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NUCLEAR
Europe Looks More Closely at Plan for Uranium Venture
Pakistan not off the hook yet over black market nuclear network: US
US Device Seen at Supected Iran Atomic Site - Sources
U.S. Offers North Korea Aid if It Phases Out Nuclear Program
U.S. to Offer Carrot; N.Korea Says Drop the Stick
Nuclear Waste Piling Up at Russia's Overloaded Facilities
Yucca Nuclear Dump Funding Plan Draws Industry Ire
MILITARY
Results of air exercise with India a "wake-up call" for US
Turkey seizes weapons cache on truck coming from Iraq
Poland interested in buying Czech fighter aircraft
British troops could be court martialed in Iraq: defence ministry
Iran to Release Eight British Sailors
U.S. Kills 20 Foreign Fighters in Iraq, Official Says
S. Korean Is Beheaded in Iraq
Peace activists find no peace in visit to Iraq
U.S. Urges Israel to Begin Dismantling Outposts in the West Bank
Israel Probes Army Abuse Claims in Photo Exhibit
Egyptian Envoy Tries to Push Israel Plan
Israel Won't Let Egypt Push Peace Talks
Saudis Offer Militants One-Month Amnesty
Iraqi PM requests NATO help, not troops
NATO develops joint antiterror package
Pakistan Army Says 30 Tribesmen Killed
Legal, Not Physical, Hussein Transfer Described by Aide
Saddam's Prison Letter
Afghan detainees routinely tortured and humiliated by US troops
Major Raid Kills 57 in Ingushetia
75 Die as Chechen Rebels Stage Raid Across Border
Spacewalk To Repair Station to Proceed
Book by C.I.A. Officer Says U.S. Is Losing Fight Against Terror
Too Many Secrets, Says Secrecy Czar
Wolfowitz Says Iraq Stay Could Last Years
Wolfowitz Testifies Pentagon Misjudged the Strength of Iraqi Insurgency
General: U.S. Dominance of Skies May Wane
Air Force Testing Robot Vehicles
U.S. Alters Its Plan for Exemption at Court
U.S. Drops Effort to Gain Immunity for Its Troops
U.S. Drops U.N. Bid for War Crime Shield
War Crimes Court Launches Congo Probe
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Lawyer's Terrorism Trial Opens in N.Y.
Federal Law on Sentencing Is Unjust, Judge Rules
TSA: Airlines Gave Gov't Passenger Data
Antiterror Data to Cover Infrastructure
Ship Disruption Feared as Security Deadline Looms
U.S. transit systems vulnerable, panel told
Group Examines Human Rights in Chechnya
Stolen Passports Still Used to Enter U.S.
Ashcroft Sued Over FBI Whistleblower Case
F.B.I. Chief Sees NATO-like Antiterror Alliance
Reviews of Guantánamo Detainees to Begin Soon, Navy Says
New 2003 Data: 625 Terrorism Deaths, Not 307
State Department Report Shows Increase in Terrorism
Memo on Interrogation Tactics Is Disavowed
U.S. Liability Key Concern in '02 Debate on Detainees
Spirited Debate Preceded Policies
White House Says Prisoner Policy Set Humane Tone
POLITICS
House Approves Defense Spending
House Approves $417 Billion for Military
Senate Wants Bush to Report Back on Iraq
NIH Scientists Broke Rules, Panel Says
Ethics Panel Reviewing DeLay Complaint
Post State Dept. Reporter Questioned in Leak Probe
Fahrenheit rising: US hawks feel heat as movie's release date nears
Bush feels the heat: US voters turn on him over Iraq
ENERGY
Western Governors Pledge to Explore Clean, Renewable Energy
Corn Producers Keen on Wind Energy
OTHER
Toxic Emissions Rising, EPA Says
Toxic Release Increased in 2002, Study Says
Polio Eradication Faces Setback in Africa
Southern Africa in Crisis, U.N. Envoy Warns
Spread of Polio in Africa Makes U.N. Fear a Major Epidemic
ACTIVISTS
Wives of Jailed Activists In China Urge U.S. Aid
Greenpeace Activists Protest Energy Plan
Bush to Draw Protests in Ireland Over Iraq
Cold War Protester Charles Hyder Dies in USA
Chinese police beat elderly women protesting outside nuclear talks venue
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- europe
Europe Looks More Closely at Plan for Uranium Venture
June 23, 2004
By PAUL MELLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/business/worldbusiness/23areva.html
BRUSSELS, June 22 - The European Commission's competition division ramped up its investigation Tuesday into a planned joint venture between Areva, the nuclear power company controlled by the French government, and its counterpart Urenco, which is owned by energy companies in Germany, Holland and Britain. The new investigation is expected to last four months.
Areva plans to buy half of Urenco's uranium enrichment research division, the Enrichment Technology Company, but the commission said in a statement that it feared that the deal might result in an increase in the price of enriched uranium, which is used to fuel nuclear power stations. The commission just completed a preliminary monthlong look at the deal.
By creating a structural link between Areva and Urenco, which together have 80 percent of enriched uranium sales in the European Union, the deal could allow the companies to dominate the market, the commission said. It also said it suspected that the venture could result in a slowdown in research and development in uranium enrichment.
Areva, Urenco, USEC of the United States and Minatom/Tenex of Russia dominate the global market for enriched uranium. Advanced enrichment methods used by Urenco and Minatom are still under development by Areva and USEC.
If the deal is permitted, "Areva would have little incentive to continue its R&D efforts," the European Commission said in a statement.
France, Germany and Sweden alerted the commission last month to the proposed joint venture because they were concerned about its impact on competition for enrichment equipment and the low-enriched uranium used in nuclear power plants, the commission said. All three countries have nuclear energy industries that rely on low-enriched uranium.
In the case of France, Électricité de France, the state-owned monopoly, is a customer of enriched uranium producers, including Areva and Urenco.
France's complaint on the deal follows a recent government campaign calling for French "national champions" in various industries, and its opposition to an accord that would bolster Areva struck some as odd. France has also sought Areva's help in bailing out the troubled French conglomerate Alstom.
"France might have been expected to support such a deal that strengthens a French company, but in this case it is more concerned about the deal's impact on EdF and on French electricity consumers," said one person close to the investigation, who insisted on anonymity.
French government officials were not immediately available to comment on the investigation.
Urenco is jointly owned by the German power companies E.ON and RWE, the Dutch company Ultra-Centrifuge Nederland and BNFL of Britain. Urenco's Enrichment Technology Company division develops, designs and builds centrifuges used in uranium enrichment, the most expensive part of nuclear energy production. Gaseous centrifugation is a cheaper way to produce enriched uranium than gaseous diffusion, the method still used by Areva and USEC.
Areva plans to replace Eurodif, now the biggest enrichment plant in Europe, with one that uses centrifuge technology by 2012. Urenco already operates three smaller enrichment plants employing the modern technology in the European Union.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan not off the hook yet over black market nuclear network: US
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jun 23, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040623013805.2m06e7m6.html
The United States has not let Pakistan off the hook over illicit exports of nuclear weapons technology, the State Department said Wednesday.
The United States will press Pakistan to tighten nuclear export controls to prevent any future black market proliferation networks, Christina Rocca, the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, told a congressional hearing.
Opposition Democratic legislators had demanded that the government tie aid to Pakistan with progress it makes on nonproliferation, anti-terrorism cooperation and democratization.
Rocca said Pakistan's nuclear program remained under scrutiny four months after it was linked to a proliferation network led by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the country's nuclear bomb who publicly confessed to selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Gary Ackerman, the Democratic representative from New York, asked Rocca at the hearing whether the government continued to ask Pakistan for information on the illicit network or whether the investigation had been completed.
"Oh, no, it continues," she said. "It continues, and we're working very closely with the government of Pakistan on the investigation."
Rocca said Washington had to rely on information provided by Pakistani authorities on the network's activities, having had no access to Khan, who has been pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf.
She said she could not answer whether the government had asked to interview the scientist, pointing out that it was an "extremely sensitive matter."
Ackerman and another Democratic legislator, American Samoa Representative Eni Faleomavaega, suggested that conditions be imposed on a five-year, three-billion-dollar aid package to Pakistan beginning in fiscal year 2005 to ensure that it kept its word.
"I believe the time for conditions is now," Faleomavaega said. "And I would like to clearly state that I do not believe we will see an end to terrorism or nuclear proliferation until the US Congress imposes restrictions on US aid to Pakistan."
Rocca insisted that the United States had very close cooperation with Pakistan on non-proliferation, anti-terrorism cooperation and democratization.
"We don't see any reason -- there has been no cause at all for us to have second thoughts about providing any assistance to Pakistan," she added.
Ackerman felt the Bush administration had struck a very bad bargain with Pakistan by "giving a pass on nuclear proliferation issues" in exchange for perceived cooperation in the war on terrorism.
He questioned military ruler Musharraf's seriousness in battling terrorism and embracing democratic reforms as well as the level of support he received among moderate Pakistanis.
"We are hitching our wagon to a very questionable horse," he said.
Rocca said the United States was working relentlessly with Pakistan to increase and tighten its nuclear weapons exports control regimes.
Pakistan recently introduced a bill in parliament which, if passed, "would go a long way to towards meeting the standards that we are encouraging them to reach," she said.
-------- iran
US Device Seen at Supected Iran Atomic Site - Sources
June 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran-device.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - A radiation monitoring device spotted in Iran at a razed site where Washington suspects Iran conducted covert atomic bomb-related research was itself made in the United States and sold directly to Tehran, sources said.
A Western diplomat and an independent nuclear expert who follow the Vienna-based U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told Reuters the radiation detection device -- called a ``whole body counter'' -- was identified as having been made by the Connecticut-based firm Canberra Industries, Inc.
The disclosure could prove embarrassing to Washington which has accused Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons program and has called on countries to crack down on exports of even seemingly innocent machinery that could be used in weapons programs.
Tehran says it only wants nuclear power for electricity.
``There is no doubt that the whole-body counter came from Canberra Industries and under a legal export,'' said the nuclear science expert, who has analyzed satellite images of the site taken by the U.S. firm DigitalGlobe's Quickbird satellite.
The counter, used to measure radiation contamination in humans, was sold directly to a university or hospital in Iran in the early 1990s with a U.S. export license, the sources said.
The device was seen at Lavizan, situated near a military installation in Tehran. Satellite images of Lavizan show Tehran razed buildings and removed a significant amount of topsoil. Ironically, the U.S.-made device is the reason U.S. officials are convinced Iran pursued undeclared atomic activity there.
``The presence of the whole body counter there is weird and out of place, but it doesn't prove that there was any weapons activity going on at Lavizan,'' said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Securityand a former U.N. weapons inspector.
``We need to know how it got there (from the hospital or university) and why,'' he added.
Lavizan was first mentioned in May 2003, when a group of Iranian exiles said it was a biological weapons research site.
Iran vehemently denied that it has conducted any undeclared nuclear or weapons-related activities at Lavizan. But a diplomat close to the IAEA said inspectors would go there ``very soon.''
NEW DEMOLITION WORK AT SUSPECT SITE
Canberra Industries declined to comment, but an industry source familiar with devices like whole-body counter said it was a ``totally innocuous'' device designed for peaceful activity.
Asked if the counter could be modified to detect plutonium or other substances to make it usable in weapons-related activity, the source, who declined to be identified, said:
``Very theoretically speaking, all kinds of things can be done,'' the source said.
Last week, Reuters obtained from ISIS and GlobalDigital two satellite photos taken in August 2003 and March 2004 that showed Iran had dismantled buildings and removed rubble and topsoil at the site, called the Lavizan-Shiyan Technical Research Center.
The U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, Kenneth Brill, accused Iran of using ``the wrecking ball and bulldozer'' to sanitize Lavizan prior to the arrival of U.N. inspectors.
``This destruction at the site raised concerns because it is the type of measure Iran would need to take if it was trying to defeat the powerful environmental sampling capabilities of IAEA inspectors,'' ISIS said in an analysis of the images.
Last week the IAEA Board of Governors unanimously passed a resolution that sharply rebuked Iran for not cooperating fully with a U.N. investigation of Tehran's nuclear program.
The IAEA began investigating Iran after an Iranian exile group reported in August 2002 that Tehran was hiding a massive uranium enrichment facility and other sites from the IAEA.
-------- korea
U.S. Offers North Korea Aid if It Phases Out Nuclear Program
June 23, 2004
By JOSEPH KAHN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/international/asia/23CND-KORE.html?hp
BEIJING, June 23 - The United States today presented North Korea with a proposal for phasing out its nuclear program in exchange for aid and security guarantees, as senior Bush administration officials acknowledged softening their hard-line stance to jump-start negotiations with Pyongyang.
James A. Kelly, the chief American negotiator, presented a proposal to his North Korean counterparts on the opening day of six-nation nuclear talks in Beijing, a senior administration official said, adding that "it was time to start getting specific" in the so-far-inconclusive negotiations.
American officials said North Korea rebuffed an invitation to hold a private meeting on the side of the six-party talks to discuss the proposal in more detail today. The North Korean delegation, which put forward its own plan at the talks, had no immediate reaction to the American offer.
The talks, the third round of negotiations involving China, Japan, South Korea and Russia as well as the United States and North Korea, are expected to continue through Friday. Expectations for achieving a breakthrough at this round remain modest.
Under the American plan, North Korea would have to fully disclose its nuclear program, submit to inspections and pledge to begin eliminating the program after a "preparatory period" of three months.
In exchange, the reclusive regime of Kim Jong-Il, the North Korean leader, would receive shipments of heavy fuel oil to meet its energy needs, be granted a "provisional security guarantee" by the United States, and see the lifting of some sanctions.
The proposal, which American officials said was first presented to them by South Korea earlier this month and was modified in Washington, is a combination of ideas put forward in earlier rounds of talks.
Administration officials described the proposal they made as "more tangible and more specific" than any offered in the past and expressed cautious optimism that the talks were "headed in a new direction" now that they had a firm proposal on the table.
The administration appears to have eased its opposition to engaging in detailed negotiations with North Korea, which President Bush once labeled as member of the "axis of evil." Last summer, when negotiations first got under way, Mr. Bush said that providing any benefits to North Korea before it completely abandoned its nuclear program would be like submitting to blackmail.
But as the talks progressed, Asian diplomats argued that the North Koreans were willing to engage in substantive negotiations and discard their weapons program for the right incentives. China, South Korea and Japan have all urged the United States to bring a concrete proposal to the latest round or risk being seen as recalcitrant.
"We did think it was a good time to offer a proposal because colleagues and allies urged us to do so," one administration official said.
Another American official said that China had persuaded the United States that it was worth supporting economic change in North Korea, noting that Mr. Kim had undertaken some experiments with markets that deserved international support.
Significantly, a senior administration official said that the new plan does not require North Korea to accept the precise formula for resolving the standoff, the "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement" - known by the intials C.V.I.D. - of its nuclear program that the administration had insisted was its bottom line in any agreement. In previous rounds, the same official had suggested that North Korea would have to agree to that wording before discussions of any benefits it might receive could commence.
The official said C.V.I.D. was still the goal of the United States. But he said that the repetition of that demand and the suggestion that North Korea had to give up it nuclear program before it could expect benefits had "inflamed sensibilities" at earlier rounds.
A Bush administration official said that in the planning sessions held before the formal opening of today's talks, the North Korean negotiators continued to deny that they have a program to enrich uranium to make nuclear fuel in addition to a plutonium program, which the North has acknowledged having.
American charges that the country has a secret uranium enrichment program, first broached in 2002, were the original cause of the current standoff, and Bush administration say they have gathered more evidence since that time to support the charge.
It was unclear whether the new American plan requires North Korea to specifically acknowledge having a uranium enrichment program in the first stage of any agreement. But American officials said addressing the uranium program was an indispensable part of their plan.
North Korea also seems likely to push for a considerably longer timetable for phasing out its weapons program than the United States advocates, in part to receive more benefits along the way.
--------
U.S. to Offer Carrot; N.Korea Says Drop the Stick
June 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States said on Wednesday it plans to offer a proposal to try to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis at six-party talks in Beijing as an entrenched Pyongyang urged Washington to drop its hostile stance.
Chief negotiators from six countries opened discussions on the 20-month nuclear crisis at the exclusive Diaoyutai State Guesthouse Wednesday, as Japan warned that the credibility of the talks would be on the line if no progress was made.
Progress in two previous rounds has been glacial, and few expect major breakthroughs despite the U.S. proposal, which the New York Times said contained incentives for the North to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
``We are prepared for serious discussion and we have a proposal to offer,'' U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said in an opening statement at the talks.
``A focus on the common objective, and practical and effective means to attain it, will lead in a very positive direction with new political, economic and diplomatic possibilities,'' he said.
Kelly gave no details.
The two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and host China have held two previous rounds of senior-level talks on the 20-month crisis, both of which ended inconclusively.
The New York Times said in its Wednesday edition U.S. negotiators would offer the North new but ``highly conditional'' incentives to give up its nuclear weapons, including a provisional guarantee not to invade.
The incentives, if offered, would be the first significant, detailed overture to North Korea since President Bush took office more than three years ago and branded North Korea as part of an ``axis of evil'' alongside Iran and pre-war Iraq.
Under the proposal, aid would also begin flowing to North Korea once its leader Kim Jong-il made a commitment to dismantle his plutonium and uranium weapons programs, the newspaper said.
``China, Russia, Japan and South Korea would immediately begin sending thousands of tons of heavy fuel oil every month, and Washington would offer a 'provisional' guarantee not to invade the country or seek to topple Mr. Kim's government,'' it said.
It was unclear how such a proposal would be greeted by the unpredictable North, which unleashed a characteristic barrage of anti-U.S. rhetoric ahead of the talks.
``No positive results can be expected from the third round of the six-party talks if the U.S. again raises its old brigandish demand at the talks that will start today,'' North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in a commentary.
North Korea's chief negotiator, Kim Kye-gwan, said Pyongyang would abandon its nuclear weapons program if the United States dropped its ``hostile policy'' toward the North, a refrain that has echoed in previous rounds.
In a sign of how far apart Pyongyang and Washington remain, Kim said the United States must first drop its demands for complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of its weapons programs and agree to its own compensation proposal.
The North has demanded security guarantees and economic aid before it will consider scrapping its nuclear weapons programs. The United States has said the North must agree to abandon its nuclear programs before it offers any security pledges or aid.
MORNING SPENT IN BILATERAL TALKS
China's Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the talks, which continue until Saturday, would focus on how to realize a nuclear weapons-free Korean peninsula and how to make the first step toward that nuclear weapons-free goal.
Progress at previous rounds has been measured in modest diplomatic increments, such as whether to meet again.
Japan said the credibility of the talks was on the line.
``Whether or not this round of talks will produce concrete progress over the issue of the nuclear development, an urgent international problem, will test the credibility of the six-party process itself,'' chief negotiator Mitoji Yabunaka told the opening session.
Analysts have said neither the United States nor North Korea appeared in a hurry to resolve the crisis ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.
For the United States, an agreement could require concessions that could open Bush to criticism.
For North Korea's Kim, the prospect of a win by Democratic challenger John Kerry raises the possibility of the return of less confrontational Clinton-era officials.
-------- russia
Nuclear Waste Piling Up at Russia's Overloaded Facilities
June 23, 2004
MOSCOW, Russia, (ENS)
http://www.antiatom.ru/download/040615.htm
The Russian government's three year old program to enter the nuclear waste reprocessing business is failing to attract customers, but even so, the country's inadequate storage and reprocessing facilities cannot handle the radioactive waste that is being sent there, according to new research by the anti-nuclear organization Ecodefense.
At a time when the G8 and the United States want to stop the spread of uranium and plutonium, Russia plans to produce more of these materials, say the report's authors Vladimir Slivyak and Alisa Nikoulina. Making clear their opposition to the Russian import of other countries' nuclear fuel, the authors say Russian policy is, in fact, the reprocessing of imported nuclear waste, and the extraction of plutonium from it. President Vladimir Putin signed three laws to allow spent fuel imports into Russia in the spring of 2001, over the opposition of the vast majority of Russian citizens, according to ROMIR Research Group, an independent Russian public opinion and market research agency affiliated with the U.S. based Gallup Group.
According to 2001 public opinion polls, 93 percent of Russian citizens opposed the import of spent nuclear fuel.
A poll in 2002 found that about 90 percent of Russians fear nuclear energy. In 2002, on the 16th anniversary of the explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, protest actions against importing spent nuclear fuel were held in 82 Russian cities.
In 2001, the Russian Ministry for Atomic Power, Minatom, claimed the waste import plan would be a good business move for Russia and estimated it would bring in US$20 billion in business over the next 10 years. "According to these calculations," the Ecodefense report states, "the first two years of import should have made profit of about $4 billion. However, in 2001-2003 Minatom earned on operations with foreign spent nuclear fuel only $100 million, which is 40 times less than estimated."
Minatom has only those clients whom it had had before the legislation was changed, while negotiations aimed at attracting new clients have been unsuccessful. Russia's biggest nuclear waste client, Ukraine, is now organizing spent nuclear fuel storage on its own territory and may stop sending its spent fuel to Russia as soon as in 2005.
The report stresses that Russian nuclear waste facilities are in poor condition and that the transportation of spent nuclear fuel involves high risks for the countries on the route. The two major facilities working with spent nuclear fuel - Mayak and Krasnoyarsk-26 - are economically ineffective and, far from standing on their own economically, are 50 percent subsidized by the government.
Mayak, near Ozersk City in Russia's Chelyabinsk region, is the country's only spent nuclear fuel reprocessing facility, while Krasnoyarsk-26, in Zheleznogorsk, stores spent fuel but does not reprocess it.
Russian nuclear warheads are reprocessed at Mayak as well as spent nuclear fuel. Here, highly enriched uranium (HEU) warhead components are machined into metal shavings. The shavings are heated and converted to an HEU oxide on their way to becoming reactor fuel. (Photo courtesy NNSA)
The Russian nuclear industry has space enough to store 2,000 to 2,500 metric tonnes of spent nuclear fuel, Slivyak and Nikoulina say, which is not enough to provide for even a single large international contract, given that Russian spent nuclear fuel must also be stored at Mayak and Krasnoyarsk-26.
Still, Ada Amon, director of the Hungarian NGO Energy Club, points out that on April 30, the day before Hungary became a full member of the European Union, the Hungarian government announced that an agreement had been signed with Russia that allows Hungary to transport to and store spent nuclear fuel in Russian facilities.
"This is a clear manifestation of the hypocrisy around any nuclear issue and also demonstrates the so-called openness of the nuclear industry as well as the respective governments to any real public discussion on the problems connected to nuclear waste does not exist," said Amon, who is in Budapest for the Fourth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health opening today.
The Hungarian nuclear waste would be transported by train to the Mayak complex. In 1997, Minatom signed a contract to import 3,500 spent nuclear fuel assemblies from Hungary, though later the Russian Supreme Court nullified the deal. Nevertheless, Hungarian nuclear waste is still stored at Mayak awaiting final disposal, Slivyak and Nikoulina explain.
Security around Russian nuclear waste facilities is very low, they warn. Any country sending nuclear waste to Russia must understand that there is a high risk that the waste might end up in the hands of terrorists and could be used for weapons of mass destruction. Also, the transport of spent nuclear fuel is vulnerable to terrorist attack, say Slivyak and Nikoulina.
"The transport of spent nuclear fuel - which also contains plutonium - should be halted," Slivyak says, and "the export of EU nuclear waste to Russia should not even be considered."
But European nuclear waste is being imported. Slivyak and Nikoulina cite the comments of a Bulgarian governmental official to the weekly "Rusenergy" in 2002 that they say provide grounds to believe that Bulgaria's nuclear cooperation with Russia is based on the intention to get rid of as much of spent nuclear fuel as possible at the least cost before Bulgaria joins the EU, which could take place as early as 2007.
Since the laws permitting import of spent nuclear fuel came into effect in June 2001, about 10 trains carrying spent nuclear fuel have arrived in Russia from Ukraine and Bulgaria.
Soon after the Russian legislation was passed, Bulgaria sent its first spent fuel shipment. It roused protests in Ukraine and Russia with demonstrations in seven cities along the Trans-Siberian Railway. In the end of November 2001, 41 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from the Bulgarian Kozloduy nuclear power plant was transported to Krasnoyarsk-26.
Bulgarian and Ukranian spent nuclear fuel was delivered to Krasnoyarsk-26 several times in 2002, says the Ecodefense report.
In June-July 2003, the transport of about 20 tons of Bulgarian spent nuclear fuel to the Mayak nuclear complex took place. In mid-June the ship caryying this nuclear cargo got stuck at the Danube River due to navigation problems, but by the end of July, the waste did arrive at Mayak.
In addition, small consignments of nuclear materials from the research reactors of Romania and Yugoslavia have been imported to Russia on a non-commercial basis under a joint program with the United States to keep research reactor fuel out of terrorist hands by repatriating it to Russia.
Under a new U.S.-Russia agreement, more than a dozen countries will be eligible to receive financial and technical assistance from the United States to ship their fresh and spent research reactor fuel - originally obtained from Russia or the Soviet Union - back to Russia for safekeeping and reprocessing into safer materials.
An agreement for the fuel repatriation program was signed by U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Director Alexander Rumyantsev of the Russian Federal Agency for Atomic Energy May 27 in Moscow. It is part of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative announced by Abraham the day before at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna which aims to keep weapons grade nuclear materials out of terrorist hands.
"With today's agreement, we are moving forward to complete the important work of repatriating fresh and spent HEU [highly enriched uranium] fuel, which will reduce the threat of terrorism and prevent the proliferation of weapons-grade uranium," Abraham said.
More than 20 research reactors in 17 countries have been identified as having Russian/Soviet-supplied fuel, according to the U.S. Energy Department. This new initiative builds on existing U.S. nonproliferation efforts to minimize and eventually eliminate reliance on HEU in the civilian fuel cycle, including converting research and test reactors from the use of HEU to the use of safer low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuels, Abraham said.
But Slivyak and Nikoulina point out that this nuclear deal covers fresh as well as spent nuclear fuel, which is the only material permitted for import under the new Russian law.
Yet within Russia, Minatom presents its plans as targeted exclusively towards reprocessing and a future plutonium based economy. "Launching of a new spent nuclear fuel reprocessing plant is impossible at least until 2020, while the old one lacks capacity and urgently needs large investments," Slivyak and Nikoulina write.
They cite the publicly stated opinion of Mayak's own management officials that conditions at the Mayak facility are inadequate. "The facility needs nearly US$600 million for reconstruction and has no plan for obtaining that sum," write Slivyak and Nikoulina. "A radioactive waste vitrificating facility at Mayak works with long interruptions which increases the already serious problem of radioactive waste accumulated at the facility."
In the beginning of 2003, for the first time in Russian history, spent nuclear fuel reprocessing was suspended at Mayak because the government revoked its license for violations of nuclear regulations.
But in spite of the fact that Mayak failed to eliminate the violations that caused revocation of its license, in March 2003 Gosatomnadzor, the Russian Federal Inspectorate for Nuclear and Radiation Safety, reinstated Mayak's license under the governmental pressure, Slivyak and Nikoulina report.
In spite of the worldwide tendency to improve physical protection of nuclear sites since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 there is no confirmed information on improvement of security at Minatom's sites, the Ecodefense report states. "On the contrary, a number of facts provide evidence of a low level of physical protection of those sites."
"In the first half of 2002, the secured zone of a nuclear site at Krasnoyarsk-26 was illegally visited by a group of people who recorded their visit and then made it public at one of the Russian TV channels (NTV)," write Slivyak and Nikoulina. "Later on, local environmentalists repeated their inspections of the facility that were later repeated by Federal Security Service (ex-KGB). Both discovered unavailability of the facility's security forces to prevent possible terrorist acts."
"Anyone who is able to pay some hundreds of Rubles (US$20-30) to the security guards, can get into the secured areas" at Mayak, they write. They explain that the social situation in many closed nuclear units and settlements near nuclear power plants is "socially unfavorable," for personnel. "Alcohol and drug addictions are widespread."
In addition to these problems, smuggling of radioactive materials is taking place under the noses of customs officials, the authors say. They relate an April 2003 incident in which the illegal import of nuclear waste was detected by Kaliningrad Customs Service.
A container with radioactive materials hidden among the carpentry equipment was sent from Belgium to the address of a business in Kaliningrad, a northwestern region of Russia on the coast of Baltic Sea. Investigators discovered that the radioactive package was not declared and was hidden from customs supervision. The radiation level of the container was a million times higher that allowed, the Russian news agency Vesti-RTR reported.
"According to a source in Kaliningrad Customs, each year there are several cases like that happening, and it's suspected that the most radioactive packages get through the border many different ways," write Slivyak and Nikoulina. Finally, they warn, Minatom contracts contain no requirement that reprocessed spent fuel be sent out of Russia, back to the country of origin. "Russia, already having enormous problems with accumulated radioactive waste, has chained itself to an aggravation of this problem in the course of the next decades."
"Unless import of spent nuclear fuel is stopped," conclude Slivyak and Nikoulina, "Russia will become the world's leading nation by amount of radioactive waste, and then by the number of nuclear waste dumps."
The name Minatom is retained throughout their report although in early spring 2004, President Putin disbanded Minatom and established the Federal Agency for Atomic Power (FAAP) instead. Some Minatom functions were incorporated into the Ministry for Industry and Energy and issues related to the nuclear weapons industry were handed over to the Ministry of Defense.
-------- us nuc waste
Yucca Nuclear Dump Funding Plan Draws Industry Ire
Chris Baltimore
REUTERS USA:
June 23, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25653/newsDate/23-Jun-2004/story.htm
WASHINGTON - A plan by Republican 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.
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 Democrat Henry 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 (70,000 metric 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 this week.
"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."
The industry says it has already borne its share of costs.
Since 1983, utility customers have paid a fee of 1/10 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.
Spent fuel from the nation's nuclear plants has been piling up for years. An estimated 50,000 tons (45,500 metric tons) of it is stored at 72 sites in 33 states, mostly near urban areas in the East and Midwest.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Results of air exercise with India a "wake-up call" for US air force: general
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jun 23, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040623210447.wil34maf.html
The US Air Force got a "wake-up call" in air-to-air training exercises with India earlier this year that showed the United States can no longer take air superiority for granted in a conflict, a top US general said Wednesday.
A study of the "Cope India" air exercise, conducted by the US and Indian air forces in Gwalior, India last February, is secret, said General Hal Hornburg, head of the air force's Air Combat Command.
"But we have to learn a lot of things from that," he told defense reporters here. "We have to learn if we want air superiority it doesn't come cheap and it's not automatic."
The Russian-made SU-30s are reported to have bested the F-15s in a majority of their engagements, much to the surprise of the organizers.
It was the first time the two top-of-the-line US and Russian-made fighters have flown against each other in an exercise, an air force spokeswoman said.
It pitted F-15Cs from the air force's 3rd Wing out of Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska against a variety of Indian fighters, not just the SU-30s. They included Russian-built MiG-21s, MiG-29s and French-made Mirage 2000s.
Although the US fighters flew with certain restrictions that handicapped their effectiveness, the performance of the Indian fighters exceeded expectations.
"In general, we may have learned some things that suggest we may not be as far ahead of the rest of the world as we once thought we were," Hornburg said.
He said the results of the exercise showed the need for the F/A-22 Raptor and the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). Both aircraft are stealthier than the F-15, but the F/A-18 also has greater range and speed than the air force's existing fighters.
The air force has been battling the perception that the costly new fighters are a luxury at a time when the United States has dominance in the air.
"I thought it was a wake-up call for some things that we've been talking about before, and it provided validation," Hornburg said.
The trade journal Aviation Week and Space Technology reported last month that the exercises showed the SU-30s had a clear advantage over the F-15C in a long-range fight.
The US and Indian aircraft were seeing each other at the same time with their radars but the SU-30 pilots were able to simulate-fire their Russian-made AA-10 "fire-and-forget" Alamo missiles first, the weekly said.
Experts say the SU-30 has a more advanced radar than the F-15C.
Hornburg said the F-15Cs that took part in "Cope India" were not equipped with the latest US active electronically scanned array radar.
"We are going to put new radars, as much as we can afford, in the F-16s and the F-15Es, and my prediction is we will have to do for the F-15C as well in due course," the general said.
The exercise appears to hold lessons for the air force in east Asia, where China is acquiring SU-27 and SU-30 fighters and AA-12 air-to-air missiles.
"I see air forces across the spectrum and across the world becoming better and better as each year passes," Hornburg said.
"China is very formidable. It is a huge, collossal nation, and they are very technologically adept. Do I worry about the Chinese? I would say I worry about anyone who could be a possible threat, to include them and many others," he said.
-----
Turkey seizes weapons cache on truck coming from Iraq
ANKARA (AFP)
Jun 23, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040623163618.56va9k1f.html
Turkish border guards have seized guns, hand grenades, mines and explosives in a tanker truck which entered the country from Iraq, a senior local official said Wednesday.
The Turkish driver of the vehicle was detained and police launched an investigation into the incident, the deputy governor of the southeastern border province of Sirnak, Resul Celik, told Anatolia news agency.
The cache, discovered in the truck after it entered Turkey from the Habur crossing point, included 28 firearms -- among them 20 Kalashnikov rifles and four Kanas-type rifles usually used in assassinations -- as well as "a great number" of hand grenades, mines, bullets and explosives, Celik said.
Last month, police in the region seized some 100 guns and thousands of bullets hidden in three trucks carrying wheat from Iraq, which were thought to have been destined for sale at the underground market.
Turkish security forces are on high alert ahead of a NATO summit in Istanbul next week, which US President George W. Bush will attend.
Southeastern Turkey has been the scene of a bloody Kurdish rebellion for self-rule. The rebels ended a five-year unilateral ceasefire with Ankara
--------
Poland interested in buying Czech fighter aircraft
PRAGUE (AFP)
Jun 23, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040623152202.eklrlft2.html
Poland may buy up to 60 L-159 light combat aircraft from the Czech plane manufacturer Aero Vodochody, company spokesman Vitezslav Kulich told AFP Wednesday.
"We are in discussions about selling between two and 60 L-159s to Poland but the discussions are at an early stage and nothing will be agreed for some time," Kulich said.
Poland is leading efforts to establish a joint training base for air force pilots from the Visegrad Four countries - the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia as well as Poland. All four joined the European Union on May 1.
The countries' defence ministers aproved the plan at a meeting last month.
According to Czech Radio, the planes would be purchased to equip the training base.
But Kulich said he could not confirm that.
"The joint training centre is a matter for the Poles that we cannot comment on," he added.
-------- britain
British troops could be court martialed in Iraq: defence ministry
LONDON (AFP)
Jun 23, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040623205420.vy8x8mr5.html
British soldiers accused of mistreating Iraqi prisoners could face court martial inside Iraq, Britain's Ministry of Defence said Wednesday.
Four British soldiers have already been ordered to stand trial for allegedly beating and sexually abusing detainees in Iraq, while dozens more cases are being investigated.
The defence ministry's director-general of operational policy, Martin Howard, said Wednesday that there were arguments for holding the hearings -- which would be under British jurisdiction -- in Iraq.
"The court martial would ideally be held close to the scene of the crime," Howard told the House of Commons Defence Committee.
"That is obviously much easier, but it would depend on whether you have the right sort of legal representation and have got qualified people on the spot. In the case of Iraq, you probably have got the right people," he said.
"In general, courts martial have the same sort of status as a crown court so, as I understand it, members of the public can attend. There may be stricter security in Iraq but, in principle, members of the public can attend."
Earlier this month the Ministry of Defence said that military police were investigating 75 reported incidents connected with British troops in Iraq.
This number had now risen to 79, Howard told the committee.
-------- iran
Iran to Release Eight British Sailors
June 23, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/international/middleeast/23CND-IRAN.html?hp
TEHRAN, June 23 - The Iranian government declared today that it was releasing the eight British sailors and marines it arrested early Monday, after they entered Iranian territorial waters of Shatt Al Arab.
But although British diplomats arrived in southern Iran to collect the servicemen today, the actual release was not expected until at least Thursday morning.
"The British delegation who went to south of Iran to collect the sailors and the marines visited them this evening," a person at the British Embassy said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "They took personal stuff for them like T-shirts and took messages for their families. They were in very good spirit and were aware even of the football scores. It is agreed that they will go back but the discussion over the modality of their return will continue tomorrow."
Earlier, the deputy chief of culture and propaganda for the Iranian armed forces, Ali Reza Afshar, announced that the government had decided to free the men.
"Considering statements by British sailors that the boats carrying them mistakenly entered Iran's territorial waters, the armed forces decided to release the boats and their occupants," he said in a dispatch from the IRNA news agency.
"Those detained were carrying full military equipment and specialized maps of the region," he added. "After our investigation, it became clear that the equipment was for use in their coastal patrol mission."
But British and Iranian authorities were still negotiating over the process for handing over the sailors and marines, who could simply cross the waterway back into Iraq or could be brought here to the capital and flown out, perhaps all the way to Britain.
"The whole diplomatic machine is still moving," a diplomat at the British Embassy said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
There were also conflicting signals from Iran suggesting disagreement among factions in Iran over the release. Despite government assurances that they would be released, the men were shown on television marching blindfolded as they were led by two Revolutionary Guards at some open-air location.
On Tuesday, state-run television and the Revolutionary Guards, who are close to the radical section of the government and had detained the Britons, said the eight men would be prosecuted for illegally entering Iranian territorial waters. That assertion was later denied by both Iran's Foreign Ministry and a top military official.
Today, the hard-line daily Jomhouri Islami wrote in an editorial that the British government was meddling in the Persian Gulf and accused it of orchestrating incursions by boats from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates into Iranian territorial waters in the past weeks.
Furious over Iran's handling of the matter, the British Foreign Office summoned the Iranian ambassador in London on Tuesday to demand consular access to the detainees as well as answers about what was happening to them.
Britain's foreign minister, Jack Straw, also telephoned his Iranian counterpart, Karmal Kharazi, and was told by Mr. Kharazi that he would personally look into the matter, said Ian Gleason, a spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair.
"We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible," Mr. Gleason said.
British government and military officials said the sailors and marines had been on a training exercise and were bringing the boats to Iraq to bolster the Iraqi Riverine Patrol Service.
The state-run television channel Al Alam reported today that although the servicemen would be released, the Iranian Navy planned to keep their weapons, equipment and boats.
-------- iraq
U.S. Kills 20 Foreign Fighters in Iraq, Official Says
June 23, 2004
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/international/middleeast/23CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 23 - Up to 20 foreign fighters were killed overnight during an American military strike on a house in the city of Falluja, a senior military official said today.
The assault came after Muslim insurgents beheaded a South Korean hostage and threatened to assassinate the Iraqi prime minister.
"Falluja has become a place where large numbers of foreign fighters remain," a senior military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters in Baghdad. "We are concerned about this. We don't know if it has become a clearinghouse for terrorists, but we are watching it closely."
Earlier, the military said in a statement that it had carried out an attack on a safehouse belonging to a "known Zarqawi network."
The killers of the South Korean, Kim Sun Il, an interpreter, were believed to be members of a group called Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad, which is linked to the Jordanian terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Today, militants threatened to assassinate the prime minister, Iyad Allawi. "As for you, Allawi - sorry, the democratically elected prime minister - we have found for you a useful poison and a sure sword," a taped voice, represented as that of Mr. Zarqawi, said on an Islamist Web site, according to Reuters.
American officials said they were taking the threat against the prime minister seriously and that protecting his life was now one of the chief concerns leading up to the June 30 handover of sovereignty.
"We are making security for the prime minister a top priority," a senior occupation official said today.
President Bush called Mr. Allawi to "reiterate his commitment to the Iraqi people," the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Philadelphia, according to The Associated Press. Mr. McClellan added that the call was not arranged in response to the assassination threat and that the president had planned to call Mr. Allawi beforehand.
Mr. Kim had dreamed of becoming a Christian missionary in the Arab world. He was abducted five days ago near Falluja.
The execution was carried out after the South Korean government rejected the captors' demand that it halt the scheduled deployment of an additional 3,000 troops to Iraq in August. A videotape broadcast on Al Jazeera television showed Mr. Kim sitting or kneeling quietly in an orange jumpsuit and blindfolded with an orange cloth. Five masked men, three cradling guns and one with a sheathed knife, stand behind him.
"Your army has not come here for the sake of Iraqis but for cursed America," one of the men says.
Al Jazeera, which did not show the killing, reported that the men then beheaded Mr. Kim. The Central Intelligence Agency has said Mr. Zarqawi was the man seen beheading Nicholas Berg, an American who had been kidnapped, on a tape circulated on the Internet.
In a televised address today, the president of South Korea, Roh Moo Hyun, called Mr. Kim's slaying a crime against humanity. He condemned terrorism, vowing "to deal sternly with it together with the international community," according to The A.P..
"When we think of his desperate appeals for life, our hearts are wrenched with grief," Mr. Roh said.
President Bush said Mr. Kim's beheading was another futile effort to drive the United States and its allies out of the country. "They want us to cower in the face of their brutal killings," he said, "and the United States will not be intimidated by these people."
This was the third beheading in the Middle East in the last several weeks. Last Friday, Saudi members of a cell suspected of being linked to Al Qaeda decapitated Paul M. Johnson Jr., an abducted American engineer. Mr. Berg was killed last month.
American soldiers found the body of Mr. Kim, 33, between Baghdad and Falluja, the volatile Sunni city 35 miles west of the capital. "It appears that the body had been thrown from a vehicle," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a spokesman for the occupation forces, said Tuesday in a statement to The Associated Press. "The man had been beheaded, and the head was recovered with the body."
Today, the American military said three Iraqi civilians, one of them a child, were killed when an "improvised explosive device" exploded in central Baghdad. The Iraqi police said the device was a roadside bomb, Reuters reported.
In all the recent beheadings, the victims were wearing orange shirts similar to prison jumpsuits. Some analysts have speculated that the jumpsuits are meant to evoke the humiliations of Muslim men at the Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Mr. Kim was kidnapped Thursday as he was returning to Baghdad in a civilian convoy that had left an American military base 120 miles west of the capital.
He had been working for a South Korean company that supplied goods to the American military, and held degrees in Arabic, English and theology. He was working in Iraq to earn enough money to carry on his studies, his sister said.
Militants released a videotape on Sunday in which they demanded that the South Korean government abandon its deployment plans within 24 hours or receive the head of Mr. Kim.
Falluja remains the single most problematic place for the occupation forces in Iraq. In early May, marines withdrew from the city and turned it over to a 2,000-strong militia composed partly of insurgents, and Falluja now remains firmly in the hands of hard-line Sunni clerics and guerrilla fighters.
Last Saturday, an American jet fired missiles at what General Kimmitt said was another suspected Zarqawi safe house in Falluja. At least 26 people were killed.
It was unclear whether Mr. Kim was killed by the same people who had kidnapped him. Insurgents have announced rewards for the abduction of foreigners from countries that have sent soldiers to Iraq.
Scores of foreigners have been kidnapped since the bloody uprising in April, and many are still being held.
Kim Chun Ho, the head of the Gana Trading Company, which employed Mr. Kim, has told the Yonhap news agency that several other foreign contractors were traveling in the same convoy with Mr. Kim and were also kidnapped.
He said those contractors were working for Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton and the largest private supplier to the American forces. The company said Tuesday that it could not confirm the kidnappings.
South Korea has 660 noncombat troops in Iraq. The addition of the 3,000 in August would make the country's deployment here the third largest, behind the United States and Britain.
Polls in South Korea show that a majority of people there oppose their government's participation in the war. The government released a statement on Tuesday emphasizing that the troop deployment is "for reconstruction and humanitarian aid support."
Insurgents have pursued a strategy of punishing countries that join in the occupation. In April, fighters killed one of four Italian hostages but released the others. A Japanese photographer and two nonprofit workers were kidnapped in April and eventually released. In both cases, the countries refused to negotiate with the captors.
Many of the hostages who have been released have won their freedom through the mediation of Sunni clerics. Earlier on Tuesday, wire services reported that an Iraqi mediator said he had seen Mr. Kim alive and that the captors had agreed to extend talks.
Edward Wong reported from Baghdad for this article, and James Glanz from Basra.
--------
S. Korean Is Beheaded in Iraq
In Seoul, Officials Say Hostage's Slaying Will Not Deter Troop Deployment
By Jackie Spinner and Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62068-2004Jun22?language=printer
BAGHDAD, June 23 -- Kidnappers beheaded a South Korean civilian who had been held captive since last week after the government in Seoul rejected a demand that its troops be withdrawn from the international military force in Iraq, South Korean officials said Wednesday.
U.S. soldiers found the body of Kim Sun Il, 33, at 5:20 p.m. Tuesday on the side of a road between Baghdad and Fallujah, the city west of Iraq's capital where Kim was abducted last Thursday. The South Korean Embassy in Baghdad confirmed that the body was Kim's.
Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said in a statement: "It appears that the body had been thrown from a vehicle. The man had been beheaded, and the head was recovered with the body."
Kim's captors, a group that identified itself as Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad, had threatened in a videotape released late Sunday to kill him unless South Korea agreed to withdraw the 660 troops it has in Iraq and cancel a planned deployment of 3,000 additional forces to northern Iraq.
In the video, Kim was shown pleading for his life. "I don't want to die. I don't want to die," Kim screamed. Pleading for South Korean soldiers to leave Iraq, he said: "I know that your life is important, but my life is important."
The South Korean government rejected the demand Monday and attempted to negotiate for Kim's release. On Tuesday, in another videotape broadcast by al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television network, the same group said it had beheaded Kim.
The group, headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian linked by U.S. officials to al Qaeda, also asserted responsibility for the beheading last month of an American businessman, Nicholas Berg. In Saudi Arabia, a group claiming affiliation with al Qaeda said it was behind the beheading of another American, Paul M. Johnson Jr., whose decapitated corpse was found Friday on the outskirts of Riyadh, the Saudi capital.
Kim, an evangelical Christian who had studied Arabic, English and theology, was working as a translator for a South Korean contractor that provided supplies to the U.S. military in Iraq. His family said he was hoping to save enough money to fulfill his dream of becoming a missionary in the Middle East.
President Bush on Tuesday condemned the beheading as "barbaric" and said he remained confident that South Korea would go ahead with plans to send troops to Iraq. "The free world cannot be intimidated by the brutal actions of these barbaric people," Bush said.
In Seoul, the semi-official Yonhap news agency said President Roh Moo Hyun was told of Kim's slaying at about 1 a.m. Wednesday. Roh appeared stunned by the news, according to the news agency, having received an upbeat briefing on the prospects for Kim's release a few hours earlier by Vice Foreign Minister Choi Young Jin.
In brief, nationally televised remarks later Wednesday, Roh said he felt "heartbroken" over the killing but added: "We shouldn't let them achieve what they want through terrorism. We strongly denounce such an act of terror and are firmly determined to cope with it in conjunction with the international community," according to the Reuters news agency.
The death "breaks our heart," Shin Bong Kil, a South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in announcing Kim's death.
In the video broadcast on al-Jazeera on Tuesday, five hooded men -- two armed with guns and another with a sword -- surrounded a kneeling man, believed to be Kim. He was dressed in an orange jumpsuit similar to those worn by prisoners and blindfolded with a strip of cloth. The broadcast did not show the beheading, but a spokesman for al-Jazeera said a subsequent unaired portion of the tape showed one of the men cutting off Kim's head with a knife, Reuters reported.
On the video, one of Kim's captors delivered a message to the South Korean people, saying: "Stop lying. Stop deceiving, because your army is not here for the Iraqis. It is for the Americans."
In a news briefing early Wednesday, Shin told reporters that "our government's basic spirit and position has not changed. We confirm that again, because our troop deployment is for reconstruction and humanitarian aid support for Iraq."
But Kim's death appeared almost certain to broaden opposition in South Korea to the country's already unpopular involvement in Iraq. Public opinion polls show that more than 56 percent of the population opposes the troop deployment. More than a thousand South Koreans took to the streets for a second day on Tuesday, demanding a withdrawal from Iraq, while hundreds more took part in candlelight vigils for Kim.
Most South Koreans were asleep when Kim's death was reported at about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday. Television networks quickly turned their attention to the lower-middle-class home in Pusan, South Korea's second-largest city, where Kim's parents collapsed in grief and tears, lying prostrate before a traditional death altar they had arranged with his photo.
"How could it have come to this?" a tearful neighbor shouted at reporters as she consoled Kim's parents. "How can we have faith in the world anymore?"
A distraught college friend of Kim's demanded that the government explain why it failed to do more to win his release.
"We longed for his safe return with the candlelight vigils, and people were desperately praying, all in vain," said Lee Sang Hoon, 27. "I just can't believe this has happened. Somebody has got to take responsibility for this."
In Iraq, where the U.S.-led occupation is scheduled to hand over political authority to an interim Iraqi government at the end of the month, the beheading of Kim again brought home the deadly nature of a months-long campaign by insurgents to kidnap foreigners.
In addition, foreigners and Iraqis have been targets of almost daily bombings and assassinations in recent weeks, which continued Tuesday in the northern city of Mosul with the killings of the dean of the college of law at Mosul University and her husband. Layla Abdulla Saeed and Moneer Yahya Ali Khairo were found dead outside their home, the U.S. military said.
Meanwhile, a U.S. military judge refused to grant a new preliminary hearing for a soldier accused of abusing detainees at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad but said he would allow defense attorneys to interview the top U.S. military commanders in Iraq about the scandal as the soldier's trial moved forward.
The rulings in the case against Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II were identical to the ones the judge, Col. James Pohl, made the day before in pretrial proceedings for two other soldiers charged with abuse.
Seven soldiers from the 372nd Military Police Company, based in Cresaptown, Md., have been charged with beating and humiliating detainees in U.S. custody at the prison.
Pohl had rescheduled Frederick's pretrial hearing for the end of next month after his civilian defense attorney failed to appear in court in Baghdad on Monday. But Frederick waived his right to have his civilian attorney present, and the judge took up the matter on Tuesday with Frederick and his military attorney, Capt. Robert Shuck.
Faiola reported from Seoul. Special correspondents Johee Cho in Seoul and Huda Ahmed Lazim in Baghdad contributed to this report.
--------
Peace activists find no peace in visit to Iraq
They say children are suffering most
The Capital Times
By Samara Kalk Derby
June 23, 2004
http://www.madison.com/captimes/news/stories/76950.php
Madison resident Marion Stuenkel (right) tours the al-Khadhimya neighborhood in Baghdad in April with Stewart Vreisinga, a Canadian who is a permanent member of the Christian Peacemaker Teams. Stuenkel is the secretary of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice. (Contributed photo)
Everyday life in Iraq is nothing like what Americans see on TV and read in their newspapers, Marion Stuenkel told a nearly full house Tuesday night at the Wil-Mar Center on the east side.
There was a disconnect, the Madison resident said; "I felt that I was living in a parallel universe the whole time I was there."
Stuenkel, the secretary of the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, was in Iraq for 11 days in April as a delegate of the Christian Peacemaker Teams, which support violence reduction efforts around the world.
She said everyone she met knew someone tortured by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and also someone detained or killed by U. S. forces, Stuenkel said. She said she met 4-year-old and 8-year-old children with bullet wounds to the head.
While she was in Iraq, coalition troops invaded Fallujah. "It was the My Lai of this war. We were committing a massacre in Fallujah," she said.
"The soldiers are going to come home after doing terrible things. They are going to come home to us broken."
The people of Iraq are grateful that Saddam Hussein is gone. And a year ago they were filled with hope, she said, but that is not the case now.
When she returned home, Stuenkel said she got rid of her TV.
"It's all lies. You might as well just turn it off," she said to loud applause from an audience of about 60 people who attended the Madison Area Peace Coalition forum, "The Occupation of Iraq Must End: Two Voices Say Why."
The other voice was that of George Martin of Milwaukee, the program director for Peace Action Wisconsin and an active member of the Green Party. Martin was in Baghdad for two weeks in January as part of a delegation from the Coalition United for Peace and Justice.
"It was so much worse than I expected," Martin said.
On television, Americans see images of violence, military vehicles and personnel, and Iraqi men in the streets, he said.
But the reality is that more than half the population of Iraq is under 14, and these children are bearing the brunt of the occupation, Martin said. "We don't see that."
On American television screens, the attack on Baghdad looked like fireworks on the Fourth of July, Martin said.
"We didn't see the death. We didn't see the destruction. We didn't see the hundreds of thousands of children who cannot sleep at night because of post-traumatic stress."
The Iraqis Martin talked to reported that the U.S. military would conduct home searches in the early morning hours when families were asleep. They told him soldiers would steal the little money and jewelry the people had.
Martin said U.S. soldiers encouraged the Iraqi looting and thievery that took place after the initial "shock and awe" military blitz. "We said, 'Go get 'em, Ali Baba,' " he asserted.
Both Martin and Stuenkel called for the United States to get out of Iraq now.
"We hear the argument that if we leave, there will be a civil war," Martin said. "But it couldn't get any worse." The people he talked to in Iraq want to take charge of their own destiny, he said.
During a question-and-answer session, a young man in the crowd asked what to make of the idea that America is exporting democracy to Iraq.
Activist and Vietnam veteran Will Williams, sitting in the back of the room, piped up.
America is governed by powerful corporations that pull the strings of its politicians, he said. Before the war in Iraq there were protests around the world, and the people were ignored.
"If democracy in Iraq is anything like it is here, they are better off without it."
E-mail: skalk@madison.com
-------- israel / palestine
U.S. Urges Israel to Begin Dismantling Outposts in the West Bank
June 23, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/international/middleeast/23mide.html
JERUSALEM, June 22 - The United States wants Israel to follow through with a pledge to dismantle settlement outposts in the West Bank, the American ambassador to Israel said Tuesday.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to evacuate all Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip has focused attention on the coastal territory. But Ambassador Daniel C. Kurtzer said the United States was also looking for Israeli action on the informal outposts and the formal settlements in the West Bank.
"These are commitments undertaken by Israel," Mr. Kurtzer said in an interview with Israeli Army Radio. "They are not as a result of any kind of pressure from our side, so this is something Israel undertook to do and therefore, sure, we expect them to be fulfilled."
The Bush administration has been broadly supportive of Israel, but it has regularly raised the issue of settlements, where the overall Jewish population continues to increase by roughly 10,000 residents a year.
Jewish settlers have erected about 60 informal outposts in the West Bank since March 2001, when Mr. Sharon came to power, according to Peace Now, an Israeli monitoring group. Most consist of just a few mobile homes on isolated hilltops, but some include permanent homes.
Some outposts also have electricity, water, telephone lines and paved roads provided by the government.
A senior Israeli official said recently that there were about 25 "illegal outposts'' in the West Bank and that Israel was committed to tearing them down.
Mr. Sharon made the pledge a year ago when Israel and the Palestinians accepted the so-called road map, a peace plan drawn up by the United States with broad international backing.
The plan calls for taking down all settlement outposts built since March 2001, and for Israel to freeze the expansion of the formal settlements.
But the plan stalled amid continuing violence shortly after its inception in June 2003. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have met their obligations in the first phase of the plan.
The main requirement for the Palestinians is for them to begin breaking up factions responsible for violence against Israel.
Israel's High Court of Justice issued a temporary injunction on Monday preventing the government from dismantling Givat Haroeh, one of the larger West Bank outposts, with about 70 residents.
Yariv Oppenheimer, an official with Peace Now, said Mr. Sharon's government had periodically dismantled small outposts, but had avoided taking down the larger ones.
"Some outposts are becoming real settlements, and it will become harder and harder to remove them," Mr. Oppenheimer said.
While Mr. Sharon's Gaza withdrawal plan calls for removing all 7,500 Jewish settlers in that territory, he has said that he will seek to consolidate Israel's hold on the West Bank settlements, where some 230,000 settlers live.
The Palestinians are demanding the removal of all Israeli settlements, and are seeking all of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank for a future state.
In violence on Tuesday, Israeli forces in northern Gaza shot and killed two Palestinians near the town of Beit Hanun, The Associated Press reported, citing Palestinian security officials.
The Israeli military said it fired on two armed Palestinians who approached an army patrol.
--------
Israel Probes Army Abuse Claims in Photo Exhibit
June 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-abuse.html
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - The Israeli army grilled a group of ex-conscripts on Wednesday over a photo exhibition they say documents abuses of Palestinians by troops and Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
The army said it was probing the allegations raised by ``Breaking the Silence: Soldiers Tell About Hebron'' -- a display of photographs and videotaped accounts collected by the four troopers in the flashpoint city.
But exhibition organizers accused authorities of hushing up criticism of Israel's action to suppress a 3-1/2-year-old Palestinian uprising.
``I think there is an attempt here to prevent other soldiers from breaking the silence,'' said Giora Salmi, director of the Tel Aviv gallery staging the exhibition.
One picture from Hebron, where troops guard 500 hardline settlers who live ensconced among 150,000 Palestinians, shows soldiers lounging near a blindfolded detainee.
In another, a Palestinian is caught in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle. Several photographs are of anti-Arab graffiti scrawled by settlers on Hebron homes.
The confessionals also contain serious allegations.
In one video, a soldier whose face and voice are obscured recalls a comrade firing teargas into Palestinian crowds in Hebron, unprovoked. ``He got a big kick out of it,'' the soldier says.
Salmi said the four organizers were being interrogated by military police who confiscated one of the exhibit's videotapes on Tuesday.
A military spokeswoman said they had been called in to testify in a criminal investigation of the allegations.
``The Israel Defense Force (IDF) sees in the exhibit a need for continued concern with moral issues,'' she said.
One of the organizers, Yehuda Shaul, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that his superiors in Hebron showed little interest in keeping soldiers to the army's code of conduct.
``There were a lot of people there, the next generation of IDF commanders, who weren't open at all to questions of ethics. For them, the slogan 'war is war' was a satisfying answer to everything,'' said Shaul, a former non-commissioned officer.
Palestinians and human rights groups have frequently accused the Israeli army of using excessive force and overlooking abuses by troops and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israeli officials say security forces have been strained by Palestinian suicide bombings and that infractions are rare.
--------
Egyptian Envoy Tries to Push Israel Plan
Associated Press
By JOSEF FEDERMAN
June 23, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
JERUSALEM (AP) -- An Egyptian envoy presented a detailed timetable to Israeli and Palestinian leaders Wednesday on how to secure the Gaza Strip, including the calling of a cease-fire by Palestinian militants in September.
Palestinian officials said they welcomed the proposals, delivered by Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman. However, Israeli officials were skeptical about Egyptian assurances that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is on board.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon plans to pull out of Gaza by September 2005, but refuses to negotiate with the Palestinians. He has asked Egypt, which borders Gaza, to help guarantee security in the territory. Sharon, meanwhile, said he has no intention of ever allowing Arafat to leave his West Bank headquarters. The prime minister told advisers in a closed-door meeting Wednesday that he will not allow 74-year-old Yasser Arafat to leave his office in the West Bank town of Ramallah "for the next 45 years," participants said.
Arafat has been confined to his compound for more than two years. In its mediation, Egypt has proposed allowing Arafat to move to Gaza, saying his presence there would help maintain order after an Israeli withdrawal.
Suleiman met with both sides Wednesday and laid out a detailed timetable for the coming months, said Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, a participant in the talks.
Qureia said 30 Palestinian security officers would undergo training in Egypt in July and August. The schedule calls on Palestinian militant groups, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to commit to a cease-fire by September. Shortly thereafter, some 200 Egyptian advisers would arrive in Gaza to train the Palestinian security forces. By September, the Palestinians will also have to present a detailed plan on reforming the security services, officials said.
The Israeli participants, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Egypt also pledged to collect weapons and dismantle the militant groups and to halt Palestinian incitement. Israeli TV reports said that phase would begin in eight months.
Palestinian officials said Arafat has delivered a security reform plan, under which Maj. Gen. Abdel Razek Majaidie, a long-time Arafat loyalist, would serve as overall security chief in the Gaza Strip. Arafat would remain firmly in control, the officials said.
Suleiman said he was "very satisfied" after his talks with Arafat.
But Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who met Suleiman later Wednesday, was skeptical. Israel accuses Arafat of supporting attacks on Israelis.
"If Arafat's commitment is real, then it will be the first time that such a thing really happens," Shalom said. "But after knowing Arafat for so many years, I don't see Arafat coming through on this occasion either." He said Israel would be pleased if "the Egyptians manage to convince Arafat to fight these terror organizations."
Militants have killed hundreds of Israelis in nearly four years of fighting. The road map requires the Palestinians to dismantle militias, but Palestinian leaders have refused, saying a crackdown would spark a civil war.
-------
Israel Won't Let Egypt Push Peace Talks
Associated Press
By RAMIT PLUSHNICK-MASTI
Jun 23, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Wednesday he welcomed Egypt's efforts to work out security arrangements for the Gaza Strip after an Israeli withdrawal, but he would not let himself be pushed into new negotiations with the Palestinians.
Egypt has been negotiating with Israel and the Palestinians to prevent Gaza from collapsing into chaos following the pullout planned for next year. Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman met with Palestinian officials Wednesday and planned to meet later with Israeli officials to discuss the withdrawal.
Sharon said the talks with Suleiman will focus on security and the prevention of arms smuggling into Gaza. Israeli officials said they would not accept Egypt's demand to halt military strikes in Gaza once a delegation of 200 Egyptian security advisers arrives to train Palestinian security forces.
Sharon told government officials he welcomed Egyptian security efforts in Gaza, but would not allow Egypt to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians, according to officials in the meeting. Sharon has insisted he would not negotiate his unilateral withdrawal plan with the Palestinians, saying they are uninterested in peace.
"I don't plan to allow the Egyptians to become mediators between Israel and the Palestinians or to put on the agenda general Israeli-Palestinian peace talks or, at this point, an Israel-Palestinian process in Gaza," he said, according to the officials. "The dangers of such negotiations are greater than the benefits of Egypt's involvement."
Egypt is key to Sharon's plan, helping to ensure that the Islamic militant group Hamas does not come to power in the volatile territory.
As part of its security plan for Gaza, Egypt has pushed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to reform his security forces and give up much of his control over them.
Arafat has resisted such demands in the past, but recently indicated he might comply. If he stalls, he risks losing the support of Egypt, one of his few remaining allies.
After meeting with Arafat on Wednesday, Suleiman pronounced himself "very satisfied" with what he was told, and said the Egyptian advisers were coming "within months." He did not elaborate.
Assistant U.S. Secretary of State William Burns met with the Egyptian foreign minister and said Israel's planned disengagement was a step toward implementing the American-backed Middle East road map to peace.
"We have no illusions about the difficulties in this path," Burns said.
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.
Earlier this week, Palestinian militant factions, which would have to agree to a cease-fire as part of the Egyptian plan, announced that they oppose any Egyptian security role in Gaza.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath tried to soften the growing criticism of the Egyptian role, and welcomed Cairo's assistance. "They (the Egyptians) are coming as advisers and as experts, not as rulers," he said.
Shaath said Arafat has accepted the Egyptian security proposals in general, but gave no evidence a plan had been prepared.
Suleiman met Wednesday with Arafat in Ramallah after talking with U.N. mediators. He later was to meet with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz.
Israeli officials said they would tell Suleiman they would not make a blanket promise to halt military strikes in the Gaza Strip once Egyptian advisers are deployed there. However, Israel will propose a compromise that should enable the sides to agree on security arrangements for Gaza, an official said on condition of anonymity.
"Without doubt some of the Egyptian conditions are unacceptable, but that's part of the issue," Shalom told Israel Radio on Wednesday.
Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel needed to retain control over Gaza's border crossings - a move Palestinians say will seal them in a virtual prison - to prevent Gazans from stockpiling missiles and other weapons to attack Israel.
"I think that to rely on Egypt is very problematic," he told Army Radio.
In new Gaza violence, Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun shot and killed a Palestinian man.
Palestinian hospital officials said Ibrahim Sada, 21, was killed by random machine gun fire from Israeli tanks in the area. The army said it fired at a group of armed men in the area and identified hitting one.
Israeli troops have been operating in the area near the border since Tuesday, uprooting orange trees to pave a new road, Palestinians said.
The troops killed two Palestinians there Tuesday. The army said it had fired at two gunmen who approached its soldiers. Palestinians said the two were killed when soldiers fired a tank shell at a group of people during a military operation.
Also Wednesday, the army killed a man in the West Bank city of Nablus. The army said troops shot the man when he pulled a pistol on them as they tried to arrest him. The troops also arrested a top Islamic Jihad official in the city, the army said.
-------- mideast
Saudis Offer Militants One-Month Amnesty
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Saudi-Terrorism.html?hp
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- Saudi Arabia offered Islamic militants a limited amnesty on Wednesday, saying their lives would be spared if they surrendered but they would face the ``full might'' of state wrath if they did not.
They must surrender within a month, Crown Prince Abdullah said, reading a statement from his half brother, King Fahd, on state television. Abdullah said the offer was open to anyone who has not yet been ``arrested for carrying out terrorist acts.''
``We are opening the door of amnesty ... to everyone who deviated from the path of right and committed a crime in the name of religion,'' he said.
``We swear by God that nothing will prevent us from striking with our full might, which we derive from depending on God,'' anyone who ignores the offer, Abdullah said.
Saudi Arabia has suffered a series of suicide bombings, gunbattles and kidnappings since May last year, which have particularly targeted foreign workers in the kingdom. The attacks have blamed on al-Qaida and sympathizers of the anti-Western terror network.
The most recent attack was the June 12 kidnapping of American engineer Paul M. Johnson Jr. Six days later he was beheaded after the government rejected the kidnappers' demand that it release all its detained militants.
At a news conference earlier Wednesday, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud said calls for Saudis to wage holy war in Iraq were illegitimate and that the kingdom would not permit its citizens to go to the neighboring state to fight the U.S.-led forces.
Saudi newspapers have published obituaries and reports of funerals for Saudis who are said to have died fighting the occupying forces in Iraq.
``We don't allow that,'' Prince Saud said when asked about Saudis fighting in Iraq. ``Why should people go to Iraq for a holy war? Iraq is a Muslim country and the only religious duty in Iraq should be to help the Iraqi people. Any call for holy war (in Iraq) is illegitimate.''
He did not say what measures the kingdom was taking to stop Saudis from going to Iraq to fight.
Prince Saud condemned Tuesday's beheading of a South Korean, Kim Sun-il, whom militants had kidnapped in Iraq.
His execution proves ``terrorism has no conscience. ... These people have no human values, they are far away from Islam,'' the foreign minister said.
In a video tape of the South Korean hostage, a kidnapper spoke with an Arabic dialect and accent that suggested he was from Saudi Arabia or a neighboring Gulf Arab state.
-------- nato
Iraqi PM requests NATO help, not troops
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Jun 23, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040623163045.waaq1opl.html
Iraqi prime minister Iyad Allawi has written to NATO seeking the military alliance's help in the form of training and other technical assistance, an official said Wednesday.
The letter made no mention of asking for soldiers to be sent, NATO sources added.
"Mr Allawi has indeed sent a letter to the alliance asking for NATO assistance, in the form of training and other forms of technical assistance," the official told AFP.
The letter was received Monday and has been transmitted to NATO member states for consideration by NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, added the official, requesting anonymity.
The request comes days ahead of a North Atlantic Treaty Organizationsummit in Istanbul next week at which the United States is pressing for the alliance to play a greater role in Iraq.
US President George W. Bush recently suggested that the US-led alliance could help train Iraqi security personnel and the new army, an area in which it has considerable expertise.
At this month's G8 summit, French President Jacques Chirac appeared to leave open that possibility, while affirming that intervention in Iraq was not NATO's job.
Asked what sort of training NATO could provide, the official at the alliance's Brussels headquarters said: "I would guess it would go in the direction of armed forces.
"NATO is not really in the police business," he said.
The official declined to predict what the response will be from NATO leaders preparing to gather in Istanbul for the two-day summit next Monday.
"I can't anticipate decisions that will take place at Istanbul," he said. "But certainly allies are considering the request and discussing it and will have of course a very fulsome discussion on this subject at Istanbul."
The now 26-member alliance was plunged into the most serious crisis of its 55-year history in the run-up to last year's Iraq war, when a group of countries led by France and Germany opposed US plans for NATO to help Turkey.
-----
NATO develops joint antiterror package
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Bill Gertz
June 23, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040622-113725-1407r.htm
The NATO military alliance is stepping up cooperative efforts to fight terrorism with a plan for new defenses aimed at protecting ports from attack, stopping homemade bombs and creating new methods of sending commandos into hot spots.
The package of programs will be presented at the NATO summit set to begin Monday in Istanbul, and heads of state and defense ministers of the 26 NATO members are likely to approve it, according to a senior alliance official.
"There is a pressing need to combat terrorist organizations and provide the right mix of offensive and defensive capabilities to NATO troops in the field," the official said.
If formally approved, it will be the first time that NATO has agreed to carry out a collaborative arms and defense development program, the official said.
"The eight measures signal the determination that the alliance has to meet the terrorist threat to the alliance head-on," said the official, noting that the danger of Islamist and other terrorism is "present and growing."
The official said the eight-point defense package was developed by NATO's Conference of National Armaments Directors and includes:
•Reducing the vulnerability of large aircraft to portable missiles.
•Developing countermeasures to improvised explosive devices, such as nerve-gas and car bombs.
•Creating precision air-drop technology that will help NATO commandos conduct pinpoint drops on terrorist targets, such as houses and caves.
•Stepping up defenses at ports and harbors.
•Developing new aircraft defenses for helicopters, such as protecting rotary-wing planes from rocket-propelled grenades.
•Making better detectors, protective gear and equipment, and weapons that can combat chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear bombs.
•Developing new technology for intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance and apprehension of terrorists.
•Creating new methods of explosive-ordnance disposal and post-attack planning.
Unlike the European Union, whose members are divided over which measures to use in combating terrorism, NATO militaries are united in the new armaments program, the official said.
"The French, Germans and Italians are all good players in this," he said. The Italian military is expected to take the lead in protecting harbors and ports from terrorist attacks, and the Spanish are working on systems to defeat improvised bombs.
Slovakia's military, which specialized in making guns and ammunition when it was part of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, will team with Norway to work on explosive-ordnance disposal.
The Czech Republic will take the lead on dealing with chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats.
France's military, which does not contribute to NATO forces, is expected to assist.
The U.S. military will contribute to all eight areas, but is not expected to focus on a single defense capability, the official said.
Alliance leaders also are expected to discuss plans for the NATO mission in Afghanistan, where a force is based in the capital, Kabul.
A NATO role in Iraq also could be on the agenda.
Other key issues will be NATO's development of a joint missile-defense command structure, the first step in deploying missile defenses to shield NATO troops from missile attacks.
"We've now agreed to a detailed technical blueprint for theater missile defense for NATO," the senior official said. The blueprint is a battle-management system for NATO to use missile defenses in the future.
NATO leaders also will discuss a new allied ground surveillance program, a multibillion-dollar plan to set up a system of unmanned aerial vehicles and aircraft to provide ground targeting data.
NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in London on Friday that the alliance needs to improve its ability to dispatch forces.
"Missions such as Afghanistan present wholly new challenges in terms of generating forces," he said. "We have never done anything quite like this before, and it should not be a surprise that there are challenges."
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Army Says 30 Tribesmen Killed
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-al-Qaida-Hunt.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Army troops killed 30 tribesman suspected of shielding al-Qaida fugitives, a senior Pakistani security official said Wednesday, bringing the death toll from a counterterrorism sweep along the Afghan border to 100.
As many as 70 ``foreign terrorists'' were also killed in the operation, which ended last week, said Brig. Mahmood Shah, the head of security in Pakistan's northwestern tribal regions. He told The Associated Press that it was unclear whether any leading al-Qaida figures were among the dead.
Among the dead were Nek Mohammed, a renegade tribal leader accused of sheltering al-Qaida fugitives. He was killed last week in a missile strike on a mud-brick compound near Wana, the main town in South Waziristan. Six other people died in the assault.
Shah said Mohammed was a ``criminal'' who supported al-Qaida suspects for ``monetary gains.''
Mohammed led resistance against a massive Pakistani military operation in South Waziristan in March in which 120 people were killed, including 48 security forces.
In an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., Mohammed called for the overthrow of the Pakistani and Afghan governments.
Shah said the tribal leader admitted he was behind attacks on army troops in South Waziristan and Karachi, where a senior military official earlier this month escaped an assassination attempt.
He later agreed to cooperate with the government and turn over foreign militants, but reneged.
``He was given enough time to change himself, but he wasted the opportunity,'' Shah said.
After Mohammed's death, local tribesmen were helping Pakistani authorities in their efforts to find al-Qaida figures ``more willingly,'' Shah said.
He said troops had searched 172 homes in border regions in the past two weeks, but no militants or weapons were found.
Afghan officials and the U.S. military, which is pursuing al-Qaida on the Afghan side of the border, have pressed Islamabad to step up military activity in the lawless border regions. The area is considered a possible hideout for al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden.
-------- prisoners of war
Legal, Not Physical, Hussein Transfer Described by Aide
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/international/middleeast/23SADD.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 22 (AP) - The United States will transfer legal custody of Saddam Hussein and other top prisoners to Iraqi authorities as soon as Iraqi courts issue the necessary warrants, an American official said Tuesday.
But American forces will not let go of the former dictator, even after Iraq regains sovereignty next week, because it does not have a prison strong enough to hold him, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
American forces will honor transfer-of-custody requests from Iraq's new government, which takes power June 30, as long as they are accompanied by arrest warrants from an Iraqi court, the official said in a legal briefing with reporters.
Details of the transfer will be laid out in a memorandum of understanding between American-led multinational forces and the newly appointed Iraqi interim government, he said.
American forces need to keep Mr. Hussein and other top figures from his government in prison for their own safety and to secure them against escape, the official said.
Once his legal custody shifts, Mr. Hussein will lose his prisoner of war status and will be considered an accused criminal. He will win due process rights, including access to a lawyer, and will be subject to questioning by an investigating judge from the special Iraqi war crimes tribunal, the official said.
American troops captured Mr. Hussein in December near his hometown of Tikrit.
In the meantime, the International Committee of the Red Cross is pressing United States authorities to release three letters Mr. Hussein wrote to his family while in captivity, saying the usual censorship process has been inexplicably delayed.
Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the Red Cross delegation to Iraq, said Tuesday that the letters had been given to American authorities for checking, as the Geneva Conventions provide, but had apparently never been forwarded as addressed.
--------
Saddam's Prison Letter
The captive Iraqi tells his family to 'say hello to everyone'-and his lawyer claims that the former dictator's human rights are being violated in jail
Newsweek By Rod Nordland
June 23, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5270914/site/newsweek/
June 22 - Military censors have blacked out nine of the 14 lines. But in what remains of his letter, Saddam Hussein assures his family that "my spirit and my morale, they are high, thanks to greatness of God."
The message-apparently the first and only letter the former Iraqi dictator has sent to his family since his capture last December-is on a standard "family message" form provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). It is addressed simply "to my daughter," and was delivered to the family by the ICRC after they visited Saddam on Feb. 21. The letter, apparently in Saddam's handwriting, was shown to NEWSWEEK by Muhammed al Rushadan, a Jordanian lawyer retained by Saddam's family.
Rushadan is currently on a visit to the United States, where he hopes to make the case that his client's human rights are being violated and that he's being held in violation of the Geneva Conventions. In addition, says Rushadan, he believes Saddam is being mistreated like some of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib were. "There are fresh wounds on his body," he said, citing a Red Cross document he claims to have. "I say to the ICRC that you should do your job under Article 10 of the Geneva Conventions, or you should quit your job."
The document in question, produced by Rushadan on Sunday shortly before the lawyer left for New York to lobby the U.S. media, actually turns out to be what the ICRC calls a "capture card," a form that detainees fill out and which authorities use to report their detention to the Red Cross, which makes inspection visits and carries letters for prisoners. Apparently signed by Saddam and dated Jan. 21, 2004,-more than five weeks after U.S. forces pulled him from a spider hole near his hometown of Tikrit-the card carries two check marks in the four boxes listed under the heading "Internee's/detainee's health." One of the selected boxes lists the prisoner as being in "good health;" the other notes that he is "slightly wounded."
Rushadan seizes on the "slightly wounded" notation to say that this proves Saddam had been mistreated after his capture more than a month earlier, saying that the light wounds he suffered being pulled out of his spider hole in December would have healed by then: "These must be fresh wounds." The lawyer offers no other proof to back up his assertion, and it is uncertain whether the capture card was filled out by Saddam himself or whether it represents an independent assessment of his condition. U.S. military authorities have said repeatedly that the Iraqi is being treated humanely.
Aside from the section on health, the card lists his name, his occupation ("President of the Republic of Iraq") and his rank ("Field Marshal"). The form does not note whether he is a prisoner of war, civilian internee, security detainee or common-law prisoner-the four choices on the card. It also does not detail his place of detention, a secret prison somewhere in Iraq, probably a facility close to Baghdad International Airport.
Photos by Robert King-Zuma for Newsweek Nada Doumani, a spokesman for the ICRC in Iraq, said that the capture card is a blank form that the agency distributes and its staff are not in a position to verify the information in it. She had no comment about Saddam's condition, citing ICRC policy to discuss the conditions of detention only with the detaining authority. Saddam, she said, was first visited by ICRC representatives on Feb. 21, a month after the date on the capture card, and has been visited twice since then-about the frequency that is normal for Red Cross visits to detainees. She confirmed also that Saddam is in Iraq, though could not divulge where.
--------
Afghan detainees routinely tortured and humiliated by US troops
The Guardian
Duncan Campbell and Suzanne Goldenberg
Wednesday June 23, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,1245236,00.html
Detainees held in Afghanistan by American troops have been routinely tortured and humiliated as part of the interrogation process, in the same way as those in Iraq, a Guardian investigation has found.
Five detainees have died in custody, three of them in suspicious circumstances, and survivors have told stories of beatings, strippings, hoodings and sleep deprivation.
The nature of the alleged abuse indicates that what happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was part of a pattern of interrogation that has been common practice since the US invasion of Afghanistan.
Yesterday, in an attempt to stem charges that senior officials in the Bush admin-istration condoned the use of torture in the war on terror, the White House released hundreds of pages of documents outlining its internal deliberations on interrogation.
The memos, which originated at the Pentagon, the White House and the justice department and date from January 2002 to April last year, were intended to show that the president and his aides insisted that detainees at Guantánamo Bay should be treated humanely.
But one such memo leaked earlier this month said that Mr Bush had the legal authority to allow torture, giving new impetus to a campaign by human rights organisations and Democrats.
Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic member of the Senate subcommittee on foreign operations, told the Guardian that prisoners in Afghanistan "were subjected to cruel and degrading treatment, and some died from it".
"These abuses were part of a wider pattern stemming from a White House attitude that 'anything goes' in the war against terrorism, even if it crosses the line of illegality."
Syed Nabi Siddiqi, a former police officer, said he was beaten and stripped. "They took off my uniform. I showed them my identity card from the government... Then they asked me which of those animals - they made the noise of goats, sheep, dogs, cows - have you had sexual activities with?"
A second detainee, Noor Aghah, said he was forced to drink bottles and bottles of water during his interrogation.
Another prisoner, Wazir Muhammad, was held for nearly two years, firstly in Afghanistan and then at Guantánamo Bay.
"At the end of my time in Guantánamo, I had to sign a paper saying I had been captured in battle, which was not true," he said. "I was stopped when I was in my taxi with four passengers. But they told me I would have to spend the rest of my life in Guantánamo if I did not sign it, so I did."
Parts of an inquiry by Brigadier General Chuck Jacoby into allegations of abuse in custody are to be made public next month by the head of the US forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General David Barno.
Gen Barno said: "I will tell you without hesitation that intelligence procedures have got to be done in accordance with the appropriate standards _ all our forces will treat every detainee here with dignity and respect."
The network of US detention centres around Afghanistan has largely avoided scrutiny, yet, according to the coalition forces last week, more than 2,000 people have been detained there since the war.
"In some ways the abuses in Afghanistan are more troubling than those in Iraq," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch. "While it is true that abuses in Afghanistan often lacked the sexually abusive content of the abuses in Iraq, they were in many ways worse.
"Detainees were severely beaten, exposed to cold and deprived of sleep and water. Five are known to have died [two of natural causes]."
-------- russia / chechnya
Major Raid Kills 57 in Ingushetia
Overnight Attacks By Chechen Rebels Target Authorities
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61864-2004Jun22.html
MOSCOW, June 22 -- Heavily armed guerrillas from Chechnya assaulted Russian and local installations in a neighboring region Tuesday, touching off fighting that killed at least 57 people in the deadliest incursion outside Chechen borders in five years.
Between 100 and 200 fighters opened fire with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades on targets in three towns in Ingushetia in orchestrated overnight attacks before vanishing as quickly as they had appeared. Among the dead were the region's acting interior minister, killed in his car as he sped to his headquarters, two prosecutors and a U.N. aid worker.
President Vladimir Putin flew to Ingushetia to inspect the scarred region and ordered in a military detachment to restore order and help hunt down the attackers. "They need to be found and wiped out," the president said in televised remarks at the Kremlin before he left, "and those who can be caught must be caught alive and brought to trial."
The attacks are another challenge to Putin's efforts to treat the decade-old Chechen conflict as largely finished and reestablish stability in the region. Overpowered on the conventional battlefield, Chechen rebels have increasingly turned to suicide bombings in southern Russia and Moscow, as well. Last month, Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, a Kremlin ally, was assassinated in a bombing during a parade at a soccer stadium in the capital, Grozny.
Now, for the first time in 20 months, local resistance forces have demonstrated that they can marshal a relatively large-scale attack and in Ingushetia they have chosen a relatively new combat zone. The war has gradually been slipping over into Ingushetia in the form of guerrilla attacks, random airstrikes, abductions and a failed assassination attempt against the region elected leader in April.
Russian officials tied Tuesday's attacks to Islamic extremism elsewhere in the world. "What it shows is that terrorist acts staged in various countries and regions have a logical connection between them," Putin's national security adviser, Igor Ivanov, said in an interview at the Kremlin. "Their goal is to destabilize the situation, to provoke the authorities to take certain steps that could later be used to justify their actions."
Local residents emerging from basements where they had hidden during a night of gunfire and explosions expressed fear that the war had now unmistakably arrived.
"The situation in Ingushetia was getting dramatically worse in the last several weeks," Yekaterina Sokirianskaya, an activist with the Moscow-based human rights group Memorial, said by telephone from Nazran, the main city in Ingushetia. "But nobody expected such an attack. People are afraid. It's obvious that the war has spilled over to Ingushetia already."
"It's going to be the same as in Chechnya," said Arsen Sakalov, the Ingushetia coordinator of another human rights group, the Chechen Justice Initiative. "This was the first step. The terrorists were testing the waters."
The incursion was reminiscent of a thrust by Chechen guerrillas into neighboring Dagestan in August 1999. That provoked Russian authorities to launch their second Chechen offensive in a decade and fueled Putin's rise to the office of prime minister and later the presidency. But this time, the attackers focused on striking law enforcement targets rather than seizing territory.
The attacks began at about 10:45 p.m. Monday in Nazran, as well as the villages of Karabulak and Sleptsovskaya, and continued past 3 a.m. Tuesday, according to officials and residents.
"We at first thought it was fireworks," Sokirianskaya said. "We thought it was someone's wedding or something. Then it got louder and louder and everyone got scared and turned their lights off. The air was thick with the smell of gunpowder."
The guerrillas seized several checkpoints and, impersonating police officers, began stopping cars. When one high-ranking prosecutor arrived at a checkpoint, the guerrillas demanded to know who he was, according to several accounts from the region. When he produced identification, the guerrillas shot him dead.
The acting head of the region's Interior Ministry, Abukhar Kostoyev, and his deputy were also shot in their cars as they drove to ministry headquarters after the attack, officials said.
"These people were not freedom fighters," declared Alexei Baigushkin, spokesman for the local branch of the Federal Security Service, Russia's domestic intelligence agency. "They're regular bandits." The bodies of five slain officers from the service were mutilated, he said. The attackers "killed without any pity."
Baigushkin said in an interview that some guerrillas had disguised themselves as federal troops and conducted their own zachistka, or cleansing operation, in an Ingush village, imitating Russian troops who take away civilians, often to be tortured or killed. Instead of civilians, though, Baigushkin said the guerrillas went door to door checking documents and took away anyone connected to a law enforcement agency. Others raided an armory and drove away with three trucks loaded with weapons.
While guerrillas reportedly managed to seize part of the Interior Ministry building in Nazran, officials said 15 ministry troops fought them for six hours and prevented them from opening jail cells before the assailants retreated.
By early morning, a long column of armored vehicles and troop trucks was streaming into Ingushetia. Putin later ordered a new regiment of Interior Ministry troops to take up positions in Nazran and criticized subordinates. "Judging by everything that is going on here," he said after arriving, "the federal center is not doing enough to defend the republic."
According to authorities, 47 of the dead were police officers, prosecutors or other security agents. Just two attackers were reported killed. The rest of the dead were civilians. At least 60 other people were injured, officials said. After fighting subsided Tuesday morning, bodies and burned-out armored personnel carriers and cars were left in the streets.
The guerrillas included Chechens, Ingush and Russians, officials said; some asserted that a few Arab fighters also participated. Chechen commander Aslan Maskhadov recently warned that rebels would mount new operations, but his deputy, Akhmed Zakayev, told a Russian radio station that Maskhadov was not behind the latest attacks. Russian officials said they suspected guerrilla commander Shamil Basayev of orchestrating the operation, as he did the 1999 thrust into Dagestan.
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75 Die as Chechen Rebels Stage Raid Across Border
June 23, 2004
By C. J. CHIVERS and STEVEN LEE MYERS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/international/europe/23russ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
GROZNY, Russia, June 22 - An audacious overnight raid by heavily armed militants in a southern Russian republic neighboring Chechnya killed at least 75 people and wounded dozens more before the fighters withdrew with minimal losses and a cache of captured weapons, officials said Tuesday.
The raid, which began late Monday night with attacks against police and security posts across the republic of Ingushetia, was concentrated in the principal city, Nazran. It was the largest attack by Chechnya's 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, meeting with his law enforcement deputies in the Kremlin on Tuesday, vowed to retaliate for the raid, as he has before when the war in Chechnya has flared, though to little obvious effect. "We have to find and destroy them," he said in remarks broadcast on the state television channels. "Those whom it is possible to take alive must be brought to trial."
Underscoring the severity of the attack, Mr. Putin flew to Ingushetia and met with the president, Murat M. Zyazikov, and other officials. "Based on everything that is happening here, the federal center is not doing enough to protect the republic," Mr. Putin said in televised remarks. He ordered a regiment of Interior Ministry troops to Ingushetia, as well as additional army troops to bolster security at the republic's airport.
The death toll remained unclear Tuesday night, 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 more police officers were listed as missing. The office of Ingushetia's president said at least 28 civilians had died.
At least 100 militants seized the Interior Ministry's headquarters for several hours and destroyed several other security posts around Nazran and in two other cities before breaking off the raid and retreating early Tuesday, official accounts said.
Ingushetia's acting interior minister, Abukar Kostoyev, and his deputy were killed in the fighting. Two criminal investigators and four prosecutors died as they drove separately through an intersection controlled by militants in Nazran, according to news reports. A United Nations aid worker, Magomed Getagazov, was shot dead as he rode home in a taxi from work in the city, the organization's office in Moscow said.
In all, 200 militants were believed to have taken part in the attacks. According to two security officials interviewed in Mozdok, north of Ingushetia, only two militants died. New fighting was reported Tuesday 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 vehicles loaded with arms, ammunition and possibly explosives, most taken from the Interior Ministry, the officials said.
"The main goal was to get weapons," Sergei B. Prokopov, an official the with the regional prosecutor's office, said in an interview in Mozdok. Referring to fighting overnight 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 pocked by gunfire and the 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 conflict in Chechnya had spilled into Ingushetia. "What else can happen?" asked Raisa S. Pushtova, a doctor in a Nazran hospital where many of the wounded were taken.
She was treating four critically injured 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 widespread devastation on the streets, many of which remained blocked off.
"Most people are in their apartments, afraid to leave," she said by telephone 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 in an attempt to highlight the progress being made in Chechnya.
Only last week, Maj. Gen. Alu Alkhanov, Chechnya's interior minister and the frontrunner in the republic's coming presidential election, said no more than 500 rebels were still resisting federal and local forces in Chechnya. In Grozny on Tuesday, General Alkhanov denounced the attacks as an act of desperation.
"They have a desire to show their activity, to show the conflict is expanding," he said in an interview with reporters in his office in Grozny.
The Chechen separatist leader, Aslan Maskhadov, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty last week that the rebels would change tactics and focus on larger attacks. General Alkhanov said the effort would fail.
"I don't like to make predictions, but in my view, they gathered everything they could to show they still exist," he said. "They showed that today. From today on, appropriate work will start, and this bold work will be punished because innocent people died."
Despite a decade of conflict that first erupted in 1994, Chechnya's separatists have shown striking resilience, despite Russia's overwhelming military might. Scattered in the mountains and remote villages, the separatists have in recent years relied increasingly on suicide bombings or other terrorist attacks against Russians and Chechens loyal to Moscow. Only six weeks ago, a bomb hidden in a concrete pillar at Grozny's main stadium killed the republic's pro-Kremlin president, Akhmad Kadyrov.
In Grozny, Taus Dzhabrailov, the newly appointed chairman of the state council in Chechnya, said in an interview on Tuesday that the raid underscored the folly of negotiating an end to the conflict, as some have urged before elections to replace Mr. Kadyrov are held in August. "Do you think now is the time to be negotiating with these groups?" he asked.
C. J. Chivers reported from Grozny for this article, and Steven Lee Myers from Moscow. Rachel Thorner contributed reporting from Moscow.
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Spacewalk To Repair Station to Proceed
Astronauts to Use Russian Equipment
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61982-2004Jun22.html
The United States and Russia will proceed this week with a complicated and unprecedented spacewalk outside the international space station despite a last-minute dispute over the use of Russian equipment that threatened to delay things for a day, NASA engineers said yesterday.
The spacewalk by space station commander Gennady Padalka of Russia and science officer Mike Fincke of the United States, to replace a faulty circuit breaker, will be the first time that astronauts will use Russian spacesuits to work on the U.S. side of the station.
As a result, control of the six-hour walk will be overseen partly by controllers in Russia and partly by NASA in Houston, using two languages. The astronauts must make a long traverse from the Russian side of the station to the repair site on the U.S. side and may lose radio communications at some points. That could force them to use hand signals or to rendezvous at a predetermined "outpost" so they can resume speaking with ground controllers and each other.
The spacewalk is also only the second time that a U.S. astronaut will work outside without a third person to assist from within the spacecraft. A similar spacewalk in February ended prematurely when the cooling system malfunctioned in one of the Russian spacesuits.
The spacewalk has been planned for two months, since a circuit-breaker malfunction caused one of the station's four main gyroscopes to shut down. An earlier problem with another gyroscope left the station operating with only two, the minimum needed to keep the orbiting laboratory properly oriented.
Should another gyro fail, controllers could still position the station by using thrusters, but John Curry, lead flight director for the spacewalk, said in a news conference that "we don't want the thrusters to fire" during two other spacewalks planned for later in the year. Thruster fuel leaves a toxic residue, and the residue can become a hazard to the crew if it contaminates a spacesuit and is then carried into the space station.
The spacewalk is scheduled to begin Thursday at 5:50 p.m. Eastern time and to take six hours.
On Monday, it appeared that the walk would be delayed because of what Michael T. Suffredini, NASA international space station manager for integration and operations, called a "negotiation" with Russian officials over the in-kind compensation Russia will receive for the use of its equipment.
The 1998 memorandum of understanding signed between the United States and Russia established a barter arrangement for services provided for the space station by each nation. "We negotiate what we barter for the services," Suffredini said. "We try to balance out our contributions."
On Monday, Russian officials insisted that the in-kind compensation be agreed upon before the spacewalk goes forward, prompting NASA to announce that the spacewalk would be delayed for a day. However, Suffredini said at yesterday's news conference that the Russians had reconsidered and have agreed to proceed and "wrap up negotiations whenever we wrap up negotiations."
Complications in the planned spacewalk arose last month, when cooling systems in U.S. spacesuits also malfunctioned, rendering them unusable, and forcing Padalka and Fincke to revert to the Russian suits and the Russian airlock. That will require them to make a 45-minute transit across the Russian side of the station to reach the repair site.
The crippled circuit breaker is in a box about the size of a telephone book. It will be swapped out with another breaker box. If the gate protecting the breakers cannot be opened, the two astronauts will switch a cable to connect the affected gyroscope to a different circuit breaker.
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INTELLIGENCE INSIDER
Book by C.I.A. Officer Says U.S. Is Losing Fight Against Terror
June 23, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/politics/23INTE.html
WASHINGTON, June 22 - A new book by the senior Central Intelligence Agency officer who headed a special office to track Osama bin Laden and his followers warns that the United States is losing the war against radical Islam and that the invasion of Iraq has only played into the enemy's hands.
In the book, "Imperial Hubris," the author is identified only as "Anonymous," but former intelligence officials identified him as a 22-year veteran of the C.I.A. who is still serving in a senior counterterrorism post at the agency and headed the bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999.
The 309-page book, obtained by The New York Times, provides an unusual glimpse into a school of thought inside the C.I.A., and includes harsh criticism of both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
"U.S. leaders refuse to accept the obvious," the officer writes. "We are fighting a worldwide Islamic insurgency - not criminality or terrorism - and our policy and procedures have failed to make more than a modest dent in enemy forces."
The author says the threat is rooted in opposition not to American values, but to policies and actions, particularly in the Islamic world.
It is rare for a C.I.A. officer to publish a book while still serving at the agency and highly unusual for the book to focus on such a politically explosive topic. Under C.I.A. rules, the book had to be cleared by the agency before it could be published. It was approved for release on condition that the author and his internal agency not be identified.
The book itself identifies "Anonymous" only as "a senior U.S. intelligence official with nearly two decades of experience in national security issues related to Afghanistan and South Asia." It identifies a previous book, "Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America," as being written by the same author.
Former intelligence officials identified the officer to The Times and noted that he was an overt employee of the C.I.A., but an intelligence official asked that his full name not be published because it could make him a target of Al Qaeda.
The senior intelligence official said the book had been vetted to insure that it not include classified information. "We still have freedom of speech," the official said. "It doesn't mean that we endorse the book, but employees are free to express their opinions."
In a report issued in March, the staff of the Sept. 11 commission described the bin Laden unit as a place where a "sense of alarm about bin Laden was not widely shared or understood within the intelligence and policy communities." Another new book, "Ghost Wars," by Steve Coll of The Washington Post, was based in part on interviews with the officer, identified by his first name, Mike.
Mr. Coll reported that the White House sometimes complained to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, that the officer was "too myopic" in his approach to manage the bin Laden group.
In the book, the author denounced the American invasion of Iraq as "an avaricious, premeditated unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat," and said it would fuel the anti-American sentiments on which Mr. bin Laden and his followers draw. "There is nothing that bin Laden could have hoped for more than the American invasion and occupation of Iraq," he writes.
In warning that the United States is losing the war on terrorism, Anonymous writes: "In the period since 11 September, the United States has dealt lethal blows to Al Qaeda's leadership and - if official claims are true - have captured three thousand Al Qaeda foot soldiers." At the same time, he adds, "we have waged two failed half-wars and, in doing so, left Afghanistan and Iraq seething with anti-U.S. sentiment, fertile grounds for the expansion of Al Qaeda and kindred groups."
The bin Laden unit, or "station" in agency parlance, is part of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center. It was established in 1996 at the agency's headquarters in Virginia as part of an organizational experiment that marked the first time the agency had dedicated a station to an individual instead of a country. A staff report issued by the Sept. 11 commission in March, based in part on extensive interviews with the former station chief, described leaders of the station as having been deeply frustrated when a plan to capture Mr. bin Laden in the spring of 1998 was not recommended by the C.I.A.'s leadership for approval by the White House.
The chief and other leaders of the the bin Laden station were transferred from it in mid-1999, according to the Sept. 11 commission report, after morale in the unit sagged and President Clinton was informed by his national security adviser that covert actions against Mr. bin Laden had not been fruitful.
In the book's preface, the author appears to direct criticism not only at policymakers but also at his superiors in the intelligence agencies, including Mr. Tenet, who fended off criticism after the attacks before announcing this month that he would resign on July 11.
The author expresses "a pressing certainty that Al Qaeda will attack the continental United States again, that its next strike will be more damaging than that of 11 September 2001, and could include use of weapons of mass destruction."
"After the next attack," he adds, "misled Americans and their elected representatives will rightly demand the heads of intelligence-community leaders; that heads did not roll after 11 September is perhaps our most grievous post-attack error."
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Too Many Secrets, Says Secrecy Czar
J. William Leonard frets about the breakdown of the classification system.
MSN By Jack Shafer
June 23, 2004
http://slate.msn.com/id/2102855/
In a little-noticed mid-June speech, secrecy czar J. William Leonard fretted over signs of a breakdown of the classification system for national security.
Leonard heads the Information Security Oversight Office, the National Archives branch that develops classification and declassification policies at the behest of the president. In his talk, given at a classification training seminar, Leonard complains that the system has lost touch with the "basics": Some agencies don't know how much information they classify; they don't know whether they're classifying more than they once did or less; they don't know whether they're classifying too much or too little; and they don't know whether they're classifying material for too long a period or too short.
This quality-control breakdown has resulted in agencies classifying too much information and, in some cases, classifying information that by law shouldn't be stamped "secret" in the first place. Implying that the government classified the reports of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib to cover up the scandal, Leonard says:
[I]n no case can information be classified in order to conceal violations of law or to prevent embarrassment to a person, organization or agency. ... Specifically, "exactly from whom are we keeping the information secret?" In the case of detainee abuse, we are obviously not keeping it secret from the detainees-they experience the abuse and interrogation techniques first hand. And I assume we do not expect them to sign a nondisclosure agreement upon their release from custody based upon the premise that they had been exposed to classified information when they are subjected to abusive techniques.
Don't mistake Leonard for an ACLU firebrand: As Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists (whose excellent listserv alerted me to the speech) puts it, Leonard "is not an 'openness' advocate or a free-lance critic of government secrecy." He's a career security professional who deplores the leaks of classified material to the press.
Leonard attributes what he calls an "epidemic" of leaks to the press to the dysfunctional classification system, which has recently taken to using the war as an "excuse to disregard the basics of the security classification system." Leaks are coming out of the "highest levels of our government" (the Valerie Plame affair); a former Cabinet secretary is alleged to have handed off classified material to a book author for publication, and the classification machine is operating so poorly down at Guantanamo Bay that a chaplain was publicly charged with pilfering secrets on his computer and then released.
"The problem [Leonard] has identified is that the currency of classification is being devalued by questionable, sometimes suspiciously self-serving secrecy actions," writes Aftergood in e-mail. "This produces an erosion of security discipline, which in turn fosters an environment in which leaks are more likely to come about. The net result is bad security policy and bad public policy."
Because leaks of classified information make for such great headlines, journalists rarely give much thought to why something was leaked or why it was classified in the first place. Leonard's speech encourages us to look for the important story behind every leaked classified-info story and ask these questions: Why was the information classified in the first place? Who or what was served by its classification-some self-interested bureaucracy or our national interest? (Think Abu Ghraib.) Who was served by the leak? Who was damaged? (Think Valerie Plame.) Who is served by declassification delays?
The secrecy czar has spoken. But who's listening? According to Nexis, nobody. I couldn't find a single story about the speech. Maybe he should have leaked it to the press instead of posting it on the Web.
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Wolfowitz Says Iraq Stay Could Last Years
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61943-2004Jun22.html
The U.S. military could remain in Iraq for years, but with the passage of time it should be able to step back into more of a supporting role for Iraqi security forces, the Pentagon's number two official said yesterday in a hearing notable for sharp partisan exchanges.
"I think it's entirely possible" that U.S. troops could be stationed in Iraq for years, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told the House Armed Services Committee. But, he added, as the Iraqi army and new national guard develop, "we will be able to let them be in the front lines and us be in a supporting position."
Wolfowitz said it is possible that U.S. troops could be used to enforce Iraqi martial law after the partial transfer of power a week from now. Ayad Alawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, has said martial law is possible to crack down on insurgents.
Helping impose martial law, Wolfowitz said, "might actually be something that we might mutually agree was necessary to bring order in a particularly difficult place."
But much of the hearing was devoted to a series of unusually pointed discussions between Wolfowitz and Rep. Ike Skelton, a centrist Missourian who is the committee's senior Democrat.
Skelton told Wolfowitz he senses two Iraqs: "One is the optimistic Iraq that you describe, and the other Iraq is the one that I see every morning, with the violence, the deaths of soldiers and Marines." He added, with some emotion: "I must tell you, it breaks my heart a little bit more every day."
Skelton also was dismissive of White House comments about "staying the course" in Iraq. "I don't think anyone here questions your resolve or questions the resolve of the president to succeed in Iraq," he said. "But there's a difference between the resolve on the one hand and competence on the other." He said he now fears that the United States is descending into "a security quagmire" in Iraq.
The two men went back and forth several times.
"From your description, Mr. Secretary, I don't see an end in sight," Skelton said. "We're stuck."
"We're not stuck, Mr. Skelton," Wolfowitz replied. He said that the U.S. strategy in Iraq clearly is to develop Iraqi forces that can take over security from U.S. and allied troops.
At another point, Skelton said he did not see a plan to bring about success in Iraq. He added, "We broke it -- we must do our best to fix it."
Wolfowitz shot back, "We didn't break Iraq. Saddam Hussein broke Iraq." The Pentagon official, just back from a four-day visit to Iraq, said, "It is going to be a big job to repair it, but I feel much more confident than before this trip, after spending many hours with the new prime minister and members of his government, that there is an Iraqi team ready to take charge on July 1st and committed to fixing that damage."
As the hearing went on, Wolfowitz sought to temper his initial presentation. "Maybe it's optimistic compared to the total gloom and doom that one otherwise hears, but I in no way mean to minimize the security problem," he said. "I agree with you, it is the obstacle to all the other progress that has been made." He said he is worried especially about the next six months, as insurgents seek to derail the Iraqi elections being planned for January 2005.
Wolfowitz also said the media are part of the problem in Iraq. "Frankly, part of our problem is a lot of the press are afraid to travel very much, so they sit in Baghdad and they publish rumors," he said.
Reporters in Iraq recently have restricted their movements, sometimes at the recommendation of U.S. officials, because of widespread violence.
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STRATEGY
Wolfowitz Testifies Pentagon Misjudged the Strength of Iraqi Insurgency
June 23, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/politics/23MILI.html
WASHINGTON, June 22 - Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, said Tuesday that the Pentagon had underestimated the violent tenacity of an insurgency that formed after Baghdad fell, and he acknowledged that the United States may be forced to keep a significant number of troops in Iraq for years to come.
But even under questioning from House Democrats, Mr. Wolfowitz never wavered from an optimistic posture as he cited "enormous progress" in the effort to stabilize Iraq and hand over responsibility for governing and security to the Iraqis.
Mr. Wolfowitz, who just returned from a five-day visit to Iraq, told House Armed Services Committee members that he heard military personnel from the United States and its allies, as well as Iraqi citizens, say the world does not realize the successes achieved as Iraq 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. "It doesn't mean that there aren't serious problems in Iraq; we all know about the problems. But I think that what doesn't get through in all the reporting on problems is there's also been enormous progress."
Mr. Wolfowitz's assessment was challenged by Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the committee's ranking Democrat, who read aloud the administration's goals for Iraq as stated last July, and said they had still not been met.
"The four pillars of this plan were establishing security, restoring essential services, creating conditions for economic development, and enabling the transition to democratic governance," Mr. Skelton said. "It's clear that these goals have not been achieved, at least not to the extent we had hoped, largely because we haven't established security."
Mr. Skelton asked Mr. Wolfowitz whether American forces might be required to remain in Iraq for "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."
Mr. Wolfowitz said Pentagon planners had not counted on the ability of a guerrilla-style resistance to form, operate and grow after the capture of Saddam Hussein and the arrest or killing of his top advisers.
"If you want to say what might have been underestimated, I think there was probably too great a willingness to believe that once we got the 55 people on the blacklist, the rest of those killers would stop fighting," Mr. Wolfowitz said.
During more than three hours of testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz received compliments and support from committee Republicans but dueled with Democrats over an exit strategy for American forces and the quality of intelligence supplied by Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress.
When pressed to address charges that Mr. Chalabi provided false intelligence on Iraq's program for unconventional weapons, which helped form the administration's arguments for war, Mr. Wolfowitz said "nothing in Iraq is black and white."
But he said American military commanders told him that "some of the intelligence that his organization has provided us has saved American lives and enabled us to capture some key enemy targets."
Mr. Wolfowitz also defended the Bush administration's assessment that American intelligence had evidence of contacts between Al Qaeda and the Hussein government.
Mr. Hussein's Iraq was "a state that had contacts of a murky but ominous sort with Al Qaeda," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "The mere fact of contact is disturbing."
Committee members also pressed Mr. Wolfowitz about a mismatch between individual battlefield successes and a lack of political progress.
"I'm deeply concerned about a precipitous withdrawal of troops, for whatever reason, in the short term, if we don't achieve a political end-state that is satisfactory to the American people," said Representative Ellen O. Tauscher, Democrat of California.
Mr. Wolfowitz offered reassurances, saying "what terrifies the enemy the most is the prospect of an elected Iraqi government." He said the administration's plan for bringing stability to Iraq is based on passing sovereignty to an interim government by July 1; training and equipping Iraqi security forces; moving to an elected government late this year or early next year; seeking additional international forces; and forming a constitutionally elected government by the end of 2005.
"I would hope five years from now we see an Iraq that has more or less effectively defeated this enemy," Mr. Wolfowitz said. "It doesn't mean that terrorism will be gone."
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General: U.S. Dominance of Skies May Wane
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Air-Force.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The success of the Indian air force against American fighter planes in a recent exercise suggests other countries may soon be able to threaten U.S. military dominance of the skies, a top Air Force general said Wednesday.
``We may not be as far ahead of the rest of the world as we thought we were,'' said Gen. Hal M. Hornburg, the chief of Air Combat Command, which oversees U.S. fighter and bomber wings.
The U.S.-India joint exercise, ``Cope India,'' took place in February near Gwalior in central, India. It pitted some F-15C Eagle fighters from the 3rd Wing at Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska, in mock combat against Indian MiG, Sukhoi and Mirage fighters.
The F-15Cs are the Air Force's primary air superiority aircraft. The Indian fighters, of Russian and French design, are the type of planes U.S. fighters would most likely face in any overseas conflict.
Hornburg, speaking to reporters, called the results of the exercise ``a wake-up call'' in some respects, but he declined to provide details, other than to suggest the Indian air force scored several unexpected successes against the American planes.
For the last 15 years, the U.S. military has enjoyed almost total command of the air during conflicts. A few fighters and fighter-bombers have gone down, usually victims of surface-to-air missile fire, but in general, American planes have been able to target enemy ground forces at will.
In the most recent invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein's air force stayed grounded.
Still, new tactics, better Russian fighters like the Su-30, and a new generation of surface-to-air missiles mean that U.S. dominance could be ending, said Loren Thompson, who follows military issues for the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank.
``The United States has grown accustomed to having global air superiority, yet we haven't put much very much money in the last generation into maintaining that advantage,'' he said, noting the F-15 first flew in the 1970s.
``So of course the rest of the world is finally starting to catch up,'' he said.
Hornburg said the exercise shows the need for some new Air Force fighters, particularly the F/A-22 Raptor, which is intended to replace the F-15C. But critics deride the aircraft as too expensive and built to counter a threat that hasn't existed since the Soviet Union collapsed.
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Air Force Testing Robot Vehicles
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Robot-Protection.html
EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla., (AP) -- The Air Force wants to take away Staff Sgt. Miguel Jimenez's job, and that's just fine by him.
The Miami airman was plucked from his normal security duties at nearby Tyndall Air Force Base to help test whether a robotic vehicle can take the place of humans in guarding air bases and troops.
``If somebody wants to spend the money and send something like that out there instead of my life, I'm all about that,'' Jimenez said Tuesday of the robots that cost from $200,000 to $500,000.
One robot being tested is a Jeep-size, four-wheeled vehicle that has been equipped with radar, television cameras and an infrared scan to detect people, vehicles and other objects. It carries a breadbox-sized mini-robot that can be launched to search under vehicles, inside buildings and other small places.
Another robot is fashioned from an off-the-shelf, four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, giving it added versatility because a human also can ride it like a normal ATV. Both vehicles can be remotely operated from laptop computers and can be equipped with remotely fired weapons, like an M-16 rifle or pepper spray.
``What we are hoping is the robots will actually detect the enemy first,'' said Capt. Adolfo Meana Jr., chief of the concepts division for the Force Protection Battlelab at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas.
``If you shoot the robot we don't care. We know you're there, you're hostile, and we can keep our forces in reserve to move tactically against the enemy. The robots will save our troops' lives,'' he said.
The vehicles can be programmed to patrol specific areas and then alert an operator by radio if they find something suspicious. They have loudspeakers and microphones for questioning intruders and the operator can pick from a variety of languages.
A human always is in the loop because the military doesn't want to give machines complete discretion, said Walter Waltz, chief of robotic research for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Tyndall.
Jimenez said he found the laptop controls easy to use.
``If somebody that uses PlayStation or X-Box, that type of thing, it's right up their alley,'' Jimenez said.
On the Net:
http://www.nosc.mil/robots/land/mdars/mdars.html
-------- war crimes
U.S. Alters Its Plan for Exemption at Court
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61941-2004Jun22.html
UNITED NATIONS, June 22 -- The Bush administration has abandoned its plan to seek a Security Council resolution providing an open-ended exemption for U.S. personnel serving in U.N.-authorized peacekeeping missions from prosecution by the International Criminal Court, senior U.S. and Security Council diplomats said.
The United States, under increasing criticism for U.S. abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, was facing a diplomatic defeat in the 15-nation council over the U.S.-sponsored text. The United States is pressing instead for a resolution that would shield U.S. personnel from prosecution only through June 2005.
The court was established under a 1998 treaty to prosecute individuals responsible for the most serious crimes, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since the court began its work, in July 2002, the United States has demanded that the council grant its personnel an exemption from prosecution to carry out its global peacekeeping obligations.
In reducing that demand, senior U.S. officials said Tuesday that they have obtained written assurances from 90 countries that they would not surrender U.S. personnel to the court, which is based in The Hague.
Still, without a Security Council exemption, there is a possibility that U.S. troops accused of engaging in massive human rights violations could be subject to prosecution by the court if U.S. authorities refused to try the cases. In such cases, the crime must have been committed on the soil of a country that has ratified the 1998 treaty but has not signed an agreement with the United States.
Afghanistan, for example, has ratified the treaty but also has signed an agreement with the United States pledging not to hand over U.S. personnel to the court. Iraq has not ratified the treaty.
At the request of the United States, Philippine U.N. ambassador Lauro L. Baja Jr. said he intends to introduce an amendment calling for a final one-year extension of a July 2002 resolution that shields troops from countries, such as the United States, that have not ratified the treaty.
"This is a suggestion that will address the concerns of some Security Council members that this not go on in perpetuity," said Stuart Holliday, the U.S. representative to the United Nations for political affairs. The Philippines is "consulting with other council members to see whether this in fact would accommodate their positions."
Last week, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the Security Council to oppose the U.S. resolution seeking an open-ended exemption. In a confidential memo, Annan told the Security Council that it would discredit the United Nations and undercut efforts to "promote the rule of international law."
Annan's remarks have hardened council opposition. Several key council members -- including Chile, Algeria and Pakistan, which recently considered supporting the U.S. resolution -- say they are now undecided. "Everybody is watching to see what the others are going to do," said Algeria's U.N. ambassador, Abdallah Baali.
Chile's U.N. ambassador, Heraldo Munoz, said that Annan's remarks "created a new political context" for the debate.
"We do not want to slap the secretary general in the face," added German U.N. ambassador Gunter Pleuger. Germany, like France, indicated that the latest U.S. concession was not sufficient to win its support.
The treaty establishing the court has been signed by 135 countries and ratified by 94. President Bill Clinton signed it in December 2000, but the Bush administration renounced it in May 2002, cautioning that it could be used to carry out frivolous trials against U.S. troops.
A month ago, the administration was confident that the council would adopt the resolution. But the initiative began to unravel after Chile decided to abstain, and China warned that it was considering abstaining, or even vetoing the resolution, citing abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. U.S. officials said China, which has not ratified the treaty, opposed the United States because it had recently supported Taiwan's bid for observer status in the World Health Assembly.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz acknowledged at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee that the abuse at Abu Ghraib had taken a diplomatic toll. "The damage is enormous," he said.
--------
U.S. Drops Effort to Gain Immunity for Its Troops
June 23, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/international/middleeast/23CND-NATI.html?pagewanted=all&position=
UNITED NATIONS, June 23 - The United States bowed to broad opposition on the Security Council today and announced that it was dropping its effort to gain immunity for its troops from prosecution by the International Criminal Court.
"The United States has decided not to proceed further with consideration and action on the draft at this time in order to avoid a prolonged and divisive debate," the deputy American ambassador, James B. Cunningham, said on emerging from the council.
The envoys from the 15-member council had spent the morning in closed session discussing a rewritten version of the American troop exemption resolution circulated among them Tuesday night to try to meet the widespread objections.
A resolution granting a year's exemption had passed the council the past two years, but this year the attempt to renew it ran into difficulties because of the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq and a strong statement of opposition from Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The rare setback for American diplomacy at the United Nations came just two weeks after the Bush administration was praised in the world organization for demonstrating flexibility and a willingness to compromise in securing a unanimous vote on a resolution affirming the arrangements for the transfer of power in Iraq.
Ambassador Wang Guangya of China, a country that had supported the measure the past two years, said, "Clearly from the very beginning this year, China has been under pressure because of the scandals and the news coverage of the prisoner abuse, and it made it very difficult for my government to support it."
"My government," he added, "is under particular pressure not to give a blank check to the U.S. for the behavior of its forces."
Spain's ambassador, Juan Antonio Yáñez-Bernuevo, explained his country's opposition by saying, "For us, the essential thing is to remain faithful to the international criminal court, which we strongly support, and also to the United Nations charter and to respect the statement made by the secretary general last week, which had a powerful effect."
Last week Secretary General Annan called on the Security Council to turn back the American move, saying it was "of dubious judicial value" and particularly objectionable in the aftermath of the prisoner abuse cases in Iraq.
In his remarks, Mr. Annan said that passing the measure would discredit the council, the United Nations and the "primacy of the rule of law," and he appealed to the members to maintain the common purpose they had shown earlier this month in their unanimous vote on the Iraq resolution.
Mr. Yáñez-Bernuevo said that he regretted that the Americans had not mounted the same kind of diplomatic effort that secured the June 8 unanimous vote behind the resolution covering the arrangements for the June 30 transfer of power to Iraq and its aftermath.
"We would have liked to see a process as we saw in the Iraq resolution, a more collective effort that would have maintained the council's unity," he said. Instead, he said, "According to what we heard from the U.S., that was the last word, they could not go any further, there was no point in pursuing the matter."
Heraldo Muñoz of Chile said of Mr. Annan's statement: "It has a very important impact on many delegations. It certainly created a new context for the consideration of this resolution."
The Bush administration has said it needs the protection to prevent people from using the court to bring politically motivated war crimes prosecutions against Americans abroad.
Elaborating on that today, Mr. Cunningham noted that the United States was the "largest contributor to global security" and said, "When the United States voluntarily commits its armed forces to participate in peacekeeping missions around the world, we believe it is wholly inappropriate to subject them to a tribunal which cannot provide adequate guarantees of due process."
Asked if the United States would limit its participation in peacekeeping activities in the future - a threat it has made in past years when disagreement over the resolution has emerged - Mr. Cunningham said, "I'm not going to comment on that."
Addressing concerns about American military conduct abroad, he said, "The United States has a well-functioning system of military justice that will assure accountability."
Since the international court was created two years ago, the Bush administration has made bilateral agreements with 90 countries to exempt its troops, and Mr. Cunningham said that that effort would continue.
This year's draft resolution, introduced last month and then withdrawn in the face of objections, extended protection to American soldiers participating in United Nations-approved peacekeeping forces beyond the current expiration date of June 30. That same day, next Wednesday, Iraq regains sovereignty and the predominantly American force there becomes a United Nations-mandated one. The United States had consequently been pressing hard for a vote before then.
Though there were three abstentions in last year's vote and several more expected this year, American diplomats in May said they felt confident they could obtain support for a routine "technical rollover" of the measure.
Mr. Annan's appeal to Security Council unity, however, caused several nations to rethink their backing of the original resolution and of their reluctance to be seen as defying the United States. By Monday, 8 of the 15 countries let it be known that they would abstain - an outcome that would deny the United States the votes needed for passage.
Tuesday evening, American diplomats circulated a new version aimed at meeting a major objection - language in the original proposal that expressed the intention to renew the one-year exemption each July 1 for further 12-month periods "for as long as may be necessary."
Mr. Annan had protested that this clause served to perpetuate United Nations approval of what had been considered a temporary emergency departure from international law.
That paragraph had been eliminated in the new version, and new language was inserted that pledged that this request for a one-year exemption would be the final one.
That attempt to bridge the differences did not work, and Mr. Muñoz said that while he thought the United States decision had been "too rushed," it was probably the best one under the circumstances.
"Better not to present the draft resolution to a vote when the council appears to be divided," he said. "Better not to be divided after the consensus and the unity that we showed on Iraq."
--------
U.S. Drops U.N. Bid for War Crime Shield
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-UN-US-War-Crimes.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Facing global opposition fueled by the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, the United States on Wednesday dropped its attempt to renew a U.N. exemption shielding American troops from international prosecution for war crimes.
The U.S. move raised concern that Washington might carry out its threat to shut down or stop participating in U.N.-authorized peacekeeping operations.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters that every request would be examined ``both in terms of voting for a peacekeeping mission'' and providing Americans to participate. A key factor will be ``what the risk might be of prosecution by a court to which we're not party,'' he said.
While the United States won praise for not pushing for a vote that would have deeply divided the U.N. Security Council, the Bush administration suffered a defeat in its lengthy battle against the world's first permanent war crimes tribunal.
William Pace, head of the Coalition for an International Criminal Court, which represents more than 1,000 organizations supporting the tribunal, called the U.S. decision ``a victory for international justice.''
The court can prosecute cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed after it was established on July 1, 2002.
But it is a court of last resort and will step in only when countries are unwilling or unable to dispense justice themselves, a condition proponents say makes it highly unlikely an American would be prosecuted.
Washington has also signed bilateral agreements with 90 countries that bar any prosecution of American officials by the court.
The court's chief prosecutor announced its first investigation on Wednesday -- of war crimes in Congo.
When the court was established -- the culmination of a campaign for a permanent war crimes tribunal that began with the Nuremberg trials after World War II -- Washington threatened to end its involvement in U.N. peacekeeping operations if it didn't get an exemption for Americans.
President Bush's administration argues that the court could be used for frivolous or politically motivated prosecutions of American troops.
After lengthy negotiations, the Security Council agreed to a one-year exemption, which was renewed a year ago. The court started operating last year.
The 94 countries that have ratified the 1998 Rome Treaty creating the court maintain it contains enough safeguards to prevent frivolous prosecutions and insist that nobody should be exempt.
Last month, the United States circulated a resolution that would have authorized a new one-year exemption after the current one expires on June 30.
But it put off a vote to work on a resolution endorsing the June 30 handover of power in Iraq, which was unanimously adopted on June 8.
One council diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Washington probably would have gotten the minimum nine ``yes'' votes in the 15-member council if it had called for a vote immediately after introducing the resolution.
But over the past five weeks, the scandal over the abuse of Iraqi detainees by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison has grown, and last week Secretary-General Kofi Annan made a rare intervention into council affairs. He urged members to oppose the resolution, questioned the legality of an exemption and warned against dividing the council.
Several council members said the prisoner abuse and Annan's opposition were factors in their refusal to back the original resolution and a last-minute U.S. attempt at compromise that would have made this one-year exemption the final one.
France, Germany, Spain, Brazil, Chile and China had said they would abstain on the original resolution, and Romania and Benin had indicated they were likely to join them.
When Spain and China -- key nations the U.S. needed to change their votes -- announced before Wednesday's council meeting that they wouldn't support the compromise, the United States knew the resolution would be defeated, so Washington decided to abandon it.
``We believe that our draft and its predecessors fairly meet the concerns of all. Not all council members agree, however,'' U.S. deputy ambassador James Cunningham told reporters after informing the council of the decision.
``The United States has decided not to proceed further with consideration and action on the draft at this time in order to avoid a prolonged and divisive debate,'' he said.
He stressed that the United States is ``the largest contributor to global security and has special well-known interests in protecting our forces and our officials.''
Cunningham said the United States will ``continue to negotiate bilateral agreements'' to protect Americans.
Both Spanish and Chilean envoys said Annan's opposition had great influence on the outcome.
Annan said the U.S. decision ``will help maintain the unity of the Security Council at a time when it faces difficult challenges,'' his spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said in a statement.
China's U.N. Ambassador Wang Guangya said the prisoner abuse scandal was paramount in ending China's support for an exemption.
``China is under pressure because of the scandals and the news coverage of the prisoner abuse'' and it couldn't give the United States ``a blank check,'' he said.
--------
War Crimes Court Launches Congo Probe
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-International-Court-Congo.html
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- The International Criminal Court is launching an investigation of war crimes committed during conflicts in Congo -- the court's first formal case since its creation two years ago, the chief prosecutor said Wednesday.
The court, which has been monitoring events in Congo for nearly a year, would investigate accusations of atrocities among warring tribes and insurgents from neighboring Rwanda, including allegations of summary executions, cannibalism and torture.
Rwanda and Congo fought a 1998-2002 war in Congo that embroiled the armies of at least four other African nations, split Africa's third-largest nation, and killed an estimated 3.3 million people, most through famine and disease.
In April, Congo became the second country to give jurisdiction to the court to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide committed on its territory. The first was Uganda, but no formal investigation has begun there.
The announcement did not say when prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo would send investigators to the central African nation.
``It is potentially a huge milestone in attempting to end the impunity that has been so rampant in the Congo for so long,'' said Richard Dicker, head of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Program.
One challenge for the court will be providing security for investigators and potential witnesses.
Moreno-Ocampo said investigations would focus on the northeastern Ituri region, where the worst atrocities have been reported, worsened by struggles to control the region's mineral wealth. In 2003, a French-led force went to the area after reports of massacres.
Since the 1990s, millions of people have died as a result of fighting or war-related starvation and disease in Congo, formally known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC, and once known as Zaire.
In a written assessment last year, Moreno-Ocampo pointed to ``summary executions, systematic torture, unlawful arrests and detention of individuals.'' Crimes targeting women were common, and children as young as 7 were forced to fight.
The ICC investigation can only consider crimes committed since the court was founded in July 2002 because it has no retroactive jurisdiction.
The court has jurisdiction over war crimes in the 94 countries that have ratified its founding treaty when those countries prove incapable of pursuing the investigations themselves. Cases also may be referred to the court by member states or the U.N. Security Council.
The announcement coincided with Washington's surprise announcement it was dropping an attempt to win the Security Council's approval for a third year of exemptions from prosecution for U.S. citizens by the tribunal.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Lawyer's Terrorism Trial Opens in N.Y.
Trio Accused of Helping Client in Plot
By Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62498-2004Jun22.html
NEW YORK, June 22 -- A federal prosecutor laced into prominent defense lawyer Lynne Stewart and two co-defendants as their trial opened Tuesday, arguing that they had supported a terrorist conspiracy aimed at kidnapping and killing innocent people.
Stewart and the other defendants are accused of helping Omar Abdel Rahman, the imprisoned blind cleric convicted of terrorism charges in 1995, to send orders to followers in Egypt. In one such message in 2000, Rahman withdrew his support for a cease-fire with the Egyptian government.
"His words and speeches were as dangerous as weapons," prosecutor Christopher Morvillo told a Manhattan jury at the opening of a trial that is expected to stretch into the autumn. "The defendants pulled off a jail break" by going into the prison and disseminating Rahman's words.
Stewart is the first defense lawyer in a terrorism case to face federal charges of conspiring to support terrorism. Specifically, she is accused of conspiring to provide "personnel" to the Islamic Group in Egypt. Rahman himself -- via his statements -- was the person she provided, according to the government's indictment.
In his opening statement, Stewart's attorney, Michael Tigar, quickly tried to poke holes in the government's case. A large man with a courtly trial manner, he told the jury that Stewart did nothing more than defend the sheik with all the energy she could muster.
Tigar noted that the Rahman allegedly smuggled out some of his most objectionable messages -- including a fatwa ordering the killing of Jews everywhere -- during a period when Stewart was prohibited from talking to her client.
"So the fact that someone issued a horrible, terrible statement, well, Lynne Stewart had nothing to do with it," Tigar said. "She was a courageous and honorable lawyer, and as provided for by our Constitution, she defended an accused terrorist."
Tigar acknowledged that Stewart released the cease-fire statement, a move that the government contends violated special measures prohibiting Rahman from contacting his followers. But he and Stewart, who spoke to reporters later, contended there is no basis to accuse her of supporting terrorism.
Tigar added that Stewart is a lifelong New Yorker, possessed of leftist politics, whose grandchildren were in the courtroom. She therefore was unlikely to embrace fundamentalist terrorism, he said.
Rahman, convicted of conspiring to blow up two Hudson River tunnels, the New York FBI building and the United Nations, is serving a life sentence.
Tigar also took aim at one of the government's more damaging accusations: that during a prison meeting with Rahman, Stewart had applauded a Filipino terrorist organization for kidnapping people with an eye toward demanding Rahman's release.
On a government tape recording, Stewart allegedly said that the kidnapping was "a good thing." But according to Tigar, Stewart in fact said that it was a good thing the kidnapping was reported, and moments later she can be heard saying of those kidnapped: "That's so sad, that's so sad."
Mohammed Yousry, a translator, and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a friend of Rahman's, also face charges of terrorist conspiracy. Yousry's attorney offered a wide-ranging rebuttal of the government's case yesterday, noting that his client translated no message or newspaper article for the sheik without the expressed direction of the defense lawyers.
As proof of his client's dislike for Rahman's fundamentalist politics, attorney David Ruhnke quoted a section of Yousry's doctoral thesis, which analyzes Rahman's opposition to the Egyptian government. The cleric, Yousry wrote, wants to "exchange one form of totalitarianism for another."
--------
Federal Law on Sentencing Is Unjust, Judge Rules
June 23, 2004
By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/national/23judge.html
A federal judge in Boston ruled on Monday that federal sentencing laws were unconstitutional because they gave prosecutors too much power.
In an impassioned 177-page decision, the judge, William G. Young, described a system in which prosecutors used various strategies to reward those who pleaded guilty and to impose exceptionally harsh sentences on those who chose to stand trial and then lost.
"The focus of our entire criminal justice system has shifted away from trials and juries and adjudication to a massive system of sentence bargaining that is heavily rigged against the accused citizen," Judge Young, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Boston, wrote in a decision reconsidering the sentences he had imposed on two defendants.
Judge Young acknowledged that similar challenges to the sentencing guidelines had been rejected by all of the appeals courts that had considered them. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the guidelines themselves in 1989, but he said more recent Supreme Court cases supported his analysis.
The Supreme Court is now considering a similar issue in the context of Washington State's sentencing laws.
Judge Young said that about 97 percent of federal criminal convictions nationwide were the result of plea bargains. Defendants accused of federal crimes in Massachusetts who insist on a trial, he added, face sentences six times as long as those they would receive after a guilty plea and an agreement to cooperate with prosecutors.
Judge Young cited a litany of methods used by prosecutors to encourage defendants to plead guilty under federal sentencing guidelines issued by a commission created by Congress in 1984. They include, he said, "charge bargaining," in which prosecutors drop selected charges in exchange for a plea, and "fact bargaining," in which prosecutors turn a blind eye to evidence, typically guns or drugs, that would require a harsher sentence.
Michael J. Sullivan, the United States attorney in Boston, said Judge Young's accusations were not accurate.
"We don't do charge or fact bargaining," Mr. Sullivan said. "You charge based on what the evidence would support and what the law would allow. You don't overcharge. You charge based on the available evidence."
Judge Young's opinion is representative of many federal judges' dissatisfaction with their limited role in criminal sentencing, said Frank O. Bowman, a law professor at Indiana University and an author of a treatise on the subject. The decision is, he said, "a long cry of anguish about the state of federal sentencing, which, while perhaps a little overheated, is an excellent summary of the current state of things."
Judge Young relied on two recent Supreme Court cases to hold the sentencing guidelines unconstitutional. Though the later of the cases was decided in 2002, he wrote that he had not fully appreciated their significance until he read an article by William J. Trach, then a student at Harvard Law School, in the February Harvard Law Review.
The two cases, Judge Young reasoned, require that all facts that increase the punishment to which a defendant is exposed be proved to a jury. But sentencing hearings take place before only judges, and the rules of evidence do not apply.
"Courts today," he wrote, "must base their conclusions on a mishmash of data including blatantly self-serving hearsay" presented by prosecutors. The data, he wrote, often include information about crimes with which the defendants have never been charged and even crimes of which they have been acquitted.
Because the sentencing guidelines allow judges to increase sentences based on such material, he continued, the procedure can be unconstitutional in given cases.
Judge Young's decision concerned the sentences of five defendants convicted on drug charges.
He had sentenced Richard Green to 20 years in March and William Olivero to four years in June. On reflection, he wrote, both sentences were too long. In Mr. Green's case, he said he had been wrong to rely on evidence about guns and other drugs that the jury had not heard. The right sentence, he wrote, was four years.
In Mr. Olivero's case, Judge Young said, prosecutors engaged in "starkly illegal fact bargaining." When Mr. Olivero was offered a plea bargain, the judge wrote, the charges had no reference to a gun; after trial, prosecutors relied on the gun for an enhanced sentence. The right sentence, he concluded, was 16 months.
Both cases are on appeal, which means that Judge Young no longer has jurisdiction. He asked the appeals court to return the cases to him for resentencings.
He sentenced a third defendant, Jason Pacheco, to 12 years, saying the result would have been the same before his new analysis.
He said he would issue decisions on the other two defendants soon.
-------- homeland security
TSA: Airlines Gave Gov't Passenger Data
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Passenger-Privacy.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government may have broken federal privacy law when it asked airlines to turn over personal data about passengers for a test of background-check project, a senator said Wednesday.
Four airlines and at least two reservation systems provided the information to the government or its contractors, the acting head of the Transportation Security Administration told a Senate committee. Some of the companies denied that.
The agency previously had said only two airlines had done so.
Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, top Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said the agency ``may have violated'' the Privacy Act, which says the government must notify the public if it intends to collect records on people.
The law also requires that the government tell people how to find out what information is being collected about them.
The disclosures, which Lieberman said were ``disturbing,'' came out during a hearing on David Stone's nomination as the agency's administrator.
An agency spokeswoman, Yolanda Clark, the Homeland Security Department's privacy officer is investigating the agency's involvement in the data-sharing from airlines. The information, known as passenger name records, includes credit card numbers, travel reservation details, address and telephone number. It also could mean meal requests, which can indicate a passenger's religion or ethnicity.
The committee head, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, criticized the agency for being slow to disclose the full extent of the transfer of passenger data.
``In the fight against terrorism, we have to be careful not to trample on our values,'' she said.
Privacy advocates said they wanted a congressional investigation.
``Congress needs to step in and create some privacy protections for passengers,'' said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union technology and liberty program.
A program for checking passenger backgrounds has been delayed because U.S. airlines refused to turn over passenger data for testing, after the disclosure that some had already done so.
JetBlue and American were criticized for handing over such data to government contractors.
In May 2002, Stone said there were four companies working for the government to develop a technology to assign risk to passengers using data provided by American. Some of the four got passenger data on their own from Delta Air Lines, Continental Airlines, America West Airlines, Frontier Airlines and Galileo International, a reservation system, Stone said.
A year later, the reservation system Sabre gave a computer disk containing passenger data to government to test parts of passenger screening system. The disk was returned four months later and no one tried to read it, Stone said.
In the spring of 2003, JetBlue gave the government some data to see if certain changes could be made to that system, Stone said.
Continental said the information was disclosed ``under highly restrictive nondisclosure confidentiality agreements'' and has been destroyed.
Delta spokeswoman Peggy Estes denied that the airline shared the data with a government contractor. Galileo said it had not given any customer data to the government.
On the Net:
Transportation Security Administration: http://www.tsa.gov
Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov
--------
Antiterror Data to Cover Infrastructure
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Homeland-Security.html
DALLAS (AP) -- The counterterrorism communications network that allows the federal government and local officials to quickly exchange information will expand to include gas pipelines, power plants and other infrastructure facilities in a pilot program announced Wednesday.
More than 25,000 officials in the Dallas, Seattle, Indianapolis and Atlanta areas will be included in the expansion of the Homeland Security Information Network, which will include private companies for the first time.
``You can't secure the homeland unless you secure the hometown,'' Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told about 550 people, ranging from apartment managers to hospital executives, who eventually will become part of the Homeland Security Information Network-Critical Infrastructure.
The network uses software and other technology to replace manual methods such as calling lists that created communication logjams after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, officials said.
For instance, a federal official can call 10,000 mayors and sheriffs per minute and set up a hot line that could receive 30,000 calls at a time. Network members also can send 3,000 faxes and 5,000 e-mails at a time.
``I am confident that unless we develop systems of shared, actionable information, we will not do everything we can as a country to prevent an attack,'' Ridge said at a downtown Dallas hotel.
The pilot program will be tested for the rest of the year to determine its feasibility across the country.
The Department of Homeland Security's counterterrorism network connects 50 states, five territories, Washington, D.C., and 50 major urban areas.
On the Net:
Homeland Security: www.dhs.gov
Dallas network: www.swern.gov
Seattle network: www.nwwarn.gov
Indianapolis network: www.ian.gov
--------
Ship Disruption Feared as Security Deadline Looms
June 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-security-shipping.html
HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Europe's ports face potential disruption next week as a deadline looms for international shipping to implement tough and expensive new rules to prevent a terror attack.
With the clocking ticking toward the July 1 deadline, a top German official said on Wednesday it was still unclear how strictly the new rules could be enforced without causing a ``big hiccup'' in trade and shipping.
``If everybody is going for strict measures in Europe, we will disrupt the European Community,'' said Christoph Brockmann, head of shipping at the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency which is overseeing the implementation of the security measures. 200 ships that call at German ports each day were in possession of an International Ship Security Certificate, which they will require by law from July 1, he told Reuters.
The United Nations' International Maritime Organization (IMO) says ships without valid certificates may be refused entry to ports, or they may be detained or expelled.
But Brockmann said ``we will run into big trouble'' if the rules were strictly applied and all such vessels were forced to anchor before entering port and submit to inspections. Within a couple of days, they would start to block access to terminals.
Authorities are also concerned that unless the rules are applied consistently, ship operators will transfer their business to ports that turn a blind eye.
``There are a lot of harbours in Europe and we are not quite sure what the other countries will do on July 1, so that makes things very, very difficult,'' Brockmann said.
``If there are different rules for treating ships...that automatically leads to uneven competition,'' said Harry Mohns, responsible for security at terminal operator Eurogate in the north German port of Hamburg.
'DIRTY BOMB' THREAT
Security experts have long highlighted the risk that militant groups such as al Qaeda could not only kill many victims but paralyze world trade by using shipping containers to smuggle a device like a radioactive ``dirty bomb'' into a port.
About 90 percent of all cargo moves in containers and some 250 million are shipped annually.
Under the new IMO rules, port authorities, shipping companies and every individual vessel must have security officers and approved emergency plans.
Mohns said his company had had to invest millions of euros (dollars) in items like surveillance cameras, communications equipment and new electronic systems for checking IDs of everyone entering its terminals. Its Hamburg facility was certified only on Monday.
Apart from the IMO measures, the United States has also imposed stricter rules for U.S.-bound cargoes, including tighter screening of containers at the world's top 20 ports and a requirement for sea carriers to provide a full cargo description 24 hours before loading.
Mohns said these measures had extended container loading times by about a day on average. At a Hamburg news conference, the head of the American Chambers of Commerce in Germany welcomed the moves but said the right balance was needed between security and costs.
``Tighter security measures mustn't be allowed to lead to disproportionately greater bureaucracy and higher costs,'' Dierk Mueller said.
Some experts question the effectiveness of the tighter IMO rules, pointing out that sea transport is only part of a wider chain in the movement of containers, which also frequently involves trucks, trains or barges.
``You don't have anyone taking responsibility for the entire chain, from door to door,'' said Adnan Rahman of think-tank Rand Europe, which described the container industry in a report last October as ``wide open'' to the threat of terrorism.
--------
U.S. transit systems vulnerable, panel told
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By By Tom Ramstack
June 23, 2004
http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20040623-124646-1081r.htm
The federal government has neglected the security needs of the nation's public transit systems, according to witnesses at a congressional hearing yesterday.
Congress is focusing more of its attention on terrorism risks to public transit as a result of the March 11 train bombings in Madrid and because of continuing threats against passenger rail systems.
Transit industry leaders told the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee on highways, transit and pipelines yesterday they are unable to handle all their security concerns without more federal assistance.
Richard White, Metro general manager, said Washington's transit agency is a "national security asset" because of its response to terrorism risks, but that it still needs $150 million to complete its security system.
"In the last two years, [the Department of Homeland Security] has spent over $9 billion on aviation security and only $115 million on transit security," Mr. White said. "Yet transit carries 16 times more passengers per day."
Among Metro's unfunded security needs are better "weapons of mass destruction" detection systems, intrusion sensors, training for emergencies and more video cameras for buses, he said.
Since the September 11 attacks, security improvements to Metro have included chemical sensors in stations, bomb-containment trash cans and digital cameras on buses, Mr. White said.
Subcommittee Chairman Tom Petri, a Wisconsin Republican, said testimony from the witnesses "will lay the groundwork for the development of public-transportation security legislation."
He also said one security problem was a lack of clear guidelines among federal officials and transit agencies on how to handle an emergency.
The Federal Aviation Administration developed a "memorandum of understanding" with the Transportation Security Administration describing each agency's duties in situations such as the September 11 attacks.
The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has no such document but is developing it at the request of Congress.
"How much more potential for miscommunication is there, then, for a [Department of Transportation] agency that doesn't have any formal documentation of its relationship with [the Transportation Security Administration]," Mr. Petri said.
Representatives of federal agencies warned against trying to find easy answers to the complex problem of terrorism.
"Public transportation is designed as an open system," said Robert Jamison, FTA deputy administrator. "There's no technological quick fix for security concerns." The congressmen asked about threat levels for public transit.
"It will change on a daily basis," said Chet Lunner, TSA assistant administrator. "It's impossible for me to tell you in five years where that threat will stand."
The Madrid train bombings that killed 198 persons "strengthened our resolve to improve our security posture against similar attacks," Mr. Lunner said.
Forty-two percent of terrorist attacks worldwide in recent years have occurred on public transit systems, the witnesses said.
The United States has about 6,000 public transportation agencies that carry more than 14 million passengers daily.
After the September 11 attacks, the FTA established a security program that included vulnerability assessments of the 37 largest transit systems, grants for emergency drills and an employee-awareness training program for 46,000 transit employees.
Nevertheless, the American Public Transportation Association recently estimated the security needs of 120 transit agencies participating in its survey at $6 billion.
Several bills are already pending in Congress on transit security.
They include S. 2453, the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee's Public Transportation Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which authorizes $3.5 billion in capital grants, $1.5 billion for operating assistance and $200 million for research. Other bills take similar approaches.
-------- human rights
Group Examines Human Rights in Chechnya
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Chechnya-Rights.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Human rights abuses by pro-Kremlin forces are rampant in Chechnya and increasingly expanding into neighboring Ingushetia, Amnesty International said Wednesday.
Only a few Chechen families have been left untouched by rampant human rights violations, said Mariana Katsarova, presenting a report compiled by the London-based group. While men fall victim to mysterious abductions, women are subjected to arbitrary detentions, torture and rape, the group said.
Federal soldiers and members of the local special security services headed by Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen deputy prime minister and son of assassinated President Akhmad Kadyrov, are increasingly targeting human rights activists, Katsarova said.
Imran Ezhiyev, head of the Society of Russian-Chechen Friendship, a leading rights group active in Chechnya, has been detained 17 times and has been tortured, including having his teeth filed, she said.
Those who have or plan to file suits with the Strasbourg, France-based European Court of Human Rights are also persecuted -- harassed and threatened, and their relatives killed or abducted, she said.
Human rights abuses are also spreading to the neighboring province of Ingushetia, the report said, ``and this must be reflected in the programs of international organizations'' such as the Council of Europe and the United Nations, Katsarova said.
She told of 14 female residents of Ingushetia -- 13 Ingush and one Chechen -- whose pictures have been posted on a federal wanted list of suspected suicide bombers. The women are actually doctors working in the Ingush office of the U.S. International Medical Corps, Katsarova said.
The organization's representatives met with regional Federal Security Service officials, prompting them to recognize the error. However, the women are still being sought, Katsarova said.
Russian forces have been bogged down in Chechnya since 1999, when they returned after rebel raids on a neighboring Russian region. The Russians fought an unsuccessful 1994-96 war against separatists that left the region de facto independent.
-------- immigration / refugees
Stolen Passports Still Used to Enter U.S.
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Passport-Security.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- People using stolen passports still are able to enter the country despite enhanced security checks meant to keep them out, Congress was told Wednesday.
And sometimes when U.S. border authorities discover such passports and deny entry, they give the documents back to the travelers, said Clark Kent Ervin, the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general.
That part of Ervin's testimony before the House Committee on International Relations rankled California Rep. Tom Lantos, the panel's top Democrat. He called such a practice ``moronic'' and ``idiotic.''
``An insane asylum would be embarrassed to have such a procedure,'' Lantos said.
Bill Strassberger, a Homeland Security Department spokesman, said the agency's goal is to take all false documents out of circulation, but sometimes documents are given back by mistake.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. government has sought to keep better track of those who enter the country. But Ervin said his office found examples of people entering the country even though they carried passports entered in government databases as lost or stolen.
``We obtained documents that recount instances in which blank, bona fide passports from other countries were stolen and, as determined from their serial numbers, later used to enter the United States,'' Ervin told members of the committee.
Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., said Ervin's findings are disturbing.
``In today's world when countries are tightening up their border controls due to terrorism concerns, what could be more valuable than a first-class ticket to travel unfettered anywhere in the world? A stolen passport may be worth more than its weight in gold,'' Hyde said.
``This seems to me a vulnerability we have been too late in paying attention to and Congress deserves some blame for that.''
Ervin said his office plans to release a follow-up report on passport security in about six months. Citing the ongoing investigation, he was unwilling to give further details on where the travelers entered, how they were able to pass through security and whether any of those who entered pose terrorism threats. He said his office would have informed proper authorities if any of the travelers were deemed a threat.
James Sullivan, U.S. national central bureau director for Interpol, estimated there are more than 10 million stolen or lost passports in circulation, many of them from European countries where international travel is more common, he said.
Interpol, an international law enforcement agency with 181 participating countries, has compiled a database containing 1.6 million records of identification numbers from lost or stolen national identity and travel documents, such as passports, visas and vehicle registrations.
Ervin's investigators discovered the illegal entries while reviewing the visa waiver program, which allows citizens of 27 countries that are close American allies to enter the United States without a visa. Starting in September, those people will be required to be fingerprinted and photographed through the U.S.-VISIT program.
On the Net:
House Committee on International Relations:
http://wwwc.house.gov/international--relations/
Department of Homeland Security: http://www.dhs.gov
-------- justice
Ashcroft Sued Over FBI Whistleblower Case
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-FBI-Whistleblower-Lawsuit.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A watchdog group sued Attorney General John Ashcroft on Wednesday for classifying previously public documents pertaining to a whistleblower's claims of security lapses in the FBI's translator program.
Citing national security, Ashcroft recently classified documents related to the case of Sibel Edmonds, a former linguist at the FBI. The lawsuit charged that reclassifying materials that had previously been in the public domain is illegal and unconstitutional.
The suit was filed in federal court by the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group that has been following the case.
In 2002, Edmonds told her bosses of her concerns about shoddy translations and suggested one interpreter with a relative who works at a foreign embassy may have compromised national security. Edmonds was fired soon after. The bureau cited performance issues as reasons for the dismissal.
Ashcroft told Senate Judiciary Committee members at a hearing earlier this month that he took responsibility for the decision to classify the Edmonds' information.
``The national interests of the United States would be seriously impaired if information provided in one briefing to the Congress were to be made generally available,'' he said.
The suit said Edmonds' case was discussed by the FBI during unclassified Senate Judiciary Committee briefings in 2002. It said letters urging the FBI to investigate her claims were posted on the Web sites of Sens. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
Those letters have since been removed from the Web sites.
``This is an extraordinary and dangerous abuse of power by Ashcroft to improperly use the classification system to hide information that the Justice Department finds embarrassing,'' said Danielle Brian, executive director of the project.
The group has been investigating Edmonds' allegations and wants to post its findings on its Web site, but is barred from doing so now because of the reclassification, Brian said.
Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said the suit had no merit and the government would respond in court.
On the Net:
Project on Government Oversight: http://www.pogo.org
Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov
-------- police
AGENCIES F.B.I. Chief Sees NATO-like Antiterror Alliance
June 23, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/politics/23BURO.html
WASHINGTON, June 22 - The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, said Tuesday that he expected the bureau would someday be part of an "official international terrorism alliance," similar in structure to NATO, the European military alliance in which the United States is a key member.
Mr. Mueller, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, said preliminary discussions had already begun among NATO members aimed at forging more formal ties among European countries that now cooperate through a fragmented patchwork of legal assistance treaties and informal relationships.
Mr. Mueller's speech was an important one for a director who took over the F.B.I. two weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11. His tenure has been devoted to preventing terrorist attacks while reorganizing an agency that has been widely criticized for failings that contributed to the missed signals of Sept. 11.
"In the future, we must have the creativity to think of possibilities we have not imagined," he said. "We must become more flexible, more agile and more mobile. I envision the F.B.I. of tomorrow as a highly trained, electronically sophisticated, international networked organization that has terrorism as its principal target."
Mr. Mueller's aides said they hoped the speech would help define a broader context for his reorganization efforts and would help him defend the bureau from proposals by lawmakers to strip it of some or all of its authority over terrorism inside the United States.
Mr. Mueller said that one of his proposals - to create a Directorate of Intelligence - would in effect create a new agency within the F.B.I. that would fuse law enforcement and counterterrorism functions to "identify potential targets, potential terrorists, predict their actions and neutralize them before they attack."
"Intelligence is a tool," Mr. Mueller said. "That tool becomes increasingly important when there are more threats than we can physically pursue. We need an edge to tell us what to investigate. Soon all counterterrorism cases will be intelligence-driven operations with law enforcement sanctions as an ancillary aspect."
Even with efforts to improve the F.B.I.'s intelligence collection capacity, Mr. Mueller predicted a "long and difficult war" against terrorism.
"Al Qaeda still has the desire and the means to attack us," he said. "This will be likely for years to come."
In answering questions after his speech, Mr. Mueller said he estimated that the total number of Islamic extremists in the world with the motivation and capability of making terror strikes was in the "low thousands."
He also said that the number of extremists within the United States was decreasing. But he repeated his warnings that the threat remained serious.
"Al Qaeda is working with other independent groups and individuals sympathetic to their cause," he said. "And they are recruiting outside the Middle East to find individuals who will easily blend with the American population, as well as those who are disenfranchised within the United States who might be converts to their cause."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Reviews of Guantánamo Detainees to Begin Soon, Navy Says
June 23, 2004
By MARIA NEWMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/politics/23CND-NAVY.html
The secretary of the Navy said today that annual reviews of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba would begin within a matter of weeks, a process to determine whether they should be released or continue to be held as a "threat to America."
The secretary, Gordon R. England, said in a Pentagon news briefing that review boards consisting of three military officers would consider information about each detainee - including hearsay, rumors and intelligence reports - and then make recommendations to him about the fate of each of the 595 detainees at Guantánamo. Many are suspected of terror activities, and some have been held almost two years.
"I expect that out of all the cases, there's some we can act on quickly, hopefully in a matter of a couple of weeks," Mr. England said.
The new review boards will not assign guilt or innocence, the secretary said, but will only determine whether a prisoner should be released or held for further inquiry. Prisoners will be represented by military officials, but not lawyers, and the process will be closed to the public.
Nonetheless, he asserted, "our approach is to make this process very fair, clear, precise and transparent."
In spite of complaints from human rights activists and the governments of some of the detainees' home countries, investigators have moved to bring military prosecutions against only a dozen or so, military officials recently said.
The secretary's briefing came a day after the White House made public a stack of internal documents on the treatment of war prisoners to back up President Bush's declaration that torture was "not part of our soul."
The Bush administration has found itself in a defensive posture over disclosures of mistreatment of captives at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which have also called into question methods used to pressure detainees to talk during interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and other places.
Earlier today, leading Democrats in the House said they were introducing legislation to try to force the Bush administration to release more documents related to the handling and treatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. They also want to create a special select committee to expand the investigation into reports of prisoner abuses by the military.
Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that the nine Democrats on the panel were supporting an amendment to the intelligence authorization bill that would withhold funds until more documents on the prisoner abuse investigation were released.
"It is intended to underscore the seriousness of the prisoner abuse issue and the committee's determination to get the straight story," Ms. Harman said.
She said that she had visited Guantánamo Bay three times and traveled to Baghdad twice with other members of the Intelligence Committee to discuss security issues with high-ranking officials who oversaw the prisoner interrogations.
"Nobody in those meetings in either place ever disclosed the issues around prisoner abuse, even though the purpose of our mission was to understand interrogation policies," she said at a Capitol Hill news conference with other Democratic leaders today. "This is very serious. We don't have the documents. We don't have candid testimony."
Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said legislation would be introduced to create a bipartisan select committee to investigate the prisoner abuse questions.
He said the committee had written to President Bush in the past to request documents on prisoner abuse, and had set a deadline of June 17. "That date came and went, and the president failed to respond to our request," Mr. Waxman said. "Meanwhile, the House has failed to conduct any oversight investigations about the Abu Ghraib prison incident or the problems in Guantanamo or Afghanistan."
"I think we're looking at a classic case of abuse of power," Mr. Waxman added.
At the Defense Department briefing, Secretary England was asked if today's announcement was timed to quell criticism of the administration's approach on prison policy.
Mr. England said the new review system, which military officers had referred to in February as a "quasi-parole board," had been in the planning stages for some time. "It just happens it's finally coming to fruition now," he asserted.
Mr. England said that he had met with representatives of several human rights organizations and the Red Cross earlier today to solicit their comments and suggestions on the new review process before it was put in place.
"It's important that we do it right for the American people and for the detainees," Mr. Gordon said.
"This is an administrative review process to determine if people should continue to be detained or released or transferred with conditions," he continued. "This is to determine the state of that person in terms of are they a continuing threat to America or, frankly, do they have intelligence value to America, because if they do, we obviously don't want to release them right away."
-------- terrorism
New 2003 Data: 625 Terrorism Deaths, Not 307
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60660-2004Jun22?language=printer
New figures released yesterday by the Bush administration show dramatically higher terrorism casualties last year than the State Department documented in an April report that U.S. officials heralded as evidence of great progress in the battle against terrorism.
The statistics show that 625 people died in terrorist attacks last year, not 307 as first reported. The corrections also reveal a larger number of incidents deemed "significant" by government analysts than at any time since U.S. authorities began issuing figures, in 1982.
John O. Brennan, a 23-year CIA veteran who oversaw the effort, took "personal responsibility." He blamed antiquated computers and personnel shortages for the errors and dismissed suggestions that the administration purposely fabricated the figures.
"Anyone who might assert the numbers were intentionally skewed is mistaken," said Brennan, director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), created by President Bush to produce efficient and comprehensive assessments of domestic and international terrorism.
When the April report was released, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said it provided "clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight." Yesterday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Armitage's words were based on incorrect information.
The revised figures show that more people were killed by terrorists last year than at any time since 1998, apart from 2001, when the Sept. 11 hijackings caused 2,973 deaths. Terrorist bombings and shootings left 3,646 people injured around the world -- more than in any year in the past six.
Incidents climbed dramatically in the Middle East, especially in Iraq. Attacks claimed dozens of victims in Israel, the Philippines and India. Thirty-five Americans died, all overseas.
Powell, reported by colleagues to be furious about the errors in this year's Patterns of Global Terrorism review, noted three times in a short statement to reporters yesterday that Brennan's office reports to the director of the CIA.
Powell remains angry about CIA data he included in a 2003 speech to the United Nations in favor of invading Iraq, aides say. When he questioned his top terrorism aide at a meeting after the errors in the terrorism report were discovered, one aide said, it was "about as upset as I've seen Powell."
Speaking with reporters yesterday, Powell pointed to "computational and accounting errors." He added: "The American people can have confidence in what we are doing and what we have done."
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), credited by Powell with alerting him to the problems in a May 17 letter, had accused the administration of skewing the data. "This manipulation," Waxman said at the time, "may serve the administration's political interests, but it calls into serious doubt the integrity of the report."
Reached yesterday, Waxman said of Powell, "I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt that they're simply incompetent, but even that's distressing." He called it shocking that the administration produced a "basically useless" report on such a critical topic.
Phil Singer, a spokesman for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), the Democratic presidential candidate, denounced the correction as "just the latest example of an administration playing fast and loose with the truth when it comes to the war on terror."
"The White House has clearly tried to blur the lines between 9/11 and Iraq, exaggerated the threat of [weapons of mass destruction], and has now been caught trying to inflate its success on terrorism," Singer said.
The annual Patterns report is intended to be the definitive U.S. survey of terrorist attacks and the people behind them. Although compiled by State, the statistics were produced by the CIA until last year, when Bush created the TTIC.
Bush intended the TTIC to bridge intelligence gaps by blending the CIA's overseas intelligence with the FBI's information about domestic threats. It is a stand-alone agency but based at the CIA; the office had a staff of 124 in April.
Brennan, for years a senior aide to CIA Director George J. Tenet, cited confusion as the task was shifted to the TTIC. He pointed to an "exceptionally antiquated database." A key supervisor departed in December and was not replaced, he said. Private contractors rotated in and out.
Brennan also cited "inattention." Information was wrongly entered into computers. No attacks that occurred after Nov. 11, 2003, were included, and neither the CIA nor the State Department noticed. That meant omitting four bombings in Turkey that killed 61 people and an assault in Saudi Arabia that left 17 dead and 122 wounded.
Figures produced by the TTIC were sent to the CIA, which forwarded them to State, Brennan said. A CIA representative said that the agency "played no role in vetting the numbers from this database" and that "TTIC took over the database in 2003."
J. Cofer Black, the State Department's top terrorism official, said the faults "were honest mistakes and certainly not deliberate deceptions as some have speculated." He said staffers who erred are "very hard-working, well-intentioned people who do make mistakes." State Department staff members also failed to catch the mistakes.
The revised numbers show there were 3,646 people injured, not 1,593 as first reported. There were 175 "significant" incidents, five more than first reported, and 208 incidents of all types, not 190.
Powell said the figures "were off, but they were not off by wild amounts." He noted that 100 fewer people died in terrorist attacks in 2003 than in 2002. As for Armitage's widely reported comment, Powell said his deputy "reflected the report as he received it."
Bush and top aides have blamed terrorists for deadly attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, but few of those assaults were included in the total. The administration does not count attacks aimed at on-duty troops because they are combatants.
Staff writers John Mintz and R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this report.
--------
STATISTICS
State Department Report Shows Increase in Terrorism
June 23, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/politics/23TERR.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 22 - The State Department announced Tuesday that the number of significant international terrorism episodes rose slightly last year, and that the number of those injured in all international terrorism episodes went up by more than 50 percent. Both trends contradicted earlier findings cited by the Bush administration as evidence that it was winning the campaign against terrorism and later disowned as erroneous.
The new report, reflecting two weeks of efforts led by the State Department to review the original statistics, showed that the total number of international terrorist episodes rose to 208 last year from 205 in 2002. A first report, issued April 29, said the number had fallen to 190 from 198. The number of injuries resulting such episodes rose to 3,646 from 2,013 last year, instead of falling to 1,593 as the earlier report said.
The number of "significant events" in international terrorism rose by more than the State Department had earlier said, to 175 from 138 instead of to 170.
"Our effort is to put out the most accurate information we can," Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said at a news conference on Tuesday, adding that "we have identified how we have to do this in the future in order to make sure that we don't run in to this kind of problem again."
The report's release was accompanied by an unusually testy exchange between Mr. Powell and reporters, who asked repeatedly about the comments made by Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage in April that the first report presented "clear evidence that we are prevailing in the fight" against terrorism.
"I'm aware of what Mr. Armitage said, and what Mr. Armitage said reflected the report as he received it on the 29th of April," he said.
Asked if the new statistics meant that the United States was not "prevailing," Mr. Powell said that he had to leave for a meeting at the White House but that two specialists would explain. "Here are the experts," he said. "They will tell you."
Left behind were J. Cofer Black, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, and John O. Brennan, director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, who asserted that a combination of technical and human errors, including an obsolete database and computer program, caused the errors.
For example, Mr. Brennan said that in preparing tables for the original report, titled "Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003," a computer failed to generate statistics for the period after mid-November, leaving out several incidents. Officials vetting the information at the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department then failed to recognize what happened. But Mr. Brennan and Mr. Black insisted that there were no political motivations or efforts to gloss over the trends.
"We here in the Counterterrorism Office, and I personally, should have caught any errors that marred the `Patterns' draft before we published it," Mr. Black said. "But I assure you and the American people that the errors in the `Patterns' report were honest mistakes, and certainly not deliberate deceptions as some have speculated."
But the political damage appeared likely to continue as Democrats seek to make an issue of the administration's credibility, citing the failure to find unconventional weapons in Iraq and the assertions by President Bush and others of links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
But the Democratic lawmaker who had helped expose the flaws in the first terrorism report, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, commended the State Department for acting to correct it. He said he accepted Mr. Powell's explanation that the errors resulted from "incompetence," not politics.
"I give Secretary Powell a great deal of credit for admitting they have made a mistake and trying to rectify it," Mr. Waxman said. "He is the only administration official I can recall who has admitted to making a mistake."
Democrats charged that by saying the report showed the Bush administration was "prevailing," Mr. Armitage was taking a document that has been issued annually for 22 years and thrusting it into the political arena. State Department officials say Mr. Armitage had intended to cite the broad information in the report, including the progress in specific areas like Afghanistan.
In a brief telephone interview, Mr. Armitage said: "I'm pleased that an accurate report has now been submitted, and of course we are going to prevail in the war on terrorism. But the numbers in the new terrorism report show that it's going to be a tough and difficult slog."
When the first report was published, there was little coverage.
Nearly three weeks later, an op-ed article in The Washington Post by two professors said the figures did not add up. A letter from Mr. Waxman was released about that time.
Then, after a story in The Los Angeles Times, Mr. Powell's staff reviewed the matter, and the department announced June 10 that the report contained many errors. Mr. Powell said he was "not a happy camper."
According to Mr. Black and Mr. Brennan, the main problem was that two years ago, the State Department, which had compiled terrorism statistics in cooperation with the Central Intelligence Agency, handed the job over to a new agency created as as a clearinghouse on terrorism data.
With fewer than 150 employees, this unit, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, is supposed to analyze threats reported overseas and domestically and figure out from where the next attacks may come.
But according to administration officials, C.I.A. and State Department officials then passed what they regarded as a tedious job of producing statistics for the annual report to the unit, which was understaffed and handicapped by turnover, old computers, software that did not work and other problems.
But some officials said Tuesday that the statistics themselves are arbitrary, dictated by American law. For example, the report does not include attacks by citizens of a country against citizens of the same country, because these are not regarded as "international" terrorism.
Nor does it include civilians killed accidentally by military action inside a country. Thus, foreigners killed by suicide bombs in Israel are included, but civilians killed accidentally by Israeli forces are not. American soldiers killed in Iraq are not included unless they are in a civilian setting, such as in a hotel bombing.
-------- torture
Memo on Interrogation Tactics Is Disavowed
Justice Document Had Said Torture May Be Defensible
By Mike Allen and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60719-2004Jun22?language=printer
President Bush's aides yesterday disavowed an internal Justice Department opinion that torturing terrorism suspects might be legally defensible, saying it had created the false impression that the government was claiming authority to use interrogation techniques barred by international law.
Responding to pressure from Congress and outrage around the world, officials at the White House and the Justice Department derided the August 2002 legal memo on aggressive interrogation tactics, calling parts of it overbroad and irrelevant and saying it would be rewritten.
In a highly unusual repudiation of its department's own work, a senior Justice official and two other high-ranking lawyers said that all legal advice rendered by the department's Office of Legal Counsel on the subject of interrogations will be reviewed.
As part of a public relations offensive, the administration also declassified and released hundreds of pages of internal documents that it said demonstrated that Bush had never authorized torture against detainees from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In doing so, the administration revealed details of the interrogation tactics being used on prisoners, an extraordinary disclosure for an administration that has argued that the release of such information would help the enemy.
The legal memos and policy directives provided a new level of insight into the administration's internal debate and decision-making over how far it should go to gain information from terrorism suspects, including:
• A Feb. 7, 2002, memo signed by Bush saying that he believed he had "the authority under the Constitution" to deny protections of the Geneva Conventions to combatants picked up during the war in Afghanistan but that he would "decline to exercise that authority at this time."
"Our nation recognizes that this new paradigm -- ushered in not by us, but by terrorists -- requires new thinking in the law of war," Bush wrote.
The memo, which had not been scheduled to be declassified until 2012, settled a bitter dispute between the State and Justice departments over the issue. It outlined Bush's rationale -- announced the day he signed it -- that some of the Geneva Conventions would apply to fighters for Afghanistan's Taliban but not to members of the al Qaeda terrorist network. Bush added that "our values as a Nation . . . call for us to treat detainees humanely."
• New details on the range of severe interrogation techniques approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for use at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including stripping detainees to humiliate them, using dogs to scare them and forcing them to remain in stressful positions. Those measures were later curtailed after military lawyers in the field questioned their legality.
• Documents showing that U.S. military interrogators were driven to seek more aggressive interrogation techniques because, in the words of Army Gen. James T. Hill, chief of the U.S. Southern Command in October 2002, "some detainees have tenaciously resisted our current interrogation methods."
• Military lawyers and policy officials alike were preoccupied during their deliberations by the possibility that officers, intelligence officials and law enforcement authorities could be prosecuted for violating the constraints of U.S. law or international conventions protecting detainees.
White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales told reporters yesterday that Bush's aides decided to make the disclosures, because they "felt that it was harmful to this country, in terms of the notion that perhaps we may be engaging in torture." The steps followed a string of polls showing sinking public confidence in Bush's handling of the war on terrorism.
None of the documents provided by the White House governed practices at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons in Iraq, although some of the ideas approved at least temporarily -- such as stripping prisoners -- would be mirrored in the graphic photos that drew international condemnation and heavy scrutiny of U.S. detention practices.
Earlier yesterday, Bush said Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy, a U.S. ally in Iraq, had brought up the practices at Abu Ghraib. Bush said he had "assured him that these soldiers do not represent what Americans think."
"Let me make very clear the position of my government and our country: We do not condone torture," Bush said. "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."
In the White House briefing, the aides took the extraordinary step of publicly questioning advice provided by top administration lawyers, with Gonzales saying that the internal administration debate included "unnecessary, over-broad discussions."
At issue was an Aug. 1, 2002, memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to Gonzales. A Justice Department official said yesterday that the administration planned to scrap a provision in it opining that interrogators who torture al Qaeda or Taliban captives could be exempt from prosecution under the president's powers as commander in chief. "I don't believe it was necessary," the official said. "The president never asked us to overrule" laws barring torture, he said. Bush has not authorized any interrogations that would employ methods outside the law, he said.
Gonzales said that memo and a related Pentagon memo had been meant to "explore the limits of the legal landscape," and to his knowledge had "never made it to the hands of soldiers in the field, nor to the president." He acknowledged that some of the conclusions were "controversial" and "subject to misinterpretation."
The documents that were released and the White House briefing focused on military interrogations and left many questions unanswered. Gonzales refused to comment on techniques used by the CIA, beyond saying that they "are lawful and do not constitute torture." He also would not discuss the president's involvement in the deliberations.
Democrats on Capitol Hill said they would continue pushing for more documents. "The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. "Now, responding to public pressure, the White House has released a small subset of the documents that offers glimpses into the genesis of this scandal."
The administration had argued that supplying details of interrogation techniques would make it easier for detainees to resist. Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II said that there was "some value in having some uncertainty" for terrorism suspects but that "under the circumstances, this was the right thing to do."
Staff writers Dana Priest and R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this report.
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U.S. Liability Key Concern in '02 Debate on Detainees
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62069-2004Jun22.html
A furious debate erupted in January 2002 between the State Department and the Justice Department over the type and degree of human rights protections available to fighters picked up in the hundreds by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
The State Department said that, as a matter of law, soldiers in the Taliban forces associated with the country's leadership were protected by the Geneva Conventions. But the Justice Department, arguing for those at the Pentagon who sought more latitude in the use of tough interrogation techniques, said the Taliban fighters were not entitled to those protections.
While the contours of this debate have been known for some time, one of the internal administration memos revealed yesterday by the administration makes clear for the first time the preeminent concern of those who supported the Justice Department's position, which was subsequently embraced in part by President Bush.
The memo, amounting to 12 crisp paragraphs written by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and sent on Feb. 1, 2002, to Bush, warned in stark terms that if the president sided with the State Department, American officials might wind up going to jail for violating U.S. and international laws.
This anxiety about eventual criminal prosecution under a series of strict laws barring torture or cruel and inhumane treatment evidently lay beneath much of the administration's debate over the limits on interrogation at the outset of the post-9/11 war on terrorism, the documents released yesterday suggest.
While on the one hand, some military officials wanted maximum flexibility to pressure stubborn detainees into spilling what they knew, they also wanted to be assured of immunity from criminal sanctions if they pushed beyond traditional interrogation tactics to the edge of what could be considered torture.
This balancing act was at the heart of the administration's protracted reviews in 2002 and 2003 -- at the State Department, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House -- of what the legal standards were for handling detainees and what the implications would be for those who took part in interrogations and in setting U.S. policy.
The State Department had argued that international law required that members of the Taliban militia receive the protections of the Geneva Conventions, including possible status as enemy prisoners of war, and that to decide anything else would undermine similar protections guaranteed under the law to captured U.S. military personnel.
Ashcroft, arguing for his department's interpretation of the law, said that if Bush sided with Justice, the decision would "provide the highest assurance that no court would subsequently entertain charges that American military officers, intelligence officials, or law enforcement officials violated Geneva Convention rules." A U.S. law approved in 1996, he noted, makes such violations a domestic crime.
A decision to support the State Department's view, Ashcroft told the president, would "carry higher risk of liability, criminal prosecution, and judicially-imposed conditions of detainment," meaning that courts might wind up dictating precisely how detainees should be treated or even ordering their peremptory release.
The struggle between the State and Justice departments over the degree of legal protections owed to Taliban fighters provoked the administration's first major effort to parse the law and fix the limits on what it could do. These issues had gone largely unexplored for six years -- since Congress had written legislation making torture a domestic crime subject to the death penalty.
But Pentagon and Justice Department officials, feeling pressured to extract intelligence from detainees who were proving adept at resisting traditional interrogation methods, sought a major reexamination of the laws after the terrorist attacks on the United States. They strove throughout their deliberations to find and preserve as much latitude as they could under those laws.
In the end, Bush decided he had the right to suspend the application of the Geneva Conventions' protections to Taliban militia members but opted not to do so; at the same time, he declared they were "unlawful combatants" and not prisoners of war, making them eligible for more aggressive interrogation techniques.
"Our nation recognizes that this new paradigm -- ushered in not by us, but by terrorists -- requires new thinking in the law of war," Bush said in a Feb. 1, 2002, memo on his decision. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld subsequently approved -- and then rescinded -- a series of tough interrogation techniques for unlawful combatants, which wound up being used not only on Taliban members but also on Iraqis in 2003.
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Spirited Debate Preceded Policies
Pentagon Lawyers Urged Restraint
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61942-2004Jun22.html
The Pentagon documents released yesterday reveal a gripping internal debate over interrogation tactics for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, with Pentagon lawyers warning that the military's reputation could suffer as a result of tools approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In December 2002, as Pentagon officials were trying to get detainees to offer more useful information about al Qaeda, Rumsfeld approved a variety of techniques, such as stripping prisoners to humiliate them, using dogs to scare them and employing stress positions to wear them down, the documents show. The tactics also included using light and sound assaults, shaving facial and head hair and taking away religious items.
Pentagon officials say most of the techniques were never used, and a Pentagon working group recommended that Rumsfeld roll back these methods. In a memo to the defense secretary in March 2003, the group wrote: "When assessing exceptional interrogation techniques, consideration should be given to the possible adverse affects on U.S. Armed Forces culture and self-image, which at times in the past may have suffered due to perceived law of war violations."
As has been previously reported, Rumsfeld did subsequently rescind approval for the most aggressive tactics, including the use of dogs and stripping prisoners. But the documents released yesterday reveal many new details of the behind-the-scenes deliberations over what would be permitted at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the holding facility for about 600 detainees picked up in the U.S. campaign against terrorists over the past three years.
For instance, during an initial Pentagon review of the tactics being used at Guantanamo, completed Nov. 27, 2002, Rumsfeld added a handwritten note to the bottom of a document in which he approved new interrogation techniques that included forcing prisoners to stand for four hours at a time. "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"
The documents also show commanders and lawyers debating the legality of certain techniques and being torn between what they considered vague guidance offered by past legal cases and the desire to provide useful intelligence to thwart future terrorist attacks.
On Oct. 11, 2002, for example, the commanding general at the Guantanamo Bay detention center, Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, asked his commander to approve the use of death threats against detainees and their families, wrapping a detainee in wet towels to "induce the misperception of suffocation," stress positions, exposing them to cold weather and water, and using dogs.
These techniques had been reviewed and deemed legal under the Geneva Conventions by Dunlavey's legal adviser, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, who wrote that they would be permissible "so long as there is an important governmental objective" and the tactics are not used "for the purpose of causing harm or with the intent to cause prolonged" mental or physical suffering.
But Dunlavey's commander, Gen. James T. Hill, chief of U.S. Southern Command, expressed unease with this interpretation and asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers, for guidance. "I am uncertain whether all the techniques . . . are legal under US law, given the absence of judicial interpretation of the US torture statute," Hill wrote on Oct. 25, 2002. "I am particularly troubled by the use of implied or express threats of death of the detainee and his family."
A month later, the Pentagon's general counsel, William J. Haynes II, approved the use of dogs and stripping, but threw out the other more controversial methods. He also approved "grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing" among a list of two dozen other tactics.
In a memo dated Nov. 27, 2002, Haynes said that while the tougher techniques "may be legally available . . . we believe our armed forces are trained to a standard of interrogation that reflects a tradition of restraint."
--------
INMATES
White House Says Prisoner Policy Set Humane Tone
June 23, 2004
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/politics/23ABUS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 22 - In a February 2002 directive that set new rules for handling prisoners captured in Afghanistan, President Bush broadly cited the need for "new thinking in the law of war." He ordered that all people detained as part of the fight against terrorism should be treated humanely even if the United States considered them not to be protected by the Geneva Conventions, the White House said Tuesday.
That statement of principle, which has been described publicly but never before released in its entirety, came at a time of intense debate within the Bush administration over how far the military and the intelligence agencies could and should go in using coercive interrogations and torture to extract information from detainees, administration officials said as they released hundreds of pages of previously classified documents related to the development of a policy on the detainees.
By late 2002, the documents showed, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was fleshing out the policy under intense pressure to squeeze more information from people seized in Afghanistan. He briefly approved techniques including the use of dogs, and by April 2003 he approved the use, under some conditions, of interrogation techniques including changes in diet, reversing sleep cycles, and isolation.
But the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, told reporters on Tuesday that Mr. Bush never considered more aggressive options set out by administration lawyers, including those in an August 2002 Justice Department memo that appeared to offer a permissive definition of torture. The Justice Department on Tuesday essentially disavowed that memo, saying it was now considered irrelevant. It is being rewritten, a senior department official said.
The documents released Tuesday did little to settle some of the central questions surrounding what happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including whether the administration tacitly or explicitly encouraged military personnel and intelligence officers - in Afghanistan, at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and finally in Iraq - to be more aggressive than the written policies for dealing with detainees would permit.
The White House rejected any link and said Mr. Bush had made clear what the policy of the United States was.
"The president has given no order or directive that would immunize from prosecution anyone engaged in conduct that constitutes torture," Mr. Gonzales said. "All interrogation techniques actually authorized have been carefully vetted, are lawful and do not constitute torture."
Directly addressing any suggestion that the administration's consideration of more aggressive interrogation might have sent a signal to military personnel that abusing prisoners was justified and therefore contributed to what happened at Abu Ghraib, Mr. Gonzales said, "We categorically reject any connection."
Democrats said the documents released Tuesday appeared to represent only a portion of important legal documents related to detainees.
The administration released the documents after months in which its policies toward interrogation and torture have been called into question by the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib. The documents showed that the effort to draw up new rules for interrogation after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks drastically widened the scope of techniques considered at the highest levels of the administration, but also in the end a reluctance to endorse many of them.
The release of the documents seemed to be driven by a sense at the White House that the gravity of the prison abuses required a fuller disclosure of the legal papers and internal debate that formed the basis for Washington's handling of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Administration officials said that the documents did not circulate widely in the government at the time they were prepared and that there was no connection between their exploration of the legalities of various interrogation techniques and what happened at Abu Ghraib.
Senate Democrats prepared a subpoena last week requesting more than a dozen documents beyond those released Tuesday. That subpoena was blocked last Thursday in a 10-to-9 party-line vote of the Senate Judiciary Committee. On Tuesday, Democrats dismissed the administration's document release as highly selective and said it failed to address important questions about its handling of detainee issues.
"The stonewalling in the prison abuse scandal has been building to a crisis point," Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said in a statement. "Now, responding to public pressure, the White House has released a small subset of the documents that offers glimpses into the genesis of this scandal. All should have been provided earlier to Congress, and much more remains held back and hidden away from public view."
None of the documents released Tuesday sheds any light on the legal thinking behind the detention of a small number of high-level Qaeda operatives who have been detained by the Central Intelligence Agency at secret locations around the world and who have been subjected to coercive interrogations without access to lawyers or human rights groups.
Asked Tuesday about the prison abuse and torture, Mr. Bush told reporters in the Oval Office that torture ran counter to the values of the United States and that he would never sanction its use.
"Let me make very clear the position of my government, and our country," Mr. Bush said. "We do not condone torture. I have never ordered torture. I will never order torture."
Briefing reporters after releasing the documents, Mr. Gonzales said they highlighted "the thorough and deliberative process the administration used to make policy decision on how to wage the global war on terrorist organizations."
Although he acknowledged that some of the legal issues raised during internal administration debates were controversial, he said the principles settled on by Mr. Bush were "more narrowly tailored" than the legal theories offered by his lawyers and made clear that torture was not an option for interrogation.
The "abstract" discussions about stretching the bounds of the law on torture and interrogation were never made available to "soldiers in the field, nor to the president," Mr. Gonzales said.
With the administration clearly eager to distance Mr. Bush from the debate over what kinds of interrogation techniques were allowable or legal, the Justice Department on Tuesday described as irrelevant and unnecessary a detailed, 50-page memo sent by the department to the White House in August 2002 on the legal restrictions on torture, saying the document was now considered irrelevant.
The memo, which leaked out in the news media earlier this month, appeared to offer a legal rationale for harsh treatment of Qaeda prisoners, setting a high bar for what constituted torture. It was sent from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to Mr. Gonzales.
The memo concluded that under international law banning torture, a tactic "must inflict pain that is difficult to endure" and that "physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death," according to a copy released by the administration.
But a senior Justice Department official said the document was "overbroad and irrelevant" and was unnecessary because no one in the administration had ever asked for the legal authority to torture captives. The department is now rewriting the entire memo in a less abstract, more case-specific context, the official said.
The official said prisoners in Iraq were clearly covered by the Geneva Conventions and that Iraqi prisoners were "legally distinct" from Qaeda or Taliban prisoners. "Our simple advice to everybody in connection with the Iraq detention is comply with the Geneva Conventions," the official said.
Some of the documents showed that the administration originally had no intention of making its internal debate public anytime soon. Mr. Rumsfeld's April 16, 2003, memo authorizing the limited use of more aggressive interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay was stamped "Declassify On: 2 April 2013."
Eric Lichtblau and David Johnston contributed reporting for this article.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
House Approves Defense Spending
By Dan Morgan and Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61796-2004Jun22.html
The House overwhelmingly approved a $417 billion spending bill yesterday that gives the Bush administration most of what it wants for the Pentagon in 2005, but a related House report warned that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are "generating great stresses" on U.S. forces.
The vote was 403 to 17 in favor of the annual spending bill, which funds new weapons, a missile defense system, military pay and benefits, and the global war on terrorism. It includes $25 billion as well for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a sum that is viewed as only a first installment, with possibly larger outlays early next year.
But the political unanimity belied growing concerns in the House over the financial stresses posed by multifaceted U.S. military commitments.
"It is becoming clearer with each passing day that these operations are generating great strains on the current force, in terms of both manning and equipment," said a report by the House Appropriations Committee. "The committee is deeply concerned that these stresses are creating many near and mid-term challenges which have yet to be fully factored into Department of Defense plans and budgets."
The speedy House action on the spending bill was in sharp contrast to a slow debate in the Senate on a $447 billion defense authorization measure that covers the Energy Department's nuclear weapons programs as well as Defense Department activities. That bill is now in its fourth week of consideration.
Yesterday the Senate once again reaffirmed its support for the administration's missile defense plans and agreed to ease "Buy American" restrictions that limit the Pentagon's ability to procure defense goods from abroad.
The Senate voted 56 to 44 to defeat a proposal by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) to cut $515 million planned for new missile interceptors and use the money instead for domestic anti-terrorism and global nuclear containment programs.
The vote on Levin's proposal followed several other Democratic defeats on the missile defense issue over the past week, including an attempt to bar deployment of the system before it undergoes operational testing. The first interceptors are scheduled to be deployed in Alaska and California later this year.
Levin's amendment would not have affected these interceptors or 10 others scheduled for deployment over the next two years. His proposed cuts would have come from funding designated for another 10 interceptors in future years, which would bring the total to 30.
Protecting homeland security and getting control over nuclear material that could fall into terrorists' hands have a higher priority than protections against ballistic missile attack that may not prove effective, Levin said. But Republicans defended the missile defense program as a top national priority.
The "Buy American" showdown came over a proposal by Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.) to reject an Armed Services Committee proposal to relax the procurement rules for defense firms of certain close allies, mostly NATO countries. There was no direct vote on Dayton's proposal, but the Senate instead approved a proposal by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to ease current restrictions for a smaller number of countries. The vote was 54 to 46.
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House Approves $417 Billion for Military
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/politics/23house.html
WASHINGTON, June 22 (AP) - The House approved a $417 billion military spending bill Tuesday that includes $25 billion for United States operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus billions for major weapons systems.
The 403-to-17 vote underscored a bipartisan consensus in an election year behind military spending that wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have accentuated. If anything, Democrats argue that President Bush has requested too little for operations in the two countries in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 and predict that the $25 billion he requested for the latter months of this year will prove at least $50 billion too low.
"No doubt, after the election the public will be told what the facts are on the installment plan," said Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, who voted for the bill.
While Mr. Bush wanted to decide exactly how his requested $25 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan would be spent, the House limited his unfettered control to $1 billion. The rest was assigned to 22 specific accounts; for example, $674 million to provide armor for Humvee vehicles.
The bill provides $1.6 billion for one more Virginia-class submarine, the Navy's most advanced attack submarine, and $4.4 billion to continue developing the joint strike fighter, a next-generation aircraft being developed for the Navy, Air Force, Marines and American allies.
The national missile defense program would get $9.7 billion, $458 million less than the president wanted. There is less money than Mr. Bush wanted for development of the Navy's DD(X) warship program and for the Army's future combat system designed to link soldiers by computer with drones and combat vehicles. But the bill has more than Mr. Bush sought for an additional Arleigh Burke class guided-missile destroyer.
The bill also includes $685 million for American diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan and $95 million to help victims of famine and war in Sudan and Chad that Mr. Bush did not want. In a letter, the White House budget office said the money was "unnecessary at this time."
The measure also has money for the 3.5 percent military pay increase that Mr. Bush requested.
The Senate Appropriations Committee passed a similar $416 billion military spending measure with $25 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan that would give Mr. Bush slightly more leeway than the House would. Mr. Bush would control $2.5 billion of that money, and the rest would generally be assigned to broader spending categories than the House version provides.
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Senate Wants Bush to Report Back on Iraq
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Defense-Spending.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Senate moved Wednesday toward approval of a defense spending bill that covers only part of the Pentagon's upcoming war costs but gives the military a pay raise and increases troop levels.
Lawmakers said they expected passage of the $447 billion defense authorization bill late in the night Wednesday.
The bill for spending in the year beginning Oct. 1 includes $25 billion for war costs. Officials are expected to submit a supplemental budget later of at least that much again for the two ongoing campaigns.
The spending bill also would add 20,000 troops to an Army stretched thin by the war in Iraq and other commitments around the world, a move opposed by the Pentagon and White House.
The bill, generally mirroring one passed a month ago in the Houses, includes an across-the-board 3.5 percent pay raise for military personnel.
It also spends billions of dollars on weapons programs, including $10.2 billion for missile defense.
In voting earlier Wednesday, senators passed an amendment requiring President Bush to report to the Republican-controlled Congress on his efforts to stabilize Iraq. But they rejected one that would have forced him to give an estimate of how many American troops will remain in the violence-plagued country a year from now.
They also:
--Rejected a proposal that National Guard and reservists become eligible for retirement benefits at age 55 instead of 60.
--Rejected an amendment to limit the growth of U.S. military and civilian contractors helping Colombia's fight its drug war. Opponents said the full increase from 400 to 800 troops and 400 to 600 civilians was needed to keep up progress in the war, which also fights narco-terrorism.
-------- corruption
NIH Scientists Broke Rules, Panel Says
Deals With Companies Went Unreported, Probe of Potential Conflicts of Interest Finds
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61798-2004Jun22?language=printer
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health violated federal rules by engaging in lucrative collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and not reporting those arrangements to ethics officials as required, according to documents released yesterday as part of an escalating congressional investigation into conflicts of interest at the agency.
The House oversight subcommittee had already identified several instances in which scientists engaged in outside activities that posed at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. But in those cases the arrangements had been approved by top legal and ethics officials. Now, NIH officials said, disciplinary actions may be needed.
Testimony yesterday also provided evidence that Lance A. Liotta, a researcher at the National Cancer Institute, continued to receive thousands of dollars in compensation from one such business arrangement through May, despite his testimony under oath last month that he had suspended the collaboration months before.
The subcommittee said Liotta and others used their government computer systems to exchange e-mails relating to their private consultancies, supporting some lawmakers' contention that some government scientists have been illegally using federal resources for personal gain.
It remains to be seen how many of the subcommittee's allegations will stand up to closer scrutiny as bona fide breaches of ethics rules. Many details of the cases were still missing as of yesterday, and key individuals could not be reached to comment after the hard-hitting six-hour hearing came to a close.
But having learned of some of the new findings late last week, NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni came before the subcommittee yesterday with proposed revisions to NIH ethics rules more severe than those he had recommended a month earlier.
"I have reached the conclusion that drastic changes are needed," he said.
The new allegations emerged as part of the panel's expanding investigation into government employees' consulting deals with private companies. Although House members began by focusing on NIH, where top scientists' spare time is in great demand by drug companies wishing to capitalize on their expertise, they widened their probe last week to include 15 other federal agencies. In letters sent to agency heads, the subcommittee chairman, James C. Greenwood (R-Pa.), and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-Tex.) asked that records of all such collaborations be provided to them by July 2.
Yesterday's surprise disclosure that many NIH scientists may be engaging in outside deals without the required agency reviews and approvals grew from inquiries Greenwood made to 20 pharmaceutical companies.
Given the lack of a centralized NIH database of all agency scientists' outside collaborations, Greenwood went directly to the companies, asking them to reveal all the arrangements they had.
Of the 264 arrangements the companies reported, Greenwood said, "about 100" were apparently unknown to NIH officials.
That sampling has Congress wondering, "What else is out there?," said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.).
In one example detailed by Greenwood, drug giant Pfizer Inc. reported that Trey Sunderland, a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, was paid $517,000 in fees, honoraria and expense reimbursements related to consulting arrangements with the company over the past five years. Greenwood said the information was not on Sunderland's financial disclosure reports as required by federal ethics rules.
An NIH official said Sunderland was traveling abroad and could not be contacted.
In another highlighted arrangement, Alan Moshell of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases was retained as an expert witness in several private product-liability lawsuits involving the drug Accutane at a rate of $600 per hour -- and did so without required agency permission -- Greenwood said. Those arrangements were described by Health and Human Services general counsel Alex M. Azar II as particularly worrisome as Moshell allegedly testified in those trials to the inadequacy of the government's own warning label on the drug.
Moshell did not respond to calls and an e-mail late yesterday.
The subcommittee also provided new details regarding an alleged conflict of interest outlined in a May hearing, in which cancer researcher Liotta and an FDA scientist became paid consultants for a California biotechnology company that is in competition with a Bethesda company with which the two scientists and the Cancer Institute were already collaborating.
Liotta testified last month that by March of this year he had suspended the California arrangement, pending a fresh ethics review by agency officials who initially approved the deal but later expressed regret at having done so.
Yesterday, Greenwood flashed on a giant screen copies of several canceled checks from the company -- Biospect Inc. of South San Francisco, recently renamed Predicant Biosciences -- made out to Liotta. The latest check, for $3,125, was dated May 1.
Greenwood also showed evidence supplied by the company that it had paid Liotta a total of $70,000, significantly more than the approximately $49,000 that Liotta reported to ethics officials.
A cancer institute spokesman said yesterday that Liotta had an appointment and would not be able to respond to media queries.
Zerhouni has already imposed new tiers of ethics review for all proposed outside consulting arrangements by NIH employees and greater public disclosure of approved arrangements. Yesterday, he proposed additional restrictions, including some that could be accomplished internally and others that may require new legislation.
Among them: a ban on ownership of drug company or biotech stocks by some key employees, and restricted stock ownership for all other employees; no membership on corporate boards; creation of a centralized registry of all outside arrangements and a public list of the awards that employees may receive; and prohibition of all paid consulting or speaking engagements at institutions that receive NIH funding.
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Ethics Panel Reviewing DeLay Complaint
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-DeLay-Ethics.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House ethics committee said Tuesday it will review a complaint from a Texas congressman that accuses House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, a fellow Texan, of ``serious criminal acts.''
The committee said Democratic Rep. Chris Bell met House rules for filing such a complaint. The decision is largely procedural and is not based on the merits of the allegations.
DeLay, a Republican, has called the complaint filed last week the product of a disgruntled lawmaker. Bell, a freshman, lost his re-election bid in Texas' March primaries after Republicans redrew his Houston district.
The committee's decision Tuesday triggers a 45-day review of the complaint.
After the review, the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct can choose from among three steps: establish an investigative subcommittee to look into the complaint's allegations; extend the review another 45 days; or recommend dismissal of the complaint or parts of it.
Bell called the committee's move ``an important first step in the long journey to restore integrity and ethics to the people's House and to hold the House majority leader accountable for his actions.''
DeLay said at a briefing earlier Tuesday that GOP House members have expressed misgivings to him about the ``use of the ethics committee for political gains.'' He said he addressed the concerns in the Republicans' weekly conference meeting, saying the party would respond by passing its agenda.
``I'm not going to attempt to influence the ethics committee,'' the Republican leader said. ``I have every confidence the ethics committee will do the right thing.''
In the complaint, Bell made three charges:
--That DeLay illegally solicited and accepted political contributions from Kansas-based Westar Energy Corp. in return for legislative favors. Westar executives, at the time in 2002 the company was lobbying for a provision in a major energy bill, contributed $58,200 to various campaigns and political action committees, including $25,000 to DeLay's PAC, Texans for a Republican Majority.
--That DeLay's PAC in September 2002 sent $190,000 in corporate money to the Republican National Committee ``in an apparent money-laundering scheme'' intended to provide money for GOP candidates to the Texas state legislature.
--That in 2003, when the Texas legislature was battling over the GOP redistricting plan, DeLay abused his office by asking the Federal Aviation Administration to track down a private plane that carried some Democratic legislators away from Austin to prevent Republicans from getting a quorum to vote on the plan.
On the Net:
House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct: http://www.house.gov/ethics/Press(underscore)Statement(underscore)De lay.html
-------- investigations
Post State Dept. Reporter Questioned in Leak Probe
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62265-2004Jun22.html
A Washington Post reporter was questioned yesterday by the special prosecutor investigating the possibly illegal leak of a CIA employee's identity by Bush administration officials.
State Department reporter Glenn Kessler submitted to a tape-recorded interview that will be provided to a grand jury investigating the disclosure last summer of CIA employee Valerie Plame's name to columnist Robert D. Novak.
Kessler said he agreed to be interviewed about two phone conversations he had with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, at Libby's urging. At the prosecutor's request, Libby and other White House aides have signed waivers saying they agree to release reporters they have talked to from keeping confidential any disclosures about Plame.
Kessler said he told prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald that, during conversations last July 12 and July 18, Libby did not mention Plame or her husband, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, or Wilson's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger to investigate whether Iraq tried to buy uranium there.
In October, The Post reported that "on July 12, two days before Novak's column, a Post reporter was told by an administration official that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador's CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction."
The article said Plame's name was not mentioned and the purpose of the disclosure was to cast doubt on Wilson's report rather than reveal her identity. Novak had reported a similar account on July 14 that he said was provided him by two administration officials.
Kessler said he would not have agreed to testify if it had violated any promise of confidentiality.
"Mr. Libby signed a waiver in which he asked me to discuss with the special counsel whether the Wilson matter was raised in two conversations that I had with him in 2003. Under these circumstances, at the request of my source, I am giving a deposition regarding these questions," Kessler said.
The Post's executive editor, Leonard Downie Jr., said the decision to allow Kessler to be deposed was "reached in a way so that we are not violating any confidential source agreements, and we will never do so willingly."
Kessler said that his testimony was limited to inquiries about the Plame-Wilson matter, and that he did not discuss the unrelated topics he discussed with Libby on July 12 and July 18. The interview took place in the presence of lawyers for The Post at a law office rather than before the grand jury, which has been taking testimony since January.
Fitzgerald has subpoenaed reporters from NBC and Time magazine, and both news organizations have gone to court to try to block his efforts. Legal experts said that reporters can often tie up requests for their testimony in lengthy court proceedings but in the end are afforded little protection from having to testify if subpoenaed before a grand jury.
-------- propaganda wars
Fahrenheit rising: US hawks feel heat as movie's release date nears
June 23, 2004
Los Angeles Times
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/smh9.htm
Controversy might just be Michael Moore's best friend. With Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore's incendiary documentary due in US cinemas this week, supporters of President George Bush are pressuring theatre owners not to show the film, liberal groups are developing a counter-attack and the former New York governor, Mario Cuomo, has joined the fight to appeal against its R rating.
Bad news? Hardly. Like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, all the gnashing of teeth is generating the sort of media attention that should pay off at the box office. The documentary, which opens in New York today and in the rest of the country on Friday, will screen in more than 700 cinemas; Moore's Oscar-winning Bowling for Columbine played on 243 screens at its peak.
Cinema owners have shown no signs of bowing to an internet campaign organised by Move America Forward to drop the film. The group, which has ties to Republican campaigns and last year's effort to push the miniseries The Reagans off CBS, was formed last month by Howard Kaloogian, an influential California Republican.
John Fithian, president of the National Association of Theatre Owners, calls the tactic "ill-advised and counterproductive". Every time someone protests about a film, he notes, it lights a fire under the box office.
Meanwhile, Moveon.org, a liberal political action committee, is also mobilising its ranks. Last week, it sent an alert to its 2.2 million members asking them to bring friends to the film and to view the trailer on a website to counter the pressure of people opposed to the movie.
Distributors say the R rating could result in a 20 per cent decline in box office takings. They have brought aboard a prominent advocate in Mr Cuomo, who will attend a June 22 hearing to appeal against the rating.
-------- us politics
Bush feels the heat: US voters turn on him over Iraq
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
23 June 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=534286
President George Bush's bid for re-election is stalling as a result of the turmoil in Iraq, according to the results of an opinion poll that shows he has fallen behind in the race for the White House.
For the first time a test of the public mood has shown Mr Bush trailing his Democratic challenger, John Kerry, not just in the overall contest for the presidency but in what was considered his strongest suit: the fight against terrorism.
The latest Washington Post/ABC News survey offers a distinctly gloomy prospect for Mr Bush in his battle to secure a second term. After three months in which his foreign policy strategy has been under the spotlight like never before, public opinion may be finally turning against the Iraq war. His chances of re-election have never looked more uncertain.
The poll's findings confirm that even a record $100m-plus of campaign advertisements aimed at discrediting his opponent have been no counterbalance to the torrent of bad news for Mr Bush - the continuing violence in Iraq, damning reports on the pre-war intelligence failures and the 11 September attacks, and, above all, the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib.
The President now trails Mr Kerry by 45 per cent to 53 per cent, one of the widest margins yet recorded.
Most worrying for Republicans are Mr Bush's plunging poll ratings in the "war on terror", which once seemed set to carry him to a comfortable election win in November.
Instead, for all the party machine's efforts to brand Mr Kerry as weak on national security, it is the Democrat who is judged likely to do the better job in fighting terrorism. The margin is a bare 48 per cent to 47 per cent, a dead heat in statistical terms. But it is in sharp contrast to the Washington Post/ABC News poll's finding just a month ago, when the President led by 52 per cent to 39 per cent. Americans' views of the Iraq occupation are also changing. Only 51 per cent believe the war has improved the long-term security of the US.
A record 71 per cent say the level of US casualties in Iraq is "unacceptable". And by a 52 to 47 majority, Americans feel the war was not worth fighting.
A similar majority disapproves of Mr Bush's job performance. Although more than four months remain until the election on 2 November, not since Harry Truman in 1948 has an incumbent president has been so low in the polls at this stage and still won a second term.
In a separate dent to the administration's credibility, the State Department was yesterday issuing revised figures for the victims of terror worldwide in 2003, showing a sharp increase in the number of those killed. A report two months ago claimed that 307 people died in 190 attacks, the fewest since 1969 - enabling Mr Bush to boast that the US was winning the "war on terror". But the new figures, to be announced by Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, were expected to show that the total killed was close to the 725 who died in 2002. "The facts we had were wrong," Richard Boucher, Mr Powell's spokesman, said.
The poll contains other alarming data for the White House. Mr Bush has based his political image on straight talking. But, by a 52 per cent to 39 per cent margin, Mr Kerry leads in the "honest and trustworthy" category - a measure of how much Iraq and the reasons advanced for the war have eroded the President's credibility.
Even more astonishing, and equally worrying for Bush strategists, those surveyed gave the Democratic candidate a massive 20 point lead when asked which candidate "better understands the problems of people like you."
The finding turns campaign stereotypes on their head. Whatever his failings, Mr Bush was supposed to be the "regular guy" candidate. Whatever his virtues, Mr Kerry has mostly been depicted as a patrician and extremely wealthy north-easterner who has little in common with ordinary Americans. Even if the third party contender Ralph Nader is included in the race for the White House, Mr Kerry, a Massachusetts senator, still leads President Bush by 48 per cent to 44 per cent, with 6 per cent for Mr Nader. Most analysts believe that the independent candidate will, in fact, do badly should he stand, probably picking up less than the 2.7 per cent he won four years ago.
Mr Nader took a significant step in that direction yesterday, by enlisting Peter Camejo, a Green Party activist, to be his vice-presidential running mate. This should bring a formal endorsement by the Greens of Mr Nader, who ran as the party's nominee in 2000.
If so, he will win de-facto ballot access in 22 states, including Florida where Nader votes cost Al Gore the state, and the presidency, four years ago. But this time the Democrats are so united in their desire to get rid of Mr Bush that few are likely to indulge in the luxury of a protest vote.
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Western Governors Pledge to Explore Clean, Renewable Energy
June 23, 2004
SANTA FE, New Mexico, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-23-09.asp#anchor4
Western governors agreed unanimously on Tuesday to explore opportunities to develop "a clean, secure and diversified energy system for the West and to capitalize on the region's immense energy resources."
The governors have agreed to examine the feasibility and actions required to reach a goal of 30,000 megawatts of clean energy by 2015 and a 20 percent improvement in energy efficiency by 2020.
The initiative was detailed in a resolution adopted at the annual meeting of the Western Governors Association (WGA), an independent, nonprofit organization representing the governors of 18 states and three U.S. flagged Pacific islands.
Spearheaded by Governors Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat, and Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, a Republican, the resolution builds upon recommendations the governors received from the nearly 700 participants at the North American Energy Summit, which the association held in April.
A new working group will be formed to determine how to reach that goal, and at the same time, ensure the region has the necessary generation and transmission capacity.
"This region has a unique opportunity to develop clean energy to fuel our growing economy," said Richardson, WGA Chairman. "We have an enormous potential to improve the efficiency of energy use. The West also has the highest quality solar, wind, and geothermal resources in the nation, and this clean energy initiative will determine the steps needed to take advantage of this unique opportunity."
Governor Dave Freudenthal of Wyoming will serve as lead governor for energy policy, along with Richardson and Schwarzenegger.
"Western governors recognize that both traditional and non-traditional resources will play an important role in meeting the energy needs of the West," Freudenthal said.
----
Corn Producers Keen on Wind Energy
June 23, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-23-09.asp#anchor7
A majority of U.S. corn producers recently surveyed want federal and state governments to do more to promote wind energy.
The survey found 90 percent of corn farmers support the development of wind energy and 89 percent want the U.S. House of Representatives to quickly pass the same wind energy production tax credit extension as the U.S. Senate in order to encourage new wind energy projects. New wind power development has stalled this year because the production tax credit expired at the end of December 2003.
"U.S. corn farmers are unified to the tune of 70, 80 or 90 percent on the essential federal and state wind energy policies needed to realize the tremendous community based renewable energy and rural economic development potential that wind energy offers," said Dan McGuire, chief executive officer of the American Corn Growers Foundation, which organized the survey.
The survey was conducted by RMA Research, Inc. of Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
It consisted of 500 farmers in 16 top corn producing states with more than 90 percent of the 2004 planted corn acreage based on federal data.
Each farmer surveyed had at least 100 acres of corn.
The survey found 89 percent of those polled want farmers, industry and public institutions to promote wind as alternative energy and 81 percent are more inclined to invest in wind energy because it helps clean the environment.
Seventy-seven percent want farmers to be offered financial incentives such as production tax credits through government programs to encourage wind energy development
The poll found 85 percent support rural electric cooperatives to support and promote wind energy and 82 percent agree that farmers, landowners and investors should be able to sell electricity from wind turbines to public power districts.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Toxic Emissions Rising, EPA Says
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61795-2004Jun22.html
Industry released 5 percent more toxic chemicals into the environment in 2002 than the year before, the Environmental Protection Agency reported yesterday.
The latest statistics, compiled in the agency's annual Toxic Release Inventory, represent a setback: In 2001, according to the inventory, toxic emissions had declined by about 16 percent. Environmental groups, moreover, charged yesterday that polluters were releasing four to five times more toxic material than they reported.
Kim Nelson, who directs the EPA's Environmental Information Office, said much of last year's increase was caused by an Arizona-based copper smelting facility that closed and had to dispose of significant waste material. Without that facility, she said, emissions dropped by 3 percent nationwide.
"This is a very broad and far-reaching effort the agency has implemented to inform the American public about toxics," Nelson said.
Under a 1986 law targeting 650 chemicals, companies must report to the EPA how much of each they release annually, and the agency reports these figures to the public. The federal government does not directly monitor the release of all emissions, though it has recently taken enforcement action against facilities that missed the EPA's July 1 reporting deadline.
The 2002 figures marked the first time since 1997 that reported emissions increased. Releases of lead increased 3.2 percent and mercury jumped by 10 percent, though Nelson attributed the mercury increase to a single gold mine. However, emissions of dioxin, a carcinogenic byproduct of various industrial processes, fell by 5 percent.
Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, disputed the EPA's explanation of the 2002 increase. "The growth in emissions is too big to be explained away by pointing at a smelter here or a factory there," he said. "This is an across-the-board increase in pollution."
In addition, two environmental groups released a study yesterday that suggested the government figures sharply understated emissions. They based their critique on findings by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which determined the concentration of toxic substances in the air around refineries and chemical plants was far higher than the figures reported to state and federal authorities.
Extrapolating to other states, the groups concluded that industry was underestimating releases of carcinogens such as benzene and butadiene by as much as 400 or 500 percent.
"The public is being exposed to far more toxins than the EPA is reporting," said Environmental Integrity Project counsel Kelly Haragan, whose group co-wrote the report with a Texas air quality group. "EPA has known for a long time its numbers are inaccurate."
The EPA's Nelson said that the agency had "no evidence of significant trends" in underreporting, adding that critics have unrealistic standards. "The law doesn't require precise monitoring of every single chemical at every single facility in the country," she said.
Frank Maisano, spokesman for the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a utility group, said mercury pollution will decline as soon as the Bush administration is able to change the rules for power plant emissions. Many Democrats and environmental groups charge that the Bush proposal would weaken regulations that compel plants to install new pollution controls when they modernize facilities.
"What it shows is we really need EPA to move forward with its efforts to regulate emissions, as they have proposed to do," Maisano said.
--------
Toxic Release Increased in 2002, Study Says
June 23, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/politics/23toxic.html
WASHINGTON, June 22 - The Environmental Protection Agency said on Tuesday that the amount of toxic chemicals released into the environment increased by 5 percent in 2002, only the second time conditions grew worse since the yearly Toxic Release Inventory began in 1987.
Agency officials said the latest jump, following a 15 percent decrease for 2001, was generally attributable to one large copper-smelting operation in Arizona. Otherwise, they said, the overall level of toxic release would have fallen by 3 percent for 2002, the most recent year for which data is available.
They also said that if mining operations were not included in the latest inventory - and they should not be, according to a 2003 Federal District Court decision that changed the definition of mining disposal - the overall release for 2002 would be 15 percent below the year before.
While the agency report found that the release of dioxins had fallen by 5 percent, the levels of mercury rose by 10 percent and lead by 3.2 percent.
The agency released the data on the same day that two environmental groups - the Environmental Integrity Project and the Galveston-Houston Association for Smog Prevention - issued a study that said the toxic releases reported to the E.P.A. were "four to five times" lower across the country than was accurate. The groups said the discrepancy occurred because the agency allowed companies to use dated methods of collecting information and because it trusted the companies to monitor themselves.
The study was based on measurements of the emissions of 10 toxic substances from chemical plants and refineries in and around Houston. Those results were then fed into a computer model that extrapolated results for the rest of the country.
Kelly Haragan, a lawyer for the Environmental Integrity Project, said the material for the report was generated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, making Texas the first state to analyze reporting data from chemical plants and refineries in its jurisdiction. Ms. Haragan said Texas found that emissions of some substances with known adverse health effects, including ethylene, propylene and butadiene, were more than 400 percent higher than officially reported.
"Other studies in the United States have shown underreporting," Ms. Haragan said, alluding to efforts in Pennsylvania and California. "But Texas is the only place that has given us a method to demonstrate how extreme the underreporting is."
Kim Nelson, head of the E.P.A.'s office of environmental information, avoided characterizing the agency's latest inventory as good or bad news. Ms. Nelson questioned the results of the environmental groups' study, saying the E.P.A. had seen no evidence of systematic underreporting.
"We would look at trends, and where we see significant underreporting, we would investigate," Ms. Nelson said in a conference call with reporters. "If the reports are inaccurate, we would apply enforcement actions."
She said hundreds of facilities had been notified of potential violations for delaying their reports. She said none were under investigation for deliberately underreporting the amounts of toxic releases.
Bob Slaughter, president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, a trade organization, attacked the study by the environmental groups as erroneous and misleading, pointing out that toxic emissions "have declined in part because of actions taken by the refining industry."
Addressing the conclusions of the E.P.A. inventory, Scott Segal, an energy industry lobbyist, argued that the agency's annual inventory provided a poor measure of toxic emissions because it gathered information on so many toxic chemicals, about 650, from nearly 25,000 facilities. Mr. Segal said a more reliable yardstick was the information collected from 300 air monitor sites around the country, which he said had shown a 31 percent decrease of toxic emissions from 1993 to 2002.
Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, took aim at the E.P.A., saying: "The era of big government may be over, but the era of toxic pollution is back. After three years of weakened regulation and no enforcement, every polluting industry in America clearly feels free to put whatever they want into the air and water. In previous years, we saw real, substantial decreases of emissions every year. Not anymore."
-------- health
Polio Eradication Faces Setback in Africa
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61984-2004Jun22?language=printer
The 16-year effort to eradicate polio from the globe is threatening to unravel in Africa, with the report yesterday that a 10th country -- Sudan -- now harbors the disease after being free of it for three years.
Nigeria, where the current upsurge began, now has five times as many cases of polio as it did this time last year, officials at the World Health Organization in Geneva said. New cases have been found in 30 of its 37 states, with most in the Muslim north, where immunization efforts virtually stopped last year because of political rivalries and rumors about the vaccine's safety.
Africa's season of high transmission for the virus is about to begin, raising the specter that thousands of children may contract the disease in the year it was supposed to be extirpated.
"Right when it should have been disappearing during the low season, this virus was gathering steam to come roaring out," R. Bruce Aylward, global coordinator of the eradication campaign at WHO, said in a telephone briefing.
Last winter, health ministers of the countries where polio remains endemic won international agreement to step up the deadline for eradication to the end of this year, a goal that may now be in jeopardy. David L. Heymann, another WHO leader of the eradication effort, said, however, that despite the setbacks, he and others are not ready to abandon that goal.
"I think there's still a chance. Africa did it before -- except in Nigeria and Niger -- and there's no reason they can't do it again," he said.
Smallpox is the only human disease ever to be eradicated. The original target date for polio eradication was pushed back several years ago from 2000 to 2005. Worldwide, there have been 333 cases this year, compared with 183 at this time last year.
Polio's appearance in Sudan and continuing spread in Nigeria has lent urgency to a request last month by a group of African health ministers that WHO help them run a coordinated 22-country immunization campaign this fall. The campaigns will aim to vaccinate every child younger than 5 -- about 74 million -- during a one-week period in late October, and again a month later. The vaccine is given as two drops of liquid in the mouth.
The fall campaign will cost about $100 million, Heymann said. About $25 million will be needed by early August.
"That's a good question," he said of where the money will come from. "We are working hard to get it."
About $3.1 billion has been spent on polio eradication since the initiative was launched in 1988 at the suggestion of the service club Rotary International, which has raised about $600 million.
Immunization rates generally need to be more than 80 percent to break the person-to-person chain of virus transmission. They were briefly that high several years ago in the African countries that were polio-free until the recent outbreak. In some cases, however, the rates have now dropped to 50 percent or lower, WHO officials reported.
Only about 1 in every 200 polio cases results in the limb weakness or paralysis that allow physicians and nurses to recognize the disease. Consequently, finding a dozen cases implies that at least a thousand people are harboring, and possibly transmitting, the virus.
The disease's appearance in Sudan, a country full of refugees living in temporary camps, was especially worrisome because people in crowded environments with poor sanitation are at greatest risk. Polio transmission follows a "fecal-oral" route. The virus grows in the intestine and is discharged in feces. It is then ingested by uninfected people, often through contaminated water.
Until a year ago, the only sub-Saharan countries where polio was found were Nigeria and Niger. Since then, virus traceable to northern Nigeria has caused cases in Burkina-Faso, Chad, Benin, Ivory Coast, Togo, Cameroon, Ghana, Central African Republic and Botswana.
Three hundred cases of polio have been found in the region this year, compared with 58 last year. Nigeria accounts for 257 cases, including 60 reported this week.
Countries with renewed infections are not considered "endemic" for polio until numerous cases appear over a period of at least six months. Besides Nigeria and Niger, the only other polio-endemic countries are Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
The Nigerian outbreak is centered in Kano, a state with about 3 million children younger than 5 that last vaccinated widely in March 2003. Along with several nearby states, Kano stopped vaccinating because of rumors that the vaccine was part of a U.S. or Western plot against Muslims and would cause infertility or AIDS. Some local leaders also used suspicions about the vaccine as a vehicle to resist the country's Christian-dominated national government.
Recently, a delegation of 22 people from northern Nigeria went to Indonesia, where the vaccine was tested and a manufacturing plant was inspected, and were convinced the vaccine was not contaminated.
Heymann said he spoke yesterday to Kano's governor, who assured him there is no longer any official resistance to resuming vaccination. Kano will use vaccine made in Indonesia, a Muslim country, in future campaigns.
A public education and advertising campaign will begin soon, and Kano-wide polio vaccination may resume in July or August, he said.
--------
Southern Africa in Crisis, U.N. Envoy Warns
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60450-2004Jun22.html
JOHANNESBURG, June 22 -- A U. N. special envoy warned Tuesday that southern Africa was plagued by widespread food shortages, poverty and AIDS deaths that were leaving behind millions of orphans and destabilizing societies.
"What is happening in southern Africa absolutely represents the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world today," the envoy, James T. Morris, said at a news conference here.
Morris visited Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland and Namibia over the past week but reserved some of his strongest language to describe conditions in Zimbabwe, a deteriorating nation whose leaders declined to meet with him.
Nearly 5 million Zimbabweans are vulnerable to hunger in the year ahead, and life expectancy has fallen to 33 because of an HIV rate that is among the highest in the world, with one out of three non-elderly adults infected, Morris said.
"We were terribly disappointed not to be able to visit Zimbabwe," he said.
Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, has acknowledged that AIDS is a major problem in his country, telling a conference in the capital, Harare, last week that even members of his own family have contracted the disease, according to news service accounts.
Mugabe, who has presided over a chaotic campaign to seize farms owned by whites and redistribute the land to Zimbabwe's black majority, told Britain's Sky News last month that the nation no longer needed food aid. "We are not hungry. It should go to hungrier people, hungrier countries than ourselves," he said. "Why foist this food upon us? We don't want to be choked. We have enough."
Morris said last year's harvest would have to be doubled for Zimbabwe to feed its 12 million people. Mugabe's government has projected a near-tripling of the harvest, from 980,000 metric tons to about 2.8 million metric tons.
Morris said he knew of no evidence to back Mugabe's claims and that a crop estimate that was to have been done in conjunction with U.N. officials had been suspended by the Zimbabwean government.
Moving from serious shortages to surplus in a single year would be "unprecedented . . . anywhere in the world," Morris said.
He also said that the World Food Program would assist Zimbabwe if the government requested it, although procuring and delivering food can take weeks or months.
Conditions are bleak elsewhere on the continent, Morris added. There are 11 million AIDS orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, and the virus that causes AIDS is rapidly killing the most productive members of societies. Schools are losing teachers to the disease faster than new ones can be trained.
The toll has overwhelmed public health systems, and many trained health workers are migrating to find better paying jobs. In Malawi, for example, only 100 nurses out of 480 trained in one recent class are working there as nurses, Morris said.
One of the few bright spots in southern Africa is Zambia, which has overcome food shortages and now has a surplus of about 200,000 metric tons. It is among the nations that welcomed white commercial farmers who fled neighboring Zimbabwe during land-reform efforts in recent years.
--------
Spread of Polio in Africa Makes U.N. Fear a Major Epidemic
June 23, 2004
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/23/health/23poli.html
As polio cases surge in Nigeria and the virus spreads to other countries, West and Central Africa are on the brink of the largest polio epidemic in recent years, alarmed officials of the World Health Organization and Unicef said yesterday.
The 60 cases just reported by Nigeria for the final week in April, the latest period for which information is available, constitute the largest weekly number for any country in recent years, the officials said.
Last weekend, genetic testing of a child who became paralyzed on May 20 confirmed that a 10th country, Sudan, had polio that had come from Nigeria. The W.H.O., a United Nations agency based in Geneva, called the new developments "a stark warning."
Even though caseloads outside Nigeria are relatively small, health officials say they may greatly understate polio's spread and the danger of an epidemic.
Only about 1 in 200 people infected by the virus develops paralysis; an overwhelming majority experience only diarrhea and other nonspecific gastrointestinal symptoms. Yet any infected individual can spread the disease.
That signals the potential for a large epidemic as polio enters the season when transmission is highest, the officials say. The polio virus spreads through feces, and contamination occurs more often when sewage backs up during the rainy season in Africa and Asia.
"It's a totally unnecessary public health tragedy," Kul Gautam, deputy executive director of Unicef, told reporters in a telephone news conference.
The threat comes just as the World Health Organization and its partners expected that their $3.1 billion program was about to make polio the second disease to be conquered around the world, after smallpox. Instead, Dr. Bruce Aylward, a polio official at the agency, said, "we could see thousands paralyzed at a time when the disease should be eradicated."
Health officials and other experts attribute the current outbreak in Nigeria and the virus's spread to other countries to a decision by the government of the northern state of Kano last August to stop immunizing children. Political and religious leaders there claimed that the vaccine made girls infertile.
Allegations about impurities in the vaccine have caused alarm and confusion among many people in Nigeria and elsewhere. Tests of the vaccine have refuted such claims, said Dr. David L. Heymann, the director of the World Health Organization's polio eradication program. The vaccine purchased by Unicef meets the organization's standards and has been used safely to eliminate the disease from many other countries.
In May, Kano's governor, Ibrahim Shekarau, pledged to resume vaccinations. But that has not happened, Dr. Heymann said. Meanwhile, polio has spread not only in Kano but from that state to other parts of Nigeria.
The W.H.O. is considering other measures, including a travel advisory, Dr. Heymann said. But the effectiveness of such an advisory is uncertain, because the spread of most polio cases to other countries is believed to have resulted from people traveling across porous borders on the ground, not from air travel.
When the health agency and its partners began the polio eradication program in 1988, 125 countries reported a total of 350,000 cases a year. This year there have been 333 cases in 13 countries, and the disease is endemic is only six countries, the agency says. But the virus can spread as long as there is a case anywhere.
Polio is defined as endemic - meaning that the chain of transmission has not been stopped within 6 to 12 months - in six countries: Afghanistan (3 cases this year), Egypt (1), India (13), Niger (18), Nigeria (257) and Pakistan (15).
In addition to Sudan, the virus has spread from Nigeria to the following nine countries since last August: Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Togo.
Polio has spread from one person to another in three countries that were once free of the disease: Burkina Faso, Chad and Ivory Coast.
Despite what they acknowledged was a serious setback, officials of the United Nations agencies and a major partner, Rotary International, maintained their optimism, saying they could still salvage their goal of eradicating the disease by the end of the year.
But to do so, they said, will require an additional $100 million to immunize 74 million children in 22 African countries in a synchronized program in October and November. Those countries cover the area extending from Mauritania in the north to Congo in the south, and from Senegal in the west to Sudan in the east.
A program that immunized at least 90 percent of the children in vulnerable areas could stop transmission and still allow the health organization to meet its goal, Mr. Gautam asserted. Dr. Aylward said one reason for optimism was that large immunization programs had quickly controlled two major epidemics in 1999: 1,103 cases in Angola and 500 in Congo.
Although "the virus is gathering steam" now in Africa, he said, "we can still do it."
Dr. Jong Wook Lee, who became director general of the health organization last July and who once ran its polio surveillance and immunization program, has made eradication a top priority.
Rotary International has contributed more than $600 million to the polio eradication coalition, which has raised $3.1 billion. Other partners include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, the World Bank, various businesses and donor countries. Volunteers play a critical role; 20 million people have taken part in the immunization programs.
The eradication program seeks an additional $100 million from new and old sources, with the first $25 million needed by Aug. 1 to start the large immunization campaign. The Group of 8 countries have pledged to pay for program until it is completed, Dr. Heymann said. James Lacey of Rotary International said, "We cannot come this close to eradication and not finish successfully."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Wives of Jailed Activists In China Urge U.S. Aid
Appeal Made as Cabinet Members Visit
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 23, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60886-2004Jun22.html
BEIJING, June 22 -- The wives of two imprisoned Chinese labor organizers called Tuesday for two visiting U.S. Cabinet members to press the Chinese government to release their husbands so they can receive urgently needed medical care.
The emotional appeal, made in an interview they requested with The Washington Post, came on the second day of a visit to Beijing by Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans and Elaine L. Chao, the first labor secretary to visit China in 16 years.
The Bush administration has used the trip to demonstrate a tough line with China on what it contends are unfair trade practices and violations of international labor standards. Earlier this year, administration officials rejected separate requests by U.S. labor unions and manufacturers to impose punitive tariffs on Chinese imports, arguing that diplomatic engagement with China was the best way to open the country's markets to U.S. products.
During the visit, Evans has urged China to do more to protect patents and has presided over the signing of three business deals between U.S. and Chinese companies, saying they would create American jobs. Chao has announced agreements to "broaden cooperation" with Chinese agencies to promote workplace safety, manage pension programs and enforce wage laws.
But there has been little or no public comment by the U.S. delegation about the ruling Communist Party's practice of jailing independent labor activists such as Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang, whose wives spoke out on Tuesday despite the risk of retribution.
"There's no other way for us," said Su Anhua, 57, Xiao's wife. "His condition is getting worse and we need help."
Yao, 53, and Xiao, 58, are serving seven- and four-year prison sentences, respectively, for leading a series of mass protests in northeastern China's rust belt in the spring of 2002. The demonstrations, among the largest to take place in China in recent years, attracted tens of thousands of laid-off workers demanding unpaid wages and punishment for corrupt officials.
The health of both men has deteriorated in prison, and they suffer serious heart problems, their wives said. Yao has lost feeling in half of his body and has difficulty moving his right leg. Xiao is having trouble breathing and was put on a respirator twice in December, they said.
Xiao is also blind in one eye and can see no more than a foot away with his other eye because of an injury he suffered during his arrest in March 2002. Prison doctors have recommended surgery, but Chinese authorities have not granted permission for him to be transferred to a local hospital, Su said.
She and Yao's wife, Guo Sujing, 54, urged the visiting U.S. officials to press the Chinese leadership to grant their husbands medical parole. There was no immediate response Tuesday night to a request for comment from Evans, but a spokeswoman for the labor secretary said Wednesday morning, "Secretary Chao will be bringing up this issue in her meetings with Chinese officials."
The State Department recently placed Yao and Xiao on a list of high-priority political prisoner cases to discuss with Chinese officials.
The Chinese government views independent labor activism as a threat to its authority, and it prohibits workers from forming their own labor unions, requiring them instead to join weak, party-run unions. In an unfair-trade complaint rejected by the Bush administration this year, the AFL-CIO argued that China's ban on independent unions was helping the government keep the prices of Chinese products unfairly low, which resulted in the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs. But some economists, including Nicholas Lardy of the Institute for International Economics, say China's labor pool is so large that ending the ban on unions and other violations of workers' rights would not raise Chinese wages and prices as sharply as the AFL-CIO argues.
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Greenpeace Activists Protest Energy Plan
June 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Greenpeace-Protest.html
MASONTOWN, Pa. (AP) -- Four Greenpeace activists climbed a smokestack at a coal-fired power plant Wednesday and unfurled a 2,500-square-foot yellow banner demanding ``Clean energy now.''
Police were trying to get the protesters down from the 700-foot smokestack at the Hatfield's Ferry Power Station, and said they would be arrested and likely charged with trespassing.
Guy Fletcher, a spokesman for Allegheny Energy, which owns the plant 40 miles south of Pittsburgh, said the company's main concern is ``the safety of the people up on the stack.
``Obviously they are trespassing but we want to get them down safely,'' he said.
In a news release, Greenpeace said the station ``is a symbol and an example of the Bush administration's dirty energy policy, which consistently favors polluting fossil fuel over clean energy sources, such as wind and solar.''
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Bush to Draw Protests in Ireland Over Iraq
June 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-bush-ireland-protests.html
DUBLIN (Reuters) - President Bush's trip to Ireland for an EU-U.S. summit will draw thousands of protesters who oppose the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq in a country where U.S. presidents are traditionally feted.
Ireland is deploying more than 6,000 police and troops to protect Bush and European Union leaders at the summit in one of the biggest security operations Ireland has staged.
Bush's lightning trip has sparked anger in Ireland where a disparate group of political parties, pacifists, trade unions, artists and religious leaders have come together for a series of demonstrations this week, culminating in a march near the summit venue at secluded Dromoland Castle on Ireland's western seaboard on Saturday.
``We expect large numbers to attend the anti-Bush protests in County Clare,'' said Fintan Lane, the convenor of Anti-War Ireland, an alliance of protest groups. ``We want him to return home with a clear understanding of the depth of Irish opposition to his warmongering.''
The mayor of Dublin, Michael Conaghan of the leftist Labour Party, has said he will join the protests.
Protesters are angry not only at U.S. policy in Iraq but at a decision by Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and the government of neutral Ireland to allow U.S. jets to refuel at Shannon en route to the Middle East.
Organizers say 50,000 protesters are expected in Dublin and some 10,000 in Shannon.
TROOPS, POLICE ON GUARD
Bush flies in to Shannon airport in County Clare, southwest Ireland, on Friday night.
He meets Ahern, European Commission President Romano Prodi and EU security chief Javier Solana at Dromoland Castle on Saturday before leaving for a NATO summit in Turkey.
Four naval vessels will patrol the Shannon Estuary close to the summit venue, a spokesman for the armed forces said.
Eight aircraft, backed by surface-to-air missiles, will be used to protect the leaders while, on the ground, 2,000 Irish troops and over 4,000 police officers will guard the venue.
Supporters of Bush's trip have stressed the importance of U.S.-Irish relations and highlighted the extent of U.S. investment in Ireland.
Ahern used an opinion piece in the Irish Times on Wednesday to stress Europe's reliance on U.S. economic might.
``The transatlantic economy generates some 2.06 trillion euro ($2.5 trillion) a year in total commercial sales and employs directly or indirectly over 12 million workers on both sides of the Atlantic,'' the prime minister wrote.
``(Europe's) economic relationship with the U.S. is the deepest it has been since the end of the Cold War.''
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Cold War Protester Charles Hyder Dies in USA
MosNews
23.06.2004
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2004/06/23/hyder.shtml
Charles Hyder, a US scientist known as a staunch opponent of the arms race, died in New Mexico at the age of 74.
His passing went virtually unnoticed by US media. Back in the 1980s his protests against the arms race received wide media coverage in the Soviet Union.
The scientist, who had worked for many years at NASA, and who held lectures at a US university, staunchly opposed the use of nuclear arms and harshly criticized President Ronald Reagan, deeming him guilty of an arms race. In 1986-87 Hyder underwent a seven-month fast in Washington, DC, protesting against the war. Mikhail Gorbachev expressed his support to the scientist, urging him to stop the strike and invited him to work in the Soviet Union.
Hyder became a popular figure on the Russian news, and many Soviet citizens took part in rallies of support of his action.
An environmental activist, Hyder campaigned against radioactive waste disposal in his home state of New Mexico. In 1998 he published his book "Human survival on a plutonium-contaminated planet". See http://www.amadorbooks.com/books/pluto.htm
Here are some other articles about Charles which can be found on the web:
Where's Doc Hyder Now?
http://prop1.org/park/persons/hyder/hyd.htm
Astrophysicist Ends WIPP Fast June 24, 2000 Nevada States News Service http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/sns23.htm
What is a Hyder flare? June 24, 2004 Australian Space Weather Agency http://www.ips.gov.au/Main.php?CatID=8&SecID=2&SecName=The%20Sun%20and%20Solar%20Activity&SubSecID=5&SubSecName=Solar%20Flares&LinkName=Hyder%20Flares
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Chinese police beat elderly women protesting outside nuclear talks venue
BEIJING (AFP)
Jun 23, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040623025009.mzkg3app.html
Chinese police dragged away and beat a group of mostly elderly women protesting outside the Beijing venue of six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear program Wednesday, witnesses said.
About 15 protesters, mostly elderly women, had gathered outside the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in western Beijing to protest against court corruption in Inner Mongolia, a pool reporter said.
Police pushed them away from journalists and rounded them up.
According to the witnesses, the protestors were taken away to a police van and some were beaten.
The incident happened just minutes ahead of a meeting at the guesthouse between the chief US negotiator at the talks, James Kelly, and his Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi.
Police were not immediately available for comment.
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