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NUCLEAR
Yankee emergency warning system faulted
State Berates Yankee For Reporting Emergency Late
Entergy can't be trusted
Japan offers energy aid to a nuclear-free North Korea
N. Korea Names Its Price
U.S. Revises Proposal at North Korea Nuclear Talks
Vandenberg launch part of missile defense test
Black Market Nuclear Probe Focuses on Syria
Fiery Hell on Earth, Part 3
House Panel Approves Yucca Mountain Bill
MILITARY
Afghan Officials Deny Reports of Soldiers Beheading Prisoners
Saudis to Let Foreigners Carry Weapons
Britain's Guantanamo
Iran Frees British Troops Seized on Border With Iraq
Detained British troops 'free to leave'
Death Threat Leveled at New Iraqi Premier; U.S. on Alert in Falluja
After Beheading, Extremists Threaten Iraq's Interim Leader
Dozens Are Killed as Rebel Attacks Ripple Across Iraq
Militants threaten to kill Allawi
Former Israeli Soldiers Tell of Harassment of Palestinians
NATO invites Russia, Ukraine to join Mediterranean patrols
Russians Pursue Insurgents
Pakistani restrictions slow U.S. search for bin Laden
Tenet furious over scathing CIA report
CIA insider says U.S. fighting wrong war
Air defense
Rules Change on Seeing Troops' Remains Return
Air force drops Canada friendly-fire court-martial
U.S. Immunity in Iraq Will Go Beyond June 30
U.S. Abandons Plan for Court Exemption
U.S. Drops Plan to Exempt G.I.'s From U.N. Court
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
National Security Archive Update, June 24, 2004
Justices Tighten Limits on Judges in Sentencing
Supreme Court Refuses to Order Cheney to Release Energy Papers
N.Y. Court Ruling Appears to Invalidate Death Sentences
Beheadings allowed by Islam, but only in extreme situations
D.C. Area Anti-Terror Spending Criticized
Agency Got More Airline Records
NSA Is Making No Secret of Its Technology Intent
U.S. to Allow Private Firms to Screen at Airports
Video Shows L.A. Police Officer Hitting Suspect With a Flashlight
Review of Guantánamo
HR groups concerned about secret jails in Afghanistan
U.S. Struggled Over How Far to Push Tactics
Lawyer for State Dept. Disputed Detainee Memo
A Guide to the Memos on Torture
Ukraine Seamen Detail Iraq Prison Torture
POLITICS
Senate Passes $447 Billion Defense Bill
Senate Passes $447 Billion Pentagon Package
Bush Is Interviewed in Inquiry on Leak of Operative's Name
FAHRENHEIT 9/11
Persuasive and passionate.
'Fahrenheit 9/11' has a point to make
'Fahrenheit 9/11' ban?
AP Lawyer: It's 'Curious' We've Had to Sue for Bush Records
Bush backers slam movie
Author of '02 Memo on Torture: 'Gentle' Soul for a Harsh Topic
Starr Endorses Legislation to Give District a Voting Seat in the House
Senate Rejects Request for Abuse Documents
Democracy Itself is in Grave Danger
ACTIVISTS
'Fahrenheit 9/11' Is a Red-Hot Ticket
In S. Korea, Grief Mixes With Anger
The Like-Minded Line Up for a 9/11 Film
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Yankee emergency warning system faulted
By SUSAN SMALLHEER
Rutland Herald Staff
Jun. 24, 2004
http://www.rutlandherald.com/04/Story/85669.html
BRATTLEBORO - The emergency at Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant last week was plagued with problems in its emergency notification system, officials said Wednesday.
Entergy Nuclear control room operators failed to correctly use a new nuclear alert telephone system during Friday's low-level emergency, resulting in delays in notifying the state about the emergency, state and Entergy officials said Wednesday.
As a result, Entergy Nuclear was 12 minutes late in notifying the state of Vermont of the emergency. By federal law, Entergy should have notified Vermont by 7:05 a.m., 15 minutes after the unusual event was declared at 6:50 a.m.
Instead the call from Entergy was verified at 7:17 a.m. by Vermont's Office of Emergency Management.
During the fire and emergency there were two different paths of emergency notification - the 911 fire call and the second call about low-level nuclear emergency.
The problems lay with the notification about the low-level nuclear emergency.
Albert Lewis, director of the Vermont Office of Emergency Management, said the problems were not on the side of the state of Vermont, although he declined to point the finger directly at Entergy.
"Let's just say it was 'operator error,'" Lewis said, who said the state was reviewing its overall emergency response.
Robert Williams, spokesman for Entergy Nuclear, acknowledged there were problems in the plant's control room in using the new nuclear notification phones. He said Entergy officials were investigating the problem and the plant personnel's response to the emergency.
At the same time, the town of Brattleboro raised questions about Vermont's notification system, which they said lags far behind the New Hampshire emergency alert system.
Lewis said the new phone system involved a dedicated telephone line that linked the emergency management offices of Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, with the Yankee control room. The new system had been installed in May.
"There were operator errors, not involving Vermont. We're reviewing everything. I'm not a perfectionist, and I'm never happy if we can't do better. We need to do better and we'll take those corrective actions," Lewis said.
"We are reviewing the performance of the plant and plant staff," Williams said, "like we do with every shutdown. Part of that is we're looking at the notification sequence between the control room and the state's communication system."
Last Friday, firefighting crews from the nuclear reactor itself, the towns of Vernon, Brattleboro and Guilford, as well as Northfield and Bernardston, Mass., battled a transformer fire at the Vernon reactor.
The fire prompted Vermont Yankee into an emergency shutdown, and also forced Entergy Nuclear to declare a low-level emergency, or "unusual event."
No one was hurt in the fire, which was confined to the non-nuclear part of the plant. Yankee remains shut down, and Williams had no timetable for repairs or how soon the plant would be back on line.
Lewis Stowell, a planner with the Office of Emergency Management, said last Friday's fire came minutes before Entergy staff were to go through one of their regular quarterly drills. Stowell said the drill was supposed to start around 7:30 a.m.
The drill was called off, as firefighters from four towns in two different states battled a fire which sent a giant column of black smoke and flames 35 feet into the air over the nuclear reactor.
The fire was fueled by a 1,000-gallon tank of cooling oil, which contained the overflow oil from the transformer. The transformer, which wasn't damaged in the fire in part because of a fire deluge system, contains 27,000 gallons of oil, Williams said.
Entergy declared a low-level emergency at the plant, the first in seven years, because crews quickly realized they couldn't put the fire out in the required 10 minutes, Lewis said.
Lewis said Entergy Nuclear employees were finally able to notify the state by using the old phone system, which was still in the control room. The old system had been slated to be removed by the end of June, but now it will remain for at least a while longer, Stowell said.
Lewis said that if the old system had failed, Entergy would have used a regular telephone line.
The town of Brattleboro is concerned about its late notification as well, but for different reasons. The town manager said formal notice of the "unusual event" came 20 minutes after New Hampshire emergency officials sent off their tone alert system to emergency responders.
Brattleboro Town Manager Jerry Remillard said he was contacted by Vermont emergency officials 20 minutes after Keene, N.H., Mutual Aid sent out its message to surrounding towns in the 10-mile emergency planning zone, which included Vernon, Guilford and Dummerston.
Remillard said Brattleboro receives its nuclear emergency alert from Vermont State Police, rather than Keene Mutual Aid because Brattleboro does its own fire dispatching. The other, smaller towns depend on Southwestern New Hampshire Mutual Aid dispatch center, which is based in Keene.
"The question is, 'Are you making it more complicated then it needs to be?'" asked Remillard, a veteran of numerous Vermont Yankee drills. "It doesn't flow smoothly, but we've learned to work with it."
Under the current Vermont scenario, Entergy notifies Vermont Emergency Management in Waterbury, and they in turn notify the Rockingham barracks of the Vermont State Police, whose dispatchers sent out the page.
Vermont State Police Capt. William Pettengill of Troop D in Rockingham said he was off Friday, but all reports were that State Police involvement in the emergency went smoothly.
Remillard said Brattleboro emergency officials know that Keene is going to get the word out much faster than Vermont emergency officials.
"We just know we're going to hear it from Keene first," Remillard said.
Remillard said he was still at home Friday morning when he got a telephone call from Brattleboro Deputy Fire Michael Bucossi, telling him about the transformer fire at Vermont Yankee. Brattleboro Fire Chief David Emery and eight firefighters took three engines, including Brattleboro's ladder truck, to the blaze.
Remillard said he then overheard that the unusual event was declared, listening to Keene Mutual Aid while standing in the Brattleboro fire and police dispatch center, at 7:26 a.m.
Remillard said he waited for his own official notification from Vermont officials. He said it came 20 minutes later, at 7:46 a.m., slightly more than an hour after the fire started and four minutes short of when the emergency was first declared by Entergy at 6:50 a.m.
"It is my opinion that it could have happened quicker and should have happened quicker. We're discussing it," Remillard said, who added that he met with Vermont emergency officials, along with representatives from New Hampshire and Massachusetts on Tuesday to review Friday's events.
Lewis said part of the problem was the different pager systems Vermont and New Hampshire uses.
He said New Hampshire uses a tone alert pager system and Vermont an alpha-numeric pager system. He said the alpha-numeric has been slower, but he said the state chose it over tone alert because it has the call-back verification capability that the state likes.
Lewis said his office was in the process of upgrading the pager response system, and he said he might consider returning to the tone-alert system.
Williams was emphatic that there wasn't any confusion between the drill and the real emergency that contributed to the delay.
"Not at all," he said. Most of the drill was supposed to occur at the simulated control room at Entergy's headquarters in Brattleboro.
Williams said the company still had no timetable for completing repairs or going back on line. The unexpected shutdown is costing Vermont utilities higher power costs. Green Mountain Power said the first week would cost them an additional $300,000.
Jason Gibbs, press secretary to Vermont Gov. James Douglas, said earlier in the week that rumors that Douglas was also a victim of late notification were untrue. One rumor had him being notified by New Hampshire Gov. Craig Benson rather than Vermont officials.
Gibbs said Douglas was notified about the fire and the emergency declaration by Kerry Sleeper, the commissioner of the Department of Public Safety, 20 minutes after the fire began. He said that the two governors discussed the Entergy emergency later in the day.
Gibbs said the fire continued to fuel the governor's concern about Vermont Yankee.
"Safety will be the most important factor in assessing the plant. With each of these incidents, concerns continue to mount," he said.
Contact Susan Smallheer at susan.smallheer@rutlandherald.com.
----
State Berates Yankee For Reporting Emergency Late
Plant Blames Lateness On Operator Error
June 24, 2004
http://www.thechamplainchannel.com/news/3458047/detail.html
BURLINGTON, Vt. -- Vermont Yankee is admitting to more problems during Friday's emergency.
The plant said it called the state of Vermont six minutes late, when the state says it was more like 10.
It all boils down to operator error.
Entergy confirms a plant worker pressed the wrong buttons on a new emergency telephone system and was forced to use a backup system instead.
"It's a six minute delay, and overall, our plant staff did an excellent job responding to the transformer fire," one Vermont Yankee official insisted.
The plant called Emergency Management 25 minutes after it declared an emergency.
Federal law requires notification within 15 minutes.
From Vermont Emergency Management, word traveled to Vermont State Police, where a dispatcher paged town first responders.
Brattleboro town manager Jerry Remillard got the call an hour after the fire broke out -- and because of differences in notification systems, 20 minutes after New Hampshire sent out its tone.
New Hampshire uses a tone alert pager system. Vermont uses an alpha-numeric pager system, which can be slower.
Emergency Managment plans to consider switching over for faster notification.
A Vermont Yankee official said the communication breakdown was a result of "things getting more stressful when an event escalates."
Since Friday, Vermont Yankee admitted a recirculation pump failed during the fire.
"Entergy is apparently selectively reporting what they want to report and leaving it to the public to dig up what's really going on," said Peter Alexander of the NE Coalition. "This is not the sign of a good corporate citizen. This sounds like a company that's trying to take advantage."
Emergency Managment plans to consider switching over for faster notification.
Still no word on when Vermont Yankee might be back line.
----
Entergy can't be trusted
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Brattleboro Reformer
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102~8855~2231821,00.html
Editor of the Reformer:
Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee is at it again: damage control, "spin," deceit, and weasel-words. This time, it is to "pretty up" the story of last Friday's transformer explosion and fire. And they are apparently working nights and weekends: Sunday night at 8 o'clock, Entergy jumped the Monday morning news with a "don't worry, be happy" fantasy press release.
In it, ENVY PR man Rob Williams made the patently absurd claim that oil and fire-fighting chemical foam spilled into the Connecticut River as a result of the fire had been "cleaned up." In fact, according to news accounts, the company that was called in to contain and clean up the spill was able only to remove a small amount of oil residue from a few rocks at the river's edge. A good portion of the oil was long gone before the so-called "clean up" even began. New England Coalition is attempting to verify reports by downstream fisherman of a substantial fish kill that coincided with the time of the fire.
Further, Entergy minimized the cause of the accident, saying "a small oil supply line used for electrical component cooling leaked onto metal that had been heated by the electrical fault." This sounds harmless enough, but in its statement Entergy ignored the cause of the massive electrical short circuit that ignited the explosion and fire in the first place.
The fact that it took four fire companies more than 35 minutes to douse the 30-foot flames -- and an hour to cool off the switchyard equipment enough to ensure the fire would not re-ignite -- is a good indicator this was no small fire.
How can the public reasonably believe anything this corporation says about its operations in Vermont? Missing nuclear fuel, cracks in the steam dryer, leaking pump seals, continuing electrical cable issues, illegal grading and construction, dumping of untested and potentially radioactive dirt into a local landfill, obstruction of the Vermont regulatory process resulting in sanctions and monetary fines against the company, deceptive and misleading statements to the mediathe list goes on. No wonder even Governor Douglas said, "Vermonters, and I among them, have lost some confidence in the operation of the nuclear power plant in Vernon" [Rutland Herald, April 23, 2004].
Through numerous regulatory interventions and interactions in both public and private, New England Coalition has plenty of experience dealing with Entergy's lawyers, PR men, and other corporate "professionals." We have found that their every word must be put through a high level of scrutiny, put back into context, and weighed against other critical information they have often conveniently omitted.
These are not the signs of good corporate citizenship. This is evidence of an irresponsible and uncaring corporation bent on wresting maximum profit from an old plant. Entergy has shown that it will take outrageous chances, ignore regulations, and do or say almost anything to get there. One thing is clear: Entergy cannot be trusted with the well-being of the community. Entergy should not have permission to undertake a risky 20 percent "extended power uprate" of its aging reactor. The company should not be granted permission to store high-level nuclear waste in casks outside the reactor building just so they can generate ever more toxic waste. And this reactor should not be granted a license extension past 2012 when its current license expires. Rather, this troubled, antiquated, and dangerous machine should be responsibly, deliberately and permanently put to rest.
Peter Alexander
Brattleboro, June 21
The writer is the executive director of the New England Coalition.
-------- korea
Japan offers energy aid to a nuclear-free North Korea
BEIJING (AFP)
Jun 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040624131533.l4be4kfi.html
Japan offered Thursday to match international offers of energy aid to North Korea if the Stalinist state freezes all its nuclear programmes despite a lingering row over the Pyongyang's kidnapping of Japanese nationals.
It was the first time that the Tokyo government announced its readiness, if conditional, to help the impoverished but heavily armed North with its energy needs, particularly heavy oil.
The pledge was made at the six-nation talks here on North Korea's nuclear ambitions, the day after the United States proposed Pyongyang dismantle its plutonium and uranium weapons programmes in exchange for heavy oil and a guarantee not to invade the country.
South Korea and China, also members of the six-nation forum, have already been considering extending energy aid in response to North Korea's demand for "corresponding measures" in exchange for its nuclear freeze.
Russia is also a member of the nuclear crisis conference.
Mitoji Yabunaka, the chief Japanese delegate, told the second-day session of the six-nation talks that three conditions should be set by North Korea for its nuclear freeze, according to a statement from the Japanese delegation.
The conditions included that "all nuclear programmes" be covered by the freeze, that North Korea volunteers information on the details of nuclear programmes and that the freeze be verified in "definite" terms.
"Our country is prepared to join international energy assistance at the six-party talks if North Korea's freeze satisfies such conditions as strict disclosure of information," Yabunaka said.
He added that the freeze should be limited to a "short period of time" as the common goal was strict nuclear dismantlement.
Japan's softening stance on energy aid followed Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il in Pyongyang last month.
At his second summit with Koizumi in 20 months, Kim promised to be more helpful in solving the cases of Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents in the 1970s.
The abduction issue, along with the nuclear standoff, has been stalling talks on normalisation of relations between the two countries.
Japan has been insisting that the abduction issue must be cleared up as a precondition to rapprochement with North Korea.
"Energy assistance is a matter that should be separated from the agenda of bilateral issues and considered within the six-nation framework," a Japanese delegate to the talks said.
It marked a departure for Japan which had drummed up the abduction issue in the two previous rounds of the six-nation talks in February and in August last year.
In a bilateral meeting with Japan on the sidelines of the six-nation talks, North Korea expressed satisfaction with the Japanese turnaround, saying that the Japanese side had "demonstrated its attitude toward solving the nuclear issue," the official said
Cash-rich Japan has vowed to help the North with economic aid after they normalise ties, as a token of atonement for its colonial rule of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945.
----
N. Korea Names Its Price
June 24, 2004
(CBS/AP)
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/06/22/tech/main625301.shtml
BEIJING - North Korea demanded massive energy aid Thursday at six-nation talks where Washington insisted that the North give up nuclear weapons development, Japanese news reports said.
The North wants the equivalent of 2,000 megawatts of power per year - an estimated one-fourth of its current total consumption - in exchange for freezing work on its nuclear program, the Kyodo News agency reported, citing diplomatic sources on the second day of talks in the Chinese capital. In the United States, a megawatt can supply power to about 1,000 homes.
It was unclear whether Washington would even discuss such a request since the United States says the North must commit to dismantling the program, not just freezing development.
The United States offered its first detailed proposal for ending the dispute Wednesday, offering the North a step-by-step plan that would provide energy aid and security guarantees in exchange for dismantling the nuclear program.
Both Japan and South Korea say they would consider giving the North fuel oil if it freezes its nuclear program as a step toward its eventual dismantling. The United States says it would not provide energy assistance under its proposal.
Also Thursday, U.S. and North Korean envoys held a rare one-on-one meeting at a Chinese government guesthouse, a U.S. Embassy spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity. She did not immediately have any details of the discussions.
Competing U.S. and North Korean proposals for ending the dispute dominated the second day of talks, which also include Russia.
"There are considerable differences, but there is common ground as well," said Cho Tae-yong, a member of the South Korean delegation. He would not give any details of the proposals.
North Korea was offering to freeze work at its main nuclear facility at Yongbyon, according to Kyodo. It did not say whether that included a commitment sought by Washington to dismantle all nuclear facilities.
It said the North's energy request was equivalent to 2.7 million tons of fuel oil per year, or the generating capacity of two light-water nuclear reactors pledged by the United States in an earlier 1994 agreement on freezing the North's nuclear program.
Construction of those reactors - already "considerably delayed - was halted after the United States said the North admitted in October 2002 to having begun a new secret nuclear program.
North Korea is believed to consume about 8 million kilowatts per year, Kyodo said.
U.S. officials said their proposal was meant to break the impasse in talks, which went through two earlier rounds with no major progress.
The U.S. proposal would include a three-month preparation period during which the North would freeze work on its nuclear program, submit a list of all nuclear activities and remove key weapons ingredients.
U.S. officials said it might be several days before North Korea responded to the "very complex" proposal.
Moscow would be willing to help provide energy aid and security guarantees, said Russian envoy Alexander Alexeyev, according to the Russian news agency ITAR-Tass. The report did not say what conditions Russia might attach to that offer.
North Korea's negotiating partners all say they want an end to the communist North's nuclear weapons development.
The dispute erupted in late 2002 when Washington said North Korea admitted operating a secret nuclear program in violation of a 1994 agreement.
North Korea has agreed in principle to give up its existing weapons programs. But it denies a U.S. claim it has a uranium-based program in addition to one based on plutonium it has acknowledged.
The U.S. government says the danger posed by the North Koreans would remain if they dismantled their plutonium program while leaving intact a uranium-based bomb program.
Washington says any settlement has to include monitoring to ensure Pyongyang does not renege on its promises and must include all of the North's nuclear programs.
Ahead of the latest talks, North Korea demanded that Washington withdraw its call for an "irreversible" dismantling of its nuclear program, casting doubt on hopes for a breakthrough.
The North Korean envoy, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan, said Wednesday that Pyongyang was willing to renounce nuclear weapons in exchange for aid and an end to Washington's "hostile policy."
North Korea has insisted that without a security guarantee from the United States, it must keep its nuclear program to deter a possible U.S. attack.
U.S. envoy James Kelly said Wednesday a resolution of the dispute would "open the door to a new relationship" between Washington and Pyongyang.
Inside tightly controlled North Korea, state controlled media takes a unique view of the nuclear standoff. Korea Central News Agency reports that the Minju Joson newspaper on Wednesday lamented the "foolish trick" the U.S. is playing by accusing North Korea of weapons ambitions and ties to terrorism.
"The U.S. is finding itself in a tighter corner as the days go by due to its foreign policy failure. It is now under fire at home and abroad," the newspaper wrote. "Its image fell to the ground and resignations are frequent inside its administration."
----
U.S. Revises Proposal at North Korea Nuclear Talks
Fuel Aid, Security Statement Possible During 3-Month Test
By Philip P. Pan and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64524-2004Jun23.html
BEIJING, June 23 -- The Bush administration presented a more specific proposal for resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis Wednesday, offering the North the possibility of energy aid from South Korea, security assurances and other benefits during a three-month test period if it promises to disclose and end its nuclear weapons programs.
U.S. negotiators at talks among six nations -- the United States, North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia -- on the standoff also backed away from hard-line language calling for the "complete, verifiable and irreversible" dismantling of the programs. The administration had insisted that the North Korean government agree to the language in two previous rounds of the talks but said it was now willing to consider other wording to describe the same goal.
One senior U.S. official described the proposal as a "repackaging and elaboration of things we have said before" and said it was likely to be rejected by the North Koreans. But other U.S. officials described it as a legitimate effort to flesh out a U.S. plan for ending the stalemate.
In any case, the proposal represents an attempt by the Bush administration to address criticism from its allies as well as domestic critics. The allies complain that the administration has not been flexible enough in the talks, while critics such as Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry have described its strategy as a failure that has allowed North Korea to produce nuclear materials undisturbed for nearly 20 months.
North Korea's delegation did not immediately respond and indicated it wanted to confer with superiors in the capital, Pyongyang. A diplomat at the talks said the Chinese were not pleased with aspects of the plan, and Russian officials said it would be impossible for North Korea to accept it.
U.S. officials in Beijing and Washington acknowledged they drafted the new proposal largely because of pressure from South Korea and Japan. Both nations, as well as China, the host of the talks, have been pushing the Bush administration to show more flexibility and let North Korea demonstrate it is willing to dismantle its nuclear program. An official in Washington said "alliance management" was one of the key motivations for making the proposal.
But a White House official said the proposal also was designed to gauge North Korean intentions. "It is a test," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It is a pragmatic and reasonable way forward."
A senior U.S. official who briefed reporters in Beijing on condition of not being identified said the plan is "more tangible and more specific" about what North Korea stands to gain by abandoning its nuclear programs and "spells out in detail" what North Korea needs to say in its promise to disarm.
Previously, U.S. officials had privately outlined a three-stage approach for ending the crisis, placing much of the onus on North Korea and providing only vague suggestions about what it would receive in return. The proposal outlined Wednesday includes stages tied directly to North Korea's performance in dismantling its nuclear programs, and various elements could be suspended or slowed if North Korea lagged in one or more areas, officials said.
Under the plan, South Korea and possibly other countries could begin providing heavy fuel oil to the North's battered economy immediately if the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, promises to dismantle the country's plutonium and uranium arms programs, U.S. officials said. The idea was floated by South Korea at the last round of talks and was neither rejected nor endorsed by the United States.
U.S. officials said this fuel would aid North Korea with its desperate energy situation and provide an incentive to begin preparations for dismantling its programs. Once North Korea began to display and secure its materials and weapons -- and its claims have been verified by U.S. intelligence -- the United States and the other nations at the negotiations would issue provisional security assurances. This formula would effectively say the countries had "no intention to invade or attack" North Korea. The United States also would lay the groundwork for a study of North Korea's non-nuclear energy needs, discussions on lifting economic sanctions and removing North Korea from a U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.
After Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld protested, President Bush rejected a State Department proposal to immediately offer security assurances to North Korea at the same time that fuel shipments were started by South Korea, said an administration official familiar with the interagency discussions.
North Korea would be given only three months to halt and disclose all of its nuclear activities, including a secret uranium enrichment program that it says does not exist, and to begin securing and destroying nuclear materials under the supervision of international monitors, the officials said. Otherwise, these preliminary benefits would be halted.
North Korea has said it needs nuclear weapons because of Bush's "hostile policy" and has demanded written security guarantees from the United States before dismantling its programs.
The proposal does not specify a timetable of benefits that the North would receive in exchange for specific steps, as North Korean negotiators have previously demanded.
The Bush administration is retreating from its demand for the "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" of the North's programs because the phrase "seems to inflame sensibilities," one official said. Another administration official said the United States was using slightly softer language -- asking North Korea to dismantle its programs "in a permanent, thorough and transparent manner subject to effective verification" -- because North Korean negotiators declared in a working-level session last month that the previous wording was "culturally offensive."
Kessler reported from Washington.
-------- missile defense
Vandenberg launch part of missile defense test
By NORA K. WALLACE
6/24/04
SANTA BARBARA NEWS-PRESS STAFF WRITER
http://news.newspress.com/topsports/062404launch.htm?now=48032&tref=1
An unarmed Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base Wednesday morning was tracked by a Navy ship's Aegis weapons system and a special radar.
The missile was boosted out of its northern silo at 1:32 a.m. toward a 30-minute flight to the Kwajalein Missile Range in the Marshall Islands.
The missile was installed with special tracking and telemetry systems to collect data, along with destruction systems in case the launch went awry.
The launch was part of a standard military program to test the reliability and accuracy of the weapon system.
But this time, it had an added function.
Sailors aboard the USS Paul Hamilton, based in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, used the Spy-1 radar -- designed to seek and track more than 100 targets simultaneously -- and the Aegis to follow the missile as it flew above the horizon. The crew charted the Minuteman for about 700 miles, according to Chris Taylor, spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.
The Aegis is part of the Ballistic Missile Defense System being developed by the agency. The system transmitted trajectory information to the Ballistic Missile Defense command center in Colorado.
The Aegis weapon system is slated to provide information that would ultimately enable the launch of a ground-based interceptor missile to knock incoming enemy missiles out of the sky.
Several live interceptors will be based at Vandenberg. The Pentagon first used an Aegis-class destroyer to track a Vandenberg missile in October 2002.
At that time, the government launched a test missile specifically for the Missile Defense Agency, and the USS John Paul Jones gathered information about the target and interceptor missiles.
The military developed the Aegis as a complete weapon system, with state-of-the-art radar and missile systems to defend against advanced air, surface and subsurface threats.
-------- terrorism
Black Market Nuclear Probe Focuses on Syria
By Douglas Frantz
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 24, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/latimes206.htm
ISTANBUL - International investigators are examining whether Syria acquired nuclear technology and expertise through the black market network operated by rogue Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, according to a U.S. official and Western diplomats.
Intelligence reports found that Khan and some associates visited Syria in the late 1990s and later held clandestine meetings with Syrian nuclear officials in Iran, said Western diplomats from a U.S. ally.
Concerns were heightened after an experimental U.S. electronic eavesdropping device recently picked up signals indicating that Syria was operating centrifuges, which enrich uranium for possible use in nuclear weapons.
Khan, who helped Pakistan develop its nuclear arsenal, has admitted selling advanced centrifuge technology and expertise to Iran, Libya and North Korea over two decades. The extent of his ring's operations remains unknown, but diplomats said that if Syria has centrifuges they would undoubtedly have come from Khan's network.
Inspectors from the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, are investigating whether sales were made to other countries as they reconstruct what officials consider the worst nuclear proliferation network in history.
A senior European diplomat familiar with the IAEA inquiry said Syria was on the list of suspected customers, but he said the agency has not found evidence that Khan visited Syria or sold technology to it.
The Syrian representative to the IAEA in Vienna did not respond to written questions submitted on Tuesday. In the past, Syrian officials have dismissed accusations that the country is pursuing nuclear weapons. The IAEA declined to comment and a spokeswoman for the State Department said, "We are unable to comment on any of these questions, because they are all of an intelligence nature."
Other Western diplomats and some U.S. officials cautioned that the information linking Syria to Khan's network is not conclusive. Even if Khan had contact with Syria, they said there is no evidence that Damascus bought centrifuges or other nuclear technology from him.
Since admitting his dealings with some countries earlier this year, Khan has been cooperating with Pakistani authorities, who are sharing some information with the IAEA and U.S.
A senior U.S. official said Khan has not denied contacts with other governments, though the official said the Pakistani scientist said sales were made only to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Khan's network involved middlemen and suppliers in Europe, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The network offered advanced centrifuge machines, components and designs as well as training for operating the machines. Libya also acquired blueprints for a nuclear bomb.
The ring operated for more than a decade before it was exposed earlier this year when Libya turned over Pakistani-supplied centrifuge components and related documents as part of an agreement to abandon its nuclear weapons program brokered by the U.S. and Britain.
Even before the scope of Khan's operations became public, the Central Intelligence Agency had raised alarms about Syria's interest in nuclear weapons and hinted at its possible efforts to acquire technology on the black market.
"Broader access to foreign expertise provides opportunities to expand its indigenous capabilities and we are looking at Syrian nuclear intentions with growing concern," said an unclassified report submitted to Congress by the CIA in mid-2003.
Syria maintains one of the Middle East's largest arsenals of ballistic missiles, developed in cooperation with North Korea and other countries. Analysts also believe Syria possesses chemical and biological weapons.
The information about its possible nuclear ambitions is more vague. The Western diplomats who described the links between Syria and Khan's network said the Pakistani scientist gave several lectures on nuclear materials in late 1997 and early 1998 in Damascus.
Beginning in 2001, they said, Khan's meetings with the Syrians were held in Iran because of Syria's concerns that its contacts with the Pakistani scientist would be exposed. They said three scientists from Khan's research laboratory in Pakistan accompanied him.
The diplomats said the meetings were part of a program intended to help Syria develop nuclear weapons.
The diplomats spoke on the condition that neither they nor their country of origin be identified because of the sensitive nature of the information and the means used to gather it. Centrifuges spin at enormous speeds to transform uranium gas into enriched uranium for reactors or bombs.
Thousands of machines are necessary to produce large amounts of enriched uranium, but even a small number would give off a distinct signal, experts said.
The senior U.S. official, who also insisted on anonymity because of the nature of the information, said an experimental electronic monitoring device had picked up the distinctive pattern of centrifuges operating in Syria in recent months. The official declined to provide any details and said the U.S. has only suspicions that the technology came from Khan's network.
Reuters news agency reported in early May that the U.S. had information that Syria was operating centrifuges. But the report said there was a division within the Bush administration over the accuracy of the information.
Some administration officials have pushed for tough action against Syria because of its ties to extremists and likely pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Other officials have argued for a softer course because Damascus has cooperated on terrorism issues.
Under pressure from Congress, President Bush applied economic sanctions on Syria on May 11 because of what he said was its support of terrorism and interference in U.S. efforts to create stability in Iraq.
----
Fiery Hell on Earth, Part 3
June 24, 2004
Rachel's Environment & Health News
http://www.rachel.org/bulletin/index.cfm?St=1
In this series, we are searching for answers to the question, "Why is the U.S. failing to stop, and in some cases actually promoting, the spread of nuclear weapons worldwide?" (See Rachel's #792 and #793.)
Answers to this question will help us understand President Bush's philosophy of environmental protection -- or perhaps the philosophy of his core supporters in the Republican Party on whom he is depending in the 2004 election.
President Bush has made it clear that he understands the threat posed by nuclear weapons, materials and know-how in the wrong hands. He has said, "We will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes and terrorists to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."[1]
This was not an isolated statement. In two key White House policy documents published in 2002, the Bush administration concluded that, "The threat of weapons of mass destruction is the highest priority for the United States and should be for other countries."[2,3]
The President has spoken out strongly and repeatedly on the matter and has even said that failure on this issue will be judged "harshly" by history.
When the White House published its National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction in Dec., 2002, the President said, "The gravest danger facing the Nation lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. Our enemies have openly declared that they are seeking weapons of mass destruction, and evidence indicates that they are doing so with determination. The United States will not allow these efforts to succeed.... History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act."[3]
Yet the evidence is overwhelming that the U.S. is failing to act on this growing threat. (See Rachel's #792, #793.) Indeed, the Bush administration is actively engaged in spreading nuclear technology and know-how into the hands of potentially-unstable nations.
On June 20, 2004, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published a 96-page report agreeing with the Bush administration that, "Terrorist acquisition of nuclear weapons poses the greatest single threat to the United States."[4, pg. 25].
However, the Carnegie report points out, "The [Bush] administration has not put money or significant political effort behind [its] proposals."[4, pg. 13]
According to the Carnegie report, the President's proposed budget for 2005 actually reduces the funds available for U.S. efforts to curb the spread of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium world-wide, and reduces the U.S. financial contribution to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) "whose responsibilities have greatly increased while its budget has stayed flat."[4, pg. 13]
Nuclear-armed terrorists are the No. 1 threat to the U.S., and the No. 2 threat is nuclear-armed states like Pakistan and North Korea. As the Carnegie report says, "National instability or a radical change in government could lead to the collapse of state control over weapons and nuclear materials and the migration of nuclear scientists to other nations or to the service of other groups."
However, instead of trying to keep nuclear technology and know-how out of the hands of such states, the Bush administration is actively encouraging U.S. corporations to sell their nuclear hardware and know-how abroad. On a recent trip to China, Vice-President Cheney was peddling Westinghouse nuclear power plants, even though China has announced that it intends to transfer nuclear technology to Pakistan.[5]
These contradictory facts are deeply perplexing. I have been reviewing the available literature on this subject for the past two years, trying to answer the question, "Why is the Bush administration promoting nuclear weapons, materials and know-how world-wide?"
Naturally, all my answers are merely hypotheses because I have no special knowledge of what motivates the President, the Vice-President, their core supporters in the House and Senate, and their advisors in the Pentagon. I only know what's in the public record.
So let us begin. In the remainder of this series, I will examine the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis #1: Simple incompetence and confusion among the nation's defense agencies. Perhaps they actually want to curb the spread of nuclear technologies but just can't manage the task.
Hypothesis #2: Perfectly normal corporate profit goals combined with the ever-pressing need for re-election campaign contributions. Perhaps the administration is promoting nuclear power to reward potential campaign contributors in the nuclear business, such as Westinghouse, General Electric, Framatone (formerly Babcock & Wilcox), Bechtel, Halliburton, Brown & Root, and other large-scale construction firms that build nuclear power plants and the infrastructure they require (roads, power lines, special docks at seaports, fuel processing plants, security apparatus and training, and so forth.)
Hypothesis #3: Nuclear power is needed now to prevent nations and regions from "going solar." Because each nuclear power plant requires an investment measured in billions of dollars, and because nuclear power plants are dangerous, they require (and thus maintain) the highly-centralized, top-down, quasi-military social structure that modern transnational corporations provide. The "military-industrial" complex that President Eisenhower warned us about in 1961 is epitomized by nuclear technologies.
Solar power on the other hand can be small-scale, locally-controlled, definitely not dangerous, much less subject to terrorist disruption,[6] and therefore much more compatible with an open, democratic social structure that might, as time passes, erode corporate control. Therefore, in a sense, solar power is dangerous and even subversive because it could subvert "business as usual."
Hypothesis #4: Just as nuclear power plants require and promote a centralized, quasi-military, corporatized social structure, so also does a world awash in weapons-grade uranium and plutonium.
So long as a there is a thriving black market in weapons-grade nuclear materials. then we can more easily justify a $450 billion annual military budget, a network of U.S. espionage agencies active now in 80 countries,[7] and pre-emptive wars such as the one now in Iraq (and others reportedly being readied now by the Pentagon against Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan[8]).
Whether your job is military, civilian, or somewhere in between, if you're in the business of fighting the nation's perceived enemies, and you want your business to thrive, then enemies armed with small nuclear weapons may be the best kind of enemies to have. Everyone will support your work against such enemies. They will even follow you into war against such enemies.
Hypothesis #5: Now we enter the realm of realpolitik, the kind of world that Henry Kissinger inhabits, where thinking the unthinkable is routine.[9]
Is it possible that some people within the Bush administration, (or among groups whom the Bush administration considers essential to its electoral success in 2004), might imagine benefits from a rogue nation or group detonating a small nuclear weapon in Jerusalem or even New York?
Here are some crackpot speculations perhaps worth considering: a) Maybe detonation of a small nuclear weapon would serve to remind the current generation how dangerous nuclear technology really is. A rogue nuclear detonation would quickly bring the civilian nuclear power industry to an end. It might also spur the international community to quickly sweep up the tons of weapons-grade plutonium and enriched uranium lying about in 40-or-so nations.
b) A rogue nuclear detonation would almost certainly spell the end of democracy as we know it. Major portions of the bill of rights would probably be canceled within hours.
Recall that the Bush adminstration saw the mass murders on 9/11 as sufficient reason to scrap the legal doctrine of habeas corpus which was formalized in English law in 1679 and was embodied a century later in the U.S. Constitution.
The U.S. Supreme Court has "recognized the fact that `[t]he writ of habeas corpus is the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action.'[10]
A writ of habeas corpus is a judge's mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought before the court so the court can determine whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he or she should be released from custody. Without habeas corpus, people can be imprisoned forever without any recourse whatsoever. Even the fact of their imprisonment can be kept secret. This is what the Bush administration has said it aims to do at Guantanamo Bay and perhaps at other quasi-military prisons the U.S. maintains around the world.
Seeing the right of habeas corpus repealed in response to the mass murders of 9/11, everyone has to be impressed by the fragility of what seemed like the immutable underpinnings of democracy and indeed civilization itself. The enemies of democracy -- inside the U.S. and outside -- can see as well as anyone that a nuclear detonation in New York would almost surely end the American experiment in self-rule.
c) There is a growing movement in the U.S. to erase the barrier that separates church and state, to replace our secular government with a religious government.[11] We can see the beginnings of such thinking in the Texas State Republican Party Platform for 2004, which says, "The Republican Party of Texas affirms that the United States of American is a Christian nation." And: "The Party understands that the Ten Commandments are the basis of our basic freedoms and the cornerstone of Western legal tradition." And: "Our Party pledges to exert its influence to restore the original intent of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and dispel the myth of the separation of Church and State."[12]
By removing the Constitutional wall that separates church and state, some people merely hope to get a free handout from Washington for their religious group (the President's "faith-based initiative" gave $1.1 billion of taxpayer funds to religious organizations during 2003).[13]
Others have much larger goals, hoping to institute a fully theocratic order in which their idea of Christian Biblical law replaces our secular democracy, essentially repealing the enlightment and returning the world to the 17th century.[11]
d) There is a different, and much larger, group of Christians who say they believe that their personal salvation depends upon the return of Christ to Earth and that this second coming of Christ requires a specific series of events to unfold in the Middle East, including the battle of Armageddon, which many interpret to mean a nuclear World War III.
These believers in Armageddon theology include the Reverend Billy Graham, the Reverend Pat Robertson, the singer Pat Boone, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Jr., Gary Bauer, Republican strategist Ed McAteer, advice columnist Laura Schlessinger, writer Hal Lindsey ("The Late, Great Planet Earth"), the Reverend Tim LaHaye (co-author of the 11-volume "Left Behind" series), House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-Tex.), U.S. Senator James N. Inhofe (R-Ok., Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works), Attorney General John Ashcroft, and many others in top leadership positions within the Bush adminstration.
Author Grace Halsell -- herself a born-again Christian from Texas -- toured the Holy Land in the Middle East twice with followers of the Reverend Jerry Falwell. Halsell then wrote a book about her experiences. In "Prophecy and Politics," which she subtitled, "Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War," Halsell wrote, "I have heard Falwell preach on nuclear Armageddon, and I saw his face turn radiant at the thought." [14, pg. 197] --Peter Montague
[To be continued.]
====
[1] President Bush quoted in Dafna Linzer, "Report Faults U.S. Action on Nuclear Proliferation," Washington Post June 21, 2004.
[2] The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (Sept., 2002), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html
[3] National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction (December, 2002), available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/WMDStrategy.pdf
[4] George Perkovich and others, Universal Compliance; A Strategy for Nuclear Security (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June, 2004). Draft available at http://www.ceip.org/strategy .
[5] H. Josef Hebert, "Cheney to shop Westinghouse nuke technology to China," Salt Lake City (Utah) Tribune April 10, 2004.
[6 Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, Brittle Power; Energy Strategy for National Security (Brown House Publishing: Andoiver, Mass., 1982).
[7] Dan Balz and Bob Woodward, "Bush Awaits History's Judgment; President's Scorecard Shows Much Left to Do," Washington Post February 3, 2002, pg. A1.
[8] General Wesley R. Clark, "The Clark Critique," Newsweek Sept. 29, 2003, pg. 31, which is an excerpt from Clark's book, "Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire" (Public Affairs, 2003; ISBN: 1586482777).
[9] See the video, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, based on the book of the same title by British journalist Christopher Hitchens (Verso paperback, 2002; ISBN: 1859843980); for the video, see http://www.thetrialsofhenrykissinger.com/trials.html
[10] Brown v. Vasquez, 952 F.2d 1164, 1166 (9th Cir. 1991), cert. denied, 112 S.Ct. 1778 (1992).
[11] See, for example, Frederick Clarkson, "Theocratic Dominionism Gains Influence," Public Eye Magazine Vol. 8, Nos. 1 and 2 (March and June, 1994). Available at http://www.rachel.org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=400 . And see Joan Bokaer, "The Rise of the Religious Right in the Republican Party," available in text format (no pictures) at http://www.rachel./org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=407 and in a 2 megabyte PDF file at http://www.rachel./org/library/getfile.cfm?ID=407 or you can find start reading the 19-page web document at http://www.4religious-right.info/ . [12] "2004 [Texas] State Republican Party Platform" available at http://www.texasgop.org/library/platform.php
[13] Elisabeth Bumiller, "Preaching to the Choir, Bush Encourages Religious Gathering," New York Times June 2, 2004, pg. A17.
[14] Grace Halsell, Prophecy and Politics; Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill & Co., 1986). ISBN 0-88208-210-8.
Rachel's Environment & Health News is a publication of the Environmental Research Foundation, P.O. Box 160, New Brunswick, NJ 08903-0160; Phone: (732) 828- 9995; Fax (732) 791-4603; E-mail: erf@rachel.org. Back issues available by E-mail; to get instructions, send E-mail to INFO@rachel.org with the single word HELP in the message. Subscriptions are free. To subscribe, E-mail the words SUBSCRIBE RACHEL-NEWS YOUR FULL NAME to: listserv@lists.rachel.org
-------- us nuc waste
House Panel Approves Yucca Mountain Bill
Thursday June 24, 2004
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4242076,00.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - A House committee approved legislation Thursday aimed at resolving a budget problem that threatens the proposed nuclear waste facility in Nevada.
The bill still faces an uncertain future in the Senate.
The legislation, passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee by a 29-19 vote, would assure a steady stream of money for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project over the next five years. The measure would keep the project on schedule to open in 2010, assuming it gets a federal license.
Money for the project 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas was cut recently to $131 million for next year, a fraction of the $880 million requested by the Bush administration.
The House bill requires that at least $750 million collected into a special nuclear waste fund each year be spent on the Yucca project. This would allow lawmakers to come up with the additional money the Energy Department wants.
Lawmakers traditionally have used the nuclear waste fund to offset other spending and to help narrow the federal deficit. Many of them are reluctant to go along any legislation that would change that practice.
The House bill also is certain to run into trouble in the Senate where it would need 60 votes to overcome procedural hurdles.
Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., is testing congressional sentiment on another way to give the project more money. He has proposed a one-time annual surcharge to collect an additional $446 million from electricity users to make up the shortfall for Yucca Mountain next year.
The nuclear industry has criticized Domenici's plan, saying that electricity consumers already have paid $22 billion into the nuclear waste fund, $15 billion of which has not been spent.
The department hopes to submit a permit application for the Yucca project with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in December and open the facility by 2010.
The underground facility would have room for 77,000 tons of defense waste and used reactor fuel now at commercial power plants and government sites in 39 states.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
KABUL Afghan Officials Deny Reports of Soldiers Beheading Prisoners
June 24, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/international/asia/24KABU.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, June 23 - Senior Afghan officials on Wednesday denied a report that soldiers from the country's new American-trained national army had beheaded four Taliban prisoners.
The local militia commander who made the original claim, Namatullah Tokhi, then retracted his statement.
In interviews on Tuesday and Wednesday, Mr. Tokhi, whose unit operates in the southern province of Zabul, told reporters from Reuters and The Associated Press that soldiers had beheaded four Taliban prisoners. He said the soldiers were taking revenge for the beheading of an Afghan soldier and translator by Taliban fighters in the Arghandab district, the scene of recent heavy fighting.
On Wednesday, the A.P. and Reuters reported that Mr. Tokhi had retracted his account. No one answered repeated calls to Mr. Tokhi's satellite telephone on Wednesday night.
The reversal came after Human Rights Watch, an American human rights group, said the beheadings would be a war crime.
If true, the commission of war crimes by soldiers from the new American-trained army would be a major setback for the United States, which has declared the fledgling 10,000 soldier force professional and capable of eventually defending Afghanistan on its own.
In an interview via satellite phone on Wednesday, Khial Muhammad Hussaini, the governor of Zabul Province, said no beheadings had taken place, either of Taliban or Afghan soldiers. He said that a clash in the Arghandab district between government and Taliban forces had left one Taliban fighter dead but that no prisoners had been taken by either side.
"I completely reject this report," he said.
Lt. Col. Tucker Mansager, a spokesman for American forces in Afghanistan, said he had received no reports of any beheadings.
Gen. Zahir Azimi, a spokesman for the Afghan Ministry of Defense, said that soldiers from the new national army were instructed on the laws of war and the Geneva Conventions and that they would not do such things to a prisoner.
He also said that Mr. Tokhi never reported any beheadings to his superiors at the Defense Ministry. "I don't know why and how he told the media," he said.
-------- arms
Saudis to Let Foreigners Carry Weapons
Associated Press Writer
By SALAH NASRAWI
June 24, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SAUDI_TERRORISM?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- Foreign residents of Saudi Arabia will be allowed to carry guns, the police minister announced after a series of militant bombings, attacks and kidnappings targeting Western workers in the kingdom.
"In principle, a citizen has the right to carry a licensed weapon, and so does the resident. If he senses danger, he can carry a personal weapon as he does in his country," Prince Nayef said late Wednesday.
A Western diplomat had said some embassies and foreign companies had asked Saudi authorities to ease rules barring private security guards from carrying weapons. Nayef's comment appeared to be a response to the requests.
Under Saudi law, foreigners - even security guards - cannot have weapons, while Saudis must apply for a permit. Nayef's comments suggested foreigners would be allowed to seek permits, though he did not elaborate.
Al-Qaida-linked militants in Saudi Arabia have stepped up their campaign of attacks, targeting foreign workers with an assault on a Riyadh housing compound in May that killed 22 people, a series of shootings and the kidnapping and beheading of an American, Paul M. Johnson Jr.
The bloodshed has spread fear among foreign expatriates. An estimated 8.8 million foreigners work among 17 million Saudis. Most hold low-skill jobs, but many work in the oil, banking and other vital sectors.
Westerners working in Saudi Arabia contacted by The Associated Press had mixed reactions to the possibility of being able to carry firearms. "I like the concept, I think its a great idea, but I hope they implement this quickly," said Jack Smith of St. Louis, who lives in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.
Smith, a gun owner in the United States, warned that people unfamiliar with weapons should get training.
"There's a lot of twitchy foreigners out there, and it could be a bigger problem if they are suddenly given a weapon in a moderately threatening situation," he said.
Another American working in western Saudi Arabia, who wanted to be identified only by his first name, Bob, also welcomed the move, but urged caution. "There are many bad examples of people owning guns in the States and we don't want to have the same situation here," he said.
Another Western diplomat said a group of Western ambassadors will meet Foreign Minister Prince Saud on Sunday in Jiddah to discuss security for foreigners.
Nayef has urged wanted militants to take up an amnesty offer made by the kingdom's rulers, "or else they will face a stronger and tougher method."
Crown Prince Abdullah, the kingdom's de facto ruler, issued the ultimatum Wednesday in the name of King Fahd, his ailing half brother, for anyone not yet "arrested for carrying out terrorist acts."
Nayef said only those who committed acts that hurt others would be prosecuted, and no one who turns himself in would face the death penalty.
Late Thursday, the Interior Ministry said a wanted militant surrendered to police "hours after" the amnesty announcement. Saaban bin Mohamed bin Abdullah Alleihi al-Shihri, who has been in hiding for almost two years, was sought in a "security-related case," the ministry statement said without elaborating.
Al-Shihri's name does not appear on a list of 26 most-wanted Saudis. The ministry said he can stay with his family until investigations begin.
Nayef said the amnesty would also apply to two men who surrendered last year, Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi and Mansour Mohammed Ahmed Faqih.
Saudi police on Thursday resumed searches in Riyadh's Suweidi neighborhood and several other districts for militants, conducting house-to-house hunts for suspects and advising families with children to leave the area.
Suweidi has been the scene of confrontations between government forces and militants.
The wave of violence began May 12, 2003, when car bombs targeted three compounds housing foreign workers in Riyadh, killing 35 people, including nine suicide bombers. Since then, the kingdom has suffered a series of suicide bombings, gunbattles and kidnappings.
Johnson was kidnapped in Riyadh on June 12 and beheaded six days later. There are fears the violence could drive out American and other Western workers vital to Saudi Arabia's oil and other industries.
Nayef said Saudi authorities are still searching for Johnson's body.
-------- britain
Britain's Guantanamo
(Inter Press Service)
by Sanjay Suri
June 24, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/suri.php?articleid=2868
LONDON - The man known only as "G" was lucky that the deterioration of his mental health became obvious.
"G," one of the 12 men held indefinitely without trial in Britain's top security prisons, was let out on bail in April on the basis that his indefinite detention had caused deterioration of his mental health.
He had begun to suffer from psychotic attacks, and these got much worse after his appeal to seek release was turned down in November last year.
He had been detained for about two years before he was released. Eight of the men have been in detention longer, since December 2001 when the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 passed.
Under the act foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorist activity can be detained indefinitely. That means they can be jailed all their life without ever being brought to trial.
One of the detainees, "M," was released in March by the special immigration appeals commission. The identities of all the men have been kept secret. They are all known by a single letter, which is not necessarily one of the initials.
"M" said after his release that many of the detainees were suffering serious mental and physical health problems.
Of those still under detention, one has been moved to a psychiatric hospital at Broadmoor. The remaining 11 are held in top security prisons.
There are reports that yet another person is being held under unspecified powers.
There is no indication when any of the men will be released. "There is no movement towards any kind of trial," Ben Ward from Human Rights Watch told IPS. "If they could have been brought to trial, this would have been done by now."
The testimony of "M" after his release stunned human rights activists. He said that during 16 months of detention he was never questioned by anyone from any agency of the British government.
"That lack of interrogation calls into question the assertion of the British government that it is diligently seeking to bring some form of prosecution against the detained men," Ward said.
Following sustained pressure from human rights activists, the British government announced the beginning of a six-month consultation process over the fate of the men in February this year. That consultation period to determine what the government called the balance between security and liberty is drawing to a close.
A parliamentary committee headed by Lord Newton had recommended in December last year that the government powers of indefinite detention should be urgently repealed. The committee was set up by Home Secretary David Blunkett.
The Newton committee said the powers to impose indefinite detention do not even fully address the threat from terrorism because they do not apply to British nationals.
The committee said these powers were damaging community and race relations because Muslims saw these powers as unjust, and as targeting Muslims. "From the human rights point of view use of indefinite detention does not work," said Ward. "But it does not work even from the security point of view."
Earlier, a human rights committee of the British parliament had similarly recommended immediate repeal of the powers of indefinite detention under the Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act.
In order to introduce those powers the British government had to declare a state of emergency under which it could suspend key human rights protections. Britain was the only country in Europe to suspend fundamental human rights obligations following September 11.
A briefing paper released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) Wednesday says the British government powers have been criticized as "discriminatory and unwarranted" by parliamentary groups and also by expert bodies in the United Nations.
The British government has signaled that it is considering deporting detainees to third countries by relying on "framework agreements," the HRW paper says. In these agreements, more commonly known as "diplomatic assurances," the government of the receiving country assures the government carrying out the deportation that the detainees will not face torture or ill treatment if returned.
"Diplomatic assurances have proved to be an ineffective safeguard in the past," Rachel Denber, acting executive director of the Europe and Central division of HRW said in a statement. "They do not shield Britain from its obligation not to expose people to such torture."
A special nine-judge panel of the House of Lords, the upper house of British parliament, is scheduled to hear an appeal on the lawfulness of indefinite detention in October.
-------- iran
Iran Frees British Troops Seized on Border With Iraq
June 24, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI and LIZETTE ALVAREZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/international/middleeast/24CND-IRAN.html
TEHRAN, Iran, June 24 - After three days of diplomatic negotiations, Iran today released the six British sailors and two Royal Marines who had strayed into Iranian territorial waters.
The men boarded a charter plane that brought them to Tehran. From here they will fly to London, a British diplomat said.
"They are at the British Embassy," the diplomat said. "They are very tired but happy."
The men had been held at a base near the southwestern city of Abadan. Their release was delayed on Wednesday because the two sides failed to reach an agreement on the logistics of how the men would be handed over.
The boats in which the sailors were captured, and their weapons and equipment, were confiscated by Iran's hard-line Revolutionary Guards. But Iran said today that it would return the boats and equipment.
Reacting to the release of the men, the British foreign minister, Jack Straw, said in London: "Obviously, I'm very pleased indeed as I know their families and service colleagues will be. These things do sometimes take time. Would that it had taken less, but at least now we can be pleased that they're happy and released. I'm told that they are in very good spirits and were well cared for."
Mr. Straw also said that the men's capture had fueled tensions between the two countries, but that he remained convinced that Britain's policy of engaging with Iran was wise.
"We have diplomatic relations with Iran, we work hard on those relationships and sometimes the relationships are complicated," he said. "But I'm in no doubt that all that our policy of engagement with the government of Iran is the best approach."
The men were arrested by the Revolutionary Guards on Shatt al Arab, a stretch of water that divides Iran and Iraq. British Royal Navy officials said the men were delivering one of the three boats to Iraqi river patrol forces.
Iran had accused the men of entering into Iranian territorial waters illegally. After interrogating the men, Iran said it was satisfied that the Britons had navigated into Iranian waters by accident and agreed to release them.
Earlier this week, the servicemen were shown on Iranian state television blindfolded and marching along the banks of the river in single file. Two of them were shown reading written apologies. Overall, though, the men were well-treated, British officials said.
Nazila Fathi reported from Tehran for this article and Lizette Alvarez from London.
--------
Detained British troops 'free to leave'
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Ali Akbar DareinI
June 24, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040623-114521-3175r.htm
TEHRAN - Iran is no longer holding eight British troops in custody, but they haven't yet been handed over to Britain, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said yesterday.
A ministry spokeswoman did not say where the six Royal Marines and two British sailors were located, but insisted they were "free to leave."
In a day of confusing statements by the two countries, Britain said last night that the troops were still in Iranian custody, and expressed confidence that they would be released soon.
The troops were detained Monday after their boats apparently strayed on to the Iranian side of the Shatt al-Arab waterway that runs along the Iran-Iraq border.
Earlier in the day, both Iran and Britain said the men would be released by the end of the day. Those words came after Iranian officials announced that the incursion appeared to be accidental.
But later yesterday, Iran's Arabic-language TV channel Al-Alam broadcast an "urgent" caption on its screen reading: "The second round of talks on the British detainees is postponed until tomorrow, Thursday," according to a translation provided by the British Broadcasting Corp.
The Iranian state channel had previously reported that British and Iranian officials were negotiating in the southwest Iranian town of Mah Shahr, near the spot where the British servicemen were detained.
When told of the Al-Alam caption, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said: "The sailors are not in detention any more. They are free to leave. The issue of handing them over to British authorities is merely a formality issue that has to be sorted out between Iranian and British officials."
In London, a British Foreign Office spokesman rebutted the Iranian claim that the troops had been freed.
"They are still in custody in southwest Iran," the spokesman said. However, he added the agreement to release the men "still stands, and there is no reason to believe there is any problem."
The Iranian spokeswoman did not say where the British troops were. But a Foreign Office spokesman told Britain's Press Association that the men were in Mah Shahr, and had been visited by British diplomats.
Late yesterday, the Foreign Office said it had not been told officially that the release had been delayed until today. It said that three British diplomats were traveling from Tehran to Abadan, a port on the Shatt al-Arab and 56 miles west of Mah Shahr, to receive the eight servicemen.
Iranian officials were quoted Tuesday as saying they would prosecute the British servicemen for illegally entering Iranian territory.
But after two telephone conversations between British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and his Iranian counterpart, Kamal Kharrazi, and constant dialogue between the British and Iranian officials, Tehran announced yesterday that the men would be released.
Britain has said the eight servicemen were delivering a new patrol boat to Iraq's river police when they were detained.
Iran will keep the three boats in which the British troops were traveling, as well as their weapons and other equipment, Al-Alam has reported.
-------- iraq
OMENS OF VIOLENCE
Death Threat Leveled at New Iraqi Premier; U.S. on Alert in Falluja
June 24, 2004
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/international/middleeast/24IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 23 - The foreign terrorist group that took responsibility for beheading a South Korean hostage turned its sights on the new Iraqi prime minister on Wednesday, issuing a statement in which it threatened to assassinate him.
On an Islamic Web site, the group singled out Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, saying, "As for you, Allawi - sorry, the democratically elected prime minister - we have found for you a useful poison and a sure sword."
American officials said the threat had come from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq, who is suspected of having been the mastermind of several deadly kidnappings and dozens of suicide attacks.
American officials said that they were not passing off the statement as an idle threat and that protecting the life of Mr. Allawi, who used to work with the C.I.A., was now one of the chief concerns leading up to the transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.
"We are making security for the prime minister a top priority," a senior occupation official said today.
At the same time, the American military is tightening its focus on Falluja, the city west of Baghdad that has simmered in an uneasy cease-fire since American troops pulled out in May and handed control to an all-Iraqi security force. American officials say they believe that Mr. Zarqawi is using Falluja, a deeply religious and traditional place known as the City of Mosques, as a headquarters.
Up to 20 foreign fighters were killed Tuesday night during an American military strike on a Falluja house, a senior American military official said. The senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the latest strike, like the one on Saturday that killed an estimated 23 foreign fighters, had been aimed at a Zarqawi hideout.
Some Falluja residents told reporters that the house that was destroyed in Tuesday's attack had not housed any militants and that a garage owner and his two sons had been killed.
American officials conceded on Wednesday that Falluja remained one of the most troubling hot spots leading up to the transfer of power.
"Falluja has become a place where large numbers of foreign fighters remain," the senior military official said. "We are concerned about this. We don't know if it has become a clearinghouse for terrorists, but we are watching it closely."
The official added: "Are we satisfied with what's going on the city? Absolutely not. But are we ready to take a new course of action? Not yet."
The official said that American commanders were still considering "the kinetic option," meaning a major military offensive, and that they needed to see more from the Falluja Brigade, the all-Iraqi force entrusted with providing security for the city.
"Keeping the city quiet is not sufficient," the American military official said, adding that more weapons needed to be turned over and more arrests made.
Muhammad Latif, the commander of the Falluja Brigade, said his 2,000 troops were stepping up patrols and trying to flush out insurgents.
"But we're a new brigade," Mr. Latif said. "We're just starting."
He said most foreign fighters had left the city. But he acknowledged that two months ago, during the height of the fighting between the marines and insurgents, there were scores of foreign fighters in Falluja.
According to Mr. Latif, there are 37 graves in Falluja's main cemetery marked "Arab," signifying that the deceased were non-Iraqi Arab fighters of unknown origin.
Kim Sun Il, the South Korean hostage, was abducted near Falluja, not in mid-June, as was previously reported, but toward the end of May, the South Korean Foreign Ministry said Wednesday. Mr. Zarqawi's group, Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad, said Tuesday that it had cut off Mr. Kim's head because his country refused to withdraw its forces from Iraq.
A terrorist group with a name similar to Mr. Zarqawi's issued a threat on Wednesday that if Iraqi officials put martial law into effect after June 30, as some Iraqi officials have threatened, there would be even bigger attacks than before.
Already Iraqi and American security forces are on high alert. American officials said they had received intelligence reports indicating that there could be a major terrorist strike, or "Baghdad offensive," in the coming days.
On Wednesday, Bechtel, one of the largest contractors in Iraq, confirmed that an Iraqi woman working with the company was killed by gunmen in Basra on Tuesday.
Also on Wednesday, the American military said three Iraqi civilians, one of them a small boy, had been killed when a roadside bomb went off in central Baghdad. Reuters reported that the victims included a woman who had been married for 15 days. Her husband, wounded in the blast, kept asking the hospital staff to call his wife, unaware that she was dead.
--------
After Beheading, Extremists Threaten Iraq's Interim Leader
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63459-2004Jun23?language=printer
BAGHDAD, June 24 -- One day after beheading an abducted South Korean, underground Islamic extremists vowed Wednesday to assassinate Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, and pursue their campaign of bombings and kidnappings until they drive U.S. occupation forces from the country.
The threat, made in an audio recording posted on a Web site often used to convey such messages, was attributed to Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian linked by U.S. officials to the al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden. Occupation officials have accused Zarqawi and his followers of being behind many of the car bombings that have plagued Iraq in the lead-up to the transfer of limited authority to Iraq's interim government on June 30.
"As for you, Allawi -- pardon, the democratically elected prime minister -- we have prepared for you a potent poison and a sharp sword and have filled for you an intoxicating cup, full of the smell of death and the odor of mortality," the man identified as Zarqawi said, mocking the appointment of Allawi to his post three weeks ago by U.N. and U.S. officials.
"Without knowing it, you have survived well-placed traps we set for you, but we promise that we shall follow our cause to the end. Unless we die first, we shall neither tire nor despair until we make you drink from the same cup as we made Izzedin Salim drink from."
Salim, who was taking his turn as president of the now disbanded Governing Council appointed by U.S. occupation authorities, was killed by a car bomb as he approached the heavily guarded government and occupation headquarters on May 17.
Allawi, as interim prime minister and close collaborator with the U.S. occupation, has long been a likely target for assassination. The opposition group he founded in exile before the fall of President Saddam Hussein was funded by the CIA. He was a member of the Governing Council and now has the top office in the interim government. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz on Tuesday called him "number one on the enemy target list."
Allawi only occasionally ventures outside the government headquarters area called the Green Zone in central Baghdad. When he does, rifle-toting security agents surround him. But he said Wednesday that Zarqawi's threat would not deter him from carrying out his duties.
"The prime minister does not care about such statements from Zarqawi," said a statement from his office. "He will continue with his work, to bring democracy to the people of Iraq."
Zarqawi's organization, which calls itself the Monotheism and Jihad Group, asserted responsibility for the beheading on Tuesday of Kim Sun Il, 33, a South Korean contractor who worked for a firm supplying the U.S. military in Iraq. The group also announced that it carried out last month's beheading of an American businessman, Nicholas Berg, who was abducted in northern Iraq.
Several hours after American soldiers found Kim's body and severed head on the road between Baghdad and the rebellious city of Fallujah, the U.S. military launched an airstrike against a house in Fallujah that it said was being used by Zarqawi's fighters. A senior U.S. military official estimated 20 foreign insurgents were killed in the attack. A similar strike Saturday also killed about 20 people, including women and children.
Early Thursday morning, insurgent forces staged major attacks on Iraqi police stations on the outskirts of Baqubah, 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, and in Ramadi, 60 miles west of the capital. Initial reports from the area said about 20 policemen were killed in the clashes. At the same time, local journalists told Arabic-language television stations that U.S. helicopter gunships fired on targets in Fallujah, the rebellious city about halfway between Baghdad and Ramadi, and a number of U.S. armored vehicles were seen headed in that direction from nearby Marine encampments.
A streetside bomb in downtown Baghdad on Wednesday killed two people and wounded several others. An Iraqi policeman, 1st Lt. Basim Ibrahim, said the bomb was inside a cardboard box that sat in front of a watermelon stand and exploded when a boy alighted from a donkey cart and picked it up. The blast killed the boy and a woman who was passing in a taxi that was set on fire by the blast, Ibrahim said.
"They might be saboteurs who came from abroad because they don't want stability and security for this country," Salih Joda Hemoud, 30, a truck driver, said near the bombing scene.
His speculation coincided with the impression U.S. and Iraqi officials have been trying to create about the campaign of violence in recent weeks: that outsiders have been the decisive factor, seeking to frustrate the desire of most Iraqis to set up a new, democratic government as urged by the United States.
"If half of what is attributed to him is true, then he is the most significant terrorist in Iraq at this time," the senior U.S. military official said of Zarqawi.
The statement attributed to Zarqawi, widely reported here on Arabic-language television networks, appears likely to encourage that view among Iraqis, many of whom have expressed reluctance to believe that their countrymen could be behind the suicide car bombings.
Weheb Hassan, 32, a crane operator, said he believed that the Bush administration was not unhappy with bombings such as Wednesday's because it does not really want to leave Iraq, with its oil reserves and strategic location for future military bases.
"As long as the Americans stay, the explosions will continue, whether they transfer sovereignty or not," he said. "They don't want the situation to stabilize."
An Iraqi soldier was killed by another roadside bomb in Mosul, about 215 miles north of Baghdad, a day after the killings of the dean of the college of law at Mosul University and her husband. Two policemen were shot to death in a drive-by shooting near Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad, authorities reported, and in the far south of the country, two women who worked for the British military in Basra were shot as they drove home Tuesday evening.
Also, efforts by Shiite Muslim religious and political leaders to draw defiant cleric Moqtada Sadr and his followers into the political process suffered a setback. A spokesman for Sadr said the cleric would not participate in a national conference scheduled for next month unless its formula for representing Iraq's diverse political and ethnic currents was changed.
"After many discussions among ourselves, Moqtada Sadr's office announced it will not be able to attend the national conference session, for many concerns," said Ahmed Shaibani, a Sadr spokesman in Najaf, a Shiite holy city about 90 miles south of Baghdad. "One of the most important is the procedure adopted for representing different people."
Fuad Masoum, a Kurd who is organizing the conference, said he had not yet sent out formal invitations. The national conference has set as its goal choosing a body similar to a legislature that would monitor the interim government and help organize elections planned for next January.
Special correspondent Huda Ahmed Lazim contributed to this report.
--------
Dozens Are Killed as Rebel Attacks Ripple Across Iraq
June 24, 2004
By EDWARD WONG and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/international/middleeast/24CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAQUBA, Iraq, June 24 - Insurgents staged what appeared to be coordinated assaults in cities across central and northern Iraq today, overrunning police stations, ambushing American patrols and driving car bombs right up to government buildings.
The assaults were reminiscent of the uprising in early April, when guerrilla fighters in the south seized a string of cities while separate groups in the west battled marines. The attacks today rippled across the so-called Sunni triangle and demonstrated that as the June 30 date for a handover of limited sovereignty draws near, the violence here will almost certainly increase in ambition if not frequency.
The attacks included assaults in Falluja and Baghdad, and insurgents moved against police stations in Ramadi, Mahaweel and the northern city of Mosul, where car bombs ripped into the Iraqi Police Academy, two police stations and the al-Jumhuri hospital.
A spokesman for the Iraqi Health Ministry, which tracks Iraqi casualties nationwide, said today's death toll was 69 Iraqis dead and 276 injured, with 44 killed in Mosul alone. The spokesman said he expected the death toll to climb.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of operations for the American Army in Iraq, said the clashes appeared to have mostly subsided by noon local time. "With the exception of what we are seeing in Baquba, most seem to be under control right now," he told reporters, according to Reuters.
Here in Baquba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, about 150 insurgents seized two police stations and began hoarding weapons in buildings around a stadium downtown in preparation for a strike on the governorate. The fighting in Baquba left two American soldiers dead and seven wounded, and at least 25 insurgents were killed, said Lt. Col. Steve Bullimore, commander of Task Force 1-6 Field Artillery of the First Infantry Division. At least seven Iraqi police officers were also reported killed.
In the northern city of Mosul, multiple car bombs exploded at police stations. And in Falluja, guerrilla fighters battled marines in street combat for the first time since late April, when the marines began negotiations to turn over control of the volatile city to an Iraqi militia.
The fighting began in Falluja, a center of anti-occupation resistance and one of the tensest places in Iraq right now, at dawn, with American helicopters firing missiles into several houses. American armored personnel carriers and several dozen soldiers then stormed into the city, which has been off limits to American troops for the seven weeks since a truce was declared.
The American military said in a statement that marines and the Iraqi Falluja Brigade had responded to attacks from insurgents in and around Falluja. The brigade is the all-Iraqi force entrusted with providing security for the city.
"The fighting was very heavy and there are too many people killed to count," said Qasim Muhammad Abdul Satar, who sits on Falluja's shura council, a body of town elders.
By midafternoon, another uneasy truce was struck, and a message blared from mosque minarets for insurgents to put down their guns and go home.
Jasim Muhammad Saleh, a former Iraqi army general in Falluja, said, "The big people of the city, the sheikhs, the tribes, the police and the mayor, met with Americans to stop their fire and the Americans agreed to withdraw to their base."
In Baquba, the seven Iraqi police officers were killed by guerrillas at one of the two police stations. The Americans sent in Apache attack helicopters and armored vehicles - including M-1 Abrams tanks - and had to call in an airstrike.
In the early afternoon, pillars of smoke curled up above the skyline. Helicopters swooped through the sky. Columns of vehicles carrying American soldiers rolled along the roadways leading to the downtown area, where three buildings were reduced to rubble by 500-pound bombs dropped from American aircraft.
The group Jamaat al-Tawhid and Jihad took responsibility for the attack and urged residents to comply with the "instructions of resistance." The group is linked to the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and was responsible for the beheading on Tuesday of a South Korean worker who had been kidnapped near Falluja. American officials have said that Mr. Zarqawi was also behind the threat issued in a statement on Wednesday to assassinate Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi. In April, the same group staged a bold daylight assault on the main police station in Falluja.
If the attack in Baquba today was the work of the group, it would be the first time it had taken responsibility for an assault outside the Falluja area. The group has also never tried to seize a city before.
Colonel Bullimore said he did not know whether Mr. Zarqawi or any group linked to him was behind the strike. "I always thought of him as an up-and-coming worldwide terrorist," he said.
Many of the insurgents wore black clothing with red headscarves wrapped around their faces. An American platoon leader, Lt. T.J. Grider, 25, said the enemy used complex tactics that he had not seen guerrillas here employ before. For example, he said, they set up ambushes in which they fired on Americans after setting off roadside bombs.
The battle began around 5:30 a.m., after a night in which an American sniper team killed two insurgents trying to set up a roadside bomb south of the downtown area, Colonel Bullimore said. A platoon of Bradley fighting vehicles returning from that mission ran into heavy fire in the Mufrek district. The insurgents seized the police station in that area and killed at least seven police officers, the colonel said.
Around the same time, insurgents drove up to the home of the chief of police of Diyala province and opened fire. The police shot back, and the police chief's family escaped injury.
Guerrillas also stormed a police station in the southern district of Buhritz, the scene of heavy fighting last week. It appeared that the insurgents wanted to cut off the major routes between two American bases and the downtown area, where the governorate buildings are, the colonel said. He added that the Americans, using a drone aircraft, had watched guerrillas stockpile weapons in three buildings around the downtown stadium.
A company sweeping toward the stadium engaged in heavy firefights in which two soldiers were mortally wounded. The Americans then called in an airstrike. Three bombs pulverized the buildings that officers said were being used as weapons storehouses by the insurgents. Cars at the foot of the buildings were destroyed.
"I think the aircraft surprised" the guerrillas, Colonel Bullimore said.
Soldiers swept through a school near one of the buildings and found a weapons cache that included mortar tubes and light machine guns. They collected the weapons and ammunition into a pile.
The battle had taken place in 120-degree heat, and at least one soldier who had collapsed from dehydration lay in the school compound with an intravenous drip running into his arm.
At one point, an Apache attack helicopter killed what the colonel said were several insurgents driving around in a black Opal on the west side of town.
The Americans towed two damaged Bradleys out of the city.
Colonel Bullimore said that by late afternoon, the guerrillas had melted away from many of the hostile neighborhoods. But it had been the costliest day of fighting for the Task Force 1-6 Field Artillery since it arrived here in March. The colonel said he was sure the insurgents would attack again.
"He's still here," the colonel said of the enemy. "He's still in the city, but he's hiding. He will come back out."
In Baghdad this morning, a man dressed in a crisply ironed police uniform walked up to a checkpoint in the Rashid neighborhood carrying a black Samonsite briefcase, and blew himself up. Four people were killed, including a farmer driving to a market with a pickup truck full of eggplant. Several people were wounded, including two American soldiers.
"The bomb was packed with ballbearings and meant to kill a lot of people," said Col. Steve Lanza of the Army said. "This could have been a lot worse. My two kids," he said, referring to the two wounded soldiers, "were lucky."
Khalid Mohammed, an official at the al-Jumhuri hospital in Mosul, said at least 50 people were killed and 170 were wounded there. An American soldier was also killed and three were wounded there, The A.P. reported.
In other attacks, four Iraqi soldiers were killed in an explosion near a checkpoint manned by Iraqi and American soldiers in the southern Baghdad district of Dora, the agency said.
In Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad, insurgents wearing black and using masks fired rocket-propelled grenades to attack two police stations, the police said.
"We were inside the al-Qataneh police station and suddenly a very heavy explosion happened," said First Lt. Ahmed Sami, The A.P. reported. "We discovered later on that the station was attacked from all around."
He said the station was destroyed in the initial blast. Seven people were killed and 13 were wounded, hospital officials said.
Another group attacked the Farook police station in Ramadi, also with rocket-propelled grenades, Lieutenant Sami said. In a third assault, insurgents attacked a Ramadi government building, destroying several police cars.
The Associated Press reported that gunmen stormed the police station in Mahaweel, a small town about 50 miles south of Baghdad, and killed an undetermined number of policemen. The gunmen blew up the police station before leaving, witnesses said, according to The A.P.
Jeffrey Gettleman contributed reporting from Baghdad for this article and Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York.
--------
Militants threaten to kill Allawi
washtimes
June 24, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040623-114522-7061r.htm
BAGHDAD - Islamist militants yesterday turned their wrath on Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, vowing to kill the man who on June 30 will replace U.S. Administrator L. Paul Bremer as the most powerful man in post-Saddam Iraq.
A second group pledged to "strike with great power and with an iron fist" if Mr. Allawi goes ahead with announced plans to introduce martial law in parts of Iraq after the June 30 turnover.
The threat appeared on a Web site purportedly controlled by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian terror chief whose group is blamed for the beheading of a South Korean hostage on Tuesday.
"As for you, Allawi - sorry, the democratically elected prime minister - we have found for you a useful poison and a sure sword," said a taped voice, thought to be that of Zarqawi.
Mr. Allawi, a former Ba'athist who plotted against Saddam Hussein from exile, responded defiantly, setting up a direct confrontation between himself and the insurgents.
"We do not care about these threats, we will continue to rebuild Iraq and work for freedom, democracy, justice and peace. Iraqis have faced these threats before," said a spokesman for Mr. Allawi.
In an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Giornale, Mr. Allawi dismissed Zarqawi as a criminal who would be caught and punished.
"Abu Musab al-Zarqawi doesn't threaten just me, but the entire country," Mr. Allawi told the newspaper, which released a copy of the interview last night.
"He has killed hundreds of Iraqis, has sown disorder and fear," Mr. Allawi was quoted as saying. "But he is just a criminal who must be captured and tried. We are used to threats, and we know how to deal with them and how to win."
A second group warned Mr. Allawi against imposing martial law in parts of the country, something he said he will consider after being sworn in at month's end.
"We warn you against this crime, which you are carrying out on behalf of your occupation masters. ... We will strike with great power and with an iron fist against all those who bless it," the group, claiming to represent Iraqi resistance and jihad factions, said in a videotape aired by Dubai-based Al Arabiya.
The increased focus on Mr. Allawi brought no letup in attacks on U.S. and allied forces, however.
The military said insurgents staged at least six attacks on American convoys throughout the country yesterday, wounding one U.S. soldier and a civilian contractor.
Zarqawi's group has taken responsibility for the beheading of American hostage Nicholas Berg last month and of Kim Sun-il, a South Korean whose decapitated body was found Tuesday.
Hours after Mr. Kim's body was found, the U.S. military launched its second attack against Zarqawi in three days with an air strike on a suspected safe house in Fallujah. A coalition military official said 20 foreign fighters and terrorists were thought to have been killed in the strike.
Fallujah residents and hospital officials said the strike hit a parking lot, killing three persons and wounding nine.
In an interview yesterday with Associated Press Television News, U.S. Brig Gen. Mark Kimmitt said many of the major attacks in Iraq are carried out by Zarqawi's forces, while former regime supporters are responsible for smaller assaults.
"He is a very, very crafty leader of a large network that is conducting terrorist operations inside this country," Gen. Kimmitt said.
"The people of Iraq must understand they have a responsibility. They bear a responsibility to make sure we take Zarqawi and his network off of the street."
Zarqawi's group killed Mr. Kim, a 33-year-old South Korean, after the Seoul government rejected its demands to withdraw troops from Iraq. His body was dumped on a road between Baghdad and Fallujah, a hotbed of Islamic extremism.
Iraq's president, Ghazi Mashal Ajil al-Yawer, said Mr. Kim's killing violated Iraqi and Islamic tradition and "completely tarnishes Iraq."
"How could we rebuild our country if we can't guarantee the safety of people who come to help build our country?" Mr. al-Yawer said on the U.S.-funded TV station Al Iraqiya.
U.S. and Iraqi officials long have warned against stepped-up violence ahead of the June 30 transfer of sovereignty, which marks the formal end of the U.S.-led occupation.
Late yesterday, insurgents hurled a hand grenade at the newly refurbished Iraqi Transportation Ministry, then engaged in a 10-minute gunbattle with security guards, injuring at least one, residents said.
Elsewhere, a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed a policeman, a woman and her child, Iraqi police said.
Another roadside bomb in the northern city of Mosul killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded four others. In Ramadi, an insurgent stronghold 60 miles west of Baghdad, gunmen killed two policemen and wounded a third in a drive-by attack, witnesses said.
-------- israel / palestine
Former Israeli Soldiers Tell of Harassment of Palestinians
June 24, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/international/middleeast/24exhi.html
TEL AVIV, June 23 - When Israeli soldiers opened an exhibit this month documenting some of their own misdeeds while serving in the tense West Bank city of Hebron, they caused a brief stir.
At a photographic institute in Tel Aviv, the soldiers, all recently discharged, offer video testimony of gratuitous harassment and abuse of Palestinians, like firing tear gas just to get a reaction. Hanging on the wall are dozens of car keys confiscated from Hebron residents, a punishment both common and unauthorized, soldiers say. And a photo taken by a soldier shows graffiti, presumably written by civilians, which reads, "Arabs to the gas chambers."
Now, the Israeli military, which had expressed only mild dismay initially, has re-energized the debate surrounding the exhibit by confiscating the video testimony on Tuesday and calling in five soldiers for questioning on Wednesday.
The exhibit remains open, and the military said it took the actions not to suppress it but to investigate the abuses described by soldiers. The former soldiers maintain that the military is trying to silence them and to discourage others from speaking out.
The driving force behind the exhibit is Yehuda Shaul, 21, an ultra-Orthodox Jew, who recently completed his mandatory military service and then recruited his former comrades for the project.
The five soldiers, himself included, spoke about their actions when questioned by the military on Wednesday, Mr. Shaul said. But they refused to identify others who speak anonymously in the video. These soldiers are not pictured, and their voices are distorted, though the television screen presents the text of their statements.
"When we made the video, we promised not to give their names," Mr. Shaul said. "We feel the army doesn't really want to deal with the serious issues, they just want to make other soldiers afraid."
The 90 photos, taken by soldiers during their Hebron duty, do not reveal abuses. They do show Palestinian detainees, blindfolded and handcuffed. There are Jewish children playing in the empty streets of a town where Palestinians have faced extended curfews.
But the video testimony from 29 soldiers describes a litany of improper actions by members of the Nahal Brigade, charged with protecting 500 Jewish settlers surrounded by 130,000 Palestinians.
Through long, sweaty days and the endless, chilly nights, the soldiers describe how discipline unravels, fatigue and boredom set in, and they experience a rush in exercising power over those with no recourse.
One soldier says a colleague would fire tear gas canisters "every time he climbed up to his post and came back from it.''
"If he saw a group of people standing and talking, he would fire the tear gas just to see them run and cough,'' the soldier added. "He got a big kick out of it."
The soldiers have been reluctant to speak to foreign journalists, saying they want their exhibit to be for internal Israeli debate.
But in a lengthy interview with Haaretz magazine, Mr. Shaul said the Hebron soldiers often used Palestinians as "human shields" despite an Israeli court decision forbidding the practice.
"Using a human shield means grabbing some fellow and sending him to open the door to a suspect's house, so if he shoots, this guy will take the bullets and not us," Mr. Shaul said. He was not aware of any Palestinians killed in this practice, but the risk was always present, he said.
Palestinians, meanwhile, have frequently fired on both the soldiers and the settlers in Hebron. A 10-month-old Jewish girl was killed in 2001. The following year, Palestinians killed nine soldiers and three security guards in one of the deadliest attacks on Israeli forces.
Mr. Shaul said soldiers would often hear Palestinian fire but were unable to locate the source. The Israeli reply would often be sustained blasts of fire at empty buildings, he said.
"The idea is that there should not be an event without a response, so you respond with a big spray of gunfire," Mr. Shaul said.
The military said the soldiers should have raised their concerns while still in uniform. In a statement, the military said it "educates its soldiers to behave according to moral standards in complex situations."
The exhibit, which has been drawing several hundred visitors a day in Tel Aviv, was busier than usual on Wednesday, apparently in response to the latest controversy, Giora Salmi, the curator, said.
Next week, the exhibit is scheduled to go on display at the Knesset, Israel's Parliament.
'Breaking the Silence' on West Bank Abuse Israeli Soldiers' Exhibit Depicts Mistreatment of Palestinians by Troops, Settlers in Hebron
By Molly Moore Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A766-2004Jun23?language=printer
TEL AVIV, June 23 -- Military police on Wednesday interrogated three Israeli reserve soldiers who organized an exhibit of photographs and videotapes chronicling mistreatment of Palestinians by troops and Jewish settlers.
A statement issued by the military said the three men were ordered to provide testimony as part of an investigation into the "allegedly violent crimes against Palestinians and damage to Palestinian property" depicted in the show.
"The army wants to keep us quiet and scare us away," Micha Kurz, 22, said after what he described as seven hours of questioning by investigators. "They're not going to shut us up, because we have a lot to say, and they're not going to scare us off."
Soldiers said police raided the exhibit at Tel Aviv College late Tuesday and confiscated a videotape in which young troops expressed anguish over their behavior.
Kurz, Yehuda Shaul and Yonatan Baumfeld, who finished their mandatory three years of active duty three months ago, assembled more than 80 provocative photographs taken by troops assigned to the volatile West Bank city of Hebron and created a video of soldiers describing humiliation and abuses suffered by Palestinian civilians at their hands, as well as those of Jewish settlers.
The exhibition, called "Breaking the Silence," is the most graphic example yet of concerns being voiced by influential Israeli soldiers and officers over the tactics and techniques of the armed forces' occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Last year, reservists from the military's top commando unit, respected pilots, four former chiefs of Israel's powerful domestic security service and hundreds of other soldiers went public with concerns over the military's ethics.
In a letter to visitors posted at the entrance of the exhibit at the college's Academy for Geographic Photography, the soldiers said: "We decided to speak out. Hebron isn't in outer space. It's one hour from Jerusalem."
The photographs in the exhibit capture the hatred of Jewish settler graffiti -- "Arabs to the Gas Chambers!" -- and the callousness of soldiers lounging on a coffee break while a 15-year-old Palestinian sits blindfolded and handcuffed on a nearby chair, a position the show's organizers said he was forced to endure for 16 hours. The youth was accused of throwing stones at soldiers.
In one of the most arresting pictures, two stick-wielding Palestinian boys play a game of "hands up," pretending they are Israeli soldiers lining up four other Palestinian children, including a female toddler in a pink suit, against a wall. An Israeli soldier stands nearby, grinning, an assault rifle cradled in his arms. Another picture shows settler children ripping down the brick wall of a Palestinian shop.
The voices of soldiers on two television screens in the gallery buttress the photo display. Although some of the soldiers allowed their faces to be shown in the film, none of their names are used.
One soldier described an evening when he and his men came upon a Palestinian wedding party driving through Hebron during a military-imposed curfew.
"We get out of the jeep," he says. "You see the groom, you see the bride, the father. As they go out [of their car] you see on their faces the fear."
The deputy commander did not want to allow the wedding party to pass, according to the soldier, who adds: "He wants to spoil everything, so they go home. He takes the car keys.
"The bride is crying, the father of the groom is really begging," he continues. "You see on their face how they are anxious about the most significant day in their life. On the other hand, I can see the deputy commander looks at them and does not see them as humans."
But the soldiers aim some of their starkest criticism at the Jewish settlers who live in central Hebron, closer to Palestinian neighborhoods than any other settlement in the West Bank.
"The settlers whom we were meant to protect rioted, occupied houses and confronted the police and army both physically and verbally," the soldiers wrote in their letter to visitors.
"Whatever is done in the name of religion is allowed," a soldier says on the videotape. "To break into shops, that is allowed. As a soldier I really felt a problem because I came from a family that has values, morals."
Photographs that appeared benign took on an ominous edge when organizers described the events preceding or following the snap of the shutter.
In one such photo, a smiling, red-bearded settler grips a gun in one hand and guitar in the other. The guitar is plastered with stickers. One reads, "Either us or them. Arab enemy." A uniformed soldier holds his own rifle as though it were a guitar and grins for the camera.
Giora Salmi, director of the Academy for Geographic Photography, explained that on his way to play the guitar for the soldiers, the settler shot out the tires of several Palestinians' cars.
Salmi said thousands of people have visited the exhibit, including numerous soldiers and their families.
The photographs also illustrate a soldier's view of war: the cityscape as seen through a bullet hole in a window; a young Palestinian man captured in the crosshairs of a sniper rifle as he feeds his pigeons on a rooftop; Palestinian schoolchildren seen through the anti-grenade grill on the window of an army jeep.
On Wednesday, Liat Mor, 18, who will begin her mandatory army service next year, stood transfixed before the photos. "It's pretty shocking," she said. "You know it's a different universe. That's why I'm here -- to get prepared."
She scrutinized a close-up of a blindfolded Palestinian man. "I don't think it will help," she said.
-------- nato
NATO invites Russia, Ukraine to join Mediterranean patrols
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Jun 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040624163437.hoh4qc0r.html
NATO is set to invite Russia and Ukraine to take part in anti-terrorism naval patrols of the Mediterranean, alliance chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said Thursday ahead of a NATO summit next week.
"We have agreed to open up our operation Active Endeavour to Russia and Ukraine," the Dutch secretary-general told reporters in advance of the summit in Istanbul on Monday and Tuesday.
"We'll discuss the modalities at Istanbul," he said.
Operation Active Endeavour was launched in the eastern Mediterranean after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, and extended a year ago to protect vessels in the Straits of Gibraltar.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation agreed in March to enlarge the mission to the whole of the Mediterranean basin.
Over the last two-and-a-half years NATO sailors have boarded nearly 50 vessels in the shipping lanes of the eastern Mediterranean while over 400 ships have been escorted through the Straits of Gibraltar between Spain and Africa.
A NATO source said the operation might yet be extended to take in the Black Sea, where both Ukraine and Russia have naval bases, but added that no decision had been taken at this stage.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russians Pursue Insurgents
Toll Rises in Ingushetia Attacks; Rights Groups Decry Roundup
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A645-2004Jun23.html
MOSCOW, June 23 -- Government forces swept through villages and forests in southern Russia on Wednesday, hunting elusive bands of guerrillas who staged coordinated attacks on government installations Monday and Tuesday. Officials said the death toll had risen to about 92.
Soldiers and police conducted door-to-door searches in several areas of the Russian republic of Ingushetia, which borders the war-ravaged republic of Chechnya, demanding documents and taking away dozens of young men. Human rights groups accused authorities of rounding up people at random and beating some of them, allegations disputed by local officials who said they were simply detaining suspects.
The government operations came a day after fighters in camouflage dress rampaged through streets in Ingushetia, firing rocket-propelled grenades at police stations, taking over checkpoints and setting fire to government buildings in the biggest outbreak of fighting in the region outside of Chechnya since 1999.
With the guerrillas now back in hiding, relative calm returned to the mountainous region Wednesday as shops remained closed for mourning and dozens of families buried their dead. "Yesterday there was panic -- people were scared. By today, things have calmed down. There are a lot of funerals going on," Madina Khadiyeva, a spokeswoman for Ingushetia's Interior Ministry, said by telephone.
The only bloodshed reported Wednesday was in Chechnya, where an overnight shootout between regional security forces and rebels in the village of Avtury killed three officers and eight insurgents, according to officials.
The fighting underscored the difficulties in President Vladimir Putin's plan to declare the Chechen war over and unilaterally impose a political settlement on the region. Amnesty International released a report Wednesday that depicted what Putin calls a "normalization" program as failing, saying the situation in Chechnya was "far from normal" and spilling into Ingushetia.
The report condemned both sides for targeting civilians but singled out the disappearances of people held incommunicado by Russian forces and allegedly tortured and raped. "Such abuses, which previously occurred almost exclusively in Chechnya, are increasingly spreading across the border to neighboring Ingushetia," it said.
Such abuses fostered speculation that the latest attacks were intended as retaliation for the recent disappearances of young men in Ingushetia. The guerrillas included Ingush and Russians as well as Chechens, according to officials, who identified the leader of the assault as Magomed Yevloyev, an Ingush who has fought alongside rebels in Chechnya.
Details of the assaults remained murky. Officials increased their estimate of guerrillas involved from a low of 200 to as high as 1,000. Likewise, the fatality count rose from 57 but varied depending on the official giving the number; more than half of the dead were said to be police officers, prosecutors and Interior Ministry troops.
Khadiyeva, the Interior Ministry spokeswoman, said government forces searched the villages of Galashki and Altiyevo on Wednesday in case the attackers simply melted back into the local population: "It's possible a lot of them are still here. That's why we're conducting these document checks."
The local office of Memorial, a human rights group, said the government raids were zachistkas, or cleansing operations, aimed in part at Chechen refugees, with about 75 taken away. "They were beating them," said Yekaterina Sokirianskaya, a Memorial activist who witnessed the raids. "They were also telling them that if they don't leave the republic in two days, they would be in trouble."
Ingushetia's president, Murat Zyazikov, a former KGB general, denied that. "Some people would very much like the situation to look this way," the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying. "But there are no sweep operations whatsoever. All this is just made up."
-------- spies
Pakistani restrictions slow U.S. search for bin Laden
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Rowan Scarborough
June 24, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040623-114524-9546r.htm
Osama bin Laden remains on the run along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, with the U.S. manhunt hindered by restrictions on the movements of covert warriors.
Defense sources say bin Laden plays less of a hands-on role in running al Qaeda than at the time he managed the September 11 plot. A new crop of terror leaders now is planning attacks at the local levels in extremist spinoff groups linked to bin Laden.
"He is much less in day-to-day control because he is on the run so much," a defense source said yesterday. "To the extent that he runs operations, he uses cutouts, human messengers, because he doesn't use cell phones."
U.S. government promises to capture the terror mastermind have ceased in recent months. As bin Laden stays under the radar, an ally, Abu Musab Zarqawi, the most wanted man in Iraq, has dominated headlines as one of the world's most gruesome terrorists.
Zarqawi is believed to be responsible for the beheading of American civilian Nicholas Berg. He has organized a series of suicide car bombings that killed scores of Iraqis and Americans.
Meanwhile, bin Laden moves through the rugged mountains by any means available - foot, donkey or vehicle - and attracts a loyal following willing to provide cover, defense officials say.
For years, he has traveled with his top deputy, Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahri, a surgeon whom one U.S. official described as particularly vicious.
Washington believes bin Laden is still alive. He has not been heard from since April and no longer appears in videotapes. An April audiotape of bin Laden turned up at Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite news channel that the Pentagon says is sympathetic to Islamist terrorists.
In that tape, bin Laden offered a "truce" to any European country that pulled its troops out of Iraq. In a January audiotape, he called on all Muslims to conduct a holy war in the Middle East against Americans.
In an infamous 1998 fatwa, or religious decree, he declared war on the United States, urging Muslims to kill Americans anywhere, anytime.
Before a spring offensive code-named Mountain Storm, U.S. military officers in Afghanistan made bold predictions that bin Laden would be captured by the year's end. That rosy scenario has given way to more sober comments.
Asked at a June 17 press conference how the hunt for bin Laden and former Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar was progressing, Lt. Gen. David Barno, the top commander in Afghanistan, made no predictions.
"That hunt continues," he said. "We have a focused effort here that's dedicated on a daily basis to looking for those leaders that are at the tops of these organizations, but it's important to get at the organization, the network, and to take down those terrorist networks as attacking the leadership. We'll continue to focus on finding the key leaders in these organizations and bringing them to justice."
A second Pentagon source said the measured statements reflect the reality of trying to catch elusive terrorists in vast, rugged areas, some of which are off-limits to uniformed personnel.
Despite a new offensive by Pakistani troops, there remain areas in the tribal regions of eastern Pakistan where government troops will not go. Although the CIA operates in Pakistan, the country is off-limits to American infantrymen who could hunt for bin Laden in the same way they hunted down Saddam Hussein and his two sons in Iraq.
"They remain optimistic, but the amount and ability of Pakistan to cooperate ebbs and flows," the official said. "There are certain places Pakistani forces can go and certain places where they cannot."
This is because President Pervez Musharraf needs the allegiance of tribal leaders as he tries to shift the country away from radical Islam and embrace the United States as an ally in the war on terrorism. Militants have made two attempts on his life, using bombs that nearly struck his armored limousine.
Officials say he must be judicious in how many missions he launches into the ungoverned areas so as not to trigger a rebellion.
Last winter, the Pentagon shifted elements of the secretive Task Force 121 from Iraq to Afghanistan to aid the search for bin Laden.
The task force is a mobile mix of intelligence collectors, aviators and warriors. It includes CIA officers; a military intelligence unit that has been known as Grey Fox; Navy SEALs and Army Delta Force soldiers attached to Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC); and the 160th Special Operations Regiment.
A senior defense source said JSOC and U.S. Special Operations Command have planned scores of missions for Task Force 121, but the team has not located bin Laden or al-Zawahri.
--------
Tenet furious over scathing CIA report
Cable News Network
June 24, 2004
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/24/tenet.letter/index.html
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Outgoing CIA Director George Tenet has fired off an angry letter to the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, after the committee issued a scathing report criticizing the agency's human intelligence gathering as "dysfunctional" and averse to risk.
"Dysfunctional organizations do not perform the way the Directorate of Operations performed in Afghanistan and in support of the military in Iraq before and after the conflict," Tenet wrote to Rep. Porter Goss.
"Dysfunctional organizations do not take down or eliminate the most dangerous proliferators in the world ... nor do they aid in the disarmament of a country like Libya."
"To suggest that the organization that was key to all these victories, not to mention the capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and more than two thirds of the al Qaeda leadership, is on the verge of being incapable of the 'slightest bit of success' is frankly absurd."
The criticisms of the CIA were contained in committee findings and recommendations attached to a bill authorizing the fiscal 2005 intelligence budget. Goss, the committee's chairman, has been frequently mentioned as a possible replacement for Tenet, who is resigning from his CIA post in July.
The report said the Directorate of Operations, which collects intelligence with agents in the field, is mismanaged and has a "dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action." The committee also charged that too much emphasis is being placed on counterterrorism.
"Countering the threat from terrorism is, of course, and should be, at the top of the CIA's list of collection priorities," the report said. "But the Central Intelligence Agency must continue to be much more than just the 'Central Counterterrorism Agency' if America is to be truly secure, prosperous and free."
To that, Tenet responded in his letter that "I find it hard to accept that any serious observer would believe, as the committee apparently does, that there is an unhealthy emphasis on counterterrorism and counterproliferation efforts."
The report also criticized the Directorate of Operations of being adverse to change and having "a continued political aversion to operational risk." Unless that changes, it "will become nothing more than a stilted bureaucracy incapable of even the slightest bit of success."
But Tenet responded that the process of rebuilding the clandestine human intelligence gathering service -- which he said was damaged by inattention during the first half of the 1990s -- has been going on for six years and "only patience, continued resolve and sustained support will see it to a successful conclusion."
"Just as the military cannot hire people off the street to become instant majors and lieutenant colonels, it takes years for the CIA to recruit, train and deploy experienced case officers," he wrote.
The committee's report also criticized the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, which collects and analyzes intelligence data, as having a culture in which rank-and-file analysts believe "senior DI managers do not want risk taking -- however calculated, caveated and warranted -- and that they will not stand by an analyst who has made the wrong prediction."
The report also said the intelligence directorate should spend less time on gathering information about current events and more time "on the longer-term, predictive, strategic intelligence forecasting that was once the strength of the DI."
"Instead of 'chasing CNN,' as the committee has observed in the past, the DI should be devoting much more of its resources to doing the kind of all-source, in-depth analysis that cannot, and is not, being done elsewhere in government or through media outlets," the report said.
But Tenet told Goss that the committee's criticisms of the Directorate of Intelligence were "ill-informed" and that "the suggestion that analysts are risk averse is simply wrong."
"It has been stressed to all our analysts that making hard calls is what we do," Tenet said. "Our work must be based on rigorous, well-reasoned and appropriately caveated analysis. Above all, we must take care not to create a chilling environment in which analysts are hesitant to make tough calls."
The committee's report also criticized the CIA's new "pay for performance" compensation plan, saying "it is a mistake to assume that money is the most significant employee motivator in the intelligence 'business.'"
But Tenet defended the program in his letter to Goss, saying that "being able to adequately and flexibly compensate our workforce would go a long way to helping CIA overcome the challenges we face in completing our essential mission."
--------
CIA insider says U.S. fighting wrong war
Anonymous career officer makes bold claims in book about U.S. war on terror
NBC News
By Andrea Mitchell
June 24, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5279743/
A career CIA officer claims in a new book that America is losing the war on terror, in part because of the invasion of Iraq, which, he says, distracted the United States from the war against terrorism and further fueled al-Qaida's struggle against the United States. The author, who writes as "Anonymous," is a 22-year veteran of the CIA and still works for the intelligence agency, which allowed him to publish the book after reviewing it for classified information.
In an interview with NBC's Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell, he calls the U.S. war in Iraq a dream come true for Osama bin Laden, saying, "Bin Laden saw the invasion of Iraq as a Christmas gift he never thought he'd get." By invading a country that's regarded as the second holiest place in Islam, he asserts, the Bush administration inadvertently validated bin Laden's assertions that the United States intends a holy war against Muslims.
In his book, titled "Imperial Hubris," he calls the Iraq invasion "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat," arguing against the concept of pre-emptive war put forward by President Bush as justification for the Iraq war.
The book also argues that the U.S. focus on bin Laden as a terrorist is the wrong way to fight him and the wrong way to think of the foe. The real enemy, he asserts, is the radical form of Islam that bin Laden and his followers espouse. And he calls for escalating the level of violence in the war against al-Qaida.
Read the complete transcript of Andrea Mitchell's interview with Anonymous below:
Andrea Mitchell: "What is your background? How many years were you, are you in the agency?" Anonymous: "Well, I've been in the intelligence community for 22 years. My background is I was trained as a historian, British imperial history. But I've been here since 1982 and have had a very good career."
Mitchell: "Starting in 1996, the CIA decided to create a station devoted to Osama bin Laden. Why?"
Anonymous: "I think it was created because the intelligence community had turned up bits and pieces of information in multiple areas of the world, after the end of the Afghan war, that indicated bin Laden was involved in one way or another with various Islamist groups who were opposing the Egyptian government or the Saudi government, the Yemeni government. And it was decided to try to make a concerted effort against this individual, to see where it would lead, to see if he was either a spendthrift billionaire, or if he was a serious military-minded opponent of the United States. And that was, I think, the genesis of the effort."
Mitchell: "Now, you were placed in charge of this station, the first time that the CIA developed a station just devoted to a man, to a person, not to a country."
Anonymous: "That's what I understand, yes."
Mitchell: "You say in your new book that the United States is not making a dent in the war on terror against these foes. Why do you think so?"
Anonymous: "Well, I think we have made a dent in some areas. I think in the leadership, the first generation of al-Qaida leadership, we've made a - certainly made a dent. America's clandestine service has done a terrific job in that regard. But we are - we remain in a state of denial about the size of the organization we face, the multiple allies it has, and more importantly probably than anything, the genius of bin Laden that's behind the movement and the power of religion that motivates the movement. I think we are, for various reasons, loath to talk about the role of religion in this war. And it's not to criticize one religion or another, but bin Laden is motivated and his followers and his associates are motivated by what they believe their religion requires them to do. And until we accept that fact and stop identifying them as gangsters or terrorists or criminals, we're very much behind the curve. Their power will wax our costs in treasure, and blood will also wax."
Mitchell: "But isn't it a distortion of Islam, what they espouse? How can you say that this is the Muslim belief to attack us and to wage war against us?"
Anonymous: "I'm certainly not an expert and neither am I a Muslim. I think the appeal that bin Laden has across the Muslim - I indeed think he's probably the only heroic figure, the only leadership figure that exists in the Islamic world today, and he does so because he is defending Muslims, Islamic lands, Islamic resources. From his perspective it's very much a war against someone who is oppressing or killing Muslims.
"And the genius that lies behind it, because he's not a man who rants against our freedoms, our liberties, our voting, our - the fact that our women go to school. He's not the Ayatollah Khomeini; he really doesn't care about all those things. To think that he's trying to rob us of our liberties and freedom is, I think, a gross mistake. What he has done, his genius, is identify particular American foreign policies that are offensive to Muslims whether they support these martial actions or not - our support for Israel, our presence on the Arabian Peninsula, our activities in Afghanistan and Iraq, our support for governments that Muslims believe oppress Muslims, be it India, China, Russia, Uzbekistan. Bin Laden has focused the Muslim world on specific, tangible, visual American policies.
"And there seems to be very little opposition to him within the Muslim world, and that's why I think that our assumption that he distorts Islam is just that, it's analysis by assertion. I'm not sure it's quite accurate."
Mitchell: "Well, you say in your book that the reality is that there is a large and growing among the world's 1.3 billion Muslims against America, not because of a misunderstanding of America but because they understand our policies very well."
Anonymous: "That's exactly right. I certainly believe that, and I think the substantial amount of polling that's been done by the Pew Trust and by other very reputable pollsters in the Islamic world indicate that most of the Islamic world believes they know exactly what we're up to, and that's to deny the Palestinians a country, to make sure that oil flows at prices that may seem outrageous to the American consumer, but are not market prices in the Islamist's eyes, supporting Russia against Chechnya. I think very coolly bin Laden has focused them on substance rather than rhetoric. And his rhetoric is only powerful because that is the case. He's focused them on U.S. policies."
Mitchell: "You're saying that no amount of public diplomacy will reach the Muslim world and change their minds because they hate everything that we stand for."
Anonymous: "No, I don't think they hate everything that they - that we stand for. In fact, the same polls that show the depths of their hatred of our policies show a very strong affection for the traditional American sense of fair play, the idea of rule by law, the ability of people to educate their children. I think the mistake is made on our part to assume that they hate all those things. What they hate is the policy and the repercussions of that policy, whether it's in Israel or on the Arabian Peninsula. It's not a hatred of us as a society, it's a hatred of our policies."
Mitchell: "You call for some very tough actions here. You talk about escalating our war against them, and you say in your book that killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. This killing must be a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. You talk about civilian deaths. You talk about landmines. Is that really what we have come to in this war on terror?"
Anonymous: "I think we've come to the place where the military is about our only option. We have not really discussed the idea of why we're at war with what I think is an increasing number of Muslims. Which - it's very hard in this country to debate policy regarding Israel or to debate actions or policies that might result in more expensive energy. I don't think it's something that we wanted to do, but I think it's where we've arrived. We've arrived at the point where the only option is military. And quite frankly, in Iraq and in Afghanistan we've applied that military force with a certain daintiness that has not served our interests well.
Mitchell: "But in fact in your book you argue that we are waging half-failed wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan that have only further incited Osama bin Laden and his sympathizers."
Anonymous: "Well, I think we made no impression on them with our military might. We are unquestionably the strongest military power on earth. And in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our opponents rode out that war. I wrote in the book that if we give the military, you know, substantial credit for actions, probably 40,000 Taliban fighters went home with their guns in Afghanistan; probably 400,000 Iraqis went home with their guns in Iraq, all to fight another day. We seem to have a little bit of trouble distinguishing between winning a war and winning a battle. And I think -
Mitchell: "In other words, we're winning the battles but not the war."
Anonymous: "We're - yes, ma'am. We've won, we won quite a few battles and marvelously so, but we're fighting opponents that perceive tactical losses rather than strategic losses. And it's quite clear that these wars are half-started."
Mitchell: "You call the invasion of Iraq, 'an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat.' Why do you think so?"
Anonymous: "For several reasons. That was a passage cut from a larger passage where I describe my personal aversion to aggressive war, to the war started by the United States. And I tried to draw an analogy between our war against Mexico in the 19th century and just saying it is not part of the American character or our basic sense of decency to wage wars except in self-defense or preemption.
"The major problem with the Iraq war is that it distracted us from the war against terrorism. But more importantly, it allowed-it made us invade, or it caused us to invade a country that's the second holiest place in Islam. It's not really the same as the Russians invading Afghanistan in 1979. Afghanistan is an Islamic country, but it was far from the mainstream of world Islam.
"Iraq, however, for both Sunnis and Shias, is the second holiest place in the Islamic world. And to invade that country, on the face of it, is a great offense to Islam and an action which almost entirely validated bin Laden's assertions about what the United States intended vis-à-vis the Islamic world."
Mitchell: "But we were encouraged by many of Iraq's neighbors quietly saying, you know, go ahead and do it as long as you get Saddam, which we did."
Anonymous: "Yes, they certainly did. But you need to remember that, I think the neighbors of Saddam were afraid of Saddam. I'm not sure our goals were their goals in those countries."
Mitchell: "You believe that, you believe that al-Qaida is going to hit us again and harder, in this country?"
Anonymous: "I believe that's the case, yes."
Mitchell: "Why?"
Anonymous: "Well, they stay very much on message and on task. And although the line is not perfectly straight, bin Laden since 1996 has told us he will attack us periodically with incremental increases in the amount of destruction he causes. And he's been true to his word. Whether you start with Somalia and move on to the explosions in Saudi Arabia in 1995 and 1996, you take one step further to 1998 and two embassies that were destroyed in East Africa. The attack on the Cole in 2000, and then the attack on New York City and Washington in-"
Mitchell: "Since there has not been an attack on the homeland since 9/11 -"
Anonymous: "Yeah?"
Mitchell: "- doesn't that suggest that al-Qaida has either lost some of its ability to mobilize and/or that our homeland security has been improved?"
Anonymous: "Well, that might indeed be the case. I tend to think that's more analysis by assertion. The one thing these people have, bin Laden and his ilk, is tremendous patience. One huge failing of the American counterterrorist community throughout its existence has been the assumption that if someone hasn't attacked us in a while, they can't attack us. And I think that's where we are, the kind of mindset that if it hasn't happened, it's because they can't. I tend to think bin Laden will attack us when he wants to. He's an individual who has been very unmoved by external events. If there's a man who marches to his own drummer in terms of timing, it's certainly bin Laden and al-Qaida."
Mitchell: "Have we not managed, by capturing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other of his henchmen, have we not managed to get at al-Qaida and undermine his ability to attack?"
Anonymous: "There is no doubt that the clandestine service of the United States has staged stunning attacks against al-Qaida. I would say that damage that the clandestine service has inflicted on al-Qaida would have wiped out any other terrorist group that we've ever known of in the last 30 years, maybe longer. The point I would make is al-Qaida is not a terrorist group. It's more akin to an insurgent organization. It pays tremendous attention to succession, to leadership succession. Were all of those people that were killed or captured important? Absolutely. Did it hurt the organization? Of course it did. But there were successors waiting in the wings; there were understudies. The organization goes on.
"Just the other day in Saudi Arabia, the Saudis killed the man responsible for the, the kidnapping and murder of Mr. Johnson."
Mitchell: "Al-Moqrin?"
Anonymous: "Yes, Mr. Moqrin. And within hours of that, al-Qaida announced that Moqrin was indeed dead and named a successor. Part of the problem when we're judging success is looking at this group as if it is a gangster organization or a criminal organization or a traditional terrorist organization. It's none of those things. And just as the American army or any army in the West would have a backup to their leader in the field, so does al-Qaida. And it's an organization that replicates itself with tremendous dexterity and speed."
Mitchell: "Do you think bin Laden is still able to call the shots?"
Anonymous: "My own inclination, for what it's worth, is yes. He's in a country where he is, as Kipling would say, the little friend of all the world. He has no enemies in Afghanistan or most of Pakistan. He's been there for 20 years. For better or worse, he stood by the Afghans from the invasion in 1979 until today. I think he probably has an ability to elude us for the, for the foreseeable future."
Mitchell: "And why do you think the CIA has not been able to capture him, to find him?"
Anonymous: "As I wrote in the book, the intelligence community as a whole has been at war against bin Laden and al-Qaida with various degrees of commitment. I would go beyond that and say the Defense Department and the intelligence community, from my, from my personal experience as I've watched as a member of the intelligence community, the Directorate of Operations at the CIA has been, has turned in a performance that's nothing less than stellar. But it cannot do it all itself."
Mitchell: "Where is the falling down? Where is our effort falling down?"
Anonymous: "Part of it, I think, is again, as I wrote in the book, is the unwillingness of senior bureaucrats in the intelligence community to take the full truth, an unvarnished truth to the president, whether it's Mr. Bush or Mr. Clinton. I'm not sure that it's proper to blame al-Qaida's existence, continued existence or attacks on any elected official. I think the, the bureaucracy at the senior levels in the intelligence community is selective in what they take to the president. I think they are loath to describe the dire problem posed by bin Laden for a number of reasons. One of them is basically political correctness. It's not career-enhancing to try to engage in a, in a debate about religion and the role it plays in international affairs. And so we, we, we address bin Laden from the perspective of law enforcement, picking them off one at a time, arresting them, killing them. And I think that's a, the, the, the result of no one frankly discussing the size of the problem or the motivation behind the problem."
Mitchell: "And what do you think the size of the problem is, first?"
Anonymous: "I think the size of the problem is - I think the first step in understanding the problem is to try to divorce yourself from the emotions generated by bin Laden's activities and rhetoric and the activities and rhetoric of the people who agree with him, or support him. The decapitation of people, the flying into the World Trade Center, the destruction of the, of the Destroyer Cole raise emotions that they must raise among Americans. But they - when we respond to those in a law enforcement manner, in a manner that describes these men as, again, criminals or terrorists, we, we fail to understand the size of the organization that supports al-Qaida and the size of the organization that al-Qaida has bred for over 20 years. I think we also forget that it's a 20-year-old organization. It's an organization that has Muslims from every ethnic group in the world. It's extraordinary. It's a singular accomplishment on bin Laden's part to have created an organization where all those Muslims from different ethnic groups, different linguistic groups work together in a manner that's effective enough to take on the United States in a war. We watched the Palestinians for 50 years unable to agree amongst themselves - and they're all Palestinians.
"So that's one problem. The other is an analytic problem. If you're looking at a terrorist group, you don't put together an order of battle as you would for an army or an insurgency. And so you talk about taking down three-quarters of al-Qaida's leadership. Well, at the end of the day, what we, what we've done is take down three-quarters of the al-Qaida leadership we knew of on 11 September 2001. And if you take that as a measurable success, it is. But you don't know, first, how big the organization was you started to work against; and second, the assumption is that it's a static, sterile organization that doesn't grow. And the one thing we can be certain of is that the attack on Afghanistan by the United States and the continued occupation of Afghanistan has caused the number of volunteers going to al-Qaida in Afghanistan, and the amount of money going to al-Qaida in Afghanistan, to have increased, I would say, probably dramatically.
Mitchell: "What is George Tenet not telling George Bush?"
Anonymous: "I'm not in a position to tell you that. I'm in a position where I could tell you what I would like to tell the president."
Mitchell: "What would you like to tell the president?"
Anonymous: "I would like to tell the president, I think, and, and it's presumptuous of me, but I genuinely think that we have underestimated the scope of the enemy, the dedication of the enemy and the threat that it poses to the United States. I think someone should have gone to the president when the, when the discussion of going to Iraq was broached and have said, Mr. President, this is something that can only help Osama bin Laden. Whatever the danger posed by Saddam, whatever weapons he had, is almost irrelevant in that the boost it would give to al-Qaida was easily seen. And if that message wasn't delivered, then I think there was a mistake made. I also think that Mr. Lincoln's view that one war at a time is plenty is probably a good piece of guidance."
Mitchell: "Now, you told the 9/11 commission that there were people in the agency who basically ignored the advice of your unit, the Osama bin Laden station, because they thought you were a little over the top, a little too zealous."
Anonymous: "Yes. I think we, we were certainly convinced by late in 1996 that we had an organization that was militarily competent, that was structured in a way that made it very difficult to isolate and attack, in the sense that it was structured in 40 or 50 countries around the world..."
Mitchell: "Do you think, do you think that your advice was ignored? Did they, did the people within the CIA, the people in charge think that you were all exaggerating the threat of Osama bin Laden before 9/11?"
Anonymous: "I'm not sure if the people thought we were exaggerating so much as they just didn't take it very seriously at all. They thought that bin Laden was just one more terrorist on a list of terrorists. I really believe Mr. Tenet was the one person who did take it seriously almost from the start, but the rest of the senior leadership in much of the intelligence community, I think, did not take it seriously.
"But I think the most important failure was in the, in the years between 1996 and 2001, the failure to correct obvious dysfunctions within the intelligence community was what led in large part to no one being able to claim that the intelligence community did the best it could before 9/11. They were failures of cooperation, failures of leadership that were brought to the attention of the senior-most members of the intelligence community and to the attention of some people at the NSC. And whether or not they ever got to the people who could actually change things, to the, to the committees in the Congress or to the president, to our elected leaders, I'm not sure.
"I know for, for many years we told various members of the Congress and the executive branch that there was seamless cooperation between the FBI and the CIA. And from my seat and from - and admittedly, from a very small portion of the total relationship between those two organizations- I cannot imagine that in any way that could have been true."
Mitchell: "The CIA and the FBI weren't cooperating even though they were supposedly assigned together in the counterterrorism which you worked."
Anonymous: "From my - over my career in the intelligence community, the CIA is an organization that produces intelligence for the rest of the government. The idea that somehow we, somehow the CIA produced information and didn't share it is a, a, a shibboleth that, that receives wide repetition. In my experience, the flow of information out of CIA to the community is extraordinary.
"The people, as I understand it, the people who were placed in the terrorism components of the intelligence community from FBI or other U.S. government agencies were put there to ensure that the CIA did not become involved with domestic U.S. criminal prosecutions, looking at U.S. citizens- anything that was beyond our purview, our legal statutory responsibilities. And so they brought in officers from other agencies who, again, in my knowledge, read everything that a CIA officer would read. And their responsibility was to cull through that information and return it, as appropriate, to their own headquarters for use domestically, something that was, again, meant to ensure the rights, the privileges of American citizens. And rightly so.
"My biggest experience was that was not done. And I think if there is a failure in these various investigations of 9/11, it's, it lies in the fact that many members seconded to the counterterrorist arena did not perform the intermediary job they were assigned to perform."
Mitchell: "According to Steve Coll of the Washington Post and his book, the White House complained over the course of several years to George Tenet that you were too myopic in your approach to bin Laden. Do you want to respond to that?"
Anonymous: "Let me say that within the intelligence community there was a group of officers, mostly women, very young, who worked extraordinary hours, who gave up vacations, delayed operations, and ruined marriages because, by the fall of 1996, they had recognized the threat posed to the United States by bin Laden and al-Qaida and the rising tide of, of the resentment in the Islamic world directed against U.S. policies; and that those two factors- the lethality of bin Laden's organization and the increasing ire of Muslims against America who were coming together in a way that threatened the United States.
"I can't take any personal credit for identifying that. My role, to the extent I had one, was to bring forth the findings of those extraordinary officers and their extraordinary colleagues in the field."
Mitchell: "But what about the criticism that you were too myopic?
Anonymous: "'Myopic' is generally a term for 'fanatic' that's used by senior bureaucrats when you're delivering a message that they don't want to take to the White House. I genuinely don't believe that an elected official, whether it's the President of the United States or a congressman or a senator, would not want to hear the truth. My suspicion is that accusations of fanaticism or myopic focus came from senior bureaucrats at the White House rather than anyone else.
"But the book explains. And it's one guy's opinion. You need to take it for what it's worth. My own experience in the intelligence community for the past now almost 10 years on this particular issue is that the hard, hard truth has not been delivered to the elected officials. Certainly the truth that - as it is seen by the people who work the issue on a day-to-day basis has not been delivered - again, with the possible exception of, of Mr. Tenet, who, to his credit, recognized this early on, perhaps did not as much as he could to drive the community to address the issue."
Mitchell: "And what are you going to say to those who say that this is anti-American and that this is a really prejudiced approach? What do you say to those who say that your call for a war against Muslim people, is really only going to make the situation worse?"
Anonymous: "I wonder how much worse the situation can be, in the first instance. We continue to believe that somehow public diplomacy or words will affect the anger and hatred of Muslims. And I'm not advocating war as my choice. What I'm advocating is, in order to protect the United States, it is our only option. As long as we pursue the current policies we have, until we have a debate about those policies, there's not a lot we can do. We won't talk them out of their anger, we won't convince them we're an honest broker between the Israel and the Palestinians. We won't convince that we're not supporting tyrannies in the Arab world from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
"It's the only option. It's not a good option; it's the only option. And I'm not saying we attack people who aren't attacking us. But in areas where we realize our enemies are, perhaps we have to be more aggressive."
Mitchell: "Even if it means civilian casualties?"
Anonymous: "That's the way war is. I've never really understood the idea that any American government, any American elected official is responsible for protecting civilians who are not Americans. My experience working against bin Laden was there was multiple occasions when we did not take advantage of an opportunity to solve the problem because we were afraid of killing a civilian, we were afraid of hitting a mosque with shrapnel, we were afraid of disrupting sales of arms overseas. Very seldom in my career have I ever heard anyone ask what happens if we don't do this.
My own opinion is we should err on the side of protecting Americans first. And if we make a mistake in that kind of action, I think the American people will accept that. It's - this is a matter of survival. This is not a nuisance anymore. No one wants to be bloodthirsty, but we're at a position in this war where we've cornered ourselves in many ways, to the point where only the military option is available to us. And if we don't use that, and we continue to pursue the policies we are pursuing, then it's a very dicey situation for America...that the war in Iraq was bin Laden's dream come true."
Mitchell: "You've said that you think the war in Iraq motivated bin Laden. What do you think the impact of the war in Iraq was on bin Laden?"
Anonymous: "Bin Laden, I think, and al-Qaida and other of America's enemies in the Islamic world certainly saw the invasion of Iraq as a, if you would, a Christmas gift they always wanted and never expected to get. It validated what they all said about American aggressiveness against Islam. It made us the occupiers of the second holiest place for Muslims in the world. In fact, now we are occupying, in the eyes of our opponents, we're occupying the two holiest places, Saudi Arabia, the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq, and the Israelis are occupying the third, in Jerusalem. The reaction of the clerical community to our invasion of the Islamic clerical community to our invasion of Iraq was uniformly negative."
Mitchell: "So what, what is the war in Iraq to bin Laden?
Anonymous: "It is, I think, a proof of his thesis that America is malignantly inclined toward Muslims, that it is willing to attack a Muslim country that dares to defy it, that it is willing to do most anything to defend Israel. It's certainly viewed as an action which is meant to assist the Israeli state. It is in every way predictably, if you will, a godsend for those Muslims who believe as bin Laden does."
Mitchell: "It's a dream come true."
Anonymous: "If you're familiar with that wonderful Christmas movie, 'The Christmas Story,' at the end of the day, Ralphie getting his air rifle even though his mother was worried his eye would get shot out. It's a terrific gift."
Mitchell: "OK. Thank you very much."
Anonymous: "You're welcome."
-------- us
Air defense
June 24, 2004
Washington Times
Letters to the Editor
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040623-090348-9414r.htm
I must take exception to several items mentioned in the otherwise correct assessment of the state of the nation's air-defense system in the column by Lt. Col. Darl Stephenson ("Rebuilding air defenses," Op-Ed, Monday).
Having served as a radar operator and intercept technician between 1957 and 1963, I find his history of the U.S. Air Force operation of the air-defense system to be accurate. However, his statement that the Navy was never a player in continental air defense is not correct.
The Navy operated a key extension to the land-based air-defense radars during the height (as he put it) of the defense system in the form of radar picket ships off both the East and West Coast. My direct experience with these very able (at the time) radar platforms is based on contact with these ships while assigned to two coastal land-based Air Force Global Coastal Infrastructure (GCI) sites.
Their "stations" were located approximately every 100 miles, from the southernmost station (70 miles east of Key West, Fla.) to the northernmost station between Labrador and the southern tip of Greenland. The Navy operated an identical setup off of our West Coast. These ships were converted World War II destroyers and destroyer-escorts (DDR/DER), and they would remain on station for 30 days at a stretch.
The Navy also pioneered and operated an extensive airborne early-warning (AEW) system (what is now called AWACS, for airborne warning and control system) from the early 1950s through the late 1960s with its well-known Willie Victors, or as they were officially known, WV-2s. While the Air Force operated an identical aircraft, the RC-121, the Navy operated a total of five numbered air wings of the WV-2s while the Air Force operated just two wings.
At our Air Force GCI site, the only fighter squadron we had to call on for the role of an all-weather air-defense interceptor was the Navy's outstanding All-Weather Fighter Squadron 3 [VF(AW)-3], whose personnel stood the two-minute alert duty 24 hours a day for the two years I was assigned to the radar site.
This was a unique unit, as it was a bit larger in the number of assigned aircraft, the Douglas F-4D-1 Skyray, as the unit stood at the two-minute alert both at Key West as well as San Diego and was assigned directly to the Air Force Air Defense Command (ADC) for continental air defense. In fact, VF(AW)-3 was a multiple winner of the Air Force ADC "A" award, given only to the most outstanding air and ground units assigned to the Air Force air defense force. To my knowledge, it is the only Navy unit to have received the award.
In my experience, the Navy was a big player in the nation's air-defense network. It is unfair not to give it credit for the outstanding effort of the thousands of officers and men who served aboard radar picket ships, AEW aircraft and front-line fighter squadrons.
MIKE O'ROURKE
Oak Hill, Va.
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Rules Change on Seeing Troops' Remains Return
Families May See Caskets' Removal From Planes
By Brian Faler
The Washington Post
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A760-2004Jun23?language=printer
The Defense Department will allow the families of U.S. troops and others killed in Iraq to watch as their loved ones' caskets are removed from military transport planes at Dover Air Force Base, according to a little-noticed memo issued last month.
In clarifying its policy, the Pentagon said it will allow service members' next of kin or a "designated representative" to attend as remains are transferred from planes to vehicles that are to carry them to the base mortuary, where they are prepared before being sent to local funeral homes.
The department supplies an honor guard to attend what it calls a "dignified transfer" of the bodies, an often-brief event that is an important emotional marker for some military families.
But until the Pentagon's May 26 memo was issued, it was not clear to some families whether they were allowed to watch the transfer.
Sue Niederer of Pennington, N.J., whose son, Army 2nd Lt. Seth Dvorin, 24, was killed in February, said she was told she could not watch the transfer. "What they said to me was: 'If you want to go to the base, you're going to stand outside like everybody else. You will not be permitted under any circumstances to actually meet the plane,' " she said. "I wanted to see my son hit American soil. I wanted to kiss my son's casket. I wanted to go welcome him back to the States."
Michael Berg of West Chester, Pa., whose son Nicholas, an American contractor working in Iraq, was beheaded in May, said he also was denied access to the base, despite a personal plea from Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. At a May 12 committee hearing, the senator asked Rumsfeld if the Pentagon would allow Berg to see the coffin transfer. "Be happy to," Rumsfeld said, according to a transcript of the hearing.
A spokeswoman for the Delaware air base said that before the recent memo, families were prohibited from watching the repatriations.
But Charles Abell, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said that while the Pentagon does not encourage families to visit Dover, it has never barred them. He said the May 26 memo puts existing policy in writing.
"We've never had a policy codified or in practice that denied families the ability to go to Dover," he said. "I know of no instances in which a family has been turned away."
The department will not allow anyone attending the transfer to photograph or make any other kind of visual recording of the proceedings. It also continues to ban members of the news media from covering the transfers.
The department's policy applies to relatives and representatives of service members, civilian employees of the Defense Department, contractors and others whose remains are brought to Dover.
The Pentagon memo comes after months of wrangling between the Bush administration and Democratic lawmakers who contended that restrictions on attending the transfers were designed to hide the human cost the of war in Iraq. Much of the debate has focused on the decision to enforce a long-standing government rule that bars reporters from Dover.
President George H.W. Bush -- whose image shared a split television screen with images of service members' caskets -- issued an executive order in 1991 making that change. But the rule was only intermittently enforced before the war in Iraq.
In March 2003, just before the U.S. invasion, the administration said it would not allow media coverage of the dead troops' return. Earlier this week, the Senate backed the administration's ban when it rejected, 54 to 39, a Democratic proposal that would have guaranteed media access to Dover.
The policy on families attending the transfers, however, has been more obscure. The Pentagon memo was largely prompted by an informal proposal by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) that would have guaranteed families access to the base. The Pentagon opposed the senator's proposal, mostly for logistical reasons. But it eventually agreed to accept Kennedy's approach if he withdrew his proposal, which he did.
"Kennedy's staff identified a shortcoming to us, and we fixed it," Abell said. "We appreciate that."
But that does not mean the department is recommending that families travel to Dover.
"The uncertainty of travel arrangements from the location of the casualty, the possible length of the positive identification process and the absence of facilities to enable the viewing of remains make Dover Air Force Base the least desirable place for family members to meet their loved one's remains," the memo says.
"The Armed Forces' tradition of support to families and dignified handling of fallen comrades is best represented when the support is provided in the local area where the next-of-kin reside or where the remains will be laid to rest," the memo says.
The memo also says that families will not be allowed to view the actual remains and will not be reimbursed for trip expenses.
"I don't think that a family ought to go through the expense and the emotional angst to go to Dover to watch that airplane arrive, only to be disappointed that that's all they get to do," Abell said. "But should a family come to Dover on their own volition, they won't be turned away."
Researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
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Air force drops Canada friendly-fire court-martial
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jun 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040624200003.nhu1m170.html
The air force dropped court-martial proceedings Thursday against an air national guard F-16 fighter pilot who accidentally bombed Canadian troops in Afghanistan, killing four.
The air force said it acted after Major Harry Schmidt, who had been charged with dereliction of duty, accepted non-judicial punishment in lieu of a court-martial.
Schmidt dropped a 500-pound bomb on Canadian forces engaged in a live-fire exercise at a range in Afghanistan on April 17, 2002, killing four Canadians and wounding eight, after mistaking the ground-fire for hostile action.
Schmidt had refused non-judicial punishment a year ago, insisting on a court-martial, but changed his mind, the air force said.
Lieutenant General Bruce Carlson, the air force commander in charge of the case, "has granted that request and the non-judicial punishment proceedings will commence immediately," the air force said.
"Once non-judicial punishment proceedings are resolved, the pending court-martial charges will be dismissed," it said.
Under the non-judicial proceedings, Carlson will review allegations that Schmidt failed to ensure that the target he attacked was not friendly, ignoring the directions of his flight leader and the crew of an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft.
If he finds Schmidt guilty, Carlson could order the forfeiture of up to one-half of Schmidt's monthly pay for two months; restrict his movements for no more than 60 days; house arrest for not more than 30 days; and a reprimand.
Initially, Schmidt also was charged with involuntary manslaughter and aggravated assault but Carlson dropped those charges a year ago.
Canadians were stunned and angered by the bombing, which marked the first Canadian deaths in combat in half a century and the worst friendly-fire incident of the Afghan war.
"We are aware of that decision and this is a US military matter," said Lieutenant Luc Charron, spokesman for the Department of National Defense.
"All our concerns stay with the families, we have an extensive aid network for them," said Charron.
-------- war crimes
U.S. Immunity in Iraq Will Go Beyond June 30
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A757-2004Jun23.html
The Bush administration has decided to take the unusual step of bestowing on its own troops and personnel immunity from prosecution by Iraqi courts for killing Iraqis or destroying local property after the occupation ends and political power is transferred to an interim Iraqi government, U.S. officials said.
The administration plans to accomplish that step -- which would bypass the most contentious remaining issue before the transfer of power -- by extending an order that has been in place during the year-long occupation of Iraq. Order 17 gives all foreign personnel in the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority immunity from "local criminal, civil and administrative jurisdiction and from any form of arrest or detention other than by persons acting on behalf of their parent states."
U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer is expected to extend Order 17 as one of his last acts before shutting down the occupation next week, U.S. officials said. The order is expected to last an additional six or seven months, until the first national elections are held.
The United States would draw legal authority from Iraq's Transitional Administrative Law and the recent U.N. resolution recognizing the new government and approving a multinational force, but some U.S. officials and countries in the multinational force still want greater reassurances on immunity, U.S. officials said.
Bush's top foreign policy advisers, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, are still debating the scope of immunity to be granted. "The debate is on the extent or parameters of coverage -- should it be sweeping, as it is now, or more limited," said a senior U.S. official familiar with discussions, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the issue.
In Baghdad, U.S. officials have been engaged all week with interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and national security adviser Mowaffak Rubaie. Both sides hope to finalize the terms before Bush leaves for the NATO summit in Istanbul at week's end, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.
The administration is taking the step in an effort to prevent the new Iraqi government from having to grant a blanket waiver as one of its first acts, which could undermine its credibility just as it assumes power. But U.S. officials said Washington's act could also create the impression that the United States is not turning over full sovereignty -- and giving itself special privileges.
The administration's move comes when issues of immunity are particularly sensitive, in light of the scandal over the abuse of U.S. detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yesterday at the United Nations, the administration, citing opposition on the Security Council, withdrew a resolution that would have extended immunity for U.S. personnel in U.N.-approved peacekeeping missions from prosecution before the International Criminal Court.
In Iraq, U.S. officials are already concerned about the potential fallout after June 30 among key players -- from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's most powerful religious cleric, to militant insurgents. But the Bush foreign policy team concluded that there are few alternatives until elections select a government that will be powerful enough to negotiate a formal treaty, U.S. officials said.
The issue of immunity for U.S. troops is among the most contentious in the Islamic world, where it has galvanized public opinion against the United States in the past. A similar grant of immunity to U.S. troops in Iran during the Johnson administration in the 1960s led to the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who used the issue to charge that the shah had sold out the Iranian people.
"Our honor has been trampled underfoot; the dignity of Iran has been destroyed," Khomeini said in a famous 1964 speech that led to his detention and then expulsion from Iran. The measure "reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog."
Ironically, Khomeini went into exile in Iraq, where he spent 12 years in Najaf -- the Shiite holy city that is now home to Sistani and his followers and where Iraqis still remember the flap that led the shah to deport a cleric who later led Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution.
In Iraq, Washington had originally hoped to achieve a formal Status of Forces Agreement to grant immunity, but that was effectively vetoed when Sistani and other Iraqi politicians said no unelected Iraqi government could enter into a treaty with other countries. The United States now hopes to negotiate a status agreement next year, after a government is elected.
In the current negotiations over Order 17, a senior Iraqi official said, the basic concept is to cover "soldiers and foreign nationals working in operations conducted by mutual consent or understanding with the Iraqi interim government and the command of the multinational force. But what that means remains to be seen."
The United States hopes to include some foreign contractors, many of whom are engaged in security operations, the Iraqi official added, while Iraq is pressing to retain sovereignty.
"It's going to be a political hot potato, and we're worried it'll be used as a hot potato in a way that is not good for either the interim government or the multinational force," the official said.
As a legal basis, Iraq's transitional law, which was worked out between Bremer and the now-disbanded Iraqi Governing Council, may be considered too weak a foundation for granting immunity. Sistani argued against it because it was not the work of elected officials.
The U.N. resolution also has no direct reference to immunity for foreign troops. The only reference is in a letter from Powell to the Security Council attached to the resolution, which says contributing states in the multinational force must "have responsibility for exercising jurisdiction over their personnel" but does not mention prosecution or other specific activity.
Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
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U.S. Abandons Plan for Court Exemption
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64323-2004Jun23.html
UNITED NATIONS, June 23 -- The Bush administration dropped its plan Wednesday to seek renewal of a U.N. resolution shielding U.S. personnel serving in U.N.-authorized peacekeeping missions from prosecution by the International Criminal Court, citing fierce opposition to the initiative.
The retreat represented the most significant defeat for the United States in the Security Council since March 17, 2003, when U.S. officials abandoned a bid to win support for a resolution authorizing the U.S.-led war against Iraq.
It also marked the most concrete evidence of a diplomatic backlash against the scandal over abuse of U.S. detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. The exemption for U.S. officials has spurred resentment since the Security Council first granted it, in July 2002, but Security Council diplomats said the detainee abuse provided a rallying point for supporters of the court.
The practical impact of Wednesday's retreat was mitigated by the United States' signing of agreements with 90 countries not to surrender U.S. personnel to the court. But it raised the possibility, albeit limited, that U.S. troops accused of massive human rights violations while serving in U.N.-authorized operations could be brought before the world court after the current resolution expires on July 1.
The U.S. decision followed an attempt on Tuesday to gain support by limiting the renewal to one year, rather than annually "for as long as may be necessary," as the current resolution states.
"We believe our draft and its predecessors fairly meet the concerns of all," James B. Cunningham, the acting U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said after informing the council of the decision. "Not all council members agree, however, and the U.S. has decided not to proceed further with consideration of action on the draft at this time in order to avoid a prolonged and divisive debate."
The withdrawal represented a major victory for the strongest court advocates on the Security Council, including France and Germany. Several council members insisted that their refusal to support the U.S. resolution reflected their support for the court. "This was not a vote against the United States," said Heraldo Muñoz, Chile's U.N. ambassador.
Others, however, noted that the detainee abuse scandal, combined with Washington's need for support of its Iraq policy, had undermined the U.S. policy of threatening to shut down U.N. peacekeeping missions if the council did not grant U.S. officials immunity.
"Their capacity for retaliation has been diminished. It has been weakened," said a senior council ambassador, who requested anonymity because he did not want to offend the United States. "They now need the United Nations."
The court was established by a 1998 treaty to prosecute individuals responsible for the most serious crimes, including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The office of the court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina, on Wednesday announced its first investigation, into reports of "thousands of deaths by mass murder and summary execution" in the Democratic Republic of Congo since July 2002.
Since the court began its work that month, the Security Council has twice grudgingly adopted a U.S.-sponsored resolution exempting U.S. personnel from prosecution.
The resolution grants immunity to "former or current officials" from countries that have not ratified the 1998 treaty, which include the United States, China and Russia. Afghanistan has ratified the treaty but has signed an agreement with the United States not to hand over U.S. personnel to the court. Iraq has not ratified the treaty.
The Bush administration was confident last month that it had lined up the nine votes needed to renew the resolution in the 15-nation council. But the U.S. initiative began to unravel when nations whose support the United States expected, such as Chile, indicated they would abstain.
The United States postponed plans to put its resolution to a vote in late May after China warned that it was considering abstaining or even vetoing the resolution. At the time, the Chinese cited concern over detainee abuses, but U.S. and other Security Council officials said that China had intervened to punish the United States for backing Taiwan's bid for observer status in the World Health Assembly.
Last Thursday, Secretary General Kofi Annan appealed to the council to oppose the resolution, saying that it would "discredit" the United Nations and undercut its promotion of the rule of law.
The moves emboldened other council members, including Russia and Algeria, to reconsider their support for the resolution.
The United States had secured assurances of support from only four other council members -- Britain, Angola, Pakistan and the Philippines -- when it decided to withdraw its text from consideration.
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U.S. Drops Plan to Exempt G.I.'s From U.N. Court
June 24, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/international/24NATI.html?pagewanted=all&position=
UNITED NATIONS, June 23 - The United States bowed Wednesday to broad opposition on the Security Council and announced 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," James B. Cunningham, the deputy American ambassador, said on emerging from the Council chamber.
The envoys from the 15-member Council had spent the morning in closed session, discussing a rewritten version of the American resolution that circulated on Tuesday night to try to meet the objections.
Resolutions granting a year's exemption had passed the Council in each of the past two years, but this year the renewal ran into difficulties because of the prison scandal in Iraq and strong opposition from Secretary General Kofi Annan.
The outcome, while a political defeat for Washington, will have no effect on the vulnerability to prosecution of American soldiers in Iraq. Neither the United States nor Iraq is a member of the tribunal, and its jurisdiction is limited to countries that do not themselves prosecute crimes by their military.
The setback for American diplomacy at the United Nations came just two weeks after the Bush administration was praised there 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.
This time American diplomats, who had been confident of obtaining a routine "technical rollover" of the measure, appeared to have miscalculated the impact of the publicity given the American mistreatment of Iraqi detainees.
They were also caught off guard by the intervention of Mr. Annan, who told the ambassadors on Friday that a vote in favor of the United States would undermine the new solidarity of the Council.
Shortly after Mr. Cunningham's announcement, Mr. Annan issued a statement saying, "The decision by the United States not to pursue a resolution on this matter will help maintain the unity of the Security Council at a time when it faces difficult challenges."
Ambassador Wang Guangya of China, which 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."
Spain's ambassador, Juan Antonio Yáñez-Bernuevo, explained his country's opposition, 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."
In calling for the Council to turn back the American request, Mr. Annan said it was "of dubious judicial value," and especially objectionable in the aftermath of the prisoner abuse. Passing the measure, he said, 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 on June 8 in their unanimous vote on Iraq.
Mr. Yáñez-Bernuevo said he regretted that the Americans had not mounted the same kind of diplomatic effort that secured that unanimous vote. "We would have liked to see a process as we saw in the Iraq resolution, a more collective effort," 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."
Ambassador Heraldo Muñoz of Chile said Mr. Annan's statement had had "a very important impact on many delegations."
The Bush administration has said it needs the troop-protection measure to prevent people from using the court to bring politically motivated war-crime prosecutions against Americans abroad.
Elaborating on that Wednesday, Ambassador Cunningham noted that the United States was the "largest contributor to global security."
"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," he said.
Asked if the United States would limit its peacekeeping actitivies in the future - a threat it has made in past years - Mr. Cunningham said, "I'm not going to comment on that."
An accompanying statement said that in the absence of a resolution, the United States would "take into account the risk of International Criminal Court review when determining contributions to U.N. authorized or established operations."
Addressing concerns about American military conduct abroad, Mr. Cunningham said, "The United States has a well-functioning system of military justice that will assure accountablity."
Since the international court was established, the Bush administration has made bilateral agreements with 90 countries barring any prosecution of American officials by the court.
The current exemption expires on June 30, the day Iraq regains its sovereignty and American troops become part of the kind of United Nations-approved force that the renewal was meant to cover.
But the court has no jurisdiction in Iraq, which did not sign the 1998 treaty establishing it, or in the United States, which is also not a signer. In addition, backers of the court argue that since it accepts cases only when a nation is unwilling to prosecute, there is little likelihood it would ever be called upon to deal with the United States.
The court, formed in July 2002, is to hear cases of war crimes, genocide and systematic human rights abuses.
The resolution that was withdrawn on Wednesday included a revision intended to meet a major objection: language in the original proposal that expressed the intention to renew the one-year exemption each July 1 "for as long as may be necessary."
That paragraph was eliminated and new language inserted that pledged that this request for a one-year exemption would be the final one. But the attempt to bridge the differences did not work, and Ambassador Muñoz, of Chile, 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 be divided after the consensus and the unity that we showed on Iraq," he said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
National Security Archive Update, June 24, 2004
Supreme Court Refuses to Approve the Immunity from Discovery Sought by Vice President Cheney
Thu, 24 Jun 2004
From: NSARCHIVE <mevans@GWU.EDU>
http://www.nsarchive.org
Washington D.C., June 24, 2004 - The United States Supreme Court today remanded to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals a case concerning the application of a federal open government law to the Energy Task Force chaired by Vice President Cheney in 2001.
"Although today's decision permits the Vice President to continue to delay release of details about who wrote the nation's energy policy, the Supreme Court refused to accept the radical argument voiced by his lawyers that the Administration is free from any inquiry into how it conducts its affairs," explained Meredith Fuchs, the Archive's General Counsel.
In 2001, President Bush established an advisory committee on energy policy, and appointed Vice President Cheney chairman of the committee. After the committee made its recommendations, the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch filed suit arguing that that the advisory committee violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) and that the committee should release its documents to the public. Vice President Cheney has argued that the committee is not required to disclose who participated in its meetings. The National Security Archive, along with a coalition of organizations, filed an amicus curiae brief in the Supreme Court in support of the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch's position. The joint statement of the coalition is available on the Archive's website.
http://www.nsarchive.org
----
Justices Tighten Limits on Judges in Sentencing
June 24, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/politics/25CND-SCOT.html?hp
WASHINGTON, June 24 - The Supreme Court today placed more limits on the power of judges to decide sentences for criminals, voting 5 to 4 to set aside a prison term in a Washington State kidnapping. The four dissenters predicted that the decision would wreak havoc on sentencing procedures in many states, and perhaps in the federal penal system as well.
The majority found that the term of more than seven years imposed on Ralph Howard Blakely Jr. violated his Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury because the judge, in going beyond the usual sentencing guidelines, had relied on facts neither admitted by the defendant nor found by the jury.
"Our Constitution and the common-law traditions it entrenches," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority, "do not admit the contention that facts are better discovered by a judicial inquisition than by adversarial testing before a jury."
Mr. Blakely pleaded guilty to kidnapping his former wife, Yolanda, in Grant County, Wash., in 1998 in a vain attempt to persuade her to remarry him. The circumstances of the crime called for a sentence of up to four years five months under state guidelines.
But the judge added an extra three years after determining that Mr. Blakely had acted with exceptional cruelty. Mrs. Blakely had been bound with duct tape, forced into a wooden box in the back of her husband's pickup truck, then driven around. Her young son witnessed much of the ordeal.
Following state law, the trial judge made his decision after holding a special sentencing hearing at which the standard of proof was a "preponderance of the evidence" rather than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard required to find guilt.
The Washington Court of Appeals rejected Mr. Blakely's arguments that only a jury could make the extra sentencing findings, and that the standard had to be beyond a reasonable doubt.
In deciding today that the Washington high court was wrong, Justice Scalia wrote, in the biting tone that has become his trademark, "The Framers would not have thought it too much to demand that, before depriving a man of three more years of his liberty, the state should suffer the modest inconvenience" of submitting its accusation to a jury.
Today's ruling was a logical outgrowth of the Supreme Court's ruling two years ago in an Arizona case that juries, not judges, must find the "aggravating" factors that make a defendant liable for the death penalty.
The same basic principle should apply as well to cases that do not involve capital punishment, the majority held today. In a somewhat unusual line-up, Justice Scalia was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote a dissent in which she predicted that "the practical consequences of today's decision may be disastrous."
"The consequences of today's decision will be as far-reaching as they are disturbing," she said, noting that many other states, and the federal government, have sentencing guidelines similar to those in Washington State.
Furthermore, she wrote, the full facts of a particular crime are not always known to the jury. Does that mean, she asked, that in every trial the jury must engage in a separate deliberation to sentence a defendant once it has returned a conviction, a procedure not followed except in death-penalty cases.
"The court ignores the havoc it is about to wreak on trial courts across the country," Justice O'Connor wrote. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Anthony M. Kennedy embraced most of Justice O'Connor's opinion.
--------
Supreme Court Refuses to Order Cheney to Release Energy Papers
June 24, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/politics/24CND-CHEN.html?hp
WASHINGTON, June 24 - The Supreme Court handed a major political victory to the Bush administration today, ruling 7 to 2 that Vice President Dick Cheney is not obligated, at least for now, to release secret details of his energy task force.
The majority of the justices agreed with the administration's arguments that private deliberations among a president, vice president and their close advisers are indeed entitled to special treatment - arising from the constitutional principle known as executive privilege - although they said the administration must still prove the specifics of its case in the lower courts.
"A president's communications and activities encompass a vastly wider range of sensitive material than would be true of any ordinary individual," the court said in a summary of the majority opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.
By sending the case back to the lower federal courts, the majority removed a significant political headache for President Bush and Vice President Cheney. As a practical matter, the outcome today means that the final resolution will not come until well after the November elections.
Critics of the Bush administration have long complained that its energy policies are far too friendly to the energy industry. It is no coincidence, the critics have said, that Mr. Cheney was formerly the chief executive of Halliburton. In pursuit of their claims, the critics have been trying to learn the names of the industry officials consulted by the administration when it was developing its policies in early 2001.
The critics scored a significant, albeit temporary, victory when the lower courts held that Judicial Watch, a conservative legal organization, and the Sierra Club, a liberal environmental group, were entitled through the discovery process, or pretrial information-gathering, to the names and roles of the private citizens who deliberated with the energy panel.
Discovery orders are ordinarily not appealable before a trial on the principle that they would create far too many piecemeal appeals. The administration urged the justices to make an exception, asserting that discovery itself, in this case, violated the Constitution by intruding on a president's "core functions" of seeking advice and developing legislation.
The seven justices in the majority acknowledged that argument. "This is not a routine discovery dispute," they held. "Special considerations control when the Executive's interests in maintaining its autonomy and safeguarding its communications' confidentiality are implicated."
But the victory was not a complete one for the White House, as the justices rejected Mr. Cheney's request that they immediately determine that he is not subject to discovery. Instead, the justices said Mr. Cheney still had to prove his case.
Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David H. Souter dissented, declaring that the lower courts ought to be able to consider right now what should be available through discovery.
The case has been enlivened by personal considerations, most notably Justice Antonin Scalia's well publicized duck-hunting trip with his good friend the vice president. Justice Scalia rejected any suggestion that he not take part in the case, noting that he was also a good friend of Alan B. Morrison, who argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of the Sierra Club.
The White House was restrained in expressing its pleasure over the ruling. "We believe the president should be able to receive candid and unvarnished advice from his staff and advisers," the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters. "It's an important principle."
-------- death penalty
N.Y. Court Ruling Appears to Invalidate Death Sentences
June 24, 2004
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/nyregion/24CND-DEATH.html
New York State's highest court today declared a central provision of the state's nine-year-old death penalty law unconstitutional, assuring that there will be no executions in the state for some time and continuing what has been a tortured legal road for the capital punishment law.
In a 4-3 decision, the state's Court of Appeals said the legislature improperly required judges to tell jurors in capital cases that if they deadlocked, the judge would impose a sentence that would leave the defendant eligible for parole after serving 20 to 25 years. The decision said that represented improper coercion of jurors to vote for execution.
Lawyers said the ruling left little ground for review by any federal court and they said it seemed clear that the state's death row would also be emptied of its four current occupants. The decision would also pose obstacles to prosecutors now seeking the death penalty in 12 cases around the state and, if the legislature fails to amend the law, would bar prosecutors from seeking capital punishment until the provision is repaired.
"Under the present statute, the death penalty may not be imposed," the decision said.
Critics maintained even during legislative debates about the law in 1995 that the provision coerced jurors to vote for death and the court majority agreed.
"The deadlock instruction," the majority said, "gives rise to an unconstitutionally palpable risk that one or more jurors who cannot bear the thought that a defendant may walk the streets again after serving 20 to 25 years will join jurors favoring death in order to avoid the deadlock sentence."
The majority decision, written by Judge George Bundy Smith, was made under the state Constitution, with the majority saying the state's guarantee of due process of law was violated by the deadlock provision.
In making its decision, the court set aside the death sentence imposed on Stephen S. LaValle, a Suffolk County roofer who was convicted of raping and killing Cynthia Quinn on May 31, 1997, in Yaphank, Suffolk County.
Mr. LaValle confessed to police that he raped and killed Ms. Quinn, a 32-year-old track coach and mother, after she happened upon him urinating on the side of a road while she was jogging and called him a bum.
Today, the judges ordered that Mr. LaValle be resentenced to life without parole or a sentence of 20 to 25 years in prison with the chance of parole.
The majority of the court also ruled that the nine pending capital prosecutions in which death notices have been served on defendants could continue - but that life without parole has to be the maximum sentence imposed.
The death penalty law was re-established in 1995, with Gov. George Pataki pushing for the law in his first year as governor. There have been no executions since the law was enacted and none appeared imminent.
Nevertheless, the governor and Senator Dale Volker have introduced legislation to eliminate the use of a parole-eligible sentence as a default when juries deadlock in the sentencing phase. Their bills would impose life without parole as the punishment if jurors were deadlocked.
At an appearance on Long Island, Governor Pataki said he wanted to study the ruling before responding at length, according to The Associated Press.
"It's a disappointing decision," The A.P. quoted him as saying.
Maria Newman contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Beheadings allowed by Islam, but only in extreme situations
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Julia Duin
June 24, 2004
http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040624-121737-2912r.htm
Beheading, the method that Islamist terrorists have used to execute three hostages in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, is specified by Islamic law, but should be used only in extreme cases, with at least one judge and credible witnesses to a crime, Islamic analysts say.
Others point out that the Koran refers to such a punishment for infidels and that Muhammad oversaw the beheading of several hundred men in his lifetime.
The tapes of the recent beheadings also have the terrorists yelling "Allahu akbar" - meaning "God is great" - while killing their hostage.
The killings of Americans Nicholas Berg and Paul M. Johnson Jr. and South Korean Kim Sun-il - and that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 in Pakistan - are "an extreme form of execution that is most inhumane," said Sam Hamod, former director of the Islamic Center in the District who is now a lecturer and writer near San Diego.
The executioners, who claim to act in the name of Islam, he said, "may find a hadith [or saying of Muhammad] that supports it, but the Koran doesn't allow it."
The killers didn't even do the job right, he said.
"If they are going to have an execution, the [executioner] must say a prayer and ask for forgiveness from God for what he is doing and pray for the person's soul being killed," he said. "You can't do it like the idiots on TV. The right thing to do is slit the person's throat, not cut off the entire head."
At issue is book 47, verse four of the Koran, which says, "Therefore, when ye meet the unbelievers in fight [or jihad], smite at their necks at length; when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly on them.
"Thereafter is the time for either generosity or ransom until the war lays down its burdens."
The "smite at their necks" wording "doesn't mean to kill somebody," Mr. Hamod said.
Any Islamic capital punishment, he added, must be handed down by a panel of judges plus there must be four credible witnesses of an extreme crime committed by the person to be executed. And civilians - but not soldiers - are protected under Islamic law.
Secular authorities in predominantly Christian nations have used beheading as a method of execution, but there is nothing in the theology of either Judaism or Christianity to justify beheading.
Beheadings are common in Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia, and Andrew Bostom, an associate professor of medicine at Boston University, called it "an ugly reality" in an essay posted on www.frontpagemagazine.com.
Such killings, he wrote, "are consistent with sacred jihad practices, as well as Islamic attitudes towards all non-Muslim infidels, in particular Jews, which date back to the seventh century."
According to one of Muhammad's biographers, Ibn Ishaq, the founder of Islam approved of the beheadings of 700 men of the Jewish Qurayza tribe of Medina, whose bodies were then stacked in trenches.
In the Koran, the incident is referred to in book 33:25-27, which says, in part, "some ye slew and some ye made prisoners."
Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership said the massacre has been accepted as fact among Muslims for 1,200 years but hardly shows up in Jewish literature.
Westernized Muslims, he said, can no longer deny what their fellow believers are doing.
"Right now in the world, many Muslims are devoting their lives to the truth of decapitation," he said. "Simply to say, 'It's not Islam' is not a helpful response, because for those who are doing it, it is."
In the Old Testament, King David killed the giant Goliath, then cut off his head. In the apocryphal book of Judith, the heroine slices off the head of the Assyrian general Holofernes as he lies drunk in his tent.
"Rabbinic understanding of capital punishment may have included decapitation," Mr. Hirschfield said. "It is a form of capital punishment that most closely resembles sacrifice mandated by God. [The Muslims who killed Western hostages] believe it is a profoundly sacred act."
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, author of "What's Right With Islam," said beheading has been a method of capital punishment worldwide, not just in Islamic law.
"What we're seeing is like the Wild West," he said of the decapitations.
"The universal theme that motivates terrorists is humiliation," he said. "The terrorism is an attempt at empowerment. Look at the images; [the executed] wearing the same orange as the prisoners of Guantanamo wore. It is the revenge of the hooded people. It is tit for tat."
-------- homeland security
D.C. Area Anti-Terror Spending Criticized
Homeland Security's Local Office Lacks Strategy, GAO Says
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A765-2004Jun23.html
As much as $340 million in federal money to secure the Washington area against terrorism has been spent without a coordinated plan or a system for measuring how safe the region is, according to a new congressional report.
The 53-page study by the General Accounting Office criticizes the Department of Homeland Security's regional office for failing to track the spending and being unable to tell Congress whether critical security gaps remain.
State and local governments in the Washington region received a massive two-year infusion of federal anti-terrorism funds after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in Washington and New York. Last year, Congress asked the GAO to assess the department's performance in protecting the capital area, identifying vulnerabilities and monitoring use of the federal grants.
The GAO report says that state and local governments took seven months to provide its investigators with grant amounts and that many lacked basic documentation of how money was spent. The study also found cases of likely duplication in purchasing decisions, including $2 million spent by local governments on similar police and fire command vehicles or similar hazardous-materials equipment.
"It's discouraging that, according to GAO, there's been no coordinated plan for spending the vast majority of federal emergency preparedness funds we've made available the past couple of years," said Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, which ordered the review.
"Clearly, we need to better understand the significant challenges the Department of Homeland Security capital region office is facing in organizing and implementing effective regional preparedness programs," Davis said.
His panel will hold a hearing today on readiness in the capital region. Thomas J. Lockwood, the Homeland Security regional coordinator, who was named to the congressionally mandated post in April after a five-month vacancy, is to be among those testifying.
Brian Roehrkasse, spokesman for Secretary Tom Ridge, said most of the grants the GAO examined were issued by Congress through other federal agencies before the Department of Homeland Security was created. He said the last $60 million has gone through a more rigorous process. The department is adopting operational standards for police and fire protective gear and is working to set national preparedness goals by next year, he added.
"We are moving from qualitative goals to more specific goals" with state and local leaders, Lockwood said. But, he added, "the federal government really shouldn't be in the position of mandating, 'Here is exactly how this will go.' This is a give-and-take between developing national standards and making sure they fit in a regional and local context."
Last week, Ridge described other proposals to address some of the problems noted in the GAO study, proposing to create multi-state purchasing agreements and to standardize terminology, grant-tracking systems, and state and local procurement staffing. He also proposed to ease procurement requirements after a department task force found that bottlenecks slowed the distribution of $8 billion in grants nationwide over the past three years.
George W. Foresman, homeland security adviser to Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D), acknowledged some failings in anti-terrorism spending in the region. But he said that after Sept. 11, 2001, regional officials decided to act swiftly, not necessarily to wait to develop detailed plans, performance measures and budget controls.
"They had to get something out the door," Foresman said, "and frankly, I think they did a pretty good job getting something out the door."
The GAO report says its auditors could find no reliable, readily available information on how local security budgets were developed, how priorities were set or how money was actually spent. It also said that no data on security gaps were available because no regionwide benchmarks on readiness had been developed.
As a result, it is difficult for the Homeland Security Department's regional coordinator "to fulfill its statutory responsibility to oversee and coordinate federal programs and domestic preparedness initiatives," GAO investigators concluded.
"It is difficult for us or [the coordinator] to determine what gaps, if any, remain in the emergency response capacities and preparedness," the report added.
The study found that because the department did not give enough feedback on preparedness plans required last year of the District, Maryland, Virginia and the rest of the nation, the local jurisdictions have little idea of what they should be doing better.
It also found that although federal law sets reporting requirements for federal grants of $300,000 or more, there is no central source tracking anti-terrorism grants of that amount in the capital region. Neither the regional coordinator nor state officials could provide complete lists of grants made to local jurisdictions, the GAO said, concluding, "This lack of supporting documentation indicates a lack of financial controls."
A review last year by The Washington Post also found a lack of coordination in spending the anti-terrorism money. The Nov. 23 Post article said that in the absence of clear federal guidelines, local and state leaders used some of the funds to plug budget gaps, spent millions on pet projects and steered contracts to political allies.
The article reported that although much of the spending helped bolster emergency preparedness, some of the money went to projects with questionable connections to homeland security. Those projects included a District summer jobs program, an environmental study of a D.C. site that officials hope to redevelop, an alarm system for a Prince George's County prosecutors' office and a custom-built fireboat for a volunteer fire company in Prince William County.
--------
Agency Got More Airline Records
Privacy Advocates Fear Extensive Transfer of Passenger Data
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A754-2004Jun23.html
Four more airlines and two travel reservation companies shared private information about their passengers with a federal government agency conducting a security screening project, the Transportation Security Administration acknowledged yesterday, raising alarms among privacy rights advocates that millions more traveler records may have been transferred than was previously known.
Delta, Continental, America West and Frontier airlines and travel reservation firms Galileo International and Sabre Holdings passed along records to the TSA or private companies working with the agency in 2002 and 2003, the TSA told a Senate panel yesterday.
Delta said yesterday it shared passenger records with the TSA and the Secret Service under an order from the TSA in February 2002 to assist with preparations for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, where the airline has a hub.
Galileo International denied that it had shared data with the TSA. Continental and America West said they shared the records with the TSA. Sabre said it provided records to the TSA but did not authorize the agency to use them. Frontier said it allowed a vendor working with the TSA to use passenger reservation records over a two-week period.
In the past year, American Airlines and JetBlue Airways Corp. acknowledged that they also handed over millions of passenger records as part of the same program. Northwest Airlines admitted that it shared records with NASA in a similar program.
The three airlines face federal class-action lawsuits on behalf of passengers who assert that their privacy was violated. The disclosures prompted the Department of Homeland Security to initiate privacy rights training for all its employees and to launch an internal probe into whether the TSA violated privacy laws.
Lawmakers pressed the TSA to provide a complete report on all of the airlines and the companies it worked with, which the agency agreed to submit. "I am not satisfied that TSA has a handle on this yet," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. "Now we're up to six airlines and two reservation entities. That is pretty extensive in its scope. . . . The idea of the government amassing databases with personal information is cause for concern."
The TSA's acting director, David M. Stone, told the committee that the agency wanted to use passenger records from airlines and reservation companies in order to test an advanced computer screening program, called CAPPS II, that would identify and rate the security risk of every airline passenger. The program has been stalled because of privacy concerns and has not been tested.
The TSA said its officials viewed some passenger information in presentations, but they did not access a database that was kept by a travel records company, Airline Automation Inc., which maintains data for several major airlines and was assisting the agency with its project.
Agency officials believed at the time that the request for records did not violate federal privacy laws, Stone said. But he also indicated that the TSA might have been wrong in that assessment.
"I commit to you that I will use my leadership role to expeditiously take appropriate steps as warranted," Stone said in a written statement to the committee. He said he supported the agency's internal examination "for the lessons that can be learned."
Passenger records typically contain a person's name, address, phone number, e-mail address, credit card number and other personal details. It was not clear yesterday how many records were transferred to the TSA, but privacy advocates said it could easily reach into the millions, based on the number of records other airlines admitted to having shared with the agency.
"It is utter outrage," said Bill Scannell, a privacy rights advocate who started a Web site encouraging passengers to boycott Delta Air Lines after the airline volunteered in 2002 to help TSA develop the CAPPS II system. The carrier backed out after a public outcry. "I would like to see a full-blown investigation by Congress. For a year and a half we have been begging and screaming to find out the truth," Scannell said.
--------
NSA Is Making No Secret of Its Technology Intent
By Ellen McCarthy
Thursday, June 24, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1085-2004Jun23?language=printer
Sitting in a dark boardroom and flanked by World War II spy posters, Harry D. Gatanas is blunt about what's happened at the National Security Agency over the past 15 years: The code-breaking organization lost its technological edge.
The Internet ushered in an era of commercial innovation that outpaced NSA's advancements, said Gatanas, the agency's senior acquisition executive. So to keep up with the world around it, the secretive organization based at Fort Meade has been forced to open its doors and do business with the private sector.
"All these companies are out there building things and the adversaries have access to that technology," Gatanas said in a recent interview at the NSA's National Cryptologic Museum. "We don't want to have blinders on; we want to look at these new technologies."
The agency's increased efforts to buy technologies and services from private companies began in 1999, Gatanas said, but have ramped up even further during recent months. NSA procurement officials held a press conference earlier this month to explain their procedures and last week announced a partnership with the state of Maryland that is intended to help companies develop relationships with the agency.
"I think it's very intimidating," Paul H. Mauritz, Maryland's director of technology strategy and business development, said of the NSA's reputation as a business partner. "If you're a product company and you believe NSA would be a buyer . . . it's very difficult to demonstrate that product. You have to have a security clearance just to get on board."
The NSA is charged with protecting the U.S. government's information systems and monitoring the communication of foreign nations. Much of the work that its 30,000 employees perform involves highly technical encryption and code-breaking procedures, Gatanas said.
Until the 1990s, the NSA did most of its development work in-house, Gatanas said. But as technology advanced, the agency found that it needed to "reach out to industry to help it solve its mission," he added.
About 85 percent of its procurements are technology-related. The agency is always looking for the most advanced systems, Gatanas said, and is particularly interested in supercomputing, language analysis, biometrics and signal processing technologies.
Last year the agency spent more than $2 billion buying goods and services from companies in Maryland, according to Gatanas. He declined to disclose the agency's total annual procurement figure. The NSA's budget is classified. Of the 2,500 companies registered with the NSA's database, more than 1,000 of them are from Maryland and 814 of those are small businesses.
The first stop for any company that wants to do business with the NSA is an orientation session at the agency's Acquisition Research Center in Hanover. At the two-hour, bi-weekly sessions, companies are briefed on the agency's needs, policies and regulations.
Interested firms are then required to register with the agency and submit a 500-word essay detailing their offerings and capabilities. When the NSA wants to hire a firm for a specific project or buy a particular technology, requests for proposals are sent to registered companies.
NSA's contract awards are not always announced, but Gatanas said the agency does hold competitions for most of its acquisitions.
The biggest challenge for most companies attempting to strike a deal with the NSA is its stringent security clearance procedures. The agency has its own clearance process that includes polygraph tests. The process takes an average of more than 200 days to complete, although the agency is trying to reduce that time to four months or less.
In addition, companies generally must already have contracts in place to get clearances, although Gatanas's office has begun to sponsor some firms through the process before they've been awarded contracts to get more new companies involved.
Pragmatics Inc., of McLean, a 19-year-old company that provides software engineering and information security services, won its first contract with the agency two years ago after attending an information session for small businesses. That contract -- which included orders for a variety of technology products and services -- was the company's first major deal with an intelligence agency, said Rick Roach, director of information assurance at the 200-person company.
ManTech International Corp., which in April won a four-year, $22.5 million deal to do engineering and maintenance work on NSA communication systems, has been doing business with the agency since the early 1980s. Peter B. LaMontagne, ManTech's senior corporate vice president, said doing business with the NSA is not that different from doing business with any other defense agency.
The biggest challenge, he said, was finding employees with the right skills who either have a clearance already or are willing to go through the agency's clearance process. "When it comes to dealing with NSA, companies just have to realize that security is the most important issue," LaMontagne said.
Ellen McCarthy writes about the local tech scene every other Thursday. Her e-mail address is mccarthye@washpost.com.
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U.S. to Allow Private Firms to Screen at Airports
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A789-2004Jun23.html
Private companies will be allowed to replace federal airport security screeners at U.S. airports by the end of 2005 under a plan announced yesterday by the Department of Homeland Security.
As many as 100 airports might be interested in the private workforce, airport groups and private screening firms said. Nearly all of the nation's 429 commercial airports are staffed by employees of the Transportation Security Administration, which was created after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The law that created the TSA allows airports to apply this November to return to a private security workforce.
The TSA said that it will select the airports and qualified screening firms to perform the work and that it will maintain responsibility for oversight and regulation. Before the terrorist attacks, private firms conducted security screening through contracts with airlines.
Security companies said they could provide better screening services at a cost lower than the government's without lowering standards. A study conducted this year by consulting firm BearingPoint found that private security companies performing screening functions at five airports in a test program performed as well as federal screeners in detecting weapons. However, a Department of Transportation Inspector General report said both sets of screeners performed "equally poorly."
"Those of us in the service industry -- that's all we do, and it's not what the government does," said John DeMell, president of FirstLine Transportation Security, a firm that employs security screeners at Kansas City International Airport. "We hold all the experience."
-------- police
Video Shows L.A. Police Officer Hitting Suspect With a Flashlight
Associated Press
Thursday, June 24, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A628-2004Jun23.html
LOS ANGELES, June 23 -- A police officer who helped arrest a man suspected of driving a stolen car was captured on video repeatedly clubbing him with a flashlight after it appeared he had surrendered.
The incident, which is under investigation by the Los Angeles Police Department, began when officers started chasing a suspected stolen car, said spokeswoman Sandra Escalante.
TV news footage shot from a helicopter showed the chase ending and the suspect running away. After a short pursuit, the man appeared to surrender to an officer.
After several other officers arrived, the man was forced to the ground, where the videotape shows an officer striking him at least 10 times with a flashlight.
The man, whose name was not released, was taken into custody. It was not known if he had been injured.
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Review of Guantánamo
June 24, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/politics/24GITM.html
WASHINGTON, June 23 (AP) - Navy Secretary Gordon R. England is to serve as the senior civilian official with final authority over the status of hundreds of detainees at the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
Mr. England will oversee a review of the status of most of the prisoners. The exceptions are those prisoners who President Bush determines should face military tribunals. Three have been charged with terrorism-related offenses.
Most of the 595 detainees at Guantánamo were captured in Afghanistan. Human rights groups protest that the prisoners have little recourse to pursue their release.
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HR groups concerned about secret jails in Afghanistan
dailytimes.com.pk
June 24, 2004
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_21-6-2004_pg4_16
Human rights groups, already alarmed by stories of prisoner abuse in American-run facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, have now raised concerns about the number of secret jails, particularly in Afghanistan. New York-based Human Rights First claims there are seven undisclosed centres in Afghanistan, including a CIA interrogation facility in the capital, Kabul, known as 'The Pit'.
In a report released this week, it said the United States was holding suspects in the war on terror in more than two dozen prisons around the world, with the biggest number of secret prisons in Afghanistan.
Secrecy surrounding the jails made "inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely, but inevitable", the group said. The US military has confirmed the existence of only two detention facilities in Afghanistan - Bagram Collection Point at the main US airbase north of Kabul and "one transitional collection point" in southern Kandahar.. "We also have about 18 transit holding sites," a spokeswoman for the US-led coalition Master Sergeant Cindy Beam said.
The US has refused to confirm or deny the report on secret detention cells.
"We don't talk about where each holding site is because it gives our enemy too much information about where we are and what we're doing," Beam said. But security sources have confirmed to AFP that the secret prisons exist here.
They said some detainees, suspected members of the Al Qaeda network, have been held in these secret jails since the fall of the Taliban regime more than two years ago. The Central Intelligence Agency, in collaboration with the Afghan secret service, runs at least five clandestine jails in Kabul, western and Afghan sources told.
Managed on a daily basis by members of the Afghan National Directorate of Security, these cells hold about 20 foreigners believed to be involved with Al Qaeda, sources say. Most are Arabs from the Middle East and North Africa.
American personnel working in these centres don't wear military uniforms, preferring for the most part traditional Afghan dress and driving around in unmarked vehicles. The prisoners are held outside any legal framework and are regularly moved from one prison to another.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which visits prisoners at Bagram and has recently been given access to Kandahar, says it is concerned by the unknown number of people detained "in secret places" by American forces, a spokesman told AFP.
"We are more and more concerned about the lot of the unknown number of people captured in the context of what we would call 'the war against terror' and detained in secret places," Erof Bosisio said from Geneva. "We have asked for information on these people and access to them. Until now we have received no response from the Americans," Bosisio said. Commissioner with Afghanistan's foremost rights group, Ahmad Nader Nadery, has called for a "transparent" detention system and the release of information on all centres and prisoners.
Whether the prisons are secret or openly discussed makes no difference as far as the detainee is concern, according to Nadery's Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.
Some 2,000 prisoners have been detained in Afghanistan since the early days of the war on terror. Many have been released or forwarded to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, while about 390 remain in custody here. Nadery's commission has registered three complaints of prison abuse while the US military is investigating two. One complaint involves a former police officer who says he was beaten, deprived of sleep and humiliated while held captive in 2003.
The US is conducting five other inquiries into the deaths of Afghans, including at least three in custody. Two of these deaths, which occurred at Bagram in December 2002, were the result of "blunt-force injuries". Meanwhile, a review into US prisons here is due to be completed within days.
-------- torture
U.S. Struggled Over How Far to Push Tactics
Documents Show Back-and-Forth on Interrogation Policy
By Dana Priest and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A756-2004Jun23?language=printer
Newly released documents and interviews portray the civilian leadership at the Pentagon as urgently concerned that al Qaeda and Taliban detainees might have information that could prevent terrorist attacks and as searching intently for effective and "exceptional" interrogation techniques that would pass legal muster.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior aides emerge as central players in the government's struggle over nearly three years to decide how far it could go to extract information from those captured in Afghanistan and Iraq and others imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The result, seen in the documents and in the officials' statements, is a trail of fitful ad hoc policymaking in which interrogation tactics were authorized for a time, then rescinded or modified after the Pentagon's lawyers or others raised legal, ethical or practical objections. Some practices authorized in the field were pulled back at the Pentagon level, and decisions on how to treat detainees were sometimes made case by case.
Rumsfeld, for example, approved in December 2002 a range of severe methods including the stripping of prisoners at Guantanamo, and using dogs to frighten them. He later rescinded those tactics and signed off on a shorter list of "exceptional techniques" suggested by a Pentagon working group in 2003, even though the panel pointed out that, historically, the U.S. military had rejected the use of force in interrogations. "Army interrogation experts view the use of force as an inferior technique that yields information of questionable quality," and distorts the behavior of those being questioned, the group report noted.
Although the White House this week repudiated a Justice Department opinion that torture might be legally defensible, Pentagon general counsel William J. Haynes II in 2003 forced the Pentagon working group to use it as its legal guidepost. He did so over objections from the top lawyers of every military service, who found the legal judgments to be extreme and wrong-headed, according to several military lawyers and memos outlining the debate that were summarized for The Washington Post.
In Iraq, where White House and Pentagon lawyers say all prisoners are protected by the Geneva Conventions, Rumsfeld agreed to hide an Iraqi captive from the International Committee of the Red Cross because, he said, CIA Director George J. Tenet asked him to. Legal experts call it a clear violation of the conventions. "A request was made to do that, and we did," Rumsfeld said last week, even as his deputy general counsel, Daniel J. Dell'Orto, acknowledged from the same podium that "we should have registered him much sooner than we did."
Rumsfeld played a direct role in setting policies for detainee treatment in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, according to a list of Defense Department memos related to Guantanamo Bay obtained by The Post. He signed seven orders from January 2002 to January 2003 establishing the interrogation center, placing the Army in charge, allowing access by the Red Cross and foreign intelligence officials, and even deciding how detainee mail would be handled.
Unlike the CIA, which vetted and won approval from the Justice Department and National Security Council for its aggressive interrogation tactics after Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon has worked largely on its own in promulgating new questioning methods.
The White House and Justice Department were "completely uninvolved with" reviewing the interrogation rules in Afghanistan and Iraq, said a senior administration official involved in the process.
The Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence T. DiRita, portrayed Rumsfeld as largely responding to requests from commanders and interrogators in the field rather than pushing a certain interrogation policy. "These things tended to come up through legal channels," he said in an interview.
Part of the Pentagon leadership's drive for more leeway in interrogations can be traced to a historic change during Rumsfeld's tenure: the military's dramatically enhanced role in collecting and analyzing intelligence that can be used to thwart terrorist networks worldwide. To accomplish this, Rumsfeld has begun an unprecedented drive to build a Pentagon-based human intelligence apparatus that could one day rival the CIA's clandestine case officer program.
This intelligence-gathering mission trumps most other priorities, including the desire to bring alleged wrongdoers to trial for their role in terrorist plots.
As Rumsfeld explained it in February to the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce: "What we think about is keeping them off the battlefield so they can't go out and kill more people, immediately interrogating them so we can find out what they know that can prevent future acts of terror against our country . . . and only last is the issue of a crime and some sort of a process that would make a judgment about that crime."
The debate over tactics at Guantanamo appears to have begun in December 2002 when two Navy interrogators heard young military intelligence personnel talking about using techniques that they described to their superiors as "repulsive and potentially illegal."
Navy general counsel Alberto J. Mora brought the issue to the attention of Haynes. Mora's appeals were ignored, however, until he threatened to put his concerns in writing for Haynes, several senior Pentagon officials said. Mora's questions led to the discovery that among the list of "counter-resistance strategies" at Guantanamo were such tactics as using scenarios "designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent for him and/or his family," according to an October 2002 memo, and wrapping detainees in wet towels or dripping water on them to make them believe they would suffocate.
Lt. Col. Diane E. Beaver, the legal counsel at Guantanamo then, ruled that those and other techniques -- including 20-hour interrogations, light and sound assaults, stress positions, exposure to cold weather and water -- were legal. She said they could be used with proper oversight and training of interrogators, as long as "there is an important governmental objective, and it is not done for the purpose of causing harm or with the intent to cause prolonged mental suffering."
Interrogators at the detention facilities were particularly interested in using the techniques against two prisoners -- one of them Mohamed al Qahtani, a Saudi detainee who some officials believed may have been the planned 20th hijacker on Sept. 11. Both detainees were considered to have important information about potential future terrorist operations, defense officials have said.
Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, the commander of Guantanamo, agreed, and sent the list of tactics to Gen. James T. Hill, head of the U.S. Southern Command, for approval.
Hill was not as convinced, and wondered in a memo about the legality of some of the techniques. He asked Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for guidance. In December, Rumsfeld approved the use of dogs and stripping, but threw out other controversial items.
Rumsfeld also set up a working group of military lawyers and others to deliberate over the range of techniques that might be useful and appropriate. The group came up with 35 techniques. Among the most severe were 20-hour interrogations, face slapping, stripping detainees to create "a feeling of helplessness and dependence," and using dogs to increase anxiety.
The president's directive in February 2002 that ordered U.S. forces to treat al Qaeda and Taliban detainees humanely and consistent with the Geneva Conventions does contain a loophole phrase: "to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity."
The working group's report discussed when the "military necessity" exception might be invoked, citing two factors. One was when government officials felt certain that a particular detainee had information needed to prevent an attack. The other factor was a likelihood that a terrorist attack was about to occur and the attack's potential scale.
But the report also noted that "military courts have treated the necessity defense with disfavor and in fact, some have refused to accept necessity as a permissible defense." The rejections have come from judges who objected to the notion of weighing one evil against another, or who feared that acceptance of the necessity argument would open the door to "private moral codes" substituting for the rule of law, the report said.
Other cautionary flags were raised as well. The report warned that use of exceptional techniques could have "adverse effects" on the "culture and self-image" of the armed forces, recalling the damage done in the past by "perceived law of war violations."
It argued that use of such tactics in some cases but not others could create uncertainty among interrogators about the appropriate limits for interrogators. It also noted that, if the tactics became public, the disclosure could undermine confidence in the war on terrorism and in the military tribunal process that was developed for putting detainees on trial.
Rumsfeld eventually pared the list of 35 methods to 24. Most were part of standard military doctrine. Seven, however, went beyond that, including: removing a detainee from the standard interrogation setting and putting him in a less comfortable room; replacing hot rations with cold food or military Meals Ready to Eat; adjusting the temperature to uncomfortable levels or introducing an unpleasant smell; reversing sleep cycles from night to day; deceiving detainees into thinking they were being questioned by people from a country other than the United States.
"The secretary has placed great stock in the legal reviews that have taken place at every level, and has been persuaded each time that he has had to make decisions, that there were sufficient legal reviews along the way," DiRita said.
A suspected Iraqi member of the terrorist group Al Ansar did not receive such a thorough legal review, defense officials said. The man -- identified by U.S. News & World Report as Hiwa AbdulRahman Rashul -- was picked up by Kurdish soldiers in June or July of 2003 and taken outside Iraq by the CIA for interrogation. In October, the CIA's general counsel told the CIA's directorate of operations that it had to bring the man back to Iraq, since all Iraqi detainees were to be accorded treatment under the Geneva Conventions.
Tenet asked Rumsfeld not to give the prisoner a number and to hide him from international Red Cross officials. He became lost in the system for seven months and was not interrogated by CIA or military officials during that time.
In his investigation into the abuse of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, Army Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba had criticized the CIA practice of maintaining such "ghost detainees" and called the practice "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine and in violation of international law."
Rumsfeld was asked at a news conference last week, "How is this case different from what Taguba was talking about, the ghost detainees?"
"It is just different, that's all," Rumsfeld replied.
"But can you explain how and why?"
"I can't."
Staff writers Mike Allen and R. Jeffrey Smith contributed to this report.
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Lawyer for State Dept. Disputed Detainee Memo
Military Legal Advisers Also Questioned Tactics
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A759-2004Jun23?language=printer
A letter about detainee policy sent in 2002 from the State Department's legal adviser to the Justice Department's deputy assistant attorney general made no attempt at bureaucratic pleasantries.
William H. Taft IV said that Justice's legal advice to President Bush about how to handle detainees in the war on terrorism was "seriously flawed" and its reasoning was "incorrect as well as incomplete." Justice's arguments were "contrary to the official position of the United States, the United Nations and all other states that have considered the issue," Taft said.
Taft's Jan. 11 letter, obtained by The Washington Post, was omitted from the hundreds of pages of documents released Tuesday by the Bush administration. The release was part of an effort to present the administration's policies on detainees since Sept. 11, 2001, as fully compliant with domestic and international law.
A fuller picture -- of senior administration officials who sought to reinterpret the law and sanction tougher treatment of detainees in the face of strongly expressed dissents by the State Department and the military services -- emerges from the State Department letter and other previously undisclosed memos.
The dissents include three classified memos written in the spring of 2003 by senior military lawyers in the Air Force, Marine Corps and Army, and a classified memo by the Navy's top civilian lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, say government officials who have read them. The officials, and others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition that they not be identified.
Two officials said the memos were written by Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack L. Rives, Marine Brig. Gen. Kevin M. Sandkuhler and Army Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Romig.
Their common theme, one official said, was that tough interrogation techniques being advocated by senior civilians at the Defense Department and by the commander of the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would not only contravene longstanding military practice but also provoke a storm of public criticism if the tactics became known.
The military lawyers, the official said, argued that coercive interrogation techniques rarely produce data as reliable as the intelligence gleaned by rewarding prisoners who cooperate -- a view also expressed in the Army's field manual, as redrafted after the Vietnam War.
They also said that tough procedures being advocated were subject to abuse that could haunt U.S. policymakers and endanger U.S. military personnel detained by other countries.
Lawyers for the Joint Chiefs of Staff raised similar concerns -- about the specific interrogation tactics being proposed and the administration's decision that protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions were unavailable as a matter of law to suspected members of the Taliban militia in Afghanistan, according to a former military official familiar with the dispute.
"It was clearly the position of the senior leaders of the military that the Geneva Conventions should apply" to Taliban militia, the official said. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the Joint Chiefs chairman, "was very strong with the Secretary of Defense on a number of occasions" in expressing this viewpoint.
The official added that military lawyers attached to Central Command, which has jurisdiction over the Middle East, and to the Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over Guantanamo Bay, also favored holding military tribunals to determine the status of individual Taliban detainees and the Geneva Convention protections to which they were entitled.
The dissidents' complaints had limited impact, according to the documents and accounts of the administration's internal deliberations.
Taft, whose role made him the government's principal interpreter of treaties, accused John C. Yoo, the deputy assistant attorney general, in the Jan. 11 letter of preparing advice for Bush based on "wrong" premises. He also said Yoo's idea that Bush could "suspend" U.S. obligations to respect the Geneva Conventions was "legally flawed and procedurally impossible."
"In previous conflicts, the United States has dealt with tens of thousands of detainees without repudiating its obligations under the Conventions," wrote Taft, who was the Defense Department's general counsel from 1981 to 1984. "I have no doubt we can do so here."
Bush nonetheless embraced the Justice Department's viewpoint and decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to combatants in Afghanistan. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell protested and persuaded Bush to reconsider; Powell and Myers presented their views at a meeting with Bush, also attended by senior Justice and Defense officials.
Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, subsequently advised Bush in a memo that Powell was wrong and the Justice Department's analysis was "definitive." Gonzales said terrorist attacks "require a new approach in our actions toward captured terrorists," and noted that terrorists had never respected the Geneva Conventions' human rights protections.
On Feb. 7, 2002, Bush signed an order asserting his right to suspend the Geneva Conventions protections for Taliban suspects -- contrary to Taft's advice -- but saying he had decided not to do so at that time. Bush also declared that all Taliban militia were "unlawful combatants," and ineligible for tribunals.
One result of the rancorous debate, according to participants, was that Yoo, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and senior civilians at the Pentagon no longer sought to include the State Department or the Joint Staff in deliberations about the precise protections afforded to detainees by the Geneva Conventions.
For example, the officials said, a 50-page Justice Department memo in August 2002 about the meaning of various anti-torture laws and treaties was not discussed or shared with the Joint Chiefs or the State Department. It was drafted by Justice for the CIA and sent directly to the White House.
The memo contended that only physically punishing acts of "an extreme nature" would constitute criminal violations, and that acts that were merely cruel, inhuman or degrading might not be subject to prosecution. It asserted that those committing torture without the intent to cause lasting harm might be immune from criminal sanctions.
"I'm confident that people would have raised questions" had they known about the memo, a knowledgeable official said. Senior officials repudiated portions of the memo on Tuesday, saying it contained "unnecessary" and "overbroad" arguments that were being reevaluated.
Major dissent about the administration's interrogation practices next arose in late 2002 and early 2003, when military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay complained to superior officers that techniques they were asked to use were abusive. That provoked an extended Defense Department review, during which military lawyers for each of the services forcefully expressed their concerns, officials said.
"We had raised them verbally. We've raised them at the action officer level. Ultimately, some memos were, in fact, signed laying out some considerations that we believe were very important in the process," said a senior military lawyer who briefed reporters last month with the Pentagon's approval.
The lawyer chose his words carefully: "By the time the final draft . . . [on interrogation methods] was completed, those considerations had all been carefully evaluated."
He said the military lawyers were comfortable with the outcome "from a legal standpoint," but did not mention the policy concerns the memos had raised.
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COMPLETE COVERAGE
A Guide to the Memos on Torture
June 24, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/international/24MEMO-GUIDE.html
The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have disclosed memorandums that show a pattern in which Bush administration lawyers set about devising arguments to avoid constraints against mistreatment and torture of detainees. Administration officials responded by releasing hundreds of pages of previously classified documents related to the development of a policy on detainees.
2002
JANUARY A series of memorandums from the Justice Department, many of them written by John C. Yoo, a University of California law professor who was serving in the department, provided arguments to keep United States officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated. The memorandums, principally one written on Jan. 9, provided legal arguments to support administration officials' assertions that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the war in Afghanistan.
RELATED SITES
• Yoo's Memo on Avoiding Geneva Conventions (PDF document) http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.01.09.pdf
JAN. 25 Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in a memorandum to President Bush, said that the Justice Department's advice in the Jan. 9 memorandum was sound and that Mr. Bush should declare the Taliban and Al Qaeda outside the coverage of the Geneva Conventions. That would keep American officials from being exposed to the federal War Crimes Act, a 1996 law that carries the death penalty.
RELATED SITES
• Gonzales's Memo to Bush (PDF document) http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.01.25.pdf JAN. 26 In a memorandum to the White House, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the advantages of applying the Geneva Conventions far outweighed their rejection. He said that declaring the conventions inapplicable would "reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions and undermine the protections of the laws of war for our troops." He also said it would "undermine public support among critical allies."
RELATED SITES
• Powell's Memo to White House (PDF document) http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.01.26.pdf
FEB. 2 A memorandum from William H. Taft IV, the State Department's legal adviser, to Mr. Gonzales warned that the broad rejection of the Geneva Conventions posed several problems. "A decision that the conventions do not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan in which our armed forces are engaged deprives our troops there of any claim to the protection of the conventions in the event they are captured." An attachment to this memorandum, written by a State Department lawyer, showed that most of the administration's senior lawyers agreed that the Geneva Conventions were inapplicable. The attachment noted that C.I.A. lawyers asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.
RELATED
• Taft's Memo on Rejection of Geneva Conventions (PDF document) http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/politics/20040608_DOC.pdf
FEB. 7 In a 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. Document released by White House.
RELATED SITES
• Bush's Directve on Treatment of Detainees (PDF document) http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.02.07.pdf
AUGUST A memorandum from Jay S. Bybee, with the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, provided a rationale for using torture to extract information from Qaeda operatives. It provided complex definitions of torture that seemed devised to allow interrogators to evade being charged with that offense.
RELATED SITES
• Justice Dept. Memo on Torture (PDF document) http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/doj/bybee80102mem.pdf
• Letter by Author of Memo on Torture to White House Counsel http://news.findlaw.com/nytimes/docs/doj/bybee80102ltr.html
Dec. 2 Memo from Defense Department detailing the policy for interrogation techniques to be used for people seized in Afghanistan. Document released by White House.
RELATED SITES
• Defense Dept. Memo on Afghanistan Detainees (PDF document) http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/02.12.02.pdf
2003
MARCH A memorandum prepared by a Defense Department legal task force drew on the January and August memorandums to declare that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal anti-torture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security. The memorandum also said that executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons, including a belief by interrogators that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful.'
APRIL A memorandum from Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to Gen. James T. Hill outlined 24 permitted interrogation techniques, 4 of which were considered stressful enough to require Mr. Rumsfeld's explicit approval. Defense Department officials say it did not refer to the legal analysis of the month before.
RELATED SITES
• Rumsfeld's Memo on Interrogation Techniques (PDF document) http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB127/03.04.16.pdf
DEC. 24 A letter to the International Committee of the Red Cross over the signature of Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski was prepared by military lawyers. The letter, a response to the Red Cross's concern about conditions at Abu Ghraib, contended that isolating some inmates at the prison for interrogation because of their significant intelligence value was a "military necessity," and said prisoners held as security risks could legally be treated differently from prisoners of war or ordinary criminals.
Other Memorandums
Some have been described in reports in The Times and elsewhere, but their exact contents have not been disclosed. These include a memorandum that provided advice to interrogators to shield them from liability from the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty and the Anti-Torture Act, a federal law. This memorandum provided what has been described as a script in which officials were advised that they could avoid responsibility if they were able to plausibly contend that the prisoner was in the custody of another government and that the United States officials were just getting the information from the other country's interrogation. The memorandum advised that for this to work, the United States officials must be able to contend that the prisoner was always in the other country's custody and had not been transferred there. International law prohibits the "rendition" of prisoners to countries if the possibility of mistreatment can be anticipated.
Neil A. Lewis contributed to this report. Online Document Sources: Findlaw.com and National Security Archive, George Washington University (gwu.edu)
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Ukraine Seamen Detail Iraq Prison Torture
Associated Press
By NATASHA LISOVA
June 24, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UKRAINE_IRAQ_ABUSE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Two Ukrainian merchant seamen, who ended up in Abu Ghraib prison after being arrested in August, were kept naked and hooded for hours during their 10 months imprisonment, a top human rights official said Thursday.
Nina Karpachova, Ukraine's ombudsman for human rights, refused to specify whether American troops were involved in the alleged torture, but said, "we know who was in charge of Abu Ghraib." The American-run prison is at the center of allegations that coalition forces in Iraq have abused prisoners.
Tanker M/V Navstar captain Mykola Mazurenko and first mate Ivan Soshchenko were arrested in August by the British navy in the port of Umm Qasr for alleged oil smuggling and sentenced to seven years in prison by an Iraqi court. The two were extradited recently on condition they serve the rest of their sentence at home.
Mazurenko and Soshchenko reportedly claimed that while in Abu Ghraib they were frequently "subjected to sleep deprivation, kept naked for hours and hooded," Karpachova told a news conference.
Prisoners were often "gassed with tear gas" and forced to "lick food straight from the floor," Karpachova said, citing letters she recently received from the seamen. Karpachova said the two "are in serious health condition."
Markiyan Lubkivskiy, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the seamen's claims would be investigated and "if it is true ... we will raise the case to the international level and do everything to protect the rights of our citizens including financial compensation."
He said Mazurenko and Soshchenko "did not inform Ukrainian diplomats in Iraq about alleged mistreatment" at Abu Ghraib.
In Baghdad, Lt. Col. Barry Johnson said the U.S. military "will investigate any and all formal complaints by both current and former detainees."
Six American soldiers accused of torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib face military trial in Baghdad.
Ukraine has the fourth largest non-U.S. contingent in Iraq. Some 1,650 Ukrainian troops are serving in the Polish-led force patrolling southern Iraq. Six Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, three of them in combat. Two of the combat deaths came last month.
-------- POLITICS
-------- budget
Senate Passes $447 Billion Defense Bill
GOP Blocks Democrats' Effort to Hold Administration More Accountable on Iraq
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1181-2004Jun23.html
The Senate last night approved President Bush's military spending blueprint for next year after a five-week struggle during which Republicans turned back Democrats' attempts to reshape it.
The 97 to 0 vote to approve the measure followed a 50 to 48 vote to defeat a proposal by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) directing the administration to report to Congress on progress in Iraq, including estimates of the number of U.S. troops who will be there at the end of next year. The Senate approved a Republican alternative requiring a report on other aspects of attempts to stabilize Iraq, but not troop estimates.
The Senate also rejected a proposal by Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) to guarantee annual increases in veterans' health benefits. The vote was 49 to 48 in favor of Daschle's proposal, but it needed 60 votes to pass because it violated budget limits.
The $447.2 billion defense authorization bill includes $25 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which may have to be augmented next year, and an increase of more than $20 billion over current levels for other expenditures. Included are record expenditures of about $70 billion for development of an array of planes, ships and weapons, surpassing even the buildup of the 1980s.
It includes a 3.5 percent military pay raise along with increases in other benefits, $10.2 billion for Bush's planned missile defense program and a go-ahead for further research on two new nuclear weapons: a low-yield "mini-nuke" and a high-yield "bunker buster" to destroy deep underground facilities.
In several votes over the past two weeks, Democrats attempted to slow what they regard as unduly hasty deployment of initial missile defenses -- the scaled-back version of President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" plan for a nuclear shield that Bush has made a centerpiece of his national security policy.
Although Republicans agreed to require operational tests next year, they balked at forcing them to be conducted by an independent testing office. They also refused to condition spending for new weaponry on any test results and rejected proposals to shift some of the funds to homeland security programs.
Democrats also failed to derail the new nuclear weapons, make war profiteering a crime and bar private contractors from interrogating war prisoners. But they succeeded in adding to the defense bill one of their major domestic priorities: legislation to toughen hate-crime laws by including gays for the first time.
The Senate-passed bill must be reconciled with a House version approved last month, a process that could prove difficult on several points. Both bills include the same framework reflecting Bush's priorities but include some politically charged differences over key details.
For instance, the House bill would delay the next round of military base closings from 2005 to 2007. The Senate's legislation would let the closures proceed as scheduled next year.
The House would permanently expand troop ranks by 39,000 -- 30,000 for the Army and 9,000 for the Marine Corps -- over the next three years. The Senate would mandate a 20,000 increase for the Army only next year. The administration opposes any mandatory increases, preferring authority to increase force levels at its discretion.
The House also included far more stringent "Buy American" rules for procurement of military materials than the Senate did. A fight over these rules delayed agreement on last year's defense bill for months, and the issue is bigger this year because of military needs and elections.
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Senate Passes $447 Billion Pentagon Package
June 24, 2004
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/politics/24spend.html
WASHINGTON, June 23 - After defeating a Democratic measure that would have greatly expanded health benefits for veterans, the Senate gave final passage on Wednesday night to a $447.2 billion Pentagon spending measure for 2005 that includes a 3.5 percent raise for service personnel.
The unanimous vote, 97 to 0, came after the Republican-controlled Senate rejected an effort by Democrats to compel the Bush administration to release documents relating to the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq.
That measure failed by a vote of 46 to 50, but an earlier vote to set it aside permanently without a vote also failed when five Republicans joined Democrats to keep the measure alive. Instead, the Senate unanimously adopted a measure calling for the Pentagon to submit continuing reports to Congress on the status and treatment of prisoners.
Democrats said later that the White House should regard the votes as a warning.
"This was a shot across the bow,'' said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "The votes tonight show that patience is wearing thin with this White House's refusal to level with the American people.''
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said: "There is a lot of dust in the air today from the circling of Republican wagons. But when the dust clears, the issue before the Senate also needs to be clear to the American people. The public is sick of the secrecy.''
The Pentagon appropriations bill now goes to the House. The Senate vote capped several weeks of debate, broken by a hiatus for the funeral of former President Ronald Reagan. The veteran's health measure, sponsored by Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader, fell 11 votes short of the 60 required to waive the Senate's budget rules so it could be considered.
Mr. Daschle said his proposal, which would have cost $300 billion over the next decade, would give every veteran access to prescription drugs and health services through the Department of Veterans Affairs. Though all veterans are entitled to such care, some endure long waits or are required to make higher co-payments depending on their incomes.
"Today the Senate had the opportunity to make good on a pledge to provide the nation's veterans with the health care they have earned and deserve,'' Mr. Daschle said in a statement after the vote. "Sadly, a narrow majority blocked the effort.''
But Senator Don Nickles, Democrat of Oklahoma, denounced the Daschle measure as a new entitlement.
"I think this amendment is not really so much about helping veterans,'' Mr. Nickles said. "I think it's trying to help politicians.''
The vote on the Daschle amendment was originally scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, prompting Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to cancel campaign events and return to Washington. But Republicans delayed its consideration, thwarting efforts by Mr. Kerry to demonstrate his support for it.
At a fund-raising breakfast on Wednesday morning, Mr. Kerry, who has missed more than 80 percent of the Senate's votes this year, expressed his irritation with Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, saying he would have expected Dr. Frist to respect Mr. Daschle's wishes.
"But oh no, oh no,'' Mr. Kerry said. "Not in this Senate, not with these people. Once again, it's my way or the highway, shut the door, lock people out, don't let them take part in democracy.''
In addition to the raise for military personnel, the spending bill increases the Pentagon's budget by 3.4 percent next year. It authorizes a permanent increase in the rate of special pay for military personnel facing hostile fire or imminent danger, to $225 a month from $150. It also increases, to $250 a month from $100, the allowance members of the military receive when they are separated from their families.
During debate on the measure, the Senate repeatedly rejected efforts by Democrats to pare President Bush's missile-based defense program.
The bill allocates $1.7 billion for the program. On Tuesday, lawmakers defeated a plan by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, that would have shifted more than a fourth of that amount, or $515.5 million, from the missile initiative to other security programs, including border and port security and programs that would combat what Mr. Levin called "the threat of loose nukes, the threat of nuclear fissile material falling into the hands of terrorists.''
-------- investigations
Bush Is Interviewed in Inquiry on Leak of Operative's Name
June 24, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/politics/24CND-LEAK.html?hp
WASHINGTON, June 24 - President Bush was interviewed by federal prosecutors today in connection with their attempts to discover who leaked the identity of an undercover officer for the Central Intelligence Agency last summer.
The White House said Mr. Bush was questioned for 70 minutes in the Oval Office by United States Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who is heading the Justice Department's inquiry into the episode, and assistant prosecutors. Jim Sharp, a Washington trial lawyer who was retained recently by Mr. Bush, was also present.
The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the president was happy to cooperate with the investigators. "The leaking of classified information is a very serious matter," Mr. McClellan told reporters. "No one wants to get to the bottom of this matter more than the president of the United States."
The interview suggested that the Justice Department may be in the final stages of its investigation into who leaked the name of the C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame, to the syndicated columnist Robert Novak. Ms. Plame is married to Joseph C. Wilson IV, who has been critical of the administration's Iraq policy and who questioned Mr. Bush's assertion early in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had sought to buy uranium in Africa.
When asked if the president had answered every question put to him, Mr. McClellan said Mr. Bush "was pleased to share whatever information he had." And when asked if Mr. Bush had any information on who had leaked Ms. Plame's name, Mr. McClellan said such questions should be directed to investigators, adding, "I would not read anything into that one way or the other."
It is extraordinary in itself for a president to be interviewed in connection with an investigation into possible criminal wrongdoing. And 70 minutes is an unusually long segment of time in the schedule of a president, whose movements are typically budgeted minute by minute.
Vice President Dick Cheney and the White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, have previously been questioned by Mr. Fitzgerald's team.
Mr. Wilson and some Democrats have charged that the White House leaked Ms. Plame's identity as a way of retaliating against him. Disclosure of the identity of an undercover officer for the Central Intelligence Agency can be a federal crime.
Mr. Wilson has mentioned several prominent White House advisers - including Karl Rove, the White House political strategist, and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff - as possible sources of the leak. They have denied it.
The president himself has not been seen as a potential target of the investigation. He could, however, become a witness if prosecutors believe he had information about the events that led to the disclosure of Ms. Plame's name or if he had personal records that might aid in the inquiry.
If the Justice Department team announces any findings this summer or fall, they could become grist for what is shaping up as a close presidential election.
-------- propaganda wars
FAHRENHEIT 9/11
BY ROGER EBERT
June 24, 2004
Chicago Sun-Times
http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/cst-ftr-moore24f.html
Lions Gate/IFC Films presents a documentary directed by Michael Moore. Narrated by Moore. Running time: 110 minutes. Rated R (some violent and disturbing images, and for language).
Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is less an expose of George W. Bush than a dramatization of what Moore sees as a failed and dangerous presidency. The charges in the film will not come as news to those who pay attention to politics, but Moore illustrates them with dramatic images and a relentless commentary track that essentially concludes Bush is incompetent, dishonest, failing in the war on terrorism, and has bad taste in friends.
Although Moore's narration ranges from outrage to sarcasm, the most devastating passage in the film speaks for itself. That's when Bush, who was reading My Pet Goat to a classroom of Florida children, is notified of the second attack on the World Trade Center, and yet lingers with the kids for almost seven minutes before finally leaving the room. His inexplicable paralysis wasn't underlined in news reports at the time, and only Moore thought to contact the teacher in that schoolroom -- who, as it turned out, had made her own video of the visit. The expression on Bush's face as he sits there is odd indeed.
Bush, here and elsewhere in the film, is characterized as a man who owes a lot to his friends, including those who helped bail him out of business ventures. Moore places particular emphasis on what he sees as a long-term friendship between the Bush family (including both presidents) and powerful Saudi Arabians. More than $1.4 billion in Saudi money has flowed into the coffers of Bush family enterprises, he says, and after 9/11 the White House helped expedite flights out of the country carrying, among others, members of the bin Laden family (which disowns its most famous member).
Moore examines the military records released by Bush to explain his disappearance from the Texas Air National Guard, and finds that the name of another pilot has been blacked out. This pilot, he learns, was Bush's close friend James R. Bath, who became Texas money manager for the billionaire bin Ladens. Another indication of the closeness of the Bushes and the Saudis: The law firm of James Baker, the secretary of State for Bush's father, was hired by the Saudis to defend them against a suit by a group of 9/11 victims and survivors, who charged that the Saudis had financed al-Qaida.
To Moore, this is more evidence that Bush has an unhealthy relationship with the Saudis, and that it may have influenced his decision to go to war against Iraq at least partially on their behalf. The war itself Moore considers unjustified (no WMDs, no Hussein-bin Laden link), and he talks with American soldiers, including amputees, who complain bitterly about Bush's proposed cuts of military salaries at the same time he was sending them into a war that they (at least, the ones Moore spoke to) hated.
Moore also shows American military personnel who are apparently enjoying the war; he has footage of soldiers who use torture techniques not in a prison but in the field, where they hood an Iraqi prisoner, call him "Ali Baba" and pose for videos while touching his genitals.
Moore brings a fresh impact to familiar material by the way he marshals his images. We are all familiar with the controversy over the 2000 election, which was settled by the U.S. Supreme Court. What I hadn't seen before was footage of the ratification of Bush's election by the U.S. Congress. An election can be debated at the request of one senator and one representative; 10 representatives rise to challenge it, but not a single senator. As Moore shows the challengers, one after another, we cannot help noting that they are eight black women, one Asian woman and one black man. They are all gaveled into silence by the chairman of the joint congressional session -- Vice President Al Gore. The urgency and futility of the scene reawakens old feelings for those who believe Bush is an illegitimate president.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" opens on a note not unlike Moore's earlier films, such as "Roger & Me" and "Bowling for Columbine." Moore, as narrator, brings humor and sarcasm to his comments, and occasionally appears onscreen in a gadfly role.
It's vintage Moore, for example, when he brings along a Marine who refused to return to Iraq; together, they confront congressmen, urging them to have their children enlist in the service. And he makes good use of candid footage, including an eerie video showing Bush practicing facial expressions before going live with his address to the nation about 9/11.
Apparently Bush and other members of his administration don't know what every TV reporter knows, that a satellite image can be live before they get the cue to start talking. That accounts for the quease-inducing footage of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz wetting his pocket comb in his mouth before slicking back his hair. When that doesn't do it, he spits in his hand and wipes it down. If his mother is alive, I hope for his sake she doesn't see this film.
Such scenes are typical of vintage Moore, catching his subjects off guard. But his film grows steadily darker, and Moore largely disappears from it, as he focuses on people such as Lila Lipscomb, from Moore's hometown of Flint, Mich.; she reads a letter from her son, written days before he was killed in Iraq. It urges his family to work for Bush's defeat. "Fahrenheit 9/11" is a compelling, persuasive film, at odds with the White House effort to present Bush as a strong leader. He comes across as a shallow, inarticulate man, simplistic in speech and inauthentic in manner. If the film is not quite as electrifying as Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," that may be because Moore has toned down his usual exuberance and was sobered by attacks on the factual accuracy of elements of "Columbine"; playing with larger stakes, he is more cautious here, and we get an op-ed piece, not a stand-up routine. But he remains one of the most valuable figures on the political landscape, a populist rabble-rouser, humorous and effective; the outrage and incredulity in his film are an exhilarating response to Bush's determined repetition of the same stubborn sound bites.
----
Persuasive and passionate.
'Fahrenheit 9/11' is both. It's also Michael Moore's best film.
Mick LaSalle,
San Francisco Chronicle Movie Critic
Thursday, June 24, 2004
E-mail Mick LaSalle at mlasalle@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/24/DDG357AP2J1.DTL
Fahrenheit 911: Documentary. Directed by Michael Moore. (R. 125 minutes. Opens Friday at Bay Area theaters.) The big moment in Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" comes midway through the documentary, and there's no mistaking it: It's the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and the president of the United States is sitting in a little chair in a Florida classroom. His chief of staff enters and whispers in his ear that the country is under attack. And President George W. Bush just sits there for seven long minutes.
In a forceful documentary devoted to puncturing the image of the president as a take-charge leader, this will be, for many, the tipping point. At the very least, it will be the scene that everyone talks about. Moore doesn't show the whole seven minutes. Instead he lingers on the scene just long enough for the audience to daydream of Eisenhower, Reagan, Truman, Bush senior, Clinton, Nixon or Kennedy in that situation, and to imagine any one of them standing immediately, excusing himself and demanding to be put in touch with his national security team.
Assessing the merits of a political film is a tricky business. Obviously, its quality is partly a function of its power to persuade, but its persuasiveness is in the eye of the beholder. Yet there are other things to consider: The movie's passion. Its serious purpose. Its tone. Its mix of words and images, and the way both linger in the mind. There's the way the movie fashions its arguments, and the cumulative effect the experience provides -- what you feel walking out, what you think about the next day. By all these measures, "Fahrenheit 9/11" is Michael Moore's best film.
Certainly, it's a career landmark, the film that signals his transition from political entertainer to political thinker, from propagandist to idiosyncratic journalist, from colorful gadfly to patriot. If "Bowling for Columbine" was a step, this is a leap, in which Moore vaults past Will Rogers into some territory all his own. In the 90-year history of the American feature film, there has never been a popular election-year documentary like this one.
The film, which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, has a single unifying idea that brings together its various elements. The idea is an emotional one, namely that America has been living in a kind of nightmare for the last few years, one that began not with the events of Sept. 11, 2001, but from the moment that the networks took Florida out of the Gore column on election night 2000. Moore posits that the main source of America's nightmare has been the presidency of George W. Bush. There's anger at the core of Moore's position, but he never shows it. And while he sprinkles the film with his deadpan humor, for the most part he plays it straight, laying down facts methodically, trusting in the audience's interest and attention. The connection between the Bush family and the bin Laden family's oil interests dominates the first section of the film. Although Moore doesn't uncover anything sinister, the sheer extent of this personal and financial connection comes as a surprise, and it fuels Moore's outrage that the bin Laden family was allowed to leave the United States without interrogation following Sept. 11.
That Moore is becoming an artist is evident in the way he depicts the World Trade Center attacks. Instead of going to stock news footage, he blacks out the screen and makes us listen to the sounds of Lower Manhattan on the horrible day. It brings it all back. From there, Moore challenges the president's handling of the war on terror by bringing in experts to say that the Afghanistan war was "botched," that too few troops were sent. He details lapses in homeland security. To bolster his case that the administration has fostered a culture of fear, he goes to a tiny town in Virginia and talks to citizens on the lookout for terrorists. When asked what the terrorists might want to bomb, several locals say, "The Wal-Mart."
Moore had a camera on the ground in Iraq, and the footage he got is like nothing seen on American television. A woman sobs and screams that her family's house has been destroyed. American soldiers clown around near hooded detainees, while other soldiers express doubt about the mission. Moore's effects are manipulative in the best sense -- even though the audience knows what he's up to, the moments still have power. As the president talks about the need for war, Moore shows kids playing in Baghdad. Later, he shows a boy lying in the street with his forearm barely attached to his body. On the home front, Moore shows a mother whose son was killed in Iraq, reading her son's final letter -- in which he says that he hopes the president isn't re- elected.
Moore is playing for keeps. The somber tone notwithstanding, this film is on fire. It's an exhausting, shattering thing to watch, and the mood it casts lasts for days. What both exalts the experience and grounds the picture is Moore's essentially patriotic faith that a sincere, invested argument can get a hearing in America. To see "Fahrenheit 9/11" and experience its passion is to wonder why there haven't been popular political films like this since movies began, and from all points of view. It seems like such a reasonable use of cinema, and an inexpressibly worthy one.
-- Advisory: This film contains strong language, gun violence and scenes of carnage.
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'Fahrenheit 9/11' has a point to make
Forget balanced.
Thu 24 June, 2004 22:30
By Bob Tourtellotte
LOS ANGELES (Reuters)
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=entertainmentNews&storyID=535512§ion=news
Director Michael Moore's documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" debuts across the United States on Friday attacking President George W. Bush's drive to oust Saddam Hussein and looking at U.S. reaction to the attacks of September 11 and the war in Iraq.
While some complain about Moore's lack of objectivity, others say the movie follows a tradition in documentary films that shun balance in favour of a strong point of view, a trend that has re-emerged in recent years in part due to low-cost digital filmmaking.
"I think sometimes the most dishonest documentaries are the ones that pretend to be balanced because, what is balanced?" said Nick Broomfield, director of "Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer."
"Fahrenheit 9/11" makes the argument that Americans were duped and frightened into supporting the Bush administration's actions after September 11, and Moore clearly wants the president to be voted out of office in the November election.
The movie mocks President Bush and his aides, in one scene comparing them to cowboys in 1960s TV show "Bonanza" set against a map of a burning Afghanistan.
"It's not an issue of fairness in a documentary. It's an issue of first being accurate," Moore told Reuters, adding that he prefers the term "nonfiction" to describe his work.
Some of Moore's detractors shoot back with a more loaded term: propaganda. In an editorial, The Wall Street Journal said that to call Moore's "'heard-on-the-Arab-street' conspiracy theories a documentary is to insult all real documentary makers."
But other commentators note that such controversy is not new and that documentaries have long espoused causes and embraced artistic sensibilities going back to 1920s Soviet cinema and its so-called "unplayed" movies, as well as work from British filmmakers like Paul Rotha during the 1930s.
RESURGENT "DOCS"
In the United States, Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" series of documentaries championed the U.S. cause in World War Two.
"The idea that documentaries are some kind of balanced, neutral report is a recent manifestation ... and has more to do with TV journalism. Or, people see documentary films that are made-for-TV that follow journalistic conventions," said Michael Renov, associate dean at USC School of Cinema and Television.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, advocacy documentaries like Moore's "Roger and Me" resurfaced in the U.S. In that film, the director relentlessly pursued the chief of automaker General Motors in his look at the impact of factory closings in his hometown of Flint, Michigan.
The highest grossing documentary of all-time is Moore's 2002 Oscar-winning "Bowling for Columbine," which looks at the U.S. culture of guns and violence. It had a U.S. and Canadian haul of $22 million (12 million pounds) and a global box office of $58 million.
"Columbine" prompted Wal-Mart Stores to change its policy on the sale of certain types of bullets.
Rick McKay, Emmy-winning director of "Broadway: The Golden Age," called documentaries a "last bastion" of free speech. He said low-cost digital equipment enabled filmmakers to speak out because they do not need deep-pocketed financial backers.
"I no longer have to raise money for a film, and can tell exactly the sort of story I want to tell," he said.
In current hit "Super Size Me," director Morgan Spurlock grabbed a digital camera to document the damaging effects of a McDonald's fast-food diet. He has won awards and the film is burning up box office charts. McDonald's has also changed its menu, although it has said "Super Size" was not the reason.
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'Fahrenheit 9/11' ban?
Ads for Moore's movie could be stopped on July 30
By Alexander Bolton,
June 24, 2004
The Hill
http://www.thehill.com/news/062404/moore.aspx
Michael Moore may be prevented from advertising his controversial new movie, "Fahrenheit 9/11," on television or radio after July 30 if the Federal Election Commission (FEC) today accepts the legal advice of its general counsel.
At the same time, a Republican-allied 527 soft-money group is preparing to file a complaint against Moore's film with the FEC for violating campaign-finance law.
In a draft advisory opinion placed on the FEC's agenda for today's meeting, the agency's general counsel states that political documentary filmmakers may not air television or radio ads referring to federal candidates within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election. steve finn/Getty images Michael Moore
The opinion is generated under the new McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, which prohibits corporate-funded ads that identify a federal candidate before a primary or general election.
The proscription is broadly defined. Section 100.29 of the federal election regulations defines restricted corporate-funded ads as those that identify a candidate by his "name, nickname, photograph or drawing" or make it "otherwise apparent through an unambiguous reference."
Should the six members of the FEC vote to approve the counsel's opinion, it could put a serious crimp on Moore's promotion efforts. The flavor of the movie was encapsulated by a recent review in The Boston Globe as "the case against George W. Bush, a fat compendium of previously reported crimes, errors, sins, and grievances delivered in the director's patented tone of vaudevillian social outrage."
The FEC ruling may also affect promotion of a slew of other upcoming political documentaries and films, such as "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War," which opens in August, "The Corporation," about democratic institutions being subsumed by the corporate agenda, or "Silver City," a recently finished film by John Sayles that criticizes the Bush administration.
Another film, "The Hunting of the President," which investigates whether Bill Clinton was the victim of a vast conspiracy, could be subject to regulations if it mentions Bush or members of Congress in its ads.
Since the FEC considers the Republican presidential convention scheduled to begin Aug. 30 a national political primary in which Bush is a candidate, Moore and other politically oriented filmmakers could not air any ad mentioning Bush after July 30. That could make advertising for the film after July difficult since it is all about the Bush administration and what Moore regards as its mishandling of the war on terrorism and the decision to invade Iraq.
After the convention, ads for political films that mention Bush or any other federal candidate would be subject to the restrictions on all corporate communications within 60 days of the Nov. 2 general election.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" opens nationally tomorrow.
The film's distributor, Lions Gate Films, an incorporated organization, would almost certainly pay for its broadcast promotions.
David Bossie, the president of Citizens United, plans to allege that "Fahrenheit 9/11" violates federal election law, arguing that "Moore has publicly indicated his goal is to impact this election season."
Bossie had planned to file a complaint with the FEC yesterday but postponed action because his lawyers want to review it at the last minute, said Summer Stitz, a spokeswoman for Bossie's group.
"I don't think much of Michael Moore or his two-hour political advertisement - that's all it is," Bossie said. "He uses all of these words to make it look like he makes documentaries, but it's the furthest thing from the truth. Documentaries tend to be fact-based."
Sarah Greenberg, a spokeswoman for Lions Gate Films who is serving as Moore's spokeswoman, did not return a call for comment.
The FEC counsel's draft advisory opinion responded to a request for guidance from David Hardy, a documentary film producer with the Bill of Rights Educational Foundation. Hardy asked whether he could air broadcast ads that refer to congressional officeholders who appear in his documentary.
At issue in the FEC's opinion is whether documentary films qualify for a "media exemption," which allows members of the press to discuss political candidates freely in the days before an election.
In its opinion, the general counsel wrote, "In McConnell vs. FEC ... (2003) the [Supreme] Court described the media exemption as 'narrow' and drew a distinction between 'corporations that are part of the media industry' as opposed to 'other corporations that are not involved in the regular business of imparting news to the public.'"
"The radio and television commercials that you describe in your request would be electioneering communications," the counsel concluded. "The proposed commercials would refer to at least one presidential candidate. ... They would also be publicly distributed because you intend to pay a radio station and perhaps a television station to air or broadcast your commercials. ... Finally, they would reach 50,000 people within 30 days of a national nominating convention and or the general election."
However, one commissioner, Michael Toner, has a different view of what restrictions may be placed on political films.
"I think there's evidence that when Congress created the press exemption they intended for it to cover media in all its forms," said Toner. "If a documentary produced by an independent company would be subject to restriction or, equally important, if efforts to promote the documentary would be subject to restriction, I think that is very problematic."
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AP Lawyer: It's 'Curious' We've Had to Sue for Bush Records
President George W. Bush
editorandpublisher.com.
By Joe Strupp
June 24, 2004
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000550641
NEW YORK The Associated Press has sued the Pentagon and Air Force, seeking access to all records of President George W. Bush's military service, but the news agency wonders why it has come to this.
"It seems a little curious because the president made a pretty forceful presentation that he had nothing to hide," said AP General Counsel Dave Tomlin, when asked for his reaction to what the AP considers government stonewalling. "But we are not surprised."
Tomlin told E&P the lawsuit is needed to get access to a portion of Bush's record that may offer more information than the paper files previously released. "The paper file may not be everything," he said. "It has been there a long while, it could conceivably be tampered with."
Because the microfilm record has been in storage and "it can't be altered, that access to the microfilm would settle the matter," Tomlin added.
When asked why a lawsuit was needed, he said, "the administrative efforts we've made just aren't getting traction."
Tomlin said he did not expect White House officials to "rush right over with the information," after the lawsuit was filed, but expected a proper response. "It is important to get this; we'd like to see priority handling on it."
The suit, filed in federal court in New York on Tuesday, seeks access to a copy of Bush's microfilmed personnel file from the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin. The White House has said it has already released all records of Bush's military service.
The Air National Guard has control of the microfilm, which should be disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, the lawsuit claims. AP says the records "are being unlawfully withheld from the public." The lawsuit adds that no one has looked at any of the Bush military records at the state archives since 1996.
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Bush backers slam movie
The Cincinnati Post
By Amanda Van Benschoten
06-24-2004
http://www.cincypost.com/2004/06/24/fahr062404.html
Four days after President Bush was in the tri-state to stump for his re-election, a controversial film about the president will open Friday at five theaters in Greater Cincinnati.
The debut of "Fahrenheit 9/11" locally is part of its national release, which is happening despite protest from conservative groups.
Bush supporters say the film is little more than a one-sided expression of director Michael Moore's beliefs about Bush and fear it could damage his reelection effort.
"It's more propaganda than it is a document of the truth. Mr. Moore plays fast and loose with the facts," said Siobhan Guiney, executive director of Move America Forward, a California-based organization formed in May to support America's troops and the war on terror.
The organization is concerned that viewers will take Moore's word as truth because he has labeled the film as a documentary. Move America Forward says the film is factually inaccurate, and Moore's goal is to undermine support for the war on terror.
"Fahrenheit 9/11" examines how the Bush administration responded to the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It accuses the administration of creating an atmosphere of fear in order to rush America into war with Iraq, attacks the Patriot Act, and claims to offer "stories we haven't heard" about the war in Iraq, according to the film's Web site. It also suggests the Bush family has close, personal ties that go back many years with the family of Osama bin Laden.
Conservative outcry won't deter some local viewers, who say they're curious to see what all the fuss is about.
"I'm just going for a different perspective and to see what Michael Moore has to say," said Andy Studer, 22, of Grants Lick, Ky., who said his political views lean slightly to the right and that he is neither for nor against the war in Iraq.
University of Cincinnati graduate student Molly McCaffrey, 34, of Clifton, said she looks forward to seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" because she was impressed by Moore's 2002 film, "Bowling for Columbine," for which he won an Academy Award.
"Michael Moore was able to present the facts in a way that was so unbiased," she said. "He's so honest and real, which I really like."
McCaffrey, a Democrat, shares some of Moore's views on Bush: she doesn't believe the U.S. was justified in declaring war on Iraq, and she disagrees with many of the administration's policies.
"There are times where war is necessary, but this isn't one of them," she said. "I've never liked Bush personally or politically. Because of Bush's tax cuts, the states are losing money. There's a trickle-down effect: we're all suffering because of the tax cuts, except for the wealthy."
Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., contends that the film is little more than Moore's personal vendetta against Bush.
"He has a track record of not letting the facts get in the way," said Summer Stitz, a spokeswoman for the group. "He's let it be known he has a political agenda and hopes to influence the election. (It's) a two-hour political commercial."
The organization had planned to announce Wednesday its intention to lobby the Federal Election Commission to restrict the distribution of "Fahrenheit 9/11," but postponed the event at the request of its legal department.
"We're not interested in being reckless or unfair in any way," Stitz said.
"We're against the message of the movie, (but) we're absolutely for free speech."
Move America Forward has urged people to contact theatres to express their concern and ask them to reconsider showing the film. It even launched a letter and e-mail campaign against theatres that plan to show the film.
"We just want people to question (the film)," Guiney said. "If people go in knowing they're seeing Michael Moore's version of the truth, then we've accomplished our goal."
Moore has publicly said that he hopes the film will help defeat Bush at the polls in November.
"I think that it absolutely could sway the election. It feels like the tide has really turned," McCaffrey said. "(The publicity) will definitely get people talking, which is always good."
Mike Allen, Hamilton county prosecutor and chairman of Bush's southwest Ohio re-election campaign, said he doesn't expect the film to hurt the president's chances in November.
"If I know this area, the film won't do very well here," he said.
"From everything I've seen and heard, it sounds like typical Michael Moore: biased and slanted. It's not factually based."
Allen dismissed Moore as a conservative-hater who sacrifices the facts in his efforts to discredit Bush.
"I just don't think he's credible," he said. " -- Once the general public gets a taste for that, they'll see the same thing."
Moore could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
Moore is not the first moviemaker to try to use his craft to try to influence the direction of a presidential election. John Wayne released his patriotic film "The Alamo" in 1960 in a futile attempt to try to help Richard Nixon defeat John F. Kennedy.
More recently, Rob Reiner's 1995 film "The American President" was widely perceived as a sympathetic portrayal of Bill Clinton, who ran successfully for reelection in 1996.
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Author of '02 Memo on Torture: 'Gentle' Soul for a Harsh Topic
June 24, 2004
By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/politics/24MEMO.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Selected Documents Related to U.S. Policy on Interrogating Prisoners (From Findlaw.com)
Aug 1, 2002 Dept. of Justice Memo to White House Counsel Regarding Standards of Conduct for Interrogation
Aug. 1, 2002 Asst. Atty. General Bybee Letter to White House Counsel on Interrogation and Torture
Feb. 26, 2002 Asst. Atty. General Bybee Memo to DoD General Counsel Haynes Potential Legal Constraints Regarding Interrogation
Feb. 1, 2002 U.S. Atty. General Ashcroft's Letter to Pres. Bush on Taliban status under Geneva Convention
Feb. 7, 2002 Memo to White House Counsel from Asst. Atty. General Bybee on Taliban status under Geneva Convention
Additional Documents and Resources from The National Security Archive at George Washington University (gwu.edu)
The Bush administration is distancing itself from a memorandum prepared two years ago by a government lawyer asserting that the president's power to use torture to extract information from suspected terrorists is almost unlimited.
Before the recent controversy concerning his work, however, some of the officials who received the memorandum worked diligently to elevate the lawyer, Jay S. Bybee, to the federal bench. Nominated by President Bush in 2002 and confirmed by the Senate last year, he now sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Former colleagues say the judge, whose chambers are in Las Vegas, is a serious, soft-spoken, reflective man. They say it is difficult to reconcile his discussion of torture in clinical, dispassionate detail with his background. A former legal academic, Judge Bybee told Meridian, a Mormon magazine, last year that he hoped to be remembered for his probity.
"I would like my headstone to read, `He always tried to do the right thing,' " Judge Bybee said.
The memorandum, dated Aug. 1, 2002, defined torture narrowly under a federal law that prohibits it. Only pain like that accompanying "death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function" qualifies, Mr. Bybee wrote. It went on to say torture is unlawful only if the infliction of pain is the offender's specific objective. "Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent," he wrote.
The memorandum also discussed various potential defenses to criminal prosecutions for torture, including necessity and self-defense. Finally, it asserted that the president was free under his authority as commander in chief to order torture notwithstanding treaties and laws barring it.
The memorandum said it was addressed to Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in response to his questions. At a White House briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Gonzales specifically disavowed the part of the memorandum discussing the president's authority as commander in chief, saying it was "irrelevant and unnecessary."
Senior Justice Department officials took a broader view, saying the entire memorandum would be withdrawn.
Judge Bybee, 50, served as assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, an elite unit of the Justice Department that advises the executive branch on the law, from 2001 until he joined the appeals court last year. Among his predecessors in the office were William H. Rehnquist, now the chief justice, and Antonin Scalia, the associate justice.
The Office of Legal Counsel "is informally called the attorney general's lawyer," said Douglas W. Kmiec, who ran the office in the administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush. "We used to call it the conscience of the Justice Department."
Justice Department officials said that the memo had been sent directly from the Legal Counsel's office to the White House and that they did not believe it had required the approval beforehand of Attorney General John Ashcroft or his chief deputy at the time.
A former lawyer in the Legal Counsel's office said the memorandum "went through the usual channels."
Those channels would include the attorney general, said Walter Dellinger, who was in charge of the office in the Clinton administration.
"I would be flabbergasted if a memo of this singular importance was not submitted to the attorney general as well as the White House," he said. "If it was not, I am not sure what the attorney general was supposed to be doing."
President Bush apparently never saw the memorandum. "I don't believe the president had access to any legal opinions from the Department of Justice," Mr. Gonzales said Tuesday.
Senators on the Judiciary Committee who voted on Mr. Bybee's nomination were aware that as head of the legal counsel's office he would have played an important role in establishing the legal underpinnings of the fight against terror. But the lawmakers were refused access to the office's opinions on the subject.
In response to written questions posed by several senators on Feb. 21, 2003, Mr. Bybee declined to comment on the advice given by his office. Asked by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, to discuss his thinking about the status of detainees, Mr. Bybee responded: "As an attorney at the Department of Justice, I am obligated to keep confidential the legal advice that I provide to others in the executive branch. I cannot comment on whether or not I have provided any such advice and, if so, the substance of that advice."
In an interview yesterday, Mr. Leahy said the White House had withheld important information.
"If his nomination were up today," the senator said, "knowing now what we weren't permitted to know then, the Senate - this senator included - might not be so willing to give him the same benefit of the doubt for this lifetime appointment."
On Feb. 27, 2003, the Judiciary Committee, in a vote of 12 to 6, approved Mr. Bybee's nomination, with all of the votes against him cast by Democrats. Two Democrats voted in favor of Mr. Bybee, one of them Charles E. Schumer of New York. Mr. Schumer said later that the vote showed that he was willing to approve nominees whose views were inconsistent with his own.
The memorandum itself was unusual, former lawyers in the office said.
"What's depressing about the memo is not that parts of it appear to be wrong," Mr. Dellinger said. "What's depressing is that it's such a one-sided advocacy document."
Through a spokesman, Judge Bybee declined requests for an interview. A former deputy, John Yoo, now an international law professor at the University of California in Berkeley, also contributed to the August 2002 memorandum. He said he could not comment on it, citing his ethical obligations.
But he said generally that the question of what conduct constitutes torture is an important and legitimate one. A good analogy, he said, was the legal advice police officers receive on the use of force.
"This is an unprecedented conflict with a completely new form of enemy that fights in unconventional ways that violate the very core principles of the laws of war by targeting civilians," Professor Yoo said in an interview yesterday. "We should want the executive to ask what rules apply to that conflict before they enact policy, not after."
A graduate of Brigham Young University and its law school, Judge Bybee worked as a law clerk on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va.; in private practice in Washington; as a lawyer in the Justice Department and the White House in the administrations of President Reagan and the first President Bush.
But his main work in the decade before he rejoined the Justice Department in 2001 as assistant attorney general was academic. He taught at the law school of Louisiana State University and the University of Nevada, specializing in constitutional and administrative law and civil procedure.
Legal experts said they suspected that Professor Yoo was the primary author of the memorandum, given his background in international law. But a former official said that gave Judge Bybee too little credit.
"He's not an autopen machine," the official said of Judge Bybee. "He's a law professor and federal judge."
Judge Bybee is not, however, a dominant personality.
"He is a pretty gentle soul," Professor Kmiec said. "If you wanted to compare him to a personality, it would not be Donald Rumsfeld. He would be quieter, more reflective, quite temperate."
The judge is not without a playful side.
"He has a kazoo collection," said N. Gregory Smith, a former colleague on the law faculty at Louisiana State. "He'd get a little ensemble of kazoo enthusiasts together and play. They would occasionally perform the `1812' Overture."
Eric Lichtblau, David Johnston and Richard W. Stevenson contributed reporting for this article.
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Starr Endorses Legislation to Give District a Voting Seat in the House
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1086-2004Jun23.html
Congress has the authority to grant the District voting representation in the U.S. House of Representatives without amending the U.S. Constitution, former U.S. solicitor general Kenneth W. Starr testified yesterday.
Starr's endorsement, delivered before the House Government Reform Committee, helps a new bid to enfranchise 570,000 residents in the District by adding the voice of a leading conservative who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), the committee's chairman, introduced legislation Tuesday that would temporarily expand the House by two members to 437 seats, adding one seat for a representative from the District and a fourth member from Utah. The House would revert to its present size after reapportionment for the 2012 election, and the District would retain its seat.
"In my judgment, Congress enjoys constitutional authority . . . to grant to District citizens the right to vote in congressional elections," Starr said. "Fundamental principles of representative democracy support Congress's extension of the franchise" in this way.
Starr based his reasoning on the "seat of government" clause in the U.S. Constitution, which gives Congress "power . . . to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever" over the District. He noted that the courts have recognized Congress's authority to treat the District as a state in interstate commerce regulation and interstate lawsuits.
His argument picked up on findings in a 2000 Supreme Court case brought by 57 District residents and the D.C. government, who argued that the Constitution gave residents the right to representation in Congress. Although federal courts have found no such right in the Constitution, they have indicated that Congress could enact a solution.
A similar argument was presented before the panel yesterday by lawyers with D.C. Appleseed Center, a nonpartisan public interest group in the District, and their counsel, Rick Bress, former assistant to the U.S. solicitor general and law clerk to current Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
The testimony came as supporters sought to build momentum for legislation that they concede could take years to advance. In lining up a roster of conservative experts, Davis said he hoped to reassure skeptical Republican House members and strict constitutionalists about the feasibility of the bill.
Separately, the House Government Reform Committee agreed to retain former Bush assistant U.S. attorney general Viet D. Dinh for $25,000 to provide a formal opinion. Davis expects to approach other leading Republicans, including Bob Dole, to promote the legislation at an event at the GOP convention in New York City in August. Last night, Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) addressed the District's need to have full voting rights in Congress at a fundraiser he hosted at the Palm Restaurant for the Rev. Al Sharpton.
Williams told the gathering of about 25 that Sharpton had fueled the debate for statehood during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. "He speaks to voting rights all over the country," Williams said.
Sharpton said he intends to trumpet the issue of D.C. statehood during his speech in July at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. He called it a "scar" on democracy in this country.
"I don't know how we can go to foreign shores talking about democracy as long as we can't vote right in our nation's capital," Sharpton said. "It's a civil rights issue."
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Senate Rejects Request for Abuse Documents
By Helen Dewar and Dan Morgan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A624-2004Jun23.html
The Republican-controlled Senate last night derailed a Democratic demand for the release of more documents dealing with abuse of foreign prisoners as sharp debate erupted on Capitol Hill over the Bush administration's policies and practices on the use of torture.
On a largely party-line vote of 50 to 46, the Senate refused to include the Democratic proposal in the $447.2 billion defense authorization bill for next year, which was on track for Senate approval later in the evening.
A day after the White House released hundreds of pages of documents and repudiated a Justice Department memo suggesting that torture might be justified in interrogating terrorism suspects, several top Republicans rose to the administration's defense and denounced the Democratic demand as election-year politics.
But Democrats said documents released so far, including three of the 23 demanded earlier by Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, did not go far enough in answering questions about administration policies.
"We're being stonewalled," said Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). "I think it raises questions about the integrity of this administration. I think they have got to be open and honest with the American people so we can put this shameful chapter of Abu Ghraib behind us," he added, referring to abuses of detainees at the U.S.-run prison in Iraq.
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) accused the White House of orchestrating "a cover-up" on the issue.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), said: "These documents raise more questions than they answer." Arguing in defense of the administration, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), also a member of the judiciary panel, said the release of all documents dealing with U.S. interrogation techniques would "provide a road map to our enemies" and endanger national security. He described the Democratic move to force disclosure of more documents as "a political ploy to try to score points in an election year."
Full transparency does not always serve the country's best interests, "especially when it involves lives, especially when it involves our young people overseas," said Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah).On the final vote, all Republicans voted against the proposal, while all Democrats except Zell Miller (Ga.) supported it.
Airing of the documents also reverberated in the House, where a key Republican called on the Justice Department to investigate "circumstances surrounding" an Aug. 1, 2002, memo that appeared to provide legal grounds for torture. Writing to the department's inspector general on Monday, Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who chairs the appropriations subcommittee that drafts the Justice Department budget, said the memo "provided legal justifications for the U.S. government to commit cruel, inhumane and degrading acts -- including torture -- on prisoners in U.S. custody."
Wolf said he was also asking the department's Office of Professional Responsibility to look into the way the August 2002 memo was drafted matter and comment on the legal ramifications.
Yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee tacked language onto the 2005 Justice Department spending bill prohibiting any department official or contractor from providing legal advice that could support or justify use of torture. Although the provision was offered by a Democrat, Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), committee Republicans unanimously adopted it.
In another bipartisan move, the committee also approved nonbinding language calling for the Justice Department to submit a report to Congress within 30 days of enactment laying out all internal documents that condoned or permitted actions in violation of international treaties on torture and the handling of wartime detainees.
The Senate GOP "talking points," prepared by the Senate Republican Policy Committee, cautioned that disclosure of interrogation can be dangerous and defended disclosures the administration has already made.
"Because of an out-of-control media and widespread hysteria, the White House and Pentagon have been forced to reveal secret interrogation techniques just to prove our men and women in uniform aren't torturers and murders," said one of the suggested arguments. "The forced disclosure will now complicate efforts to get information from terrorists who will train to withstand these techniques," said another. "It's high past time we remember who [our] enemies are," said a third.
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Democracy Itself is in Grave Danger
June 24, 2004
by Al Gore
American Constitution Society
Georgetown University Law Center
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0624-15.htm
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/WO0406/S00303.htm
Remarks as prepared
When we Americans first began, our biggest danger was clearly in view: we knew from the bitter experience with King George III that the most serious threat to democracy is usually the accumulation of too much power in the hands of an executive, whether he be a king or a president. Our ingrained American distrust of concentrated power has very little to do with the character or persona of the individual who wields that power. It is the power itself that must be constrained, checked, dispersed and carefully balanced, in order to ensure the survival of freedom. In addition, our founders taught us that public fear is the most dangerous enemy of democracy because under the right circumstances it can trigger the temptation of those who govern themselves to surrender that power to someone who promises strength and offers safety, security and freedom from fear.
It is an extraordinary blessing to live in a nation so carefully designed to protect individual liberty and safeguard self-governance and free communication. But if George Washington could see the current state of his generation's handiwork and assess the quality of our generation's stewardship at the beginning of this 21st century, what do you suppose he would think about the proposition that our current president claims the unilateral right to arrest and imprison American citizens indefinitely without giving them the right to see a lawyer or inform their families of their whereabouts, and without the necessity of even charging them with any crime. All that is necessary, according to our new president is that he -- the president -- label any citizen an "unlawful enemy combatant," and that will be sufficient to justify taking away that citizen's liberty -- even for the rest of his life, if the president so chooses. And there is no appeal.
What would Thomas Jefferson think of the curious and discredited argument from our Justice Department that the president may authorize what plainly amounts to the torture of prisoners -- and that any law or treaty which attempts to constrain his treatment of prisoners in time of war is itself a violation of the constitution our founders put together.
What would Benjamin Franklin think of President Bush's assertion that he has the inherent power -- even without a declaration of war by the Congress -- to launch an invasion of any nation on Earth, at any time he chooses, for any reason he wishes, even if that nation poses no imminent threat to the United States.
How long would it take James Madison to dispose of our current president's recent claim, in Department of Justice legal opinions, that he is no longer subject to the rule of law so long as he is acting in his role as commander in chief.
I think it is safe to say that our founders would be genuinely concerned about these recent developments in American democracy and that they would feel that we are now facing a clear and present danger that has the potential to threaten the future of the American experiment.
Shouldn't we be equally concerned? And shouldn't we ask ourselves how we have come to this point?
Even though we are now attuned to orange alerts and the potential for terrorist attacks, our founders would almost certainly caution us that the biggest threat to the future of the America we love is still the endemic challenge that democracies have always faced whenever they have appeared in history -- a challenge rooted in the inherent difficulty of self-governance and the vulnerability to fear that is part of human nature. Again, specifically, the biggest threat to America is that we Americans will acquiesce in the slow and steady accumulation of too much power in the hands of one person.
Having painstakingly created the intricate design of America, our founders knew intimately both its strengths and weaknesses, and during their debates they not only identified the accumulation of power in the hands of the executive as the long-term threat which they considered to be the most serious, but they also worried aloud about one specific scenario in which this threat might become particularly potent -- that is, when war transformed America's president into our commander in chief, they worried that his suddenly increased power might somehow spill over its normal constitutional boundaries and upset the delicate checks and balances they deemed so crucial to the maintenance of liberty.
That is precisely why they took extra care to parse the war powers in the Constitution, assigning the conduct of war and command of the troops to the president, but retaining for the Congress the crucial power of deciding whether or not, and when, our nation might decide to go war.
Indeed, this limitation on the power of the executive to make war was seen as crucially important. James Madison wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, "The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature."
In more recent decades, the emergence of new weapons that virtually eliminate the period of time between the decision to go to war and the waging of war have naturally led to a reconsideration of the exact nature of the executive's war-making power. But the practicalities of modern warfare which necessarily increase the war powers of the president at the expense of Congress do not render moot the concerns our founders had so long ago that the making of war by the president -- when added to his other powers -- carries with it the potential for unbalancing the careful design of our Constitution, and in the process, threatening our liberty.
They were greatly influenced -- far more than we can imagine -- by a careful reading of the history and human dramas surrounding the democracies of ancient Greece and the Roman republic. They knew, for example, that democracy disappeared in Rome when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in violation of the Senate's long prohibition against a returning general entering the city while still in command of military forces. Though the Senate lingered in form and was humored for decades, when Caesar impoliticly combined his military commander role with his chief executive role, the Senate -- and with it the Republic -- withered away. And then for all intents and purposes, the great dream of democracy disappeared from the face of the Earth for 17 centuries, until its rebirth in our land.
Symbolically, President Bush has been attempting to conflate his commander in chief role and his head of government role to maximize the power people are eager to give those who promise to defend them against active threats. But as he does so, we are witnessing some serious erosion of the checks and balances that have always maintained a healthy democracy in America.
In Justice Jackson's famous concurring opinion in the Youngstown Steel case in the 1950s, the single most important Supreme Court case on the subject of what powers are inherent to the commander in chief in a time of war, he wrote, "The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercised by George III, and the description of its evils in the declaration of independence leads me to doubt that they created their new Executive in their image ... and if we seek instruction from our own times, we can match it only from the Executive governments we disparagingly describe as totalitarian."
I am convinced that our founders would counsel us today that the greatest challenge facing our republic is not terrorism but how we react to terrorism, and not war, but how we manage our fears and achieve security without losing our freedom. I am also convinced that they would warn us that democracy itself is in grave danger if we allow any president to use his role as commander in chief to rupture the careful balance between the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of government. Our current president has gone to war and has come back into "the city" and declared that our nation is now in a permanent state of war, which he says justifies his reinterpretation of the Constitution in ways that increase his personal power at the expense of Congress, the courts, and every individual citizen.
We must surrender some of our traditional American freedoms, he tells us, so that he may have sufficient power to protect us against those who would do us harm. Public fear remains at an unusually high level almost three years after we were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. In response to those devastating attacks, the president properly assumed his role as commander in chief and directed a military invasion of the land in which our attackers built their training camps, were harbored and planned their assault. But just as the tide of battle was shifting decisively in our favor, the commander in chief made a controversial decision to divert a major portion of our army to invade another country that, according to the best evidence compiled in a new, exhaustive, bipartisan study, posed no imminent threat to us and had nothing to do with the attack against us.
As the main body of our troops were redeployed for the new invasion, those who organized the attacks against us escaped and many of them are still at large. Indeed, their overall numbers seem to have grown considerably because our invasion of the country that did not pose any imminent threat to us was perceived in their part of the world as a gross injustice, and the way in which we have conducted that war further fueled a sense of rage against the United States in those lands and, according to several studies, has stimulated a wave of new recruits for the terrorist group that attacked us and still wishes us harm.
A little over a year ago, when we launched the war against this second country, Iraq, President Bush repeatedly gave our people the clear impression that Iraq was an ally and partner to the terrorist group that attacked us, al-Qaida, and not only provided a geographic base for them but was also close to providing them weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear bombs. But now the extensive independent investigation by the bipartisan commission formed to study the 9/11 attacks has just reported that there was no meaningful relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida of any kind. And, of course, over the course of this past year we had previously found out that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So now, the president and the vice president are arguing with this commission, and they are insisting that the commission is wrong and they are right, and that there actually was a working cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida.
The problem for the president is that he doesn't have any credible evidence to support his claim, and yet, in spite of that, he persists in making that claim vigorously. So I would like to pause for a moment to address the curious question of why President Bush continues to make this claim that most people know is wrong. And I think it's particularly important because it is closely connected to the questions of constitutional power with which I began this speech, and will profoundly affect how that power is distributed among our three branches of government.
To begin with, our founders wouldn't be the least bit surprised at what the modern public opinion polls all tell us about why it's so important particularly for President Bush to keep the American people from discovering that what he told them about the linkage between Iraq and al-Qaida isn't true. Among these Americans who still believe there is a linkage, there remains very strong support for the president's decision to invade Iraq. But among those who accept the commission's detailed finding that there is no connection, support for the war in Iraq dries up pretty quickly.
And that's understandable, because if Iraq had nothing to do with the attack or the organization that attacked us, then that means the president took us to war when he didn't have to. Almost 900 of our soldiers have been killed, and almost 5,000 have been wounded.
Thus, for all these reasons, President Bush and Vice President Cheney have decided to fight to the rhetorical death over whether or not there's a meaningful connection between Iraq and al-Qaida. They think that if they lose that argument and people see the truth, then they'll not only lose support for the controversial decision to go to war, but also lose some of the new power they've picked up from the Congress and the courts, and face harsh political consequences at the hands of the American people. As a result, President Bush is now intentionally misleading the American people by continuing to aggressively and brazenly assert a linkage between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein.
If he is not lying, if they genuinely believe that, that makes them unfit in battle with al-Qaida. If they believe these flimsy scraps, then who would want them in charge? Are they too dishonest or too gullible? Take your pick.
But the truth is gradually emerging in spite of the president's determined dissembling. Listen, for example, to this editorial from the Financial Times: "There was nothing intrinsically absurd about the WMD fears, or ignoble about the opposition to Saddam's tyranny -- however late Washington developed this. The purported link between Baghdad and al-Qaida, by contrast, was never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the region. It was and is nonsense."
Of course the first rationale presented for the war was to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. Then the rationale was to liberate Iraqis and the Middle East from tyranny, but our troops were not greeted with the promised flowers and are now viewed as an occupying force by 92 percent of Iraqis, while only 2 percent see them as liberators.
But right from the start, beginning very soon after the attacks of 9/11, President Bush made a decision to start mentioning Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in the same breath in a cynical mantra designed to fuse them together as one in the public's mind. He repeatedly used this device in a highly disciplined manner to create a false impression in the minds of the American people that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11. Usually he was pretty tricky in his exact wording. Indeed, Bush's consistent and careful artifice is itself evidence that he knew full well that he was telling an artful and important lie -- visibly circumnavigating the truth over and over again as if he had practiced how to avoid encountering the truth. But as I will document in a few moments, he and Vice President Cheney also sometimes departed from their tricky wording and resorted to statements were clearly outright falsehoods. In any case, by the time he was done, public opinion polls showed that fully 70 percent of the American people had gotten the message he wanted them to get, and had been convinced that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
The myth that Iraq and al-Qaida were working together was no accident -- the president and vice president deliberately ignored warnings before the war from international intelligence services, the CIA, and their own Pentagon that the claim was false. Europe's top terrorism investigator said in 2002, "We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and al-Qaida. If there were such links, we would have found them. But we have found no serious connections whatsoever." A classified October 2002 CIA report given to the White House directly undercut the Iraq-al-Qaida claim. Top officials in the Pentagon told reporters in 2002 that the rhetoric being used by President Bush and Vice President Cheney was "an exaggeration."
And at least some honest voices within the president's own party admitted as such. Sen. Chuck Hagel, a decorated war hero who sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, said point blank, "Saddam is not in league with al-Qaida ... I have not seen any intelligence that would lead me to connect Saddam Hussein with al-Qaida."
But those voices did not stop the deliberate campaign to mislead America. Over the course of a year, the president and vice president used carefully crafted language to scare Americans into believing there was an imminent threat from an Iraq-armed al-Qaida.
In the fall of 2002, the President told the country "You can't distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam" and that the "true threat facing our country is an al-Qaida-type network trained and armed by Saddam." At the same time, Vice President Cheney was repeating his claim that "there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government."
By the Spring, Secretary of State Powell was in front of the United Nations claiming a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network."
But after the invasion, no ties were found. In June of 2003, the United Nations Security Council's al-Qaida monitoring agency told reporters his extensive investigation had found no evidence linking the Iraqi regime to al-Qaida. By August, three former Bush administration national security and intelligence officials admitted that the evidence used to make the Iraq-al-Qaida claim was "tenuous, exaggerated and often at odds with the conclusion of key intelligence agencies." And earlier this year, Knight-Ridder newspapers reported "Senior U.S. officials now say there never was any evidence" of a connection.
So when the bipartisan 9/11 commission issued its report finding "no credible evidence" of an Iraq-al-Qaida connection, it should not have caught the White House off guard. Yet instead of the candor Americans need and deserve from their leaders, there have been more denials and more insistence without evidence. Vice President Cheney insisted even this week that "there clearly was a relationship" and that there is "overwhelming evidence." Even more shocking, Cheney offered this disgraceful question: "Was Iraq involved with al-Qaida in the attack on 9/11? We don't know." He then claimed that he "probably" had more information than the commission, but has so far refused to provide anything to the commission other than more insults.
The President was even more brazen. He dismissed all questions about his statements by saying "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida." He provided no evidence.
Friends of the administration tried mightily to rehabilitate their cherished but shattered linkage. John Lehman, one of the Republicans on the commission, offered what sounded like new evidence that a Saddam henchman had attended an al-Qaida meeting. But within hours, the commissions files yielded definitive evidence that it was another man with a similar name -- ironically capturing the near-miss quality of Bush's entire symbolic argument.
They have such an overwhelming political interest in sustaining the belief in the minds of the American people that Hussein was in partnership with bin Laden that they dare not admit the truth lest they look like complete fools for launching our country into a reckless, discretionary war against a nation that posed no immediate threat to us whatsoever. But the damage they have done to our country is not limited to misallocation of military economic political resources. Whenever a chief executive spends prodigious amounts of energy convincing people of lies, he damages the fabric of democracy, and the belief in the fundamental integrity of our self-government.
That creates a need for control over the flood of bad news, bad policies and bad decisions also explains their striking attempts to control news coverage.
To take the most recent example, Vice President Cheney was clearly ready to do battle with the news media when he went on CNBC earlier this week to attack news coverage of the 9/11 commission's conclusion that Iraq did not work with al-Qaida. He lashed out at the New York Times for having the nerve to print a headline saying the 9/11 commission "finds no Qaeda-Iraq Tie" -- a clear statement of the obvious -- and said there is no "fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the commission said." He tried to deny that he had personally been responsible for helping to create the false impression of linkage between al-Qaida and Iraq.
Ironically, his interview ended up being fodder for "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." Stewart played Cheney's outright denial that he had ever said that representatives of al-Qaida and Iraqi intelligence met in Prague. Then Stewart froze Cheney's image and played the exact video clip in which Cheney had indeed directly claimed linkage between the two, catching him on videotape in a lie. At that point Stewart said, addressing himself to Cheney's frozen image on the television screen, "It's my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire."
Dan Rather says that post-9/11 patriotism has stifled journalists from asking government officials "the toughest of the tough questions." Rather went so far as to compare administration efforts to intimidate the press to "necklacing" in apartheid South Africa, while acknowledging it as "an obscene comparison." "The fear is that you will be necklaced here (in the U.S.), you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck," Rather explained. It was CBS, remember, that withheld the Abu Ghraib photographs from the American people for two weeks at the request of the Bush administration.
Donald Rumsfeld has said that criticism of the administration's policy "makes it complicated and more difficult" to fight the war. CNN's Christiane Amanpour said on CNBC last September, "I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled. I'm sorry to say but certainly television, and perhaps to a certain extent my station, was intimidated by the aAdministration."
The administration works closely with a network of "rapid response" digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure reporters and their editors for "undermining support for our troops." Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, was one of the first journalists to regularly expose the president's consistent distortions of the facts. Krugman writes, "Let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative of the President ... you had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation.
Bush and Cheney are spreading purposeful confusion while punishing reporters who stand in the way. It is understandably difficult for reporters and journalistic institutions to resist this pressure, which, in the case of individual journalists, threatens their livelihoods, and in the case of the broadcasters can lead to other forms of economic retribution. But resist they must, because without a press able to report "without fear or favor" our democracy will disappear.
Recently, the media has engaged in some healthy self-criticism of the way it allowed the White House to mislead the public into war under false pretenses. We are dependent on the media, especially the broadcast media, to never let this happen again. We must help them resist this pressure for everyone's sake, or we risk other wrong-headed decisions based upon false and misleading impressions.
We are left with an unprecedented, high-intensity conflict every single day between the ideological illusions upon which this administration's policies have been based and the reality of the world in which the American people live their lives.
When you boil it all down to precisely what went wrong with the Bush Iraq policy, it is actually fairly simple: he adopted an ideologically driven view of Iraq that was tragically at odds with reality. Everything that has gone wrong is in one way or another the result of a spectacular and violent clash between the bundle of misconceptions that he gullibly consumed and the all-too-painful reality that our troops and contractors and diplomats and taxpayers have encountered. Of course, there have been several other collisions between President Bush's ideology and America's reality. To take the most prominent example, the transformation of a $5 trillion surplus into a $4 trillion deficit is in its own way just as spectacular a miscalculation as the Iraq war.
But there has been no more bizarre or troubling manifestation of how seriously off track this President's policies have taken America than the two profound shocks to our nation's conscience during the last month. First came the extremely disturbing pictures that document strange forms of physical and sexual abuse -- and even torture and murder -- by some of our soldiers against people they captured as prisoners in Iraq. And then, the second shock came just last week, with strange and perverted legal memoranda from inside the administration, which actually sought to justify torture and to somehow provide a legal rationale for bizarre and sadistic activities conducted in the name of the American people, which, according to any reasonable person, would be recognized as war crimes. In making their analysis, the administration lawyers concluded that the President, whenever he is acting in his role as commander in chief, is above and immune from the "rule of law." At least we don't have to guess what our founders would have to say about this bizarre and un-American theory.
By the middle of this week, the uproar caused by the disclosure of this legal analysis had forced the administration to claim they were throwing the memo out and it was, "irrelevant and overbroad." But no one in the administration has said that the reasoning was wrong. And in fact, a DOJ spokesman says they stand by the tortured definition of torture. In addition the broad analysis regarding the commander-in-chief powers has not been disavowed. And the view of the memo -- that it was within commander-in-chief power to order any interrogation techniques necessary to extract information -- most certainly contributed to the atmosphere that led to the atrocities committed against the Iraqis at Abu Ghraib. We also know that President Bush rewarded the principle author of this legal monstrosity with a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals. President Bush, meanwhile, continues to place the blame for the horrific consequences of his morally obtuse policies on the young privates and corporals and sergeants who may well be culpable as individuals for their actions, but who were certainly not responsible for the policies which set up the Bush Gulag and led to America's strategic catastrophe in Iraq.
I call on the administration to disclose all its interrogation policies, including those used by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and those employed by the CIA at its secret detention centers outside the U.S., as well as all the analyses related to the adoption of those policies.
The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another. But the people who paid the price have been the U.S. soldiers trapped over there and the Iraqis in prison. The top-heavy focus on dominance as a goal for the U.S. role in the world is exactly paralleled in their aspiration for the role of the president to be completely dominant in the constitutional system. Our founders understood even better than Lord Acton the inner meaning of his aphorism that power corrupts and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. The goal of dominance necessitates a focus on power. Ironically, all of their didactic messages about how democracies don't invade other nations fell on their own deaf ears. The pursuit of dominance in foreign and strategic policy led the bush administration to ignore the United nations, do serious damage to our most alliances in the world, violate international law and risk the hatred of the rest of the world. The seductive exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers under the constitution in a way that would have been the worst nightmare of our framers.
And the kind of unilateral power he imagines is fool's gold in any case. Just as its pursuit in Mesopotamia has led to tragic consequences for our soldiers, the Iraqi people, our alliances, everything we think is important, in the same way the pursuit of a new interpretation of the presidency that weakens the Congress, courts and civil society is not good for either the presidency or the rest of the nation.
If the Congress becomes an enfeebled enabler to the executive, and the courts become known for political calculations in their decisions, then the country suffers. The kinds of unnatural, undemocratic activities in which this administration has engaged, in order to aggrandize power, have included censorship of scientific reports, manipulation of budgetary statistics, silencing dissent, and ignoring intelligence. Although there have been other efforts by other presidents to encroach on the legitimate prerogatives of Congress and courts, there has never been this kind of systematic abuse of the truth and institutionalization of dishonesty as a routine part of the policy process.
Two hundred and twenty years ago, John Adams wrote, in describing one of America's most basic founding principles, "The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them ... to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men."
The last time we had a president who had the idea that he was above the law was when Richard Nixon told an interviewer, "When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal ... If the president, for example, approves something, approves an action because of national security, or, in this case, because of a threat to internal peace and order, of significant order, then the president's decision in this instance is one that enables those who carry it out to carry it out without violating the law."
Fortunately for our country, Nixon was forced to resign as president before he could implement his outlandish interpretation of the Constitution, but not before his defiance of the Congress and the courts created a serious constitutional crisis.
The two top Justice Department officials under President Nixon, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus, turned out to be men of great integrity, and even though they were loyal Republicans, they were more loyal to the Constitution and resigned on principle rather than implement what they saw as abuses of power by Nixon. Then Congress, also on a bipartisan basis, bravely resisted Nixon's abuse of power and launched impeachment proceedings.
In some ways, our current president is actually claiming significantly more extra-constitutional power, vis-à-vis Congress and the courts, than Nixon did. For example, Nixon never claimed that he could imprison American citizens indefinitely without charging them with a crime and without letting them see a lawyer or notify their families. And this time, the attorney general, John Ashcroft, is hardly the kind of man who would resign on principle to impede an abuse of power. In fact, whenever there is an opportunity to abuse power in this administration, Ashcroft seems to be leading the charge. And it is Ashcroft who picked the staff lawyers at Justice responsible for the embarrassing memos justifying and enabling torture.
Moreover, in sharp contrast to the courageous 93rd Congress that saved the country from Richard Nixon's sinister abuses, the current Congress has virtually abdicated its constitutional role to serve as an independent and coequal branch of government.
Instead, this Republican-led Congress is content, for the most part, to take orders from the president on what they vote for and what they don't vote for. The Republican leaders of the House and Senate have even started blocking Democrats from attending conference committee meetings, where legislation takes its final form, and instead, they let the president's staff come to the meetings and write key parts of the laws for them. (Come to think of it, the decline and lack of independence shown by this Congress would shock our founders more than anything else, because they believed that the power of the Congress was the most important check and balance against the unhealthy exercise of too much power by the Executive branch.)
This administration has not been content just to reduce the Congress to subservience. It has also engaged in unprecedented secrecy, denying the American people access to crucial information with which they might hold government officials accountable for their actions, and a systematic effort to manipulate and intimidate the media into presenting a more favorable image of the administration to the American people.
Listen to what U.S. News and World Report has to say about their secrecy: "The Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government -- cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters."
Here are just a few examples, and for each one, you have to ask, what are they hiding, and why are they hiding it?
More than 6,000 documents have been removed by the Bush administration from governmental Web sites. To cite only one example, a document on the EPA Web site giving citizens crucial information on how to identify chemical hazards to their families. Some have speculated that the principle threat to the Bush administration is a threat by the chemical hazards if the information remains available to American citizens.
To head off complaints from our nation's governors over how much they receive under federal programs, the Bush administration simply stopped printing the primary state budget report.
To muddy the clear consensus of the scientific community on global warming, the White House directed major changes and deletions to an EPA report that were so egregious that the agency said it was too embarrassed to use the language.
They've kept hidden from view Cheney's ultra-secret energy task force. They have fought a pitched battle in the courts for more than three years to continue denying the American people the ability to know which special interests and lobbyists advised with Vice President Cheney on the design of the new laws.
And when mass layoffs became too embarrassing they simply stopped publishing the regular layoff report that economists and others have been receiving for decades. For this administration, the truth hurts, when the truth is available to the American people. They find bliss in the ignorance of the people. What are they hiding, and why are they hiding it?
In the end, for this administration, it is all about power. This lie about the invented connection between al-Qaida and Iraq was and is the key to justifying the current ongoing constitutional power grab by the president. So long as their big flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the public's mind, President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for himself the power to make war on his whim. He will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil liberties -- again on his personal discretion -- and he will continue to intimidate the press and thereby distort the political reality experienced by the American people during his bid for re-election.
War is lawful violence, but even in its midst we acknowledge the need for rules. We know that in our wars there have been descents from these standards, often the result of spontaneous anger arising out of the passion of battle. But we have never before, to my knowledge, had a situation in which the framework for this kind of violence has been created by the president, nor have we had a situation where these things were mandated by directives signed by the secretary of defense, as it is alleged, and supported by the national security advisor.
Always before, we could look to the chief executive as the point from which redress would come and law be upheld. That was one of the great prides of our country: humane leadership, faithful to the law. What we have now, however, is the result of decisions taken by a president and an administration for whom the best law is NO law, so long as law threatens to constrain their political will. And where the constraints of law cannot be prevented or eliminated, then they maneuver it to be weakened by evasion, by delay, by hair-splitting, by obstruction, and by failure to enforce on the part of those sworn to uphold the law.
In these circumstances, we need investigation of the facts under oath, and in the face of penalties for evasion and perjury. We need investigation by an aroused Congress whose bipartisan members know they stand before the judgment of history. We cannot depend upon a debased Department of Justice given over to the hands of zealots. "Congressional oversight" and "special prosecution" are words that should hang in the air. If our honor as a nation is to be restored, it is not by allowing the mighty to shield themselves by bringing the law to bear against their pawns: it is by bringing the law to bear against the mighty themselves. Our dignity and honor as a nation never came from our perfection as a society or as a people: it came from the belief that in the end, this was a country which would pursue justice as the compass pursues the pole: that although we might deviate, we would return and find our path. This is what we must now do.
-------- ACTIVISTS
'Fahrenheit 9/11' Is a Red-Hot Ticket
At the Film's U.S. Premiere, the White House Takes the Heat
By Hanna Rosin and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A849-2004Jun23?language=printer
The White House preemptively gave the movie two thumbs down: "Outrageously false," said communications director Dan Bartlett, when he was asked about some of its allegations.
Sizzling! countered Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), who plans a teach-in at a Seattle theater to tap into the "anger brewing against this administration."
The director, Michael Moore, predicted that those on the fence regarding his new documentary will be off it and on his side when the last credits roll.
A group called Move America Forward has begun a letter-writing campaign asking theaters not to show "Michael Moore's horrible anti-American movie."
All this before "Fahrenheit 9/11" has even officially opened.
"I can't think of any precedent for it in a presidential campaign," says Frances Lee, a political science professor at Case Western Reserve University. "As a marketing phenomenon it seems to echo 'The Passion [of the Christ]': intense enthusiasm, organized groups buying tickets with proselytizing zeal, the sense that one is getting something that corporate America wanted to stifle."
The last time a cultural moment injected itself into the race for president was in 1992, with then-candidate Bill Clinton's scolding of rapper Sister Souljah. But when "Fahrenheit 9/11" opens tomorrow in nearly 900 theaters nationwide -- a record for a documentary film release -- it will be received like a two-hour campaign commercial aimed at President Bush and his war on terrorism.
"I did not set out to make a political film," Moore has said in several TV interviews. "The art of this, the cinema, comes before the politics."
"It's not a personal attack on the Bush family?" asked NBC's Matt Lauer last week.
"Oh yeah, it's that. If you'd have asked the question that way," replied Moore.
Moore, whose previous films took on General Motors and corporate America and the firearms industry, has borrowed all the techniques of modern political campaigns to promote this one. He hired master political operative Chris Lehane, a former adviser to Al Gore and Wesley Clark, to do publicity for the movie. He's lined up the equivalent of endorsements, from former New York governor Mario Cuomo, who says he'll do "anything possible to get this picture advanced," to labor activists, who "are anticipating the release of this movie as eagerly as evangelicals were anticipating the release of Mel Gibson's movie," says a spokesman for the California Labor Federation.
Last night's U.S. premiere at the Uptown Theatre in Cleveland Park brought Moore and his wife, Kathleen Glynn, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax, the movie's distributor, and the city's liberal establishment, including a dozen senators and a large contingent from the Congressional Black Caucus.
So strong is the appearance of a campaign that David Bossie, president of Citizens United, accuses Moore of violating federal elections laws. A movie? Violating election laws? "Moore has publicly indicated his goal is to impact this election," Bossie said.
Since Bartlett made his comments about the movie in an interview with the New York Times last month, the White House and Bush campaign spokesmen have said little about the film, conscious in hindsight that they gave former counterterrorism official Richard A. Clarke publicity a publisher couldn't buy when they attacked his book, "Against All Enemies," this spring.
"The American people can tell the difference between fact and fiction," says campaign spokesman Terry Holt. "This election is about serious issues, and I don't think most American voters consider Michael Moore a serious analyst of American politics."
Privately, however, some White House officials say they are in a bind about how to respond. Americans have always formed impressions of public figures from the movies; think Oliver Stone's "JFK," Spike Lee's "Malcolm X," Charlton Heston's portrayal of Moses. This time is different because the subject is living, unfolding history, four months before an election.
The documentary includes endless shots of Bush golfing, taking vacations and shaking hands with Saudi oil tycoons at fancy hotels. Moore revives the old pre-Iraq war stereotype of Bush as a hapless, inarticulate bungler but with a twist; Bush is portrayed as lazy, a failure of will and not genes.
"It's so easy to say that Bush is an idiot," Moore said in an interview yesterday. "But I don't say it. You just let his own words and his own pictures do it."
In one already infamous scene, the president is shown on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just after an aide whispers to him that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center. He's sitting before an elementary school class, reading "My Pet Goat." He continues to sit with the children as seven minutes tick by, his expression tense but inscrutable.
"Was he wondering if maybe he should have showed up to work more often?" Moore's voice-over asks.
This may be a cheap shot, exaggerated, distorted, taken out of context, as the president's defenders argue. But even so, an image like this can stick. For just those reasons, one faction within the Bush camp argued for the Richard Clarke treatment -- blitzing the airwaves with administration officials to offer repetitive, factual-sounding point-by-point rebuttals.
But that faction lost. If a reporter asks President Bush about the movie, he plans to respond jokingly, one of his strategists said. "To take it on would give it too much credibility," the strategist said. "He's not going to get into a debate himself with this little filmmaker guy."
Moore doesn't think the strategy will work. "There's nothing the White House can do about it now," he said. "They're not going to be able to ignore it, because there's going to be too much conversation about it."
For their part, neither Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, nor anyone in his campaign has said anything about the movie out of concern that "we will get stuck with all that Michael Moore baggage," said one senior adviser.
At any rate, Moore hardly spares mainstream Democrats. He calls the party "weak-kneed and wimpy," and the movie shows Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who was at the Uptown last night, and former presidential candidate Richard Gephardt sitting on stools voicing their approval for the war.
"The movie poses a conundrum for John Kerry," Moore said. "You can't watch the last hour of this movie and leave the theater and not at least pose the question to him: How could you have voted for this war?"
In this latest movie Moore has been praised for having matured as a filmmaker, but his worldview hasn't changed much since "Roger and Me" -- history can be explained by tracing connections between rich people and their friends.
Much of the factual squabbling so far between Bush and Moore supporters involve the movie's portrayal of business relationships between the Bush and bin Laden families. Issues include whether Bush approved planes to carry Saudis, including bin Ladens, out of the country right after Sept. 11, 2001, before they could be interviewed by the FBI and whether Salem bin Laden invested in Bush's Texas oil company. With his rapid editing, racing from fact to fact, Moore leaves the impression that Bush and his cronies stood to benefit not just from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but from Sept. 11.
But both Clarke and the 9/11 Commission have said officials did nothing wrong by chartering those flights. And as for the oil investment: "Even if it happened, its significance is nothing," says Peter Bergen, author of "Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden." "Salem couldn't be more different than Osama bin Laden. He loved the U.S. He spent a lot of time in Houston. He played guitar. He is the mirror image of Osama."
Another controversy arose over the portrayal of Rep. Mark Kennedy (R-Minn.) in the trailer, and later in the movie. In a throwback to his "Roger and Me" days, Moore went to Capitol Hill and stuck a microphone in the face of various congressmen to ask them whether they would help sign up their children to fight in Iraq. Most knew to duck Moore, but Kennedy was polite enough to stop.
The movie shows Kennedy looking trapped and afraid. But in reality, he explained to Moore that he has a nephew serving in Afghanistan and he would like to help in the recruiting effort, particularly for those congressmen who supported the war.
When Kennedy complained about his portrayal, Moore responded with his trademark combination of literal-mindedness and aggression. On his Web site Moore prints the exchange between him and Kennedy but still says the film's portrayal is factually accurate. He then badgers Kennedy for failing to live up to his promise and actually ask members of Congress to sign up their kin.
One touchy issue that hasn't yet gotten much notice is over Moore's portrayal of U.S. troops. In the movie they badger civilians, women and children included. They taunt prisoners. They listen to a rock song, "Fire Water Burn," as Iraq burns behind them.
Paul Rieckhoff fought in Iraq for a year and came back to start the Web site Operation Truth to tell Americans that war is not some video game. MoveOn touted him as a spokesman because he admires Moore and wanted to see the movie.
"It's thought-provoking. Sensational. Will really energize conversation," he said after he saw it. "It's obviously slanted in one way, so if you take it as your only source of information that would be pretty narrow. But some people will love it, some will hate it."
But, Rieckhoff added, "I'm ticked off at the way he portrays soldiers. It really makes them look stupid, like these testosterone-enraged mindless killers, like a bunch of barbarians. I'm going to tell him that."
To the young veterans of the Howard Dean campaign, graduates of Rock the Vote and an older generation of Bush haters who are well aware of his flaws, Moore still carries the hope of reaching out to a larger audience.
Moore is not a registered Democrat; he styles himself as more of a populist. Although he lives on New York's Upper West Side now, his heart is in Flint, Mich., he always says, where he grew up as the son of an autoworker.
"Yes, he's a celebrity of the left, but he can also reach up and appeal to a broad cross section of Americans," says Adam Ruben, field director for MoveOn PAC, which is organizing voter registration drives around theaters showing the movie. "That's what makes this film more important."
But Moore says he doesn't mind preaching to the choir.
"I'm very happy to speak to them because that choir has been asleep," he says. "Many of them have turned into cynics who have just decided to sit on the sidelines. If I can give them a song to sing as they leave the theater and become active once again, that's a good thing."
At a party at an Adams Morgan restaurant after the premiere, Moore called the reception in Washington "unbelievable."
"It's a great audience because they get all the inside, wonky stuff. . . . You don't have to explain Arbusto or Harkin Energy or what the Securities and Exchange Commission does."
Moore spent the night in a back corner booth at the Left Bank, drinking wine and eating sushi with his wife and friends, gratified, he said, that people here "got it."
Staff writer Richard Leiby contributed to this report.
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In S. Korea, Grief Mixes With Anger
Close U.S. Ties Blamed For Troop Deployment
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 24, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A810-2004Jun23.html
SEOUL, June 23 -- The thump of a Buddhist monk's drum echoed through the neon-laced avenues of central Seoul. The sound was a solemn soundtrack for hundreds of South Koreans offering sticks of traditional incense in protest and remembrance on Wednesday, a day after the beheading in Iraq of their countryman, Kim Sun Il.
But in a nation where most citizens are opposed to the government's involvement in Iraq, the anger was directed not only at the extremists who decapitated Kim, 33, a translator known mostly for his religious devotion and gentle manners. It also was focused on the long-standing U.S.-South Korean alliance, which many see at the core of the tragedy and which is polarizing this country of 48 million in a manner unseen since the Korean War.
Kim's captors executed him on Tuesday after the South Korean government rejected their demands to pull out of the U.S.-led effort in Iraq. The reaction to his death appears to further delineate a national schism between those in favor and those against the half-century-old friendship with the United States, while generating a fresh wave of anti-American sentiment.
"This was not our war. We are there out of responsibility to our alliance with the United States," said Park Eun Joo, 28, a human rights activist, who was weeping by an incense pyre and holding a sign demanding "South Korean Troops Out of Iraq."
"But the truth is the Iraqi people don't want us there -- it is that simple," she said. "Yes, I blame the militants for what happened. But I also blame George Bush for pressuring South Koreans to go against our will. Now, an innocent South Korean is dead."
Nearby on the sidewalk, however, Kim Bit Nari, 18, shouted at the protesters. "Sometimes a Korean has to die for his country!" she said. A music major at a local university, Kim expressed strong support for good relations with the United States: "Look, South Korea is a weak country; we just can't protect ourselves alone in this world."
South Korea dispatched 660 medical and engineering troops to Iraq last year, acting on a U.S. request. After months of delay, the Seoul government last week firmed up plans to send its main contingent of 3,000 troops -- a mobilization that will make the South Koreans the largest foreign force in Iraq after the United States and Britain.
Unlike other allies involved in Iraq, South Korea's leaders have not focused on the war in moral terms. Rather, the nation's participation has been pitched to a largely skeptical populace as a necessary evil. If South Korea sends troops to Iraq, the government has argued, the Bush administration is likely to moderate its position in dealing with North Korea. While the United States has taken a hard line on North Korea's illicit nuclear program, South Korean officials are aiming at rapprochement with Kim Jong Il's government in Pyongyang.
Many South Koreans still emphasize the importance of the U.S. alliance, forged in repelling the 1950 invasion from the North. Opponents of President Roh Moo Hyun view a warming to Pyongyang, and rising anti-Americanism here, as dangerous for the long-term security of South Korea.
South Koreans appeared in a state of shock over Kim's death. The news arrived at about 2 a.m., meaning the nation woke up to newspapers blaring headlines of false hope that his execution had been stayed. That hope was based on rumors circulating Tuesday that Kim's captors, a group said to be linked to al Qaeda, had delayed killing him.
As Roh stuck by his pledge to dispatch troops, lawmakers were demanding that the government clarify its handling of Kim's kidnapping. Statements by Kim's South Korean employers in Iraq -- which supplied food and clothing to the U.S. military -- indicated that U.S. authorities may have been aware of the kidnapping before South Korea's announcement last Friday that it would deploy its main contingent of troops in August.
The South Korean Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that Kim apparently was kidnapped at the end of May, rather than on June 17, as initially reported. The North American bureau of the Foreign Ministry, according to the semi-official Yonhap News Agency, learned about the kidnapping from CNN. Al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television channel, first broadcast a tape of the hostage on Sunday. [On Thursday, Roh ordered a full investigation into the case in response to new disclosures, the Reuters news agency reported.]
A bipartisan group of 50 South Korean lawmakers signed a petition on Wednesday calling for the government to "halt and reconsider the additional dispatch" of troops. Experts said the measure was unlikely to muster immediate support in the National Assembly, but legislators are set to vote in September on extending the deployment beyond this year.
"If the U.S. kept information from us because they feared the information might have a negative effect on the dispatch, then that was cowardice," said Song Young Gil, a legislator from the Uri Party allied to Roh. "No matter what the reasons were, it is nonsense that they expect us to be the third largest allied country to send troops, when they cannot provide trust to an ally nation. The U.S. has totally lost its credibility by this behavior in the eyes of the Korean public."
Special correspondent Joohee Cho contributed to this report.
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The Like-Minded Line Up for a 9/11 Film
June 24, 2004
By JOHN FILES
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/movies/24film.html
WASHINGTON, June 23 - Michael Moore brought his movie "Fahrenheit 9/11," and his crusade to unseat President Bush, to a movie theater just a couple of miles from the White House on Wednesday night.
With full Hollywood trappings - a red carpet, klieg lights and dozens of photographers - nearly 800 members of the capital's Democratic leadership turned out for the official premiere of the film, which opened on Wednesday here and in New York.
"This is where I wanted to have the main premiere because this is where the change has to take place,'' said Mr. Moore, dressed for the occasion in a black suit and gray sneakers. "I want this country back in the hands of the majority - the majority that did not vote for Mr. Bush."
Mr. Moore said he hoped the film might encourage people who had not voted in a presidential election before to do so this year.
"It's my personal aim that Bush is removed from the White House,'' he said. "But if the movie can inspire a few of the 50 percent of Americans who do not vote to get involved and be engaged then that is important."
The guest list, liberally sprinkled with members of Congress, political consultants and lobbyists, tipped decidedly to one side of the aisle. It included Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks; Paul Begala, a political adviser in the Clinton White House; Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, a former Clinton aide; Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader; and Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic national chairman.
Senator Bob Graham of Florida said, "There might be half of the Democratic Senate here."
Indeed, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films, in introducing the film, looked around the audience said, "I think they've done a wonderful job at bringing together a bipartisan audience."
The film focuses on the Iraq war and longstanding ties between the Bush family and prominent Saudis and on whether those ties clouded the president's judgment in recognizing warnings before the Sept. 11 attacks.
After spending $6 million to make the movie, the Walt Disney Company declined to distribute it because the company deemed the film too partisan. Amid the resulting furor, the movie took top prize at the Cannes International Film Festival in May, and Lions Gate, an independent studio, agreed this month to distribute it. (Miramax, a Disney division run by Mr. Weinstein and his brother, Bob, bought the film from Disney and arranged for its distribution in North America.)
For weeks before the premiere, both parties have been giving it their political spin. Republicans have said viewers will know enough to discount the film's anti-Bush stance. Democrats say it could tap into discontent with Mr. Bush's Iraq policy and help the campaign of Senator John Kerry, his expected Democratic challenger.
Mr. Moore said Wednesday night that he was bipartisan when it came to taking on those in seats of power.
"Democrats don't escape the lens in this film," Mr. Moore said. "And when the Democrats are back in power in this country, we'll refocus our lens on them."
While the Washington showing was billed as the official premiere of the movie, a Manhattan theater started showing the film at midnight Tuesday. About 200 people lined up for the midnight show and another screening that started later at Loews Village VII at Third Avenue and 11th Street. Nick Anderson, 22, said he was surprised to find tickets on sale for that showing.
"We wanted to see it as soon as possible," he said, standing outside the movie theater with a friend. "This is easier for people to understand than reading books, reading newspapers or watching C-Span."
After watching the movie, Mr. Anderson decided that it would be a great recruiting film. "I hope it makes a difference," he said, "and makes people get out and vote."
Katie Bachler, 22, said she lost interest in politics after the war in Iraq started; it was pointless to protest, she thought, because no one listened. But seeing the movie inspired her, she said.
"I think I might become more politically active," said Ms. Bachler, a recent graduate from Occidental College in Los Angeles. "This is a base for talking about world events. I hope there's new dialogue created."
Elaine Aradillas contributed reporting from New York for this article.
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