials find a broader pattern of misconduct and knowledge about it stretching into the middle chain of command. But there is no clear evidence to date that the highest military or civilian leaders ordered or authorized the mistreatment of prisoners at American-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Still, the ever-shifting rules, in which lists of accepted interrogation tactics were widened drastically before being reined in over 17 crucial months, helped foster a climate in which abuse could flourish.
Starting with the 17 interrogation techniques approved in a standard Army manual, commanders at the Guantánamo prison doubled the permitted methods by late 2002, before shrinking the list. In Iraq last fall, directives on treatment of prisoners were changed at least three times in six weeks. Some of the procedures authorized in Iraq had been banned as too harsh months earlier at Guantánamo.
Some officers skirted international treaties governing prisoner treatment, some soldiers have said, instructing subordinates to hide detainees from monitors sent by the International Committee of the Red Cross. In one instance, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld approved an order to hold a suspected Iraqi terrorist but to keep his name off the prison rolls, effectively shielding the "ghost detainee" from Red Cross inspectors.
Lacking clear guidance, soldiers at various jails were apparently confused about the rules. In Iraq, some guards were such sticklers that they demanded paperwork to take away detainees' blankets, while others did not understand that they needed written authorization to intimidate prisoners with dogs.
Many guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq said they had been told by intelligence officers to "soften up" detainees, but some thought that meant making them do calisthenics to tire them out, while others took it to mean forcing them to crawl naked on leashes for hours.
Beatings were accepted enough at Abu Ghraib that some soldiers recorded the number of stitches their victims required with tack marks on the wall. In the worst cases in Afghanistan and Iraq, abuse resulted in deaths, including 10 cases now being investigated as homicides.
While President Bush has portrayed the events at Abu Ghraib as the actions of just a few soldiers at one prison, the picture emerging from documents, interviews and Congressional testimony points to a broader pattern of misconduct and knowledge about it stretching up the chain of command.
While the mistreatment did not go entirely unnoticed, many soldiers who had hints of the abuse did not report it. In a chaotic environment in the midst of a war, some soldiers said later, they assumed it must have been authorized.
"It was confusing the way the place was run," Sgt. Samuel Jefferson Provance III, who worked in interrogations at Abu Ghraib as part of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion, testified at a military hearing last month. "It was a shocking experience."
For military officials at the highest levels, the administration's fight against terrorism was a new kind of war. As Gen. James T. Hill, head of the military's Southern Command, said, describing the government's post-Sept. 11 effort to rewrite longstanding practices about prisoner treatment, "we really were moving into uncharted waters."
Geneva Rules Didn't Apply
Soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as planning began for the invasion of Afghanistan, the Pentagon asked Justice Department lawyers to assess whether detainees held in Afghanistan or in the new American-run prison at Guantánamo Bay could claim they had been mistreated under the Geneva Conventions and federal and international laws.
The lawyers concluded that the Geneva Conventions did not apply, because Guantánamo was outside the territorial United States, and because Al Qaeda and the Taliban were not legitimate states, so were not parties to the agreements. One memorandum argued that the president could authorize even "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment to protect national security, as long as it did not cause "great suffering or serious bodily injury" to detainees, like "killing or torturing them."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and State Department lawyers fired back objections, but apparently lost. An August 2002 memo on interrogation standards from the Justice Department to the White House counsel further whittled down the definition of torture. To qualify, the document said, mistreatment had to inflict pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
Military officials have described those legal arguments as theoretical and removed from the decision making about rules for interrogation and treatment of prisoners.
But first in Guantánamo and Afghanistan, and then in Iraq, commanders authorized procedures harsher than those spelled out in the Army's interrogations field manual. The 17 general techniques, like manipulating a prisoner's emotions or persuading the prisoner that it was futile to resist, formed a boundary that the American military had heeded in the recent past.
Like the legal memorandums, the decision to go beyond the field manual was based on the ground that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. For prisoners in Iraq, the reasoning was that the protections were not as restrictive as previously interpreted by the United States.
Harsher Procedures Added
At Guantánamo, the first clear widening of authority came in December 2002, when commanders asked the Pentagon for more latitude in interrogating a Saudi Arabian prisoner believed to be the planned 20th hijacker of Sept. 11.
The authorities thought the man, Mohamed al-Kahtani, had information about possible future attacks, but he had resisted standard interrogation techniques.
In response, Mr. Rumsfeld authorized at least 17 new procedures beyond those in the field manual, a senior Pentagon official said. They applied to all Guantánamo prisoners.
Those harsher techniques included hooding; exploiting a prisoner's phobias, sometimes using muzzled dogs in interrogations; removing some of a detainee's clothing; and the use of "minimum physical contact" like poking or grabbing.
Even though these harsher techniques were approved, senior military officials said last week that those four specific practices were never used at Guantánamo. Still, interrogators at the site and military lawyers in Washington objected. Just over a month later, Mr. Rumsfeld ordered a group of military lawyers, intelligence analysts and policy makers to review the rules.
On April 16, 2003, Mr. Rumsfeld narrowed the list of approved techniques. He permitted 24 methods at Guantánamo, including 17 from the Army manual, but stipulated that 4 of them required his explicit approval. They involved using incentives to cooperate, like offering hot showers in the winter, segregation for more than 30 days, good-cop-bad-cop interrogation and an approach called "pride and ego down," which exploits a prisoner's loyalty, intelligence or perceived weakness.
Defense officials said those more aggressive techniques had been used with only two prisoners at Guantánamo and did not constitute torture.
In Iraq, there had been no formal interrogation rules in place beyond those in the Army manual until late August 2003.
Then, officers at Abu Ghraib sought to give interrogators more freedom and proposed a set of rules drafted by an Army unit that had recently arrived from Afghanistan. The unit, the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, had a questionable record. Two prisoners under its supervision at Bagram Collection Point in Afghanistan died in December 2002, apparently in homicides that are still being reviewed by criminal investigators.
The battalion's commander, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, proposed 30 interrogation techniques, and two lawyers working for Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq, approved them. Defense officials have refused to say exactly what procedures were authorized under the proposal or under later directives put into effect in Iraq. A senior Pentagon official said last week that it was unclear whether those additional techniques had ever been used in interrogations.
Wider, Then Narrower Policy
Meanwhile, another crucial chain of events had already been set in motion. Stephen A. Cambone, Mr. Rumsfeld's top intelligence official, encouraged Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, then the head of detention operations at Guantánamo, to visit Iraq to find ways to improve the quality of intelligence extracted from detainees about the growing anti-American insurgency.
On Sept. 9, General Miller completed a review of operations in Iraq and recommended a detainee interrogation policy that borrowed heavily from the procedures approved for Guantánamo. He proposed establishing a new interrogation and debriefing center and ensuring that military police officers were assigned to help set the conditions for questioning.
On Sept. 14, General Sanchez authorized variations on what General Miller had recommended. Those rules allowed the use of harsh procedures banned from Guantánamo, including using sleep deprivation, to as little as four hours' rest each 24 hours, and making prisoners stand or crouch in positions for up to an hour, according to Senate aides who have read the confidential document.
As in Guantánamo, the policy ignited a debate among military lawyers, with particular objections coming from the Central Command.
So on Oct. 12, General Sanchez issued a much narrower policy. Most of the harsher methods automatically authorized in the earlier directive, like segregating a prisoner for more than 30 days, would not be permitted without the general's approval.
According to General Sanchez's top lawyer, Col. Marc Warren, the new procedures were consistent with the Geneva Conventions. But the policy still allowed interrogators to improvise if they received approval, according to a senior military official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon last month.
It remains unclear whether the changes were communicated through the ranks of interrogators and guards, particularly those at Abu Ghraib. Rules posted on the wall in the prison's Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, for example, were apparently outdated.
Some troubling practices were clearly tolerated, soldiers said in interviews and sworn statements. Forced nudity was common in the prison's highest-security area, or "hard site," overseen by military intelligence officers. One interrogator told investigators that he "generally" threw tables around a room holding detainees, while another said she did not regard slapping a detainee as abusive.
Several soldiers said in interviews that Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, who was in charge of the interrogation center, had handcuffed and hooded detainees who had been beaten and had hidden them in a cell during a Red Cross visit. Others said Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at the prison, had permitted them to intimidate detainees with dogs. None of the dog handlers have been charged with wrongdoing, and two of them have said they were following orders from Colonel Pappas.
By the accounts of the seven soldiers now charged, the abuses seen in the notorious photographs from the prison began as an attempt to encourage prisoners to talk.
Pfc. Lynndie R. England, telling investigators last month about what was going on in prison photographs, said making prisoners crawl with leashes was intended as a "humiliation tactic" to get them to tell more about the rape of an Iraqi boy.
But several of the soldiers charged said later acts depicted in photographs, like piling prisoners naked or forcing them to masturbate, had nothing to do with interrogations. "We thought it looked funny, so pictures were taken," Private England told investigators.
Senior Army officers in Baghdad say they did not learn about those abuses until a soldier came forward in January. But several senior Army officers knew by last November that the Red Cross had complained about problems at the prison, including forced nudity and physical and verbal abuse of prisoners.
Among those aware of the concerns were General Sanchez's top deputy, Maj. Gen. Walter Wojdakowski; his intelligence officer, Maj. Gen. Barbara G. Fast; and his top lawyer, Colonel Warren. In addition, a small unit inside the prison began reporting beatings and other abuses last fall in documents sent to military lawyers in Baghdad and a review board of colonels, according to military intelligence officers.
The role played by General Sanchez remains a particular focus of investigators. He authorized interrogation procedures in September that he banned 28 days later, and he visited Abu Ghraib at least three times in October, when the worse of the abuses occurred. He has said he did not learn of the incidents until January.
Last month, in response to growing concerns in Congress, General Sanchez narrowed the interrogation rules in Iraq once again, barring virtually all coercive tactics.
In early June, the general removed himself as the officer overseeing an inquiry into the role of military intelligence soldiers in the prisoner abuse, clearing the way for an Army general to interview him for the investigation.
--------
U.S. Approved Use of Dogs Against Prisoners
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
By Steve Holland
Jun 22, 2004
http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/410779|top|06-22-2004::19:25|reuters.html
- President Bush said he has never ordered the torture of Iraqi or al Qaeda prisoners as the White House on Tuesday released secret documents showing the use of dogs to induce fear was approved among interrogation methods at Guantanamo Bay and then abandoned.
The White House release of a thick file of newly declassified papers tried to demonstrate that Bush and his top aides, in setting policy on interrogation methods, insisted that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, be treated humanely.
"Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country: We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture. The values of this country are such that torture is not a part of our soul and our being," Bush told reporters at the White House.
But Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont accused the White House of releasing a "self-serving selection" of documents. "The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point," he said.
The documents showed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002 approved harsh interrogation techniques for Taliban and al Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, only to rescind many of those weeks later and approve less aggressive techniques in April of 2003.
Treatment of the Guantanamo detainees, including interrogation methods, has come under scrutiny following a scandal over abuse and sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
Rumsfeld originally approved aggressive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo Bay after military leaders there complained in a memo that "current guidelines for interrogation procedures at GTMO limit the ability of interrogators to counter advanced resistance."
The Guantanamo Bay leaders requested permission to use a wet towel and dripping water to induce "the misperception of suffocation" and the use of "mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing."
In response, in December 2002 Rumsfeld approved tactics such as forcing a detainee to stand up for up four hours, forced isolation for up to 30 days, deprivation of light, use of 20-hour interrogations, removal of clothing, forced shaving of facial hair, "inducing stress by use of detainee's fears (e.g., dogs)," and use of mild physical contact that did not cause injury.
A Pentagon legal brief recommending the use of the tactics argued that the proposed techniques were likely to pass constitutional muster as long as they were applied "in a good faith effort and not maliciously or sadistically for the very purpose of causing harm."
"The federal torture statute will not be violated as long as any of the proposed strategies are not specifically intended to cause severe physical pain or suffering or prolonged mental harm," the legal brief said.
White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales played down some of the documents produced by lawyers as "abstract legal theories" that "do not reflect the policies the administration ultimately adopted."
The methods actually used, according to a memo, fell somewhat short of what Rumsfeld approved, such as 20-hour interrogations and deprivation of light and forced shaving.
Rumsfeld abruptly rescinded most of the aggressive tactics in a Jan. 15, 2003, order and said if any of them were believed needed a request should be forwarded to him for a decision with a "thorough justification" and a "detailed plan for the use of such techniques."
Then in April 2003, Rumsfeld outlined a new list of interrogation techniques that permitted significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee, "sleep adjustment," "changing the diet of a detainee" with no intended deprivation of food or water, and isolation of detainees.
An August 1, 2002, Justice Department memo detailed how to avoid violating U.S. and international terror statutes while interrogating prisoners.
White House officials insisted the broad policy was that prisoners should be treated humanely, but included in the documents was an active discussion of how far interrogations could go without being called torture.
"We're going to be aggressive in our interrogations. There's no question about that," Gonzales said. He insisted that the United States would not engage in torture and said the administration uses the definition of torture provided by Congress as "a specific intent to inflict severe physical or mental harm or suffering."
The documents outlined previous and current techniques for nearly 600 al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners now at Guantanamo Bay, most taken in Afghanistan.
A Feb. 7, 2002, memo from Bush to top members of his administration said al Qaeda and Taliban detainees were to be "treated humanely and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles" of the Geneva Convention.
Gonzales denied Bush's determination contributed to the abuses at Abu Ghraib. "We categorically reject any connections," he said.
A top Pentagon lawyer, Daniel Dell'Orto, said it was clear from the start that the Geneva Convention would apply in Iraq.
He said any abuses at Guantanamo were punished.
He cited an incident in which a female interrogator took off her blouse, kept her T-shirt on, sat on a detainee's lap "as part of her interrogation technique" and ran her hands through his hair. She was suspended from duties for 30 days. (Additional reporting by Charles Aldinger and Adam Entous)
-------- russia / chechnya
Armed clashes erupt in Russian republic near Chechnya
AFP
June 22
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040622/1/3l78o.html
Armed clashes erupted overnight near Russia's separatist republic of Chechnya as rebels stormed police targets in neighboring Ingushetia in brazen attacks that left dozens of people wounded and dead, news reports said.
Clashes between rebels and law enforcement authorities broke out in at least three towns in Ingushetia, which houses tens of thousands of refugees who fled the fighting in Chechnya and where many Chechen rebels have taken shelter.
Dozens of people, including civilians, were wounded and killed, news reports said. Ingushetia's Interior Minister Abukar Kostoyev was among those killed, Interfax reported.
An unidentified official with the Russian emergencies ministry's regional office said 16 people had been killed in the fighting and 59 had been wounded, adding this was a provisional toll, Interfax reported.
Interfax earlier quoted another emergencies ministry official as saying six people had been killed and 50 wounded.
The fighters targeted police stations, government buildings and checkpoints in the towns of Nazran, Karabulak and Sleptsovsk during the raid, which witnesses told AFP began around 10:00 pm (1800 GMT) Monday.
"They tried to take over the interior ministry and several of the regional police stations," Umar Sapraviyev, an official with Ingushetia's representation in Moscow, told Moscow Echo radio.
Many of the rebels, who apparently moved onto their targets from Chechnya and the neighboring republic of North Ossetia, shouted "Allah-u-Akbar" (God is greatest), Ingushetiya.ru news site reported, quoting witnesses.
Terrified residents spent the night cowering in their homes to sounds of automatic gunfire, mortars, grenade launchers, and helicopters flying overhead, witnesses told AFP.
"Many people are panicked and want to leave as soon as morning comes," one Nazran resident told AFP by telephone during the night. "Some say they may even go back to Chechnya."
Residents who had come in contact with the masked rebels during the fighting said that, judging by their dialects, they appeared to be both Ingush and Chechen.
At one of the police stations, the Nazran ROVD, 30 officers were killed, Ingushetiya.ru reported, quoting an unnamed police officer.
Witnesses reported seeing a military vehicle column come under gunfire a few minutes after entering Ingushetia from the neighboring republic of North Ossetia.
Many of the wounded were taken to Ingushetia's main hospital.
"Among them are civilians and representatives of law enforcement agencies... there are those who are severely injured," Interfax quoted an unnamed hospital official as saying.
The battles had died down by early Tuesday as the rebels withdrew, though sporadic fighting continued, news reports said.
The fighters did take control of at least one of the police checkpoints that are ubiquitous in Ingushetia, RIA-Novosti reported, quoting a camera crew with NTV television that was stopped at the post by masked armed men. "They pointed guns at us and ordered us to get out of the car," the news agency quoted an NTV reporter as saying.
"They said they were rebels," the reporter said, apparently referring to Chechen separatists, who have been fighting pro-Moscow forces in the region since the start of the current Russo-Chechen war in October 1999.
The crew saw several bodies in military uniforms lying near the checkpoint. "It looked like they were manning the checkpoint and were shot by the rebels," he said.
Ingushetia President Murat Zyazikov announced a three-day mourning period beginning on Wednesday, Interfax reported.
"This was aimed at destabilizing the situation" in the region, Zyazikov said.
The incursion was the most spectacular military operation by Chechen rebels outside the war-torn republic in years.
Russia poured tens of thousands of troops into Chechnya in October 1999 in what was supposed to be a lightning-strike anti-terror operation.
The Kremlin insists that the war has effectively ended and the situation in the ravaged republic has normalized. But a guerrilla war that claims lives on nearly a daily basis belies such claims.
--------
Rebel Raid Near Chechnya Is Said to Kill at Least 75 People
June 22, 2004
By C.J. CHIVERS and STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/international/europe/22CND-RUSS.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
GROZNY, Russia, June 22 - An audacious overnight raid by heavily armed militants in a southern Russian republic neighboring Chechnya killed as many as 75 people and wounded dozens more before the fighters withdrew with minimal losses and a cache of captured weapons, officials said today.
The raid, which began late Monday night with a series of attacks against police and security posts across the republic, Ingushetia, was the largest attack by Chechen separatist rebels outside Chechnya since 1999. And it appeared to catch police and security officers in the region off guard and ill prepared.
President Vladimir V. Putin met with his law enforcement deputies in the Kremlin today. He vowed to retaliate for the raid, as he has before - though to little obvious effect - when the war in Chechnya has flared.
"We have to find and destroy them," Mr. Putin said sternly in remarks broadcast on the state television channels. "Those whom it is possible to take alive must be brought to trial."
The death toll remained unclear by tonight, but among the dead were at least 47 local police or security officers, the senior Kremlin official in the region, Vladimir Y. Yakovlev, said, according to the Interfax news agency. At least four police officers were listed as missing in action. The office of Ingushetia's president said at least 28 civilians also died.
The fighting killed Ingushetia's acting interior minister, Abukar Kostoyev, and his deputy. Two criminal investigators and four prosecutors died as they drove in separate cars through an intersection controlled by militants in Ingushetia's capital, Nazran, according to news reports. A United Nations aid worker, Magomed Getagazov, also died, caught up in the fighting as he rode in a taxi home from work, the organization's office in Moscow said.
At least 100 militants seized the Interior Ministry's headquarters for several hours and destroyed several other security posts around Nazran and two other cities before breaking off the raid and retreating early today, according to official accounts.
In all, some 200 militants were believed to have taken part in the attacks. According to two security officials interviewed in Mozdok, a city on the border of Chechnya and Ingushetia, only two militants died in the fighting.
New fighting was reported this afternoon near Galashki, a small village in Ingushetia, where at least some of the militants appeared to be making their way through the rugged Caucasus foothills southeast of Nazran toward Chechnya. They were driving stolen trucks and cars loaded with ammunition, weapons and, possibly, explosives, the officials said.
There were conflicting reports about whether the fighters retreated with hostages. It appeared that most of the fighters escaped.
"The main goal was to get weapons," Sergei B. Prokopov, an official with the regional prosecutor's office, said in an interview in Mozdok. Referring to overnight fighting in two other towns, Karabulak and Sleptsovskaya, he added, "The other attacks were just a diversion."
Televised reports showed scenes of destruction in the center of Nazran. The Interior Ministry's headquarters was charred and gutted. Other buildings and cars were pockmarked by gunfire and the splash-shaped impacts of rocket-propelled grenades.
In Nazran, witnesses described a night of panic that gave way to a new day of fear over how easily the simmering conflict in Chechnya spilled into Ingushetia. "What else can happen?" said Raisa S. Pushtova, a doctor in a Nazran hospital where many of the wounded were taken.
She was treating four critically wounded patients in her ward. Among the dead were three children, she said, apparently caught in the hail of gunfire and grenade blasts in Nazran. She described devastation on the streets, many of which remained blocked off.
"Most people are in their apartments, afraid to leave," she said in a telephone interview from the hospital.
The violence badly undermined repeated assertions by Russian officials that the Chechen rebels were too battered to mount significant offensive operations. Mr. Prokopov said the raid's focus on seizing weapons suggested that Chechnya's insurgents still had a reservoir of support.
"This means they have new recruits they have to arm," he said in an interview as he traveled with journalists on another of the periodic trips the Kremlin organizes to highlight the progress being made in Chechnya.
Only last week, Chechnya's Interior Minister and the front-runner in the republic's new presidential election, Maj. Gen. Alu Alkhanov, that no more than 500 rebels were still resisting federal and local forces in Chechnya. In Grozny today, General Alkhanov said the attack was the work of the Chechen separatist leader, Aslan Maskhadov, who told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last week that the rebels would change tactics and focus on larger attacks.
Despite a decade of conflict that first erupted in 1994, Chechnya's separatists have shown striking resilience, in the face of Russia's overwhelming military might and uneven support within Chechnya, where many residents voice anger over the seemingly endless cycle of attacks and counterattacks.
Scattered in the mountains and remote villages, the separatists have in recent years relied more and more on suicide bombings or other terrorist attacks against Russian and Chechens loyal to Moscow. Only six weeks ago, a bomb hidden in a pillar at Grozny's main stadium killed the republic's pro-Kremlin president, Akhmad Kadyrov.
Kremlin officials have said that the militants receive financing and other support from international terrorist organizations.
In Grozny, Taus Dzhabrailov, the newly appointed chairman of the state council in Chechnya, reiterated that view in an interview today, saying the raid underscored the folly of negotiating an end to the conflict, as some have called for before elections to replace Mr. Kadyrov are held in August.
"Do you think now is the time to be negotiating with these groups?" he said.
Ingushetia, with a predominately Muslim population with close ethnic ties to Chechnya, had been the site of clashes and bombings before, but until today had been largely spared the worst of the two wars that have raged nearby, despite a large population of Chechen refugees.
Today's raid - and the militants' apparent success - prompted unusually pointed public criticism of the handling of the war by federal security and military forces.
Issa M. Kostoyev, the Ingush representative in the upper house of Parliament, or Federation Council, expressed outrage that the militants were able to enter the republic and effectively seize an entire district in its capital for several hours.
"This was the result of carelessness and an inability to localize the situation," Mr. Kostoyev, who is related to the slain interior minister, told the Interfax news agency. "Efficient measures should have been taken to seal the entire border with Chechnya. This should have been done by federal forces, but they did not do anything."
The police and border troops throughout southern Russian went on alert today, fearing further attacks. The president of Ingushetia, Murat M. Zyazikov, issued a statement calling for calm, mourning the casualties and promising swift retaliation.
"It was aimed at destabilizing the situation in the republic, expanding the combat zone and creating panic among the local population," said Mr. Zyazikov, who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt earlier this year for which Chechen militants were blamed.
Rachel Thorner contributed reporting from Moscow for this article.
-------- space
Starship Private Enterprise
Rocket Plane Becomes First Manned Civilian Craft in Space
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58996-2004Jun21?language=printer
MOJAVE, Calif., June 21 -- Flying a foam composite rocket ship powered by laughing gas and burning rubber, Mike Melvill took off faster than a bullet over a ramshackle airport in the desert Monday and overcame serious malfunctions to become the first astronaut to reach space in a mission entirely funded by private entrepreneurs.
The 90-minute early morning flight was heralded by the space plane's inventor, Burt Rutan, and his financial backer, billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen, as the dawn of a new age in commercial space travel.
The pair envision that sometime in the next decade or so, astro-tourists will be able to pay around $10,000 each to repeat the feat and experience, for a few minutes at least, weightlessness -- and some awesome views.
According to instruments aboard SpaceShipOne, the craft pushed through the outer atmosphere and touched the edge of space, some 62 miles, or 328,491 feet, above the Earth's surface. The Rutan team, however, is still awaiting independent confirmation of the feat from observers at nearby Edwards Air Force Base. Upon his return to Earth, Melvill, the 63-year-old veteran test pilot wearing a lucky horseshoe pendant from his wife, pumped his fists in the air and appeared ecstatic.
Later, he said he was afraid on the way down, as he experienced forces of five times Earth's gravity. He was also dealing with malfunctions in the craft's ability to control its trim while plummeting back home at Mach 3, three times the speed of sound, or 3,300 feet per second -- faster than a bullet fired by an M-16 rifle.
At his apogee, Mevill said, the colors were "staggering," the clouds over faraway Los Angeles looked like snow, and he could see from San Diego to Mono Lake, 400 miles, and detect the curvature of the planet. "Looking down at Earth," Melvill said, "was almost a religious experience."
During his four minutes of weightlessness at the peak of his arc, Melvill tossed a handful of colored candies into the cockpit and watched them float around his head.
NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who walked on the moon during Apollo 11, came out to the tarmac and "welcomed me to the club," Melvill said.
Allen, the computer impresario who is among the richest men on the planet, said he had devoured books and TV reports of space flight as a boy. Watching the Monday flight, he said, "the sensation was incredible. Elation mixed with relief."
Allen has said he funded the project "in excess of $20 million," not exactly pocket change, even for a man worth an estimated $20 billion.
Rutan, too, confessed he felt a combination of pride and anxiety. "It was not a perfect flight," he admitted at a press conference following the touchdown. And indeed, despite all the "Right Stuff" speak, it sounded downright hairy.
At one point in the flight, SpaceShipOne apparently experienced a serious anomaly in the trim controls, which adjust the ship's roll and pitch. Rutan described the mechanism as "a very critical flight control. I can't think of anything more critical."
Rutan added, "No way we'd fly again without fixing it." But the problem has not yet been thoroughly investigated.
Many astronauts and military pilots, supported by governments in the United States and abroad, have reached the altitude of space over the last half-century, and a number of civilians have flown aboard the space shuttle and Russian spacecraft.
But Rutan and his team are the first to do so with no government help -- and not in a titanium machine powered by solid-fuel rockets, but a relatively lightweight craft. It was "a manned space program designed from scratch," Rutan boasted, in four years for $20 million -- about what NASA would spend "on a paper study," Rutan taunted.
Rutan is among at least 27 competitors (of whom about a half-dozen are considered serious challengers) who seek to win the Ansari X Prize by year's end. The $10 million X Prize, devised by a coterie of entrepreneurs and space buffs in 1996, goes to the team that can launch a vehicle into suborbital space (62 miles high) twice in two weeks with the same craft, carrying a pilot and two passengers -- or, as these flights are still very risky, their equivalent weight.
Rutan said he envisioned a next-generation suborbital spacecraft as a luxe cruiser, with big windows and spacious seats, that would allow the tourist to press his nose to the glass, get a good look at space, and then unbuckle for a few minutes of weightlessness, floating in a giddy escape from Earth's gravitational coils.
While Rutan is now clearly in the lead for the X Prize, and Monday's flight was a milestone, SpaceShipOne carried only Melvill. No passengers. No extra weight. The Rutan team said it hopes to go after the X Prize with two flights later this year.
But the Canada-based Orva Space Corp. is hot on Rutan's heels. The Canadians plan for a giant helium-filled balloon that will release a rocket 80,000 feet above Earth for a high-altitude launch into suborbital space.
Late Sunday night, with SpaceShipOne hidden away in its hangar at the Mojave Airport, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, the wind over the high California desert was howling at almost gale strength. But as the sun rose over the tarmac, and thousands gathered for the launch, the breeze died down to a trickle in the orange windsocks, and the sky was empty of clouds.
As the flying rocket rolled down the runway, it appeared to be a most fantastical contraption. The suborbital vehicle itself, SpaceShipOne, looks like a bomb with folding wings. It was cradled underneath the belly of its larger mother ship, called White Knight, a futuristic twin turbojet with long outstretched wings and a high bullet-shaped cockpit. Tethered together, the pair looked insectile, like mating dragonflies.
The White Knight took off and turned toward the sun. The conjoined craft made big lazy turns, slowly gaining altitude for an hour. Melvill later recalled being a bit lonely.
There was a final checklist between White Knight and SpaceShipOne, assuring that the pressure in the rocket ship was good and the rockets primed to fire. At around 50,000 feet, White Knight released SpaceShipOne, which glided for a moment. Then Melvill flipped two switches and fired the hybrid rocket engine, which runs on a mixture of solid- and liquid-fueled propellants, burning nitrous oxide (more commonly known to dental patients as laughing gas) and hydroxy-terminated polybutadiene (a clear rubber).
Soon after Melvill lit the candle, and as the space plane began to reach its ascent speed of three times the speed of sound, the pilot said the craft rolled heavily left and right, 90 degrees, and he briefly considered aborting the mission.
From the ground, the crowd could clearly see the contrail of the blazing rocket wiggle. But Melvill and ship regained control. It soared into the sky, and the earthbound spectators gasped at its speed.
Then it disappeared from sight. The burn was scheduled to last about 80 seconds, but it appears to have extinguished after about 75 seconds, and Rutan and Melvill said later they are not yet sure whether Melvill shut it down or the rocket expended its fuel. The astronaut later said that piloting the craft, which required him to steer the spaceship (unlike NASA shuttles, which basically launch by computer control), was not easy.
"Even if a good pilot hopped in there," Melvill said, without extensive training and simulation "he'd be instantly dead."
As the craft made its reentry, the wings of SpaceShipOne drew up, an innovation that Rutan describes as "feathering," which forces the craft to return to Earth like a badminton shuttlecock, stabilizing it, distributing the heat along the whole ship. Rutan said this gives his spaceship its greatest asset, "a risk-free reentry."
And as Rutan reminded journalists, SpaceShipOne was America's first return to space since the space shuttle Columbia's disaster 16 months ago, as it broke apart on its return to Earth.
Monday's suborbital flight was similar to NASA's first two manned Mercury space missions in 1961. It did not reach Earth orbit, in which spacecraft such as the space shuttle can circle the Earth every 90 minutes.
After its feathered wings slowed SpaceShipOne, acting as a kind of air brake, the wings spread out again and the craft glided back toward the Mojave airport. But because of the problems with the trim controls, it was more than 20 miles off course as it began its descent.
It was still close enough to get home, and the landing appeared a perfect rolling touchdown. On the ground, the small ship didn't look much worse for wear, though a single foil was bent.
An earlier Rutan-designed aircraft, the Voyager, captured the world's attention in 1986 when it became the first plane to circumnavigate the globe without refueling. That historic two-person aircraft is now displayed near the main entrance of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Staff writer Guy Gugliotta contributed to this report from Washington.
--------
Manned Private Craft Reaches Space in a Milestone for Flight
June 22, 2004
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/science/space/22PLAN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MOJAVE, Calif., June 21 - A veteran civilian test pilot on Monday became the first human to reach space in a privately developed program, guiding a tiny rocket ship more than 60 miles above California in a flight with several white-knuckle moments.
In front of thousands of spectators and a teeming press corps, the squid-shaped craft, SpaceShipOne, was lifted into the atmosphere shortly after 6:30 a.m., attached to the belly of a sleek plane called the White Knight.
When the plane reached an altitude of 50,000 feet, it dropped the smaller craft, and its pilot, Michael W. Melvill, started the rocket that took him up nearly 300,000 feet more, to the beginnings of space. He then brought SpaceShipOne back to earth as a glider, touching down at 8:15.
When Mr. Melvill, 63, emerged, he climbed atop the spaceship, spread his arms and gave a primal holler: "Yeeeeeeee-haaah!"
Both craft were designed by Burt Rutan and his company, Scaled Composites, with the help of the Microsoft billionaire Paul G. Allen, who said he had put more than $20 million into the project.
"The flight today opens a new chapter in history, making space access within the reach of ordinary citizens," said Patti Grace Smith, the associate administrator for commercial space transportation for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Ms. Smith presented Mr. Melvill with astronaut wings after the flight.
Mr. Melvill earned those wings with some tense moments. During the rocket-fired ascent, he and Mr. Rutan recounted in a news conference, SpaceShipOne suddenly rolled 90 degrees to the left.
Mr. Melvill quickly corrected, rolling the plane 90 degrees to the right, but then found that his trim controls, which are supposed to help control lift and drag, had a malfunctioning motor. He switched quickly to backup controls, stabilized the errant trim system and left it alone until he reached the ground again.
"I was afraid to touch it," Mr. Melvill said.
The trim problem left the plane some 20 miles off course and changed the angle of flight so that it reached only 328,491 feet - just 400 feet beyond the goal, an altitude of 100 kilometers. The team had been hoping to go even higher, 360,000 feet.
Mr. Rutan called the malfunction "the most serious safety problem we have encountered" in the nine years it took to create and launch SpaceShipOne. He added, however, that the backup systems and Mr. Melvill's training all came together for a successful flight.
Mr. Melvill also said that during ascent he had heard a loud bang, which was apparently caused by a cover over the tail nozzle that buckled during the flight.
"I was pretty scared," he said.
But Mr. Rutan said later that the problem had had little, if any, effect on the flight. It was the first time the plane had flown with that nozzle, which was somewhat larger than the ones used on previous flights.
Until Monday, the only travelers to reach the imaginary line between Earth's atmosphere and suborbital space have been aboard ships paid for and controlled by governments. Monday's flight is a major step along the way for the Rutan team to be able to claim the Ansari X Prize, an international competition to launch people into space without government assistance.
The competition, which began in 1996, has attracted more than two dozen teams from around the world. It requires contestants to fly three people to an altitude of 100 kilometers and then to repeat the flight with the same craft within two weeks. The boundary of space is not well defined; NASA gives astronaut status to anyone who has flown higher than fifty miles, but some European authorities mark the border at 100 kilometers, or a little more than 62 miles. The X Prize founders settled on the higher number.
The creators of the prize modeled it on the competitions that spurred early developments in aviation, including the $25,000 Orteig Prize that Charles Lindbergh won in 1927 with his trans-Atlantic solo flight from New York to Paris.
The X Prize foundation has announced that it will end the competition on Jan. 1 if there is no winner. Mr. Rutan said on Monday that if the flight had been uneventful the next flight would have been intended as the first of two X Prize flights. But he said that the malfunctions called that plan into question, and that his team would make no decisions until the causes of the problems had been identified and corrected.
The broad goal of the modern competition is the same as the earlier endeavors: to popularize the new technology and to build interest in its commercial uses. The backers of the X Prize hope to see a new era of space tourism, just as the first fliers set off a flurry of barnstorming, the first flowering of air tourism.
The flights of Lindbergh and others also showed the way to practical commercial uses of the air, including mail delivery, and supporters of the X Prize hope to see the emergence of low-cost space vehicles that will some day allow new commercial opportunities that might include space-based manufacturing and research.
A presidential commission last week recommended that NASA rely more heavily on private industry and encourage competitions like the X Prize.
Mr. Rutan had invited the public to see the event, and people came by the thousands. A makeshift trailer park held an all-night party, and cars were streaming toward Mojave airport at 4 a.m.
Even Mr. Rutan's competitors cheered him on Monday. Geoff Sheerin, whose Canadian Arrow team has a spaceship with a sleek, Buck-Rogers-with-a-Maple-Leaf design, said all sides wanted to see a team begin the age of private sector human space flight.
"This is a fantastic day for this industry," Mr. Sheerin said.
Congratulations also came from higher above the earth.
"We're all in the space business together," said Lt. Col. Edward Mike Fincke, an astronaut on board the International Space Station.
If Mr. Rutan's team wins the prize, the project will eclipse his most famous previous achievement in airplane design, the Voyager, which in 1986 flew around the world without refueling.
Still, Monday's flight was a long way from the heights that astronauts reach on a regular basis. Suborbital space was a brief stepping stone 40 years ago on the way to orbit and the Moon.
The space station hovers some 240 miles above Earth, and maintaining that orbit requires speeds of 25 times the speed of sound. Re-entering the atmosphere at such speeds causes the punishing conditions that make the return to Earth risky. It was a hole in the heat shielding that led to the loss of the shuttle Columbia last year and its crew of seven.
But to Mr. Rutan, the idea that private enterprises may someday send private citizens into space is compelling - and even more so, he says, since NASA has grown so bureaucratic that it cannot be counted on to do the job.
At a news conference here the day before the flight, Mr. Rutan said: "Thirty years ago, if you had asked NASA - and people did in those days - 'How long would it be before I could buy tickets to space?' the answer was, 'About 30 years.' If you ask today, you'll get about the same answer: 30 years. I think that's unfortunate. There has been no progress at all made toward affordable space travel."
That sentiment was popular in the crowd. One of the spectators handed Mr. Rutan a sign that read:
Space Ship: One
Government: Zero.
--------
Developing a 'robust space industry'
washtimes
June 22, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040621-095851-1462r.htm
Since it was announced six months ago, the president's new vision for space exploration has been criticized as too vague and too expensive. Yet as the final report from the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond was released last week demonstrates, implementing that vision is both possible and vital to national interests.
The commission - composed of scientists, industry leaders and space policy experts and chaired by former Air Force Secretary Edward "Pete" Aldridge - unanimously endorsed the vision, and offered both programmatic and pragmatic recommendations for fulfilling it. One of the report's most striking features was its recognition of budget and geopolitical realities. While China and other nations are investing in space, there is little probability - at least in the short- to middle-term - that they will threaten U.S. dominance there. As a consequence, NASA budget planning must have more of the tortoise than the hare - rarely flashy but steadily moving forward for years and decades to come.
To drive that steady progression into space, the commission recommended that NASA place much more emphasis on the private sector. Commissioners said private industry should "have a far larger presence" in space operations and that NASA should reach into "commercial and non-profit communities" for their ideas and innovations. It also recommended that policy-makers encourage the development of a "robust space industry," which would eventually become "a national treasure." NASA would have the imprimatur to contract out most of its work aside from extremely specialized functions, such as human space flight.
Yesterday's successful flight of SpaceShipOne - the first private spacecraft to take humans into near space - proves that such enterprises have real potential. The craft was designed and built for a fraction of what state-sponsored efforts cost. Other endeavors are almost certain to follow.
The commission also recommended, among other things, that NASA be streamlined and that its field centers be transformed into research and development centers. John Logsdon, the director of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, said that, if implemented, the recommendations would be "the most radical transformation of how NASA does business since NASA was created."
Not all the commission's recommendations will be easy to follow. But they should be tried. The vision has been laid out, and recommendations for its implementation have been reported. Congress should give the president the authority he needs to take the next steps into space.
-------- spies
INTELLIGENCE
Bush Considers Replacing C.I.A. Chief More Quickly
June 22, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/politics/22INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 21 - The White House is actively debating whether to act this summer to select a permanent successor to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who is scheduled to step down on July 11, Congressional officials and others involved in the discussions said Monday.
John McLaughlin, Mr. Tenet's top deputy, was chosen earlier this month by President Bush to take over as acting director. But Mr. Bush is now reconsidering an earlier plan to leave Mr. McLaughlin in place through the November election, the Congressional officials and others said.
Among those being mentioned within the administration and in Congress is Representative Porter J. Goss of Florida, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Mr. Goss, 65, served for about 10 years as a Central Intelligence Agency case officer, beginning in the early 1960's.
He has served as the Intelligence Committee's chairman since 1997, but had already announced plans to retire from Congress in January, at the end of the current session.
Mr. McLaughlin is highly regarded, but White House officials have said a central motivation for keeping him on is to avoid a confirmation battle in the Senate this summer. Now, however, people involved in the discussion say that plan is being revisited out of concern that a failure to select a permanent successor may be both a practical and political mistake.
One hypothetical situation reportedly being discussed within the White House is how Mr. Bush would be perceived by the public if there is another terrorist attack against an American target before the election and an acting intelligence chief is still in place.
Some people involved in the discussions said a member of Congress like Mr. Goss or Representative Christopher Cox, Republican of California, would probably win quick confirmation in the Senate, though submission of a nominee from Congress might still stir some Senate debate about the Bush administration's handling of Iraq.
Mr. Tenet, who announced his departure earlier this month, is not the only senior intelligence official stepping down. James L. Pavitt, the C.I.A.'s deputy director for operations, has also announced a plan to retire this summer, leaving a vacuum at the helm of the clandestine war on terrorism.
Some involved in the talks said they did not expect any decision to be made until next month, when the presidential commission on the Sept. 11 attacks is to deliver a final report that is expected to recommend a sweeping restructuring of the country's intelligence agencies.
Those recommendations could significantly reshape the nature of the job that a new intelligence chief would eventually assume. But they would also almost certainly require Congressional approval, which is widely regarded in Washington as unlikely until early next year, after the election.
The harsh criticisms that are expected to be levied against the White House in two forthcoming reports are also a factor in the decision making, the officials said. The Sept. 11 commission, whose final report is to be released July 26, has argued in 17 preliminary assessments that the attacks were foreseen, at least to a general degree, and might have been preventable. The Senate committee, whose 400-page report is also understood to be sharply critical of the C.I.A., may now issue an unclassified version of the document next month, pending negotiations with the C.I.A. about large sections that an agency review has deemed too sensitive for public release.
Another critical assessment of the administration's performance is expected early next month in a new book whose author is to be identified as "Anonymous," government officials and the book's editor said. The book is described by government officials as being critical of the Bush administration's use of intelligence to justify the Iraq war, and was written by a senior intelligence analyst and cleared for release by the C.I.A., the government officials said.
The book, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terrorism," is to be released Aug. 1 by Brassey's, and is the second book by the author, after "Through Our Enemies' Eyes." Its existence was first described in the British newspaper The Guardian on Saturday.
The book's editor, Kristina Davidson, described it as "a very serious look at the cultural, bureaucratic and institutional impediments to our fighting the war on terror." Ms. Davidson said it took the C.I.A. four months to grant its approval after the book was submitted for review in January.
As described by the editor and government officials, the book's thesis reflects the views of many within the intelligence community, but some government officials have expressed surprise that the C.I.A. had authorized its release. The agency has the right to review any book written by an employee before publication.
A C.I.A. spokesman, Bill Harlow, declined to comment on the book or on the possibility that Mr. McLaughlin might be replaced as acting director this year. A spokesman for the National Security Council, Sean McCormack, also declined to comment on any White House discussions on whether to select a new intelligence chief.
Mr. McLaughlin, a 32-year veteran of the C.I.A., has been a hands-on manager at the agency since Mr. Tenet appointed him as deputy in 2000. His many admirers within American intelligence agencies say he is deeply steeped in the war on terrorism and other critical issues facing the agency, and far better suited to manage the agency, at least in the short term, than any figure brought in from the outside.
But few within the administration have described Mr. McLaughlin as a candidate to succeed Mr. Tenet on a permanent basis. And some senior intelligence officials have suggested that no interim director, no matter how able, could ever wield the clout that a permanent director could muster.
On June 3, the day that Mr. Tenet announced his resignation, Mr. Goss told an interviewer that he would consider serving as intelligence chief if Mr. Bush asked him to do so. Mr. Goss's office did not reply Monday to a request for comment.
Mr. Cox, the California congressman, is the fourth-ranking Republican in the House leadership, and serves as chairman of the House Policy Committee. He is 51 years old, and served in 1998 as chairman of a select committee that examined commercial ties with China amid concerns about industrial espionage.
Among others mentioned as possible candidates by one senior House official was Robert M. Gates, who served as deputy national security adviser and director of central intelligence under the first President Bush. Mr. Gates is now president of Texas A & M University, where he is under contract, a spokesman for the university said.
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International Man of Mystery
The Ex-CIA Agent And Current Convict Has Many Stories To Tell.
Some May Even Be True.
By Peter Carlson
Washington Post
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A59212-2004Jun21?language=printer
WHITE DEER, Pa.
Sitting in a stark white cinderblock room in Allenwood Federal Prison Camp, Edwin Wilson is telling stories about the good old days.
"I had a couple of villas that were very, very nice," he says. "I had Pakistani houseboys and I had Libyans working for me, typing up proposals in Arabic."
He's wearing a prison scrub shirt that looks as if it might have been dark blue in the distant past but has faded to gray. His hair is gray, too. But Wilson -- often described in newspapers as a "rogue CIA agent" -- looks surprisingly good for a 76-year-old man who has spent the past 22 years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement.
Tall and thin, he sports a neat white mustache that gives him the avuncular air of Walter Cronkite. Beneath his bushy white eyebrows, his eyes twinkle merrily as he tells stories of his wheeler-dealer days in the '70s, when he was an arms merchant with offices in Libya, England, Switzerland and Washington.
"Friday is a holiday in Libya, so I'd fly Thursday afternoon to Paris, then take the Concorde to Washington," he says. "Because of the time difference, I'd get to Washington before I left Libya -- Thursday afternoon. I'd go to the office on Thursday and Friday and work on my farm on Saturday. Sunday night, I'd be back in Libya. I was on a first-name basis with the stewardesses on the Concorde."
Of course, half the cons in prison tell stories about what big shots they were on the outside. But in Wilson's case, it's true, more or less. After leaving the CIA in 1971, he made millions in the arms trade, enough to buy a 2,338-acre farm in the tony hunt country of Northern Virginia, where he entertained congressmen, generals and CIA honchos, sometimes with drunken late-night hunting -- shooting deer from a truck equipped with a big aircraft searchlight.
But the fun ended in 1982, when Wilson was lured out of Libya in a sting operation and arrested in the Dominican Republic. In three highly publicized trials, he was convicted of gunrunning, selling 20 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Libya, and conspiring to kill his prosecutors. By early 1984, at age 55, he was sentenced to 52 years in prison and his many enemies figured he'd never get out.
Wilson swore he'd been framed, that he was working for the CIA all along. Few people paid attention. Half the cons in prison grumble about being framed by somebody.
But Wilson spent 12 years prying documents out of the CIA and the Justice Department with endless Freedom of Information Act requests. Last October, his efforts paid off: Citing those documents, a Houston federal judge threw out Wilson's conviction in the C-4 explosives case, ruling that the prosecutors had "deliberately deceived the court" about Wilson's continuing CIA contacts, thus "double-crossing a part-time informal government agent."
Now, with 17 years cut off his sentences, Wilson is scheduled to be released from prison Sept. 14. Maybe that's why the old rogue's eyes are twinkling. He plans to move back to Washington and start a business helping companies maneuver through the federal import-export bureaucracy.
"I've lined up a couple of potential clients," he says, smiling. Front Man
"Ed looked like a real CIA street fighter," says former congressman Charlie Wilson. "He was big and strong and dark and sinister -- dangerous-looking."
Charlie Wilson is no kin to Ed Wilson, but the two were friends back in the '70s, when the Texas Democrat was dating a woman who worked in Ed Wilson's plush townhouse offices on 22nd Street NW.
"I used to go down there and listen to Ed's stories -- war stories and CIA stories," says Charlie Wilson.
The stories weren't always true -- the one about how he'd killed Che Guevara was pure balderdash -- but they were entertaining, especially when accompanied by Ed's good Scotch.
"He was a charming fellow and a great raconteur," the ex-congressman recalls.
Ed Wilson had come a long way. Born in 1928, he grew up poor on a farm in Nampa, Idaho. He worked as a merchant seaman, then earned a psychology degree from the University of Portland in 1953. He served in the Marine Corps in Korea, then joined the CIA in 1955.
As a CIA agent, he spied on European maritime unions before discovering his forte -- running shipping companies secretly owned by the agency. Posing as a businessman, Wilson arranged clandestine CIA arms shipments to Angola, Laos, Indonesia, Congo. Meanwhile, he was also hustling up non-CIA business -- and making good money doing it. He and his wife, Barbara, a real estate agent, used his profits to buy farm properties in Virginia.
In 1971, Wilson quit the CIA to run shipping companies for a secret Navy intelligence organization called Task Force 157. By the time he left that job in 1976 to make his fortune in the international arms business, the gregarious Wilson had a network of powerful friends that included Pentagon officials, pols, retired generals and several CIA officials, including Theodore Shackley, the famous "Blond Ghost," who ran the agency's clandestine operations.
"Everything he did had the aura of the CIA," recalls Charlie Wilson. "Certainly he was working with CIA people. They'd come in when we were sipping Scotch at 6 at night." Business Was Good
"Charlie Wilson said, 'Why don't we go down and see Somoza?' " Ed Wilson recalls, sitting in the prison visiting room. "So we flew to Miami to see Somoza, who was there with his mistress -- a fiery broad but not too good-looking."
The prisoner's telling stories again, this one from the late '70s, when Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza was fighting the leftist Sandinista guerrillas who later overthrew him. Wilson drew up a proposal to provide mercenary soldiers for Somoza, then flew to Miami with Charlie Wilson and the congressman's girlfriend. They met Somoza and his mistress in a hotel, but when the dictator started dancing with the congressman's girlfriend, his mistress got mad.
"The mistress takes this goblet of water and she throws it in Somoza's face," Ed Wilson says, laughing. "He was pretty cool about it. He wiped his face off and said, 'It's kind of damp in here tonight.' "
Wilson never struck a deal with Somoza, but he soon found a better customer -- Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi.
"The reason I went to Libya," Wilson says, "is that Shackley asked me."
Shackley was an old friend and a frequent visitor to Wilson's farm. In fact, Shackley's daughter kept her horse there. Wilson says Shackley asked him to go to Libya to keep an eye on Carlos the Jackal, the infamous terrorist, who was living there. (Shackley is unavailable for comment: He died in 2002.)
"I missed Carlos but I hung around a bit," Wilson says. "They gave me contracts and I stayed till 1982, till I got arrested."
When Wilson arrived in the late '70s, the oil-rich Libyans were on a weapons-buying spree. Wilson got contracts to sell them army uniforms, ammunition, explosive timers and 20 tons of C-4 explosives.
"Please put this in there: None of that C-4 was ever used for terrorism," Wilson says.
In 1979, he arranged for an associate to smuggle four American pistols to the Libyan Embassy in Bonn, West Germany. Later, one of the pistols was used to kill a Libyan dissident there."That I feel bad about," he says.
But everything he did, Wilson claims, was designed to befriend the Libyans so he could obtain information to pass on to Shackley and the CIA. "I was buddying up to them," he says.
He was also making millions of dollars. He got a contract to supply the Libyans with foreign aircraft mechanics and a crew of former Green Berets, who helped train the Libyan army.
"I made good money on that," he says. "The net profit was about a million dollars a year."
In 1980, one of the Green Berets traveled to Colorado and shot a Libyan dissident in the head. Wilson says he knew the Libyans were trying to hire his Green Berets for hit jobs.
"They were always trying to recruit my people to do that," he says. "I had to fire people who talked to them about doing illegal things."
He tells a story: When he learned that one former Green Beret was planning to become an assassin, he fired the man. The Green Beret left Libya, returned to Fort Bragg, N.C., and walked into a tavern. He slapped a $100 bill on the bar and ordered drinks for the house.
"Then he took out a pistol," Wilson says. He forms his own right hand into a pistol -- the index finger serving as a barrel -- and he points it at his temple. "And he blew his brains out."
As he pantomimes the gruesome action, Wilson is smiling broadly. Brought to Ground
"That's a great story," says Larry Barcella when he hears that tale recounted.
Barcella, a former federal prosecutor, is the man most responsible for putting Wilson in prison. He likes Wilson's barroom suicide tale but he doesn't believe it. He doesn't believe a lot of what Wilson says.
"His story is getting better with age," says Barcella, now in private practice in Washington. "He's like a herpes sore -- he just keeps coming back. God, when did I first come across Ed?"
It was in 1977, when tales of Wilson's adventures in Libya began to surface. Kevin Mulcahy, a former CIA man recruited by Wilson, informed the FBI about Wilson's explosives deal with Libya. And Rafael Quintero, an anti-Castro Cuban with CIA ties, told the agency that Wilson had offered him a million dollars to kill a Libyan dissident in Egypt.
Barcella, then an assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, was assigned the case. At first he found it difficult to figure out whether Wilson was still working for the CIA.
"I interviewed scores of people who thought this was an agency operation," he says.
But Barcella kept digging and he came to believe that Wilson was using his past agency affiliation as cover. "He was playing people like a harp," he says.
In April 1980, Barcella obtained an indictment charging Wilson with shipping explosives and soliciting murder.
Eager to avoid trial, Wilson stayed in Libya, huddled in his seaside villa, running his businesses, grumbling about the lack of good Scotch in Libya and drinking a lot of flash, the local moonshine.
In 1982 Barcella dispatched Ernest Keiser -- an old Wilson crony with shadowy CIA connections -- to Libya. Keiser convinced Wilson that he'd arranged a deal with the National Security Council: If Wilson would run a spy operation for the NSC in the Dominican Republic, they'd arrange for his legal problems to disappear. (Keiser also sold Wilson an option on some property near Disney World.)
Desperate to escape Libya, Wilson flew with Keiser to the Dominican Republic, where he was arrested and put on a plane to New York.
"Nothing wrong with a little nonviolent government trickery," Barcella says, laughing.
Over the next two years, Wilson went on trial four times.
In Washington, he was charged with soliciting Quintero and other Cubans to kill a Libyan dissent. He was acquitted.
In Virginia, he was charged with illegally exporting an M-16 rifle and four pistols, including the one used to kill the Libyan in Bonn. He was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison -- later reduced to 10 years -- and fined $200,000.
In New York, he was charged with hiring a convicted murderer to kill Barcella and another prosecutor, plus six of the witnesses against him, and his wife, who'd filed for divorce. He was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, plus $75,000.
In Houston, Wilson was charged with illegally exporting the 20 tons of C-4 to Libya. His defense was that he had been working for the CIA. The prosecution responded with an affidavit from CIA Executive Director Charles Briggs, who swore that the agency had no contact with Wilson after 1972.
On Feb. 4, 1983, the jury began its deliberations but failed to reach a verdict: At least one juror believed Wilson might have been working for the CIA. On Feb. 5, the jury asked the judge to read the Briggs affidavit again. An hour later, the jury reached a verdict: guilty on all counts. Wilson was sentenced to 17 years, plus $145,000.
"After he was convicted of everything," Barcella says, "he finally called and said he wanted to talk to me."
They met at a U.S. Marshals office in Alexandria. Wilson told Barcella that he'd never plotted to kill him. Barcella didn't believe it. The plot, he says, had been recorded by a prison snitch wearing a wire.
"He said, 'Those guys were lying, they set me up,' " Barcella recalls. "I said, 'Ed, why lie? It was on tape.' " Ten Years in Solitary
Facing 52 years in prison, Wilson was shipped to the super-max prison in Marion, Ill., and placed in solitary confinement.
He spent 10 years there -- "10 years locked down 23 hours a day," he says.
Meanwhile, his wife divorced him. His two sons cut off communication with him. The IRS seized his property, and the man who'd once been worth $23 million declared bankruptcy.
"You'd think that would break him but it didn't," says his brother Robert, a retired accountant living in Seattle. "He never did give up."
Instead, Wilson bombarded the CIA and the Justice Department with Freedom of Information Act requests, demanding documents about himself. The feds balked. Wilson sued and won. Slowly, over a decade, the documents began to trickle out and Wilson pored over them, searching for evidence that would help free him.
By 1996, he'd uncovered a Justice Department memo titled "Duty to Disclose Possibly False Testimony. " It described the CIA's Briggs affidavit -- which had helped persuade the Houston jury to convict Wilson -- as "inaccurate." Wilson filed a motion to overturn the Houston conviction, attaching the memo as evidence.
Federal Judge Lynn Hughes did not grant Wilson's motion but he did assign a lawyer to handle Wilson's case -- David Adler, a former CIA agent.
When Adler met Wilson in Allenwood, the lawyer told his client that he, too, had once worked for the CIA.
"He jumped up and pushed his chair across the room," Adler recalls, "and he started yelling, 'You people are trying to [expletive] up my case! Goddammit, you people think you can bury me but I'm gonna go down fighting!' "
A guard started toward Wilson. Adler waved him away.
"I let Ed rant and rave for a while," Adler recalls, "and then I said, 'Look, if I was here to [expletive] up your case, would I tell you I'm a former CIA officer?' "
After that, Wilson calmed down.
Under court order, Adler was permitted to sit in a locked vault at the Justice Department and read thousands of documents on Wilson. They didn't prove that the CIA ever asked Wilson to sell C-4 to Libya. But they did document more than 80 contacts between the CIA and Wilson during his arms-dealing days: Shackley asked Wilson to acquire a Soviet missile, and to find a retirement home for a Laotian general who'd worked for the CIA. Another CIA official twice asked Wilson to supply anti-tank weapons for "a sensitive agency operation." The agency proposed using Wilson to secretly sell desalinization plants to Egypt. And so on.
The documents also showed that, within days of the Houston trial, the CIA had informed the Justice Department that the Briggs affidavit was false. Lawyers at both CIA and Justice argued that they had a "duty to disclose" the false testimony to Wilson and the judge, as required by law. But they never did.
In 1999 Adler filed a motion to overturn Wilson's conviction because "the guilty verdict was obtained through the government's knowing use of false evidence."
In response, the Justice Department admitted that the Briggs affidavit was "inaccurate" but claimed that the conviction should be upheld because the CIA had never authorized Wilson's sale of C-4.
Last October, Judge Hughes, a Reagan appointee, threw out Wilson's conviction, denouncing the government's "fabrication of evidence." If the jurors had known about Wilson's 80 CIA contacts, Hughes wrote in a scathing 29-page decision, they "very likely would have believed Wilson's theory and acquitted him."
The Justice Department decided not to appeal Hughes's decision -- or to retry Wilson.
On the day Hughes issued his decision, CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield released a terse statement on Wilson: "The CIA didn't authorize or play any role whatsoever in his decision to sell arms to Libya. That decision was his, and that is why he went to jail."
Asked recently to explain the nature of the CIA's connection to Wilson during his wheeler-dealer years, Mansfield said he'd have to think about that. An hour later, he called back with a statement.
"Edwin Wilson is full of [expletive]," he said. "If I were you, I wouldn't believe for a minute his attempts to justify his actions by blaming someone, or something, other than himself."
David Corn, author of "Blond Ghost," a 1994 biography of Shackley, has a different perspective on the Wilson affair.
"They framed a guilty man," he says. "I think he's a terrible fellow who got what he deserved, but they did frame him." Just One of Those Things
"I'd like to give you a couple of documents," Wilson says.
He slides a stack of paper across the table -- legal documents, photocopies from law books, letters to various officials. His favorite parts are highlighted with yellow Magic Marker.
Wilson says the papers prove that under sentencing guidelines, he should have been released years ago. His lawyer, sitting next to him, doesn't agree.
"I'm not sure you're right about this, Ed," Adler says.
"This is as solid as can be," Wilson says, sounding a little testy. "I should have been out four or five years ago."
Adler shrugs. There's no point in arguing with Wilson. He concedes nothing and admits no blame. His position is simple: He did nothing wrong. All the charges against him were frame-ups. All the witnesses against him were liars. He spent 22 years in prison for nothing -- and the IRS stole his property while he was inside.
"It was just vindictive," he says.
He's happy to be getting out in September but he's a little worried about money.
"I'll have $1,600 a month -- $1,000 in Social Security and $600 from CIA retirement," he says. "That means I'll probably have $500 or $600 a month to spend on rent. That'll get me a bare-light-bulb apartment somewhere."
Is he bitter?
"It's really strange but I'm not bitter," he says. "It's just one of those lousy things you get hit by in life. I never look back. I look forward. It's been a terrible waste of time but there's no profit in being bitter. There's no profit in feeling sorry for yourself."
He looks serious. He seems sincere. Is it possible that the old rogue has become mellow and philosophical? Or is he just working a new hustle here?
Wilson taps his finger on his heart. "Deep down here, I knew I wasn't guilty," he says. "That helped. If I had gone out and killed somebody, I'd feel guilty, I guess. But I don't feel guilty over this."
His face is very somber. But not for long. A minute later, he's grinning, demanding a dozen copies of this article -- no, make that two dozen.
"You won't give me a free subscription to your newspaper," he says. "I gotta get something out of your cheap outfit."
-------- us
Pentagon: Methods were OKd
Newsday
By Craig Gordon
June 22, 2004
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usabus223863116jun22,0,4921089.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines
The Pentagon plans to release declassified memos as early as today showing that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved harsh interrogation techniques at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, including forcing detainees to stand for as long as four hours straight, a senior defense official said last night.
Critics of the Bush administration say the use of uncomfortable "stress positions" and other techniques amount to torture.
The defense officials denied a CNN report that Rumsfeld also approved a technique known as water-boarding, in which a prisoner is held under water until he believes he might drown. CNN reported that the technique was approved in October 2002 but that the order was later rescinded before it was used, after complaints from Pentagon lawyers.
Also yesterday, a scheduled pretrial hearing today for Pfc. Lynndie England, accused of mistreating Iraqi prisoners seen in several of the Abu Ghraib prison photos, was postponed amid reports that her lawyers are discussing a possible plea bargain. The hearing was rescheduled for next month.
In Baghdad, meanwhile, lawyers for two U.S. military defendants in the Abu Ghraib scandal won the right to question top U.S. generals to bolster arguments their clients were following lawful orders in their treatment of inmates.
The order, issued by Col. James Pohl, a military judge, at pretrial hearings compels Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Gen. John Abizaid, chief of the U.S. Central Command, to give depositions. The defense also will have access to Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who was in charge of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and now runs U.S. detention facilities in Iraq.
Questioning senior officers who run the Iraq war could shed light on interrogation techniques and help determine how far responsibility for the abuse extends up the chain of command. However, Pohl rejected motions by counsel for Sgt. Javal Davis and Spc. Charles Graner to compel testimony from Rumsfeld.
This story was supplemented with wire service reports.
-------- war crimes
NATO Tries Ads, Again, to Capture War Suspect
June 22, 2004
By NICHOLAS WOOD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/international/europe/22kara.html
JUBLJANA, Slovenia, June 21 - After trying for almost nine years to help find and arrest the region's most wanted war crimes suspect, NATO peacekeeping forces in Bosnia are renewing their effort.
The military alliance paid for a billboard advertising campaign to coincide with Radovan Karadzic's birthday last Saturday. He is the most wanted suspect, the former Bosnian Serb leader.
The advertisements offer him a free one-way plane ticket to The Hague, the home of the United Nations war crimes tribunal. Advertising campaigns have been tried before, but without success.
Dr. Karadzic is accused of genocide by the tribunal, a charge that includes the accusation that he ordered the killings of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica near the end of the 1992 to 1995 war.
"Radovan, we didn't forget," reads the advertisement, which was also placed in the country's two leading newspapers, above a picture of an airline ticket with Dr. Karadzic's name written on it.
In spite of the presence in Bosnia of thousands of peacekeeping troops - 60,000 at one time, but down to about 7,000 now - Dr. Karadzic has managed to elude numerous operations to arrest him. He is believed by NATO officials and Western diplomats in Sarajevo to be hiding in the Serbian Republic, the Bosnian Serb-controlled half of Bosnia.
Efforts to arrest him have been stepped up in the last six months as NATO is due to withdraw from Bosnia at the end of this year and be replaced with forces led by the European Union.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld announced in December that more American military resources were being deployed in the hunt for Dr. Karadzic. The F.B.I. is helping to track financial networks that support Dr. Karadzic while he is in hiding.
The billboard campaign is the latest in a series of media advertisements designed to convince Dr. Karadzic that his time on the run is limited.
Previous billboards have said, "The noose is tightening."
"Even if he doesn't read it himself, I'm sure that someone will pass the contents on to him," said a spokesman for the peacekeeping force, Lt. Mark Hope of the British Royal Navy. "I think we can be reasonably certain he will get to hear about it."
Lieutenant Hope added that the campaign was also designed as a reminder to Dr. Karadzic's supporters that helping him to remain in hiding was illegal.
In addition to trying to track down Dr. Karadzic, the peacekeepers have been trying to find the former Bosnian Serb Army commander, Ratko Mladic, who is also wanted by The Hague. Many Bosnian Serbs regard both men to be war heroes and are hostile toward the court.
But local analysts remain skeptical about the effectiveness of NATO's birthday offer to Dr. Karadzic, with one describing it as a reminder of what little progress the alliance has made in tracking down its most wanted war criminal.
"I like to think of NATO as a military alliance and not a P.R. company," said Mirza Hajric, a Bosnian Muslim and a onetime adviser to the former Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic.
"NATO has been here for over 3,000 days, and it has not succeeded in arresting a few war criminals. That seriously undermines its credibility."
Senior international officials say that Dr. Karadzic's arrest can only be facilitated with the help of the Bosnian Serb politicians in the Serb Republic. The same officials have repeatedly accused local police commanders of helping Dr. Karadzic's support network.
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Will the World Give US War Crimes Immunity?
Antiwar.com
by Jim Lobe
June 22, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2851
The willingness of the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush to show greater deference to the United Nations and international law will be severely tested this week as it tries to persuade the Security Council to extend its exemption of U.S. troops serving in peacekeeping operations from the jurisdiction the new International Criminal Court (ICC) for another year.
To prevail, Washington must secure at least nine votes from the 15-member Council, but indications so far are that it is likely to fall short of that goal. In the past, the administration has threatened to veto UN peacekeeping operations if it does not get its way on the issue.
Despite widespread unhappiness with the resolution, which is vehemently opposed by international human rights groups who say that the exemption violates international law and undermines the global struggle to end impunity for the most serious human rights abuses, it was considered likely to be approved until the photographs of the abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq became public.
Subsequent revelations of more widespread abuses, as well as high-level administration policy memos that appeared to sanction torture, have greatly bolstered opposition to the resolution, provoking UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan himself to criticize it more harshly than ever before.
"For the past two years, I have spoken quite strongly against the exemption, and I think it would be unfortunate for one to press for such an exemption, given the prisoner abuse in Iraq," he told reporters last week before privately briefing the Security Council on his views.
"Given the recent revelations from Abu Ghraib prison," said Richard Dicker, who follows the international justice issues for Human Rights Watch, "the U.S. government has picked a hell of a moment to ask for special treatment on war crimes."
Debate on Washington's request, which appears to have the support of Angola, Britain, the Philippines, and Russia, is expected to begin this week, probably Thursday. To date, however, Benin, Brazil, Chile, China, France, Germany, and Spain have indicated they intend to abstain.
Seven abstentions would kill the resolution.
Romania has said it is prepared to abstain unless its vote is responsible for defeating the U.S. resolution, according to the Washington Post, while Algeria and Pakistan have not yet tipped their hands, although the latter is considered more likely to side with Washington.
The vote, which is almost certain to take place before July 1 when the current resolution lapses, comes at a particularly sensitive time. In the wake of serious setbacks to the U.S. occupation in Iraq, Bush signaled a more conciliatory approach toward his international critics last month in agreeing to a Council resolution that vested more authority in Iraqi government that is supposed to gain "sovereignty" over the country July 1 than Washington had initially wanted.
Bush's willingness to compromise in order to get UN backing for the continued U.S. presence in Iraq was interpreted by some as a shift from the strong unilateralism pursued by Bush since the 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon to a more multilateral approach. But Washington's push for extending the ICC exemption will severely test that thesis.
The proposed resolution prohibits the ICC, which formally opened for business one year ago in The Hague, the Netherlands, from investigating or prosecuting any current or former official or personnel from any country that has not ratified the Rome Statute, the international treaty that created the ICC, for acts committed by them during their participation in a mission authorized by the UN.
Under the treaty, the ICC has jurisdiction to prosecute cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in situations where the country that should be responsible for doing so is either unable or unwilling to pursue prosecutions on its own.
ICC supporters have long made the argument that Washington has nothing to fear from the new tribunal so long as the U.S. government is willing to investigate and prosecute such crimes as it says it is currently doing in Abu Ghraib cases and several others that have since come to light.
But the Bush administration insists that the ICC threatens U.S. sovereignty. They also argue that, given Washington's military predominance and the unique responsibilities for maintaining international peace that go with it, U.S. peacekeepers were particularly vulnerable to politically-inspired prosecutions by the ICC.
Former President Bill Clinton signed the Statute just before Bush's inauguration, but in May, 2002, the administration formally renounced Clinton's signature and launched a campaign to persuade as many countries as possible - about 80 to date - to sign bilateral agreements with Washington forbidding them from transferring any U.S. national in their custody to the ICC.
The administration has also cut off military assistance to about three dozen countries that so far have refused to sign such an agreement. Ninety-four countries, including virtually of Europe and most of the Caribbean, Latin America, and a substantial number of African states, have ratified the Statute.
At the same time, it launched its effort to secure an exemption from the Security Council. In 2002, the Security Council reluctantly went along after Washington threatened not only to withdraw all U.S. personnel from UN peacekeeping missions, but also to veto the extension of existing missions or the creation of new ones.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Refusing to Give Name a Crime
Supreme Court Upholds Nevada Law Requiring Identification
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57604-2004Jun21.html
The Supreme Court yesterday upheld a state law that makes it a crime to refuse to tell the police one's name when stopped for suspicious behavior, a ruling that strengthens the ability of law enforcement officers to detain citizens even where they lack enough evidence for a full arrest.
By a vote of 5 to 4, the court ruled that Larry Dudley Hiibel's constitutional rights to be free of unreasonable arrest and to remain silent were not violated when Deputy Lee Dove arrested him for refusing to give his name after Dove stopped Hiibel and questioned him near Winnemucca, Nev., on May 21, 2000. Hiibel was convicted of violating Nevada's "stop and identify" law and fined $250.
Hiibel and his supporters, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, had urged the court to strike down the Nevada statute, arguing that it effectively criminalizes a citizen's silence. Advocates for the homeless had argued that laws such as Nevada's could be used to harass homeless people, who are often mentally ill or lack identification cards.
But the author of the majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, made it clear that he regarded the disclosure of one's name, the only piece of information the Nevada law specifically requires, as a modest intrusion on privacy.
And whatever privacy interest or concern about self-incrimination Hiibel might have had was outweighed by the state's interests in protecting police officers and investigating crime, Kennedy wrote.
"As best we can tell, [Hiibel] refused to identify himself only because he thought his name was none of the officer's business," Kennedy wrote. "Even today, [Hiibel] does not explain how the disclosure of his name could have been used against him in a criminal case."
Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Eighteen other states have laws like Nevada's, but not all of them provide for criminal penalties.
Nevada's law says that police may detain anyone "under circumstances which reasonably indicate that the person has committed, is committing or is about to commit a crime," and that "any person so detained shall identify himself, but may not be compelled to answer any other inquiry."
It was intended to codify the Supreme Court's 1968 decision in Terry v. Ohio. That case empowered police to briefly detain suspicious subjects -- such as people who seem to be "casing" a bank in preparation for a robbery -- question them and search them for weapons.
The court created "Terry stops" to cover situations in which the police have "reasonable suspicion" of criminal conduct but not enough information for "probable cause," the constitutional standard for making an arrest.
Until yesterday, the court had never clearly said what police may require of a citizen in a Terry stop -- although in a famous concurrence to Terry, Justice Byron R. White had said there is no obligation to respond to police questions.
Hiibel, a rancher who sports a Stetson hat, made his case to the public on a Web site that includes a videotape of his encounter with Dove. The film, shot by a camera mounted on Dove's car, shows a possibly inebriated Hiibel refusing 11 requests for his name before being handcuffed and arrested.
Dove, responding to a tip about a man punching a woman in a pickup truck, had come upon Hiibel standing next to his pickup on the side of a road. His teenage daughter was in the cab.
Hiibel had argued that the Nevada law turns Terry into a license to arrest people just for seeming suspicious. But Kennedy said that would not happen because "an officer may not arrest a suspect for failure to identify himself if the request for identification is not reasonably related to the circumstances justifying the [Terry] stop."
As for the risk of self-incrimination from disclosing one's name to police, Kennedy said that would happen "only in unusual circumstances."
But Justice John Paul Stevens, in a dissenting opinion, called this assumption "quite wrong." Hiibel's name could have helped police link him to criminal activity, Stevens noted, so he "acted well within his rights when he opted to stand mute."
Justice Stephen G. Breyer, joined by Justices David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, also dissented, arguing that the court should have endorsed the position outlined in White's Terry concurrence.
The case is Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, No. 03-5554.
--------
Justices Uphold a Nevada Law Requiring Citizens to Identify Themselves to the Police
June 22, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/politics/22scotus.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 21 - People who have given the police some reason to suspect that they may be involved in a crime can be required to identify themselves unless their very name would be incriminating, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in a case that had raised concerns about the boundaries of personal privacy.
The 5-to-4 decision addressed a question that, surprisingly, had gone unresolved for decades. But the answer the court gave was hardly definitive, leaving for another day some of the more difficult issues of application.
The case was a challenge by a Nevada rancher to a state law requiring people stopped in suspicious circumstances to identify themselves on the request of a police officer. Twenty states, including New York, have such laws on their books, as do a number of cities and towns.
The rancher, Larry D. Hiibel argued that his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure and his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination were violated by the state law. Mr. Hiibel's cause was taken up by an array of groups concerned with privacy in an age when a name entered in an electronic database can provide a sometimes startling amount of personal information.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion rejected both constitutional arguments, at least as they applied to Mr. Hiibel. As a Fourth Amendment matter, Justice Kennedy said, the demand to identify oneself is a logical corollary to the circumstances of a valid police stop, as described by the court in a 1968 decision, Terry v. Ohio.
That decision permits a police officer to briefly detain, question and conduct a pat-down search of a person whose behavior has given rise to "reasonable suspicion," short of the probable cause necessary for a formal arrest. Such an encounter is widely known as a "Terry stop."
"Obtaining a suspect's name in the course of a Terry stop serves important government interests," Justice Kennedy said. "The request for identity has an immediate relation to the purpose, rationale and practical demands of a Terry stop," he added.
But as Justice Kennedy pointed out, in the 36 years since the Terry decision, the court, while permitting a police officer to question a suspect, had never explicitly decided whether the suspect had to answer or could be arrested and prosecuted for refusing. He acknowledged that a number of opinions, including a concurring opinion by Justice Byron R. White in the Terry case itself, had indicated that there was not an obligation to respond. But "we do not read these statements as controlling," Justice Kennedy said, as long as the request for identification is made in the context of a valid Terry stop.
In this case, Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, No. 03-5554, the request by a deputy sheriff for Mr. Hiibel's name was valid, Justice Kennedy concluded. The deputy had responded to a telephone report of a man hitting a woman in the cab of a truck parked along a rural road. Arriving to investigate a possible domestic assault, the deputy found a man who turned out to be Mr. Hiibel standing outside the truck, with a young woman sitting inside the cab. She turned out to be his daughter.
Eleven times, the deputy asked Mr. Hiibel for identification, and 11 times, he refused to provide it. The incident was caught by a video camera on the deputy's car, and can be seen on Mr. Hiibel's Web site, www.hiibel.com, along with Mr. Hiibel's description of the events and the following description of him: "He lives a simple life, but he's his own man."
Eventually, Mr. Hiibel was arrested and charged with the misdemeanor of refusing to identify himself. He was convicted and fined $250. The Nevada Supreme Court upheld his conviction.
In the ruling on Monday, the majority's analysis of Mr. Hiibel's Fifth Amendment challenge to the law was more ambiguous than the Fourth Amendment discussion. Mr. Hiibel argued that his conviction violated his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. But "in this case disclosure of his name presented no reasonable danger of incrimination," Justice Kennedy said, and so the case did not test the Fifth Amendment limits of a compelled-identification law.
Justice Kennedy's basis for that conclusion was that Mr. Hiibel seemed to have nothing to hide, refusing to identify himself "only because he thought his name was none of the officer's business," the opinion said. Justice Kennedy noted that "answering a request to disclose a name is likely to be so insignificant in the scheme of things as to be incriminating only in unusual circumstances."
He continued: "Still, a case may arise where there is a substantial allegation that furnishing identity at the time of a stop would have given the police a link in the chain of evidence needed to convict the individual of a separate offense." The court could decide such a case at that point, Justice Kennedy said.
This provoked a stinging dissent from Justice John Paul Stevens, who said there was no basis for assuming that names were generally nonincriminating or would not usually furnish a "link in the chain of evidence."
"Why else would an officer ask for it?" Justice Stevens said, adding, "Indeed, if we accept the predicate for the court's holding, the statute requires nothing more than a useless invasion of privacy."
In a separate dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen G. Breyer said that despite the lack of a formal precedent directly on the point, there was a "generation-old" understanding that people subjected to Terry stops were not required to answer any questions. There was no indication that this understanding "has significantly interfered with law enforcement," Justice Breyer said, and no reason to change it at this point. Further, he said, there was no way for "a police officer in the midst of a Terry stop" to know whether the situation was the ordinary one or the "special case where the majority reserves judgment."
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter joined Justice Breyer's dissenting opinion. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.
"A Nevada cowboy courageously fought for his right to be let alone but lost," the Nevada state public defender's office, which represented Mr. Hiibel at the court, said in a statement posted on Mr. Hiibel's Web site. Indeed, Mr. Hiibel, 59, became something of a folk hero in certain quarters in the months his case was pending before the court.
The Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization here, filed a brief on his behalf. Timothy Lynch, director of Cato's project on criminal justice, said in an interview on Monday that "the ruling makes it extremely difficult now for ordinary people to assert their constitutional rights against the government." Mr. Lynch said the court had "blurred the line between asserting your rights and committing the crime of obstruction of justice."
But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which also filed a brief for Mr. Hiibel, said he was encouraged by the suggestion in the majority opinion that a demand for identification documents, as opposed to just a person's name, as in this case, would have raised a deeper constitutional issue. Given an anticipated debate over national identification cards, "we think that's good news," Mr. Rotenberg said. His organization's brief emphasized the amount of information currently available from interconnected databases.
With 4 cases decided Monday, the court now has 12 decisions to go before it can conclude its term, most likely by the end of next week. Among them are the three most closely watched cases of the term, asking the court to define the legal status of detainees held as enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in a military prison in Charleston, S.C.
--------
Accused of Aiding Terror Plot, Lawyer Braces for Fight of Her Life
Attorney for Militant Sheik Plans Lengthy Testimony in Own Defense
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58882-2004Jun21?language=printer
NEW YORK -- She's the New York Mets fan with a belief in armed struggle, the pink-faced grandmother who stands accused of helping a jailed terrorist sheik order followers to kill and kidnap in his name.
Lynne Stewart, a proudly radical lawyer, could face 40 years in federal prison if she's convicted. But she's in no mood to curl up in a fetal position.
"How could I be happier? I feel like I've waited my whole life for this fight," she told a crowd of supporters at a pretrial fundraiser in a Manhattan Quaker church a few weeks back.
"I say this to John Ashcroft: Bring it on!"
The very public trial of the 64-year-old Stewart -- she plans to testify at length and write a Web log throughout -- commences this week in U.S. District Court in Manhattan and likely will stretch until autumn. A left-leaning pillar of this city's boisterous defense bar, Stewart has worked these courtrooms for two decades, representing leftists and mobsters, antiwar demonstrators and dope smugglers. She's been ranked among the city's 10 best trial lawyers.
"I love helping a jury cut through the crap," she said in an interview in her Manhattan law office a few blocks northeast of Ground Zero. "But I can't be sanguine about having the T-word hung around my neck."
The federal indictment accuses Stewart and two men -- an Arabic translator and a former U.S. postal worker -- of aiding a plot to kidnap and perhaps kill people to obtain the release of the imprisoned blind Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to blow up the United Nations, two Hudson River tunnels and Manhattan's FBI building.
The indictment alleges that while visiting her client in prison, Stewart spoke gibberish in English as a cover while the sheik gave instructions in Arabic to a follower posing as a translator. She then allegedly violated federal regulations by publicly announcing in 2000 that Rahman had withdrawn his support for a cease-fire with the Egyptian government.
Rahman is held in a maximum-security prison in Colorado and is prohibited from contacting his followers.
The federal government's indictment of Stewart in April 2002 marked the first time that it had brought charges of conspiring to provide material support for terrorist activity against a defense attorney in a terrorism case.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft framed the prosecution as another battle in the nation's war on terror. "We will not look the other way when our institutions of justice are subverted," Ashcroft said at the time.
In August 2003, however, U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl cut the heart out of the government's case. "The government's evolving definition" of material support, Koeltl wrote, "reveals a lack of prosecutorial standards" and would allow "policemen, prosecutors and juries to pursue their personal predilections."
In November 2003, federal prosecutors returned to court, bringing new charges based on the same actions by Stewart. This time, prosecutors -- who had secretly taped her talks with her client -- accused Stewart of conspiring to provide "personnel" to the Islamic Group. The sheik, in this formulation, was the "personnel."
The government argued that Stewart was effectively aiding terrorist violence to obtain her client's release. Koeltl allowed the new indictment to stand, but cautioned prosecutors that they would face a far higher standard of proof. Now they had to prove that Stewart knew her actions would aid a terrorist conspiracy.
Prominent defense attorneys and legal ethicists have rallied to Stewart's side. "The majority of the charges curtail her First Amendment rights to speak and to act as a lawyer," said Neal R. Sonnett, chairman of the American Bar Association's Task Force on Treatment of Enemy Combatants.
Stewart often embraces her clients, seeing in their cases the stuff of radical liberation. "I'm not going to say what's healthy for someone who lives somewhere else in the world," she said. "My own political sense tells me that the only hope for change in Egypt is the fundamentalist movement."
Such an argument evokes unease in some of her old friends. Ron Kuby, a pony-tailed defense lawyer and talk-show host, spent two decades working alongside radical lawyer William Kunstler and once defended the sheik. But that's over.
"I love Lynne, but no one in the world could fairly posit the sheik as a progressive or liberal on any issue," Kuby said. "In the aftermath of September 11th, I could no longer put myself in the service of those who are trying to create a world in which I would be put up against a wall and shot, and my daughter and wife would be put in burqahs."
Not a Pacifist
Stewart was a child of the working class, a girl who came of age in what once was known as Archie Bunker Queens. Her father was a meter reader. She went to a local public high school and then to a small Calvinist college in Missouri.
"I know fundamentalists because I lived among them," Stewart said. "My enemy Ashcroft is a fundamentalist."
She returned to New York and found work as a librarian at a Harlem public school. "I saw people forced to live in dirt and the filth and I thought: 'Why the hell didn't I know about this?' " She pauses, her leprechaun eyebrows dancing. "You want to know what radicalized me? Harlem, 1962."
She noticed a muscular black man across the hall, a teacher who spoke passionately about the nation's racial condition. He was Ralph Poynter, and he introduced her to black literature and radical history. They remain married to this day.
In the 1970s, she "hot-footed it" to law school, studying under Arthur Kinoy, a prominent radical legal scholar whose theories centered on the criminalization of the poor.
Stewart slowly carved out a formidable reputation. She is short and heavy, with a flat voice and a taste in clothes that might -- as she jokes -- be described as early frump. But her smile is infectious and her manner disarmingly maternal, and she can home in like sonar on the weakness in a prosecution case.
"Lynne envelops a jury in this idealistic vision," Kuby said. "She gives the sense that if they convict her poor client, the eagle in the American emblem will come to life and peck their eyes out."
In 1988 she defended Larry Davis, a longtime drug dealer involved in a shootout in which he wounded six police officers. The case seemed open and shut. But Stewart cast her client as a noble black outlaw taking on corrupt cops. Davis was acquitted.
"Blacks and Hispanics can hear the nuances in a Larry Davis story," Stewart said at the time. "Blacks fear the police being able to kill their kids at any time and being able to get away with it. This is sort of payback time."
Stewart does not blanch at violence. Blood, she says, has irrigated revolutionary struggles from China to South Africa. When the South African government locked up Nelson Mandela, his followers did not lay down their arms.
"I'm not a pacifist," Stewart said. "I have cried many bitter tears. There is death in history, and it's not all rosebuds and memorial services. Mao, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh understood this."
The Sheik
Former U.S. attorney general Ramsey Clark persuaded Stewart to take Rahman's case. His own politics have drifted far to the left and his words resonated with her.
"Ramsey said it would be a terrible black mark against progressive forces in the United States not to represent him," Stewart recalled. "He said, 'If you're a fireman and you walk by a burning building, you must run in.' "
So Stewart met the sheik. "We hit it off," Stewart said, "He's really an incredible person."
A jury, however, convicted Rahman in 1995 of terrorist conspiracy, and a judge sentenced him to life in prison, where the government imposed an order greatly restricting his contact with the outside world. Stewart continued to represent him and on May 19, 2000, traveled to his prison in Minnesota. She had earlier signed an agreement that she would not help Rahman communicate with his followers.
The government's indictment accuses Stewart of keeping up a nonsensical patter while Rahman's interpreter, Mohammed Yousry, discussed Islamic Group strategy with Rahman. The next day, the sheik dictated a letter to Yousry withdrawing his support for the cease-fire, and Stewart later released a statement to the foreign media.
The government has also indicted Yousry and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a postal employee.
Stewart doesn't deny that she violated federal regulations when she released the public statement, but she notes that she has since abided by the restrictions. And she attributes her nonsensical prison chatter to the tedium that comes with working with a translator. "Charging me with distracting the guards sounds like I was doing the hootchy-kootchy," she said.
More broadly, Stewart argues -- with support from some prominent legal ethicists -- that the government has consigned Rahman to an informational tomb. It's her ethical duty as an attorney to keep his case alive on the world stage. "His word matters," she said. "He wouldn't be the first man accused of terrorism who is released from prison when times change."
Other legal scholars counterpose another reality: Stewart's client was the leader, spiritual or otherwise, of an armed organization pursuing devastating attacks on the United States and its allies.
"Lynne was representing a very scary person, and she knew that going in," said James Jacobs, the Warren E. Burger professor of constitutional law at New York University. "It should have been very clear that she had to worry about crossing any line."
Stewart has traveled and spoken often since her indictment, reflecting her belief that the best way to avoid demonization is to let people -- not to mention potential jurors -- hear her voice. This is why she plans to testify at length -- and why the prosecution has sought to bar any mention that she's a grandmother. But she acknowledges that the shadow of a four-decade jail term looms over everything.
"You are not optimistic," she said, "because you understand the odds and the tremendous power of the federal government." Her voice trails off, then she brightens.
"My role, my role now is to play the poster girl fighting Ashcroft," she said. "Besides, who on a jury wouldn't love me?"
--------
Court backs police on showing of ID
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Jerry Seper
June 22, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040621-115845-6435r.htm
The Supreme Court yesterday in a 5-4 ruling upheld a Nevada law that requires people to identify themselves to police officers or face arrest.
The decision puts new limits on constitutional rights by requiring people to cooperate with police officers even if they are not suspected or charged in a crime.
Privacy-rights advocates had argued against the law, saying the power gives police the right to force people to submit to fingerprinting or to divulge other, more private information.
Proponents, including the Nevada Supreme Court, which refused 4-3 to overturn the 2000 conviction of Larry "Dudley" Hiibel using the law, argued that identification requests by police were a routine part of detective work, including efforts to get information on potential terrorists.
Mr. Hiibel, a Nevada cattle rancher, was arrested and convicted on a misdemeanor after refusing to tell his name or show identification to a sheriff's deputy responding to a potential assault call.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said granting police the right to obtain a person's identification in the course of "a Terry stop serves important government interests." A Terry stop refers to a 1968 Ohio case giving police the authority to briefly detain and question a person to either confirm or deny a "reasonable suspicion" that the person was involved in criminal activity.
Also voting with the majority were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that Mr. Hiibel "acted well within his rights when he opted to stand mute." Others who disagreed with the majority were Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
In the Hiibel case, the rancher was standing next to his truck along the highway when approached by a Humboldt County, Nev., sheriff's deputy, who demanded identification. According to a videotape transcript of the incident from the deputy's squad car, the deputy said there had been a report of a fight and repeatedly asked to see the man's identification.
When Mr. Hiibel refused, telling the deputy he would cooperate but had done nothing wrong, he was arrested. Nevada's "stop and identify " statute requires persons detained by an officer under suspicious circumstances to identify themselves.
The state intermediate appellate court affirmed the conviction, rejecting Mr. Hiibel's argument that the state law's application to his case violated his Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. The Nevada Supreme Court affirmed the lower court decision.
In March, Mr. Hiibel's attorney, Robert E. Dolan, deputy Nevada state public defender, argued that his client's arrest was "illegal and unreasonable," and asked that his misdemeanor conviction and $250 fine be overturned. He told the court Mr. Hiibel was arrested and convicted of a crime "simply because he did not identify himself or provide identity."
Mr. Dolan said his client was standing at the passenger side of his truck along a highway when approached by a deputy and asked if he knew anything about a fight in the area, telling the officer he did not. He said the deputy then asked for his identification, and Mr. Dolan refused.
Conrad Hafen, chief deputy district attorney in Las Vegas, argued that there were three reasons why compelling a lawfully detained person to identify himself was reasonable: It is a minimal intrusion, it advances officer safety, and it promotes effective law enforcement in the prevention and detection of crime.
"Furthermore," he told the court, "it does not violate the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination because identifying yourself is a neutral act."
Some of Mr. Hiibel's supporters, including the Cato Institute and American Civil Liberties Union, filed briefs on his behalf, saying the case - if not overturned - might set a precedent requiring Americans to carry identification at all times.
-------- homeland security
A Scenario Where Questions Linger
Despite Plans, Some Doubt Government's Ability to Provide Services in Emergency
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58886-2004Jun21?language=printer
In an era of doomsday scenarios, this is among the worst: Terrorists detonate a small nuclear weapon on Pennsylvania Avenue during the presidential inauguration.
The president and vice president, congressional leaders and much of the outgoing Cabinet are killed in the blast, not to mention thousands of ordinary citizens. It is not immediately clear who is still alive -- or who is in charge. Much of federal Washington is uninhabitable. Many agency leaders are dead. Federal employees who are still alive cannot get to their offices.
The scenario, outlined in a report last year by the independent Continuity of Government Commission, is extreme. But commission members and other experts say it illustrates that, nearly three years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks shut down agencies and threw Congress into temporary chaos, serious questions remain about the government's ability to make crucial policy decisions and provide basic services after an attack.
Although much of the legislative debate since Sept. 11 has been about how to quickly replace dead or incapacitated lawmakers, less noticed have been such matters as whether Americans would continue to get their Social Security checks, veterans hospitals would stay open, the banking system would function and mail would be delivered. Maintaining such government services, important in and of themselves, would assure Americans that the country remains unbowed, experts say.
"What you would hope to do if something drastic happened is to convince people that it's limited and it's contained, and awful as it is . . . the basics of our lives go on," said Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an adviser to the independent commission, a joint project of AEI and the Brookings Institution.
It's not a new subject. Plans to ensure the survival of federal rule after a catastrophic attack date to the Cold War and fears of a massive nuclear strike by the Soviet Union. After Sept. 11, President Bush activated such plans for the first time, dispatching a shadow government of about 100 senior civilian managers to live and work secretly outside Washington.
More recently, the Federal Emergency Management Agency supervised the deployment of thousands of federal workers to secret sites in a test of whether agencies could carry on essential work in dire circumstances.
In 1998, a presidential directive put FEMA in charge of continuity of operations planning (COOP). FEMA told agencies to identify essential functions, devise methods to preserve vital records and develop succession orders for key jobs. Agencies had to be able to reach alternate facilities within 12 hours of an attack and operate there for as long as a month.
A recent General Accounting Office review of plans for 35 departments and agencies found that none fully met all requirements. Agencies variously did not prioritize essential functions and did not account for their reliance on other agencies to carry out critical missions. Few agencies documented that they had adequate communications capabilities and space for staff and equipment in alternate facilities. And few had done recommended tests of plans. The report did not name the offices.
"Until these weaknesses are addressed, agencies are likely to continue to base their plans on ill-defined assumptions . . . and, as a result, risk experiencing difficulties in delivering key services to citizens in the aftermath of an emergency," Linda D. Koontz, a senior GAO official, testified at an April hearing of the House Government Reform Committee.
Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), the committee chairman, put it in starker terms, saying some agencies were "woefully prepared."
"Here we sit, 2 1/2 years after facing the mortal threat of 9/11, and we still cannot be assured that we are prepared to provide essential government services in the wake of a disaster," Davis said. "My colleagues and I want some answers."
Officials at FEMA, now part of the Department of Homeland Security, say most problems have been fixed. They say the GAO studied plans from 2002, many of which have since been updated.
"I believe that every department and agency has a very good, robust COOP plan in place that we just now need to fine-tune," Michael Brown, DHS undersecretary for emergency preparedness and response, told the committee.
FEMA is revising its guidance to ensure plans are more complete, Brown said. It has established a COOP working group of 67 departments and agencies in the Washington area, and smaller working groups at the regional level.
Most important, officials say, plans are being tested.
In May, FEMA led Forward Challenge '04, an exercise in which nearly 4,000 employees from 45 agencies fanned out to more than 100 secret sites in response to a simulated terrorist attack. The "crisis" was an attempted suicide bombing in the Metro, followed by the death of three Cabinet secretaries in a car accident, an assault by hackers on air traffic control systems and intelligence reports of an imminent threat of a major attack in Washington.
Officials offered few details but said the exercise went well. In an actual emergency, many thousands more workers would be dispatched to the alternate sites, generally within a two-hour drive of Washington, officials said. An after-action report is expected next month.
"We demonstrated for the first time ever through the exercise that . . . we can get to our alternate operating sites and that we can perform the communications and the interagency interdependencies necessary to continue the work of the government," Reynold N. Hoover, FEMA's director of national security coordination, said in an interview. "Does more planning and more work need to be done? Yes, certainly we do need to do that, and we continue to do that."
The best defense may be the sprawling nature of the 1.8 million-strong federal civilian workforce, analysts say. Nearly nine of every 10 federal employees live and work outside the Washington region. A terrorist strike in the nation's capital, however devastating, would leave much of the government's decentralized operations untouched. In fact, several key agencies are headquartered outside Washington, including the Social Security Administration in Baltimore and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, said Donald F. Kettl, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
One of the most decentralized departments is Agriculture, with 98,000 federal employees and 25,000 buildings. The department's emergency plans rely, in part, on its ability to send many of its 7,000 Washington-area employees to regional facilities.
"USDA has an advantage, because we're everywhere," said John Surina, deputy assistant secretary for administration. "We're in every county of the country."
The department has two major computer centers, one in Washington and one elsewhere, Surina said. Vital records are stored on computer disks and databases outside Washington. Top officials have been given cell phones designed to keep working even when regular cellular service is overwhelmed, as it was on Sept. 11. At least one Senate-confirmed deputy is always out of town, poised to take charge if top leaders are wiped out in a catastrophic attack.
"We feel pretty good," Surina said of the plans.
A potential weak spot for the government, said Kettl, is the complex communications and computer systems that tie everything together.
"All the agencies have spent a lot of time since September 11 trying to harden those, trying to test them, trying to insulate them," he said. "And nobody really knows for sure how well they would work in the absence of a real-life kind of test."
The Social Security Administration is another agency with a well-dispersed workforce, with about 65,500 employees in more than 1,300 field offices, 36 call centers and other facilities across the country. But key choke points may be vulnerable, said Witold Skwierczynski, president of an American Federation of Government Employees union local at SSA.
The agency relies on a computer center in Baltimore to maintain records and process benefits, sending information electronically to the Treasury Department in Washington, which issues Social Security checks, he said. An attack on the computer system or in Washington could cause trouble.
"If they lost the computer records or if there was a disruption in the ability to send out checks, that would probably lead to severe economic problems throughout the United States," Skwierczynski said. "There are 40 million people getting checks every month."
Brown, the FEMA official, testified that the agency has established regional COOP working groups that include many of the 28 federal executive boards, regional entities whose mission is to improve coordination among federal programs outside Washington.
Kathrene Hansen, executive director of the Federal Executive Board of Greater Los Angeles, said her organization, which has a staff of two, could serve as an important conduit of information for the region's 60,000 federal employees after an attack. But agencies do not have to inform the board of their status, Hansen said. "We can't make anybody do anything," she said. "So to have an expectation that we're going to have this central role in being responsible for continuity of operations is inconsistent with the way we're funded, the way we're staffed and the lack of authority that we have."
Part of the recent FEMA exercise was to make contact with the federal executive boards, Hansen said. But officials simply sent her an e-mail, which Hansen did not see because she had the day off and cannot access her e-mail remotely. When someone tracked her down by phone to ask why she had not responded, Hansen said she had no way of knowing the e-mail had been sent.
Hoover, the FEMA official, said there is "a lot of work yet to be done" to ensure that federal employees outside Washington know what to do. And agency officials need to be able to more easily contact FEMA about their status at alternate locations, he said.
Despite such problems, Ornstein, the government scholar, said federal officials have done "far more" planning about continuing basic executive branch services than about filling congressional vacancies after an attack. That does not mean such plans will work, he said.
"But what you can say is at least they are doing exercises . . . at least they are consciously aware of the potential problems," he said. "You never know in advance if it will work, but it will work a lot better if you do the gaming in advance and you can sort of see where the real glitches turn up."
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Fairfax orders Patriot Act impact study
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Christina Bellantoni
June 22, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20040621-115844-4267r.htm
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors yesterday ordered every county agency to report how the USA Patriot Act will harm or benefit operations.
The board voted 5-3 to direct the agencies to conduct the study. The measure is an alternative to a resolution drafted by Supervisor Catherine M. Hudgins, Hunter Mill Democrat, that criticized the Patriot Act as an encroachment on constitutional rights.
Mrs. Hudgins' resolution, which also asked Congress to allow the Patriot Act to "sunset," or lapse, bothered most of the supervisors.
Fairfax County is one of the few local jurisdictions that hasn't passed such a resolution about the Patriot Act.
Some of the supervisors said they were worried about taking such an action because they hadn't read the several-hundred-page Patriot Act. Supervisors believed ordering agencies to study the effects of the federal law would give them the information they need to decide whether to support Mrs. Hudgins' resolution.
"Clearly, there are civil libertarian concerns," said Chairman Gerald E. Connolly, a Democrat. "I'd like to have more clarity about what those are."
Mrs. Hudgins disagreed. "I do have a concern, and I join many others who have that concern," she said. "I want to ensure citizens in this county do not find themselves in a position where their rights are compromised."
During the board's meeting at the Fairfax County Government Center, about 10 persons in the auditorium held signs, some of which read: "Please keep the Bill of Rights Alive and Well for My Generation."
Board members who voted for the substitute motion were Mr. Connolly; Sharon Bulova, Braddock District Democrat; T. Dana Kauffman, Lee District Democrat; Linda Q. Smyth, Providence District Democrat; and Joan M. DuBois, Dranesville District Republican.
Those who voted against the motion were Mrs. Hudgins; Penelope A. Gross, Mason District Democrat; and Elaine McConnell, Springfield District Republican.
Supervisors Michael R. Frey, Sully District Republican, and Gerald W. Hyland, Mount Vernon District Democrat, were absent.
The motion did not set a deadline for the county agencies to file their reports with the board.
Alexandria, Arlington County, Takoma Park, Greenbelt, Montgomery and Prince George's counties and the District have passed resolutions denouncing the Patriot Act and promising to uphold the civil liberties of residents, according to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee.
Passing the resolutions is a largely symbolic act, but 330 localities nationwide, including New York City, Baltimore and Philadelphia, have done so.
Most of the resolutions, including the one that was discussed by the Fairfax supervisors yesterday, urge congressional delegations to allow the Patriot Act to expire or to add congressional oversight to the act.
The growing trend isn't likely to influence those in power at the federal level, some experts said.
"I don't think it's likely to have much of an impact," said Bob Holsworth, director for the Center of Public Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University. "The major decisions here on the war on terror are going to be made at a higher level. Ideological oppositions are not likely to carry that much weight."
Activists think every bit helps.
"It's hard to ignore it after a while," said Aimee Perron, a legislative director with the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. "Congress really should look to local government to see what's going on with the people, because local government is more in touch with the people."
Miss Perron said the local efforts are important because the laws are enforced at the city and town level.
The movement began in early 2002 after Attorney General John Ashcroft introduced the act to fight terrorism in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. The act gives authorities more power to investigate terrorism and to detain suspects.
Critics argue that the act allows for unreasonable searches and seizures and violates privacy.
Miss Perron said opposition efforts are slowly starting to work.
The Civil Liberties Restoration Act was introduced last week in Congress to repeal provisions of the Patriot Act that are said to "violate civil liberties," to restore due process for those jailed by the government and to protect privacy. It was introduced by Democratic Reps. Howard L. Berman of California and Bill Delahunt of Massachusetts and Democratic Sens. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Russell D. Feingold of Wisconsin and Richard J. Durbin of Illinois.
In addition, members of the Texas Democratic Party are calling for the "immediate repeal" of some of the Patriot Act provisions, according to Sunday's editions of the Houston Chronicle.
Miss Perron said the movement has been nonpartisan - with support from Republicans, Democrats, Green Party members and Libertarians. "When we talk to people about how our liberties are being eroded, people are really concerned," she said. "We don't want the terrorists to win in that way either."
Some of the local resolutions are more firm in their nature. San Francisco's resolution asks city departments and agencies not to help federal authorities in investigations that impede civil liberties, according to published reports.
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House Bill Would Enforce Patriot Act Secrecy Clause
The NewStandard
by Jessica Azulay (bio)
Jun 22 2004
http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=589
Jun 22 - Even as the government increasingly comes under fire from civil libertarians for using Patriot Act provisions to seek personal information without probable cause, some lawmakers are working to expand those powers. In recent months, signs of public outrage have begun to surface over the FBI's use of National Security Letters (NSLs) to secretly demand information from business and public agencies about their clientele. Under one of the most controversial section of the USA PATRIOT Act, third party record holders who receive NSLs requesting information about their patrons are forbidden from telling anyone about the Letter.
Now some lawmakers in the US House of Representatives are considering a bill that would designate concrete penalties for people who refuse to comply with NSL requests for information or who tell anyone that federal agents requested personal information about their clients.
Additionally, the bill would grant the FBI greater power to secretly monitor non-citizens and would allow the use of secretly gathered evidence in immigration hearing without giving defendants the opportunity to legally challenge the information.
The Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Tools Improvement Act of 2003 (HR 3179) was introduced in the House last September and is currently in the House Judiciary Committee. The bill's opponents fear that one of the bill's sponsors, Representative Porter Goss (R-FL), who also chairs the House Intelligence Committee will fold the provisions of HR 3179 into the annual intelligence authorization bill, making it difficult for lawmakers to oppose.
The legislation calls for a one-year maximum jail sentence for anyone who knowingly violates the nondisclosure provision of the USA PATRIOT Act. Anyone who violates the rule "with the intent to obstruct an investigation or judicial proceeding" would get a maximum sentence of five years under the legislation. The bill also gives law enforcement the ability to enlist the judicial system's help in forcing people to comply with the National Security Letter information requests.
"There is no reason for this legislation," Chip Pitts, head of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee of Dallas and a former constitutional law professor told Wired News. "Given the expanse of powers and secrecy already granted in the Patriot Act, and given the unclear security benefits and possible security detriments of that legislation, why do we need a further amendment of the law to grant more powers to the government?"
But proponents of the bill do see a need for the provisions of the HR 3179 because without it, they say, the nondisclosure provision on the Patriot Act lacks teeth.
"Right now you can't disclose if you receive a National Security Letter," spokesperson for the House Judiciary Committee Jeff Lungren told Wired News. "But if you do disclose it, there is no penalty for that. There's [also] no stick to deal with a person that refuses to comply with a national security letter."
Wired reports that proponents of the legislation accuse civil libertarians of overreacting to the legislation. They say the purpose of the bill is to "plug a few gaps" in the Patriot Act by providing for clear penalties in areas that were left ambiguous.
But to Jim Dempsey, director of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), those gaps are important because they give companies a limited ability to negotiate with authorities. Dempsey told Wired that if federal agents make a request that a company finds too broad, they can sometimes resist and force the FBI to narrow their search. Dempsey's group, a non-profit public policy organization that advocates democracy and civil liberties "in the digital age," has been closely watching HR 3179 and is encouraging people to contact their congressional representatives about the legislation.
Civil liberties advocates argue that the gag rule silences members of the public from challenging the legitimacy of government requests for private information. They further accuse the government, under cover of the secrecy clause, of using the Letters to bypass probable cause requirements and obtain information about crimes unrelated to terrorism investigations.
By imposing jail terms on people who fail to comply with National Security Letters, even when noncompliance comes from legitimate concerns over violation of privacy or government abuse of authority, civil libertarians say HR 3179 would further concentrate power in the hands of government agents and narrow avenues of recourse that exist.
The proposed legislation would also further amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), which governs the procedures federal agents must follow when seeking judicial permission to electronically monitor or physically search people suspected of engaging in espionage or international terrorism on behalf of a foreign power.
The Patriot Act changed some provisions of FISA to give federal agents greater domestic surveillance powers, and the use of FISA warrants to investigate suspected terrorists in the United States has worried many civil rights groups. They say the expansions under the Patriot Act allow federal agents to spy on people's free speech and political activities without having to show probable cause.
HR 3179 would expand the FISA definition of "agent of a foreign power" to include one who "engages in international terrorism or activities in preparation therefor," but who does not necessarily work with a foreign government for terrorist organization.
"Because there is no accepted definition of international terrorism, and because they're eliminating the need for someone to be acting on behalf of a foreign government, you're relying on subjective and perhaps arbitrary or politically motivated definitions" when determining who can be investigated under FISA provisions, Pitts told Wired.
In a letter addressed to the House Judiciary Committee, a coalition of almost 80 organizations, expressed their concerns with HR 3179.
"Congress originally approved the FISA with the explicit requirement that it would only be used against individuals acting on behalf of foreign governments or groups," the letter reads. "This connection to a foreign power is essential to the constitutionality of FISA, which contains lower probable cause standards than are required in criminal cases."
A final provision of HR 3179 would allow for the use of evidence gathered with FISA warrants to be used in immigration cases without providing notice and an opportunity for the accused to challenge the evidence as is currently mandated under FISA.
In a letter to Congress urging members to oppose the Act, the ACLU says this portion of the bill would eliminate "important judicial safeguards" currently in place to assure that evidence used against immigrants in court was obtained legally.
At a May 18, 2004 hearing about the proposed legislation, Thomas J. Harrington, the deputy assistant director of the counterterrorism division of the FBI, defended HR 3179. "It contains advantageous reforms which the FBI believes are necessary to assist us in gathering the intelligence that will prevent future terrorist attacks," Harrington told the Judiciary Committee.
Nevertheless, a broad range of civil liberties groups -- including progressives and conservatives -- hold deep misgivings about granting the government increased investigative and prosecutorial powers.
They complain that even while provisions of the Patriot Act are being debated, lawmakers are attempting to secretly pass legislation that further erodes the liberties of US citizens and residents.
According to Wired and The American Spectator, HR 3179 is just one of several pieces of legislation concerning the government's powers to obtain information about citizens and residents of the US being slipped through Congress without proper debate. The Spectator reports that it was only after massive opposition from civil libertarians that the House Judiciary Committee agreed to hold a hearing on the Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Tools Improvement Act.
Even after the hearing, the Center for Democracy and Technology worries that Rep. Goss will attempt to bypass House debate on the measure by attaching it to the annual intelligence authorization bill, which according to the CDT, is debated "behind closed doors." In an action alert about HR 3179, the CDT says that, since the intelligence authorization bill contains provisions seen as important by lawmakers, it is very difficult for House members to vote against the bill, even when it contains provisions they oppose.
According to Wired, HR 3179 is just one of six bills derived from Justice Department draft legislation known as Patriot II. When the details of Patriot II were leaked to the press, the Justice Department was forced to shelve the proposal due to massive public outcry. Nevertheless, provisions of the Patriot II proposal have been showing up in Congress either as individual bills or attached to other bills as amendments and riders. In fact, the Spectator reports that last year, one of those measures was passed with little debate after the House Intelligence Committee attached it to the annual intelligence authorization bill.
"Any expansion of the PATRIOT Act is premature at this point," wrote the CDT. "Congress has not finished its oversight work to determine how the new powers in the PATRIOT Act have been used and whether they were needed to begin with." The CDT argues that before making further changes to surveillance laws, Congress "should include oversight mechanisms and judicial checks and balances."
-------- police
US FBI director wants anti-terror alliance along the lines of NATO
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jun 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040622195418.ks0ap5ud.html
US Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller said Tuesday he would like to see an international alliance against terrorism along the lines of the NATO military alliance.
"Some day, I will expect that it will be an official international anti-terrorism alliance with the structures similar to NATO and united partners joining against common enemies. It is absolutely imperative that we will be connected with our international counterparts overseas. These relationships will be the key of our success," Mueller said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.
"Al-Qaeda still has the desire and the means to attack us and this will be the case for a number of years to come. It will be a long and difficult war," he said.
"We need individuals who understand international law, are fluent in foreign languages. We need to send FBI agents to foreign countries to become familiar with other cultures. In the future we will need agents who will be capable of changing countries as easily as they changed cities in the past."
The FBI has been criticized recently by a commission examining the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. The commission faulted the agency for its handling of terrorist threats in the period before the attacks, which killed some 3,000 people.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Egyptian Man to Remain Jailed
Suspect Held in Connection With Va. Islamic Charity Probe
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59240-2004Jun21.html
A federal judge yesterday ordered that an Egyptian man stay in jail after prosecutors said he could face a third set of charges in a sprawling investigation into whether Islamic charities in Northern Virginia were financing terrorist organizations.
Soliman S. Biheiri, 52, is the only person convicted in connection with the charity probe; last year, a federal jury in Alexandria found him guilty of lying under oath on his application for U.S. citizenship. Last month, Biheiri was indicted again and charged with lying to federal agents about ties to terrorists.
Prosecutors say Biheiri concealed his connections to Mousa Abu Marzook, a leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, who has been designated a terrorist by the U.S. government. Biheiri also is accused of hiding his dealings with Sami al-Arian, a Florida college professor charged with being a leader of the terrorist group Palestine Islamic Jihad.
At a detention hearing for Biheiri yesterday, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Laufman said Biheiri could face "additional and possibly more serious charges." He declined to elaborate, but he told a federal judge that Biheiri should stay in jail because his terrorist ties, access to funds from overseas and lack of U.S. ties would make him likely to flee. Biheiri, whose estranged wife and children live in Reston, finished his first prison term on the immigration conviction June 14 but now is facing deportation proceedings.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Barry R. Poretz ordered Biheiri detained until his trial on the second set of charges, citing Biheiri's overseas travel, family ties to Egypt and "the nature and circumstances of the charges."
Biheiri's attorney, Danny C. Onorato, called Biheiri a "legitimate businessman" and blasted the government's case as weak. He accused prosecutors of harassing Biheiri with what he called "an abuse of prosecutorial discretion."
"But for the fact that he is Islamic, Mr. Biheiri would not be here before this court," Onorato said.
Laufman responded: "The notion that the only reason this defendant is here before this court is because of his race and ethnicity is wrong and beneath contempt."
Biheiri founded BMI Inc., an investment firm that adhered to Islamic principles, in New Jersey in 1986.
Prosecutors said Islamic charities based in Northern Virginia and sponsored by the Saudi Arabian government invested nearly $4 million in the company. At Biheiri's sentencing on his earlier conviction in January, prosecutors said the government believes that Biheiri was dispatched to the United States to start a financial organization as part of a plan to finance and support terror organizations.
The cluster of Islamic charities is the subject of a sprawling federal probe into allegations of tax fraud and other improprieties, according to court papers and testimony. The investigation drew widespread attention in March 2002 when federal agents raided companies operating in the 500 block of Grove Street in Herndon and elsewhere in Northern Virginia. The charities have strongly denied any terrorist links.
-------- terrorism
State Dept. to Release Revised Terror Report
Associated Press
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58880-2004Jun21.html
The State Department is prepared to announce a sharp increase last year in terrorism victims worldwide as it corrects findings that were used to boost one of President Bush's chief foreign policy claims -- success in countering terrorism.
A revised report to be released today shows a dramatic increase in both the number of deaths and other casualties, as well as a less dramatic boost in incidents, a senior State Department official said.
Still, the revised report shows that international cooperation and a new awareness of the terror threat are bringing positive results, the official said.
The initial report was issued in April. On June 10, the State Department acknowledged the findings were inaccurate. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell attributed the errors partly to a new data system and said there was no attempt to cook the figures to polish Bush's image.
When the report was issued, senior administration officials asserted it showed that Bush's campaign against terrorism was a success.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the report was based "on the facts as we had them at the time. The facts that we had were wrong."
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Judge Says Generals Can Be Questioned In Abu Ghraib Case
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57125-2004Jun21?language=printer
BAGHDAD, June 21 -- A U.S. Army judge on Monday agreed to a request by attorneys for soldiers accused of abusing detainees in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison to question the commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East, as well as several other top commanders and their subordinates.
The order by Col. James Pohl effectively compels the commanders to submit to interviews unless they invoke their constitutional right against self-incrimination. It names Gen. John P. Abizaid, who heads the U.S. Central Command and supervises operations in the region; Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq; Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, Sanchez's immediate subordinate; Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, deputy commander of detention operations in Iraq; and Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, the top military intelligence officer in Iraq.
In addition, the order requires others serving under the five Army generals to be made available for interviews.
By allowing the interviews, Pohl appeared to signal a willingness to explore what is emerging as the main line of defense for the seven soldiers accused of abusing and humiliating detainees at Abu Ghraib: that the abusive tactics used at the prison were not only condoned by their commanders but were part of their orders.
Pohl did set a limit, however, on how far he would allow that assertion to be pursued. He rejected defense requests for copies of Justice Department and Pentagon memos on torture and interrogation tactics, although he left open the possibility that he could require the government to turn them over at some point if defense attorneys are able to link what happened in Iraq with policy decisions made in Washington.
"Quite frankly, what they do in Washington, D.C., you have to connect it," Pohl told the attorneys.
In resolving several other discovery requests by the defense, the judge also asked the government to share detainee case files, allow access to detainees at the prison and provide employment records of civilian contractors working as interrogators at Abu Ghraib.
The judge also ordered that Abu Ghraib prison be preserved as a crime scene, though he acknowledged that he has little control over what happens there after June 30, when an interim Iraqi government assumes limited authority from the U.S.-led occupation. President Bush called last month for the prison to be demolished, a suggestion that was quickly rejected by Iraqi leaders.
Pohl issued the decisions at pretrial hearings for Sgt. Javal S. Davis and Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., two of seven soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company based in Cresaptown, Md., accused of abuse at Abu Ghraib, 20 miles west of Baghdad. The judge postponed the proceeding for Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II until July 23 after Frederick's civilian attorney failed to appear in court.
A hearing for another soldier charged in the scandal, Pfc. Lynndie England, 21, was scheduled to begin Tuesday at Fort Bragg, N.C., but was postponed to July 12 to allow officials to iron out logistics, one of England's attorneys said Monday afternoon.
The attorney, Richard Hernandez, said that the delay would allow each side to review extensive information in the case and permit Army officials to set up telephone conferences with witnesses in Iraq. A spokeswoman for the XVII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg confirmed the delay.
Graner faces up to 24 years in prison for his alleged role in the abuse scandal. Frederick could get up to 16 years, and Davis faces a maximum of eight years. Spec. Jeremy C. Sivits, the first soldier to face a court-martial, pleaded guilty last month, agreed to testify against the six other accused soldiers and was sentenced to a year in prison.
In response to another defense motion, Pohl granted a request by Davis's civilian attorney, Paul Bergrin, to declassify witness statements contained in an investigative report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba. Defense attorneys argued that those statements would show that the military police at Abu Ghraib were following orders.
"No one can suggest with a straight face that these MPs were acting alone," Guy L. Womack, Graner's civilian attorney, told reporters after the hearing.
Womack said photographs depicting detainees in sexually humiliating positions were ordered to be taken by military intelligence officers and civilian contractors working as interrogators.
Womack said that Graner, a former corrections officer from Uniontown, Pa., was troubled by what was going on at Abu Ghraib and tried to report it to his commanders. "He was very sorry for what they were doing at the time they were doing it," Womack said.
In rejecting the defense request for Pentagon and Justice Department memos, which offer guidance on what constitutes torture and what interrogation tactics are acceptable in dealing with terrorism suspects, Pohl said defense lawyers had not made the case that the accused soldiers were even aware of them.
"It does not strike me as to what lawyers are doing in the Pentagon . . . has anything to do with accused's state of mind," Pohl said.
Bergrin argued that Davis, his client, was influenced by superiors from President Bush on down the chain of command.
But in response to Bergrin's assertion that the military police were ordered to put detainees into "stress positions," Pohl shot back, "One man's stress may be another man's torture."
Pohl also lashed out at Frederick's civilian attorney, Gary Myers, who sent a request by e-mail to be allowed to take part by telephone, citing the cost of getting to Iraq and the danger of holding the proceeding there. The judge rejected the request last week and again on Monday.
"Mr. Myers is either here or not here," Pohl told Frederick's military attorney, Capt. Robert Shuck. "I decide who shows up and who doesn't. I don't care how many bombs are going off. Let me rephrase that: I do care how many bombs are going off, but unless there are extraordinary circumstances, I'm going ahead with this trial."
Pohl rejected initial requests to move the trials from Iraq, though he said he would reconsider if defense lawyers could show that civilian witnesses -- who cannot be subpoenaed to travel to a court-martial overseas -- would not come voluntarily because of the danger of traveling in and around Iraq.
"At the end of the day, this is a court-martial like any other court-martial," Pohl said. "If we can't assure a fair trial here for both sides, we will move it somewhere else."
In a telephone interview Monday, Myers said the decision to keep the proceedings in Iraq was intended to make public examples of the military police officers at the expense of ensuring that they received fair courts-martial.
"This is the absolutely wrong venue for these trials," Myers said from his home. "This is an effort to gain political advantage in the country and in the region, without regard for the rights of these defendants. A number of civilian witnesses may not choose to come, and they can't be compelled to go to a foreign country. This is an extremely dangerous circumstance that could grow even worse with the passage of power to the new government. No trial should be framed by bombs going off."
Staff writers Scott Higham in Washington and Josh White in Fayetteville, N.C., contributed to this report.
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Top Commanders in Iraq Will Testify in Abuse Cases
June 22, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/international/middleeast/22CND-IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 22 - The top American commanders currently involved in the Iraq war will have to submit to questioning by lawyers for two servicemen charged in the Abu Ghraib prison abuse case, according to a ruling by a military judge on Monday. The defense lawyers said they would show that the most senior military and civilian officials approved interrogation methods that violated the Geneva Conventions.
Among those who could be questioned are Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of the United States Central Command, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq; and Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, who is overseeing daily military operations.
The judge, Col. James Pohl, made the ruling during pre-trial hearings for Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., whom investigators call a ringleader of the seven military police officers accused of torturing and photographing prisoners, and Sgt. Javal S. Davis.
A third hearing, for Staff Sgt. Ivan L. Frederick II, did not go forward Monday because his civilian lawyer failed to show up, citing the extreme danger here. But Sergeant Frederick later agreed to be represented without the civilian lawyer and the hearing took place today, said First Sgt. Steve Valley.
In Monday's hearings, Judge Pohlalso called Abu Ghraib a "crime scene" and ordered the government to "take all steps possible" to preserve the prison, 15 miles west of Baghdad. That command seemed to override an earlier pledge by President Bush to raze the prison. A defense lawyer, Paul Bergrin, said members of the court should "smell the fecal matter and the urine" that the prison guards lived with every day.
In violence today, the dean of law at Mosul University, Layla Abdullah Saeed, and her husband Moneer al-Khairo, were found dead outside their home in the southern part of the city, according to the American occupation authorities. The Mosul police are investigating.
A car bomb exploded in a Baghdad street as a convoy of American troops and Iraqi police drove past, killing two Iraqi bystanders, the Iraqi police said, quoted by Reuters. The police said a bodyguard for the Iraqi minister of state, Adnan al-Janabi, was killed, along with a 6-year-old boy. Mr. Janabi was not in the area.
American and Iraqi officials have warned that insurgents will accelerate a campaign of car bombs and killings as the June 30 handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government approaches. Four marines were killed by insurgents on Monday in the western town of Ramadi, the American military said. The men mysteriously lacked the helmets and body armor that soldiers routinely wear. Ramadi is an area of increasing concern to military officials.
On Monday, Islamic guerrillas had threatened to behead a South Korean civilian hostage by sundown, unless the South Korean government canceled plans to send 3,000 troops to Iraq. The deadline passed, and Reuters today quoted a mediator as saying that the guerrillas have agreed to give more time for talks on his fate. The South Korean government has said it would not change its plans to send the troops.
The hearings in the prison abuse case Monday gave the strongest indication to date that defense lawyers plan to pin blame for the abuses on the most senior officials in the White House and Pentagon, as well as the top generals in Iraq. They suggested in arguments that the officials had created an atmosphere that encouraged the flouting of the conventions of war during interrogations.
"I feel that all seven M.P.'s are being made scapegoats," Guy Womack, the civilian lawyer for Specialist Graner, told reporters after his client's hearing. "No one can suggest with a straight face that these M.P.'s were acting alone."
The three defendants, dressed in their tan desert uniforms, sat quietly the entire day in a makeshift courtroom inside the American headquarters in central Baghdad. Their lawyers did the talking. Specialist Graner, a former corrections officer, stared at the black-robed judge from behind silver-rimmed glasses.
Among other things, Specialist Graner is accused of ordering prisoners to masturbate in front of each other and of punching an Iraqi so hard in the head that he lost consciousness. If found guilty, Mr. Graner faces a maximum sentence of up to 24 and a half years in prison and a dishonorable discharge.
Last month, Specialist Jeremy C. Sivits pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in prison.
The Army on Monday postponed a hearing for Pfc. Lynndie R. England, who was photographed holding a naked Iraqi inmate on a leash, until the week of July 12. The hearing had been scheduled for today.
Mr. Womack said the seven military police guards were following instructions from the military intelligence officers who ran the prison. But he added that the ultimate responsibility lay with Mr. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, both of whom indicated after the Sept. 11 attacks that the Geneva Conventions regarding the treatment of prisoners no longer applied.
"Because of the war on terrorism, the highest levels of government authorized an unusual proceeding," Mr. Womack said. In this atmosphere, he added, officials "lessened the normal restraints on interrogations."
American commanders have sought to portray the seven accused soldiers as a rogue outfit acting on their own.
Mr. Womack said he had evidence that a senior male Army officer was present during several of the interrogation sessions captured in the photographs whose release started the prison scandal in April. The officer tried to hide the interrogations from outsiders, Mr. Womack said. He declined to identify the officer.
Mr. Womack also asked the judge to order the government to release several memos written at the top levels of the Bush administration that showed officials trying to stretch the allowable limits for prisoner interrogations. Recent news reports have said that the memos including one by the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, that called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" were written to advise Mr. Bush that international laws concerning torture did not apply to "unlawful combatants" captured during the "war on terror."
Judge Pohl denied the motion, saying that discussions taking place in Washington did not appear relevant to the immediate cases.
The judge also denied a similar request by Mr. Bergrin, a civilian lawyer for Sergeant Davis, who said L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, had written a memo asking for a definition of interrogation methods for prisoners. Mr. Rumsfeld and his top aide for intelligence policy, Stephen A. Cambone, also wrote memos asking for such clarifications, Mr. Bergrin said.
But Judge Pohl did say the American government had to make available for interviews all the top commanders currently involved in the Iraq war. In addition to General Abizaid, General Sanchez and General Metz, those could include Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, who controls American-run prisons in Iraq; and Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, in charge of intelligence operations here.
Depending on what emerges in the interviews, the lawyers could decide to call the commanders to the witness stand or ask them to give a deposition.
Mr. Womack also said there was "a good chance" that he would try to question Mr. Rumsfeld.
Mr. Bergrin's plans were even more ambitious. "We will ask to have the president of the United States as a witness," he said. "Whether that's granted, that's a different story."
The two lawyers also asked the judge to move the venue of the courts-martial out of Iraq, arguing that the dangers here will dissuade civilian witnesses from attending. While soldiers who are witnesses can be ordered to travel anywhere, civilians can be compelled to attend trials only in the United States.
Judge Pohl denied the motions on the grounds they were "speculative," but said he would revisit the situation if hostilities here changed.
The prosecutor, Capt. Christopher Graveline, agreed to some demands from the defense. The government will turn over copies of background files on the Iraqi prisoners after the files are cleared of any classified material, he said. It will also declassify all parts of the Army report written by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, who recently concluded a three-month investigation of interrogation practices at Abu Ghraib.
Judge Pohl ordered lawyers for both sides to file all motions by July 31. Mr. Womack said the trials were not likely to start until October at the earliest, after both sides have interviewed possible witnesses.
--------
White House Plans to Release Interrogation Documents Today
June 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/politics/22CND-ABUS.html?hp
WASHINGTON -- The White House plans to release a thick file of papers documenting its internal deliberations on rules for interrogating prisoners in facilities from Abu Ghraib in Iraq to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The two-inch stack of papers was to be released late Tuesday. It is intended to counter what White House aides fear is a growing perception that the administration authorized torture as an interrogation technique, a senior administration official said.
White House legal counsel Alberto Gonzales intended to brief reporters on the documents, said four administration officials, asking to speak on grounds of anonymity because Gonzales was to talk on the record later Tuesday.
The documents are meant to show "the White House's deliberative process" in arriving at rules for complying with the Geneva Convention and rules on interrogation techniques, one senior official said. The administration decided to release the papers to fight the "constant drip on this issue" -- a continuous stream of leaks and accusations that the administration had stepped outside the bounds of international law, the official said. "Everyone reached the conclusion that the administration had authorized torture," he said.
The official, saying the United States is facing a new kind of war with an enemy that does not respect or operate under the rules of the Geneva Convention, pointed to the kidnapping and beheading of American civilian engineer Paul M. Johnson Jr. in Saudi Arabia last week. The papers being released Tuesday show that the White House and other agencies are wrestling with "how best to address that foe," one official said.
The documents cover a period of several months and were generated by several agencies, including the Department of Justice. One set of papers alone spans 50 pages.
Among the papers are some that have already been seen by the public, including previously confidential memos in which Justice Department lawyers concluded that Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are not protected by the Geneva Conventions because they do not satisfy four main conditions of the treaty itself.
Democrats criticized those memos as laying the legal foundation for Iraqi prisoner abuses, but administration officials said they were aimed mainly at showing that international treaties banning torture do not apply to al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners.
At a June 10 news conference, President Bush sidestepped questions about whether he had seen or authorized the Justice Department papers.
"The authorization I issued was that anything we did would conform to U.S. law and would be consistent with international treaty obligations. That's the message I gave our people," Bush said in Savannah, Ga. "I can't remember if I've seen the memo or not, but I gave those instructions."
That memo, which surfaced earlier this month, intensified criticism from congressional Democrats and human rights activists about what they consider a concerted effort to circumvent U.S. and international laws against torture during the fight against terrorism.
Human rights lawyers took the unusual step of filing a racketeering lawsuit this month against U.S. civilian contractors who worked at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. The suit alleges contractors conspired to execute, rape and torture prisoners during interrogations to boost profits from military payments.
A series of government lawyers' memos, many of them still secret but leaked to the media this month, said the president had the legal authority to allow torture of detainees during interrogations. Administration officials, however, said such a policy never was adopted.
But some of the papers to be released Tuesday have never been disclosed, a senior official said.
-------- propaganda wars
Board Upholds R Rating for 'Fahrenheit'
Tue Jun 22, 2004
By DAVID GERMAIN,
AP Movie Writer
http://prop1.org/prop1/radiated/drh.htm
LOS ANGELES - Michael Moore and his distributors lost their appeal Tuesday to lower the R rating for "Fahrenheit 9/11," his scathing assault on President Bush's actions before and after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Lions Gate Films and IFC Films, the movie's distributors, said an appeals board for the Motion Picture Association of America rejected their request to reduce the rating to PG-13.
The R rating prohibits those 17 and younger from seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" without an adult.
The movie, which won the top honor at last month's Cannes Film Festival, was rated R for "violent and disturbing images and for language." The movie's images include an Iraqi man tossing a dead baby into a truckload of bodies, Iraqis burned by napalm and a public beheading in Saudi Arabia.
Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Films, had argued to the appeals board that 15- and 16-year-olds should be free to see the film on their own because they could end up in military service in Iraq in the next few years.
"I hope the R rating doesn't have a large impact on the box office," Ortenberg said. "I've spoken with many parents, including some on the appeals board, who absolutely said they are going to take their children to see the film. We'll just have to hope the teenagers we're encouraging to see this picture find their way in through parents or adult guardians."
IFC Entertainment President Jonathan Sehring disagreed with the MPAA's ruling, adding: "But we do respect the process and appreciate that the MPAA listened with open minds to our appeal."
"As anyone who has read a paper, watched TV, surfed the web or chatted by a water cooler this week can attest, the interest in `Fahrenheit 9/11' has grown to mammoth proportions," Sehring went on. "It is a shame that `Fahrenheit 9/11' will become inaccessible to a segment of the American population to whom this film has a great deal of relevance."
"Fahrenheit 9/11" opens in limited release in New York on Wednesday and nationwide in about 850 theaters Friday.
----
Senate Backs Ban on Photos of G.I. Coffins
June 22, 2004
New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/politics/22cong.html
WASHINGTON, June 21 - The Bush administration's policy of barring news photographs of the flag-covered coffins of service members killed in Iraq won the backing of the Republican-controlled Senate on Monday, when lawmakers defeated a Democratic measure to instruct the Pentagon to allow pictures.
The 54-to-39 vote came after little formal debate, with 7 Democrats joining 47 Republicans to defeat the provision.
Two Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and John McCain of Arizona, voted in favor of permitting news photographers to have access to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where coffins containing the war dead from Iraq arrive.
"These caskets that arrive at Dover are not named; we just see them," said Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot who was a prisoner of war for five years in Vietnam. He added, "I think we ought to know the casualties of war."
But President Bush has insisted that the policy banning the photography protects the privacy of the families of the dead, a view reiterated by lawmakers who opposed the measure.
Some Republicans, including Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, complained that Democrats were trying to score election-year points with the effort. Mr. Grassley noted that the policy had been in place since the first Bush administration, in 1991. "This policy has been in place for 13 years," he said. "Nobody has raised a complaint about it until now."
But the policy has not been consistently followed; President Bill Clinton took part in numerous ceremonies honoring dead servicemen. In March 2003, just as the United States embarked on its war with Iraq, the Pentagon issued a directive stating that there would be no news coverage of "deceased military personnel returning to or departing from" air bases.
The measure defeated on Monday was proposed by Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, as an amendment to a $447.2 billion Pentagon spending plan for 2005, now under consideration in the Senate. Lawmakers hope to finish work on the bill on Tuesday. Mr. Lautenberg's amendment would have instructed the Department of Defense to work out a new protocol permitting the news media to cover the arrival of the war dead in a manner that protected families' privacy.
"A majority of the Senate are now working on behalf of the president to conceal from the American people the true costs of this war," Senator Lautenberg said in a statement after the vote. He said his amendment "would bring an end to the shroud of secrecy cloaking the hard, difficult truth about war and the sacrifices of our soldiers."
The issue of pictures of the war dead has been a delicate one for the administration in recent months. In April, a collection of more than 300 images of coffins landing at Dover were made available after a Web site, www.thememoryhole.org, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for any pictures of coffins arriving at Dover from Iraq.
The images were taken by Air Force photographers and released by the Air Force Mobility Command. The Pentagon later said the release of the pictures was wrong. But Senator Gordon H. Smith, Republican of Oregon, who voted against Mr. Lautenberg's amendment on the ground that it would interfere with families' privacy, said he thought the Air Force photographs "were fine." He added, "I thought that was done very respectfully."
-------- us politics
Bill Clinton Loses His Cool in Democracy Now!
Interview on Everything But Monica:
Leonard Peltier, Racial Profiling, the Iraqi Sanctions, Ralph Nader, the Death Penalty and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Tuesday, June 22nd, 2004
Pacifica Radio
Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/22/148258
Former President Clinton's memoirs have hit bookstores across the country. All three editions of the 1,000-page book - the abridged, the large print and the regular version - are in the top-ten bestseller list of online bookseller Amazon.com.
The cable networks have already begun their orgy of Clinton-bashing with Clinton's affair with Monica their main thrust.
A one-hour appearance on Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" kicked off the media extravaganza. The interview was promoted for days with a clip about Lewinsky and the program was watched by an estimated 15.4 million viewers.
In an interview airing tonight with Britain's BBC television, Clinton reportedly loses his temper with host David Dimbleby when he is repeatedly quizzed about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Clinton's outrage at the line of questioning is being billed as the first time that the former president has been seen to publicly lose his temper in an interview.
But it did happen before. Four years ago in an interview for Democracy Now! We rebroadcast that interview Amy Goodman conducted on Election Day 2000 with the then-sitting president. They discussed many topics you won't likely hear raised this week: Leonard Peltier, racial profiling, the Iraqi sanctions, the death penalty, Ralph Nader and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At one point Clinton accused Amy of being "hostile and combative." On the next day the president's aides threatened to ban Amy from the White House. Amy and her brother David Goodman wrote about the interview in their new book, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them.
On Election Day 2000, I was in the Democracy Now! office at WBAI on Wall Street when I received a call minutes before going on the air at 9:00 a.m. The caller said, "Hello, I am calling from White House Communications." Things get very frantic moments before broadcasting, and we get a fair number of unusual calls. White Horse? That's the famous tavern in Greenwich Village where poet Dylan Thomas was said to have drunk himself to death. Even the White Horse has a PR agent?
Then the caller said that the president would like to speak to me. I said, "The president of what?" We were on the air in less than a minute. "The president of the United States." Oh, please. "He'd like to call in to your radio program."
"Yeah, right," I said. "Whatever."
I ran into the studio as the theme music for Democracy Now! was playing. Our producers were Brad Simpson, a history grad student, and Maria Carrion. Maria had produced Democracy Now! for two years before moving home to Spain, and had flown back just to help out for the election. That was supposed to mean three days, but this was the election of 2000. She ended up staying five weeks-from the night before the election to the day after the final "selection" of George W. Bush. I could hardly tell Maria and Brad as they were frantically putting the finishing touches on the election show that the president was calling in, especially because I didn't believe it myself. But as the music swelled, I said, "By the way, that was the White House on the phone. They said the president might call in." "Yeah, right," Maria said. I left it at that.
When Democracy Now! finished, we were about to head out for coffee when someone began shouting from master control, "President Clinton is on the phone!" Maria ran in, took the call, and yelled for me to get into master control immediately. Gonzalo Aburto, the host of the Latino music show that followed Democracy Now! on Tuesdays, was at the control board.
I ran into the studio and heard, over the blasting Latino beat, the disembodied voice of President Clinton saying, "Hello, hello, is anyone there? Can you hear me?" The faders on our microphones were all the way down, and the music was all the way up. I practically dove over the master control board and pulled down the music, put up all of our mikes, and welcomed the president to WBAI.
"For Clinton it was supposed to be two minutes of get-out-the vote happy talk with a progressive radio show and then: Gotta go," The Washington Post later wrote of the encounter. The story continued, "In this insider media age when oh-so-serious reporters measure status by access to the powerful, Goodman is the journalist as uninvited guest," wrote Michael Powell. "You might think of the impolite question; she asks it. She torments Democrats no less than Republicans." There was no question this was President Clinton's voice, so we just launched in:
AMY GOODMAN: Mr. President, are you there?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I am, can you hear me?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes, we can. You are calling radio stations to tell people to get out and vote. What do you say to people who feel that the two parties are bought by corporations, and that they are ... at this point feel that their vote doesn't make a difference?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: There's just not a shred of evidence to support that. That's what I would say. It's true that both parties have wealthy supporters. But let me offer you ... let me just give you the differences. Let's look at economic policy. First of all, if you look at the last eight years, look where America was eight years ago, and look where it is today. We have the strongest economy in history. And for the first time in 30 years, the incomes of average people and lower income working people have gone up 15 percent after inflation. The lowest minority unemployment ever recorded. The highest minority home ownership. The highest minority business ownership in history. That's our record.
If you look at our proposals, what do we propose to do? We propose a tax cut that helps average people, for child care, for long term care. For paying for college tuition. For retirement savings. We propose to invest large amounts of money in education, health care, the environment, in our future. And we propose to keep paying down the debt, because that keeps interest rates lower.
What do the Republicans propose? A tax cut that's three times as big. Most of it goes to very wealthy people. The top one percent of the people get as much money as they would spend on health care, education and the environment combined. They propose to privatize Social Security, and if you add the two things together, we'll be back in deficits which means the economy will go down, you know, and interest rates will be higher for ordinary people.
AMY GOODMAN: President Clinton ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: So look, I mean, that's just one example. You asked the question, there's not ...
AMY GOODMAN: Right.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Look at campaign finance reform. The Democrats are for it, the Republican leadership kills it.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me just ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Look at the environment. The Dem- ... we've got the cleanest environment in history. The best environmental record in history. And the Republicans want to reverse our environmental record. So give me ... you can't give one example of where both parties are dominated by large corporations and therefore there is no difference. The American people's lives are a lot better than they were eight years ago.
The truth is there is an ideological struggle between those who believe that the best way to grow the economy is to give more money to the wealthy, and the Democrats who believe that the wealthy will make more money if average people do better.
AMY GOODMAN: President Clinton, since it's rare to get you on the phone, let me ask you another question. And that is what is your position on granting Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist, executive clemency?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, I don't ... I don't have a position I can announce yet. I think that ... I believe there is a new application for him in there. And when I have time, after the election is over, I'm going to review all the remaining executive clemency applications. And, you know, see what the merits dictate. I will try to do what I think the right thing to do is, based on the evidence. And I ... I have never had the time actually to sit down myself, and review that case. I know it's very important to a lot of people, maybe on both sides of the issue. And I think I owe it to them, to give it an honest look-see. So part of my responsibilities in the last ten weeks of office after the election will be to review the requests for pardons and executive clemencies, and give them a fair hearing. And I pledge to do that.
AMY GOODMAN: And you will give an answer in his case?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Oh, yeah, I'll decide one way or the other.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, do you support a moratorium on the death penalty, given the studies that show how racist it has been app- ... how ... how it has been applied in the (Overlap)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, I think in the case of ... I certainly support what the Governor of Illinois did. Because there was, uh ... clear evidence in Illinois that a lot of mistakes had been made. In the case of the Federal Government, I have asked the Attorney General to conduct a comprehensive review and to let me ... and to report back to us, on the racial disparities and on any question of guilt, on adequate assistance of counsel on all those things, to determine whether there should be a moratorium, and I haven't gotten her findings yet. Now so far, the only two cases which have come up have been deferred while we do this study.
And so when that comes in and if it comes in while I'm still in office, then I'll make a judgment. And if it doesn't, I think that the next President I would hope would make the same decision, based on the merits, based on what the evidence shows. The disturbing thing to me is that there is not only an apparent racial disparity on Death Row, but also ... in the Federal Government ... but also way over half the cases come from a relatively small number of the US Attorney's offices. Which is, you know, it's disturbing.
But again, let me just say this. If you are concerned about that, that's a good reason to vote for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, and Hillary for the Senate. And for the people in New Jersey, who can hear you, for John Corzine. Because we know the Democrats care about these issues, and we know they're not very important to the Republicans.
AMY GOODMAN: Vice President (Overlap)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: So that's another example of another reason you ought to vote for the Democrats.
AMY GOODMAN: ... Gore supports the death penalty.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: He does, but ...
AMY GOODMAN: And Lieberman.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Yes, they do. But there is a difference in supporting it and thinking that you would carry it out even if you thought the system was fundamentally unfair. His opponent (Overlap)
AMY GOODMAN: But the studies show that ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: But ... but the studies are not complete. Because the studies have to ... what the Attorney General is doing is not just looking at everybody that's been convicted, but everybody that could have been charged, that wasn't. There is a lot more stuff that needs to be done. And it may confirm the initial view of who is on the death penalty. But I think what ... you ought to look at that as compared with Texas, for example, where there was evidence that ... of lawyers falling asleep in their trials, were not enough to deter Texas from continuing to carry out the death penalty, which I thought was unacceptable. And so I think that if you are interested in having somebody that at least has the capacity to look at the fairness of this, you only have one choice.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I guess many people were quite disturbed that when you first ran for President, you went back in the midst of your campaign to Arkansas, and presided over the execution of a mentally impaired man.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Yeah, but let me ... let's go back to the facts here. He was not mentally impaired when he committed the crime. He became mentally impaired because he was wounded after he murdered somebody. And the law says that it is your mental state at the time you committed the crime, that is something no one else ever ... no one ever says that when they talk about it. Had he been mentally impaired when he committed the crime, I would never have carried out the death penalty, because he was not in a position to know what he was doing. That is not what the facts were.
AMY GOODMAN: Because (Overlap)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Effectively, if I had not gone home, I would have been accused of putting a tough decision off on somebody else.
GONZALO ABURTO: President Clinton, my name is Gonzalo Aburto. I am a Latino living here in New York, on behalf of La Nueva Alternativa here at BAI. And I want to ask you why Latinas and Latinos in the United States should vote for Gore and Lieberman.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I think they should vote for Al Gore and Joe Lieberman for several reasons. First of all, we are committed to fairness for legal immigrants. And we are trying to pass a law right now, to guarantee that. And our opponents in the Republican Party are opposed to that, and that's ... and the Congressional leaders are opposed to it, which is another reason to vote for Al Gore, Joe Lieberman and for Hillary, for John Corzine in New Jersey. The Latinos should know that the Democrats favor fairness for immigrants. Secondly, we favor affirmative action. Thirdly, we favor hate crimes legislation and employment non-discrimination legislation. And the appointments of judges to the Supreme Court that would protect civil rights and human rights.
And fourthly, let me say again, we have had an economic policy that has dramatically improved the lives of Latinos. When I became President, the Latino unemployment rate was 11.8 percent. Today it is 5 percent, the lowest in the history of the country. So if you are looking for somebody that wants to make sure everybody is part of America's present and future, Al Gore is your man. He also proposes to put more money into the schools in the poorest parts of our country to modernize the schools, to hire more teachers, to connect all the classrooms to the Internet.
He proposes health care reforms that would provide medicine for seniors on Medicare and more health insurance for children and for the ... for the working parents of low income people. The Latino working families have the highest level of uninsured people of any population group in the country. So for all those reasons, Latinos should vote for Gore and Lieberman and Hillary.
AMY GOODMAN: Yet despite massive protests in Puerto Rico, the US Navy continues to bomb, and you ... the island of Vieques. And you have authorized this, and ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Now wait a minute. Wait, wait just a minute now. The United States Navy has an agreement with the government of Puerto Rico, the representative of all the people of Puerto Rico, to turn back ... if ... to turn back the western half of Vieques to Puerto Rico. To not have any live fire bombing. There is no live fire bombing going on there. And to terminate all the training within a couple of years, during which time they have to find a new place to train.
So this ... this training that is going on now is subsequent to an agreement. Now, the Republicans in Congress broke the agreement, and instead of giving the Western part of the island to Puerto Rico, gave it to the Interior Department to manage. If I can't find a way to give that island, the western part of the island back to the people of Puerto Rico, and to honor the agreement that the government of Puerto Rico itself made with the support of the local leaders, including the mayor of Vieques, then the people of Puerto Rico I think have a right to say the Federal Government broke its word, and the training has to stop right now.
But I think the training should stop because the people don't want it there. But we need a place to train, and we are in the process of finding another place. And we made an agreement with the Governor and the people of Puerto Rico, the elected representatives, to turn over the western part of the island, to invest a lot of money in helping to build up the tourism capacity and protect the environmental structure of the Vieques, and to otherwise compensate the people of Puerto Rico and the Island of Vieques, for the training in the past.
So I think it was a good agreement, and I think the agreement ought to be honored. And I was disappointed that the Congress didn't fully honor it. But I think I can find a way to keep the commitment in the Federal Government anyway. And that is what I'm trying to do.
GONZALO ABURTO: Mr. President, what do you think about possible amnesty for undocumented ... (Inaudible) trabajadores indocumentados?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, I think that, uh ... that's what I meant earlier. I've got a bill before Congress now, that would treat legal immigrants from Honduras, from ... from Guatemala, from Haiti, from Salvador, in the same way that the Congress has already voted to treat immigrants from Cuba and Nicaragua. I think that it's not right, the way we have treated a lot of these immigrant populations differently. I know there aren't many Liberians probably among your listeners. Most of them live up in the Rhode Island, Massachusetts area. But they also are being treated unfairly and I am trying to get them included in immigrant fairness.
And again, I'm having a big fight with the leadership of the Republican Party in Congress. So the Democrats are for that, and ... and the ... and the Republicans aren't. So that is another reason, if you care about that, that we need to have someone to ... to stand up to them. And that means that we need Al Gore. And if ... I think the Democrats have a good chance to win the House and maybe the Senate. But if we don't win, it's very important that Gore be the President, because somebody has got to be there to stop the extremist Republicans in Congress.
And therefore, we need every Democratic Senator we can get. We need Corzine in New Jersey. We need Hillary in New York. And we need most important, we've got to have Gore and Lieberman in the White House.
AMY GOODMAN: President Clinton, UN figures show that up to 5,000 children a month die in Iraq because of the sanctions against Iraq.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: (Overlap) That's not true. That's not true. And that's not what they show. Let me just tell you something. Before the sanctions, the year before the Gulf War, and you said this ... how much money did Iraq earn from oil? Answer -- $16 billion. How much money did Iraq earn last year from oil? How much money did they get, cash on the barrel head, to Saddam Hussein? Answer -- $19 billion that he can use exclusively for food, for medicine, to develop his country. He's got more money now, $3 billion a year more than he had nine years ago.
If any child is without food or medicine or a roof over his or her head in Iraq, it's because he is claiming the sanctions are doing it and sticking it to his own children. We have worked like crazy to make sure that the embargo only applies to his ability to reconstitute his weapon system and his military statement. This is a guy who butchered the children of his own country, who were Kurds, who were Shi'ites.
He used chemical weapons on his own people, and he is now lying to the world and claiming the mean old United States is killing his children. He has more money today than he did before the embargo, and if they're hungry or they are not getting medicine, it is h is own fault.
AMY GOODMAN: The past two UN heads of the program in Iraq have quit, calling the US policy ... US/UN policy, genocidal. What is your response to that?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: They're wrong! They think that we should reward ... Saddam Hussein says, I'm going to starve my kids unless you let me buy nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and biological weapons. If you let me do everything I want to do so I can get in a position to kill and intimidate people again, then I will stop starving my kids. And so we are supposed to assume responsibility for his misconduct. That's just not right! I know they ... you know, the truth is a lot of these people want to start doing business with Saddam Hussein again because they want his money.
And, you know, they want his ... the money he earns from oil. But the ... it is an absolute fact that he has more money today than he did before the embargo. So if any child is without food or medicine, it is because he has made a deliberate decision to let them die, to try to build up pressure to lift the embargo so he can spend that money how ever he wants. He doesn't want to spend that money on his people. He wants to spend that money to become the military dictator of the Middle East again.
Now, if people want to let him do it, that's one thing. But, you know, I have consistently supported changing and relaxing the embargo since I've been President, to make absolutely sure that he had enough money and enough freedom in the use of the money to rebuild the country economically, and to try to feed those children and get them medicine. There were a lot of problems with the embargo in the beginning. There were legitimate criticisms.
But he now has more money with the absolute freedom to spend it on food and medicine and development, and medical care of all kinds, than he did before the embargo was put in. That's the fact. No one can dispute that. So nobody can figure out why there are problems among the children except that he won't spend the money on them.
He spends the money on his own military, on his own crowd and he avoids spending it on a lot of kids who need it so he can blame us, so he can actually get total control over his money, so he can rebuild his apparatus.
GONZALO ABURTO: Mr. President (Overlap)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: And, you know, remember, this is the only guy, the only world leader today who has used chemical weapons on his own citizens. And the American people in my judgement should give him all the money he needs to take care of his kids. But should do everything we can, and even if we are alone, to try to stop him from being in a position of murdering his kids again, and murdering other children in the Middle East. That's what I believe.
GONZALO ABURTO: Mr. President, are we going to see a substantial change in the policy to Cuba? Regarding Cuba?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, let me say we were on the way to that change. Back in 1996, we had a lot of changes in my first term, in our policy towards Cuba. And we were working our way toward a reconciliation. And the Cubans were working their way toward more openness, more freedom for their farmers, and their people and we were really making headway. And then, they illegally shot down those two planes, and four people died on the planes. And the Congress passed the Cuba ... the Helms/Burton bill, so-called.
And I don't have much flexibility to do much more. What I have done with Cuba is to use the maximum extent of my legal powers to promote people to people contacts with Cuba and the Cuban people. I do believe there that the Cuban people have suffered because of the embargo, and we should do more in the area of food, in the area of medicine, in the area of people to people contacts.
And, you know, I believe that it is just a question of time to when the United States and Cuba are reconciled. And I think that the situation is tragic.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you just (Overlap)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: But it wouldn't have happened if Castro hadn't shot those planes down out of the air, in blatant violation of international law. It was just murder. There is no other ... there is no way to put a fine point on it. I mean, and we were ... sometimes I think he doesn't want the embargo lifted, because it is an excuse for the problems that he has with his own administration. Because he knew where we were going, he knew we were moving to reconcile. And he knew good and well that it was a total violation of international law to murder people who were in unarmed airplanes.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you justify imposing the embargo against Cuba and lifting it against China, normalizing relations with China?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, first of all, China hasn't killed any of our pilots lately. They haven't murdered any Americans -- as a matter of fact, the United States accidentally and tragically killed some Chinese citizens during our military campaign in Kosovo. And we have differences with China that we think can best be resolved. China is a nuclear power, and we think they have missile capacity. We have worked very hard with them to reduce the ... the threats of sales of missiles to renegade states, to ... to make the world a safer place. And they've worked with us on peace on the Korean peninsula, to help the North Korean situation.
And we would ... as I said, I believe if Castro hadn't shot those planes down, and the Congress hadn't passed a law which prohibits me from doing anything with the embargo, that we might have made some real progress there. But it ... sooner or later this is going to happen, and the sooner the better. The sooner we can be reconciled with the people of Cuba, the better. But Mr. Castro is going to have to make some changes, and, you know, you can't keep just throwing people in jail for human rights violations and expect the United States to do nothing with this huge Cuban population here. I hope that we can make some more progress.
And believe me, it would have happened if he hadn't shot those planes down. And sometimes I wonder if he shot them down just to make sure the embargo couldn't be lifted, because as long as he can blame the United States, then he doesn't have to answer to his own people for the failures of his economic policy. I wish it were different and maybe it will be under the next administration.
AMY GOODMAN: Amnesty International has described what the Israeli forces are now doing in the occupied territories as ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Listen, I can't do a whole press conference here. It's Election Day and I've got a lot of people and places to call.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I guess these are the questions that may ... are very important to our listeners and these are the questions that (Overlap)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, I've answered them all.
AMY GOODMAN: Right, and we appreciate that. And ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I have answered them all. Now let me just tell you, on the Israeli Palestinian thing, the Secretary General of the United Nations and I were together in Egypt. We agreed on a three-pronged strategy to end the violence and restore the peace talks. And with regard to the Amnesty International findings, what we agreed to do was to set up a fact-finding commission, to look into what happened, how the recent violence started, and what can be done to avoid it recurring. And the agreement was that that would happen as soon as the violence was stopped. And we have had some progress in the last two or three days. Everybody is working hard.
And I think the ... the less I say right now, the better, publicly because I don't want to complicate things. I'm working my heart out to stop the violence, get the Commission appointed and get the peace process started. In the Middle East, which is something that I know more than a little bit about, the only answer to this over the long run is an agreement that covers all the issues that the Palestinians feel aggrieved by; guarantees the Israelis security and acceptance within the region; and is a just and lasting peace. That's the only answer to this in the long run.
And we've just got to work through it. I have some hope that in the next few days we'll be able to do it. Mr. Arafat is coming to see me on Thursday, and Mr. Barak, is coming to see me on Sunday. And we'll try to get it resolved. That's all I can tell you now. And I think ...
AMY GOODMAN: (Overlap) Why is ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: ... I think the United Nations will support ... well, I know they will, the implementation of the agreement that we made at Sharn el-Sheik.
AMY GOODMAN: Why not ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Which would ...
AMY GOODMAN: Why not support a UN force in the Middle East for the illegal occupation of the territories? And at this point I think we are around 150 people being killed in the occupied territories, overwhelmingly Palestinian.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: You can support it if you want to, but the Israelis won't support it. And there was a war in which that happened. And if you want to make peace, then you have to do things that both sides can agree with. That's what a peace agreement is. And I do not believe that just as I don't think Israel can forever impose their situation in the Middle East, and they don't either which is why we started the Oslo Peace Process seven years ago; neither do I think that, you know, everybody else saying the UN is going to impose their will on Israel on its own territory will work out either.
We've got to have a peace agreement here, that's the only way this is ever going to be resolved. And I don't think that we should do anything or say anything right now, except something that will stop people from getting killed, and get the peace process started again.
AMY GOODMAN: Many people say that Ralph Nader is at the high percentage point he is in the polls because you have been responsible for taking the Democratic party to the right. What do you say to listeners who are listening around the area right now (Overlap)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, I'm glad you asked that.
AMY GOODMAN: ... those concerns.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I'm glad you asked that, and that's the last question I've got time for. I'll be happy to ... answer that. What is the measure of taking the Democratic Party to the right? That we cut the welfare rolls in half? That poverty is at a 20 year low? That child poverty has been cut by a third in our administration? That the incomes of average Americans have gone up 15 percent after inflation? That poverty among seniors has gone below 10 percent for the first time in American history? That we have the lowest African American, the lowest Latino unemployment rate in the history of the country? That we have a 500 percent increase in the number of minority kids taking advanced placement tests?
That the schools in this country, that the test scores among ... since we have required all the schools to have basic standard test scores, among African Americans and other minorities have gone up steadily? Now what (Overlap)
AMY GOODMAN: Can I say that some people ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Now, let me just finish.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me just say ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Now let me ... now, wait a minute. You started this and every question you've asked has been hostile and combative. So you listen to my answer, will you do that?
AMY GOODMAN: They've been (Overlap)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Now, you just listen to me. You ask the questions, and I'm going to answer. You have asked questions in a hostile, combative, and even disrespectful tone, but I ... and you have never been able to combat the facts I have given you. Now, you listen to this. The other thing Ralph Nader says is that, you know, he's pure as Caesar's wife on the environment.
Under this administration, 43 million more Americans are breathing cleaner air. We have safer drinking water, safer food, cleaner water. We have more land set aside than any administration in history since Theodore Roosevelt. We have cleaned up three times as many toxic waste sites as the previous administrations did in 12 years. And we passed a chemical right-to-know law that is a very tough law. It's the best environmental record in history.
Al Gore's opponent, and one of the two of them are going to be President ... Al Gore's opponent has promised to weaken the clean air standards, and repeal a lot of the land protections. Now, those are the facts. People can say whatever they want to. Those are the facts.
AMY GOODMAN: What people say is that you pushed through NAFTA, that we have the highest population of prisoners in the industrialized world, of over 2 million. That more people are on death penalty in this country than anywhere else. And that people are (Overlap)
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Well, all right. Okay, that's fine.
AMY GOODMAN: (Overlap/Inaudible) ... opposed on them.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: That's fine. But two thirds of the American people support that. I think there are too many people in prison, too. I have called for a total evaluation of the people in the Federal prison system, a review of the Federal sentencing guidelines. I did my best to persuade Congress to get rid of the discrepancy between crack cocai- ... crack and powdered cocaine and the sentencing guidelines.
I agree with that. Nobody ever said America was perfect. I disagree, I think NAFTA has been good for America. I think it's been good. It has helped to reduce illegal immigration, it's helped to provide a decent standard of life in Mexico. I think it has been good. I think the agreement we made to open our markets to Africa and the poor countries in the Caribbean were good for America.
People complain about our trade agreements. Trade is at ... accounting for 30 percent of our economic growth, and we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years. How can anybody make a serious case that trade's been bad for America? We have a 15 percent increase in average income of ordinary Americans, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, and the lowest unemployment rate ever recorded among African Americans and Hispanics.
Now, I don't think you can make a sane case that if we closed up our markets, that either Africa or Latin America or America would be better off.
AMY GOODMAN: What about ...
PRESIDENT CLINTON: The real problem you've got are the ... this country is in good shape. Now, I've talked to you a long time. It's Election Day. There are a lot of other people that ...
AMY GOODMAN: We appreciate that.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: ... in America, and I've got to go.
AMY GOODMAN: One last question, what about granting an executive order ending racial profiling in this country?
PRESIDENT CLINTON: I expect that we will end racial profiling. Here is the deal. The Attorney General is supposed to give me a report on that. I'm opposed to it. Al Gore is opposed to it. Here's the deal. Look, I had some ... I had two people who work for me in the White House, who were wrongly stopped, handcuffed and hassled the other day. I have spoken out against racial profiling and Hillary has made it a big issue in New York.
And so here is the issue, and here is what we are working on. We are trying to find a way to issue orders, and reg- ... rules and regulations that end racial profiling, that clearly do not prevent law enforcement officials from investigating particular crimes. And there is a way to do it and we are working on it, and the Attorney General is working on it. But, you know, Janet Reno was a prosecutor in Miami, in Dade County, for 12 years. She dealt with a large African American population, a large Haitian population, a large Latino population.
She had a great reputation with all of them. And she is trying to fashion a resolution of this that ends racial profiling, that clearly allows law enforcement to continue. And that is where this is now. This is going to be done. And we have to do it.
AMY GOODMAN: Thank you for spending the time, President Clinton.
PRESIDENT CLINTON: Thank you.
--------
Bush Loses Advantage in War on Terrorism
Nation Evenly Divided on President, Kerry
By Richard Morin and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58293-2004Jun21?language=printer
Public anxiety over mounting casualties in Iraq and doubts about long-term consequences of the war continue to rise and have helped to erase President Bush's once-formidable advantage over Sen. John F. Kerry concerning who is best able to deal with terrorist threats, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Exactly half the country now approves of the way Bush is managing the U.S. war on terrorism, down 13 percentage points since April, according to the poll. Barely two months ago, Bush comfortably led Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, by 21 points when voters were asked which man they trusted to deal with the terrorist threat. Today the country is evenly divided, with 48 percent preferring Kerry and 47 percent favoring Bush.
With fewer than 10 days before the United States turns over governing power to Iraq, the survey shows that Americans are coming to a mixed judgment about the costs and benefits of the war. Campaign advisers to both Bush and Kerry believe voters' conclusions about Bush and Iraq will play a decisive role in determining the outcome of the November election.
The shift is potentially significant because Bush has consistently received higher marks on fighting terrorism than on Iraq, and if the decline signals a permanent loss of confidence in his handling of the fight against terrorism, that could undermine a central part of his reelection campaign message.
Overall the poll had mixed news for both candidates. Bush's marks for handling the economy and Iraq both rose slightly over the past month, but his overall approval rating remains below 50 percent. Kerry leads Bush in a three-way test that includes independent Ralph Nader and is seen as more honest and trustworthy than the president, but those surveyed question whether he has a plan for Iraq.
Fewer than half of those surveyed -- 47 percent -- say the war in Iraq was worth fighting, while 52 percent say it was not, the highest level of disapproval recorded in Post-ABC News polls. Seven in 10 Americans now say there has been an "unacceptable" level of casualties in Iraq, up 6 points from April and also a new high in Post-ABC News polling. A majority say the United States should keep its forces in Iraq until the country is stabilized, but the proportion who want to withdraw now to avoid further casualties -- 42 percent -- has inched up again to a new high. Two in three Americans say the war has improved the lives of the Iraqi people, and a growing number of Americans say the United States is making significant progress toward a democratic government. Last month, 37 percent said they saw significant progress, while 50 percent say so now.
The public is sharply divided over whether the war contributed to the long-term security of the United States, with 51 percent saying it has, a new low in Post-ABC polls. Three in four say the conflict has damaged the image of the United States throughout the world, and a majority believe the war has not improved prospects for long-term peace and stability in the Middle East.
Virtually all of the recent movement against the war has occurred among political independents. Among those with no firm party ties, the proportion who said the war was "not worth fighting" increased from 48 percent in May to 59 percent in the latest poll.
Bush's approval rating on his handling of Iraq remains negative but rose slightly in the past month to 44 percent, with 55 percent saying they disapprove.
On the key domestic issue of the economy, 46 percent give Bush positive marks, up 7 points since March and his best showing since January. The survey also found that nearly half the country rates the health of the economy as "excellent" or "good," up 6 points from March and the highest since July 2001, following a succession of positive economic statistics.
But improved marks on Iraq and the economy did not translate into a rise in Bush's overall approval rating, nor did they improve his standing against Kerry in a hypothetical November matchup.
Bush's overall job approval rating held steady at 47 percent, at its lowest point in Post-ABC News polls, while his disapproval rating reached a new high of 51 percent. That leaves Bush in a shaky position politically, based on the rankings of other recent presidents seeking reelection.
In a November ballot test, Kerry leads Bush 48 percent to 44 percent among registered voters, with 6 percent supporting Nader. Last month, Kerry and Bush were tied. With Nader out of the race, Kerry's advantage swells to 8 points, evidence of the continuing threat that Nader's candidacy poses to the Democrat.
Interest in the campaign remains high while the proportion of persuadable voters is low. Voters are paying attention to this race earlier than they did four years ago when Bush ran against Al Gore.
Eight in 10 registered voters said they are following the campaign -- slightly higher than the proportion that was paying similar attention to the 2000 campaign three weeks before the election. One in 10 voters said there was a "good chance" they could change their minds between now and November.
The survey found that Kerry's advantages over Bush extended to a range of issues. When asked which they trusted to do the better job, Kerry held a double-digit advantage over Bush as the candidate the public preferred to deal with health care (21 points), taxes (13 points), prescription drug benefits for the elderly (12 points) and education (10 points), and smaller leads on handling international affairs (8 points), the economy (5 points) and the federal budget deficit (4 points).
In only one area -- Iraq -- was Bush more trusted, 50 percent to 45 percent.
The president is viewed as a stronger leader than Kerry and as the candidate who can be most trusted in a crisis. He is also seen as best able to "make the country safer and more secure" and the one who "takes a position and sticks with it."
But by 52 percent to 39 percent, Kerry is seen as more honest and trustworthy -- a troubling finding for Bush, whose truthfulness before the war in Iraq has been called into question.
The survey also found that eight in 10 Americans support the transfer of power from the U.S.-led coalition to an interim Iraqi government on June 30. Nearly half -- 48 percent -- said it should be Iraqis who have the final say over the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq, while just as many say it should be the Americans. Big majorities said the new Iraqi government and not the United States also should control Iraq's oil industry and handle the distribution of aid from other nations.
A total of 1,201 randomly selected adults, including 1,015 self-described registered voters, were interviewed June 17 to 20 for this telephone survey. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Assistant polling director Claudia Deane contributed to this report.
--------
Nader Picks Green Party Running Mate
By Brian Faler
The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58883-2004Jun21.html
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader announced yesterday that he has selected one of the Green Party's best-known activists to be his running mate.
Nader tapped Peter Camejo, 64, a businessman who twice ran as the Green Party's candidate for governor of California, to be his vice presidential candidate. "Camejo shares my concern for economic and social justice, as well as the urgent need to protect the environment," Nader said in a statement yesterday. The announcement, which came just days before the Green Party selects its presidential candidate, will likely boost Nader's efforts to win the group's backing, said some political observers. "It seems like a very smart move, tactically, to select Camejo now, in order to extend Nader's reach to another political organization like the Greens," said Ross Mirkarimi, a longtime Green activist who worked on Nader's campaign in 2000. Camejo is "well-regarded, and he's not new to the scene."
Nader has been endorsed by the Reform Party. He twice ran for president with the Green Party's nomination before announcing earlier this year that he would strike out on his own. He said he would not accept the Greens' presidential nomination, because he does not want to be too closely associated with any party. But Nader said he would accept its endorsement, a less formal expression of support that could give him access to the party's ballot lines in 22 states and the District of Columbia.
His decision has deeply divided the Green Party between those who support the longtime consumer activist and those backing a little-known party activist named David Cobb. The party is expected to make its decision this weekend.
Camejo, a Venezuelan American who is fluent in Spanish, has backed Nader's presidential bid for months. He said he would attend the party's convention this week in Milwaukee, urging his colleagues to support a compromise in which the party would endorse both Nader and Cobb -- and allow individual states to decide which candidate to place on their ballots.
Nader's campaign has been facing an uphill battle to get on the ballots and, according to his latest campaign finance report, a shortage of cash. His campaign reported that it raised almost $1 million, but has spent nearly all of it. Nader began June with $73,000 in the bank and almost $25,000 in debt.
-------
Nader picks Camejo as running mate
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Brian DeBose
June 22, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040621-115847-2674r.htm
Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader selected California investment banker Peter Miguel Camejo as his running mate in the November election.
Mr. Camejo, 64, was a leading candidate for the Green Party in California's special recall election, which removed Gov. Gray Davis and replaced him with Arnold Schwarzenegger last year. Mr. Nader said the move solidifies his campaign and its efforts to transform government.
"He adds far more to my ticket than any candidate the other parties can produce," Mr. Nader said.
The most important issue in the election, Mr. Camejo said, is the Iraq war, which he calls unsound international policy.
A first-generation American, Mr. Camejo was born in New York to Venezuelan parents. He said he will be active in the campaign, speaking to Hispanics and blacks.
Plans include speaking on Spanish-language television and radio stations across the country.
"We will engage the Latino community in a way that has never been done before by any campaign," Mr. Nader said.
The civil rights background of Mr. Camejo will fit nicely into the campaign, Mr. Nader said. Mr. Camejo marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, Ala., in the 1960s.
Pundits are viewing Mr. Camejo's selection as a vice-presidential candidate as a way to guarantee Mr. Nader receives the Green Party endorsement.
"This is a strong step forward for him to getting a nomination from the Green Party," said Chris Kofinis, a strategist for TheNaderFactor.com, an organization devoted to building a unified front to remove President Bush from office.
Mr. Kofinis said his group is not trying to persuade Mr. Nader to drop out of the race, but it is worried that Mr. Nader's influence could spoil a close election for Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
"It is now crystal clear to Democrats and Republicans that Nader will be a factor in this election cycle," Mr. Kofinis said.
Mr. Camejo, board chairman of Progressive Asset Management of California, which he founded in 1987, said he will attend the Green Party convention in Milwaukee this week and campaign on the Nader platform.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
What incentives are there for homeowners and businesses to install renewable energy systems?
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
From the editors
E/The Environmental Magazine
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-22/s_24874.asp
Dear EarthTalk: What incentives are in place for homeowners and businesses that want to install renewable energy systems?
- Kelly Nemi, Sacramento, California
Several state and municipal governments are trying to stimulate demand for alternative energy by offering cash incentives to companies and homeowners that install solar electric (photovoltaic) systems, fuel cells, small wind turbines, solar thermal systems for heat and hot water, and other renewable energy technologies.
The Web site of the Database of State Incentives for Renewable Energy (DSIRE), a project of the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, contains comprehensive information on state and federal incentives - tax credits, grants, rebates, and special utility rates - for renewable energy technologies.
For example, according to DSIRE, Anaheim, California's public utility is encouraging residential and business customers to install photovoltaic systems by offering rebates of $4 per watt up to $7,000 total for residential systems and $50,000 for industrial installations.
The state of Indiana's Alternative Power and Energy Grant Program will help businesses, nonprofit organizations, and units of local government (such as schools) with the costs of installing solar, wind, fuel cell, geothermal, hydropower, alcohol fuel, waste-to-energym and biomass energy technologies. They'll pay up to 30 percent of the project cost, or $30,000, whichever is less.
And New Jersey's Clean Energy Rebate Program pays between $.30 and $5.50 rebates per watt for commercial or residential solar electric systems, depending upon size.
These are just a few examples. The DSIRE website features a United States map on which site visitors can click on their state to access detailed information on what grants, rebates, or tax incentives are available through their local governments and utilities. The site is updated each week and features new programs as well as changes to existing ones.
Homeowners can also finance the purchase and installation of renewable energy systems through home-equity loans. This strategy can help bring down costs through tax savings, since interest payments on mortgage loans are tax-deductible.
Got an environmental question? Mail it to: EarthTalk, c/o E/The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881. Or submit your question at www.emagazine.com or e-mail us at earthtalk@emagazine.com.
-------- energy
Port of Los Angeles opens green shipping terminal
By Reuters
June 22, 2004
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-22/s_25104.asp
LOS ANGELES - The Port of Los Angeles opened the world's first green container terminal Monday as part of a $50-million settlement of a lawsuit over air pollution that has plagued communities near the port.
The Alternative Maritime Power (AMP) terminal boasts electrical technology used by U.S. Navy ships since World War II but long resisted by the shipping industry as too costly and time-consuming to implement, environmentalists said.
The system was officially unveiled Monday at a berth leased by China Shipping Line, which agreed to retrofit 11 of its Los Angeles-bound ships for the new terminal.
Ships that use the port's electric power system instead of idling their diesel engines for days at dockside while cargo is unloaded will cut nitrogen oxide emissions by an amount equivalent to 69,000 diesel truck miles, port officials said.
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, among the world's largest ports, annually generate more than 4,000 tons of smog-forming air pollution, making them the largest source of air pollution in Southern California, environmentalists said.
Los Angeles city officials agreed to try the AMP system to settle a 2001 lawsuit brought by the National Resources Defense Council and the Clean Air Coalition on behalf of residents of San Pedro, whose rates of respiratory illnesses and cancer are among the region's highest.
"We saw their case as a must-win situation. In the next two decades the port facilities are expected to triple," said Todd Campbell, policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air.
In a settlement approved by a Los Angeles judge last week, the city agreed to pay $20 million toward clean air initiatives at the port, $20 million for community beautification, and $10 million toward other clean air efforts, Campbell said.
The settlement "won't be the thing that saves us down at the port, but it's certainly a start," Campbell said. "We will continue to advocate for good progressive policies to make sure that as we're growing, we are cleaning up."
-------- OTHER
-------- genetics
Kerry Voices Support for Stem Cell Funding
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59128-2004Jun21.html
DENVER, June 21 -- Democratic presidential hopeful John F. Kerry, taking aim at President Bush's science policy, promised Monday that he would overturn a ban on federal funding of new stem cell lines, saying that as president he would be guided by "science . . . not ideology."
Beginning a week in which Kerry will speak about his science initiatives, the Massachusetts senator's campaign touted his endorsement by 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists, who issued a letter saying Kerry would "restore science to its appropriate place in government and bring it back to the White House."
Kerry, speaking to a rain-soaked crowd at a downtown park, said he would increase funding for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department to promote more scientific research. He did not offer specifics.
Kerry was making his first campaign trip to Colorado as the presumptive Democratic nominee. He flew here from a weekend stop at his vacation home in Nantucket, Mass., and attended a luncheon in the ski resort town of Aspen, where he raised $500,000.
Colorado has been a Republican stronghold, but Kerry hopes to make an issue of job losses in the state during the past four years.
Kerry suggested Monday that the country's leadership in science and technology was in doubt, citing "reports" that other countries are investing more in research. "America," he said, "has been losing its lead."
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, disputed that characterization, saying that "only John Kerry would declare the country in scientific decline on a day when the country's first privately funded space trip is successfully completed. America is the world leader in patents, research and development and Nobel Prizes."
Schmidt said Bush's 2005 budget calls for $132 billion in research and development funding, which he said was a 44 percent increase since Bush took office.
Kerry said that more than 100 million Americans have illnesses and injuries, including heart disease and cancer, that could be cured or treated with therapies derived from stem cell research. He specifically cited former first lady Nancy Reagan's support for stem cell research. Her husband, former president Ronald Reagan, had Alzheimer's disease.
Stem cell research has remained controversial because it relies, in part, on cells from destroyed human embryos. The Bush administration has permitted research and experimentation on some existing cell lines but has heeded religious groups that have raised ethical and moral concerns about developing new ones.
Kerry seemed to suggest that his administration would pursue a more liberal policy. "We must lift the barriers that stand in the way of stem cell research and push the boundaries of medical exploration so that researchers can find treatments that are there, if only they are allowed to look. And we should do this while providing strict ethical oversight. . . . It's about investing in the future of our country. And when I am your president, I won't let ideology and fear stand in the way."
In another development Monday, Vernon E. Jordan Jr., an adviser to former president Bill Clinton, officially joined the Kerry campaign as the lead debate negotiator. Jordan said he took the job because wants to see a "change in leadership" at the White House.
In his new role, Jordan will wrestle with a Republican counterpart over where the candidates will stand, who will speak first or last and which moderators will ask the first questions. Negotiators will work with the Commission on Presidential Debates.
"I think I have a responsibility not only to John Kerry but also to the American people to have a debate on issues and information that educates the electorate as opposed to entertaining the electorate," he said.
Jordan said he first considered a role in the campaign last week, when the candidate asked.
"I'm a good Democrat," he said. "And I'm ready for change, absolutely."
Staff writer Darryl Fears contributed to this report.
--------
THE MASSACHUSETTS SENATOR
Kerry Vows to Lift Bush Limits on Stem-Cell Research
June 22, 2004
By JODI WILGOREN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/politics/campaign/22kerry.html
DENVER, June 21 - Backed by the unusual endorsement of 48 Nobel laureates, Senator John Kerry on Monday accused the Bush administration of letting ideology trump science, and promised to lift the limits on federal financing of stem-cell research and to build an economy "based on innovation, ingenuity and imagination."
Mr. Kerry and his scientific supporters echoed a 38-page report issued in February by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which accused the administration of "manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science" on issues like biotechnology, global warming and nuclear power.
Mr. Kerry vowed to "listen to the advice of scientists" and make their advisory reports open to the public. The group of scientists had complained that the White House heavily edited a report by the Environmental Protection Agency to remove almost any finding pointing to a human link to global warming.
Mr. Kerry also invoked the recent death of President Ronald Reagan from Alzheimer's disease and echoed Nancy Reagan's call for stem-cell research "to tear down every wall today that keeps us from finding the cures of tomorrow."
"We need a president who will again embrace the tradition of looking toward the future and new discoveries with hope based on scientific facts, not fear," Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, told thousands of people here at Civic Center Park, many of whom waited for hours on a rainy 50-degree day to see him.
"Presidents are supposed to think big and dream big and help our nation to do so," he said, citing Franklin D. Roosevelt's creation of the national laboratories, John F. Kennedy's commitment to put a man on the moon, and Bill Clinton's support for mapping the human genome. "When America sees a problem or a possibility of greatness, it is in our collective character to set our sights on the horizon and not stop working until we get there," Mr. Kerry said.
On Monday night, Mr. Kerry decided to upend his schedule, canceling a fund-raiser and speech on Tuesday in New Mexico to allow him to fly back to Washington overnight for a possible vote on an amendment to make health care financing for veterans mandatory. Mr. Kerry has rarely interrupted his campaign activities for Senate business, but veterans' health care is a signature issue in his campaign.
Burton Richter, who received the Nobel in physics in 1976 for discovering a subatomic particle and who helped Mr. Kerry's campaign collect his colleagues' support over the last 10 days, told reporters that "Nobel laureates tend not to use their names for anything outside of science," adding, "I hope you take that as a sign of how seriously all of us think the errors of our present course are."
Mr. Kerry's speech, beginning a week focused on science and technology, was his first public appearance in Colorado, a Republican-leaning state that the Democrats hope to win. He noted, as he has in television advertisements, that he was born at an Army hospital nearby. It also reflected his increasing attention to stem-cell research, an issue for which Democrats believe they have public support.
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Mr. Bush's re-election campaign, did not respond to the criticism of the president's policy prohibiting research on stem cells harvested since his order in 2001. The issue has split his party, with many Republicans signing on to legislation to lift the limits, particularly since Mr. Reagan's death. Mr. Schmidt answered the attack by pointing out that 22 of the 48 Nobelists who signed the pro-Kerry statement also signed a statement in January 2003 opposing war in Iraq, and 16 had given money to Democratic candidates.
In addition, 13 of the 48 were part of the group that released the February report criticizing the administration's approach to science.
"Only John Kerry would declare the country to be in scientific decline on a day when the country's first privately funded space trip is successfully completed," Mr. Schmidt said in a statement, referring to the rocket plane SpaceShipOne's journey 62 miles from earth and back.
Mr. Schmidt said the administration had increased the budget for research and development 44 percent since 2001, to $132 billion next year, and pointed to the president's plans to develop hydrogen fuel cells, promote clean coal technologies and modernize the electricity grid.
The Union of Concerned Scientists charged that the administration had often dismissed experts or selected others for scientific advisory panels based on their views on contentious subjects. The Bush administration has called most of the accusations made in the organization's report inaccurate and has said that the E.P.A. draft on global warming was dropped because more voluminous reports on climate change were in the works.
But in a conference call, three of the scientists supporting Mr. Kerry said that Mr. Bush had let America lag behind Europe and Asia in terms of patents, advanced degrees and publications in scientific journals.
"Where are the new things of tomorrow going to come from?" Dr. Richter asked. "This isn't about what's going to happen next week, it's what's going to happen next decade."
Harold Varmus, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1989 for his discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes and headed the National Institutes of Health under President Clinton, accused the Bush administration of taking a "cavalier attitude in the way it receives advice from the scientific community." Mario J. Molina, a 1995 Nobel laureate for his work in atmospheric chemistry, said he was concerned that Mr. Bush "overplays politics to scientific information."
Vernon Jordan to Assist Kerry
WASHINGTON, June 21 (AP) - Vernon E. Jordan Jr. will be the lead negotiator for Senator Kerry on the presidential debates, according to a statement from the Kerry campaign on Monday.
Mr. Jordan, a lawyer, lobbyist and aide to Mr. Clinton, will represent the campaign in negotiations with the Bush-Cheney organization on the terms of this fall's three presidential debates.
The first debate is scheduled for Sept. 30 at the University of Miami in Coral Gables.
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U.N. Agency Says Africa on Brink of Massive Polio Outbreak
June 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Polio.html?hp
GENEVA (AP) -- Africa is on the brink of the biggest polio epidemic in recent years, with the crippling disease re-emerging in Sudan's conflict-ravaged Darfur region, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
``There is no question that the virus is spreading at an alarming pace,'' said Dr. David Heymann, who heads the U.N. health agency's attempts to eradicate polio by Jan. 1, 2005.
WHO confirmed that a child was paralyzed by polio on May 20 in Darfur, the first case in Sudan in more than three years.
So far this year, the number of polio cases globally has reached 333, almost double that reported in the first six months of 2003. Nigeria, with 257 cases, is hardest hit.
Total cases last year reached 783. When WHO and other organizations launched the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988, around 1,000 children were infected every day.
Although the number of individual cases today looks relatively small to non-specialists, anti-polio experts are worried, said Bruce Aylward, who coordinates the polio initiative at WHO.
``Right now we're at the end of the low season of polio,'' he told reporters.
``This is right when polio should be at its lowest level. It suggests that the virus is gathering steam to come roaring out.''
Epidemiologists fear a major epidemic this fall -- the start of the polio ``high season'' -- leaving thousands of African children paralyzed for life, the WHO said.
The disease has struck in 9 sub-Saharan African countries this year after being limited to only two at the beginning of last year.
Health experts have long warned of looming epidemics in Darfur, where thousands have been killed and more than 1 million left homeless in a 15-month conflict between Arab militias, backed by the Sudanese government, and the black African population.
The Sudan case is the latest setback in WHO's campaign to wipe out polio worldwide, as the virus spreads from Nigeria -- the epicenter of the African epidemic -- and continues to strike in Niger, sub-Saharan Africa's other polio-endemic nation.
Besides Sudan, WHO said, a handful of cases have been found this year in previously polio-free Benin, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Chad and Ivory Coast. Botswana, in southern Africa, also reported its first new infection in February.
WHO said it urgently needs $25 million to launch a vaccination campaign across 22 African nations in October, aiming to halt the outbreak by immunizing 74 million children. Officials said they still could meet the 2005 deadline if the campaign works.
The other four of the world's polio-endemic countries -- Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India -- are still on schedule with vaccines aimed at stopping transmission of the disease before the end of the year, the WHO said.
Polio usually infects children under the age of 5 through contaminated drinking water and attacks the central nervous system, causing paralysis, muscular atrophy, deformation and, in some cases, death.
The battle against the disease has stalled in the face of resistance to immunization programs in Nigeria's heavily Muslim Kano state.
Kano suspended a vaccine campaign for six months after some Islamic leaders claimed that the vaccines were part of a U.S.-led plot to spread infertility and AIDS among Africans -- something Nigerian federal officials and the United Nations have vigorously denied.
In 1988, 125 countries were affected by polio. It has since been eradicated in Europe, the Americas, much of Asia and Australia.
Officials worry that polio could return if it is not eliminated totally because most governments worldwide have stopped vaccinating children in countries declared free of the disease, and newborn babies constantly add to the number of unvaccinated children in infected areas. Even if WHO reaches its goal of stopping transmission by the end of the year, it will need to monitor the situation for three years before certifying that polio has been wiped out.
On the Net:
http://www.who.int/en/
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Hostage Video Ignites Protest in S. Korea
Hundreds Demonstrate Against Iraq Policy;
Mission Sent to Jordan to Negotiate
By Anthony Faiola and Joohee Cho
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57177-2004Jun21?language=printer
SEOUL, June 21 -- Jolted by video footage showing one of their countrymen being held in Iraq by kidnappers threatening to behead him, hundreds of South Koreans joined candlelight vigils and prayer groups Monday while the government scrambled to negotiate the hostage's release.
In the video, first broadcast Sunday by the Arabic satellite TV network al-Jazeera and rerun countless times here Monday, Kim Sun Il, 33, screamed for his life while his hooded, armed captors demanded that South Korea quit the international military coalition in Iraq. The video was released three days after the government had finalized plans to begin deploying its main contingent of 3,000 troops there this summer.
The kidnappers gave South Korea 24 hours from sunset Sunday to agree; otherwise, they said they would "send to you the head of this Korean."
After an urgent cabinet meeting, South Korean leaders rejected the demand and dispatched an emergency diplomatic mission to Jordan in an attempt to win Kim's release.
[By Tuesday morning, after the 24-hour deadline had passed, South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman Shin Bong Kil said the government continued attempts to secure Kim's release but could not confirm whether he remained alive.]
A banner in the background of the video named Kim's abductors as members of Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad. The group is associated with Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian accused of having links to al Qaeda and blamed by U.S. officials for several recent kidnappings and car bombings in Iraq.
U.S. officials pledged to assist in the search for Kim, promising to use military and intelligence resources to help with any rescue effort. But they acknowledged that little progress had been made.
"We're developing that intelligence about where he was captured, under what circumstances he was captured, but I'm just not sure that we have built that body of intelligence yet," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq.
Kim was working as a translator for a South Korean contractor supplying goods to the U.S. military and had hoped to become a Christian missionary in the Middle East. He was kidnapped Thursday in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, South Korean officials said.
Kim Chun Ho, head of Gana General Trading Co., which employed the abducted translator, told South Korea's semi-official Yonhap news agency from Mosul that "several other third-nationality employees" from the U.S. firm KBR, an affiliate of Halliburton Co., had been traveling in the same convoy as Kim Sun Il and were also taken hostage. The report could not be immediately verified.
Kim was kidnapped one day before South Korea outlined a much delayed schedule to begin sending 3,000 troops to Iraq starting in August. The deployment would make South Korea, which already has 660 non-combat troops in Iraq, the third-largest contributor to forces there, after the United States and Britain.
A majority of South Koreans are against sending the troops, surveys indicate, and the kidnapping led some opponents to demand that the government backtrack.
"Kim is an innocent citizen, and he should not be sacrificed in what is essentially an unjustified invasion," Kim Ki Sik, the head of a citizens' group opposed to the war, said during a demonstration with several dozen protesters Monday in downtown Seoul. "We oppose this war and we oppose the Korean government's decision to send troops despite the fact that the people are against it."
South Korean leaders have called the deployment vital to shoring up their country's alliance with the United States. Ties between the two allies have wavered in recent years, particularly in the last few months, as President Roh Moo Hyun has sought a closer relationship with North Korea even as the United States has tried to isolate the Pyongyang government over its nuclear weapons programs.
Vice Foreign Minister Choi Young Jin told reporters that South Korea's dispatch plan had "not changed," and Roh sought to emphasize South Korea's benevolent intentions.
"We need to make efforts to explain that our troops will focus on reconstruction efforts without conducting hostile activities against Iraqi people," Roh said in a statement in which he described the kidnapping as a "very sad incident."
"The government should handle the case in a calm manner and use all available diplomatic resources to rescue him unharmed," he said.
The circumstances surrounding Kim's capture remained sketchy, but Kim Chun Ho told Yonhap that the translator was taken hostage while returning from a delivery to a U.S. military camp 120 miles west of Baghdad with an Iraqi employee and other foreigners of undisclosed nationality working for KBR.
Kim's sister, Kim Jung Sook, 34, said in a telephone interview that her brother had been in Iraq for eight months on a one-year contract, and planned to return to South Korea in July for their father's 70th birthday.
She described her brother as a devout Christian who had earned degrees in Arabic, English and theology in the hopes of one day doing missionary work. She said Kim had accepted the translating job to earn money and continue his studies.
"He learned Arabic because he wanted to be a pastor or a missionary working in the Middle East," Kim Jung Sook said.
Kim's sister said she was putting her faith in the government to do what was right. "Just because of one person, we cannot just flip-flop our national policy," Kim said from her family home in Pusan, South Korea's second-largest city.
Kim's mother, Shin Young Ja, however, told local television reporters that while she once believed in the Iraqi mission, she now wanted the government to rethink the deployment for her son's sake.
Correspondent Scott Wilson in Baghdad contributed to this report.
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