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NUCLEAR
Iran 'covered up nuclear spill'
'The State Boys Rebellion': A Ledger of Broken Arms
Humanity's near miss
Man who saved the world
Iran Vows to Resume Its Nuclear Program
UN nuclear chief urges Iran to reverse nuclear move
U.S. Raises Temperature in Nuke Dispute with Iran
Iran Won't Buckle to Pressure on Centrifuges
Israel Should Talk About Nuclear Arms - ElBaradei
North Korea's likely arsenal
N. Korea talks upbeat enough to prepare for a fourth round
Envoys seek solution to nuclear standoff
U.S. explores expanding missile defense system to Eastern Europe
Nyet saves world
MILITARY
Taliban Kill 16 Afghans Carrying Voter Cards
In Sudan, Death and Denial
Lockheed Martin Scuttles Titan Acquisition
New Iraqi police fight US troops who trained them
Biggest Task for U.S. General Is Training Iraqis to Fight Iraqis
U.S. Edicts Curb Power Of Iraq's Leadership
Clashes Engulf Center of Baqubah
Insurgency Leaves U.S. Forces Baffled
Looking at the Costs if Iraq Goes Up in Smoke
Israeli Raid Kills Six
7 Militants Die in Israeli Raid in West Bank
Israel Helicopter Fires Missiles in Gaza - Witnesses
Palestinians Blow Up Israeli Army Post in Gaza
Bush Meets With Leader of Turkey Ahead of NATO Summit
Israel ready to help in NATO security
Pakistan Premier Resigns, Replaced by General's Ally
Pakistani Premier Forced Out in Favor of Finance Minister
Cassini Set for 4 - Year Orbit of Saturn
CIA Puts Harsh Tactics On Hold
Report: CIA Halts Interrogation Tactics
Rumsfeld: More U.S. Troops for Iraq Not Essential
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Sentencing Decision's Reach Is Far and Wide
Ashcroft faces whistleblower secrets probe
Homeland Security, a Politicized Issue
In an Age of Terror, Safety Is Relative
Interest Grows in Blimps for U.S. Defense
Airport to Test Advance Security Checks
A New Terror Threat This holiday
Defining Torture: Russian Roulette, Yes. Mind-Altering Drugs, Maybe.
Aides Say Memo Backed Coercion for Qaeda Cases
Were Abu Ghraib abuses learned from Israel?
POLITICS
Allies' Rancor Over Iraq Is 'Over,' Bush Contends
One Group That's Not Polarized:
Movie Ads or Political Ads?
Kucinich pushing peace plank
ACTIVISTS
Democrats Find Relief Among Allies at 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
Amid Protests, Bush Sees Thaw in Europe
More Than 40,000 Protest Bush in Turkey
Tens of thousands protest Bush, NATO at Istanbul rally
Public reaction to Cassini taught NASA a lesson
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Iran 'covered up nuclear spill'
By Con Coughlin
27/06/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/27/wiran27.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/06/27/ixnewstop.html
Western intelligence officials are examining reports that Iran's Revolutionary Guards attempted to cover up a nuclear accident that occurred during the delivery of a secret shipment of weapons-grade uranium from North Korea.
The accident allegedly caused Teheran's new £260 million international airport to be sealed off by Revolutionary Guard commanders within hours of its official opening on May 9.
The first scheduled commercial landing at the airport - an Iran Air civilian flight from Dubai - was intercepted by two Iranian air force jets and diverted to Isfahan, 155 miles away, even though it was low on fuel. At the same time, trucks were placed across the runway to prevent other aircraft from landing.
The airliner's interception, which was ordered by the Revolutionary Guards, prompted an official complaint from Iran's Civil Aviation Organisation (CAO). "No regulation in the world permits threatening a passenger plane," it said in a statement.
Seven weeks later, the showpiece airport named after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution, is still closed. All commercial flights are required to use the capital's ageing Mehrabad complex.
At the time of the incident, Revolutionary Guard commanders claimed that Khomeini airport had been closed because of "security problems".
Iranian aviation officials, however, believe that Teheran wanted to cover up evidence of the previously unreported nuclear accident in 2002, linked to Iran's secret programme to build an atom bomb. Although the airport, 30 miles south of Teheran, was not ready to take commercial traffic until this spring, military flights have landed there for at least two years.
In December 2002, according to officials with access to the airport, a North Korean cargo jet delivering a consignment of nuclear technology, including some weapons-grade uranium, was being unloaded at night under military supervision. During the delivery, a container slipped and cracked on the Tarmac. All personnel in the vicinity were taken from the site and given thorough medical examinations.
Crews from the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI) wearing protective suits were brought in to clean up the spillage. The scientists worked at the site for several days, staying indoors during daylight and working only in darkness.
They later determined that the site had been completely decontaminated, and Revolutionary Guards allowed airport construction to resume, confident that they had concealed the incident from the outside world.
Their attitude changed, however, after inspectors working for the United Nations-backed International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) uncovered evidence in June 2003 that Iran had secretly enriched uranium to weapons grade at the Kalaye electric centrifuge plant, on the outskirts of Teheran. Iran had previously denied having the necessary technology.
The Kalaye revelations embarrassed Revolutionary Guards' commanders, who are responsible for protecting Iran's secret nuclear facilities. The findings prompted the IAEA to intensify pressure on Teheran for a full disclosure on the extent of Iran's nuclear programme, which Iranian officials continue to insist is being developed for purely peaceful purposes.
Iranian aviation officials, who cannot be named for their own security, believe that the Revolutionary Guards ordered the closure of Khomeini International Airport in case the IAEA inspectors detected deposits of enriched uranium. The airport will remain closed until Russian nuclear experts can examine the site of the spill and make sure that no traces of the illegal shipment remain.
A senior Western intelligence official said: "We are aware of the concerns being expressed by Iranian aviation experts and are trying to investigate them. The problem is that the Revolutionary Guards will not allow access to the airport to any foreign nationals, including UN inspectors."
Earlier this month the IAEA rebuked Iran over its failure to give a full account of its atomic programme as suspicions mounted that Iran is continuing with its efforts to build nuclear weapons.
Last week, American intelligence officials provided satellite evidence that they claimed showed a nuclear site at Lavizan Shiyan in Teheran. They said that it had been razed to remove evidence of research work that had been conducted there.
The airport closure reflects Iran's obsession with national security, which last week led to Revolutionary Guards seizing eight British servicemen patrolling the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran. The men were released after they were cleared of any wrongdoing.
----
'The State Boys Rebellion': A Ledger of Broken Arms
June 27, 2004
New York Times
By ANTHONY WALTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/books/review/27WALTONL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ON Dec. 26, 1993, pulling out of the parking lot of a Sears near Boston with a recliner purchased at the post-Christmas sale, Fred Boyce heard a radio report that made him take his foot off the gas and pull into a space: in the 1940's and 50's, while confined at the Walter E. Fernald School for the Feebleminded in Waltham, Mass., several young boys in a ''Science Club'' were fed, unknowingly, cereal dosed with radioactive calcium. Boyce had been one of those boys. His first reaction to the news that he had been used as a test animal wasn't outrage or fear but rather relief. Whatever the risks of radiation, Boyce, then 52, considered it the least of the humiliations he and his friends had suffered as wards of the state. Finally, he thought, their stories would be heard.
But in the mid-90's wave of revelations of cold war radiation experiments, the story of the Fernald School was overlooked. The doses the boys received were small in comparison to those given other unsuspecting people -- the hospital patients injected with plutonium, for instance. In ''The State Boys Rebellion,'' Michael D'Antonio, the author of ''Fall From Grace: The Failed Crusade of the Christian Right'' and ''Atomic Harvest: Hanford and the Lethal Toll of America's Nuclear Arsenal,'' documents the Dickensian abuse daily endured by the boys at Fernald and its consequences.
On his first day at Fernald, Freddie Boyce, a 7-year-old orphan, shy, slow to talk and the survivor of seven foster homes, was stripped by a social worker and dressed in stiff dungarees -- clothes that would mark him as a ''state boy,'' a child, that is, with no family connections. Alone on his cot that first night, Freddie cried: ''No one had told him exactly where he was, why he had been put there or how long he would stay. He imagined the place was a prison for boys, but he couldn't recall committing any crime that would have landed him in such a place.''
Freddie's imprisonment was not an isolated occurrence: D'Antonio details the ''extreme ideology, once presented as scientific fact, that persuaded great numbers of Americans that certain substandard children must be identified, hunted down and locked away'' -- that is, the creation of a category and threat, ''the moron as a public danger.'' Standardized tests provided a tool for those seeking to ''sort'' the population so as to accelerate natural selection. In an attempt ''to make sure every last moron was captured, many states, including Massachusetts, would establish traveling 'clinics' to administer I.Q. tests at public schools.'' By 1949, 150,000 Americans were institutionalized; of these, an estimated 12,000 were in fact ''of relatively normal intelligence.''
Conditions at schools like Fernald were appalling for those with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and other true physical or mental conditions. Given little treatment or training, they were often straitjacketed or tied to chairs and left soaked in urine and feces. Their circumstances gradually improved as advocacy groups for the disabled and mentally ill were formed; but there was no one to advocate for Freddie and his friends, whose borderline intelligence scores were often simply a reflection of emotional problems stemming from years of neglect.
At Fernald, the attendants reigned supreme, and physical abuse was commonplace: one lawyer described school records discovered years later as a ''ledger of broken arms.'' Sexual abuse of boys by attendants and older youths was also frequent. In an incident emblematic of the regime of terror, the boys were lined up one morning before taking their turns in the bathrooms. A boy called Howie refused to stand quietly; the female attendant ordered all the boys to pull down their trousers for ''red cherries'' (beatings with a coat hanger). Terrified, Howie wet his pants. The attendant then ordered a group including Freddie to urinate into a bowl, and hurled the contents into Howie's face.
D'Antonio's narrative strikes an admirable balance between the larger social context and scientific theories -- ''most troubling . . . is that it all began with a grand desire to do good'' -- and the children's lived experience. Freddie's first escape attempt is rendered with the urgency of a boy's adventure tale: he climbed out a window, shimmied down a drainpipe, ran across a snow-covered field and ''the wind chapped his face raw. . . . When two police officers on patrol in their car stopped to talk to him, Freddie didn't move. He was too cold and too scared to run.'' After the last of his many failed tries, Freddie asked a psychologist, ''If you had a kid, and even if that kid was retarded, for real, would you put him in this place?'' The doctor turned to the attending nurse and said, ''What's this kid doing here?'' He was put on a program to prepare him for release (though he was never taught to read and write, a handicap that followed him throughout his life); he had been in Fernald 11 years.
The tale is saved from unrelenting grimness by the notion of rebellion, which gives the book its title. The rebellion of the state boys was less an isolated act -- though D'Antonio narrates the residents' climactic takeover of one building and the fateful consequences for those involved -- than a way of being. Despite the inhumane conditions in which they lived, the state boys, through countless small acts of self-assertion, and through the enduring friendships they formed with one another, refused to accept the state's categorization of them as anything less than fully human.
In various ways, the survivors carried with them the scars of their experience. When Jimmy Croteau, always secretive and a virtual recluse the last 20 years of his life, was dying of cancer, Boyce sat with him, holding his hand and offering encouragement, telling him ''that he was just going to a new place, that it was O.K. to be scared but it was going to be all right.'' Boyce reminded Croteau of a time they transferred units at Fernald. ''I said it was like when we moved from B.D. up to B.H. It was scary, but we got used to it and it wound up being a better place.''
Boyce himself, though in many ways a success story -- a homeowner who held steady jobs, still close to his ex-wife and family -- also carries scars: ''I accepted I have a life that's always going to have pieces missing. I'm not unique with that. A lot of people feel that way. But I can't help but think that, without Fernald, I would have made a much bigger contribution.'' The openness and honesty of Fred Boyce and his classmates concerning their experiences at Fernald, as rendered here, is a significant contribution in itself, filling in a missing piece of our experience and memory.
Anthony Walton teaches English at Bowdoin College. He is the author of ''Mississippi: An American Journey.''
----
Humanity's near miss
27jun04
Australia Herald Sun
http://heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,9965847%255E24218,00.html
THE people of Earth have flirted with Armageddon in the nuclear age.
While the United States was the only power with atomic bombs in World War II, crushing the belligerent Japan with them in 1945, the arms race that followed nudged us ever closer to the brink.
There were fingers on buttons in the Korean War in 1950 as communism and capitalism stared each other down.
The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 pitted the US against the Soviet Union in what seemed, at the time, a prelude to global hostilities, while it is terrifying to contemplate the consequences if Israel had employed its nuclear arsenal against an invading Arab army.
The risks multiplied at frightening speed in the Cold War.
The Soviet Union's vast array of missiles was at times at the command of a paranoid mass murderer in Joseph Stalin and a buffoon in Leonid Brezhnev, while there might also have been drunken itchy trigger fingers on the other side of the equation.
The fitting acronym for a nuclear attack and its response in kind was MAD (for Mutually Assured Destruction).
How close we came to the nightmare of a nuclear winter, or at least the destruction of major cities, is told in the article on Stanislav Petrov in the Extra section in today's Sunday Herald Sun.
It was very close - millions of lives hung in the balance when Moscow's early warning centre detected hostile missiles.
Yet courage competes with arrogance; the spirit of individualism with the closed mind of totalitarianism in the report of the 1983 near-disaster.
An unorthodox hero, Lt-Col Petrov, alone stood between reason and the madness of a nuclear war. Despite the electronic evidence flooding in to his command post from spy satellites, he refused to believe the US was attacking.
The Soviet missiles stayed in their silos. He bought time to expose the alarm as false. He averted a holocaust.
It is chilling to recall that faulty technology almost caused World War III, but inspirational that a person, just like one of us, saved the planet.
----
Man who saved the world
DEREK BALLANTINE
27jun04
Queensland Sunday Mail (Australia)
http://www.thesundaymail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,9964628%255E5422,00.html
IT WAS just after midnight when the first alert jolted Stanislav Petrov upright in his chair inside the bunker at the Serpukhov-15 buildings, south of Moscow.
The control panel at his station flashed "ctapt" in Russian script.
It was the command he always feared would confront him one day on his shift in the secret early-warning centre from which Soviet nuclear responses were controlled.
The English translation was "start" and it was a direction to begin the countdown for a missile strike against the US.
The alert klaxon was piercing Lieutenant-Colonel Petrov's eardrums as he tried to gather his thoughts.
His computers, linked to satellites watching over Soviet security, were telling him that US missiles had been launched and Moscow would be obliterated in 15 minutes.
Uniformed operators were staring at him, the man who would pass the warning up the chain of command, initiating retaliatory action against the West.
He had a telephone in one hand, an intercom in the other, and his was the voice that would issue the warning that would end the world as he knew it.
This was no drill.
The atmosphere in the room was thick with dread as the red light flashed its insistent "start, start, start" command and communication links with scores of missile silos burst into life. It was September 26, 1983, in Moscow but still the 25th in Washington.
It was a date about to be infamous forever as the beginning of World War III, which would probably last only days but claim millions of lives on both sides as nuclear missiles rained down on Moscow and New York, St Petersburg and Chicago, Volgograd and Detroit.
Asked what weapons would be used in World War III, Albert Einstein had said: "I don't know. But I can tell you what they'll use in the fourth. Rocks."
"Everyone was stupefied," Lt-Col Petrov, then 44, recalled. They had trained for this but could not bring themselves to believe the madness of nuclear war was about to break out.
Thanks to one man, however, the button remained unpressed.
Thanks to Lt-Col Petrov, a career soldier who rehearsed for war but longed for peace, Soviet missiles stayed on their launchers.
He made a guess that his equipment had malfunctioned - and he was right.
According to many peace groups around the world, Lt-Col Petrov is a hero - the once-anonymous Russian, now living on a modest pension, deserving star status for the lives he saved.
Some in the Australian Parliament agree - Democrats Senator Lyn Allison moved to have him recognised 21 years after his close call with Armageddon. The Senate motion honouring him was passed this week.
"Though he won't say it, I will. I think he was most definitely a hero," says Bruce Blair, a US authority on Cold War nuclear strategies.
The false alarm that almost triggered a war was kept secret until the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, after which information about Lt-Col Petrov leaked out to the West.
It was a close run thing. US-Soviet tensions had been high and it is very likely Soviet commanders would have ordered a nuclear response if Lt-Col Petrov had acted on the early warning system's false detection of incoming missiles.
It was the time US President Ronald Reagan was calling the Soviet Union "the evil empire".
The Soviets, struggling to keep pace with US military technology, were engaged in an arms race that was pushing them towards bankruptcy. They feared they were falling behind, becoming vulnerable.
They still had strategies in place for invading Western Europe with a bold and massive stroke that would make Hitler's blitzkrieg seem child's play.
NATO had strategies for stopping such an attack - with battlefield nuclear weapons if all else failed.
Only a month before the false alert, in an incident that sent the temperatures of the Cold War warriors soaring, the Soviets had shot down a Korean passenger jet, killing 269 people, including Americans. Inside the Kremlin, President Yuri Andropov was rattled by angry US protests - the Soviet Union ordered its forces to ready themselves for some form of retaliation.
Coincidentally, NATO was preparing for exercises that would test Europe's defences. The US Navy also was sending ships into the Barents Sea for an exercise on Russia's doorstep. It was not a time for mistakes.
"If the Soviet Union had overreacted, it could have gone very badly," according to former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky.
"If war had come, Soviet missiles would have destroyed Britain entirely, at least half of Germany and France and America would have lost maybe 30 per cent of its cities and infrastructure."
Lt-Col Petrov had settled into his command chair at Serpukhov-15 a little after midnight. He was not supposed to be on duty, coming in only because a colleague was unavailable.
The computers were buzzing gently when he settled down to work, registering normal status as they communicated with Oko satellites orbiting Earth, their sensors scouring the Atlantic Sea and US mainland for the blast of missiles launched from submarines or underground silos.
There were nine satellites in the Soviet Union's early-warning constellation at the time, one following the other in relentless orbits, depending on infra-red waves to identify the hot exhaust of a rocket launch.
Only seven were on line when Lt-Col Petrov started his shift. Making do with what he had, he was situated at a critical point in the chain of command, overseeing staff monitoring signals from the satellites.
He would transmit word of an attack to general command, which in turn would contact President Andropov.
Time was of the essence - swift retaliation against the US would almost certainly follow his assessment that the homeland was in danger.
Now his nerves were facing the ultimate test.
Asked later if he had time to consider the global implications, he said: "I always thought of it. I always refreshed it in my memory. At that moment, there was no time to think. There was only time for work, work, work."
The data was telling him the US had launched a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile from Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. Then another, and another. The system was, as he later put it, "roaring" at him with urgent information on five launches.
One launch did not usually trigger warnings throughout the command system - but these multiple launches were already being reported to scores of Soviet defence units as he wrestled with the gravity of the incoming data.
There were scattered high-altitude clouds over Malmstrom that day. Because it was close to the autumnal equinox, the relative positions of the sun and clouds created a mirror effect. Instead of diffusing the sunlight, the clouds reflected it into space, confusing the infra-red sensors aboard satellite Cosmos 1382.
As sunlight bounced off the clouds, Cosmos 1382 dutifully reported first one, then five launches. For Lt-Col Petrov, the ultimate holocaust was at hand.
Still, he hesitated.
"I just couldn't believe that, just like that, all of a sudden, someone would hurl five missiles at us," he said.
"Five missiles wouldn't wipe us out. The US had not five missiles but a thousand missiles in battle readiness."
A great weight bore down on him. He said: "I imagined if I'd assume the responsibility for unleashing World War III . . . and said, no, I wouldn't."
He did not know yet that nature had played tricks with one of his satellites, but Lt-Col Petrov had doubts about the early-warning system. It was new. It had been rushed into commission.
"I had a funny feeling in my gut. I didn't want to make a mistake. I made a decision. And that was it."
Soviet politicians made Lt-Col Petrov the scapegoat for the false alarm, the blame falling on him instead of the mistake-prone technology. He suffered stress-related illnesses and was quietly retired from the army.
Now the man who saved the world is a pensioner.
He is 65 and shares his one-bedroom flat outside Moscow with memories of what might have been if he had pressed the button.
-------- iran
Iran Vows to Resume Its Nuclear Program
June 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Within days, Iran said Sunday, it will resume building centrifuges for its nuclear program in a forceful rejection of severe international castigation.
But Tehran said it welcomed international supervision of the building program and said it would not use the devices to enrich uranium -- for the time being. The process can make uranium into fuel for peaceful or military nuclear purposes.
The White House called Iran's decision further proof it was trying to build an atomic bomb, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency -- the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog -- said in Moscow that he hoped Iran would reverse its decision.
``Iran's continued failure to comply with the IAEA and continued failure to (halt) all enrichment-related reprocessing activities only reinforces the concerns we have expressed,'' White House spokesman Scott McClellan said in Washington.
``Iran needs to come clean and fully cooperate with its international obligations.''
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said he hoped Iran would reverse its decision, a setback in international attempts to resolve the standoff.
``I hope that this decision is of a temporary nature. I hope it will be reversed,'' ElBaradei told a news conference in Moscow, where he was attending a conference on nuclear power.
``Iran needs to do the maximum to build confidence after a period of confidence deficit. I look at this whole suspension of enrichment as part of this confidence building.''
Iran suspended the building of centrifuges and the enrichment of uranium under international pressure, part of the IAEA's attempts to determine the intent of Iran's nuclear program, much of which was kept secret for years.
The United States accuses Iran of trying to build nuclear weapons, and President Bush has labeled Iran part of an ``axis of evil'' with North Korea and prewar Iraq.
Iran maintains its atomic program is entirely peaceful, geared toward producing energy.
Tehran's announcement Sunday came after the IAEA approved a European-drafted resolution rebuking Iran for past cover-ups in its nuclear program.
Iran informed the IAEA and the governments of Britain, Germany and France that it would resume building centrifuges Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said.
But Tehran invited the IAEA and the three European countries to supervise its building, assembling and testing of centrifuges when the program resumes, Asefi said.
``We will do that according to regulations, under IAEA supervision,'' he said.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment last year under international pressure and in a deal with Britain, Germany and France that extracted a European promise to make it easier for Iran to obtain advanced nuclear technology.
Iran says it will remain committed to that suspension despite European failure to provide the technology.
``Nothing important has happened,'' Asefi said. ``Europeans failed to respect their commitments. Therefore, there is no reason for us to keep our moral promise.
``We remain committed to voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment. We had cooperation with the IAEA, we have (it) now and we will cooperate with the IAEA in the future.''
Though Asefi was critical of the Europeans, he said Iran's decision did not mean Tehran would end its dialogue with them. Rather, he said, another discussion between Iranian and European experts is planned ``in the coming days.''
Iran repeatedly has said it wants to control the whole nuclear fuel cycle -- from extracting uranium ore to enriching it to a low grade for use as nuclear reactor fuel. Uranium enriched to low levels can be used in power plants, while highly enriched uranium is needed for bombs.
In a Sunday appearance on ``Fox News Sunday,'' national security adviser Condoleezza Rice called Iran's nuclear program a ``very tough situation'' but ``one that still has a diplomatic solution within sight.''
``But the Iranians every day demonstrate why the United States has been so hard on them and why the president put Iran into the 'axis of evil' when he talked about Iraq, North Korea and Iran back in his State of the Union address in January 2002,'' Rice said.
----
UN nuclear chief urges Iran to reverse nuclear move
MOSCOW (AFP)
Jun 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040627183629.lozva9b2.html
UN atomic energy agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei on Sunday urged Iran to abandon a decision to resume work towards uranium enrichment as a week-long conference on peaceful uses of nuclear power opened in Moscow.
"I hope that Iran will go back to a comprehensive suspension as they have committed to us before. I would hope that this is not a major reversal," he told reporters after meeting Russian atomic energy agency chief Alexander Rumyantsev.
Tehran said Sunday it would resume construction of centrifuges for uranium enrichment but continue to suspend enrichment itself, a key step in making what can be bomb-grade uranium.
The IAEA is investigating US charges that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons.
Iran had said in a letter to ElBaradei, as well as Britain, France and Germany, last week that it would resume the "manufacturing of centrifuge components and assembly and testing of centrifuges as of June 29," next Tuesday, according to a copy of the letter obtained by AFP.
Iran claims the so-called Euro-3 broke an agreement made in February to have the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) close in June its investigation of Iran's nuclear program, in return for the suspension of all enrichment-related activities.
This suspension was part of confidence-building measures which Iran has been urged to take while the IAEA investigates US charges that the Islamic Republic is secretly developing nuclear weapons.
The 35-nation board of the IAEA passed a resolution on June 18 rebuking Tehran for failing to come clean about its nuclear program, deploring the level of Iranian cooperation and calling for the 15-month-old investigation into Iran's nuclear activities to be wrapped up within a few months.
ElBaradei told Iran on Sunday to stop complaining about Europe and focus on cooperation with the IAEA.
ElBaradei told journalists his message to Iran was: "Stop looking anywhere else. You need to look at the agency. You need to cooperate with us."
"I don't think these issues are going to be resolved through confrontation. I think these issues are going to be resolved by steady engagement and robust verification," ElBaradei said.
ElBaradei opened an IAEA nuclear power conference commemorating a half-century since the Obninsk power reactor (120 kilometres/70 miles south of Moscow) became the world's first to produce electricity for a national grid.
It also marks the 50th anniversary of the UN General Assembly resolution calling for international cooperation in developing the peaceful uses for nuclear energy.
"The factors that will shape the future of nuclear power are relatively evident and we should take action ... to enhance the prospects that nuclear energy remains a viable source of safe, secure and environmentally benign energy," ElBaradei said.
In particular, he mentioned the need to improve technology to keep reactors safe.
ElBaradei said atomic energy definitely had a future, despite concerns brought on by the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear accidents in the United States in 1979 and and in Ukraine in 1986.
Environmentalists condemn the use of nuclear energy for power, citing the danger of radiation from accidents and the problems of disposing of highly radioactive spent fuel.
But nuclear power use is growing in Asia while it continues to play a role in Western power supplies.
Another theme at the conference will be nuclear terrorism.
The United States had at IAEA headquarters in Vienna in May unveiled a 450-million-dollar plan to try to prevent nuclear materials stored around the world from falling into the hands of terrorists who could use them to make a "dirty" bomb or even a full-fledged atomic device.
Russia has been under US pressure to halt construction of Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor until the IAEA is fully satisfied that Tehran is not hiding its potential nuclear weapons ambition, or using the project to develop an atomic bomb.
But atomic energy agency chief Alexander Rumyantsev told reporters that Iran was cooperating with the IAEA and so "Russia cooperates with Iran in the construction of the first nuclear power plant unit in Bushehr."
He said Russia will "speed up negotiating" over supplying nuclear fuel to Iran for Bushehr in order to meet contractual deadlines.
----
U.S. Raises Temperature in Nuke Dispute with Iran
June 27, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-usa-iran.html
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The United States Sunday condemned Iran for persisting with what Washington regards as an atomic bomb-making program.
``Iran needs to come clean and fully cooperate with its international obligations,'' White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters traveling with President Bush to a NATO summit in Istanbul.
``Iran's continued failure to comply with the International Atomic Energy Agency and continued failure to stop all enrichment-related reprocessing activities only reinforce the concern we have expressed,'' McClellan said.
Iran said Sunday it would resist international pressure to reverse its decision to produce parts for centrifuges that enrich uranium, reneging on a pledge to suspend all enrichment activities.
Its decision was a retaliation against an IAEA resolution last week that ``deplored'' Iran's failure to cooperate fully with IAEA inspectors.
But Iran also pledged in the letter to continue to allow IAEA inspectors access to nuclear sites for short-notice, intrusive inspections under the IAEA's so-called Additional Protocol, which Tehran signed last year but has yet to ratify.
If enriched to a low level, uranium can be used as fuel for electricity-generating reactors such as the one Iran is building on its south coast. But if enriched further, to weapons-grade, it can be deployed in warheads.
Washington has pushed its Western allies to take a tougher line on Iran but Britain, Germany and France have resisted, preferring to try to persuade Tehran that it is in its interests to come clean on nuclear activities.
The U.S. official said Iran's defiance would help persuade other countries to consider referring the issue to the United Nations, which could impose economic sanctions.
``We have expressed concern within the IAEA about the need to consider sending this matter to the Security Council of the United Nations and I think this latest move may only serve to convince others of the need to seriously consider that step,'' McClellan said.
The United States, the European Union and the IAEA condemned Iran Saturday for resuming centrifuge part production and urged Iran to rethink its decision.
Iran insists its ambitions are entirely peaceful and has said it has no immediate plans to pump uranium hexafluoride gas into spinning centrifuges to start the enrichment process.
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Iran Won't Buckle to Pressure on Centrifuges
June 27, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iran-nuclear.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran will resist international pressure and hold to its decision on making centrifuges, which Washington says are key to an atomic bomb program, Tehran's chief nuclear negotiator said Sunday.
The United States, the European Union and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) condemned Iran on Saturday for deciding to produce parts for centrifuges that enrich uranium and urged Iran to rethink its decision.
``They may react bitterly or heighten pressure on us, but that is not important,'' the Secretary-General of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Hassan Rohani told parliament, in comments broadcast live on state radio.
If enriched to a low level uranium can be used as fuel for electricity-generating reactors such as the one Iran is building on its south coast. But if enriched further, to weapons-grade, it can be deployed in warheads.
Iran sent a letter to the IAEA telling the agency that Tehran ``intends to resume, under IAEA supervision, manufacturing of centrifuge components and the assembly and testing of centrifuges as of 29 June.''
Iran insists its ambitions are entirely peaceful and has said it has no immediate plans to pump uranium hexafluoride gas into spinning centrifuges to start the enrichment process.
Iran's decision was a retaliation against an IAEA resolution last week that ``deplored'' Iran's failure to cooperate fully with IAEA inspectors.
Iran has blamed Britain, Germany and France for failing to close its nuclear dossier at the IAEA board in June but Rohani said Iran would resume talks with those countries next week.
A joint U.S.-EU statement, issued after talks between President Bush and European leaders in Ireland, stopped short of threatening new action to punish Iran for reneging on a pledge to suspend all enrichment activities.
Iran pledged in its letter to continue to allow IAEA inspectors access to nuclear sites for snap inspections under the IAEA's so-called Additional Protocol.
Rohani said the country would not withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and would implement the Additional Protocol the conservative parliament is wavering on ratifying.
``Today, the system has decided to remain committed to the NPT and allow the IAEA'S inspections to continue,'' Rohani said.
-------- israel
Israel Should Talk About Nuclear Arms - ElBaradei
By REUTERS
June 27, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-israel.html
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Israel should start talking seriously about ridding the Middle East of nuclear weapons, whether it admits to having them or not, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Sunday.
Speaking to reporters on an official visit to the Russian capital, Mohamed ElBaradei -- director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) -- said this would be a main topic of his visit to Israel in early July.
``We need ... to rid the Middle East of all weapons of mass destruction,'' he said.
``Israel agrees with that, but they say it has to be ... after peace agreements,'' ElBaradei said. ``My proposal is maybe we need to start to have a parallel dialogue on security at the same time when we're working on the peace process.''
He said that a dialogue would help reduce widespread frustration in the Middle East ``about what is seen to be a security imbalance.'' He said talks on nuclear disarmament could stimulate peace efforts by building confidence in the region.
Asked if he thought the Israelis would be open to such an idea, he said: ``I don't know. That's the purpose of my visit.''
ElBaradei said he would not be lecturing the Israelis on whether or not they should acknowledge having atom bombs.
Under a policy of so-called ``strategic ambiguity,'' Israel neither admits nor denies having nuclear weapons but is widely believed to have from 100 to 200 nuclear weapons.
``I think everybody takes it as a given that Israel has a nuclear capability, if not nuclear weapons. So whether they would like to come in the open, whether they maintain ... ambiguity, it's for them to decide,'' ElBaradei said.
He said he would like Israel, as well as everyone else in the Middle East, to open up its nuclear facilities to IAEA inspections.
ElBaradei said it was unsustainable that some countries had nuclear weapons and others did not.
``As long as you continue to have countries dangling a cigarette from their mouth, you cannot tell everybody not to smoke with a high degree of credibility,'' ElBaradei said.
Israel and the United States both accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons, a charge that Tehran vehemently denies.
While Iraq and Libya are known to have unsuccessfully pursued atomic weapons, Israel is believed to be the only country in the region with the bomb.
Like India and Pakistan, which have atomic weapons, Israel has never signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
-------- korea
North Korea's likely arsenal
By GLYN FORD
The Japan Times
June 27, 2004
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fb20040627a1.htm
NORTH KOREA'S WEAPONS PROGRAMMES: A Net Assessment, by International Institute for Strategic Studies staff. Palgrave Macmillan, 80pp., 2004, $90 (paper).
To America's hard men of the right, North Korea harbors a full and fearsome array of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, and the willingness to sell them to any passing "ne're do well" terrorist.
On the shores of forecasting, views have begun to soften as the claim that North Korea within 12 months will be able to produce nuclear-tipped missiles that can hit Britain remains unverified.
"North Korea's Weapons Programmes" sets the record straight on North Korea's likely arsenal.
In 1994, North Korea had a functioning 5-megawatt graphite moderated nuclear reactor and another 50-MW reactor close to completion, both capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton made a deal to mothball both in exchange for a series of political and economic promises including annual delivery of 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil (HFO) until two 500-MW proliferation-resistant light water reactors (LWR) were completed in 2003 by a U.S.-South Korea-Japan and EU Consortium.
As far as many in the United States were concerned, the deal was designed to provide time for the "failed regime" to collapse, but North Korea refused to act out this U.S.-ordained role and stubbornly survived.
When Japanese-North Korean relations seemed to be improving, the Bush administration sabotaged the rapprochement by claiming that North Korea had a secret highly enriched uranium (HEU) program that could produce nuclear weapons. Then it cut off the only part of the 1994 promises that were kept, the HFO deliveries, and terminated the LWR program. North Korea took its only option: reopening its nuclear reactor and reprocessing the stored fuel rods. The crisis on the Korean Peninsula and the threats of U.S. military intervention.
This book gives a realistic picture. First, North Korea at best has plutonium for a maximum of six to 12 weapons, none of which has been tested. No significant further plutonium will be available until after 2010.
Second, this study and more recent information from Pakistan and elsewhere indicate that North Korea almost certainly has blueprints for HEU weapons, but does not have the specialized material, let alone the components, for an HEU program. Nor does it have the independent power stations capable of delivering the constant steady supply of electricity necessary for operating thousands of gas centrifuges.
On the missile front, based on a joint Chinese-North Korean program initiated in 1975 (East Wind 61), North Korea has several hundred Hwasong and Nodong missiles capable of hitting South Korea (with the latter capable of striking Japan) and the Taepodong series of missiles.
Yet the Hwasong is too small to carry a nuclear weapon, and the Nodong would struggle to cope with the heavier and larger HEU bomb. Back in 1998, North Korea attempted to launch the satellite Kwangmyongsong using the long-range Taepodong missile, but the Taepodong platform's third stage failed to ignite properly.
Even if adapted for military use, the Taepodong's extended range doesn't cover the U.S., and the payload is way too low to carry nuclear weapons. No further testing of the Taepodong has taken place following the country's self-imposed moratorium at the EU Troika's request in 1999.
This assessment concludes that there almost certainly are battlefield chemical weapons in some quantity but that North Korea probably has not produced biological weapons, although it is capable of doing so.
North Korea's WMD program is to be deplored, but it must be seen in perspective. The country is outspent and outgunned by South Korea, whose military budget is four times that of North Korea. The military budget of the U.S. -- North Korea's main threat -- is 40 times greater and rising.
North Korea also has little incentive to export "terror." The consequences would likely be terminal. The risk is only worth taking for billions, and even al-Qaeda doesn't have the money. If anyone is going to sell to "terrorists," it's likely to be a private-sector initiative in the former Soviet Union.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies has made it clear that there is time to negotiate a comprehensive solution: one that will provide a commitment to nonaggression from the U.S., an international commitment to humanitarian aid and development assistance in exchange for North Korea's ending its nuclear-weapons program and committing to join the international community.
Glyn Ford is a member of the European Parliament for the Southwest of England and a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Human Rights, Common Security and Defense Policy.
----
N. Korea talks upbeat enough to prepare for a fourth round
CHINA SEES HINTS PYONGYANG WILL FREEZE ITS NUCLEAR PROGRAM
By Shashank Bengali
Knight Ridder
Sun, Jun. 27, 2004
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/9024253.htm?ERIGHTS=7461518247713763135mercurynews::et@nucnews.net&KRD_RM=5qqququpsrnplmuullllllllmp|Ellen|N
BEIJING - Expressing renewed hope for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear standoff, envoys from six nations adjourned negotiations Saturday with a pledge to reconvene by September.
While the third round of negotiations ended with little formal progress, China, which hosted the meetings, pointed to hints that North Korea would eventually freeze its nuclear program in exchange for additional energy aid.
Still, ``a serious lack of mutual trust'' persists between the United States and North Korea, Wang Yi, China's vice foreign minister, said Saturday.
Among the major points of disagreement are the timing and extent of how North Korea will abandon its nuclear program, just who would conduct inspections and the specifics of energy assistance for the isolated communist country.
U.S. officials say North Korea has not been clear enough about which facilities and programs it would dismantle, or how it would dismantle them.
North Korea, for its part, wants the United States to lift economic sanctions and contribute some assistance as a show of trust.
Under a new U.S. proposal introduced Wednesday, the four other nations participating in the talks -- China, Japan, Russia and South Korea -- would provide energy aid during an initial, three-month preparatory stage. The United States itself would not provide assistance until after North Korea began dismantlement.
Perhaps most significant, U.S. officials said North Korean envoys continued to deny the existence of a program to develop nuclear weapons based on highly enriched uranium.
The current standoff began in October 2002 when the United States confronted North Korea with evidence of the uranium program. The Bush administration says North Korea acknowledged at the time that the program existed, but it has since retracted that statement.
Wang said Saturday that the two sides still had ``serious differences'' with regard to the uranium program.
The negotiations appeared to gather momentum last week after two previous rounds made little headway.
The new U.S. proposal, which also included a security guarantee to North Korea, marked the first time the Bush administration had presented the North with a road map to ending the nuclear standoff.
North Korea filled in some details of its own proposal, saying its freeze would include all nuclear weapons facilities and materials -- including its primary plutonium facility in Yongbyon -- and that it would not test weapons or transfer them to others.
It also said that ``under the right conditions'' the freeze would be the first step toward total nuclear dismantlement.
In their public statements, both sides softened their rhetoric somewhat, with U.S. envoys backing off the Bush administration's call for ``complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement'' -- a mantra that one U.S. official said had become inflammatory -- and North Korea saying it was prepared to ``show flexibility'' on some of its demands for compensation.
----
Envoys seek solution to nuclear standoff
By Shashank Bengali
Sunday, Jul 04, 2004
Washington Bureau, San Francisco Chronicle
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/nation/9026034.htm
'A serious lack of mutual trust' persists between the United States and North Korea. Wang Yi China's vice foreign minister
BEIJING - Expressing renewed hope for a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear standoff, envoys from six nations adjourned negotiations Saturday with a pledge to reconvene by September.
Although the third round of negotiations ended with little formal progress, China, which hosted the meetings, pointed to hints that North Korea would eventually freeze its nuclear program in exchange for additional energy aid.
Still, "a serious lack of mutual trust" persists between the United States and North Korea, Wang Yi, China's vice foreign minister, said Saturday.
Among the major points of disagreement are the timing and extent of how North Korea will abandon its nuclear program, who would conduct inspections and the specifics of energy assistance for the isolated communist country.
U.S. officials say North Korea has not been clear enough about which facilities and programs it would dismantle, or how it would dismantle them.
North Korea, for its part, wants the United States to lift economic sanctions and contribute some assistance as a show of trust.
Under a U.S. proposal introduced Wednesday, the four other nations participating in the talks - China, Japan, Russia and South Korea - would provide energy aid during an initial, three-month preparatory stage.
The United States would not provide assistance until after North Korea began dismantlement.
Perhaps most significantly, U.S. officials said North Korean envoys continued to deny the existence of a program to develop nuclear weapons based on highly enriched uranium.
The standoff began in October 2002 when the United States confronted North Korea with evidence of the uranium program.
The Bush administration says North Korea acknowledged at the time that the program existed, but it has since retracted that statement.
Wang said Saturday that the two sides still had "serious differences" with regard to the uranium program.
The negotiations appeared to gather momentum last week after two previous rounds made little headway.
The U.S. proposal, which also included a security guarantee to North Korea, marked the first time the Bush administration had presented North Korea with a road map to ending the nuclear standoff.
North Korea filled in some details of its own proposal, saying its freeze would include all nuclear weapons facilities and materials - including its primary plutonium facility in Yongbyon - and that it would not test weapons or transfer them to others.
It also said that "under the right conditions," the freeze would be the first step toward total nuclear dismantlement.
In their public statements, both sides softened their rhetoric somewhat, with U.S. envoys backing off the Bush administration's call for "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" - a mantra that one U.S. official said had become inflammatory - and North Korea saying it was prepared to "show flexibility" on some of its demands for compensation.
-------- missile defense
U.S. explores expanding missile defense system to Eastern Europe
By Jonathan S. Landay
Sun, Jun. 27, 2004
Knight Ridder Newspapers
http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/9026889.htm
ISTANBUL, Turkey - The Bush administration is exploring the possibility of expanding the nascent U.S. missile defense system into Eastern Europe as a protection against an attack from the Middle East.
U.S. diplomats and Defense Department officials have been quietly talking with NATO members Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic about whether one of them might host the new launch site, U.S., Hungarian and Czech officials told Knight Ridder.
The facility would comprise underground silos housing interceptor-tipped missiles that would be fired at enemy missiles as they soared through space. A network of powerful radars would guide the interceptors into collisions with their targets.
A launch site in any of the three former Soviet-bloc nations would be able to defend the United States and its European allies from attacks by small numbers of missiles fired from the Middle East, said U.S. officials.
Iran - whose hard-line Islamic regime is part of what President Bush called "the axis of evil" - is believed to be developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that might pose such threats in the future, said U.S. officials.
Iran denies it is developing long-range missiles or nuclear weapons.
U.S. officials said they are also wary of Syria's missile ambitions, and worried that a terrorist group might one day obtain a long-range missile.
"The president has said ... that the way we conceive missile defense ... will not only protect the United States, but our allies," said a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "General proliferation of ballistic missiles (is) a threat we will continue to face."
The Bush administration is pursuing the talks with the Eastern Europeans even though its missile defense program remains fraught with technical problems and has not been tested under realistic conditions, a concern expressed by the Pentagon's own chief weapons tester.
Many critics contend that the system will never work.
"Here they are moving toward a third missile defense site without having completed the first site or having successfully proven the system," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington arms control advocacy group.
Missile defense advocates contend that the technical problems can be worked out as work on the system matures.
While the talks with Poland were made public last month, the ACA's journal, Arms Control Today, was the first to learn of the discussions with Hungary and the Czech Republic, and is to publish a report on its Web site (www.armscontrol.org) this week. An advanced copy was made available to Knight Ridder, which confirmed the details.
U.S., Hungarian and Czech officials stressed that the discussions are at very preliminary stages, and that numerous issues must be considered before a decision can be made on whether one of the three might host an interceptor site.
"We are totally pre-decisional," said a State Department official, who requested anonymity. "We are just measuring the interest of NATO allies that would be willing to host a third site."
Vratislav Janda, the deputy chief of the Czech Embassy in Washington, said that the issue would have to be thoroughly discussed in parliament and by the Czech public before his government could opt to host the facility.
But he said that Czech officials believed that such a site could bring advantages, including closer trans-Atlantic security cooperation and work for local businesses.
The Pentagon is constructing rudimentary interceptor launch sites in California and Alaska as part of a so-called Ground-Based Midcourse Defense. The system would be part of what the Bush administration sees as multi-layered anti-missile defenses comprising land-based and sea-based interceptors and airborne lasers that could destroy missiles at different stages of flight.
The interceptor launch sites being built at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, are intended to defend the United States against a limited number of missiles lofted by North Korea.
North Korea in 1998 tested a missile with a range estimated at more than 1,200 miles, but since then has been observing a unilateral testing freeze.
The CIA says North Korea may be ready to flight test a missile capable of reaching parts of the United States "with a nuclear weapon-size payload." Pyongyang is believed to have several nuclear warheads, and has so far rejected U.S. demands to close its nuclear weapons program.
Bush is expected to declare Fort Greely's first six interceptors operational before the November presidential election despite the unresolved technical problems and uncertainty about whether the system will work. Four interceptors are to be deployed at Vandenberg early next year.
Twenty more interceptors are to be installed at Fort Greely and Vandenberg by 2006.
The Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency is seeking funds to begin preliminary work on 10 interceptors to be based outside the United States. But the $35 million request has been the subject of wrangling in congressional deliberations on the 2005 defense budget.
Air Force Gen. Ronald Kadish, the Missile Defense Agency director, argued to the Senate Armed Services Committee in March that a site outside the United States "will put us in a better position to defend our allies and friends and troops overseas against long-range ballistic missiles. For the cost of 10 GBIs (ground-based interceptors) and associated infrastructure, we will be able to demonstrate in the most convincing way possible our commitment to this critical mission objective."
The first indication that the Bush administration is eyeing a location in the former Soviet bloc came last month when Under Secretary of State John Bolton disclosed to reporters in Poland that U.S. and Polish officials were "engaged in discussions ... about the possibility of basing interceptors and radars here."
Aside from whether the technology will work as planned, questions include whether the host country and other allies would contribute to the considerable costs of the facility.
Other questions involve the security of the facility and its operational control. For instance, if the host country and other European allies shared the costs, would they also have a say in operating the site?
Another factor would be the reaction from the former master of Eastern Europe, Moscow, which is already discomforted by NATO's expansion into its former domain.
Some experts fear that Russia and China could react by stepping up their efforts to neutralize U.S. missile defenses.
-------- russia
Nyet saves world
27jun04
Sunday Herald Sun.
A RETIRED Russian army colonel has emerged as the hero of a desperate incident that saw the world come within seconds of assured nuclear destruction.
On September 26, 1983, Russia's strategic early warning system alerted the Soviet military to massive incoming US nuclear strike.
On duty in a bunker just outside Moscow was Russian Lt-Col Stanislav Petrov.
Petrov came within seconds of ordering a massive retaliatory strike but recognised that the automatic system signalling the launch of US intercontinental ballistic missiles was faulty.
This week Lt-Col Petrov was commended as "the man who saved the world" by a motion passed unanimously by the Australian Senate.
And he was presented with the World Citizen Award by the Association of World Citizens on Friday.
Get the full story in today's Sunday Herald Sun:
http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,9965847%5E24218,00.html
Humanity's near miss
THE people of Earth have flirted with Armageddon in the nuclear age.
While the United States was the only power with atomic bombs in World War II, crushing the belligerent Japan with them in 1945, the arms race that followed nudged us ever closer to the brink.
There were fingers on buttons in the Korean War in 1950 as communism and capitalism stared each other down.
The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 pitted the US against the Soviet Union in what seemed, at the time, a prelude to global hostilities, while it is terrifying to contemplate the consequences if Israel had employed its nuclear arsenal against an invading Arab army.
The risks multiplied at frightening speed in the Cold War.
The Soviet Union's vast array of missiles was at times at the command of a paranoid mass murderer in Joseph Stalin and a buffoon in Leonid Brezhnev, while there might also have been drunken itchy trigger fingers on the other side of the equation.
The fitting acronym for a nuclear attack and its response in kind was MAD (for Mutually Assured Destruction).
How close we came to the nightmare of a nuclear winter, or at least the destruction of major cities, is told in the article on Stanislav Petrov in the Extra section in today's Sunday Herald Sun.
It was very close - millions of lives hung in the balance when Moscow's early warning centre detected hostile missiles.
Yet courage competes with arrogance; the spirit of individualism with the closed mind of totalitarianism in the report of the 1983 near-disaster.
An unorthodox hero, Lt-Col Petrov, alone stood between reason and the madness of a nuclear war. Despite the electronic evidence flooding in to his command post from spy satellites, he refused to believe the US was attacking.
The Soviet missiles stayed in their silos. He bought time to expose the alarm as false. He averted a holocaust.
It is chilling to recall that faulty technology almost caused World War III, but inspirational that a person, just like one of us, saved the planet.
Local heroes
VICTORIAN medical scientists can take a bow - again - as a breast cancer screening program for unborn babies comes on line.
Developed largely in Melbourne, the technology enables women in high risk groups to overcome a faulty gene that transmits the disease to their children, a breakthrough worthy of the highest praise.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Taliban Kill 16 Afghans Carrying Voter Cards
June 27, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-afghan-election-killings.html
KABUL -- Taliban guerrillas kidnapped and then killed 16 people in an Afghan province after finding them with voter registration cards for the country's September elections, a district official said Sunday.
The guerrillas stopped a bus carrying 17 civilians through the district Friday, said Haji Obaidullah, chief of Khas Uruzgan district in the central province of Uruzgan.
The guerrillas took the passengers to the neighboring province of Zabul and killed all but one of them when they found they were carrying voter cards, he quoted the lone survivor as saying.
``They were apparently killed because they were carrying the registration cards,'' he said.
-------- africa
In Sudan, Death and Denial
Officials Accused of Concealing Crisis as Thousands Starve
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8610-2004Jun26?language=printer
MORNAY, Sudan -- There are tents here that no parent wants to visit. They are called feeding centers, shady rectangular units where children fight death. Sitting on a mat and holding his son's frail hand, Mohammed Ishaq and his wife, Aisha, have been here five days, nursing 9-month-old Zohar on drops of water from a large pink cup, praying that somehow he will survive.
Zohar spits up the water. His cough is rough, and his thin skin clings to his ribs. His withered left arm is connected to an IV. He is suffering from malaria, complicated by malnutrition. Near him, other parents rock, nurse and pray for their babies, who are passed out or moaning, their eyes rolled back as they vomit emergency rations of corn and oil.
Six hundred miles to the east in the capital, Khartoum, Mustafa Osman Ismail, the foreign minister of Sudan, stretched back in his plump leather chair in an air-conditioned office overlooking the Nile.
"In Darfur, there is no hunger. There is no malnutrition. There is no epidemic disease," he said in an interview. Yes, he conceded, there is "a humanitarian situation." But the hunger, he said, was "imagined" by the media.
Both hunger and denial are weapons in Sudan, according to U.N. officials and international aid workers. After accusing the government of imposing a policy of forced starvation on the people of Darfur, they now say that official attempts to conceal the crisis are endangering efforts to prevent famine among an estimated 1.2 million people.
Mornay is the largest refugee camp in the region. It is a labyrinth of suffering, where one child in five is acutely malnourished, aid workers say, where for six months 75,000 people have lived on less than half the food they need to survive, where six people die every day, mainly children and the elderly, from hunger and disease.
In the town of Mornay, near the camp, there is a market with no food. There is a tiny mosque where no one is praying, because 3,000 people are crammed into its dank and fetid spaces. There is arable land outside the camp, but crops cannot be gathered because militiamen on horseback, clad in government uniforms, roam the scrubby landscape. Assault rifles are balanced on their laps, and whips hang from their belt loops. Women are trapped inside the camp, unable to forage for firewood or food.
There are 129 such camps across Darfur, 31 of which are inaccessible because they are in areas held by the government or the rebels in the region, which stretches along the border of Chad. More than a million people live in the camps, many of which lack water, supplies and sanitation, and operate without any feeding centers.
The people in the camps were driven from their villages and farms by pro-government Arab militiamen, a ragtag collection of traditional tribal fighters and criminals known in Arabic as Janjaweed, which means "men who ride horses and carry G3 guns." The Janjaweed fighters have terrorized and killed, witnesses say, and are also accused of rapes and beatings.
Tensions in Darfur have simmered since the 1970s, when drought and competition over scarce resources sparked clashes between largely nomadic cattle and camel herders, who view themselves as Arabs, and the more sedentary farmers, who see their ancestry as African. Both groups are Muslim.
The tensions flared in February 2003, when groups of students and political activists from three of Darfur's African tribes started a rebellion against the government, complaining that the Arab ruling elite had failed to develop the area.
The Darfur groups thought it was time to press their case when a peace deal finally began to take hold in an unrelated conflict between the Islamic government in the north and rebels based in southern part of the country, a region that is largely animist and Christian, after 21 years of war and more than 2 million deaths.
The first major victory of the Darfur groups was the capture of the military town of El Fashir in a battle last year. They killed 75 government soldiers, stole weapons and destroyed four gunships and two Antonov aircrafts, government officials said. In response, the government began to arm local militias to boost the army and also launched an aerial bombardment of villages, witnesses say.
Over the past 16 months, more than 10,000 people have been killed and thousands driven from their homes by the Arab militiamen. Human rights and aid groups accuse the government of carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign, targeting three tribes: the Fur, Massaleit and Zaghawa.
Sudanese authorities tightly restrict access to the region. But this week, NASA satellite photos still being reviewed provided a clearer view: 56,000 houses, with conical roofs known as tukels, have been destroyed in nearly 400 villages.
Aid workers predict that many more people will die, and that the U.N. World Food Program will be able to reach only 800,000 of the 1.2 million displaced people because of continuing violence. Aid workers are also concerned the rainy season will slow or stop food shipments. And waterborne diseases in crowded camps with no latrines will increase the number of deaths, they said. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimated that at least 350,000 people will die of disease and malnutrition over the next nine months.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell plans to visit Darfur next week to urge the Sudanese government to disarm the Arab militias or face U.N. sanctions. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has also scheduled a visit.
Aid workers and analysts say they hope the visits will push the United States to lead an intervention that will provide airlifts of food and medicine. The U.S. military is considering sending a team to Chad to assess the feasibility of a humanitarian mission that would help refugees who have fled Sudan, State Department officials said.
Aid workers also hope the attention will remove a crucial obstacle to stopping the famine: government denial. Headlines this week in a government newspaper, Sudan Vision, read: "Situation in Darfur Under Control" and "Ethnic Cleansing Sheer Fabrication."
A U.N. report issued in May on conditions in the village of Kailek in western Darfur accused local government officials of ordering "a policy of forced starvation" by insisting that the villagers faced no problems, even as militias prevented food deliveries. Nine children in the area reportedly died of malnutrition every day.
At the same time, the government has also restricted access to humanitarian workers and journalists, granting travel permits infrequently and allowing only a small part of the affected areas to be visited. Last week, Jan Egeland, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, said the government was holding up visas for non-U.N. relief workers and delaying the shipment of necessary equipment.
Pacing inside a Doctors Without Borders compound in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, Jean-Hervé Bradol, president of the group, said he was angry at the Sudanese government and the United Nations for their slow responses after officials toured feeding centers in Mornay. He puffed frantically on a cigarette, his face ghostly, his brown hair strewn wildly.
"This is the attitude that accelerates crisis. If you deny there's a problem, you don't have to address it," Bradol said. "We asked for food planning. We asked for trucks. They say they will come -- yes -- in six months, when it's too late. I am hoping I am wrong. In the meantime, thousands will die."
"By denying that there is a humanitarian crisis, the government can continue phase two of its ethnic cleansing campaign," said John Prendergast, a former Clinton adviser on Africa and an analyst for the International Crisis Group, a research organization based in Brussels. "Phase one consisted of driving people out of their villages. Phase two is designed to use starvation and disease to finish the job started by the government-supported Janjaweed militias."
"If Khartoum is pressured to remove the obstacles, and the U.S., EU and U.N. vastly increase the airlift and delivery capacity for moving humanitarian supplies, hundreds of thousands of lives will be saved," he said. "Rarely in the history of these kinds of humanitarian emergencies is the choice so stark, so simple."
Not Safe to Go Home
On a recent afternoon, the Sudanese government's commissioner general for humanitarian affairs, Sulaf Din Salih, visited Western Darfur and told aid workers that refugees should be encouraged to return home. Aid workers said that similar orders to return were being issued across Darfur.
In Zalingei, a camp about 50 miles southeast of Mornay, elders from the village of Zulu told aid workers that officials said the villagers would be paid to return home, in the hopes that others would follow. When they journeyed back, they said they found 40 corpses of their relatives rotting in the sand, the aid workers said. They returned immediately to the Zalingei camp, where a food shortage is raging.
On a recent visit to the city of El Geneina, the governor told the French Foreign Ministry's envoy, Renaud Muselier, "Everything is fine. No problem. Everyone can go home."
A trip with the French official down a dirt track, however, exposed a war zone where gunmen roamed. Sunburned men rode on camels, guns cradled on their laps, just steps from Mornay camp. One held a whip. Others herded hundreds of sheep, cattle and camels, smiling and waving as visitors passed. Aid workers and the displaced people in the camp said the animals were stolen.
Rapes and attacks continue around the edges of the camp every night, women there said, as they rocked sickly babies with hollow eyes. Each week in Mornay, at least five women and girls as young as 12 have been raped when they left the camp, according to a report by Doctors Without Borders. The real number is thought to be far higher because many women are reluctant to report attacks.
Stalked by Disease
With her 8-month-old malnourished twins at her breasts, Khadija Mohammed, 32, did not know how to help her children. Habiba was crying, and Hussein was passed out, unable to drink her milk. He has malaria, fevers at night, diarrhea and vomiting, his medical chart shows. His weight is half what it should be.
Mohammed came to the Mornay camp six months ago from her village in Ber Medina, 3 miles south. Her 6-year-old son and two brothers were killed.
"The nomads said, 'Lie down on the ground.' One pointed his gun toward me. Then he aimed his gun up and started firing," she said.
Her 5-year-old daughter, Arfe, who has a halo of curly braids, was hit in the buttocks but survived. "Now she sometimes gets fever, she sometimes gets headaches. She has trouble walking," her mother said.
Arfe tried to help her mother with the twins and struggled to help lift Habiba. Her mother shook her head no and lifted her daughter's frayed yellow dress to show nine stitches, a scar and a bullet lodged in Arfe's right buttock.
"We are hungry here," she said. "But where else can we go? I am afraid."
Others in the camp also said they would not leave. Mohammed Ishaq, the father of tiny Zohar, said he couldn't leave even if he wanted to, because his son is too ill to be moved.
"I am very much afraid for my son," he whispered, looking at his child's hand, each tiny finger clinging to his. "I can't love him. He is too sick."
In the noon heat, Sandrine Normand, an exhausted-looking physician with Doctors Without Borders, ran her hand over Zohar's mother's back. She then took the pink cup from her hands and gently, drop by drop, tried to make the baby swallow the water.
There will be many funerals here soon, Normand said, crouching down to sit with Zohar's parents.
-------- business
Lockheed Martin Scuttles Titan Acquisition
San Diego Defense Contractor Fails to Settle Federal Bribery Investigation
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8745-2004Jun26.html
Lockheed Martin Corp. abandoned its $2.2 billion deal to acquire Titan Corp. yesterday after the San Diego-based company failed to resolve a federal bribery investigation, ending a nearly year-long courtship plagued by controversy.
Bethesda-based Lockheed gave Titan until Friday to reach a plea agreement with the Justice Department, which is investigating whether Titan consultants bribed officials in Saudi Arabia and Benin, an African nation, to win contracts, including some for communications equipment. Titan asked Lockheed to extend the deadline when it became evident the investigation was continuing, but Lockheed refused.
"It's not a decision that we took lightly," said Thomas J. Jurkowsky, a Lockheed spokesman. "We did not want the uncertainty that surrounded the transaction to continue indefinitely. We concluded that terminating the agreement was in the best interest of Lockheed Martin and its stockholders."
Lockheed Martin, the nation's largest defense contractor, prized Titan for its growing information-technology business, which includes programs with intelligence agencies. About 8,700 of Titan's 11,000 employees have security clearances, an important selling point at a time when intelligence programs are among the fasting-growing defense sectors and applications for new clearances are backed up for months. About 2,500 Titan employees are based in the Washington area.
But Lockheed did not want to inherit legal responsibility for a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practice Act, which prohibits U.S. companies or their agents from bribing foreign officials to win business, particularly because bribery has been an issue for the company before. In 1995, Lockheed Corp., a predecessor to Lockheed Martin, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe an Egyptian politician for help in securing a contract for three C-130H cargo jets.
The Securities and Exchange Commission staff has recommended civil charges against Titan. The company set aside $3 million to pay possible fines. Titan has also been dogged by a U.S. Army report that associated one of its former employees with abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad.
After announcing a deal to buy Titan in September, Lockheed Martin delayed closing twice, lowered the price by $200 million and set the deadline for Titan to resolve the bribery case.
The Justice Department and the SEC were aware of the deadline and worked to resolve the case in time, Jurkowsky said. "They did everything they could, they sought to make it happen, but ultimately an agreement" could not be reached in time, he said. Jurkowsky declined to say whether Lockheed blamed Titan for the breakdown.
"We worked very hard with the Department of Justice and SEC to reach a resolution and we are continuing to cooperate and work with them for that resolution," said Ralph "Wil" Williams, a Titan spokesman. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment yesterday. An SEC spokesman did not return a call seeking comment.
With the acquisition canceled, Lockheed is likely to use the cash it would have paid Titan shareholders to raise dividends to its own shareholders and buy back stock, industry analysts said. Some also expect Lockheed, maker of the F-16 fighter and Atlas rocket, to find another company to acquire in Titan's place and continue its growth in information technology.
The Titan acquisition was seen as Lockheed's response to the purchase by its Falls Church-based rival, General Dynamics Corp., of a local technology company, Veridian Inc. Titan, with $1.8 billion in revenue, is among the largest publicly traded information technology companies available at a time when the sector is consolidating and large defense firms want to widen their info-tech capabilities.
"There was a reason [Lockheed] wanted to do this deal in the first place, and that reason is still there," said Jon B. Kutler, chairman and chief executive of Quarterdeck Investment Partners LLC.
"They are going to be more aggressive about filling that spot," said Robert D. Kipps, head of investment bank Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin's defense group.
For Titan, the end of the deal will usher in a transition back to a stand-alone company. Chief executive Gene W. Ray said in a statement that he was disappointed that the deal fell through. Ray has said the firm will not look for a new buyer.
Titan was not for sale when Lockheed pursued it, Ray said. "The offer of a merger came from Lockheed Martin, not Titan."
Titan is likely to stay independent for the next few years, but its reasons for accepting Lockheed's offer linger, industry analysts said. Titan has a relatively high debt load, more than $500 million, which makes it difficult for it to pursue acquisitions of its own, and Ray, 65, does not have an obvious successor, Kipps said.
"The issues that caused them to be interested in a sale are still going to be there a couple of years from now," Kipps said.
-------- iraq
New Iraqi police fight US troops who trained them
telegraph.co.uk
By Damien McElroy
27/06/2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/06/27/wirq127.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/06/27/ixnewstop.html
With american fighter jets and helicopters buzzing the skies overhead, an officer in Iraq's new police force approaches a group of fighters on Fallujah's front lines with an urgent call to arms.
"I need a man who can use an RPG," says Omar, who wears the uniform of a first lieutenant. Four hands shoot up and a cry rings out: "We are ready." He chooses a young man, Bilal, and they drive to an underpass on the outskirts of the city.
There, on Highway One, an American Humvee is driving east. Bilal aims and fires his rocket propelled grenade, turning the vehicle into a smoking, twisted, metal carcass. The fate of its occupants is unknown.
First Lt Omar is sworn to uphold the law and fight the insurgency that threatens Iraq's evolution into a free and democratic state. Instead, he is exploiting his knowledge of US tactics to help the rebel cause in Fallujah.
"Resistance is stronger when you are working with the occupation forces," he points out. "That way you can learn their weaknesses and attack at that point."
An Iraqi journalist went into Fallujah on behalf of the Telegraph on Wednesday, a day on which an orchestrated wave of bloody rebel attacks across the country cost more than 100 lives.
Inside the Sunni-dominated town, he met police officers and units of the country's new army who have formed a united front with Muslim fundamentalists against the Americans, their resistance focused on al-Askeri district on the eastern outskirts of the town.
That morning, US marines had taken up "aggressive defence" positions on one side of Highway One. On the other side, militant fighters were dug in, ready for battle.
Their preparations were thorough. Along the length of a suburban street in al-Askeri, they had dug foxholes at the base of every palm tree. Scores of armed men lined the streets. Most had scarves wrapped around their heads but others wore the American-supplied uniform of Unit 505 of the Iraqi army, and carried US-made M-16 rifles. Yet more were dressed in the olive green uniforms worn by Saddam Hussein's armed forces. Since April, when a US offensive failed to crush an uprising by Islamic fighters and Ba'athist loyalists, Fallujah has been effectively a no-go area for American troops.
A newly formed, 2,000-strong force known as the Fallujah brigade, led by a Saddam-era general, Mohammed Latif, was supposed to disarm the rebels. Instead, the town remains a hotbed of resistance. Now, once again, US military pressure is being brought to bear.
Three separate air strikes have been launched on houses in the town in recent days, aimed at killing an al-Qaeda leader believed to be based in Fallujah. The Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is believed to be behind the wave of kidnappings and terror attacks across Iraq.
US officials say that they narrowly missed their target on Friday, in their most recent strike on a house where he was suspected of hiding. Up to 25 people were killed.
On the ground in al-Askeri, tension was once again rising under the US attacks. Strangers had to seek permission from the "district commander", a local imam called Sheikh Yassin who controls a broad coalition of Saddam loyalists and Islamic radicals, to move beyond the rebel lines. The sheikh, who has emerged as the neighbourhood strongman since the uprising against American occupation, has used his following to unite all strands of resistance under his leadership.
His radio buzzed constantly as scouts, moving incognito in private cars, sent in reports about US positions around the suburb. The ground shook as F-16 Falcons dropped precision-guided 500lb bombs on rebel positions near the football stadium, half a mile away.
US commanders have spoken of their frustration over the Fallujah Brigade's failure to rein in rebels, and the ineffectiveness of the political deal struck with local tribes in April. "We've been prepared to pull the plug on it three or four times, but each time we detect a faint heartbeat," a senior marine officer said. To Sheikh Yassin, the supposedly anti-rebel brigade is a useful tool, providing support for his fighters. "We respect the Fallujah brigade - it never interferes against us," he says. He openly acknowledges that his coalition was a marriage of convenience, bringing together the secular Saddam faithful and Muslim fundamentalists.
The imam, who wants Iraq to be governed by Islamic law, points to one of his companions - a colonel in the disbanded Iraqi army - and asks why he is still fighting.
The colonel is blunt. "Fallujah is the starting point of the return of the Ba'ath Party," he says. "Our comrades in Baghdad and other provinces are joining our struggle. Here already we are free. No one can touch us."
In violence yesterday, a car bomb in the predominantly Shia city of Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad, killed at least 15 people according to the Arabic satellite news channel al-Jazeera.
Six guerrillas and several other people were killed in Baquba, north of Baghdad, when rebels blew up the local party headquarters of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's prime minister, and attacked a moderate Shia political party's office. Another car bomb killed a man in the Kurdish city of Arbil.
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Biggest Task for U.S. General Is Training Iraqis to Fight Iraqis
June 27, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/international/middleeast/27ARMY.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 26 - On a recent afternoon in his new office in the heavily fortified Green Zone, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, a celebrated American field commander, sketched his vision for how America's forces might one day extract themselves from this country.
"I know where this ends," said General Petraeus, 51, who earlier this month took control of a vast project to oversee the training of Iraqi security forces. "It ends with the Iraqis in charge of their country. At the end of the day, you get as many Iraqis as possible to have a stake in the success of the new Iraq to defeat the insurgency."
Just a few hundred yards from his office, the magnitude of his challenge loomed in the form of Zhuhair Khamis, an Iraqi Civil Defense officer standing guard at the entrance to the American compound.
"I am not ready to fight Iraqis," said Mr. Khamis, a 33-year-old Iraqi Shiite. "I will throw down my weapon, I will throw down my uniform, and I will give back my badge. I will fight foreigners; but I am not ready to fight Iraqis."
General Petraeus, who scored some of the Army's some of the most notable successes in the previous year here, is now charged with perhaps the most ambitious project that will unfold in the year that begins with the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty on Wednesday: rebuilding an Iraqi security force that collapsed during April's uprisings, when Iraqi soldiers quit and ran rather than fight their own people.
General Petraeus's goal, in his own words, is to help create an Iraqi Army that will have the discipline and the heart to defeat the insurgency on its own, and ultimately enable American forces to go home.
Anything less will probably condemn the Americans to a bloody, long-term intervention here, or to a withdrawal that would send Iraq spinning off into chaos.
In a war that seems more like a quagmire every day, General Petraeus says he can see the shape of victory in Iraq - he just cannot predict he will get there.
"I can't predict when that will be," he said. "It's not going to be someone flipping a light switch."
Last year, as the head of the elite 101st Airborne Division, General Petraeus's efforts in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul constituted one of the few bright spots in an otherwise troubled occupation.
For General Petraeus, the new job presents an enormous risk, one that could make or break an already impressive military career. The task - creating a credible army in a foreign country under siege - seems likely to require skills that American generals are not ordinarily known for, like offering advice that might be ignored, or standing on the sidelines while Iraqis step to the fore.
The magnitude of the task that confronts General Petraeus was made clear two months ago, when revolts in Falluja and in cities across southern Iraq led to the widespread collapse of the 200,000-man, American-trained Iraqi security forces.
The uprisings were eventually brought under control, but the Iraqi forces hardly played a role. In Baghdad, half of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a national militia trained by the Americans, either quit or sided with the insurgents; in Karbala, the corps disintegrated entirely. In Falluja, when American commanders ordered Iraqi soldiers into battle, they mutinied, with some 200 armed Iraqis refusing to board American helicopters.
Gen. Paul Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi forces until General Petraeus took over earlier this month, said the Americans tried to do much too fast, and missed the degree to which the country's various ethnicities and religious groups had failed to jell into a coherent nation.
"In America, we have this national ethos; you identify with the Pledge of Allegiance and the flag, the stars and stripes," General Eaton said. "In Iraq, that is overshadowed by tribe, imam, family and ethnicity. I talked to countless young soldiers who said, `My name is Muhammad, and I am a Turkoman' or `I am a Sunni' or `I am a Shiite.' "
General Petraeus acknowledges the obstacles but believes he can transcend them. A 1974 graduate of West Point, he is a veteran of operations in Haiti and Bosnia, but not in a combat zone until he came to Iraq last year.
He has a doctorate in international relations from Princeton University, where he wrote his dissertation on the lessons of the Vietnam War.
As a young battalion commander, General Petraeus survived a gunshot wound to the chest, and later shattered his pelvis during a parachute jump.
For all of that, General Petraeus is a fanatical devotee of physical fitness; the general can demolish 19-year-old recruits in pushup contests, and two years ago, at the age of 49, completed a 10-mile run in less than 64 minutes.
"Do you think you can outrun me?" General Petraeus said, challenging an Iraqi soldier at the Taji training base north of Baghdad the other day.
Even before General Petraeus arrived, American commanders had already begun a vast overhaul of the Iraqi security services, based on the experience of the April uprisings. With the new Iraqi leadership, they have taken the country's most important internal security unit, the civil defense corps, and begun turning it into a branch of a revamped 100,000-man Iraqi Army.
The locally recruited corps officers will be taken out of their homes and cities, away from their families and tribes and mosques, and turned into regular soldiers who live on bases and train and fight together. To make that happen, the Americans have committed $3 billion to building training sites and regional headquarters and to better equip Iraqi soldiers.
It will be up to General Petraeus to carry out these changes, and he says he plans to carry them out in much the way he did in northern Iraq, where he commanded American forces until earlier this year.
For nearly a year, General Petraeus reigned as a kind of benevolent dictator in the city of Mosul, presiding over an array of projects that transformed the region. He hired and fired local leaders. He conducted combat operations. He decided which former members of the Baath Party could stay, and which would go.
In nearly a year in Mosul, General Petraeus's 101st Airborne Division carried out some 5,000 reconstruction projects worth an estimated $57 million.
In addition to refurbishing schools and irrigation networks, the general created a youth soccer league with 150 teams, appeared on a call-in radio show and even set up a television network, Mosul Television, known around town as MTV.
The biggest TV hit: "Iraqi Idol," a talent search program modeled after its American counterpart.
"A wild success," General Petraeus said.
He said his philosophy in Mosul was not to dictate to the Iraqis or give them handouts, but to help them do the jobs themselves. It is the same philosophy, he said, that will guide him in his mission to train the new Iraqi Army.
"What we are going to do now is nothing new," General Petraeus said. "We are enabling, supporting and assisting Iraqis. We made a lot of friends there."
For all the general's efforts, the Mosul experiment began to sour last autumn, when the security situation sharply deteriorated. A number of Iraqis cooperating with the American-backed government have been killed there in recent months.
Mosul's experience is similar to that of many other cities around central Iraq, where millions of dollars spent on projects ultimately failed to quell the insurgency.
To set up an effective Iraqi Army, General Petraeus believes that the most important change is already happening - putting Iraqis in charge of the army and the government.
Part of the problem last April, he acknowledged, was not just that Iraqi soldiers were refusing to fight other Iraqis, it was that the people who were ordering them to do so were Americans.
To that end, the Americans have installed a veteran Iraqi general, with a history of independence from Saddam Hussein, as the army chief of staff. Already, that general, Amir Hashemi, said he had found the America training of Iraqi troops to be woefully inadequate.
"I am not satisfied with the training provided by the Americans," General Hashemi said. "We must do this the Iraqi way."
General Petraeus says he is cheered by that kind of independence, since it is the Iraqis, ultimately, who will have to do the fighting.
Yet at the same time, General Petraeus is trying to impart Western notions on the armed forces here, particularly the idea that the army, and the Iraqi nation, must transcend loyalties to tribe and religion.
"This is your new tribe," he said to an Iraqi soldier, an ethnic Kurd, who stood in line as General Petraeus inspected the troops.
"These are all your new brothers," he said to another.
Yet for all the talk of encouraging the Iraqis to go their own way, General Petraeus has on occasion found it difficult to forget that he is after all an American general, whose every order is obeyed and whose very presence commands immediate respect.
On those occasions, the Iraqis have usually been happy to remind General Petraeus that, come June 30, Iraq will be their country again.
On recent visit to a police station in the southern Iraqi town of Hilla, General Petraeus strode in and offered his hand to the police chief there, Gen. Qais Mamoonia.
"Welcome to Hilla," General Mamoonia said to General Petraeus.
"Thank you, general, but I have actually been here before," General Petraeus said. "In April last year I came. We liberated Hilla."
General Qais paused for a long time, looking up at the ceiling.
"Welcome again, then," he said.
There was laughter all around, and the two men got down to work.
--------
U.S. Edicts Curb Power Of Iraq's Leadership
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8665-2004Jun26?language=printer
BAGHDAD, June 26 -- U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer has issued a raft of edicts revising Iraq's legal code and has appointed at least two dozen Iraqis to government jobs with multi-year terms in an attempt to promote his concepts of governance long after the planned handover of political authority on Wednesday.
Some of the orders signed by Bremer, which will remain in effect unless overturned by Iraq's interim government, restrict the power of the interim government and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country's democratic transition. Among the most controversial orders is the enactment of an elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support.
The effect of other regulations could last much longer. Bremer has ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the interim prime minister he selected, Ayad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi's choices on the elected government that is to take over next year.
Bremer also has appointed Iraqis handpicked by his aides to influential positions in the interim government. He has installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry. He has formed and filled commissions to regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. He named a public-integrity commissioner who will have the power to refer corrupt government officials for prosecution.
Some Iraqi officials condemn Bremer's edicts and appointments as an effort to exert U.S. control over the country after the transfer of political authority. "They have established a system to meddle in our affairs," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the Governing Council, a recently dissolved body that advised Bremer for the past year. "Iraqis should decide many of these issues."
Bremer has defended his issuance of many of the orders as necessary to implement democratic reforms and update Iraq's out-of-date legal code. He said he regarded the installation of inspectors-general in ministries, the creation of independent commissions and the changes to Iraqi law as important steps to fight corruption and cronyism, which in turn would help the formation of democratic institutions.
"You set up these things and they begin to develop a certain life and momentum on their own -- and it's harder to reverse course," Bremer said in a recent interview.
As of June 14, Bremer had issued 97 legal orders, which are defined by the U.S. occupation authority as "binding instructions or directives to the Iraqi people" that will remain in force even after the transfer of political authority. An annex to the country's interim constitution requires the approval of a majority of Allawi's ministers, as well as the interim president and two vice presidents, to overturn any of Bremer's edicts. A senior U.S. official in Iraq noted recently that it would "not be easy to reverse" the orders.
It appears unlikely that all of the orders will be followed. Many of them reflect an idealistic but perhaps futile attempt to impose Western legal, economic and social concepts on a tradition-bound nation that is reveling in anything-goes freedom after 35 years of dictatorial rule.
The orders include rules that cap tax rates at 15 percent, prohibit piracy of intellectual property, ban children younger than 15 from working, and a new traffic code that stipulates the use of a car horn in "emergency conditions only" and requires a driver to "hold the steering wheel with both hands."
Iraq has long been a place where few people pay taxes, where most movies and music are counterfeit, where children often hold down jobs and where traffic laws are rarely obeyed, Iraqis note.
Other regulations promulgated by Bremer prevent former members of the Iraqi army from holding public office for 18 months after their retirement or resignation, stipulate a 30-year minimum sentence for people caught selling weapons such as grenades and ban former militiamen integrated into the Iraqi armed forces from endorsing and campaigning for political candidates. He has also enacted a 76-page law regulating private corporations and amended an industrial-design law to protect microchip designs. Those changes were intended to facilitate the entry of Iraq into the World Trade Organization, even though the country is so violent that the no commercial flights are allowed to land at Baghdad's airport.
Some of the new rules attempt to introduce American approaches to fighting crime. An anti-money-laundering law requires banks to collect detailed personal information from customers seeking to make transactions greater than $3,500, while the Commission on Public Integrity has been given the power to reward whistleblowers with 25 percent of the funds recovered by the government from corrupt practices they have identified.
In some cases Bremer's regulations diverge from the Bush administration's domestic policies. He suspended the death penalty, and his election law imposes a strict quota: One of every three candidates on a party's slate must be a woman.
Iraqis have already scoffed at some of the requirements. Judges on the Central Criminal Court of Iraq, who were appointed by Bremer, have refused to impose 30-year sentences on people detained with grenades and other military weapons. At the same time, many Iraqi politicians contend that banning the death penalty was a mistake. Several have said they will push to reinstate capital punishment after the transfer of political authority.
Some of the Iraqis recently appointed by Bremer as inspectors and commissioners said they should have been given their jobs months ago. Had that happened, they insisted, they would have had more time to build support for the activities.
"There are some doubts about my work," said Nabil Bayati, the inspector general in the Ministry of Electricity, who is charged with rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. People in the ministry, he said, "don't understand it yet."
Siyamend Othman, the chief executive of the Iraqi Communications and Media Commission, said his fellow commissioners were only appointed three weeks ago. "Had this commissions been set up six months ago, we would have been in a far more secure position than we are today," he said. "We would have had six months to prove and to show to the Iraqi people our worth and what we're capable of doing, and why this commission is such an important institution."
In recent weeks, Bremer has issued orders aimed at setting policy for a variety of controversial issues, including the future use of radioactive material, Arab-Kurd property disputes and national elections planned for January.
On June 15, Bremer signed an order establishing the Iraqi Radioactive Source Regulatory Authority as an independent agency regulating radioactive material in Iraq. His order forbids, even after the transfer of sovereignty, any activity involving radioactive material except under requirements established by the agency.
On June 19, in an effort to keep unemployed Iraqi weapons scientists from working for other nations, Bremer established the Iraqi Non-Proliferation Programs Foundation, a semi-governmental organization set up to provide grants and contracts to people who worked on Saddam Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs. An initial grant of $37.5 million was set aside by Bremer to pay the scientists' expenses to attend international conferences so they can be retrained for non-weapons employment.
The foundation, which has been exempted from a ban on government support to former high-ranking members of Hussein's Baath Party, is also supposed to establish a venture capital fund to promote the commercial development of products and technologies by former employees of Iraqi weapons programs, according to the order setting up the foundation.
On May 28, Bremer signed an order establishing a Special Task Force on Compensating Victims of the Previous Regime. The task force, appointed by Bremer, is to devise a means for determining the number of victims, estimate fair compensation and recommend a system under which claims could be made and adjudicated. An endowment of $25 million was set aside from oil income to be used to compensate victims and their families, according to the order authorizing the task force.
But perhaps Bremer's most far-reaching and potentially contentious order is the election law, which he signed June 15. The law states that no party can be associated with a militia or get money from one. It also requires the electoral commission to draft a code of conduct barring campaigners from using "hate speech, intimidation, and support for, the practice of and the use of terrorism."
The law, signed last week, is intended to establish the framework and policies that will govern next year's national elections to select a 275-member national assembly. But experts in Arab world elections have questioned how the law will be received by the Iraqi people once its terms are widely known. Some predicted that the rules would be challenged and perhaps ignored by the interim Iraqi government.
"I foresee real political conflict about these rules," said Amy Hawthorne, an Arab specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies elections.
"The laws came out from behind a curtain while armed conflict is going on," said Hawthorne, who expects people and parties to challenge the laws after July 1 because "they were created under the [occupation] authority and their legal status is a bit murky."
"The notion of [the U.S.] decreeing election law prior to June 30 is unfortunate," said Leslie Campbell, who has worked in Iraq for the National Democratic Institute.
Financing elections, difficult in the United States, could be an even greater problem in Iraq where not only the wealthy but also foreign countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and even the United States are openly putting money into political parties and politicians. The Bremer law calls on parties to "strive to the extent possible to achieve full transparency in all financial dealings" and calls on the electoral commission to consider issuing regulations.
Campbell said such a law "may be a lot cleaner than letting the commission have it out with the interim government in a messy way, but it is not good that the electoral commission is not promulgating key parts of the law."
Campbell said it would be difficult, if not impossible, to enforce the provision separating militia members from politics since all the major Iraqi political parties are associated with armed organizations. Although the occupation authority has attempted to demobilize militias, most have not yet disbanded.
Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who specializes in Iraq, said the appointed electoral commission's power to eliminate political parties or candidates for not obeying laws would allow it "to disqualify people someone didn't like."
He likened the power of the commission to that of religious mullahs in Iran, who routinely use their authority to remove candidates before an election. "In a way, Mr. Bremer is using a more subtle form than the one used by hard-liners in Iran to control their elections," Cole said.
Pincus reported from Washington.
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Clashes Engulf Center of Baqubah
U.S. Troops Battle Bands of Insurgents and Heat in Day-Long Fighting
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8616-2004Jun26?language=printer
BAQUBAH, Iraq, June 26 -- Heavy fighting engulfed downtown Baqubah on Saturday as U.S. troops and black-clad insurgents clashed intermittently in palm groves, traffic circles and major avenues only days before a fledgling Iraqi government is scheduled to assume political authority after 15 months of occupation.
Following the coordinated attacks that ripped through six cities on Thursday and killed more than 100 Iraqis, U.S. military commanders said they expected more strikes as insurgents tried to disrupt the transfer of power on Wednesday. Those predictions proved true before 8 a.m. when insurgents operating in small groups peppered government buildings with rocket-propelled grenades and rifle fire. Many of the insurgents then dissolved into narrow alleys and clusters of date palms, a pattern that occurred throughout the hot, windy day.
U.S. troops pursued them in armored convoys and on foot through a downtown district crowded periodically with bewildered civilians, some of whom later joined the fight on the side of U.S. troops. On the city outskirts, meanwhile, U.S. soldiers raided houses looking for guerrillas and weapons stockpiles.
At times, the attacks followed amplified calls from Baqubah's many minarets, although soldiers were unsure if the messages were coordinating insurgent operations, as had been the case in previous uprisings.
By day's end, the outcome of the fighting remained inconclusive. U.S. officials later said six guerrillas were killed in the fighting. But to the soldiers watching the battlefield from a rooftop near the heart of the fighting, the challenges of imposing order here had become dauntingly clear after a day of clashes complicated by shifting rules of engagement, sapping heat and unorthodox guerrilla tactics.
"It's ever-changing scenery," said Sgt. Tom Evans, 34, a squad leader from 3rd Platoon, Bravo Battery, of the 1st Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade Combat Team. Reflecting on the days remaining before the transfer of sovereignty, he said: "The closer we get to 30 June, the more of this stuff is happening."
The streets of this farming center 35 miles northeast of Baghdad had filled with traffic Saturday morning when insurgents blasted the Iraqi police station across the street from a compound used by the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. Rocket-propelled grenades slammed into several buildings, sending showers of debris into the streets below.
The firing came from both ends of the street below Evans's men, who manned machine guns and Mark-19 grenade launchers from sandbagged positions overlooking the occupation compound's north side. A few blocks farther north, the violet dome of the Anafsa mosque and its turquoise-tipped minaret peeked over three-story apartment buildings.
In the hours that followed, fighting swirled around the soldiers' tumbledown building, centering on the provincial government facility known as the "Blue Dome." That building, two blocks from the compound, sits near a palm grove in Baqubah's civic center.
In recent days, the insurgents have attacked the area repeatedly in an apparent effort to cut it off from additional U.S. forces and effect a symbolic capture of the city's seat of political power. Military commanders predict that the insurgents' objective will not change but that the scale of their attacks will grow more ambitious.
"Watch them, watch them!" shouted Evans, an ebullient Texan with a well-trimmed mustache and little patience for his soldiers' frequent swearing over the radio network. "Three individuals on your right."
A blue four-door sedan pulled into the empty avenue before 9 a.m. and appeared to fire a grenade into a building about 100 yards from the compound. Evans's soldiers fired on the car, and the men inside darted down a side alley.
Through sniper scopes, the soldiers could see the men partially hidden behind a blue banner with Arabic inscriptions. An informant later told a guard at the compound gate that the car contained weapons.
A crowd of about 40 men gathered on the corner near the thickening traffic on Orange Circle, just beyond the immobilized car. Every few minutes, one or two rifle shots sounded.
"Drink water, guys, drink water!" Evans yelled, as the heat, which would push above 115 degrees in the next few hours, took hold. "Looks like it's going to be a long day."
From a rooftop one floor below, Sgt. Brett Granrose, 25, from Stillwater, Okla., stared through the scope of his M-4 rifle and saw increasing activity around the car, which sat 250 yards away with two of its doors open. Backed-up traffic began to eddy around it, frustrating Evans and emboldening one of the men behind the banner. Slowly, the man moved toward the car.
"If he touches that car, shoot it," Evans yelled to Granrose. A minute later, Granrose squeezed the trigger, and a shot cracked down the avenue. The man fled.
Soon afterward, the strains of the muezzin's call rang out from the minaret loudspeakers. Evans checked his watch. It was 10 a.m.
"The prayer guy is starting early today," he said. He keyed his radio, calling for an interpreter to come up to the roof and translate the message. Before one arrived, the crackle of small-arms fire sounded from less than a block away.
"We have gunshots, south gate," Evans said into the radio. Then, to no one in particular, "They just picked it up for some reason."
Just as quickly, the popcorn pop of small-arms fire gave way to long, thudding bursts from heavy machine guns. Grenade explosions thumped in long staccato strings.
"Be advised the Blue Dome is getting rocked," Evans announced into the radio. "Seems like the action is moving in our direction, so be ready. We're looking northwest, moving our direction."
Suddenly, the world below was in motion. Crowds ran down the avenue past Orange Circle, empty of the traffic that had clogged it minutes before. Only the muezzin and gunfire interrupted the hush that had fallen over the city of 250,000 people.
"Light it up, baby!" Evans shouted above the din. His men cheered as a column of Bradley Fighting Vehicles rumbled past toward the palm grove. The small-arms fire moved to within 50 yards of the occupation complex, directed at the police station.
At the start of the day's fighting, Col. Dana Pittard, the brigade commander, had met with the city's police chiefs, who pleaded for heavier weapons to repel the attack.
"We're going to arm them," said Pittard, who would provide machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. "They want to fight, which is something we did not see in April" when the police fled in the face of a similar uprising.
Pittard also said he received reports that Iraqi civilians, carrying AK-47s permitted under occupation regulations for protection of homes, had begun pursuing the insurgents on their own. According to one report, a group of them ran into the palm grove, a favorite insurgent staging area, amid heavy firing on the Blue Dome.
"We've never seen that before," Pittard said. "I'm very encouraged by it."
The civilians' involvement necessitated new rules of engagement for Evans's men. Soldiers had been permitted to fire on anyone carrying a weapon or dressed in the insurgents' signature black uniform. But Evans informed the men that for the rest of the day they could fire only on people who were both armed and clad in black.
As heavy fighting ebbed and flowed over the next hour, the blue sedan remained; in the words of one soldier, it was "a Mexican standoff." At 11:30 a.m., a man in gray slacks and a gray striped shirt appeared at the guard post and offered to retrieve the weapons from the car. Evans agreed, with one caveat.
"If he turns off the street, shoot him," he told his rooftop snipers. He also ordered a squad from the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a U.S.-trained paramilitary force whose woefully under-equipped recruits have generally performed poorly against a more skilled insurgency, to escort the volunteer.
From a side street, the man in gray appeared, flanked by five civil defense soldiers. The men gingerly made their way along the empty street toward the car, watched by a gathering crowd. The Iraqi soldiers, only one of them in body armor, fired into the air.
The group covered the 250 yards in a minute, and just as quickly the civilian ran back to the compound with news. The weapons, he said, consisted of several rocket-propelled grenades wrapped in wires -- an apparent booby trap.
But the civil defense soldiers continued to check the car, removing four grenades, a launcher and an ammunition vest. They tested the trunk before one of them noticed wires leading to it from the back seat. Slowly, they headed back to the compound with their find.
"Good job, guys!" Evans yelled.
A half-hour later, a U.S. infantryman knelt in the avenue 100 yards from the car, holding on his shoulder an AT-4 rocket launcher. He took aim at the blue sedan as soldiers gathered on the roof to watch. The private squeezed the trigger, and with a deafening boom the car exploded to hoots and cheers.
"You just gave the guy one less reason to wash it," one soldier yelled.
The car burned for hours. Then a group of Iraqis, some of them children carrying white bags, stripped the charred mess.
The day wore on, the fighting flaring and fading in a cycle that kept the soldiers on edge. At twilight, Evans headed for his bunk and a few hours' sleep. The muezzin's call echoed in the near distance.
"You wouldn't believe this place just after the sun rises," Evans said. "It's beautiful."
-------
Insurgency Leaves U.S. Forces Baffled
Soldiers Share Tales of Hostility and Kindness on a Shifting Battlefield
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8796-2004Jun26?language=printer
KARBALA, Iraq -- During more than a year in Iraq, Sgt. David Taylor saw perhaps as many Iraqis through the primary sight of his M1 Abrams tank as he did face to face. But who exactly he saw still baffles him.
The salty tank commander from the 1st Armored Division worked on the edge of Baghdad's desperately poor Sadr City for much of the past year. Then, in late April, he was rushed to this city 60 miles southwest of Baghdad to help put down an armed uprising in what developed into the most difficult fighting of his time here.
One day a few months ago, his men hauled tons of topsoil into the Baghdad slum to refurbish a rundown soccer field, a children's project in the midst of a grown-up war, and something well outside a tank commander's job description. When they returned the next morning to finish the task, the soil had disappeared.
"They stole dirt, their own dirt," said Taylor, 37, a Persian Gulf War veteran from Copperas Cove, Tex. Shaking his head and staring into his lunch at a post cafeteria here, he added, "I still haven't figured them out."
Throughout the 15-month U.S. occupation of Iraq, soldiers from the 1st Armored Division worked to pacify a country recovering from decades of dictatorship and a traumatic invasion. Just as relentlessly, the war worked on them.
They faced a shifting insurgency that culminated in a 60-day fight for the Shiite Muslim south as intense as any since the war began. And over their 15 months, during which 97 division soldiers died in combat and more than 1,000 were wounded, they struggled to clarify their perception of the everyday Iraqis they believed they had come to help.
Their time here has left many soldiers, from veteran tank drivers to young company commanders, with a confused picture of the Iraqis who never took up arms against them. Many share tales of intimate kindnesses by individual Iraqis. But they also acknowledge that the tactics they used against an elusive insurgency, while killing many enemy fighters, created new adversaries among civilians caught in the crossfire.
The soldiers express uneasiness about the country's course as they prepare to depart after the June 30 handover of limited authority to an Iraqi government. It will be charted, say many street-level soldiers, by ordinary Iraqis who often appeared less determined to influence the country's future than did the insurgents who mingled among them.
"Not to be cynical about it, but we just don't know whether to trust them," said Lt. Tim Hogan, a 25-year-old military police officer from Dubuque, Iowa.
In late April 2003, the division arrived in Baghdad to carry out a "stability operation" in the aftermath of a swift war. In the first few weeks there was some shooting, mostly in neighborhoods sympathetic to the collapsed government. Soon, nation-building duties, such as Taylor's soccer stadium, consumed the soldiers. If the Iraqis were not entirely friendly partners, they were not overtly hostile, either.
But just as the everyday frustrations of military checkpoints, road closures and arrests wore down the Iraqis, roadside bombs afflicted the soldiers. Capt. Jon Dunn, 31, a company commander from Woodbridge, Va., ran into five during his time in Baghdad and became known as the "metal detector" among his soldiers. As a new year began, the battlefield was treacherous. But the insurgency had yet to fully show itself.
"Until April, it was unthinkable to come after coalition forces with an RPG," said Capt. Ty Wilson, 31, a company commander from Fairfax, Va. "Then suddenly they were everywhere."
The uprising overwhelmed perceptions formed over the previous year of nation-building, leaving the trauma of combat to define the soldiers' understanding of the Iraqis.
After weeks of fighting under cover of darkness, Lt. Jon Silk found himself in a running gun battle lit by daylight. In late May, Silk's platoon pushed into Kufa, a stronghold of the anti-American militia led by the young cleric Moqtada Sadr. The troops' mission was to test a truce declared a few days earlier, using themselves as targets.
The blazing rooftop ambushes that greeted his men were an unequivocal sign that the cease-fire had not taken hold. Searching for a way to get above the fire, Silk and his men charged into a private home, apologized briefly to the flustered owners, and headed to the roof to set up gun positions.
"I thought they'd be angry, upset," said Silk, an amiable 35-year-old from Boston who had spent his career in the enlisted ranks until commissioned before the war. "The next thing I know, they're serving us food and tea while we were fighting."
In the streets below Silk's position, the battle worsened. He and his men left the surprising hospitality and joined the fight, at times engaging insurgents in hand-to-hand combat. But Silk was also receiving a shocking new daylight perspective on the kind of combat that had been hidden in darkness for weeks.
"When we returned to camp that afternoon, me and my gunners were all shaking," Silk said. "It was the first time we'd ever seen what our guns were doing to them."
Capt. Geoff Wright, who commands a tank company, was in the fight with Silk that day in Kufa. And he, too, was taken aback after seeing the faces of his enemy, much younger than he had imagined, up close.
To Wright, known for his wry sense of humor, the daylight fighting also clarified in a disappointing way the halting progress the Americans had made with Iraqis during the occupation.
In this case, it seemed to Wright, the Shiite Muslim majority that had largely welcomed the U.S. invasion after suffering under ousted president Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led government had turned.
"It was interesting to think about," said Wright, 31, of Emmaus, Pa. "These were the same people that all year you have been trying to cultivate, and now they are either sitting on the fence and quietly hoping you succeed or working against you."
Many division soldiers suggested that the tactics employed by the insurgency shaped, unfairly or not, their view of Iraqis who were not technically part of it. The distinction was often a challenging one to make on the urban battlefields they encountered.
Soldiers were attacked during the spring campaign in the south from the roofs of hospitals and the classrooms of schools. Mosques became weapons stockpiles and staging areas for ambushes. Snipers hid in the tops of date palm trees.
"They had good ideas about where they wanted us to fight," said Staff Sgt. Robert McBride, 35, from Roscoe, Tex., and a veteran of the Persian Gulf War.
But rarely, particularly as the uprising developed, did Iraqi civilians step forward with information to save soldiers from an ambush or point out a weapons depot. Part of the reason for that was fear, soldiers said they believed, but also a reluctance to take sides.
After weeks of intense fighting near Kufa's Salah mosque, Capt. John Moore, a tank company commander, said people emerged from their homes to greet the soldiers. No help had been forthcoming in the previous weeks, but to Moore it appeared that a new popularity flowed from their apparent victory.
"Maybe they were just happy we weren't shooting off heavy weaponry in their neighborhood anymore," said Moore, 33, of Chesapeake, Va. "But it also seemed like they were happy the SOBs were gone."
For most of the division's three-month extension, Col. Rob Baker's 2nd Brigade Combat Team was responsible for a stretch of towns south of Baghdad that are among the most hostile to the occupation. Over that time, 12 of his soldiers were killed, more than twice the number who died over the previous year.
Foreigners are routinely attacked along the road through Mahmudiyah and Latifiyah, where disaffected Sunni tribes once loyal to Hussein, as well as foreign militants and Shiite rebels, have taken refuge. U.S. troops face ambushes and roadside bombs.
To Baker, building an intelligence network among the different groups -- sometimes working in concert and other times at odds -- has been a revealing challenge. He has given his informants cameras, GPS equipment and espionage training.
"In some cases, they do it out of patriotism," Baker said of the few Iraqis who have worked with him. "Others we put on the payroll."
Community outreach efforts by Baker and his men have been tailored to local sensibilities. In addition to spending $13.5 million on development projects since mid-April, Baker has adopted new, softer rules in dealing with a mostly suspicious community.
He ordered soldiers not to place bags over the heads of detained Iraqis and whenever possible to arrest suspected insurgents outside the view of their wives. Baker also wrote a letter of apology to every detainee wrongly arrested, handed to them upon release.
"Even if one of the people in a house killed one of our soldiers, we'd be back to fix the door we broke down in arresting him the next day," said Baker, 44, of Aberdeen, Md., who bears a passing resemblance to his high-school classmate, former Baltimore Orioles star Cal Ripken Jr.
The outreach, Baker contends, has had some success. His men are defusing more roadside bombs than are exploding, and in recent weeks they have captured a number of important local leaders of the insurgency. But the nature of the resistance often means that new enemies are made as fast as friends.
After a car bomb exploded in Yusifiyah in May, killing eight soldiers, Baker ordered a sweep through the neighborhood. His soldiers searched more than 700 houses over the next 12 hours, leaving, in his words, "a lot of disgruntled citizens."
"We have a big challenge to improve our image," Baker said. "What we are trying to instill in Iraqis is trust and confidence. But it doesn't mean we will win their friendship."
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FAILURE AS AN OPTION
Looking at the Costs if Iraq Goes Up in Smoke
June 27, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/weekinreview/27sang.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON - The carnage of 100 dead in a single grim day in Iraq was still playing out on television screens last week when the man about to take over the unenviable job of American military commander there, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., dryly summarized the situation to Senator John McCain: "It is certainly not how I envisioned it to be, senator. I think the insurgency is much stronger than I certainly would have anticipated."
He is not the only one in Washington hinting that failure is an option when Iraq is handed back to the Iraqis. It is tempting to conclude, as the locals throw stones at the wreckage of their liberators' armored cars, that Iraq will be a disaster for years to come. The reality may well be more complicated.
From Wednesday forward, when formal sovereignty passes to Iraqi hands, the United States may face a strategic landscape defined by an Iraq caught in a netherworld: between democracy and anarchy, neither a terror state nor the shining example of a new democracy in the Middle East, an independent state that is not truly sovereign, stable or unified.
Perhaps, as some in the administration argue, the chaos and bloodshed everyone expects to unfold are simply an ugly rite of passage. "Can a thousand or so dedicated terrorists bring down a society?'' one of President Bush's senior advisers on the issue asked on Friday afternoon. "It is a laboratory experiment.''
So what are the strategic implications for Washington if that experiment goes up in smoke? It is something that most senior officials in the administration won't discuss. There is already talk in Washington of "Iraq syndrome," an understandable reluctance to confront the next threats to American security because the first exercise of President Bush's pre-emption policy cost so much blood and billions in treasure.
But that is only the first item on the list. In private, even some of Mr. Bush's ideological partners and political allies concede that anything short of clear success could derail the grander mission that Mr. Bush said in February 2003 was the real justification for the war - to "begin a new phase for Middle Eastern peace."
Another strategic cost is already clear: Mr. Bush's failure to find those mobile biological labs, an active nuclear program or any hard evidence of coordination between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda has made some nations leery of confronting the two other members of the "Axis of Evil,'' Iran and North Korea. In both countries the evidence of nuclear ambitions is far clearer than it ever was in Iraq. But already the Chinese are throwing the administration's intelligence failures back in Mr. Bush's face, for example, questioning some of his allegations about North Korea's suspected nuclear program.
But the biggest strategic cost of failure in Iraq - or even years of muddle, which some consider the more likely possibility - could be the loss of influence for a sole superpower that only a year ago was being described as a benevolent empire.
Edward P. Djerejian, who served as a top American diplomat throughout the Middle East for many Republican administrations, and who led a study for the Bush administration about the failures of American public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim worlds, described two possible outcomes: "The long-range picture is this: Even if Iraq looks messy and violent, if in the end there is a government that shares power with major groups in the country, the end game can be positive. But if it goes the other way, it will be viewed in history as a destabilizing event that not only didn't bring security but caused instability, and set back the key goals we said we were trying to achieve on the Arab-Israeli front, on energy security and certainly on democratizing the region."
In short, the gamble of George W. Bush's presidency really starts on Wednesday evening. That is when the American flag comes down over the occupation headquarters in one of Mr. Hussein's grand palaces, and L. Paul Bremer III, who has been the American vicar during the occupation, boards his airplane. At that point, said Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, "we will have to step back and let the Iraqis figure a lot of these issues out for themselves."
The crux of Ms. Rice's dilemma is that the United States is stepping back before it has met its own strategic goals for a post-Saddam Iraq. She and Mr. Bush had no choice: the same White House that before the war refused to use the word "occupation'' (the approved phrase was "liberation'') now concedes that Iraq grew to detest the occupiers, undercutting the American strategic agenda. But after Wednesday, there is no guarantee that the new government will not veer off in a very different direction.
The depth of the challenge is best reflected in the administration's own goals for Iraq, described in a "background briefing'' by White House officials on New Year's Day, 2003, two and a half months before the first shot was fired.
"The goal is to disarm the country, dismantle the terrorist infrastructure and liberate the Iraqi people," the briefing began. The specific goals included: "provide security to avoid chaos and revenge attacks," create a "political space for Iraqi democratization" and "preserve Iraq as a unitary state, with its territorial integrity intact."
The White House's list went on. "Prevent unhelpful outside interference, military or nonmilitary," it said. "Rapidly start reconstruction, especially in the oil sector, so that its proceeds can be used to the benefit of the Iraqi people." It concluded with the assurance that "the United States will not seek to dictate from afar."
What worried the White House in January 2003 still worries it in June 2004. The terrorist network is, if anything, more robust now than it was then. While White House officials bristle at the suggestion that the country is becoming a jobs program for jihadists - "these guys weren't playing canasta two days before'' we invaded Iraq, one shot back the other day - the fact remains that young graduates of the madrassas from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan to Indonesia see Iraq as the place to stage their battle. That may force the new Iraqi prime minister, Iyad Allawi, once a paid asset of the C.I.A., to declare martial law.
But can the Americans, still reeling from the photos of prison abuses, become the enforcers for a crackdown, perhaps one that even breaks up antigovernment rallies? "It's not a role we can afford to play,'' a national security official conceded.
Nor is it clear that once the United States steps back, other powers will not try to step in - starting with Iran. "The question remains as to whether it is a spoiler or a supporter of the transition,'' Judith S. Yaphe, a scholar at the National Defense University, wrote this month. So far there is little evidence that Iran is exercising much influence, and Washington is betting that Iraqis are even more suspicious of Iranians motives than they had been of Mr. Bremer's.
There are other strategic tests: whether the Kurds stay inside the national tent, whether Americans have the access to Iraqi oil that they may need if Saudi Arabia becomes unstable, whether moderate leaders in other Middle Eastern states feel emboldened by the Iraq experience or worry that the chaos will spread.
But over the next five years, the real test of strategic success or failure may not lie in democratic elections; it took the Philippines and South Korea decades to get to that moment, even with American troops based in the country. The real test may be Starbucks.
Will Baghdad - or Falluja or Najaf - be peaceful and prosperous enough one day for Iraqis to sip a cappuccino on the sidewalk without fear of losing a limb or worse? Starbucks thrives in lots of places that do not enjoy American-style freedoms. But it depends on security and a rising middle class that wants a wireless hot spot more than it wants a religious war. There are 10 in Beirut, the Baghdad of the 80's. In the end, the Bush administration would take that outcome, happily.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Raid Kills Six
Palestinian Leaders Attack is One of Deadliest on Guerrillas
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A23
JERUSALEM, June 26 -- Israeli troops discovered an underground room being used by Palestinian militants as a hideout in the West Bank city of Nablus on Saturday and pounded it with grenades and gunfire, killing six senior leaders from three Palestinian groups, Israeli army officials and Palestinian security sources said.
It was one of the deadliest attacks on a group of senior guerrilla leaders since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000. The dead included the West Bank leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Nayef Abu Sharekh, who was in his forties, and the leader of the Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank, Fadi Bahty, 26, according to Palestinian security and hospital officials.
Jaffar Masri, a senior member of the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, was also killed in the attack, Palestinian officials said, as were three other senior leaders of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed faction linked to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah political movement.
Israeli officials said Abu Sharekh, Bahty and Masri were the masterminds of numerous suicide bombings that killed dozens of Israelis.
Late Saturday, the body of a seventh, unidentified man was discovered in the rubble, an Israeli army spokesman said.
Two other Palestinian men, including another senior al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades leader, were killed by Israeli troops Saturday in Nablus, a city known as a center of Palestinian militancy about 28 miles north of Jerusalem. The killings came on the third day of an Israeli army operation in Nablus and raised the toll to 11 Palestinians killed and 24 injured, Palestinian hospital officials said.
Israeli troops invaded the old city in the center of Nablus on Thursday, where they imposed a curfew and have been engaged in rooting out Palestinian guerrillas and weapons workshops. The operation was launched after Israeli police apprehended a would-be suicide bomber from Nablus in a neighborhood in north Jerusalem on Tuesday. Later that day, Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint discovered a backpack loaded with explosives in the trunk of a taxi headed from Nablus to Jerusalem.
The new crackdown is one of the most intensive in Nablus in a year. Residents contacted by telephone said local mosques were blaring messages from loudspeakers urging citizens to attack Israeli troops who were manning road blocks across the city and mounting house-to-house searches in the old city. Israeli soldiers earlier in the week distributed leaflets demanding that guerrillas turn themselves in and asking Nablus residents to inform on them. The leaflets warned that if the militants did not give themselves up, Israeli soldiers would use all means to capture them, residents said.
Nablus's old city is a warren of narrow alleys and tunnels that Palestinian fighters have used to evade capture and frustrate many Israeli search operations, and the Israeli strike on the hideout was a bit of a fluke, according to Palestinian security sources.
Israeli soldiers on patrol in the old city at about 3 p.m. stumbled upon a senior member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Nidal Wawi, about 35, as he was emerging from a tunnel. Equally surprised, Wawi and the soldiers both opened fire, and Wawi was killed, Palestinian security officials said. Israeli soldiers then mounted an intense search, they said, and a few hours later discovered the hidden room, which they destroyed with grenades, killing six Palestinians.
An Israeli army spokeswoman offered a slightly different version of events. She said Israeli troops spotted two armed men in a house, and a firefight erupted, during which one Palestinian was killed and the second escaped down a tunnel hidden in the house. Soldiers threw smoke bombs into the tunnel, the spokeswoman said, flushing out a militant from another tunnel entrance in a nearby house.
The soldiers discovered a room two floors below ground and called for the others inside to come out, but they refused, so the soldiers threw grenades into the room and opened fire, killing at least six senior leaders. Late Saturday, Israeli soldiers discovered a seventh body, she said.
Earlier in the day, Ehab Asleem, 17, was shot and killed in the courtyard of his home, Palestinian officials said. An Israeli army spokeswoman said Asleem was armed, and troops opened fire before he could get off a shot. Asleem's father and brother also were shot and seriously injured in the incident, Palestinian hospital officials said.
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7 Militants Die in Israeli Raid in West Bank
June 27, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/international/middleeast/27mide.html
JERUSALEM, June 26 - Israeli troops killed seven Palestinian militants on Saturday, including two senior figures, when they raided a house and found the men in a hidden room in the West Bank city of Nablus, the military and Palestinians said.
The raid came on the third day of a major Israeli incursion in Nablus, where the soldiers have been tracking down militants. After finding the men, the soldiers opened fire on them at close range and tossed grenades, the military said.
The dead included Nayef Abu Sharkh, 45, the Nablus leader of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a faction loyal to the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, said Palestinian officials in the city. The West Bank leader of Islamic Jihad, a man known as Sheik Ibrahim, was also among those killed, the officials said.
Over all, four members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, two from Islamic Jihad and one from Hamas were killed.
The Israeli military killed an eighth Palestinian in Nablus on Saturday when troops fired on two armed men who were trying to approach a group of soldiers. The second man escaped, the military said.
In other developments on Saturday, Mr. Arafat told a Greek diplomat he was committed to a cease-fire during the Summer Olympics this August in Athens.
Mr. Arafat made his statement at the ceremonial lighting of an Olympic torch for the Palestinians, held at his compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah. He was joined by Eleni Sourani, the Greek consul general in Jerusalem. Israeli officials were not immediately available for comment.
Also on Saturday, William J. Burns, the chief State Department diplomat for the Middle East, met in Ramallah with the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, about the proposed Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip.
"We genuinely believe that this is a moment of opportunity that none of us can afford to miss," Mr. Burns said. "The Israelis and the Palestinians must fulfill obligations in order to take advantage of that."
Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, says Israel is acting unilaterally in Gaza because he does not consider the Palestinian leadership to be a credible negotiating partner.
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Israel Helicopter Fires Missiles in Gaza - Witnesses
June 27, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-missile.html
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli helicopter gunship fired three missiles at a target in the eastern part of Gaza City early Monday, witnesses said.
The attack occurred just hours after Palestinian militants blew up an Israeli army post in the Gaza strip, wounding at least six soldiers.
There were no details immediately available on the target of the missile strike or whether there were any casualties in the helicopter attack.
The militant Islamic Hamas movement and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group in President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, both claimed responsibility for the earlier attack.
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Palestinians Blow Up Israeli Army Post in Gaza
June 27, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-explosions-toll.html
GAZA - Palestinian militants blew up an Israeli military post near a Jewish settlement in the southern Gaza Strip Sunday, causing at least six casualties, emergency services said.
Israeli Channel 10 Television said one soldier was believed dead in the blast, but emergency services were uncertain there had been fatalities. They said one soldier had been trapped in the rubble. Ambulance workers revised down initial estimates of dozens of casualties.
The militants dug a 350-yard tunnel under the army post near the southern Gaza Strip settlement of Gush Katif and set off a large quantity of explosives. Witnesses reported hearing two enormous explosions rip through the base.
Rescue efforts were hampered by Palestinian militants, who opened heavy gun and mortar fire at emergency workers and soldiers who came to the scene on a road leading to the settlement bloc. The militant Islamic Hamas movement and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group in President Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction, both claimed responsibility for the night-time attack.
They said it was retaliation for Israel's assassination of two top Hamas leaders earlier this year as well as the killing of a leader of the al-Aqsa Brigades in the West Bank city of Nablus Saturday.
Hamas later said in a statement that it carried out the attack alone.
The attack was a blow to the Israeli army in Gaza, where it lost 13 troops in ambushes last month.
Violence has surged in Gaza since February, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced a plan to quit the desert territory, which many Israelis see as a costly liability. The cabinet approved his initiative in principle on June 6.
Militants sworn to destroying Israel want to portray any withdrawal as a victory, while the army is determined to smash them before pulling out of the strip, which was captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Scores of Palestinians were killed in a huge raid into Gaza last month following the deaths of the Israeli soldiers.
Israeli forces Sunday ended their deadliest raid in the West Bank for months after killing the commander of the al-Aqsa Brigades militant group.
Israeli security sources said Nayef Abu Sharkh, 38, was responsible for numerous attempts, some financed by the pro-Iranian Lebanese group Hizbollah, to dispatch suicide bombers to Israel.
-------- mideast
Bush Meets With Leader of Turkey Ahead of NATO Summit
June 27, 2004
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/international/europe/27CND-BUSH.html?hp
Just days before the June 30 handover of sovereignty in Iraq, President Bush arrived in neighboring Turkey for a NATO summit that is expected to deal with issues in Iraq, including approval by the group's heads of state and government of an agreement to help train Iraqi security forces.
Mr. Bush said in a meeting with Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Ankara today that he was looking forward to working on regional matters, including Iraq, and on how to strengthen NATO.
"I appreciate so very much the example your country has set on how to be a Muslim country and at the same time, a country which embraces democracy and rule of law and freedom," Mr. Bush said in a photo session with Mr. Erdogan, according to a White House transcript.
But Mr. Bush's first trip to Turkey was met by tens of thousands of demonstrators in Istanbul protesting the policies of the United States in the region.
"Get lost Bush, get lost NATO," the protesters chanted, according to the Reuters news agency. "Murderer USA get out of the Middle East."
Protesters had also dogged President Bush's visit to Ireland, where he said on Saturday that the "bitter differences" between the United States and Europe over the war in Iraq were over, and that NATO had a responsibility to help Iraqis with their own security.
As Mr. Bush spoke at an outdoor joint news conference in Ireland with Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland and Romano Prodi, the president of the European Union, the anti-Iraq war protesters blocked at least one of the main roads leading to Dromoland Castle, a 16th-century fortress turned luxury resort where Mr. Bush had stayed.
Mr. Bush had said he hoped NATO would agree at the summit in Istanbul to help with the training of Iraqi security forces. The training commitment, which is near agreement, represents a greatly lowered expectation on the part of the White House since it became clear in recent weeks that NATO was not willing to commit any troops to Iraq.
"NATO has the capability and I believe the responsibility to help the Iraqi people defeat the terrorist threat that is facing their country," Mr. Bush said. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of Iraq, he noted, had asked NATO for training help and equipment in a recent letter. "I hope NATO responds in a positive way," Mr. Bush said.
In Brussels on Saturday, the NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, confirmed that the alliance had reached a deal to train Iraqi armed forces. "NATO heads of state and government are expected to approve this agreement at their summit meeting in Istanbul on June 28," he said in a statement.
In Ankara, Mr. Bush also expressed support for Turkey's bid to join the European Union. "I would remind the people of this good country that I believe you ought to be given a date by the E.U. for your eventual acceptance into the E.U.," he said.
Mr. Bush has acknowledged that he is not especially well-liked in Europe. When asked in Ireland by a White House reporter how he could explain his unpopularity in opinion polls here and whether Americans should be concerned about it, Mr. Bush replied that he was most concerned about his re-election campaign in the United States.
"I must confess, the first polls I worry about are those that are going to take place in early November this year," he said. "Listen, I care about the image of our country." He added that "as far as my own personal standing goes, my job is to do my job" and that "I'm going to set a vision, I'm going to lead, and we'll just let the chips fall where they may."
Mr. Bush said that Mr. Ahern had questioned him in a meeting on Saturday morning about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the American treatment of other prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, as did President Mary McAleese of Ireland in her own meeting with Mr. Bush.
"I told them both I was sick with what happened inside that prison," Mr. Bush said, referring to Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, where Americans abused Iraqi prisoners. "The actions of those troops did not reflect what we think. And it did harm."
Mr. Bush said he told both Mr. Ahern and Ms. McAleese that the United States would deal with the investigations into the prison abuse scandal "in a transparent way."
Mr. Ahern said "these things happen."
"Of course, we wish they didn't, and it's important then on how they're dealt with."
Mr. Bush was in Ireland for an annual European Union-United States summit meeting, and both he and Mr. Ahern emphasized what they called the progress they had made: signing joint agreements on counterterrorism, counterproliferation, H.I.V. and AIDS and an agreement that enables the satellite navigation systems used in the United States and Europe to be used interchangeably by 2008.
Despite large demonstrations across Ireland on Friday night, when the police estimated that 10,000 had marched against Mr. Bush and the Iraq war in Dublin, protesters interviewed outside Dromoland Castle on Saturday said their numbers had been diminished by government attempts to frighten them away through widely stated warnings that violent confrontations were likely.
Elisabeth Bumiller reported from Ireland and Christine Hauser reported from New York for this article.
-------- nato
Israel ready to help in NATO security
Jerusalem Post
Jun. 27, 2004
By ARIEH O'SULLIVAN
Israel is ready to participate in NATO security and counter-terrorism missions on a limited and short-term basis, according to a senior IDF officer.
The IDF is also offering to help NATO with missile defense based on the Arrow system technology as well as sharing its experience with erecting formidable security fences and border barriers, the senior officer said.
"NATO understands that we are an address for counter terrorism and we want to boost our profile in the war against terror," said the officer who could not be named but was intimately involved in the matter.
In particular, the IDF is offering to dispatch to NATO experts on counter-terrorism as well as bomb disposal units. According to the senior IDF officer, NATO is open to the idea of Israeli participation on a professional basis.
The cooperation could be part of NATO's decision to train Iraq's new army since it would not likely be in Iraq and most probably in Germany.
"We won't be able to say no to serious requests," the senior IDF officer told The Jerusalem Post. "Beating (Palestinian) terror here is not enough for us. We have to contribute to the world fight against terror."
When the heads of the enormously expanded NATO countries gather in Istanbul Monday they may be setting their sights on us.
Not us in particular, but Israel as part of the Middle East and Mediterranean basin.
With 26 nations now members of the North American Treaty Organization, the Istanbul summit marks the first time leaders of the expanded alliance have meet since seven new members - Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - were formally added in March.
Some believe their future is south, to the Mediterranean basin nations made up of Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Mauritania. Last week, NATO head Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said he wants the summit build up defense cooperation with Middle Eastern and North African countries.
"In Istanbul, I am confident that we will also open up, for the first time, a security dialogue with the broader region of the Middle East," said de Hoop Scheffer on the eve of the summit. "This dialogue must be, and will be, a two-way street." While some lip service has been given to the idea of expanding the alliance's decade-old "Mediterranean dialogue" program, few believe it to seriously move forward.
First of all, Arab countries have reacted coolly to Western initiatives to build closer ties based on promoting reform in their nations. Second of all, Israel would be hesitant to be tied down by formal military alliances with an organization of 25 European nations.
Still neither Israel nor any of the seven other Mediterranean basin member countries were invited to attend the summit; not even on an observer status.
Last month, Gen. Harald Kujat, chairman of NATO's military committee and its top military officer, paid a quiet visit to Israel. Top IDF brass briefed him and he was taken to the security fence being erected in the West Bank. Upon seeing it, Kujat exclaimed: "It should have been done long ago," a senior IDF officer quoted him as saying.
Still, at least one senior official in the Defense Ministry is skeptical of NATO's interest in Israel. The official dismissed Kujat's visit as a "punching the ticket so he could go to Istanbul and say he was here."
"NATO is floundering and doesn't know what to do with itself," the senior defense official said.
The sentiment he represents in the defense establishment is one that believes NATO has played out its role by expanding beyond effectiveness. Europe has taken a collective decision to ignore Islamic terrorism with the hopes that it will leave them alone and it seems the only thing they'll be able to agree upon is how to put that Jewish country in its place. "We have to beware of NATO because I see it one day being directed toward us," said the senior defense official.
However this sentiment is not popular in the IDF or the Foreign Ministry or most strategic think tanks.
"NATO, in contrast to other international organizations, has the Americans playing a leading role so we get a fair hearing there," said Efraim Inbar, head of the BESA Center for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University.
He warned that as NATO expands its role Israel should be cautious not to have them put into situations counter-productive to Israel's interests, such as deployed in the Gaza Strip. "This would not be a good idea," Inbar said. According to Inbar, Israel sought membership in NATO in the 1950s but was rejected. Full membership today is not on the agenda.
"Israel doesn't want to be a member. No one is going to fight for us. We don't expect it. But it is beneficial to have close links for such an important organization and make them aware of our concerns."
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Premier Resigns, Replaced by General's Ally
June 27, 2004
By SALMAN MASOOD and AMY WALDMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/international/asia/27stan.html?hp
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 26 - Pakistan's prime minister, Zafarullah Khan Jamali, said Saturday that he had resigned and dissolved his cabinet. He will be replaced for now by Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, the president of the Pakistan Muslim League political party, considered a major ally of President Pervez Musharraf's.
Mr. Hussain said Shaukat Aziz, the finance minister in the dissolved cabinet, would become prime minister once he wins a seat in the National Assembly. Mr. Aziz is currently a senator.
Rumors had circulated for weeks that Mr. Jamali, who had been elected by his party in 2002 with the support of General Musharraf, had lost that support. All indications are that he did not go willingly: on Friday, Mr. Jamali told Pakistani newspapers that he was not preparing to resign, and that the rumors about his departure were false.
But at a party meeting in Islamabad on Saturday evening, Mr. Jamali said he was resigning "so that another better person can run the country in a better manner."
Mr. Hussain, who leads the Pakistan Muslim League, is a trusted lieutenant, standing among General Musharraf's closest political allies.
Mr. Aziz returned from living abroad as a senior Citibank executive in 1999 at General Musharraf's request. On his watch, Pakistan's economy has had one of its best performances. The Economic Survey and Budget passed by Parliament on Friday said the gross domestic product grew at 6.4 percent in 2003-4, well above the target of 5.3 percent. But poverty remains high for about one-third of the population.
Having a technocrat prime minister may also be an attempt to signal the president's commitment to broadly reforming Pakistani society.
But for advocates of democracy in Pakistan, General Musharraf's refusal to let Mr. Jamali finish his term was a blow, emphasizing again that Parliament has less power than the president. Under constitutional amendments General Musharraf created, he has the right to dismiss the prime minister, as well as Parliament, though Mr. Jamali's formal resignation means the president did not actually exercise this right.
"It is shallow," Rasul Baksh Rais, a Pakistani political analyst, said of his country's democracy. "It doesn't have roots in the society - and there are questions about the locus of power in the system. I am less optimistic about the prospect of genuine representative democracy today than I was six or seven months back."
Samina Ahmed, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization, said: "You cannot in a parliamentary democracy have a head of state running the show. Parliament must be sovereign."
General Musharraf took power in a coup in 1999, then held a general election in October 2002 in which the party he had cobbled together with defectors from other parties, including Mr. Jamali, won the largest number of seats.
The portly Mr. Jamali was Pakistan's first prime minister from Baluchistan, a province that has long had a tense relationship with the government. His departure may further stoke antigovernment sentiment among Baluchi nationalists.
The problem, Ms. Ahmed said, was not between the two men, but in the system General Musharraf had created. He is facing a rising law-and-order problem in Karachi, a nationalist movement and a pro-Taliban government in Baluchistan, and an ongoing conflict with Al Qaeda militants and their supporters in the North West Frontier Province.
Mr. Rais said General Musharraf had been eager to avoid having to remove Mr. Jamali through a parliamentary vote of no confidence, because there was no guarantee of the outcome. The opposition, which includes a coalition of Islamist parties who have sometimes clashed with the president, had indicated they would support Mr. Jamali.
The looming question for Pakistan, or at least those who care about its progress toward democracy, is whether General Musharraf will indeed step down as chief of the armed forces at the end of the year, as he has promised.
Ms. Ahmed is not hopeful, saying, "Given the fact that he's turning up everywhere - including Parliament - in his uniform, I think we know where things are headed."
Salman Masood reported from Islamabad for this article and Amy Waldman from New Delhi.
--------
Pakistani Premier Forced Out in Favor of Finance Minister
By John Lancaster and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8637-2004Jun26.html
NEW DELHI, June 26 -- After 19 months in power, Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali resigned Saturday evening at the request of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, in a shakeup that underscored the army's continuing dominance of Pakistani politics.
Jamali gave no reason for his resignation, which he announced at a meeting of the governing political party, the Pakistan Muslim League. He nominated party president Chaudry Shujaat Hussain as his successor. Pakistani officials said Hussain would hold the seat until the installation of Musharraf's favored candidate, Shaukat Aziz, a former Citibank executive who currently serves as finance minister.
Over the last several months, there have been persistent reports of strained relations between Musharraf and Jamali, an unassuming career politician from the turbulent border province of Baluchistan. Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup, backed Jamali for prime minister after the October 2002 elections that were supposed to mark the restoration of democratic civilian rule.
In practice, Jamali wielded little power, as Musharraf continued to call the shots. Musharraf, who remains army chief of staff, has hinted in recent weeks that he will renege on a pledge he made -- as part of a deal with opposition parties -- to give up his army post by year's end.
Analysts expressed little surprised at Jamali's resignation, noting the army has repeatedly stepped in to topple civilian governments and leaders in the name of protecting the national interest. "As long as he's in uniform you will see these antics," Mohammed Ziauddin, Islamabad editor of the English-language newspaper Dawn, said of Musharraf in a telephone interview from the capital. "Now that an election has been held, and the party is in power, he should have let that work."
Musharraf did not comment on Jamali's resignation, but the president's political allies defended the decision to force Jamali out. "He was working at the pleasure of the president," said Ejaz ul-Haq, the minister for religious affairs and the senior vice chairman of the Pakistan Muslim League. "The president must have had a solid reason to ask him to go. We will stand by the president in all his decisions."
A close aide to Musharraf, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that in forcing Jamali out, the president sought to redress the grievances of politicians from Punjab, one of Pakistan's four provinces, who felt that Punjabis were underrepresented in the upper reaches of civilian government. Hussain, the interim choice for prime minister, is from Punjab, as is Aziz, the finance minister, although he has spent much of his life in Karachi and abroad. "Punjab was left out of" the civilian government hierarchy, the aide said. "There is a simmering sense of deprivation in Punjab."
The aide also noted that, if Musharraf reneged on his pledge to give up his army post, he would need the support of the Punjabi-dominated officer corps.
Although he had no experience in politics before he became finance minister, Aziz has been widely credited with Pakistan's strong economic performance in the past two years. Before joining the government, he held senior positions with Citibank in London and New York, where he still owns an apartment.
Khan reported from Karachi, Pakistan.
-------- space
Cassini Set for 4 - Year Orbit of Saturn
June 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Saturn-Cassini.html
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- Two decades and $3.3 billion in the making, an international exploration of Saturn begins this week when a spacecraft slips through a gap in the planet's shimmering rings and arcs into orbit.
After a seven-year, 2.2 billion-mile journey, the Cassini spacecraft will fire its engine Wednesday night to slow down, allowing itself to be captured by Saturn's gravity. The maneuver will inaugurate a four-year, 76-orbit tour of the giant planet and some of its 31 known moons, including huge Titan.
To scientists, Saturn and its rings are a model of the disk of gas and dust that initially surrounded the sun, and they hope the mission offers important clues about how the planets formed.
Shortly after entering orbit, Cassini will act on its best chance to photograph the rings that have entranced astronomers for centuries.
``We'll never be that close to the rings as immediately after the insertion,'' said Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and team leader for Cassini's radar instrument.
Cassini, laden with a dozen instruments, also carries a probe named Huygens that will be launched into the murky atmosphere of Titan.
The frozen moon intrigues scientists because it may have many of the chemical compounds that existed on Earth before life began.
Named for 17th century Saturn observers Jean Dominique Cassini and Christiaan Huygens, the joint project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency dates back to proposals made in 1982.
Many of the project's 260 scientists have spent years just planning the mission, building Cassini at JPL in Pasadena and getting the spacecraft out to Saturn.
``We received our letters of acceptance of being team leaders or team members almost 15 years ago,'' Elachi noted at a briefing this month. ``So as you could imagine my colleagues have great anticipation.''
Cassini has already been sending data to Earth, including a wealth of information and sharp images from a close flyby of Saturn's strange, battered old moon Phoebe.
``It's a great curtain raiser for the Saturn show that's about to start at the end of the month,'' JPL imaging team member Torrence Johnson said.
Cassini is 22 feet long, 13.1 feet wide and weighed nearly 12,600 pounds loaded with fuel and the probe. Too far from the sun to rely on solar panels, it uses nuclear power to provide electricity.
People who worried that an accident could release nuclear material protested Cassini's Oct. 15, 1997, launch from Cape Canaveral, Fla. There was more concern when Cassini made a 1999 Earth flyby, but all went as planned.
The wok-shaped Huygens probe, developed by the European Space Agency, will be released from Cassini in December and will enter Titan's atmosphere in January.
Just under 9 feet in diameter and weighing 705 pounds, its six instruments will investigate Titan's atmosphere and then its surface, if it survives the impact of landing after a 2 1/2-hour descent by parachute.
It may not find a hard surface, however, and instead splash down into liquid ethane, which would quickly shut down the probe.
The probe will radio data back to Cassini up to a maximum of 30 minutes after touchdown. By then, either its batteries will have failed or Cassini will have passed over Titan's horizon.
In 2000, mission officials discovered a problem that would have prevented Cassini from receiving most of that data. The design had not accounted for the Doppler effect, which will change the frequency of the transmissions as Huygens falls through the atmosphere.
Jean-Pierre Lebreton, ESA's Huygens project manager, assured reporters earlier this month that the problem was fixed. But he said testing would continue until scientists were sure.
According to Elachi, some scientists believe Titan has a ``pre-biotic'' environment in which there is organic, or carbon-based, chemistry, but the surface temperature of minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit is inhospitable to life.
``In a sense it will give us a past picture of our own planet before biology got started,'' he said.
Saturn will be some 930 million miles from Earth when Cassini arrives. Radio signals will take 84 minutes to travel each way, so the spacecraft will enter orbit on autopilot.
On the Net: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/
-------- spies
CIA Puts Harsh Tactics On Hold
Memo on Methods Of Interrogation Had Wide Review
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8534-2004Jun26?language=printer
The CIA has suspended the use of extraordinary interrogation techniques approved by the White House pending a review by Justice Department and other administration lawyers, intelligence officials said.
The "enhanced interrogation techniques," as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries. The tactics have been used to elicit intelligence from al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
Current and former CIA officers aware of the recent decision said the suspension reflects the CIA's fears of being accused of unsanctioned and illegal activities, as it was in the 1970s. The decision applies to CIA detention facilities, such as those around the world where the agency is interrogating al Qaeda leaders and their supporters, but not military prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.
"Everything's on hold," said a former senior CIA official aware of the agency's decision. "The whole thing has been stopped until we sort out whether we are sure we're on legal ground." A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the issue.
CIA interrogations will continue but without the suspended techniques, which include feigning suffocation, "stress positions," light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and making captives think they are being interrogated by another government.
The suspension is the latest fallout from the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and is related to the White House decision, announced Tuesday, to review and rewrite sections of an Aug. 1, 2002, Justice Department opinion on interrogations that said torture might be justified in some cases.
Although the White House repudiated the memo Tuesday as the work of a small group of lawyers at the Justice Department, administration officials now confirm it was vetted by a larger number of officials, including lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office.
The memorandum was drafted by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to help the CIA determine how aggressive its interrogators could be during sessions with suspected al Qaeda members. The legal opinion was signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the office and now a federal judge. The office consists mainly of political appointees and is considered the executive branch agencies' legal adviser. Memos signed by the head of the office are given the weight of a binding legal opinion.
A Justice Department official said Tuesday at a briefing that the office went "beyond what was asked for," but other lawyers and administration officials said the memo was approved by the department's criminal division and by the office of Attorney General John D. Ashcroft.
In addition, Timothy E. Flanigan -- then deputy White House counsel -- discussed a draft of the document with lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel before it was finalized, the officials said. David S. Addington, Cheney's counsel, also weighed in with remarks during at least one meeting he held with Justice lawyers involved with writing the opinion. He was particularly concerned, sources said, that the opinion include a clear-cut section on the president's authority.
That section of the memo has become among the most controversial within the legal community that has analyzed the opinion since it was made public by The Washington Post. During Tuesday's briefing, White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales called the commander in chief section "unnecessary."
The Justice Department, he said, "will make a decision as to whether or not that is something that should continue to remain in the opinion." Justice Department officials said it would be scrapped.
The commander in chief section of the opinion said laws prohibiting torture do "not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants" in his role as commander in chief. Congress, which has signed international laws prohibiting torture, "may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield," according to the August memorandum.
Another element of the opinion criticized by outside lawyers is that it defines torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." That standard would allow a variety of tactics that would be considered cruel and inhumane under international law, legal experts have said.
At a briefing Tuesday, Gonzales declined to answer repeated questions about how the legal opinion, or the upcoming review of it, affected the CIA. But, he added, "As far as I'm told, every interrogation technique that has been authorized throughout the government is lawful and does not constitute torture."
Asked yesterday about the memo's circulation to a wider group of officials than previously known, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy replied in an e-mail: "It would not be uncommon for the Department of Justice to discuss issues with lawyers throughout the administration. Regardless, the President's policy is very clear. He expects detainees to be treated in a manner consistent with our laws, treaties and values. The President has spoken out against torture, he has never authorized it, nor will he. As we have said, portions of the memo are overbroad and the Department of Justice is reviewing it."
The legal debate over CIA interrogation techniques had its origins in the battlefields of Afghanistan, secret counterterrorism operations in Pakistan and in President Bush's decision to use unconventional tools in going after al Qaeda.
The interrogation methods were approved by Justice Department and National Security Council lawyers in 2002, briefed to key congressional leaders and required the authorization of CIA Director George J. Tenet for use, according to intelligence officials and other government officials with knowledge of the secret decision-making process.
When the CIA and the military "started capturing al Qaeda in Afghanistan, they had no interrogators, no special rules and no place to put them," said a senior Marine officer involved in detainee procedures. The FBI, which had the only full cadre of professional interrogators from its work with criminal networks in the United States, took the lead in questioning detainees.
But on Nov. 11, 2001, a senior al Qaeda operative who ran the Khaldan paramilitary camp in Afghanistan was captured by Pakistani forces and turned over to U.S. military forces in January 2002. The capture of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan, sparked the first real debate over interrogations. The CIA wanted to use a range of methods, including threatening his life and family.
But the FBI had never authorized such methods. The bureau wanted to preserve the purity of interrogations so they could be used as evidence in court cases.
Al-Libi provided the CIA with intelligence about an alleged plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Yemen with a truck bomb and pointed officials in the direction of Abu Zubaida, a top al Qaeda leader known to have been involved with the Sept. 11 plot.
In March 2002, Abu Zubaida was captured, and the interrogation debate between the CIA and FBI began anew. This time, when FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III decided to withhold FBI involvement, it was a signal that the tug of war was over. "Once the CIA was given the green light . . . they had the lead role," said a senior FBI counterterrorism official.
Abu Zubaida was shot in the groin during his apprehension in Pakistan. U.S. national security officials have suggested that painkillers were used selectively in the beginning of his captivity until he agreed to cooperate more fully. His information led to the apprehension of other al Qaeda members, including Ramzi Binalshibh, also in Pakistan. The capture of Binalshibh and other al Qaeda leaders -- Omar al-Faruq in Indonesia, Rahim al-Nashiri in Kuwait and Muhammad al Darbi in Yemen -- were all partly the result of information gained during interrogations, according to U.S. intelligence and national security officials. All four remain under CIA control.
A former senior Justice Department official said interrogation techniques for "high-value targets" were reviewed and approved on a case-by-case basis, based partly on what strategies would work best on specific detainees. Justice lawyers suggested some limitations that were adopted, the former official said.
The former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the administration concluded that techniques did not amount to torture if they did not produce significant physical harm or injury. However, interrogators were allowed to trick the detainees into thinking they might be harmed or instructed to endure unpleasant physical tasks, such as being forced to stand or squat in stress positions.
"Clearly, that is not considered torture," the former Justice official argued. "It might be unpleasant and it might offend our sensibilities in most situations, but in these situations they were necessary and productive."
At the same time, the former official said, "we never had a situation where we said, 'You can do anything you want to.' We never, ever did that. We were aggressive, but our people were very scholarly and lawyerlike."
Staff writers John Mintz and Dan Eggen contributed to this report.
--------
Report: CIA Halts Interrogation Tactics
June 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-CIA-Prisoners.html
The CIA has suspended use of some White House-approved aggressive interrogation tactics employed to extract information from reluctant al-Qaida prisoners, The Washington Post said.
Citing unnamed intelligence officials, the newspaper reported in Sunday's editions that what the CIA calls ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' were put on hold pending a review by Justice Department and other lawyers.
The techniques include such things as feigned drowning and refusal of pain medication for injuries.
The paper quoted current and former CIA officers aware of the recent decision as saying the suspension reflects the agency's concern about being accused of unsanctioned and illegal activities, as it was in the 1970s.
The decision applies to CIA facilities around the world, but not to military prisons at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere, the Post said. A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the issue, it said.
It said CIA interrogations will continue, but without the suspended techniques, which also include feigning suffocation, ``stress positions,'' light and noise bombardment, sleep deprivation, and making captives think they are being interrogated by another government.
The newspaper said the interrogation methods were approved by Justice Department and National Security Council lawyers in 2002, outlined to congressional leaders and required the authorization of CIA Director George J. Tenet for use.
-------- us
Rumsfeld: More U.S. Troops for Iraq Not Essential
(Reuters)
By Charles Aldinger
June 27, 2004
http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2004/06/27/rumsfeld_more_us_troops_for_iraq_not_essential_1088340887/
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - The United States may not have to increase its force levels in Iraq but it has contingency plans in case the need arises, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Sunday.
Rumsfeld also said that threats by Iraqi insurgents to behead three Turkish hostages will not delay Wednesday's formal handover of power to Iraq's interim government or disrupt the NATO summit in Istanbul.
"The real task of security is not to flood a country with more and more troops," he told BBC Television from Istanbul.
Rumsfeld said the U.S. Army was making contingency plans for more troops, should commanders in Iraq request reinforcements to help Iraqi security forces deal with an upsurge of violence.
"That does not mean that we will necessarily need them, that means we will do the prudent planning," he added.
The United States has about 140,000 troops in Iraq joined by nearly 25,000 other foreign forces.
Other U.S. defense officials have said the Army is preparing for any need for an additional 10,000 to 20,000 troops, although they have not been requested by American commanders in Iraq.
Rumsfeld told reporters later that insurgents in Iraq were increasingly attacking "soft" civilian targets and those from allied countries in an attempt to discourage other nations and to get them to withdraw troops or aid from Iraq.
PRAISE FOR ALLIES
Rumsfeld praised Turkey, Japan and South Korea for refusing to negotiate with hostage takers in Iraq and said a 72-hour deadline set for the beheading of three Turkish civilians was aimed at disrupting a two-day summit of alliance leaders.
"Will it work? I think not ... It will not be effective," he said.
The United States previously questioned a decision by Spain to withdraw its troops from Iraq after a deadly train bombing in Madrid.
"I think you'll find that there may from time to time be some country that decides that they are going to change their approach," Rumsfeld told reporters. "But I think, overwhelmingly, people understand that it is not wise to allow yourself to be terrorized ... Once you start down that road, it's a dead end."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Sentencing Decision's Reach Is Far and Wide
June 27, 2004
By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/politics/27sentencing.html?pagewanted=all&position=
In March, at the sentencing hearing after his conviction in a financial fraud case, Jamie Olis broke into tears when he heard his fate. Under the federal sentencing guidelines, which penalize defendants who choose to go to trial and can sharply increase sentences based on factors like the financial losses involved, a federal judge in Houston sentenced Mr. Olis, a 38-year-old midlevel executive with an infant daughter, to 24 years in prison.
On Thursday, in striking down Washington State's sentencing law, the Supreme Court almost certainly also doomed the federal guidelines that generated Mr. Olis's sentence and hundreds of thousands like it.
That means Mr. Olis, who has started serving his sentence while the courts consider his appeals, may be entitled to a much shorter prison term. In light of the decision, said Frank O. Bowman, an author of a treatise on sentencing law, "Olis's sentencing range would probably be zero to six months."
Thursday's decision requires any factor that increases a criminal sentence, except for prior convictions, to be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. Many sentencing schemes allow or require judges to impose longer sentences based on all sorts of criteria, including the defendant's background and the nature and severity of his crime.
The decision may also affect sentencing laws in at least seven states in addition to Washington and the federal system, said Kevin R. Reitz, an expert on sentencing at the University of Colorado. In all of those jurisdictions, many people sentenced in recent years may be expected to challenge their sentences. And prosecutors, defendants and judges in pending and new cases will face an altered landscape.
"It throws the whole country's criminal system into turmoil," said Professor Bowman, who teaches law at Indiana University.
In the federal system alone, which handles a small minority of criminal cases, the "vast majority" of 270,000 sentences in the last four years may be affected, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in her dissent. "The court ignores the havoc it is about to wreak on trial courts across the country," Justice O'Connor wrote.
John Kramer, a former executive director of the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, said the decision could affect almost 90,000 state cases in the same period. In North Carolina, about 8,000 cases may be affected in those years, said Ronald F. Wright Jr., a law professor at Wake Forest University and an expert on sentencing law.
Jeffrey Fisher, who represents the defendant who challenged the Washington law, said that perhaps 2,600 Washington cases would be affected by the decision in that time frame.
The defendant, Ralph Blakely, had pleaded guilty to kidnapping his estranged wife, which carried a penalty of 53 months. A judge increased the sentence to 90 months based on his finding that Mr. Blakely had acted with "deliberate cruelty," which the defendant had not admitted and no jury had found. The Supreme Court said the imposition of additional time violated Mr. Blakely's right to a jury trial.
Legal scholars were virtually unanimous in agreeing with Justice O'Connor that the decision guts the federal sentencing guidelines.
"It will invalidate the federal guidelines," Mr. Reitz said. "The federal system looks to be invalid from top to bottom."
Pending cases, including those on direct appeal, are affected by the decision. So are, Justice O'Connor wrote, all sentences that followed a 2000 decision, Apprendi vs. New Jersey, on which Thursday's decision was based. A separate decision on Thursday suggested that neither Apprendi nor the new sentencing decision will otherwise be applied retroactively.
The Supreme Court gave trial judges no guidance on how to adjust to the ruling. Starting Thursday morning, for instance, federal judges conducting sentencing hearings had to decide whether to ignore the federal sentencing guidelines entirely, to rely on only those aggravating factors that had been proved to the jury or to carry on as before pending definitive guidance from higher courts.
The middle course is a likely one, experts said.
Luke Esser, a Washington State senator, said the Supreme Court's decision would please defense lawyers in the short run.
"The convicted felons that they represent are very happy that they may be having some of their sentences reduced," Mr. Esser said. "I think the general public and most of the state legislators will not share their enthusiasm."
It is less clear whether defendants will be better off in the long run.
Also unclear is whether the decision will give judges more or less power in deciding sentences. The decision seemed to endorse both traditional sentencing schemes that leave sentences entirely up to judges so long as they do not exceed statutory maximums and schemes that designate fixed sentences for given crimes. Only a middle approach, in which judges are required to make their own factual findings to increase sentences, was held unconstitutional.
Sentencing guidelines that allow or require judges to impose more lenient sentences based on mitigating factors are apparently unaffected.
Prosecutors and judges may use a variety of stopgap measures to address the decision, experts said. Prosecutors can add more factors to indictments and to plea agreements. Judges can require juries to answer so-called special interrogatories concerning the additional factors or give juries a role in sentencing, as happens in death penalty cases.
State legislators in Washington will turn to fixing the flaws in the state's sentencing law identified by the Supreme Court when they reconvene in January, said Mr. Esser, a Republican and the vice chairman of the Senate judiciary committee.
The approach the Washington Legislature ultimately adopts may influence lawmakers in other states and members of the commission that oversees the federal guidelines. Mr. Esser said he favored longer sentences that judges may reduce based on mitigating factors. He dismissed the idea of giving jurors a larger role in sentencing as "too expensive to the point of impracticality."
Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in Thursday's decision, said that practical considerations must take a back seat to the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of a right to a jury trial. "Our decision cannot turn," Justice Scalia wrote, "on whether or to what degree trial by jury impairs the efficiency or fairness of criminal justice."
Mr. Bowman questioned that approach. "They're just upsetting the apple cart," he said. "They're saying, 'You guys pick up the apples.' "
Eli Sanders contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Ashcroft faces whistleblower secrets probe
UPI
By Shaun Waterman
6/27/2004
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040627-030547-4386r
WASHINGTON, June 27 (UPI) -- The federal government's secrecy watchdog is conducting an inquiry into whether Attorney General John Ashcroft acted properly in classifying information relating to a lawsuit brought by a whistleblower from the FBI's translation unit.
Sibel Edmonds, a contract translator who blew the whistle on mismanagement, inefficiency and serious security problems, is suing the Department of Justice for violating her First Amendment rights by quashing her claims against the FBI with the rarely invoked "state-secrets privilege."
Her case relates to the way the translation unit in the bureau's Washington field office was run immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Edmonds has made shocking allegations about incompetence, lax internal security and deliberate efforts to frustrate the unit's work -- some of which have been acknowledged to be true by the FBI.
The translation issue goes to the heart of the pre-Sept. 11 failure of the FBI and the intelligence community in general to catch the attackers and stop the plot that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Secrecy experts say the affair appears to be part of a pattern of behavior by the Bush administration: the abuse of classification procedures to stifle public debate about politically sensitive aspects of the war against terrorism.
In April, as part of Edmonds' suit, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the hand over of any unclassified documents or other information the government had relating to her case -- specifically, information that had been briefed to members of Congress and their staffs at two meetings with senior FBI officials in 2002.
About two weeks after the order was made the staffers received an e-mail message from one of their colleagues explaining that the FBI "now considers some of the information contained in (those) briefings to be classified."
The briefings dealt in detail with Edmonds' allegations: that many of those hired to work in the unit could barely speak English; that they left secure laptop computers lying around while they went to lunch; that they took classified material home with them; and -- even more disturbing -- that some had undeclared contacts with foreign organizations that were under surveillance.
She said bureau operations -- including counter-terror ones -- were compromised as a result.
Bureau officials at the briefings "admitted most of the facts (about Edmonds' allegations) but denied the conclusions," Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a longtime critic of the FBI, said in a statement provided to UPI earlier this year.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing June 8, Ashcroft told lawmakers that he had personally signed off the classification decision, which he justified on national-security grounds.
"If there is spilled milk and there is no damage done," he said, "if you can recollect it and put it back in the jar, you're better off than saying, 'Well, it's spilled, no damage has been done, we might as well wait until damage is done.'"
Others argued that the milk could not be put back in the jar.
Sen. Grassley told Ashcroft that it was "a little ludicrous ... that you classify this information now," after it had been so widely aired.
In an interview with United Press International, J. William Leonard, head of the Information Security Oversight Office, the government's secrecy watchdog, said that the FBI told him it was not retrospectively classifying or re-classifying any information -- the material had been secret all along.
"What seems to have happened," he said, was that "well-meaning (FBI officials) attempted to be responsive to congressional requests for information by 'talking around' what was classified. In doing so, they appear to have inadvertently made an unauthorized disclosure of classified information."
Officials who work the liaison between Congress and federal agencies told UPI that such disclosures do happen from time to time.
But Mark Zaid, Edmonds' attorney, said officials had not behaved as if the contents of the briefings were classified until they needed to do so in order to quash his client's lawsuit.
"The content of those briefings was widely disseminated to the media; it was referred to repeatedly in congressional correspondence. It was discussed by senior FBI officials in meetings with Edmonds' attorneys and others, none of whom had security clearances," he said.
"At no time was there any indication that this information was classified until the judge ordered them to turn it over."
When UPI asked FBI spokesmen for comment about Edmonds' allegations in March, officials declined to comment on certain allegations against individuals on privacy grounds but said nothing about any information relating to the case being classified.
"This is all about the lawsuit," Zaid concluded. "It is the (Justice) Department's lawyers scrambling to try and gain a litigation advantage."
Leonard said that there were still several unanswered questions in his mind about the matter and that his inquiries were continuing.
"I am aware that there are aspects of this case on which I don't have all the information I need," he said. But he added that "At this point in time, I have no information that would lead me to disbelieve the FBI's representations that this material was classified all along."
Leonard said that it was clear there were "lessons to be learned ... about how classification decisions are documented and conveyed to cleared personnel.
"What procedures are there for making sure people know what's classified and what's not?" he asked. "It's pretty fundamental."
"The government's position is, to say the least, confused," commented Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, which "works to challenge excessive government secrecy and to promote public oversight," according to its Web site.
Aftergood argued that this lack of clarity was a symptom of a deeper problem.
"The fact that officials briefed openly on this information shows that it's not obvious, even to them, what is classified and why. No one needs to be told that information about sources and methods or ongoing intelligence operations should not be revealed -- it's obvious.
"The fact that it was so clearly not obvious in this case leads one to question whether it was properly classified."
Edmonds has answered that question to her own satisfaction already. "This is simply an attempt to silence me and to stifle debate about the FBI's record on fighting terrorism and on Sept. 11 in particular," she told UPI.
"Nothing more, nothing less."
Zaid passed to UPI copies of correspondence about Edmonds' allegations that had been released to her under the Freedom of Information Act. "Those letters, which set out her allegations in some detail, are stamped 'unclassified,'" he pointed out. "As of January 2003, this information was not considered secret by the FBI."
But Leonard said that releasing the letters did not mean they contained no classified information. "This information was quite clearly not in the control of the executive branch," he said. "Officials do not have a basis to withhold public material that may contain classified information."
Aftergood said that the controversy had had at least one positive effect from the government's point of view.
"Tactically, it has changed the subject from a discussion about the substances of Edmonds' very serious allegations to one about the finer points of classification policy."
He said the case seemed to fit an emerging pattern. "There have been a disturbing number of cases recently where substantive discussion of and inquiry into important subjects have been sidelined by official secrecy and issues of classification."
He cited the prisoner mistreatment scandal at Abu Ghraib as one example.
FBI spokesman Joe Parrish told UPI Sunday that the matter involved both classified information and a pending case and that the bureau would not comment.
-------- homeland security
Homeland Security, a Politicized Issue
To Suspicious Candidates, the Threat of Attack Is No Longer Above the Fray
By John Mintz and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8612-2004Jun26?language=printer
Hours before Attorney General John D. Ashcroft announced a new threat of a terrorist attack last month, the presidential campaign of John F. Kerry was ready with an unusual response.
Harold A. Schaitberger, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, which has endorsed Kerry, told reporters that he found the timing of the news conference "very suspicious" because it followed a fall in President Bush's approval ratings. Kerry aides, it turned out, had e-mailed "talking points" to sympathetic Democrats urging such a response, and organized the telephone news conference that featured Schaitberger.
Homeland security was once a field in which Democrats and Republicans largely avoided savaging each other, to show unity to enemies and allies alike. But the episode suggests the degree to which the issue is becoming politicized as the first presidential election since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks approaches, according to government officials, members of both political parties and experts on terrorism.
"It used to be said that in war, partisan politics ended at the water's edge," said Randall J. Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and now a consultant on domestic security. "But that was when the battlefields were overseas. Now the battlefields are here, and we don't know where to draw the lines."
The battle lines between Bush and Kerry are evenly drawn. In a June 20 Washington Post-ABC News poll, when voters were asked to name the candidate they trust to do a better job handling the war on terrorism, 48 percent favored Kerry and 47 percent preferred Bush. Just a month before, voters chose Bush by 52 to 39 percent.
In April, Kerry accused Bush of failing to secure the nation's chemical plants from terrorist attacks. In recent weeks, he has given speeches on nuclear terrorism and defenses against biological weapons attack. On May 26, Kerry told a rally at a Seattle pier that the Department of Homeland Security should inspect all incoming shipping containers, not just the 2 percent now examined.
"We deserve a president who doesn't make homeland security a photo opportunity," Kerry said.
Democrats note that these charges are not extraordinary; they have been leveled by bipartisan commissions that studied homeland security. Bush campaign officials say the administration already is acting on many of their recommendations.
For their part, Republicans have also politicized the issue, at times distorting Kerry's stance on terrorism matters, Democrats say. Last month, a Bush campaign ad said Kerry was "pressured by fellow liberals" to oppose wiretaps and subpoena powers in the USA Patriot Act, and "would now repeal the Patriot Act's use of these tools against terrorists."
In a Bush campaign conference call with reporters, campaign manager Ken Mehlman was asked to back up the statement that Kerry was pressured by liberals or that Kerry opposed wiretaps, but did not. He said Kerry objected to the USA Patriot Act after liberals did, and that "a common-sense reading indicates he intends to repeal those important tools."
Referring to the growing political discord, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said, "We know 2004 will be a political roller-coaster ride."
Ridge said he confronts a difficult situation: While U.S. intelligence believes terrorists want to disrupt this summer's national political conventions, any security actions by his department as the election approaches will prompt suspicions among some that he is politicizing security. "My job is not to be distracted by that," he said.
A year ago, Ridge said, he and Bush agreed he should not participate in GOP fundraisers or other partisan events. Ridge recalled occasions when he joined Bush at nonpolitical homeland security events around the country in the daytime, and then, as the president went on to attend political fundraisers in the evening, Ridge waited alone in limousines in hotel parking garages.
Democrats know they can tap into some Americans' concern that terrorism alerts could be used to distract the public from bad news about the Bush administration. Government officials strenuously deny ever doing this.
Kerry campaign aides who asked for anonymity because the matter is a delicate one theorize that the administration is manipulating for political impact the U.S. intelligence conclusion that al Qaeda hopes to derail U.S. elections with new attacks.
Democrats say the fact the Republican National Convention is to be held only miles from the World Trade Center site in New York weeks before the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks will allow Bush's promoters to invoke powerful imagery of loss, heroism and American resolve for naked political advantage.
Firefighters, whose union was the only one to endorse Kerry during the Democratic primaries, and New York police officers have volunteered to speak out during convention week if Bush is perceived as exploiting the convention date or site.
Republicans "will rue the day they chose this place and date, because it will backfire on them when people see that they are exploiting a tragedy," Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe said of the GOP convention.
"We are not, and will not in any way, exploit" the convention's proximity to Sept. 11, Bush campaign manager Mehlman said. "Their credibility in talking about politicizing this is zero, given their politicization of it."
In the first two years after the attacks, the politics of homeland security were relatively easygoing. Congressional Republicans were as likely as Democrats to criticize the Bush administration for foot-dragging and inattention.
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Chris Cox (R-Calif.) and ranking Democrat Jim Turner (Tex.) have joined to promote several initiatives, such as a bill to reset formulas determining how homeland security grants are parceled out to states.
But the two-party collegiality on homeland security has worn thin in recent months.
On the morning of Ashcroft's announcement, which cited weeks-old intelligence, Ridge appeared on five morning news shows. In contrast to the dire message Ashcroft would later deliver, Ridge said that the terrorist danger was serious but not the gravest it had ever been.
As Ridge's appearances continued, the Kerry campaign e-mailed Democrats asking surrogates to say publicly that "it was wrong to sit on this [terrorist threat] information so long" and expressing the hope that the administration is "following a security schedule, not a political schedule" in issuing the alert.
Just after noon, Schaitberger, who has lobbied for greater spending on firefighters, said the Ashcroft announcement scheduled for an hour later was a trick to divert attention from Bush's political headaches.
On the same call, David Holway, president of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers -- which also endorsed Kerry -- said, "the administration has been sitting on information that is vital to our law enforcement. I would hope this whole [Ashcroft] press conference has not been coordinated by the Bush committee."
Hours later, Ashcroft held his news conference, describing a graver danger than Ridge had described. Ashcroft said al Qaeda was "90 percent" finished preparing for an attack here. People close to Ridge said he and his aides were deeply frustrated by Ashcroft's statements, because the Homeland Security Department, not the Justice Department, has the authority to issue such alerts. Ashcroft had not vetted that language with other officials, they said.
Moderate Democrats on Capitol Hill were frustrated as well, but for a different reason. Starting early that morning, they told Kerry aides they were making a mistake by suggesting the Bush administration had politicized terrorism fears, congressional sources said.
"We told the Kerry people, 'you shouldn't be saying that. . . . A Kerry administration would say the same thing as Ashcroft,' " given the security concerns about the upcoming Memorial Day and plans for hundreds of thousands of people to visit the Mall, a Democratic staffer said. Rep. Turner said that "based on briefings I have previously received, the information presented today [by Ashcroft and Ridge] was accurate and balanced."
--------
FEAR FACTOR
In an Age of Terror, Safety Is Relative
June 27, 2004
By GREGG EASTERBROOK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/weekinreview/27east.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON - On the subway a few weeks after the Madrid bombings, I noticed a parcel under a seat. I asked other passengers, but no one claimed the object. I looked inside the parcel and saw some papers and an elaborately wrapped object the size of a grapefruit. The train pulled into Metro Center, the main station of the Washington subway. I contemplated that I might be about to pick up a bomb, but then I'd already been stupid enough to look inside, so I carried out the package, put it on a bench and told the station manager. Officers appeared quickly, though trains continued running and people kept milling past.
When I first saw the package, should I have used the emergency intercom to alert the motorman? Should he have stopped the train and evacuated everyone? When I alerted the manager, should she have closed the station, bringing the entire system to a halt? Had it turned out to be a bomb, pundits second-guessing the disaster that followed might have said the station manager and I were fools for not pushing the panic button. But what if a trainload of frantic people had been evacuated into a dark tunnel with a high-voltage rail, all because of an elaborately wrapped grapefruit?
This is an example of the practical limits to security in the post-9/11 world. With the introduction of sophisticated airport inspections, bomb-screening of checked bags, security stops at building entrances, better passport controls, "smart borders" with improved computers and identity scanners, and hundreds of radiation and bioweapon detectors installed in urban areas, security has significantly improved in just three years. This summer, residents of New York and Boston are seeing lots of extra patrols, bomb-sniffing dogs and police drills, in preparation for the political conventions.
But some of what's being done is primarily psychological: to make people feel more safe, regardless of whether they really are. And though the government must try any reasonable idea to counter terrorism, in the next round of security improvements to come there will be serious limits to practicality and affordability.
Consider train safety. Recently the Transportation Security Administration tested screening of Amtrak passengers at the New Carrollton, Md., stop. Riders walked one by one through a device that sniffs the air for molecules associated with explosives. Probably anyone carrying a bomb would have been detected. But Amtrak has about 500 stations, half unstaffed whistle-stops. To add bomb-sniffers, plus personnel, to every station would be a significant expense.
The New Carrollton stop is a quiet suburban station handling roughly 1,000 passengers a day. The Washington subway system carries half a million passengers a day. Many enter at downtown stations that are mob scenes; to make everyone walk through sniffer machines would be incredibly cumbersome. The New York subway system carries 3.8 million passengers a day, boarding at 468 stations. Screening all those riders would be a logistical nightmare, even if cost were no object. Many New York stations would need extensive re-engineering, and the lines would stretch up the stairs.
And cost is an object. An estimated $11 billion has been spent to improve American airline security since Sept. 11, 2001. The airlines board about 1.5 million passengers a day. With the New York subway system alone carrying more than twice that, screening might cost about twice as much as has been spent on airline security.
Maybe there's a way to avoid subway passenger screening. Starting in July, Boston transit police will hand-search the packages of travelers on the storied T subway system. Riders will continue to board unscreened. Officers, some with explosives-sniffing dogs, will wander through cars and demand that passengers open packages, briefcases or backpacks. Already there is an excruciating legal dispute about whether the officers should be scanning for those who fit terrorist profiles, or making random searches: that is, ordering grandma to show what's in her purse while ignoring the Middle Eastern-looking young man with the backpack.
Set aside the legalities and concentrate on the practical. The Boston system has 247 transit officers, only a fraction of whom will be on trains at any particular time. What are the odds officers will stumble onto the one person, among hundreds of thousands, who is carrying something dangerous?
People will feel safer knowing that officers are there, and making people feel safer may be the next best thing to actual safety. In the months after 9/11, National Guard units in battle fatigues patrolled airports: those camouflage outfits would hardly have helped Guard members blend in against a backdrop of vacationers and Chick-Fil-A stands. Officers with assault rifles now walk Times Square, though the chances an assault rifle will be needed are slim.
Amtrak now demands that ticket buyers show a driver's license or similar identification. Maybe this will catch a lone deranged person, but the 9/11 attackers made sure their paperwork was in order. Many office buildings now require visitors to show a driver's license, which a low-wage desk worker glances at perfunctorily. During the Democratic National Convention in July, the police will close much of the highway system of downtown Boston.
How much has been spent on real action? Steven M. Kosiak, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington research group, estimates that since Sept. 11, 2001, about $26 billion has been invested in improving the security of critical infrastructure in the United States. Domestic security over all (personnel and preparedness as well as infrastructure) is a $41.3 billion line in the current federal budget, and President Bush has requested $47.4 billion in fiscal 2005, a request that includes allotments like $3.6 billion to stockpile vaccines and antidotes. Domestic antiterrorism spending is now at nearly 10 times the level of President Bill Clinton's final budget for it. Nonetheless, last year a Council on Foreign Relations report said domestic security was drastically underfinanced.
Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, says he wants still higher spending. He advocates 100,000 more firefighters, 5,000 new police officers trained specifically for antiterrorism, special funds for states and cities whenever an orange-level security alert is issued and other new investments.
But money for more security must be weighed against other priorities. The Council on Foreign Relations study, for example, noted, "Only 10 percent of fire departments in the United States have the personnel and equipment to respond to a building collapse." Yet should most fire departments have millions of dollars' worth of equipment to handle a building collapse, when the chances of this happening in any one place, even any one big city, are tiny?
Further improvements in security may prove impractical, or threats to liberty. Should bus passengers be screened? Israel, that most security-conscious of nations, has found bus attacks nearly impossible to stop. Should all cars be inspected before entering parking garages? The first World Trade Center attack involved a van bomb in the parking garage. (Cars entering the parking lots at many federal buildings are now inspected; this is not done at most commercial lots under private skyscrapers.) Should everyone carry an identity card with "biometric" data coded into it? The economic considerations are just as daunting. Mr. Kosiak estimates $407 billion has been spent in the wake of 9/11, a figure that includes military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. If the estimate is correct, then more than 1 percent of the gross domestic product since 9/11 has gone to security improvements and to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. National prosperity has declined slightly as a result.
Extra security layers also burden the economy. Roadblocks slow the movement of goods; complex inspections of shipments add to processing costs; restricting entry to the United States of the 99.9999 percent of foreign citizens who mean no harm is bad for tourism, for movement of intellectual capital and other aspects of the economy. One reason America has prospered is that it invested heavily in removing friction from the economy by making trade, travel and transactions as convenient as possible. Since 9/11, "we've been putting the friction back in," Brian Michael Jenkins of the RAND Corporation has noted.
Consider movement of shipping. Some 20,000 shipping containers a day arrive at United States ports, with perhaps 1 percent inspected. An estimated 250 million shipping containers are in motion around the world. The Central Intelligence Agency is believed to have concluded that a crude atomic bomb or other terror weapon is far more likely to arrive in the United States via shipping container than on a missile from a rogue state.
But 20,000 shipping containers per day cannot be fully inspected without significantly slowing the economy. The Department of Homeland Security has a program to place American inspectors overseas at ports like Rotterdam and Singapore. But there's a practical limit to how secure shipping can be, just as there are practical limits to many ideas to improve security.
In a world of six billion souls, all it takes is one person a day willing to commit suicide to cause harm and sustain the sense of civilization in jeopardy. Governments will keep trying to improve public safety, but no matter how much is spent, there may be a limit to buying security against that one person.
Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of "The Progress Paradox."
--------
Interest Grows in Blimps for U.S. Defense
June 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Dirigibles-For-Defense.html
COLUMBUS, Ga. (AP) -- In this age of laser-guided weaponry and real-time satellite communications, it may be difficult to imagine any interest in supplying the U.S. defense arsenal with fat, lumbering blimps. But it's no joke.
Backers of airships say they are cheaper than satellites and manned reconnaissance planes, and would fill a gap between the two. And, by hovering over a particular area, airships can provide more persistent surveillance than unmanned reconnaissance drones.
The blimps also could serve as communications platforms, providing wireless phone or Internet service.
``Think of us as a low-hanging satellite,'' said Mike Lawson, president of Techsphere Systems International LLC, which is gearing up to produce 60-foot and 200-foot versions of its ``Aerosphere'' spherical airship in Columbus, Ga. ``We're a niche in the marketplace that will create a safer world.''
Techsphere recently demonstrated a prototype of the smaller airship to Navy officials.The beach-ball-shaped blimp circled at an altitude of 1,500 feet with two men aboard to show its potential in airborne surveillance.
The airship was to be on public display at the St. Mary's County Airport outside Washington, D.C., on Monday.
Among Techsphere's rivals is defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp., which has a $40 million contract from the U.S. Missile Defense Agency to develop a high-altitude prototype in Akron, Ohio, home of the Goodyear blimps.
The aerospace giant, which has built more than 300 airships since 1928, is sticking with the traditional blimp shape. But its 500-foot-long, 150-foot-wide prototype will be about 25 times larger than Goodyear blimps. Lockheed's unmanned craft would be controlled from the ground and operate at 65,000 feet.
G. Guy Thomas, a science and technology adviser for the Coast Guard, confirmed that the Coast Guard is considering airships for enhancing port security by detecting approaching ships 500 to 1,000 miles away.
``I think we're going to see some in the not-so-distant future,'' he said. ``We're going to try to team with some people to buy one.''
Airships date to 1783, and this wouldn't be the first time that they have been drafted for national defense. The Navy was using airships as long ago as the 1920s and '30s, when its biggest enemy was a threat that hasn't gone away: stormy weather.
In one of the worst Naval airship disasters, 73 crewmen were killed in 1933 when the USS Akron crashed in a storm off the New Jersey coast. Eight years earlier, 14 crewmen were killed when the USS Shenandoah was lost in a storm over Ohio.
``I think whoever is promoting airships is going to have a hard time getting past the weather because they're big and they're vulnerable,'' said Dave Fulghum, senior military editor for Aviation Week & Space Technology.
This time around, researchers have been updating lighter-than-air technology for the 21st century, with new power systems and fabrics to help them survive extreme temperatures and solar radiation in the stratosphere, well above the storms at lower elevations.
The Aerosphere's outer skin is made from tough Spectra fiber, an ingredient used in the body armor issued to U.S. troops in Iraq. An inner envelope of Mylar polyester film contains helium to provide lift.
While a satellite can cost the government about $150 million, airship developers say their craft would cost only a few million.
Anthony H. Cordesman, a defense expert with the Center for Strategic & International Studies, said airships have potential, but their future will depend on cost.
``Everything depends on the economics and obviously, the seller always touts the system,'' he said. ``I've been listening to this for 20 years and very few people have bought any.''
The Aerosphere is based on a design developed over 21 years by Hokan Colting, a Canadian who set a world airship altitude record of 21,000 feet last year. His design is maneuvered by propellers mounted around the sides.
Currently, the propellers are powered by gasoline engines that rotate up and down to fly the airship and hold it in position. They also can spin it on its axis, provide lift or land without the large ground crew and moorings required by blimps.
Developers are considering diesel generators mounted inside the airship to run electrically powered propellers that would improve performance and maneuverability. Higher altitude versions -- which would be safer from enemy fire -- may be powered by fuel cells and solar panels.
The Aerosphere would operate initially from 5,000 to 15,000 feet and remain aloft for about two days. The company's 200-foot unmanned version would remain aloft for several months at about 65,000 feet, well above the jet stream and storms.
By comparison, the unmanned drone planes that the Border Patrol began using this month over the U.S.-Mexico border to spot illegal immigrants patrol at 12,000 to 15,000 feet. They can stay aloft for 20 hours at a time.
Aiming even higher in the sky, researchers at New Mexico State University's Physical Science Laboratory have proposed a futuristic balloon that would use wind flowing over its wings to hold it in a geostationary orbit without propulsion. It would operate at about 100,000 feet and remain in position for three months at a time.
``Airships have gone in and out of fashion as the mission requirements have come and gone,'' said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense consulting group in Alexandria, Va. ``There is probably more interest in airships today than there has been for some time. Whether any of that is going to pan out is a different question.''
On the Net:
Techsphere: http://www.techspheresystems.com
Lockheed Martin: http://www.lockheedmartin.com
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Airport to Test Advance Security Checks
June 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Airport-Background-Checks.html
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) -- A select group of frequent fliers is getting a chance to bypass extra security inspections at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, but to do that they must submit to background checks in advance.
On Monday, Minnesota's largest airport becomes the first in the country to start signing up a hand-picked group of people for a 90-day pilot program for the Transportation Security Administration.
Only frequent fliers contacted by Northwest Airlines are eligible. Northwest spokesman Thomas Becher said 1,600 people had expressed interest as of Friday, and only 30 of those contacted were not interested.
``Clearly, it's in our interest and our passengers' interest to make air travel a more efficient experience,'' he said.
The TSA wants to sign up 2,000 people to participate, said spokeswoman Amy Von Walter.
The agency announced earlier this month that the trial program would begin at the Twin Cities airport before expanding to Boston, Los Angeles, Houston and Washington.
The TSA could expand the program nationally based on the tests results and funding, spokesman Mark Hatfield said.
Participants in the pilot program will be required to give the government their name, address, phone number, birth date and ``biometric identifiers,'' including fingerprint and iris scan. That information will be matched against law enforcement and intelligence databases such as the terrorist watch list.
Starting sometime in July, participants will be able to pass through a special lane at one of the airport's security checkpoints.
They will not be able to bypass the metal detector and screens for carry-on bags, but would avoid more intensive secondary screening if they do not set off any security devices.
Passengers now are subject to these checks if a security alarm registers or if a computer-assisted screening program detects something unusual -- a one-way ticket or ticket bought with cash, for example.
The test program is free for the volunteers, but if the program is expanded nationally, registered travelers could expect to a pay a fee to cover administrative costs, officials have said.
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A New Terror Threat This holiday, watch out for those floating beer coolers
TIME magazine
Sunday, Jun. 27, 2004
By ELAINE SHANNON
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040705-658292,00.html
As the July 4 holiday approaches, Bush Administration officials are bombarding the nation's police, fire, emergency and corporate-security offices with another round of terrorism warnings. Although there are no plans to raise the threat level from yellow to orange, a senior Justice Department official says, "there's very serious intelligence that's corroborated, that's multiple sourced, that indicates that al-Qaeda is intent on hitting us and hitting us hard this year." The official concedes, however, that "we don't have specific information."
Along with this now familiar general warning, the FBI has introduced the specter of a new terrorism threat: booby-trapped beer coolers. A lightly classified bulletin sent to 18,000 state and local agencies last week advised local authorities to look out for plastic-foam containers, inner tubes and other waterborne flotsam commonly seen around marinas that could be rigged to blow up on contact. Also, the bulletin warned, terrorists might attach bombs to buoys. FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials say no such devices have actually been discovered, nor is there any current intelligence that terrorists are hatching plots involving floating bombs. But some officials believe al-Qaeda may be focusing on harbors and shipping channels in an effort to replicate the success of the October 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in the port of Aden, in which suicide bombers used a small launch laden with explosives to rip a 40-ft. hole in the warship's hull, killing 17 sailors.
-------- torture
WORD FOR WORD
Defining Torture: Russian Roulette, Yes. Mind-Altering Drugs, Maybe.
June 27, 2004
By KATE ZERNIKE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/weekinreview/27word.html?pagewanted=all&position=
OF all the memos released by the White House last week in response to the prison abuse scandal in Iraq, none have been more incendiary than the so-called torture memo, dated Aug. 1, 2002, and written by Jay S. Bybee, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.
The department and the White House have distanced themselves from the document. But the memorandum's antiseptic discussion of the definition of torture is likely to continue to fuel the debate. Following are a few excerpts.
The memo starts by explaining that some acts may be "cruel, inhuman or degrading" but not constitute torture under Section 2340, the federal law criminalizing torture. To rise to the level of torture, it argues, the acts must be of an extreme nature, specifically intended to inflict severe pain or suffering, mental or physical. But the statute is vague on the meaning of "severe," so the authors try to construct one.
In the absence of such a definition, we construe a statutory term in accordance with its ordinary and natural meaning. The dictionary defines severe as "unsparing in exaction, punishment or censure" or "inflicting discomfort or pain hard to endure; sharp; afflictive; distressing; violent; extreme; as severe pain, anguish, torture" "extremely violent or grievous, severe pain" "of pain, suffering, loss, or the like: grievous, extreme" and "of circumstances hard to sustain or endure." Thus the adjective "severe" conveys that the pain or suffering must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.
A good model, the memo suggests, can be found in statutes regulating what kind of emergency medical conditions qualify for payments of health benefits.
Although these statutes address a substantially different subject from Section 2340, they are nonetheless helpful for understanding what constitutes severe pain. They treat severe pain as an indicator of ailments that are likely to result in permanent and serious physical damage in the absence of immediate medical treatment. Such damage must rise to the level of death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function. These statutes suggest that "severe pain" as used in Section 2340, must rise to a similarly high level, the level that would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure or serious impairment of body functions in order to constitute torture.
Turning to the matter of what constitutes severe mental pain, the memo notes that the statute prohibits torture caused by mind-altering substances, which the authors take to mean drugs. But, the memo argues, this doesn't rule out all drugs.
Instead, it prohibits the use of drugs that "disrupt profoundly the sense or the personality." By requiring that the procedures and the drugs create a profound disruption, the statue requires more than that the acts "forcibly separate" or "rend" the senses or personality. Those acts must penetrate to the core of an individual's ability to perceive the world around him, substantially interfering with his cognitive abilities or fundamentally alter his personality.
The authors say they cannot find a definition of profound mental disruption in mental health literature or United States law, so they offer some examples of their own.
Such an effect might be seen in a drug-induced dementia. In such a state, the individual suffers from significant memory impairment, such as the inability to retain any new information or recall information about thin previously of interest to the individual. This impairment is accompanied by one or more of the following: deterioration of language function, e.g., repeating sounds and words over and over again; impaired ability to execute simple motor activities, e.g., inability to dress or wave goodbye; inability to recognize and identify objects such as chairs or pencils despite normal vision functioning. Moreover, we think that pushing someone to the brink of suicide, particularly where the person comes from a culture with strong taboos against suicide and it is evidenced by acts of self-mutilation, would be a sufficient disruption of the personality to constitute a "profound disruption."
The torture statute also says that severe mental pain can result from the threat of imminent death, the authors note. Imminent, however, is the operative word.
Threats referring vaguely to things that might happen in the future do not satisfy this immediacy requirement. Such a threat fails to satisfy this requirement not because it is too remote in time but because there is a lack of certainty it will occur. Indeed, timing is an indicator of certainty that the harm will befall the defendant. Thus, a vague threat that someday the prisoner might be killed would not suffice. Instead, subjecting a prisoner to mock executions or playing Russian roulette with him would have sufficient immediacy to constitute a threat of imminent death.
The authors then look to the federal Torture Victims Protection Act to see how it defines torture. They note that the courts have not given lengthy analysis on this subject. But at least seven acts consistently reappear in decisions about violations of the law, suggesting to the authors at least seven firm examples of torture.
1) Severe beatings using instruments such as iron barks, truncheons and clubs;
2) threats of imminent death, such as mock executions;
3) threats of removing extremities;
4) burning, especially burning with cigarettes;
5) electric shocks to genitalia or threats to do so;
6) rape or sexual assault, or injury to an individual's sexual organs, or threatening to do any of these sorts of acts; and
7) forcing the prisoner to watch the torture of others.
While we cannot say with certainty that acts falling short of these seven would not constitute torture under Section 2340, we believe that interrogation techniques would have to be similar to these in their extreme nature and in the type of harm caused to violate the law.
In an appendix, the memo lists several cases in which American courts have ruled that the victim was tortured. One case describes what happened to three Americans who were held as hostages in Lebanon. They sued the government of Iran for its role in their kidnapping.
Plaintiff was kidnapped at gunpoint. He was beaten for several days after his kidnapping. He was subjected to daily torture and threats of death. He was kept in solitary confinement for two years. During that time, he was blindfolded and chained to the wall in a 6-foot-by-6-foot room infested with rodents. He was shackled in a stooped position for 44 months, and he developed eye infections as a result of the blindfolds. Additionally, his captors did the following: forced him to kneel on spikes; administered electric shocks to his hands; battered his feet with iron bars and struck him in the kidneys with a rifle; struck him on the side of his head with a hand grenade, breaking his nose and jaw; placed boiling tea kettles on his shoulders; and they laced his food with arsenic.
The memo ends by noting two cases in which courts ruled there was no torture.
The plaintiff was held for eight days in a filthy cell with drug dealers and an AIDS patient. He received no food, no blanket and no protection from other inmates. Prisoners murdered one another in front of the plaintiff. The court flatly rejected the plaintiffs claim that this constituted torture.
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Aides Say Memo Backed Coercion for Qaeda Cases
June 27, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/international/middleeast/27MEMO.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 26 - An August 2002 memo by the Justice Department that concluded interrogators could use extreme techniques on detainees in the campaign against terror helped provide an after-the-fact legal basis for harsh procedures used by the C.I.A. on high-level leaders of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.
The legal memo was prepared after an internal debate within the government about the methods used to extract information from Abu Zubaydah, one of Osama bin Laden's top aides, after his capture in April 2002, the officials said. The memo provided a basis for coercive techniques used later against other high-ranking detainees, like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief architect of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, who was captured in early 2003.
The full text of the memo was made public by the White House on Tuesday without any explanation about why it was written or whether its standards were applied. The memo suggested that the president could authorize a wide array of coercive interrogation methods in the campaign against terrorism without violating international treaties or the federal torture law. It did not specify any particular procedures but suggested there were few limits short of causing the death of a prisoner.
It has been known that the methods used on Mr. Zubaydah and other senior Qaeda operatives stirred controversy in government counterterrorism circles. But until now, it has not been clear that the memo was written in response to the Central Intelligence Agency's efforts to extract information from high-ranking Qaeda suspects, and was unrelated to questions about handling detainees at Guantánamo Bay or in Iraq.
While the memo appeared to give the C.I.A. wide latitude in adopting tactics to interrogate high-level Qaeda detainees, it is still unclear exactly what procedures were used or the extent to which the memo influenced the government's overall thinking about interrogations of other terror detainees captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The officials said the memo illustrated that the Bush administration, in the months after the September 2001 attacks, was urgently looking for ways to force senior Qaeda detainees to disclose whether they knew of any future terrorist attacks planned against the United States.
The memo, which is dated Aug. 1, 2002, was a seminal legal document guiding the government's thinking on interrogation. It was disavowed earlier this week by senior legal advisers to a Bush administration trying to contain the diplomatic and political damage caused by the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. The legal advisers said the memo would be reviewed and revised because it created a false impression that torture could be legally defensible.
In repudiating the memo in briefings this week, none of the senior Bush legal advisers whom the White House made available to reporters would discuss who had requested that the memo be prepared, why it had been prepared or how it was applied. On Friday, the Justice Department and C.I.A. would not discuss the origins of the memo, but in the past officials at those agencies have said that the interrogation techniques used on detainees were lawful and did not violate the torture statute, which generally forbids inflicting severe and prolonged pain.
The memo, one of several legal documents released last week on the legal status of detainees, discussed standards to be applied in interrogations. One document, signed by President Bush, said that prisoners should be treated humanely. The August 2002 memo was a legal opinion that concluded in much broader terms that international treaties and federal torture law imposed few restrictions on American officials.
The memo was addressed to Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, and was signed by Jay S. Bybee, then the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The memo said that the document was an effort to define "standards of conduct" under international treaties and federal law. It concluded that a coercive procedure could not be considered torture unless it caused pain equivalent to that accompanying "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death."
The Justice Department was asked to prepare the memo about the time of Mr. Zubaydah's capture in April 2002, the officials said, in an effort to clarify the permissible limits of interrogation because of questions raised by the treatment of Mr. Zubaydah and a few other Qaeda operatives then in custody. It remains unclear what role Attorney General John Ashcroft played in the debate over interrogation techniques or in the preparation of the memo, but Justice Department officials said he did not review it before it was sent to the White House.
Mr. Zubaydah, who managed Al Qaeda's worldwide recruiting system for Mr. bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan, was one of the first high-level detainees captured after the Sept. 11 attacks. The full extent of the tactics used during his interrogation are still not publicly known, but the methods provoked controversy within the C.I.A. and prompted concerns about whether agency employees might be held liable for violating the federal torture law. That law makes it a crime for an American operating overseas under governmental authority to torture anyone. The tactics also raised concerns at the F.B.I., where some agents were aware of the techniques being used on Mr. Zubaydah.
It is known that some Qaeda leaders were deprived of sleep and food and were threatened with beatings. In one instance a gun was waved near a prisoner, and in another a noose was hung close to a detainee.
Mr. Mohammed was "waterboarded" - strapped to a board and immersed in water - a technique used to make the subject believe that he might be drowned, officials said.
In the end, administration officials considered Mr. Zubaydah's interrogation an example of the successful use of harsh interrogation techniques. Most notably, he helped identify Mr. Mohammed as the principal architect of the September 2001 plot and was the source of information about Jose Padilla, who was arrested in May 2002 in what officials said was a plot to develop a dirty bomb using radiological materials.
Since Mr. Zubaydah's capture, another dozen to two dozen high-level Qaeda operatives have been taken into custody in a classified C.I.A. interrogation program. All of the high-level detainees are being held at secret locations outside the United States. None have had access to lawyers or human rights groups.
The Bybee memo, the officials said, was not designed to support the use of aggressive techniques on less important captives at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or on prisoners in Iraq.
In addition, some of the officials said they wanted to explain the background of the memo because they hoped to dispel the impression that Mr. Bybee, now a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, was somehow a rogue advocate of extreme and potentially unlawful torture tactics. Instead, they said, Mr. Bybee and other lawyers who helped prepare the memo were trying to explore the boundaries of what the law might allow in the context of high-level Qaeda detainees.
The officials said that the memo followed a series of exchanges between the C.I.A. and the Justice Department over the legality of specific techniques used on detainees not long after the Bush administration had decided to keep them out of the American judicial system and treat them as unlawful combatants who would not be protected by the Geneva Conventions, which bar harsh treatment of prisoners of war.
At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration did not have an established infrastructure or legal framework for handling terrorism detainees. But after the attacks, the administration decided that terrorism should be considered a national security issue rather than a law enforcement matter, and President Bush turned to the C.I.A., rather than the F.B.I., to take the lead in the detention and questioning of captured Al Qaeda leaders.
Mr. Bybee's memo provided sweeping legal authority for a wide range of interrogation techniques to be used on Al Qaeda operatives. To be regarded as torture, the memo said, mental pain also must be caused by "threats of imminent death; threats of infliction of the kind of pain that would amount to physical torture; infliction of such physical pain as a means of psychological torture; use of drugs or other procedures designed to deeply disrupt the senses, or fundamentally alter an individual's personality; or threatening to do any of these things to a third party."
The memo added that the use of drugs under certain circumstances during interrogations would be permitted, as long as their effects fell short of what it described as legally prohibited: the "profound disruption of the senses or personality." The memo then explained at length that the definition of the word "profound" allowed for a broad interpretation of what measures were acceptable short of that.
"By requiring that the procedures and the drugs create a profound disruption, the statue requires more than that the acts forcibly separate or rend the sense or personality," it said. "Those acts must penetrate to the core of an individual's ability to perceive the world around him, substantially interfering with his cognitive abilities, or fundamentally alter his personality."
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Were Abu Ghraib abuses learned from Israel?
Palestinians think so, but Shin Bet interrogators scoff at U.S. methods
San Francisco Chronicle
Matthew Kalman
June 27, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/06/27/MNGMM7CTSF1.DTL
Jerusalem -- Palestinians who have spent time in Israeli detention say the images of sexual abuse and humiliation from Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison are painful reminders of their own experience at the hands of Israeli interrogators.
Some, like Hisham Abdel Razzaq, the Palestinian minister for prisoners, believe the similarity is more than coincidental.
"I am inclined to think that the Americans copied the Israeli techniques, " said Abdel Razzaq. "I can't prove it in an objective manner, but the striking similarities are overwhelming."
But veterans of Israel's Shin Bet secret service, which conducts most of the country's anti-terrorist investigations, scoff at such charges and say sexual humiliation of the type seen in photos from Abu Ghraib is not even a useful tool in interrogating suspects.
"Under questioning, a terrorist should be made to yield," said Ami Ayalon, a former director of the Shin Bet. "Sexual abuse goes too far by breaking him, so it's not an option. A broken man will say anything. That information is worthless."
The Shin Bet and other Israeli law enforcement bodies operate under detailed interrogation guidelines set in a 1999 Supreme Court ruling, which resulted from a lawsuit filed by human rights advocates. Israel is a signatory to the 1991 International Convention Against Torture.
Under the ruling, interrogators, who had been given permission to use "moderate physical and psychological pressure" to extract information from detainees, were barred from a long list of coercive practices reported by former prisoners. Specifically, the ruling prohibited violent shaking, sleep deprivation, hooding and exposure to extreme temperatures, including freezing baths in winter, as well as a form of constraint known as shabah, in which the prisoner is tightly shackled for long periods.
Loopholes in the law allow the Shin Bet to use "moderate physical pressure," including sensory deprivation and shaking that stops short of causing permanent damage, on "ticking bombs" -- suspects it believes have information about imminent attacks.
Both Israeli security officials and human rights campaigners who have closely monitored the treatment of prisoners in Israeli detention say the abuses at Abu Ghraib were categorically different from techniques used by Israelis.
"I think the Americans have their own experience with interrogation. They don't need the Israeli security service for such matters," said Hannah Friedman, executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, or PCATI, one of the groups whose lawsuit led to the 1999 court ruling.
Friedman said a couple of cases documented by her group involved apparent sexual humiliation, but not on the systematic level apparent from the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib.
"We have some evidence of prisoners or detainees stripped naked and evidence of one Israeli prisoner who was stripped four times, but not like the pictures we saw from Abu Ghraib," said Friedman. "Most of the time when prisoners are stripped, it is before they are moved from one location to another and done on the pretext of searching for weapons, not during interrogation. For Muslim people, it is very degrading because it is against their religious values."
Ayalon insisted that Shin Bet interrogators exhibit more "professionalism" than the U.S. military police accused of mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib and are more sensitive to Muslim culture. Interrogators undergo almost three years of Arabic and psychology training before confronting their first suspect, he said.
Some Palestinian and other Arab prisoners held by Israel have alleged more serious sexual abuse. Mustafa Dirani, a leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah who was released in a prisoner swap earlier this year, said he was raped by a military intelligence officer he knew as "George," but the charge was never proved.
Friedman said that abuses dipped after the Supreme Court ruling, but they have risen since the Palestinians began a wave of suicide bomb attacks against Israel in 2001.
"In September 2001, PCATI estimated that the total number of detainees being subjected to torture and other forms of ill treatment reached 'only' dozens," the committee said in a report last year. But the report continued: "Since the beginning of 2003 there has been a sharp rise in the torture, ill treatment, humiliation and incarceration in inhuman conditions of Palestinian detainees by the Shin Bet.''
Friedman's committee continues to voice concern about Israeli interrogation techniques, including the alleged use of banned techniques such as shabah, in which a prisoner is locked in tight handcuffs and leg irons and forced to sit in a contorted position with a stinking sack over the head and loud music playing nonstop.
Abed al-Ahmar, a Palestinian human rights worker from Bethlehem who has been detained for most of the past three years on suspicion -- as yet unproven -- of being involved with the banned Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said he experienced shabah even after its use was banned.
"The shabah position caused terrible tightening in my back muscles, and I felt that my stomach was being ripped out from my body," said al-Ahmar.
Israelis are divided on the use of torture, but most agree that it is permissible in the case of "ticking bombs." Even before the current intifada began in September 2000, 64 out of 120 members of Israel's Knesset parliament said they supported the use of torture in questioning suspected terrorists.
The Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group says that with the rise in suicide attacks, Israelis are becoming less sensitive to the issue of maltreating prisoners. "Since the start of the (latest) intifada, there are even more arrests, which means more interrogations and illegal detentions, and at the same time greater silence among the public in its compliance with Israeli violations of human rights," the group said in a recent report.
The Palestinian rumor mill has been rife with accusations that Israel was involved in the Baghdad prison abuses, but Yossi Melman, a journalist who is regarded as one of Israel's best-informed experts on intelligence matters, dismisses such allegations.
"U.S. documents (related to the prison abuse scandal) and Shin Bet history clearly show that Israel is not aiding the United States in the torture of Iraqi prisoners," he said.
Indeed, some former Israeli intelligence officers derided practices seen at Abu Ghraib, such as photographing nude prisoners, which observers have suggested was intended to allow intelligence officers to blackmail detainees and encourage them to turn informant after their release.
"An informant risks being caught and killed by his countrymen, so he will only be effective if he works of his own free will, feeling it is worth his while," said Menachem Landau, a retired Shin Bet officer who supervised Palestinian collaborators. "Someone acting out of fear will be unreliable and could even end up attacking his handler to clear his name."
Micah Halpern, author of "What You Need to Know About: Terror," agreed that the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse did not serve any useful purpose.
"What happened in that Iraqi prison was not interrogation -- it was intimidation for the sake of intimidation,'' Halpern said. "It was gratuitous humiliation. It was for kicks."
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
Allies' Rancor Over Iraq Is 'Over,' Bush Contends
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7684-2004Jun26.html
NEWMARKET-ON-FERGUS, Ireland, June 26 -- President Bush asserted Saturday that the bitterness over Iraq among European allies was "over" and that NATO has a responsibility to do more to help the fledgling government that will assume limited authority in Baghdad on Wednesday.
"I think the bitter differences of the war are over," Bush said at a news conference after a three-hour summit between the United States and the 25-member European Union. "Some people didn't agree with the decision that I made, and others made as well. But we all agree that a democratic Iraq, a peaceful Iraq . . . is in all our benefit."
The EU was represented by Romano Prodi -- president of the European Commission, the EU's executive arm -- and Bertie Ahern, prime minister of Ireland, which currently holds the EU's rotating presidency.
Antiwar protesters forced a 30-minute delay in Bush's news conference with Ahern and Prodi -- a symbolic victory over a president who prizes punctuality. Bush had to wait while the White House press corps was driven in circles on double-decker buses because thousands of opponents of the Iraq war had blocked miles of nearby roads.
At the news conference at the Renaissance-era Dromoland Castle in County Clare, Ahern said discussions included ways the countries could "best work together to support the people of Iraq as they start the process of building a sovereign, secure and democratic country."
The EU issued a statement promising "full and sustained support" for Iraq's incoming interim government. The bloc did not announce any specific pledge of assistance or relief from the debts of the previous regime.
Thousands of demonstrators marched to the area around the castle, protesting the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and the handling of suspected terrorists and calling for an end to U.S. military flights through Shannon Airport, a refueling point in Ireland used by thousands of U.S. troops each month.
After the news conference, Bush flew to Turkey for a NATO summit that was to be dominated by a request from the new Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, for "urgent help" training security forces. Key NATO members had resisted Bush's call to train Iraqi troops under NATO's flag, but NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffe said ambassadors meeting in Brussels had "reached an initial agreement to respond positively to the request of the Iraqi interim government for assistance with the training of its security forces." Therefore, instead of holding tough negotiations, leaders at the summit are likely to ratify that agreement, which was vague about details.
"NATO has the capability, and I believe the responsibility, to help the Iraqi people defeat the terrorist threat that's facing their country," Bush said.
With bloodshed in Iraq escalating as the handoff approaches, Bush said that "in terms of exit strategies," the United States would "work to stand up an Iraqi security force and police force that is able to function, to work up a chain of command where the Iraqi police and security folks know that they're working for Iraqis, not for Americans."
One of the tenser moments in the summit came when the European leaders condemned abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. "I told them both I was sick with what happened inside that prison," Bush said. "So were the American citizens. The action of those troops did not reflect what we think. And it did harm. It did harm, because there are people in Ireland and elsewhere that said this isn't the America we know."
First lady Laura Bush canceled an interview with Carol Coleman, a reporter for Radio and Television Ireland who told the president during an interview on the eve of his visit that the world "is more dangerous" because of the war in Iraq. Bush repeatedly scolded Coleman for interrupting him. Coleman said on Irish radio that the interview was canceled because the White House is not used to aggressive questioning. White House press secretary Scott McClellan confirmed the interview was canceled but did not say why.
----
One Group That's Not Polarized:
9 Out of 10 Critics for Daily Papers Back 'Fahrenheit'
By E&P Staff
June 27, 2004
Editor & Publisher
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000553027
NEW YORK They like Mike. While the country as a whole appears split, along political lines, over the controversial Michael Moore documentary, "Fahrenheit 9/11," movie reviewers at U.S. daily newspapers are not.
An E&P survey of 63 daily papers that ran reviews, in "red" and "blue" states alike, finds that 56 gave the film a positive nod, with only seven abstaining, an almost 90% favorable rating.
The seven in the "anti" camp were: Detroit Free Press, Rocky Mountain News of Denver, San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News, New York Post, South Florida Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, The Philadelphia Daily News and The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.
Among the "pro" crowd were reviewers from moderate to conservative papers such as the Boston Herald, Daily News of Los Angeles, The San Diego Union-Tribune and Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Many of the positive reviews expressed reservations but overall weighed in on the plus side.
Among the few negatives, Phoebe Flowers in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel called the film "hyperbolic hysteria," and Lawrence Toppmann in the Charlotte Observer observed that Moore "rakes muck like nobody else, but almost as much of it sticks to him as to his subject."
But they were drowned out by praise, not only from some of the expected big city papers but from smaller towns. Boo Allen of the Denton (Texas) Record Chronicle referred to "Maestro Moore." Philip Martin in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette of Little Rock called the film "tough and true," while James Sanford in the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette found it to be a "skillfully" directed "two-hour indictment."
Mary Pols in the Contra Costa Times of Walnut Creek, Calif., pretty much covered the waterfront in calling the film "passionate, clever, scathing, funny, snarky, brutal, sad, glib and at times superficial."
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Movie Ads or Political Ads?
Complaint Says Line Is Too Fine
June 27, 2004
New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/politics/campaign/27ads.html
The advertising push behind Michael Moore's new documentary critical of President Bush, "Fahrenheit 9/11," is angering some Republicans, who say it is little more than a commercial campaign devised to help Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.
For instance, one television commercial for the film, which opened nationally on Friday, shows Mr. Bush in mid-golf game, talking emphatically to news cameras that follow him around the course.
"We must stop these terrorist killers," he says before turning his back to tee off and shouting back at the pack, "Now watch this drive!"
The scene is one of many featured in the film that paint the president as cavalier, cynical and insincere in the war against terrorism.
Until the marketing campaign began, Republicans had been dismissive of the film, arguing that it would have little effect on the election because its audience would consist mostly of people already planning to vote against Mr. Bush.
But the advertising campaign has been a different story.
"There's only a very small percentage of Americans that are going to go and see this movie," said David Bossie, head of Citizens United, a conservative group that has run advertisements to promote Mr. Bush. "A much larger number are going to be bombarded by these political ads run by Michael Moore, potentially all the way through the election."
Mr. Bossie has asked the Federal Election Commission to classify the advertising as political and subject to rules that restrict broadcasts of commercials paid by unregulated money from corporations or unions. Under those rules, the advertisements for the film would have to stop 30 days before the Republican National Convention begins on Aug. 30.
Experts on campaign finance law said the commission was not likely to rule on the complaint for months because of its generally slow, deliberative style. Spokesmen for the commission said that although the advertising would be considered political because it features a candidate for a federal office, it could qualify for an exemption from the restrictions for news and commentary.
Tom Ortenberg, president of the domestic distributor of the film, Lions Gate Films Releasing, said it was unclear how much advertising it would run for the film late next month.
Mr. Ortenberg said lawyers were reviewing the company's options.
"If we are still running television ads, we will make certain that they are in full compliance with any and all regulations," he said, adding that if that meant removing Mr. Bush from the commercial, "we can market this film without him."
Still, Mr. Ortenberg said, the advertising was not meant to advance any aim other than promoting the film and driving viewers to the box office.
"We're distributing it in a wholly nonpartisan fashion," he said.
The advertising campaign is not as extensive as those for other widely released movies. People privy to the figures say that while the typical marketing and printing budget for a feature film is about $40 million, that spending for "Fahrenheit 9/11" is less than $10 million.
Of that sum, $3 million has gone to television advertising, concentrated in markets that neither campaign considers battlegrounds, among them New York, Washington and Los Angeles. The commercials have also run nationally on some cable networks, including CNN and Comedy Central, studio executives said.
With that in mind, Mr. Bush's chief campaign strategist, Matthew Dowd, said he was none too concerned.
"No voters are going to see their spot that are in the target states," Mr. Dowd said.
Democrats were of a mixed mind about the political effects of the advertising.
"I don't think these spots are flattering to Bush," David Axelrod, a Democratic media consultant, said. "But I don't know how swing voters would receive them. These are people who don't disrespect Bush, and they don't even necessarily dislike him."
Either way, Mr. Moore and his representatives said, they were pleased about the latest Republican complaints, because they are feeding their marketing strategy to bill the film as the most controversial of the summer.
"It's just going to send more people into a movie in which George W. Bush stars," Chris Lehane, a spokesman for Mr. Moore, said. "And we're going to have to make sure to send them a holiday card to express our gratitude."
-------- us politics
Kucinich pushing peace plank
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Stephen Dinan
June 27, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040627-123450-8676r.htm
Dennis J. Kucinich's presidential campaign rolls on, with his supporters having won endorsement from four state Democratic parties for his proposed Department of Peace and his campaign planning to take that message to the Democratic National Convention in Boston next month.
The congressman from Ohio is the only major Democratic candidate still actively challenging Sen. John Kerry, who has long since sewn up the delegates required to collect the presidential nomination at the convention, which begins July 26.
But Mr. Kucinich is still fighting and hopeful, his convention coordinator Tim Carpenter says, that he can "remind Senator Kerry there is a progressive wing, and he can be proud of the progressive wing."
As other candidates have dropped out, Mr. Kucinich has been winning a small number of delegates and firmly occupying the antiwar ground of the Democratic Party. Mr. Kucinich has said his role is to protect the party's left flank, and Mr. Carpenter said he is doing that by giving the 3 percent to 5 percent of the "left wing" a voice.
The candidate and his message have won some victories. Last weekend, his supporters persuaded the Texas Democratic Party to adopt a resolution calling for a federal Cabinet-level Department of Peace, following endorsements from Oregon, Colorado and Washington in previous weeks.
"It is very significant for us it's in Texas, and Democrats in Texas are saying loudly that peace is the direction they want to move in," said Dot Maver, Mr. Kucinich's campaign manager. "War is not inevitable. Peace is inevitable."
Mr. Carpenter said while he doesn't expect the national platform to endorse a Peace Department, the campaign does hope to win inclusion of a statement calling for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.
"What we're going to look for is a commitment of our party to end this war," he said.
Mr. Kucinich's supporters haven't played much of a role in the Democratic Platform Committee to this point, but Ms. Maver said they have been told they will have a role when the committee meets in Miami on July 9 and 10 to draft the party platform.
"We will have access at this point and are planning to bring a number of supporters to Miami," Ms. Maver said.
A spokesman for the Democratic Party didn't return three calls last week seeking comment on Mr. Kucinich's role in the platform or at the convention.
Though he hasn't won any state primaries or caucuses, Mr. Kucinich has had some solid showings. According to TheGreenPapers.com, a nonpartisan Web site that tracks delegates, he has won 67.5 delegates to the convention, ranked fifth, just behind former candidate Wesley Clark. Mr. Kucinich's delegate count includes a very strong showing in Colorado, where he gained only 13 percent of the caucus votes on April 13 but won 22 percent, or 14, of the delegates.
Mr. Kucinich also has raised more than $11 million during his run.
Though Mr. Kucinich had some solid showings in the late primaries and caucuses, Mr. Kerry had a few stumbles. With such overwhelming showings as 92.1 percent in New Jersey, Mr. Kerry scored just 66.4 percent in Arkansas' May 18 primary and 67.9 percent in Montana's June 8 primary.
A spokeswoman for the Kerry campaign did not return a call for comment.
Mr. Kucinich's campaign said as the candidate field shrank, his antiwar message unified Democrats who had been supporting other antiwar candidates and who want to see the party take a strong antiwar stance this election.
Still, on such issues as the Iraq war and trade, where Mr. Kucinich has called for repealing free-trade agreements, the campaign said other Democrats never will respect the role he has played.
"Dennis will never get the credit he deserves in this campaign for moving this debate," Mr. Carpenter said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
AT THE MOVIES
Democrats Find Relief Among Allies at 'Fahrenheit 9/11'
June 27, 2004
By BRUCE WEBER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/politics/campaign/27fahrenheit.html
KARMEL, Ind., June 26 - Doug and Julie Arnold were among the early arrivals on Friday at the Regal Cinemas here, where Michael Moore's Bush-bashing film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," opened before noon on the first day of its exposure to a national audience.
The Arnolds had to drive 50 miles to get to this affluent Indianapolis suburb from their home in Kokomo, and Mr. Arnold had to take the morning off from his job as a school administrator, but, as Mrs. Arnold explained, "They just don't show art movies in Kokomo."
The couple said they were impressed that the film had won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival last month. And they said they were also motivated by the hoopla surrounding the film. But Mr. Arnold seemed almost embarrassed to add, "Moore's politics pretty much align with ours."
Such was the mood at the Regal Cinemas, a free-standing complex behind a shopping mall, where one of 17 screens was showing "Fahrenheit 9/11" and where central Indianans of liberal inclination gathered as if in a secret club, seeking safety and solace among like-minded citizens.
Indeed, it was not easy to find theaters showing the film in this part of Indiana. Nearly every one of the 30 or so people interviewed here during the day made sure to point out that Hamilton County, which includes Carmel, is thoroughgoing Republican territory.
"We feel all alone sometimes, especially since the 2000 election," said Don Etherington, a junior high school teacher from Tipton. He attended the morning screening with his son, Kyle, 20, a political science major at Indiana University, Kokomo, who plans to seek an internship at the White House next year - but only if John Kerry wins the election in November.
Some 25 or so members of the Hamilton County Democrats, the local arm of the state Democratic committee, showed up for the early evening show.
"We were tailgating in the parking lot," said one of them, Keith Clock, a paralegal, who was also passing out fliers for a Michael Moore house party.
And as the day went on and the crowds increased - some 60 people made it to the early screening, but by the 7 p.m. show the 300 or so seats were mostly occupied - the moviegoers' relief at being among allies became palpable. After the evening show, the audience erupted in prolonged applause.
The film, part polemic and part character assassination, presents President Bush as a buffoon and his administration as having filched the 2000 election, ignored the terrorist threats before Sept. 11, 2001, and manipulated the facts and public opinion to justify a war against Iraq. The central motive for the war, the film suggests, is a desire to protect the ties of the Bush family and their inner circle to Saudi Arabian oil money.
The film was financed by the Disney Company, which then refused to allow its Miramax subsidiary to distribute it, a contretemps that only heated up Mr. Moore's already inflammatory reputation. Lions Gate Entertainment stepped in and released the film in New York on Wednesday, and then nationally on Friday. It is now on a total of 868 screens, more than three times the number showing Mr. Moore's previous documentary, "Bowling for Columbine," which won an Oscar, at its peak. A Lions Gate spokesman, Peter Wilkes, said the preliminary box office gross for Friday was more than $8 million, and that the weekend total was expected to exceed $20 million, which would be an opening weekend record for a documentary.
It is unclear whether the film will, as Mr. Moore hopes and some Republicans fear, influence the November election by pushing swing voters to the Democratic side, or whether it will merely preach to the already converted and antagonize the opposition, soldering the fiercely polarized prongs of the electorate more solidly in place. To judge by interviews conducted in conservative enclaves in Michigan, Ohio and Florida on Friday, as well as in Indiana, the first wave of attendees was solidly anti-Bush, and more than one moviegoer likened the film's appeal to that of the year's other controversial film - "The Passion of the Christ" - for evangelical Christians.
"We're trying to provide freedom to Iraq by killing the Iraqis?" said Chuck White, 62, a former Republican from Sterling Heights, Mich., who said the president's arrogance had turned him against the party. "We're turning our soldiers here and in Iraq into monsters."
At the Kenwood Towne Center Theaters in St. Bernard, Ohio, north of Cincinnati, one moviegoer kept up a running commentary aloud, and no one seemed to mind. "He's dangerous," when Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld flashed on the screen. "He's an idiot," he said of Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security. "He's a traitor," the man said, watching Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, wet his comb with his own saliva before combing his hair. And his pronouncement on President Bush? "He's clueless," the man said.
Throughout the day, isolated disapproval was expressed: "We booed it; we're Bush fans," said Beck Warwick, a 16-year-old high school student in Carmel, who attended the film with two friends, one of whom, Michael Klemen, said he felt pushed around by Mr. Moore's relentless politics.
"I just thought they were trying to brainwash you," Mr. Klemen said.
But the overwhelming majority of moviegoers would sooner vote for Michael Moore than return Mr. Bush to office for a second term. They may not be Mr. Moore's most wished-for audience, but he would be heartened to know that at least a few Republicans emerged from theaters on Friday on wobbly pins.
"All the offhand remarks they caught Bush making, he wasn't very presidential," said Jerry Murrell, a retired stockbroker in Carmel and a Republican who voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. Mr. Murrell said that he had grave doubts about the war in Iraq, and that after seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" his next vote "is going to take a lot of thought."
And in Pensacola, Fla., Monica Moody, a 20-year-old restaurant hostess who described herself as a conservative Republican, proved to be Mr. Moore's perfect target.
"Oh my goodness, I cried," Ms. Moody said. "I'm still trying to process everything. It really makes me question what I feel about the president. I'm still going to respect him as our president, but it makes me question his motives. Of course, I think that's the whole point of the film, to question his motives. But after watching it, I do question my loyalty to the president. And that's scary for me."
Sam Baltrusis in Pensacola, Fla., Albert Salvato in Cincinnati and Alan Fisk in St. Clair Shores, Mich., contributed reporting for this article.
--------
THE PRESIDENT
Amid Protests, Bush Sees Thaw in Europe
June 27, 2004
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/27/international/worldspecial/27PREX.html?pagewanted=all&position=
NEWMARKET-ON-FERGUS, Ireland, June 26 - President Bush declared on Saturday that the "bitter differences" between the United States and Europe over the war in the Iraq were over, and that NATO had a responsibility to help Iraqis with their own security.
But as Mr. Bush spoke at an outdoor joint news conference here with Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland and Romano Prodi, the president of the European Union, anti-Iraq war protesters blocked at least one of the main roads leading to Dromoland Castle, a 16th-century fortress turned luxury resort where Mr. Bush is staying. The protesters delayed the start of the news conference by half an hour because three buses holding reporters from the United States and Europe were held up on one of the traffic-clogged roads leading to the castle.
Mr. Bush said he hoped NATO would agree at a summit meeting opening Sunday in Istanbul to help with the training of Iraqi security forces. The training commitment, which is near agreement, represents a greatly lowered expectation on the part of the White House since it became clear in recent weeks that NATO was not willing to commit any troops to Iraq.
"NATO has the capability and I believe the responsibility to help the Iraqi people defeat the terrorist threat that is facing their country," Mr. Bush said, with the Irish and American flags flying from the turrets of the castle behind him. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi of Iraq, he noted, had asked NATO for training help and equipment in a recent letter. "I hope NATO responds in a positive way," Mr. Bush said.
[In Brussels on Saturday, the NATO secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, confirmed that the alliance had reached a deal to train Iraqi armed forces. "NATO heads of state and government are expected to approve this agreement at their summit meeting in Istanbul on June 28," he said in a statement.]
White House officials in recent weeks have lowered the bar for international commitments to Iraq as it has become clear that NATO would not commit any troops to Iraq.
Mr. Bush also acknowledged that he is not especially well-liked in Europe. When asked by a White House reporter how he could explain his unpopularity in opinion polls here and whether Americans should be concerned about it, Mr. Bush replied that he was most concerned about his re-election campaign in the United States.
"I must confess, the first polls I worry about are those that are going to take place in early November this year," he said. "Listen, I care about the image of our country." He added that "as far as my own personal standing goes, my job is to do my job" and that "I'm going to set a vision, I'm going to lead, and we'll just let the chips fall where they may."
Mr. Bush said that Mr. Ahern had questioned him in a meeting on Saturday morning about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the American treatment of other prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, as did President Mary McAleese of Ireland in her own meeting with Mr. Bush.
"I told them both I was sick with what happened inside that prison," Mr. Bush said, referring to Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, where Americans abused Iraqi prisoners. "The actions of those troops did not reflect what we think. And it did harm."
Mr. Bush said he told both Mr. Ahern and Ms. McAleese that the United States would deal with the investigations into the prison abuse scandal "in a transparent way."
Mr. Ahern said "these things happen."
"Of course, we wish they didn't, and it's important then on how they're dealt with."
Mr. Bush was in Ireland for an annual European Union-United States summit meeting, and both he and Mr. Ahern emphasized what they called the progress they had made: signing joint agreements on counterterrorism, counterproliferation, H.I.V. and AIDS and an agreement that enables the satellite navigation systems used in the United States and Europe to be used interchangeably by 2008.
By midafternoon in Ireland, it was unclear how many demonstrators had blocked the road leading to Dromoland Castle. They could not be seen from any of the press buses, which ended up taking such a circuitous route to the castle that a trip that normally takes 15 minutes took more than an hour.
Despite large demonstrations across Ireland on Friday night, when the police estimated that 10,000 had marched against Mr. Bush and the Iraq war in Dublin, protesters interviewed outside Dromoland Castle on Saturday said their numbers had been diminished by government attempts to frighten them away through widely stated warnings that violent confrontations were likely.
In the period leading up to the meeting, newspapers published front-page photos of columns of tanks and armored vehicles, and emphasized the fact that 6,000 soldiers and police officers would be patrolling around Dromoland Castle in the largest military operation ever orchestrated in the Irish Republic.
A helicopter hovered above the main protest march near Dromoland, but no other military presence was visible, except for the maze of 10-foot trenches and earth embankments that soldiers constructed across the fields of neighboring farms in order to dissuade anyone from approaching the castle.
"They've made it very difficult to get here," said Rose Finn, a 33-year-old elementary school teacher who drove to County Clare from Dublin with her husband and baby daughter for the demonstration.
But around 2,000 people did walk three miles from the town of Ennis to a small bridge over the Rine River, where 50 police officers stopped them about one mile from Dromoland. The dozens of rainbow-colored flags and the streaming sunshine created a festive atmosphere. People on bicycles, running children and dogs all wove through the crowd as it moved along a deserted and remote country road towards the castle. Once they reached the barricades, the protest leaders staged several theatrical pageants, including a mock version of Macbeth, and portrayed a makeshift jail cell that held a protester wearing a Bush mask. Ciaran O'Reilly, wearing dreadlocks and face-paint, said he was protesting in sympathy with American soldiers sent to Iraq against their will, then read a list of American war dead, including their ages and rank. Like most demonstrators, he focused on the perceived role the Irish government played by permitting American military planes to land at the airport nearby for repairs and refueling.
About 1,000 protesters were kept outside the gates at Shannon Airport, where Mr. Bush left on Saturday afternoon for Ankara, Turkey, where he was to stay Saturday night and hold meetings Monday morning. He will then leave for Istanbul and the NATO summit meeting.
Brian Lavery contributed reporting for this article.
--------
More Than 40,000 Protest Bush in Turkey
June 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Turkey-Protest.html
ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) -- Tens of thousands of Turks chanting anti-Bush slogans demonstrated against the president's visit to their country on Sunday and a NATO summit.
Bush is unpopular in Turkey, where the overwhelming majority of the public opposed the Iraq war. As the president arrived in Turkey Saturday, supporters of Jordanian-born militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi said they kidnapped three Turkish workers in Iraq, Arab TV station al-Jazeera reported. The group has threatened to behead the hostages, an al-Jazeera employee told The Associated Press.
The protest in the Kadikoy district, on the Asian side of Istanbul, attracted more than 40,000 people, mostly members of leftist groups, police said. There were some 100 foreign protesters from Greece, Britain, The Netherlands, Portugal and Syria.
``We want to throw NATO out of Istanbul,'' said Dogan Aytac, a Turkish protester with a flag in his hat that read: ``Get out Bush!'' A 20-year-old Greek protester, Odysseas Maaita, said, ``We are here to express our solidarity with the Turkish people, with the people of the Middle East and all others that are under attack, to say that we are against NATO.''
The summit is to be held on the European side of the city, across the Bosporus, about six miles from Kadikoy.
Turkey dramatically boosted security before Bush's arrival and in preparation for the NATO summit, which begins Monday.
F-16 warplanes patrolled the skies of Istanbul on Sunday. AWACS early warning planes dispatched by NATO will help monitor a no-fly zone over the city. More than 23,000 police will be on duty during the summit. Turkish commandos are patrolling the Bosporus in rubber boats with mounted machine guns. Bush, who will attend the summit along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac and others, met with Turkish leaders in Ankara on Sunday morning and flies to Istanbul in the early afternoon.
At the protest, demonstrators chanted ``Istanbul will be a grave for NATO.''
They carried banners, reading: ``Down with American Imperialism,'' and ``Go away Bush!''
Greenpeace activists carried signs against nuclear weapons. Others chanted in English: ``Yankees Go Home!''
Thousands of policemen, deployed in back streets, watched the crowds from a distance as a police helicopter hovered above.
In Ankara on Saturday, Turkish police fired tear gas at scores of stone-throwing leftist demonstrators, just hours before Bush arrived in the country. Police said 13 officers were injured by rocks hurled during the rally, the Anatolia news agency reported Sunday.
On Sunday, police rounded up some 15 leftist demonstrators in downtown Ankara, saying the group was planning to stage a firebombing in the city.
Bush's arrival was preceded by a series of protests and bomb blasts, including one Thursday that injured three people outside the Ankara hotel where Bush is expected to stay. Another blast that same day on an Istanbul bus killed four people and injured 14.
The bombings has been blamed on militant leftists.
Militant Kurdish, Islamic and leftist groups are active in the country, and security in Istanbul has been of special concern since November, when four suicide truck bombings blamed on al-Qaida killed more than 60 people.
--------
Tens of thousands protest Bush, NATO at Istanbul rally
ISTANBUL (AFP)
Jun 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040627172104.mb2lyjaf.html
Tens of thousands of protestors spilled into the streets in Turkey's largest city on Sunday for a noisy demonstration against a two-day NATO summit and the presence of US President George W. Bush.
Watched by a heavy police presence, the protestors filled a central square on the Asian side of Istanbul, some four kilometres (two and a half miles) from the summit venue on the other side of the Bosphorus Strait, bisecting the city.
Bearing colorful banners with anti-NATO slogans, the demonstrators -- ranging from left-wingers to Islamists and environmentalists -- chanted slogans such as 'Istanbul will become a grave for NATO' and 'United States, Assassins, Leave the Middle East'.
There was no official figure on how many protestors there were in the Kadikoy square on the banks of the Bosphorus but some organisers put it as high as 100,000.
Many were wearing T-shirts which read "The war organization NATO should be disbanded" and "Do not come Bush", while some members of the Islamist-leaning human rights organization Mazlum-Der showed up in orange convict's clothes with chains on their legs, resembling prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Speeches delievered by the organizers -- three anti-NATO groups, opposition parties, trade unions and civic bodies -- charged that the alliance, under the leadership of the United States, was preparing for a belligerent policy in the Middle East that would throw the region into chaos.
"The torturers, the killers are here for a summit of war. Our struggle is for the people of the Middle East who resist torture and occupation," said Mustafa Avci, the secretary-general of KESK, one of the biggest trade unions in Turkey.
Gencay Gursoy, the head of the Istanbul Union of Doctors, said "The NATO summit is a summit that will paint the Middle East red with blood and war" The speeches were often interrupted by slogans of 'Yankee Go Home, This Country is Ours' as some protestors beat on drums and blew whistles.
"NATO is gathering here to prepare a dirty scheme on the Middle East. What they want is to take over the region's oil resources," one of the protestors, 52-year-old construction engineer Sevki Ayoglu, told AFP.
Another, 34-year-old academic Ozlem Onaran, said she joined the demonstration to stand against "global looting, war and US military aggression".
Foreigners who took part in the demonstration included members of the Communist Party of Greece, invited by the Turkish Communist Party.
"I am here on holiday. I joined an anti-NATO rally in Izmir (in western Turkey) and then came up here," said 55-year-old Dutch bank emmployee Kees Mittendorf, holding a placard which read 'Bush and Sharon are the greatest terrorists of the Middle East'.
Hundreds of police officers in full riot gear, backed by armoured vehicles, kept a close watch on the demonstration, which ended peacefully after two hours.
Organisers had originally wanted to hold the rally on the city's European side close to the so-called NATO valley where Bush and world leaders arrived Sunday ahead of the two-day summit, but authorities refused them permission on security grounds.
Some 25,000 police, backed by paramilitary troops and combat aircraft, were on duty to ensure security for the summit.
Steel and concrete barriers were erected to close off a large area around the summit venue, the press centre and the hotels where the guests are staying.
----
Public reaction to Cassini taught NASA a lesson
BY CHRIS KRIDLER
Jun 27, 2004
FLORIDA TODAY
http://www.floridatoday.com/news/space/stories/2004b/spacestoryN627CASSINI.htm
CAPE CANAVERAL -- While a number of NASA missions over the years have carried some kind of nuclear fuel, the Cassini mission ignited an explosion of protests when it launched from Cape Canaveral in October 1997.
Many people were concerned about the spacecraft's highly toxic plutonium, though NASA said the risks were small. Sixteen protesters got probation for trespassing after their group rushed the fence at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
"There was a huge mass of, just a solid wall of military behind the fence," said Peg McIntire of St. Augustine, a 93-year-old "Grandmothers for Peace" protester from the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice.
"It was a barbed-wire fence that they said had glass on the top, and actually some of our people threw a small carpet over the top, climbed up and went over the fence that way, and of course all of them were arrested. Three of us managed to get through the gate, because we were all pretty old."
The tumult over Cassini, which is due to arrive at Saturn on Wednesday, helped NASA rethink how it talks to the public about the new nuclear propulsion initiative, Project Prometheus.
"Part of that idea is to be open and transparent in everything we do," said Alan Newhouse, the project's director, when he spoke at April's Space Congress in Cape Canaveral. The week before, he visited the local Sierra Club chapter to outline the goals of the project and answer questions.
To get its message out and understand the concerns of protesters, NASA enlisted the help of the nonprofit Keystone Center in 2001. The center helps facilitate understanding between people on opposite sides of science and public policy issues.
Its final recommendations, released this month, warn NASA that "nuclear power is a hard sell" and that some people are skeptical that NASA will spend enough on nuclear projects to be safe.
Keystone recommended NASA strengthen its written materials on Project Prometheus; interact more with professional and community groups, as well as state and local regulators and Congress; invite people with different perspectives to discuss the issues; and use independent reviews that will be available to people with concerns.
McIntire still says launching Cassini was immoral, and she's skeptical about future nuclear launches.
"I'm entirely in favor of scientific research and the use of nuclear energy if it can be used safely, but plutonium cannot and will not be safe," she said.
NASA's first Prometheus mission is to be the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, which, at such a great distance from the sun, would need "football fields of solar arrays" if it didn't have nuclear power, Newhouse said.
"It's a real challenge to do a science investigation with limited power," he said.
It's not clear what kind of nuclear fuel the Jupiter mission will use. Cassini's Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators produce electricity from heat caused by the radioactive decay of plutonium.
Several nuclear-fueled missions have inspired protests, said Jan Seinkner, head of investigations for Space Gateway Support, which provides security and other services to the spaceport.
Security forces try to talk to protesters in advance to minimize risks they might face or pose. In 1997, they negotiated with the Cassini protesters and allowed a few to trespass at the Cape.
"Our role was to ensure that they were not going to make attempts to disrupt the launch, so essentially we just monitored their activities," Seinkner said.
The threat of terrorism in a post-9-11 world might alter such arrangements, he said.
Security forces will proceed as dictated by NASA or the Air Force, SGS spokesman Sam Gutierrez said.
Contact Kridler at 242-3633 or ckridler@flatoday.net
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