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NUCLEAR
Israel's EER wins deal to treat Chernobyl waste
Nuclear Industry Still Haunted by Chernobyl - UN
Asia is turning to nuclear power, says international nuclear agency
British Nuclear reactors to close down
UN 'not worried' by Iran nuclear project
Iranians say suspect site was used for military research
Brazil Denies Blocking U.N. at Nuke Plant
U.N. agency to push ahead with Russian nuke dump
Russia To Speed Up Nuclear Deal With Iran: Top Nuclear Official
U.N. Unconcerned by Russia's Atomic Work in Iran
Oppenheimer Celebration Examines the Myth and the Man
NRC details Yankee inspection
MILITARY
Afghan Asks NATO to Protect Officials Registering Voters
Powell Says Sudan Must Restrain Militias
British Nuclear reactors to close down
Pentagon Brass and Military Contractors' Gold
A Message From CACI
Report Examines Defense Hiring
Pentagon Brass and Military Contractors' Gold
U.S. Expels 2 Guards at Iran U.N. Mission
U.S. Hands Authority To Iraq Two Days Early
The Missing
Iraq to Take Legal Custody of Hussein on Wednesday
Roadside Bomb Kills 3 U.S. Troops in Iraq
Iraq Videotape Seems to Show Killing of a G.I.
Israelis Roll Into Gaza to Find Rocket Sites
Palestinians Fire Rockets As Sharon Visits
Oviedo held on return to Paraguay
NATO Agrees to Help Train Iraqi Forces
Afghanistan set for centre stage at NATO summit
Karzai's plea to Nato on troops
'Boston Phoenix' IDs 'Anonymous' CIA Officer
Court to Review Spies' Right To Sue CIA Over Broken Vow
War on terror 'diverting spy resources'
Japan prepares push for place on Security Council
The Business of Rebuilding
From Occupation to 'Partnership'
Army to Call Up Retired and Discharged Troops
Croatian Serb leader jailed
U.S. Military Tribunal to Try 3 Suspects
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Park Police Chief Fights for Reinstatement
Justices Back Detainee Access To U.S. Courts
Analysis Executive Branch Reined In
Justices Affirm Legal Rights of 'Enemy Combatants'
Pundits laud 'enemy combatants' ruling
Justices Will Hear Argument on Medical Marijuana Laws
Colombia coca growers protest U.S. drug spraying
FBI Warns That Terrorists May Use Floating Bombs
U.S. Expels Iranians Accused of Filming Sites
Justice Department Says It Can't Share Lobbying Data
Police Tactic to Sidestep Miranda Rights Rejected
Tactic of Delayed Miranda Warning Is Barred
Attorneys for Detainees Plan Fast Action
For Prisoners, Only Certainty Is Right to a Court Hearing
Court orders due process for Guantanamo prisoners
POLITICS
Russia releases 7 that U.S. returned as terror suspects
The Administration vs. the Administration
Pyrrhic secrecy victory
Analysis State Department Now Assumes a Greater Role
In Classic Check and Balance, Court Shows Bush It Also Has Wartime Powers
ENERGY
Yeast Plus Agricultural Wastes Equals Ethanol
OTHER
Environmentalists Lose Ship Pollution Challenge
Comment Period on Mercury Emissions to End
New Mercury Rules Get Heavy Response
Biotechs mine hardy bacteria for industrial use
Grow-your-own body parts may be available
ACTIVISTS
Defiance Leads to Cellblock Senate Disruptor Won't Apologize
Mother allows photos of Calif. soldier's coffin
English Grandmother Wages War Against U.S. Military
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Israel's EER wins deal to treat Chernobyl waste
REUTERS ISRAEL:
June 29, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25735/newsDate/29-Jun-2004/story.htm
TEL AVIV - Israeli firm EER said on Sunday it won a contract from the Ukraine government to treat low-level radioactive waste from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
EER will invest $40 million to set up several waste treatment facilities and expects to receive income of about $35 million a year from the plants, the company said in a statement.
The contract to treat some 500,000 tonnes of waste is on a basis of build, operate and transfer and is for a period of 20-25 years.
The explosion at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, was the world's worst civil nuclear accident and has been blamed for thousands of deaths due to radiation-linked illness, a huge increase in cancer and high radiation levels in affected areas. "We have a unique technology. There is no pollution and no ash," EER Chairman Itschak Shrem told Reuters.
EER developed the plasma gasification melting technology together with Russia's Kurchatov Institute research centre and the Radon Institute. The technology uses high temperatures to transform the waste into ceramic residue and gas.
The Israeli company, which recently raised $9 million from Japan's Takahashi Group, is seeking a strategic partner to join EER.
"We believe this deal will lead to other contracts," Shrem said, noting the company has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese government for a large medical waste project.
EER is also setting up a facility in Israel using the same technology to treat municipal waste and which will serve as a demonstration model.
Investors in EER include Israeli investment company Shrem Fudim Kelner & Co (DOSR.TA: Quote, Profile, Research) and its subsidiary SFK Technologies (SFKT.TA: Quote, Profile, Research) , Urdan Industries (URDN.TA: Quote, Profile, Research) , the Japanese company and South Korean investment firm EBN.
----
Nuclear Industry Still Haunted by Chernobyl - UN
REUTERS RUSSIA:
June 29, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25733/newsDate/29-Jun-2004/story.htm
MOSCOW - The nuclear industry is still struggling to overcome the damage done to its reputation by Chernobyl, even though nuclear power is an "environmentally superior" energy source, the U.N. atomic agency.
"Despite the array of measures that have been put in place since Chernobyl to offset the possibility of a severe accident, these risks can never be brought to zero and they continue to weigh heavily on public perceptions," International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said.
The Chernobyl disaster occurred in April 1986, when an explosion at the Ukrainian power plant spewed a cloud of radioactivity across Europe and the Soviet Union.
Around 30 people died from radiation exposure after the accident, nearly 2,000 children later developed thyroid cancer and thousands of other fatal illnesses have been blamed on it. More than 100,000 people were resettled, causing physical, economic and psychological hardship.
In a speech at a conference marking the 50th anniversary of the first nuclear power plant near Moscow, ElBaradei said that the nuclear power industry has never fully recovered.
He said that in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl accident, atomic energy accounted for around 16 percent of the world's energy output - the same ratio as today.
"The environmental superiority of nuclear power as a source of electricity - particularly important in light of recent concerns about greenhouse gases and climate change - has frequently received less attention than the accumulation of spent (reactor) fuel and radioactive waste."
The IAEA has said that nuclear power emits virtually no greenhouse gases, which are believed to be the cause of global warming.
ElBaradei added that in the future, nuclear power would probably be recognized as indispensable in developing countries which lack natural resources like gas, oil or coal.
Later at a news conference, ElBaradei told reporters that greater reliance on nuclear energy could avoid the "excessive use of fossil fuel" and prevent an environmental catastrophe.
-------- asia
Asia is turning to nuclear power, says international nuclear agency
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
By Karl Peter Kirk,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-29/s_25359.asp
VIENNA, Austria - Asian countries are increasingly turning to nuclear power to meet their energy needs, even as Western countries move away from nuclear energy sources, the U.N. nuclear agency said recently.
While the construction of nuclear plants in Western Europe and North America has virtually stopped in recent years, Asian countries are forging ahead, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said ahead of a major six-day conference on the future of nuclear power starting Sunday in Moscow.
About 16 percent of the world's electricity is produced by 442 nuclear power plants, mostly in Western Europe and North America.
But nuclear energy is increasingly popular in many Asian countries because they lack access to more traditional sources of fuel, such as coal or gas, said IAEA expert Alan McDonald.
"For countries like South Korea and Japan, they don't have so many alternatives," McDonald said.
Countries where the energy demand is growing fast or with economies conducive to long-term investments - including several Asian nations - are more likely to go for the nuclear option, he added. According to agency figures, 18 of the 27 nuclear power plants currently under construction are in Asia, as are 27 of the last 31 plants built around the world.
None are planned in North America and only one is planned in Europe: in Finland.
The agency has made several projections for just how much nuclear power production will increase in Asia. One median estimate says that nuclear plants in Asia could produce four times more energy in 2050 than now.
But nuclear power plants pose risks, as the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine and Three Mile Island meltdown in the United States demonstrated. Terrorism has added yet another worry. Safety concerns have led four European governments to phase out nuclear power completely, while others have decided against building more reactors.
Concern for the environment may pressure European governments to reconsider, McDonald said. Nuclear power may be one of the few alternatives if renewable energy sources are unable to meet future energy demand and governments go ahead with plans to penalize emissions of carbon and other pollutants released in the use of fossil fuels.
In North America, too, the future of nuclear power is unclear, though permission for the construction of one new plant could be given by 2010, the agency said.
Despite the high costs of construction, nuclear plants may also become more attractive if the price of fossil fuels rises, the IAEA said. If the cost of nuclear fuels were to double, the price for electricity from nuclear plants would need to rise by 2 to 4 percent, while a doubling of the cost of natural gas would result in an electricity price increase of more than 60 percent, the agency said.
"If you've paid off your starting up costs, you can make a lot of money," McDonald said, adding that a string of license extensions for existing plants could soon be approved in the United States. Most U.S. plants were built in the 1970s, and their initial licenses said they could operate for 40 years. The extensions would allow them to produce electricity for 20 more years.
The world's first civilian nuclear power plant opened June 26, 1954, in Moscow.
-------- britain
British Nuclear reactors to close down
Since 2000, four different Magnox plants, consisting of 16 different reactors, have been shut down
Erik Martiniussen,
2004-06-29
Bellona Foundation (Russia)
http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/nuclear/sellafield/34631.html
British nuclear giant British Nuclear Fuel, or BNFL, today announced its plans to shut down one of its oldest nuclear power plants- the four reactor Chapelcross station in Scotland.
The plant, which went into operation in 1959, was originally planned to be phased out March next year, but due to technical problems the deadline has been pushed forward. One of the four reactors at the plant has remained out of service since an accident in 2001, and the rest have been switched off since February.
Continued Magnox operation not justified
"We have now reached the position at Chapelcross where we are clear that continuing to deploy the resources needed to maintain generation from the three remaining - by modern standards - relatively small reactors at this site cannot be justified commercially," said Chapelcross site manager Dr. Bob Clayton.
Many of the 450 workers at the site will be retained for several years while decommissioning takes place and reactors are made safe. The work force will now concentrate on de-fuelling the reactors before beginning on demolition at the site near the city of Annan.
The reactors at Chapelcross were the first of the first generation of British nuclear reactors that later came to be called Magnox reactors. In total, 26 such reactors were built in the United Kingdom. Except for Chapelcross and its sister power plant, Calder Hall at Sellafield, all of the reactors were constructed between 1960 and 1970. As a consequence of the Chapelcross closure, there will only be eight Magnox reactors left in operation, dispersed among four different plants. The United Kingdom is the only country in the world that operates this kind of reactors.
In a statement today, Mark Morant, Managing Director of the group's Reactor Sites business praised the site and its workforce: "As the world's currently longest serving nuclear power station, Chapelcross has earned a rightful place in the record books as a faithful provider of electricity to South West Scotland and the North of England.
An early weapons producer
The Chapelcross plant was actually constructed to operate both as an electricity generator and a producer of weapons grade plutonium, and for many years played a central role in the UK nuclear weapons programme, producing plutonium both for atomic and hydrogen bombs. It is believed that the reactors produced weapons-grade plutonium for the British army as late as in 1978-1979.
For the last fifteen years Chapelcross has been operating purely as an electricity production plant. Still the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear disarmament, or SCND, argues that Chapelcross continued to play a military role-until it was shut down today-through the delivery of tritium to the military.
Modern nuclear weapons contain small quantities of tritium-a radioactive material that plays a key role in the thermonuclear process of a hydrogen bomb, and is also used to boost the yield of atomic bombs. It is used on British Trident warheads. Tritium is a radioactive material with a short half-life of 12 years. Because it decays so quickly it has to be replaced. The tritium in British nuclear weapons is replaced after seven or eight years. The military, therefore, demands a constant supply of tritium-and in according to the SCND this has been delivered by Chapelcross.
5,000 tonnes of Depleted Uranium are stored at Chapelcross. This was part of a massive military stockpile of this material which has been controversially used in conventional weapons. In 1998 Britain, announced that the material at Chapelcross would no longer be considered as military material and would be placed under EURATOM and IAEA safeguards.
End to Magnox generation
Over the last years BNFL has had considerable technical problems with its old Magnox reactors. Since 2000, four different Magnox plants, consisting of 16 different reactors, have been shut down. All of the remaining eight Magnox reactors are expected to closes within the next six years.
BNFL though hopes to build four to six new light-water reactors in the same location that some of the shut down Magnox reactors now stand. These new reactors have been developed by the BNFL-owned company Westinghouse, and are called the AP 600 and the AP 1000. But the construction of new nuclear power plants in the UK has been put on ice for the time being.
The British government has proposed a goal to reduce the country's CO2 emissions by 60 percent by 2020. But in order to achieve this, the government would like to pursue alternative sources of energy, not nuclear sources. However, the British government has said it is open for a new assessment of nuclear power at a later point in time.
-------- iran
UN 'not worried' by Iran nuclear project
Muhammad al-Baradai, IAEA chief says Bushehr is an energy project
Tuesday 29 June 2004
Reuters
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/F9318581-05EB-42F3-ADBE-A64F30C3015F.htm
The UN's nuclear chief on Tuesday said he was unconcerned by Russia's construction of a nuclear reactor in Iran, brushing aside US allegations that the facility could be used to develop nuclear weapons.
The UN's nuclear chief on Tuesday said he was unconcerned by Russia's construction of a nuclear reactor in Iran, brushing aside US allegations that the facility could be used to develop nuclear weapons.
Washington has strongly criticised Russia for pushing ahead with construction of the $800 million reactor near the Iranian port of Bushehr, saying Tehran could use Moscow's atomic knowhow to develop nuclear weapons.
"Bushehr is not apparently at the centre of international concern because Bushehr is a project to produce nuclear energy," Muhammad al-Baradai, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief, said after talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"It's not something that is of any concern on our part," he told reporters at Putin's country residence outside Moscow. He said Bushehr was not mentioned in his hour-long talks with Putin and Russia's top atomic and security officials.
Washington, which says Iran is part of an "axis of evil" of states seeking weapons of mass destruction, has called on Russia to ditch the project. It also fears Iran would use Bushehr as a cover for the transfer of other sensitive nuclear technology.
Support
Iran says it has no atomic weapons plans. Moscow denies any suggestion that Tehran could make a bomb on the basis of the technology to operate the power station.
A Moscow source involved in the Bushehr project said al-Baradai's support was crucial at a time when Washington seemed to be stepping up criticism of Iran's nuclear programme.
"He publicly threw his weight behind Russia, and that's really important for us to keep the project rolling," the source said.
----
Iranians say suspect site was used for military research
Sunday, July 04, 2004
(AFP)
http://www.iranmania.com/news/300604a.asp
NOVO OGARYOVO, Russia, June 29 - Iran has said that a site in Tehran, alleged by the United States to have been used for developing weapons of mass destruction, was in fact a "former research-and-development military" installation, UN nuclear watchdog chief Mohammed ElBaradei said Tuesday.
"Our inspectors went yesterday to Lavizan (the suspect site). The Iranians said it was a former R and D military site," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general ElBaradei told reporters in Novo Ogaryovo outside Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Iranians said the site "was used as a physics institute and later on for biotechnology R and D ... for medicine," ElBaradei said.
Suspicion has surrounded the site since satellite images from a US commercial firm showed that buildings which had been there in August had been razed to the ground by March and that topsoil had been taken away.
The Washington think tank the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) said on its website that this set alarm bells ringing "because it is the type of measure Iran would need to take if it was trying to defeat the powerful environmental sampling capabilities of IAEA inspectors."
Environmental sampling involves swipes taken to find traces of radiation."I have to wonder if it is the whole story, particularly since they took down all the buildings and razed the site," ISIS scientist David Albright told AFP Tuesday, referring to Iran's claim there was no weapons work in Lavizan.
"Their declaration is rather vague and looks like it covers all the bases. Medical research has to be mentioned" to explain whole body count machines found at the site, machines which measure radiation contamination, he said.
The United States claims that Iran is hiding an atomic weapons program and has urged the IAEA to bring Tehran before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.
ElBaradei said Lavizan had radiation body counters, which measure radiation contamination in humans, and which could have been US-made.
He said the IAEA has not determined if the site was for weapons development or peaceful purposes, as Iran claims. IAEA inspectors have taken environmental samples at Lavizan. "We are continuing to clarify that this site was not nuclear related. We are pleased with the Iranian cooperation," ElBaradei said.
Albright said the next step will be for the IAEA to get the results of the environmental samples, which can take four to six weeks, and to see if the whole body count machines have all the original parts as shipped from the United States.
"These machines can be used for all kinds of (peaceful) purposes. You have it in a hospital if you are giving radiation treatments... The IAEA will look however to see if the whole body counters are modified" to look for (bomb-grade) plutonium for example, or if the original parts have been taken out and put back in, which would also be suspicious, Albright said.
"If Iran is innocent, why did they tear the site down," Albright said. "Things look really bad when people destroy things unilaterally," he added, noting that the IAEA was not notified of the site being razed.
The Lavizan site was brought to public attention in May last year, when an Iranian opposition group, the National Council of the Resistance of Iran, alleged that it was home to a biological weapons research facility.
Iran has remained under heavy international suspicion. The35 -nation board of the Vienna-based IAEA passed a resolution on June 18 rebuking Tehran for failing to come clean about its nuclear program. Iran confirmed Sunday it had razed the Lavizan site, but insisted it was to make a park and not to cover up nuclear weapons activities as the United States has alleged.
On June17 , the United States accused Iran of razing nuclear sites to hide banned nuclear activity."It's deplorable but not surprising that Iran's deception has gone to the extent of bulldozing entire sites to prevent the IAEA from discovering evidence of its nuclear weapons program," US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
-------- latinamerica
Brazil Denies Blocking U.N. at Nuke Plant
Tue Jun 29, 2004
(AP)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=589&ncid=734&e=3&u=/ap/20040630/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/brazil_nuclear_inspections
BRASILIA, Brazil - Brazil's defense minister denied Tuesday that his country was blocking U.N. inspections of its nuclear enrichment facilities.
"Brazil accepts inspections," Jose Viegas told reporters. "What we have to negotiate are the specific characteristics of the safeguard agreement."
Viegas made his remarks in response to comments by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed El Baradei carried in newspapers Tuesday. He said that Brazil must allow access to the uranium enrichment plant or stand in violation of international treaties.
Although Brazil signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1997 and said its nuclear program has purely peaceful objectives, questions about its commitment have simmered for more than a year.
The government earlier this month confirmed that IAEA inspectors were denied access in February and March to centrifuges at the facility in Resende, some 60 miles southwest of Rio.
It cited the need to protect industrial secrets and said the centrifuges were, and will remain, off-limits for visual inspection.
The centrifuges are used to enrich uranium so it can be used for fuel in nuclear reactors and potentially in bombs.
-------- russia
U.N. agency to push ahead with Russian nuke dump
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
By Maria Golovnina,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-29/s_25343.asp
MOSCOW - The U.N. atomic agency will press ahead with plans to build the world's first global atomic waste dump in Russia to keep the dangerous material away from extremists, the agency's head said on Monday.
Highly radioactive waste from power plants, which can be used to make an atom bomb, is currently put into temporary - and often poorly guarded - warehouses around the world. There are no final repositories where the material can be stored for more than 10,000 years after which it would be harmless.
"It's a very good thing for us. I'd like to push that as much as I can," Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said after talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. "If we can have a state-of-the-art repository here in Russia, that would be a major breakthrough.... They (the Russians) are, of course, very keen that we have a robust plan to combat possible nuclear terrorist attacks."
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov, speaking alongside ElBaradei at a conference on Sunday, said Moscow fully supported the IAEA proposal. "Russia is the only country in the world where legislation allows to do that," he said.
Russia amended legislation in 2001 to allow spent nuclear imports. The project, which is likely to lead to a dump being built in the vast wastes of Siberia, could bring Moscow up to $20 billion in revenues in a decade, according to some estimates.
But a source familiar with the project said it could take years before officials get down to actual construction. "The project is still pretty much in the making. It will take years, more than five years, before it's done," the source said.
Spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in water pools for up to four decades for its radioactivity and heat production to decline. After that, most countries plan to seal it in containers and dig it underground.
"(The Russian facility) is not going to be the only one," ElBaradei said. "But at least this would be the first one which would be ready to accept foreign spent fuel."
He said financing and other issues had yet to be finalized.
Russian ecologists have long protested against what they say would be turning Siberia into a giant dump for nuclear trash.
"The most incredible thing is that such an immoral and criminal idea of turning Russia into a global nuclear waste dump found the support of the prime minister, who clearly doesn't understand what horrors he is talking about," said Vladimir Slivyak, co-head of the Ecodefense environment group.
----
Russia To Speed Up Nuclear Deal With Iran: Top Nuclear Official
June 29, 2004
(MosNews)
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=6/29/2004&Cat=9&Num=066
MOSCOW -- Russia will avoid delays in the launch of an atomic reactor in Iran by speeding up talks with Tehran on a key bilateral deal, the head of the Russian Atomic Energy Agency, Aleksandr Rumyantsev, said. "We don't face any difficulties with signing of the deal on the return on nuclear fuel from the Bushehr nuclear plant," Reuters quoted Rumyantsev as saying. "Our Iranian colleagues have confirmed they are ready to sign this document... We will speed up talks if we see the process is being delayed because we need to fulfill our contractual obligations."
Such an agreement would oblige Iran to return spent fuel from the reactor to Moscow. The promise to sign this agreement was made by Russia under U.S. pressure. The agreement would ease concerns that Iran could extract plutonium for nuclear bombs. However, its signing has been delayed repeatedly, the agency reminded.
Industry insiders quoted by the agency say disagreement over technical matters between Russia and Iran, as well as Moscow's efforts to avoid spoiling relations with the United States nearly prompted Moscow and Tehran to abandon the project earlier this year.
The document on the fuel's return must be signed soon for Bushehr's first 1,000-megawatt reactor to go on stream in late 2005 and reach full capacity in 2006. Once the agreement is signed, Russia will ship fuel to Iran to start up Bushehr. Spent fuel will be sent back to a storage centre in Siberia after roughly a decade of use.
It had been said by Iran and Russia that it was impossible to make a bomb with the technology Moscow had been providing to the plant.
----
U.N. Unconcerned by Russia's Atomic Work in Iran
Tue Jun 29, 2004,
By Maria Golovnina
(Reuters)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=716&e=14&u=/nm/20040629/ts_nm/nuclear_russia_iran_dc
NOVO-OGARYOVO, Russia - The U.N.'s nuclear chief Tuesday said he was unconcerned by Russia's construction of a nuclear reactor in Iran, brushing aside U.S. allegations that the facility could be used to develop nuclear weapons.
Washington has strongly criticized Russia for pushing ahead with construction of the $800 million reactor near the Iranian port of Bushehr, saying Tehran could use Moscow's atomic know-how to develop nuclear weapons.
"Bushehr is not apparently at the center of international concern because Bushehr is a project to produce nuclear energy," Mohamed ElBaradei, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief, said after talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"It's not something that is of any concern on our part," he told reporters at Putin's country residence outside Moscow. He said Bushehr was not mentioned in his hour-long talks with Putin and Russia's top atomic and security officials.
Washington, which says Iran is part of an "axis of evil" of states seeking weapons of mass destruction, has called on Russia to ditch the project. It also fears Iran would use Bushehr as a cover for the transfer of other sensitive nuclear technology.
Iran says it has no atomic weapons plans. Moscow denies any suggestion that Tehran could make a bomb on the basis of the technology to operate the power station.
A Moscow source involved in the Bushehr project said ElBaradei's support was crucial at a time when Washington seemed to be stepping up criticism of Iran's nuclear program.
"He publicly threw his weight behind Russia, and that's really important for us to keep the project rolling," the source said.
To allay U.S. concerns Iran could extract plutonium from Bushehr's spent nuclear fuel and make bombs, Russia has pledged to sign a deal with Iran to oblige it to return all fuel to Russia after a decade of use at Bushehr.
ElBaradei said the fuel "could be a concern" but praised Russia's resolve to get it back.
A Western diplomat who follows nuclear issues said it might not be wise for countries to cooperate in the nuclear field with Iran while it was not living up to its obligations.
"The more important problem at the moment is Iran's failure to satisfy obligations under the (Non-Proliferation Treaty) and obligations to other countries," the diplomat said.
He was referring to Iran's announcement last week that it was resuming production and testing of centrifuges, which can be used to enrich uranium, after promising France, Britain and Germany to suspend all uranium-enrichment related activities.
(Additional reporting by Louis Charbonneau)
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Oppenheimer Celebration Examines the Myth and the Man
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
June 29, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/science/29alam.html?ei=5062&en=678af7cbf604cfe3&ex=1089086400&partner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 27 - Too bad J. Robert Oppenheimer did not live to attend his 100th-birthday party here over the weekend.
The "father of the atomic bomb," who died in 1967, might have enjoyed mingling with the octogenarians who helped build the bomb; his doppelgänger, a distant relative wearing a loose suit, a porkpie hat and vivid blue contact lenses; as well as former students, parents intent on teaching their children all about the cold war, and a Who's Who of Manhattan Project historians.
Oppenheimer remains a controversial figure, revered by some historians, and by most scientists and engineers who worked under him, and reviled by others. Accused of Communist sympathies at the height of the cold war, he was stripped of his security clearance in 1954, and lived out his life at Princeton University under a shadow of suspicion.
Controversy aside, it is important to keep talking about Oppenheimer, said Cynthia C. Kelly, president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving the history of the atomic age. "And it's very important to preserve Manhattan Project history," Ms. Kelly added, "to understand what happened here and how it changed the world."
To that end, the foundation and the Los Alamos Historical Society organized a two-day "Oppie Fest" on Friday and Saturday to celebrate the physicist's centennial. He was born in New York on April 22, 1904.
Except for Dr. Hans Bethe, who turns 98 next week, all the top scientists who worked on the bomb are dead. But scores of others who played less visible roles are alive and talking. "They love to tell their stories," Ms. Kelly said.
On Friday, several elderly men with wispy white hair and bolo ties festooned with turquoise stepped in front of audiences and told vivid tales of how they built Fat Man and Little Boy, the nuclear weapons that ended World War II.
John Mench, 84, described barracks connected by boardwalks over a sea of mud. He remembered the machinists and welders who worked for $50 a month and the glorious day the Women's Army Corps arrived.
Dr. McAllister Hull, 80, helped build "the gadget," as Fat Man was called, by casting the explosives that ignited its plutonium core. He used candy kettles and malted-milk stirrers to get the job done.
An unexpected attraction was an Oppie ringer, Andy Oppenheimer, 51, from London, who described himself as a distant relative and consultant on unconventional weapons for the Jane's Information Group, the provider of intelligence and military and security analysis. Scientists who knew Robert Oppenheimer said the resemblance was striking, except for the diamond stud earring and the blue contacts.
For one day only, visitors rode buses and glimpsed the building sites for the bombs, deep behind a security fence. Three sites are marked for preservation, the V site, where implosion devices were assembled; the gun site, where Little Boy was tested; and a Quonset hut where Fat Man was tested and assembled.
Americans visit Civil War battlegrounds. Why not the grounds that gave birth to the atomic bomb and the cold war? Ms. Kelly envisions a discontinuous national park that would include missile silos in Montana; remnants of weapons complexes at Hanford, Wash.; the Oak Ridge, Tenn., National Laboratory; and dozens of other historic places. Parents, she said, could take their children along an atomic trail.
A measure before Congress would instruct the National Park Service to identify Manhattan Project buildings and artifacts nationally and develop ways to interpret them for the public.
The Los Alamos Historical Society recently purchased what it calls the crown jewel of such a park, Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer's house on Bathtub Row in the heart of Los Alamos. The house, which had one of the town's six bathtubs in 1943, is where Oppie served martinis, Edward Teller played the piano and Enrico Fermi danced the night away. When the current residents, Bergen and Helene Suydam, leave the house they have owned for 58 years, curators will turn it into a museum.
On Saturday, Oppenheimer's hagiographers took to the stage. Jon Hunner, a historian at New Mexico State University who wrote a coming book, "Chasing Oppie," described his early years, how this brilliant, frail, overprotected child went to camp where bullies painted his genitals green and locked him in an outhouse overnight, how he mastered languages easily, how he discovered the American West on horseback.
Robert S. Norris, author of "Racing for the Bomb" (Steerforth Press, 2002), described how Oppenheimer's boss, Gen. Leslie R. Groves of the Army, chose the brilliant but untested physicist to create the nation's first weapons laboratory.
Kai Bird, co-author of "Robert Oppenheimer: An American Life," to be published next year, described his life here, his wife's drinking, his sex appeal and the intense stresses of his scientific and personal problems.
Richard Rhodes, author of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, said that with the Manhattan Project "fading into myth," it was worth asking why one man, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, should emerge as the iconic central figure of what might have been the single most important development of the 20th century. Tall, handsome, brilliant, compassionate and self-loathing, Oppenheimer could never settle on an identity, Mr. Rhodes said. One friend said Oppie never knew whether he wanted to be president of the Knights of Columbus or B'nai B'rith, or both.
This ambiguity is raw material for myth making, Mr. Rhodes said. Like Thomas Jefferson, who had his slaves, Oppenheimer had Hiroshima. Americans bitterly debate the decision to drop the bomb, ensuring that his troubled legacy lives on.
It lives on in other ways, too. More than half a century before Sept. 11, 2001, Oppenheimer foresaw the threat of terrorists' possessing nuclear bombs and hiding them for detonation on American shores. Along with Niels Bohr and others, he said the only ways to forestall such threats were to open every shipping container with screwdrivers or, alternatively, to give away nuclear technology, free, to every nation.
Any system based on outlawing military development of atomic energy or relying solely on inspection will not work, they said. Rather, nations need to collectively take control of uranium resources and make their uses transparent so that every country can keep an eye on every other.
"Knowledge of the how to release nuclear energy," Mr. Rhodes said, "is new knowledge of the natural world, to which the human world has no choice but to adapt or be destroyed. With Bohr, Oppenheimer understood that truth, and it was a deeper understanding than theoretical physics, original and profound."
Correction: July 1, 2004, Thursday
An article in Science Times on Tuesday about a festival in Los Alamos, N.M., to celebrate the centennial of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer misstated his final affiliation. Oppenheimer, who died in 1967 at 62, was director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.; he was not connected with Princeton University.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- vermont
NRC details Yankee inspection
By CAROLYN LORIÉ
Brattleboro Reformer Staff
6/29/2004
http://www.reformer.com/Stories/0,1413,102%257E8860%257E2241271,00.html
MONTPELIER -- Representatives from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said they have no intention of "rubber stamping" Vermont Yankee's "uprate" application.
At a presentation before the state Public Service Board, the NRC laid out general plans for a pilot engineering assessment that will be done as part of the uprate review.
The assessment will begin in mid-August and entail six personnel for three weeks.
Bill Ruland, power uprate manager for the NRC, said that Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee needs to make a case for its request to increase power.
"Entergy must provide sufficient justification to prove to us that safety is maintained," he said. "They aren't there yet."
Last year, Entergy Nuclear Vermont Yankee applied to increase power output by 20 percent. The application process was two-tiered in that the company had to apply both to the Public Service Board and the NRC. State law required Entergy to get a certificate of public good from the Public Service Board, before making uprate-related modifications to the plant. All changes to nuclear power plant licenses require approval by the NRC, which is currently reviewing VY's application. A decision is expected early next year.
On March 15, the board gave Vermont Yankee conditional approval, pending an engineering assessment from the NRC. After the order was issued, there was a great deal of speculation about whether the agency would meet the board's request. Although the board, as a state body, did not have the authority to mandate the federal commission to do the additional inspection, it nonetheless retained jurisdiction over the case until all the requirements were met.
Almost two months after the order was issued, the NRC announced that plans had been in place to implement a new engineering assessment program and that Vermont Yankee would be the first plant to have it done.
Monday's presentation was an explanation of that program.
In addition to the representatives from the NRC, also present were members of the Department of Public Service, representatives from the New England Coalition and the Windham Regional Commission, as well as officials from Entergy.
Speaking on behalf of the Department of Public Service, state nuclear engineer Bill Sherman gave his approval of the NRC's proposed inspection.
"We believe the new engineering assessment is a positive step that meets the intent of the board's request," he said.
He added, however, that the department was eager for the NRC's response to issues Sherman raised about the uprate, namely concerns regarding net positive suction head, cracks in the steam dryer and steam flow vibration.
Ruland said the agency was in the process of responding and that a letter would be sent, possibly as soon as this week.
Other plants that have significantly increased power have had problems as a consequence. Quad Cities in Illinois experienced extended shutdowns due to problems with its steam dryer.
Concern about the plant's reliability has been the main focus of the board and the issue was brought up repeatedly. Chairman Michael Dworkin asked the NRC whether the uprate review process would assess the overall reliability of the plant following the uprate.
Ruland said it would not.
He added, however, that the concerns raised by the Department of Public Service are the "big technical challenges associated with power uprate at this time" and that the NRC was reviewing each of them.
Dworkin also said that while the board did not have the authority to regulate safety issues at the plant, it was nonetheless a central concern. Radiological health and safety are the sole purview of the NRC.
"Although our responsibilities are not the same, they are linked," said Ruland.
In his opening remarks, Ruland said that, "We will not approve the power uprate until we, the NRC, determine that it is safe."
Opponents of the uprate lauded the NRC's decision to meet the board's request.
"I was very impressed that the NRC representatives acknowledged that they are conducting this special assessment in response to 'stakeholder's concerns,'" said Peter Alexander, executive director of the New England Coalition. "This is a clear statement that citizen advocacy works, even with an agency as intractable as the NRC."
The coalition, a nuclear power watchdog group, served as intervenor in the uprate case before the board and advocated for a safety assessment similar to the one conducted at Maine Yankee nuclear power plant in 1996.
The results of NRC's assessment of Vermont Yankee will be made public once it is completed, most likely some time in October.
While the coalition was laudatory about the NRC's responsiveness to public input regarding additional inspections, it was less pleased with the agency's timing.
On July 1, Vermont Yankee's request to amend its license will be posted on the Federal Register. This gives parties interested in voicing opposition to the proposal 60 days in which to apply to the NRC for a hearing, which the coalition intends to do.
Because the hearing application must be completed by Sept. 1, however, the coalition must apply without the benefit of the inspection results.
"How can there be meaningful citizen intervention when the public won't have access to this critical information," asked Alexander. "It's just plain unfair."
While NRC representatives said that the agency intends to respond to all public concerns about the uprate, there was some hesitation about opening the inspection process up to public scrutiny.
Ruland said Entergy could choose to set up a public advisory panel, but that it was not the role of the NRC to establish such a body.
Board member John Burke suggested that the NRC should consider having one of the coalition's expert witnesses on the inspection team.
"Having someone with a critical eye might be useful," he said.
Three engineers from the nuclear industry, David Lochbaum, Paul Blanch and Arnie Gundersen, served as witnesses for the coalition. All three have questioned the safety of Vermont Yankee's proposed power increase and have accused the NRC of being at the beck and call of the industry.
Blanch, Gundersen and Lochbaum have been vocal about the need for additional inspection.
While the board's order called for the NRC to do a vertical slice of four systems, the federal regulator said that it will instead examine safety components at the plant that are most likely to be affected by the uprate. According to Ruland the NRC's proposed inspection program exceeds what the board requested and would satisfy any lingering concerns about the safety of the plant if the uprate is ultimately approved.
Ray Shadis, technical advisor the coalition, disagreed, calling the proposed assessment in no way comparable to what was done at Maine Yankee.
"[The engineering assessment] is NRC fast food. There's some satisfaction, some nourishment but hey, it isn't a meal. And certainly isn't a Happy Meal," he said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Asks NATO to Protect Officials Registering Voters
June 29, 2004
By SUSAN SACHS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/international/europe/29CND-PREX.html?pagewanted=all
ISTANBUL, June 29 - President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan pleaded with hesitant NATO leaders today to rush troops to his country to protect officials trying to register voters for coming national elections.
Extra troops promised by NATO should be sent immediately, he said, because violence was disrupting preparations for the vote, set for September, and threatening the country's shaky progress toward democracy.
"I would like you to please hurry," said Mr. Karzai, whose speech was met with polite applause but no commitment.
His appeal came on the second day of a two-day NATO summit meeting that was marked by daily street protests and thinly veiled disputes about the alliance's role in nation building and security for both Afghanistan and Iraq.
The demonstrations against NATO and the United States took place outside the view of visiting heads of state, who spent most of their time inside a secured zone that encompassed the hotel and business center of Istanbul.
However, a small bomb or explosive devise blew up today on an empty Turkish Airlines plane as workers were cleaning it at the main Istanbul airport. Three of the workers were slightly injured.
The plane had arrived from the Turkish port city of Izmir. Security officials said the cleaners had picked up an object that looked like a wallet and might have contained plastic explosives.
Before the summit meeting began, several small concussion bombs went off in Istanbul, including one that exploded on a crowded city bus, killing four people. Last Friday, the day before Mr. Bush arrived in Turkey, a similar bomb exploded outside the Ankara hotel where he was to stay.
Turkish authorities blamed those incidents on left-wing extremists.
A few hours after Mr. Karzai spoke, President Bush issued a call for political and social reform in Muslim nations and mentioned Afghanistan as an example of NATO's support for new democracies.
He also returned to a familiar theme, saying that the American-led invasion of Iraq freed Iraqis to build a democracy that would inspire other nations in the region.
Speaking to about 200 Turkish politicians, army officers, journalists and business leaders, Mr. Bush also blamed the autocratic rulers in the Arab world and beyond for fostering a culture of extremism and resentment of the west.
Their suppression of dissent, he said, increases radicalism.
"In the last 60 years, many in the west have added to this distrust by excusing tyranny in the region, hoping to purchase stability at the price of liberty," the president added. "But it did not serve the people of the Middle East to betray their hope of freedom and it has not made western nations more secure to ignore the cycle of dictatorship and extremism."
The summit was dominated by requests from both Afghanistan and the new interim government of Iraq for NATO help. On both issues, there were deep disagreements over the proper role for the alliance itself, as opposed to its individual member nations.
The NATO leaders agreed to augment their 6,500-strong force in Afghanistan and to extend its operations outside the relatively calm capital, Kabul. But there was no consensus on sending extra troops immediately, as requested by President Karzai.
"We have rejected the request on the additional troops before the elections in Afghanistan," said Vecdi Gonul, the defense minister of Turkey, which has the second largest army in NATO.
Turkey has offered to send troops to Afghanistan, however, as part of the expanded NATO operation later this year or early next year.
-------- africa
Powell Says Sudan Must Restrain Militias
June 29, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Powell-Sudan.html?hp
KHARTOUM, Sudan (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday the Sudanese government must rein in militia groups that he blamed for the uprooting of more than 1 million people in western Sudan.
Speaking to reporters while flying to the east African country, Powell called the situation in the Darfur province horrific and said prompt action is needed. ``The death rate is going to go up significantly over the next several months,'' he said, regardless of how quickly outside aid be provided.
Immediately after arriving, Powell met with President Omar el-Bashir. Aside from restraining ethnic Arab militias, which have been attacking Darfur's black population, Powell said he planned to urge el-Bashir to reopen a peace process for the region and to allow full access to Darfur for humanitarian aid groups and relief supplies.
Powell said Libya has expressed willingness to facilitate overland deliveries of humanitarian assistance. Libya and Sudan have a common border in the Darfur region.
On Wednesday, Powell plans to visit camps in Darfur that house some of the people displaced by the conflict, which U.S. officials have characterized as ethnic cleansing. The United Nations says some 2 million people desperately need food and humanitarian aid in the world's worst current humanitarian crisis.
Powell flew here after accompanying President Bush to the NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey.
U.S. officials said the administration has moved aggressively to deal with the Darfur conflict partly because the world's inaction at the time of massive ethnic killing in Rwanda genocide a decade ago contributed to the deaths of more than 800,000 people.
The United States spent $116 million on humanitarian relief for Sudan over the past year and has an additional $164 million in the pipeline. The United States has sent food, blankets and plastic sheeting to Darfur aboard at least 15 relief flights in recent weeks.
``We've got to act now because we're running out of time,'' Powell said. He said the situation in Darfur is moving toward genocide, ``but we are not there yet.''
He added that he is aware of the possibility that Sudanese authorities may try to mask the gravity of the situation in Darfur by emptying camps for displaced people that Powell plans to visit.
``I will take into account everything I hear,'' he said. ``I think I can sort out where people are constrained from speaking. We have been watching these places through a variety of means,'' he said. ``We know what they look like, how many people have been there in the past, and if suddenly there are not that many people there tomorrow, I will take that all into my computer.''
The conflict began as a rebellion by black African rebels, who accused the government of widespread neglect. The counterinsurgency led by an Arab militia known as the Janjaweed has led to at least 30,000 deaths and substantial starvation and disease.
-------- britain
British Nuclear reactors to close down
British nuclear giant British Nuclear Fuel, or BNFL, today announced its plans to shut down one of its oldest nuclear power plants- the four reactor Chapelcross station in Scotland.
Since 2000, four different Magnox plants, consisting of 16 different reactors, have been shut down.
Erik Martiniussen,
2004-06-29
Bellona Foundation (Russia)
http://www.bellona.no/en/energy/nuclear/sellafield/34631.html
The plant, which went into operation in 1959, was originally planned to be phased out March next year, but due to technical problems the deadline has been pushed forward. One of the four reactors at the plant has remained out of service since an accident in 2001, and the rest have been switched off since February.
Continued Magnox operation not justified
"We have now reached the position at Chapelcross where we are clear that continuing to deploy the resources needed to maintain generation from the three remaining - by modern standards - relatively small reactors at this site cannot be justified commercially," said Chapelcross site manager Dr. Bob Clayton.
Many of the 450 workers at the site will be retained for several years while decommissioning takes place and reactors are made safe. The work force will now concentrate on de-fuelling the reactors before beginning on demolition at the site near the city of Annan.
The reactors at Chapelcross were the first of the first generation of British nuclear reactors that later came to be called Magnox reactors. In total, 26 such reactors were built in the United Kingdom. Except for Chapelcross and its sister power plant, Calder Hall at Sellafield, all of the reactors were constructed between 1960 and 1970. As a consequence of the Chappelcross closure, there will only be eight Magnox reactors left in operation, dispersed among four different plants. The United Kingdom is the only country in the world that operates this kind of reactors.
In a statement today, Mark Morant, Managing Director of the group's Reactor Sites business praised the site and its workforce: "As the world's currently longest serving nuclear power station, Chapelcross has earned a rightful place in the record books as a faithful provider of electricity to South West Scotland and the North of England.
An early weapons producer
The Chapelcross plant was actually constructed to operate both as an electricity generator and a producer of weapons grade plutonium, and for many years played a central role in the UK nuclear weapons programme, producing plutonium both for atomic and hydrogen bombs. It is believed that the reactors produced weapons-grade plutonium for the British army as late as in 1978-1979.
For the last fifteen years Chapelcross has been operating purely as an electricity production plant. Still the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear disarmament, or SCND, argues that Chapelcross continued to play a military role-until it was shut down today-through the delivery of tritium to the military.
Modern nuclear weapons contain small quantities of tritium-a radioactive material that plays a key role in the thermonuclear process of a hydrogen bomb, and is also used to boost the yield of atomic bombs. It is used on British Trident warheads. Tritium is a radioactive material with a short half-life of 12 years. Because it decays so quickly it has to be replaced. The tritium in British nuclear weapons is replaced after seven or eight years. The military, therefore, demands a constant supply of tritium-and in according to the SCND this has been delivered by Chapelcross.
5,000 tonnes of Depleted Uranium are stored at Chapelcross. This was part of a massive military stockpile of this material which has been controversially used in conventional weapons. In 1998 Britain, announced that the material at Chapelcross would no longer be considered as military material and would be placed under EURATOM and IAEA safeguards.
End to Magnox generation
Over the last years BNFL has had considerable technical problems with its old Magnox reactors. Since 2000, four different Magnox plants, consisting of 16 different reactors, have been shut down. All of the remaining eight Magnox reactors are expected to closes within the next six years.
BNFL though hopes to build four to six new light-water reactors in the same location that some of the shut down Magnox reactors now stand. These new reactors have been developed by the BNFL-owned company Westinghouse, and are called the AP 600 and the AP 1000. But the construction of new nuclear power plants in the UK has been put on ice for the time being.
The British government has proposed a goal to reduce the country's CO2 emissions by 60 percent by 2020. But in order to achieve this, the government would like to pursue alternative sources of energy, not nuclear sources. However, the British government has said it is open for a new assessment of nuclear power at a later point in time.
-------- business
Pentagon Brass and Military Contractors' Gold
By Leslie Wayne
The New York Times,
June 29, 2004
http://www.worldpolicy.org/projects/arms/updates/062904.html
Edward C. Aldridge's storied career exemplifies the dizzying spins of the revolving door between the Pentagon and its military contractors. He has been secretary of the Air Force, president of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation and, most recently, an under secretary of defense.
Now, he is a member of the Lockheed Martin Corporation board, a detail that did not prevent him from being named to head President Bush's commission on space exploration. Lockheed is one of NASA's biggest contractors, and only Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, objected and called for Mr. Aldridge's removal, complaining of conflict of interest.
But Mr. Aldridge, who receives $155,000 a year from Lockheed and owns $115,000 in company stock, stayed put. Last month, the commission called for privatizing much of NASA. One of the biggest potential beneficiaries is United Space Alliance, a Lockheed company that operates the space shuttle and does more business with NASA than any other contractor.
Mr. Aldridge brushes off criticism of his roles, saying that his actions are in compliance with current ethics laws.
"It doesn't bother me, and I don't give it any credibility," he said in a telephone interview. "The space commission's agenda is for the next 50 years. We didn't get into any issues on who will be bidding on contracts down the road. We just want to create vision for success and what is right for NASA."
For years, the revolving door between the Pentagon and military contractors has spun without much notice in Washington. But the multiple roles played by top Pentagon and government officials, like Mr. Aldridge, who have joined the ranks of military contractors as executives, board members and lobbyists, are now coming under closer scrutiny after a top Air Force official negotiated a lucrative job contract with the Boeing Company while still overseeing Boeing business. This is not the first time Mr. Aldridge's actions have raised eyebrows. Last year, in the month before he left the Pentagon for Lockheed's board, Mr. Aldridge approved a $3 billion contract to build 20 Lockheed F/A-22's, after having long criticized the program as overpriced and having threatened to cancel it.
While the number of people who make such transitions is not tracked by the government, the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington nonprofit group that studies military spending, will issue a report today showing that 288 top government officials since 1997 have taken positions at the 20 largest military contractors at levels high enough that they were disclosed in federal regulatory filings.
The infusion at such companies as Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon makes it difficult "to determine where the government stops and the private sector begins," the report states.
On Capitol Hill, Senator McCain, who heads the Senate Commerce Committee, will hold Congressional hearings soon on the Pentagon's revolving door, the first on the subject in nearly a dozen years. Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, tried to insert a provision into the 2005 Pentagon spending bill last week to tighten ethics laws, but his effort was beaten back by stiff opposition.
"The potential for abuse is enormous.'' said Senator Byrd, who added that the relationship between military contractors and the Pentagon is "too close, too chummy.''
Under current law, government officials who make contracting decisions must either wait a year before joining a military contractor or, if they want to switch immediately, must start in an affiliate or division unrelated to their government work. One big loophole is that these restrictions do not apply to many high-level policy makers, like Mr. Aldridge, who can join corporations or their boards without waiting.
Senator Byrd's proposal would have extended the waiting period to two years, and made it apply to many policy makers like Mr. Aldridge. The proposal would also have eliminated the provision exempting government employees from the waiting period if their new jobs were in a division unrelated to their government work.
Even the Bush administration, which has been criticized for its close ties to corporate America, is siding with some of the critics. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called for the Pentagon general counsel's office to look into the rules and regulations governing negotiations between top-level government officials and the military contractors who might want to hire them.
The White House issued an executive order this year making it more difficult for senior administration officials seeking employment with government contractors to get waivers exempting them from many of the ethics rules as they negotiated their post-government jobs.
"The president is committed to the highest standards of ethical conduct, including avoiding financial conflicts of interest," said Andrew H. Card, White House chief of staff, who drafted the executive order. "Compliance with the highest standards in connection with negotiations for post-government employment" is a "particularly important aspect" of a civil servant's duties, Mr. Card said.
The study from the Project on Government Oversight is the most comprehensive on the subject, and a comparison with previous years is difficult. But, Danielle Brian, executive director of the project, said that at the Pentagon, "It's a given that the second half of one's career will be in industry, and it wasn't always that way.
"We don't want our government filled with people who are using their government positions as a steppingstone to making money in the private sector,'' she said. "Yet this issue has been off everyone's radar screen for so long, it's turning into the normal protocol with military contractors."
The steady march along the Potomac from the Pentagon to military contractors has its defenders. Steven Kelman, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said the revolving door enabled hard-working government employees to accept low wages, if they knew there was a future benefit. Moreover, Mr. Kelman said, the large number of Pentagon officials working at military contractors infuses those companies with a sense of public purpose.
"Given the lower salaries in government for senior people," said Mr. Kelman, who also works for the Accenture Corporation as a lobbyist promoting closer links between business and government, "if you prevented them from having careers after they left government in the area where they worked, it would be harder to recruit and retain civil servants."
Like baseball teams vying for superstars, top military contractors can each boast of their generals, admirals and Pentagon civilian brass. For instance, Lockheed lays claim to Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Boeing has Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is a member of the boards of other military contractors, including United Defense Industries and L-3 Communications. Boeing also has Rudy F. deLeon, former deputy secretary of defense.
Over at Northrop, there is Gen. John T. Chain, a retired commander of the Strategic Air Command, while General Dynamics has Paul Kaminski, a former defense under secretary, and former Lt. Gen. David K. Heebner, who was an Army assistant vice chief of staff.
To some, this is all for the better.
"Personally, I'm offended by the criticism," said Thomas Jurkowsky, a Lockheed spokesman and a former rear admiral and chief of naval information. "I interpret it as someone questioning my integrity. At Lockheed, there are ethics policies and rules in place, and certainly they are more than sufficient. People know what is right and what is wrong."
The swiftness of the opposition to Senator Byrd's efforts shows how hard it will be for him to tighten existing rules - even as he vows to press on.
"We don't want to make people unemployable in whole industries," said Alan Chvotkin, general counsel of the Professional Services Council, a trade group representing government contractors.
Moreover, the revolving door does not just go in one direction, adding another potential area of conflict.
When he took office, Mr. Rumsfeld made clear his preference for corporate expertise in the Pentagon and named executives from military contractors as heads of the three services: James Roche, the secretary of the Air Force, is a former vice president of Northrop Grumman; Gordon England, the secretary of the Navy, is a former executive at General Dynamics; and Thomas P. White, a former secretary of the Army, came from Enron.
It was the first time in recent memory that heads of all three services came directly from government contractors.
A study by the World Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group at the New School University, found that the Bush administration, in its first year and a half, named 32 appointees who were former executives, paid consultants or major shareholders of top military contractors to top policy-making positions.
William Hartung, author of the study, said a rough comparison showed this exceeded the number of industry-related appointees in either the Clinton administration or the administration of the first President Bush.
"There's a danger when you have too many folks from the corporate world advising you," Mr. Hartung said. "It can lead to inbred decision making that is pro-corporate and anti-taxpayer."
Two members of the influential Defense Policy Board, a quasi-governmental board that advises Mr. Rumsfeld on military strategy, were hired by Boeing as consultants while it was seeking Pentagon approval for a $20 billion contract for aerial refueling tankers.
An internal Boeing e-mail message indicated that the men, Adm. David Jeremiah, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a member of five corporate boards, and Gen. Ronald Fogleman, who retired from the Air Force, were to lobby Mr. Rumsfeld's office.
General Fogleman, in an interview, confirmed he was a Boeing consultant, but said he never contacted anyone at the Pentagon on the company's behalf. Still, he did endorse portions of the Boeing tanker plan at a variety of public events. Admiral Jeremiah declined to comment.
Finally, there is Mr. Aldridge. On joining the Lockheed Board, Mr. Aldridge was immediately named by Mr. Rumsfeld to a blue-ribbon panel studying how the Pentagon should buy weapons - including those made by Lockheed, which has received $142 billion in government contracts in the last seven years.
For nearly a decade, Mr. Aldridge, who prefers to be called Pete, was also a member of the Defense Science Board, another influential group that advises Mr. Rumsfeld on military strategy and whose members are privy to classified information.
Mr. Aldridge recently left the Defense Science Board because it posed a conflict with his role as a director of Global Crossing. Recently, a majority stake in Global Crossing, a telecommunications company emerging from bankruptcy, was acquired by Singapore Telecommunications, which is controlled by the Singapore government.
In fact, Mr. Aldridge's presence at Global Crossing eased government concerns about the sale of the company - and its critical telecommunications networks - to a foreign buyer.
The Singapore deal, which will bring $100 million to Global Crossing, received Justice Department approval last year after Mr. Aldridge agreed to sit on a special Global Crossing committee to monitor United States security concerns and to give up his work on the Defense Science Board, a powerful but nonpaying seat.
"When I wanted to leave the Pentagon, I first went to the lawyers to see if there were any restrictions, and I had none," said Mr. Aldridge, explaining these moves. Besides, multibillion-dollar military contracts are reviewed by so many people at the Pentagon that "there is no way to be so blatant and show favoritism,'' he said.
"The system doesn't allow it."
----
A Message From CACI
From: Jody Brown <jbrown@caci.com>
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
June 29, 2004
Dear DC Anti-War Network PO Box 21827 Washington, DC 20009-1827
In our ongoing effort to protect CACI's reputation, we pay attention to what is said about our company. We have noted with concern some of the recent statements about us in literature promoting your group's upcoming antiwar demonstration in Richmond. It appears that you have been taken in by erroneous information about CACI, our employees and our work in Iraq.
Please understand that CACI as a company does not participate in political debate or policy decisions. We have served the United States government through nine presidential administrations since our founding in 1962. We provide services at the request of our government customers and have skills that can be used to help gather intelligence and information. Unfortunately, in a highly-charged situation such as the one our country faces in Iraq, rumor, speculation and even news reports often run ahead of the truth. Indeed, a lawsuit filed against our company is so loose in its regard to facts that we consider it both malicious and slanderous.
While we certainly respect your right to express your views about the war in Iraq, we hope you will be faithful to the truth in your discussion of our company and the services we are providing to the U.S. military in Iraq. With that in mind, I believe it is important that I offer you some basic information.
Since 1962, CACI has been successfully providing support services to government and private sector customers to enhance efficiency and security. Based in Arlington, Virginia, CACI employs some 9,400 people in more than 100 offices in the United States and Europe. Our employees provide specialized skills and services that are in short supply to a range of U.S. government and state government agencies as well as some private customers.
You may disagree, but let me assure you we are proud of the services we provide to help American soldiers in Iraq carry out their mission.
CACI employees are providing a range of information technology services including intelligence services and logistics support in that country. Specific responsibilities include property management and recordkeeping; installation of computer systems, software and hardware; IT training and on-site technical support. CACI employees also are providing intelligence support, including analysis, background investigations, screenings and interrogation.
As you likely know, we also are providing a small number of qualified interrogators, at the Army's request because the Army does not have sufficient interrogation personnel available for assignment to Iraq. All of those hired by us had had prior experience in information-gathering and intelligence and have received training from the U.S. military or other bona fide government organization in the requirements of the Geneva Convention and the U.S. rules of engagement in Iraq. CACI received about 1,600 applications for these positions and, as of June 1, 2004, it had hired fewer than three dozen of those for work in Iraq.
While some have suggested that an employee of the company may be involved in wrongdoing at Abu Ghraib, I cannot emphasize too strongly that CACI does not condone and will not tolerate illegal behavior, such as torture, by any employee under any circumstance. We will act quickly and forcefully if the evidence shows misconduct by its employees in Iraq. Like every American, CACI is concerned about the reported abuses and we are working to determine whether any CACI employees were involved in inappropriate activity. But we do not yet have confirmation of any wrongdoing. I am sure you understand that our decisions about employees will be governed by facts - not rumor, speculation or pending, but incomplete inquiries.
As you exercise your Constitutional right to express your views on the War in Iraq, I am confident that you also will respect the fundamental rights of others, including the right of CACI and its employees to conduct our business affairs in peace. I also hope that any discussion of CACI by you and others involved in the demonstrations will be based on fact and that you will work hard to avoid any misrepresentation, falsehoods or distortions about CACI and the work we do.
Please review the attached news release for the facts about our business in Iraq.
The Truth Will Out
(See attached file: CACI Clarifies Information About Iraq Interrogator Contract June 28 2004.doc)
~~
CACI Clarifies Information about Interrogator Services in Iraq
- Company corrects inaccurate and false information being widely disseminated -
Arlington, Va., June 28, 2004 - CACI International Inc (NYSE:CAI) today stated that due to the erroneous, inaccurate and false information being widely disseminated and repeated, it has again become necessary to clarify various aspects of its contract arrangements with the U.S. Army to provide interrogator services (an intelligence information gathering function) in Iraq.
For more than 42 years, CACI has proudly provided information technology (IT) services to its U.S. government customers to meet their mission and systems goals. For over four decades the company has successfully provided IT services during nine U.S. Presidential administrations that have had varying policies and objectives. CACI's steadfast objective in its government contracting has always been to support the country's future through quality service.
With over 9,400 employees, operating from over 100 office locations in the U.S.A. and around the world, CACI takes pride in satisfying its customers and in complying with the highest ethical standards. CACI's advanced information technology solutions and intelligence support services in Iraq enhance military effectiveness. Our efforts also free up the troops for other critical military missions. The company has been commended for its performance from its U.S. military customers in Iraq.
While CACI provides services around the world for the U.S. government, its recent work in Iraq has received attention because of widely disseminated media reports of abuse at the Abu Gharib prison near Baghdad.
Unfortunately, various media reports have included erroneous, inaccurate and false information, which the company intends to correct. Additional information on this matter is available on CACI's website www.caci.com.
The company stated the following facts:
· CACI does not now provide, and never has provided, interrogator services to any U.S. government entity at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or in Afghanistan. CACI's limited roll in providing interrogators in support of the U.S. Army has been confined to Iraq. Allegations to the contrary are totally false.
· CACI's contract arrangements with the U.S. military have not been fashioned in a manner intended to mislead or to otherwise deceive anyone at any time and any such allegations are totally false. CACI's contracts are a natural outgrowth of the contracting arrangements pursuant to which CACI and its acquired predecessor, Premier Technology Group Inc., provided support to its U.S. Army clients for a number of years. All arrangements have been fully visible at all times to U.S. government contracting authorities.
· CACI acquired its General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule Contract and Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) under which the interrogation (an intelligence information gathering function) services are being provided as part of the assets it acquired from Premier Technology Group, Inc in May 2003. The subject GSA Schedule Group 70 (Information Technology) contract was awarded to Premier Technology Group in 1998. The then U.S. Army Directorate of Contracting, Fort Huachuca, Arizona, awarded the subject BPA to Premier Technology Group under that GSA Schedule Group 70 contract in September 1998. Administration of the BPA was transferred from the U.S. Army at Fort Huachuca to the National Business Center (NBC), Department of Interior at Fort Huachuca on January 14, 2001 as part of a government reorganization that saw the Army contracting office become part of the Department of the Interior when Army operations at Fort Huachuca were substantially reduced. The subject BPA was extended for an additional five years by the NBC, and modified on July 31, 2003, as is customary, to reflect the acquisition by CACI. When the U.S. Army required interrogator support after deploying to Iraq, and contracting offices in Iraq and Kuwait said they were unable to take on the added administrative effort, the U.S. Army contracted for needed support in Iraq through the Fort Huachuca BPA. The U.S. Army continues to convey its satisfaction with the services being provided by CACI on these projects and has requested CACI's continued support.
· CACI's contract with the U.S. military requires the company to provide interrogators (for intelligence information gathering) who have had training and/or experience in one or more related fields specified by the government. Those candidates who have been determined to meet the government-specified qualifications and hired are assigned to work in Iraq under the direct project supervision of the U.S. Army. These are the requirements of CACI's contract, and CACI has performed in accordance with the requirements.
· CACI's Statement of Work for interrogators requires individuals with specified information-gathering and analysis experience at the tactical and operational levels who possess at a minimum a Department of Defense Secret-level security clearance, which requires U.S. government background checks on the individuals. The Statement of Work further specifies that the U.S. military will provide readiness training and briefings on rules of engagement and general orders applicable to coalition armed forces, DoD civilians and U.S. contractors, including the provisions of the Geneva Conventions.
· CACI's contract requires that employees work under the monitoring and supervision of the U.S. military chain-of-command in Iraq. CACI personnel have no responsibility for management, supervisory or command authority over any non-CACI personnel. CACI operates a full-time in-country administrative chain-of-command over all of its employees in Iraq.
· CACI has recruited qualified candidates with the capability to perform their assignment with moderate to minimal supervision in order to ensure that the candidates have sufficient experience and maturity to be responsible and accountable. Employees are responsible for their actions and work performance regardless of the environment into which they are placed.
· As to widely repeated employee misinformation, CACI has never employed Mr. John Israel. Mr. John Israel was incorrectly identified as a CACI employee in the illegally released, "leaked", sections of the classified (SECRET/NO-FOREIGN) report issued by Major General Antonio M. Taguba regarding allegations of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. Mr. Israel is not now and never has been an employee of CACI.
· CACI employee Steven A. Stefanowicz was the only CACI employee identified in the Taguba report. The report alleges culpable wrongdoing on the part of Mr. Stefanowicz; however, Henry Hockeimer Jr., a partner in Hangley Aronchick Segal & Pudlin in Philadelphia, attorney for Mr. Stefanowicz, has stated, "Any meaningful review of the facts will inevitably lead to the conclusion that Mr. Stefanowicz's conduct was both appropriate and authorized."
· CACI does not condone or tolerate illegal acts or behavior on the part of its employees. It is the company's clear and unambiguous policy that all its activities shall comply with all applicable laws at all times. In the unfortunate event that a CACI employee acted improperly or illegally, CACI will take immediate and appropriate action. To date, however, no CACI employee has been formally charged or indicted by the U.S. government with any wrongdoing, and the company has not discovered any evidence confirming allegations of culpable behavior despite active investigation into the matter. Reflecting CACI's commitment to individual rights and civil rights, as well as the rule of law and due process, the company will not condemn an individual on the basis of unsubstantiated and unproven allegations.
· CACI's interrogation (an intelligence information gathering function) support and analysis work for the U.S. Army in Iraq is a very small fraction, less than 1%, of the company's total worldwide business. Nonetheless, CACI is proud of its people for the work and the service they have provided for the U.S. military and their country under hazardous conditions in Iraq.
· CACI is not now and never has been involved in political activist pursuits of any kind for its own individual corporate benefit.
· CACI does not now have and never has had a political action committee (PAC). The Company makes no effort whatsoever to influence or interfere with the rights of its officers and employees to participate as they see fit in supporting any candidate for office through a private donation.
Additional information, news releases and FAQs on CACI's Iraq business and these matters is up on CACI's website www.caci.com.
CACI International Inc provides the IT and network solutions needed to prevail in today's new era of defense, intelligence, and e-government. From systems integration and managed network solutions to knowledge management, engineering, simulation, and information assurance, we deliver the IT applications and infrastructures our federal customers use to improve communications and collaboration, secure the integrity of information systems and networks, enhance data collection and analysis, and increase efficiency and mission effectiveness. Our solutions lead the transformation of defense and intelligence, assure homeland security, enhance decision-making, and help government to work smarter, faster, and more responsively. CACI, a member of the Russell 2000 and S&P SmallCap 600 indices, provides dynamic careers for approximately 9,400 employees working in over 100 offices in the U.S. and Europe. CACI is the IT provider for a networked world. Visit CACI on the web at www.caci.com.
There are statements made herein which do not address historical facts and, therefore could be interpreted to be forward-looking statements as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements are subject to factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from anticipated results. The factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated include, but are not limited to, the following: regional and national economic conditions in the United States and the United Kingdom (an economic downturn in the UK is affecting CACI's UK operations), including conditions that result from terrorist activities or war; failure to achieve contract awards in connection with recompetes for present business and/or competition for new business; the risks and uncertainties associated with client interest in and purchases of new products and/or services; continued funding of U.S. Government or other public sector projects in the event of a priority need for funds, such as homeland security, the war on terrorism or rebuilding Iraq; government contract procurement (such as bid protest, small business set asides, etc.) and termination risks; the results of government investigations into allegations of improper actions related to the provision of services in support of U.S military operations in Iraq; the results of the appeal of CACI International Inc. ASBCA No. 53058; individual business decisions of our clients; paradigm shifts in technology; competitive factors such as pricing pressures and/or competition to hire and retain employees; material changes in laws or regulations applicable to our businesses, particularly in connection with (i) government contracts for services, (ii) outsourcing of activities that have been performed by the government, and (iii) competition for task orders under Government Wide Acquisition Contracts ("GWACs") and/or scheduled contracts with the General Services Administration; our own ability to achieve the objectives of near term or long range business plans; and other risks described in the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
# # #
For other information contact:
Jody Brown Senior Vice President, Public Relations (703) 841-7801, jbrown@caci.com
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Report Examines Defense Hiring
224 Ex-Federal Officials Worked for Contractors in Past 7 Years
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page E02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13269-2004Jun28.html
More than 200 former senior government officials and members of Congress worked for the country's largest defense contractors during the past seven years, according to a report by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a District-based watchdog group.
At least one-third of the 224 former government officials had influence over procurement issues before taking a job in industry, the report said. The totals are based on publicly available information and may understate the number of former government officials who worked for contractors during that period, POGO officials said. They added that not all of the former officials identified in the report went directly from public service to the defense industry job.
The "revolving door," in which former government officials accept jobs with defense contractors, has been under increased scrutiny since Darleen A. Druyun, a former Air Force procurement official, was fired by Boeing Co. for illegally accepting a job with the company while still negotiating a multibillion-dollar proposal to lease and buy Boeing planes. Druyun has pleaded guilty to conspiracy and faces possible jail time. Following Druyun's case, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld called for a review of the Pentagon's post-government employment rules.
"The revolving door has become such an accepted part of federal contracting in recent years that it is frequently difficult to determine where the government stops and the private sector begins," the report said. It recommends simplification of the rules on post-government employment and more oversight of the process.
Lockheed Martin Corp., the world's largest defense contractor, has had the most former government officials on its payroll in the past seven years, POGO said. Since 1997, 57 senior government officials have worked for the company, including six who served on Lockheed's board and 35 who were lobbyists, the report said.
Chicago-based Boeing employed 33 senior government officials in the period studied, and Northrop Grumman Corp. and Raytheon Co. employed 20 and 23, respectively. Falls Church-based General Dynamics Corp. employed 19, the report said.
Lockheed, which has its headquarters in Bethesda, said that it complies with government regulations when recruiting former government officials and that the company's own rules eliminate even the appearance of impropriety.
To attract the most qualified technical experts it is often necessary to find recruits with government experience, industry officials said. "Who do you want designing equipment that is going to be used in combat? Individuals who have been on the battlefield. Who do you want designing a new cockpit? You want someone who has flown in a cockpit, not someone from the pharmaceutical industry," said Lockheed spokesman Tom Jurkowsky, a former Navy officer.
Raytheon officials said the report incorrectly identifies five former government officials as current and former members of its board. POGO officials responded that the five individuals worked for Vertex Aerospace, which Raytheon owned, in whole or part, until recently.
Boeing said the report named one senior executive who has never worked in government and another who had a 26-year gap between his government duties and assuming a position with Boeing. The report implies that Boeing lobbies only to obtain defense contracts, but the firm is also interested in aviation security and free-trade policies, said Boeing spokesman Doug Kennett.
POGO's recommendations would make the post-government employment rules unnecessarily complex and could discourage industry experts from taking a government job, industry officials said.
"There is a public good to having a flow of information between government and industry," said Jonathan L. Etherton, vice president for legislative affairs for the Aerospace Industries Association, an industry group. "If you make the rules too draconian, you lose that benefit."
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Pentagon Brass and Military Contractors' Gold
June 29, 2004
By LESLIE WAYNE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/business/29door.html?pagewanted=all&position=
dward C. Aldridge's storied career exemplifies the dizzying spins of the revolving door between the Pentagon and its military contractors. He has been secretary of the Air Force, president of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation and, most recently, an under secretary of defense.
Now, he is a member of the Lockheed Martin Corporation board, a detail that did not prevent him from being named to head President Bush's commission on space exploration. Lockheed is one of NASA's biggest contractors, and only Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, objected and called for Mr. Aldridge's removal, complaining of conflict of interest.
But Mr. Aldridge, who receives $155,000 a year from Lockheed and owns $115,000 in company stock, stayed put. Last month, the commission called for privatizing much of NASA. One of the biggest potential beneficiaries is United Space Alliance, a Lockheed company that operates the space shuttle and does more business with NASA than any other contractor.
Mr. Aldridge brushes off criticism of his roles, saying that his actions are in compliance with current ethics laws.
"It doesn't bother me, and I don't give it any credibility," he said in a telephone interview. "The space commission's agenda is for the next 50 years. We didn't get into any issues on who will be bidding on contracts down the road. We just want to create vision for success and what is right for NASA."
For years, the revolving door between the Pentagon and military contractors has spun without much notice in Washington. But the multiple roles played by top Pentagon and government officials, like Mr. Aldridge, who have joined the ranks of military contractors as executives, board members and lobbyists, are now coming under closer scrutiny after a top Air Force official negotiated a lucrative job contract with the Boeing Company while still overseeing Boeing business. This is not the first time Mr. Aldridge's actions have raised eyebrows. Last year, in the month before he left the Pentagon for Lockheed's board, Mr. Aldridge approved a $3 billion contract to build 20 Lockheed F/A-22's, after having long criticized the program as overpriced and having threatened to cancel it.
While the number of people who make such transitions is not tracked by the government, the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington nonprofit group that studies military spending, will issue a report today showing that 288 top government officials since 1997 have taken positions at the 20 largest military contractors at levels high enough that they were disclosed in federal regulatory filings.
The infusion at such companies as Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon makes it difficult "to determine where the government stops and the private sector begins," the report states.
On Capitol Hill, Senator McCain, who heads the Senate Commerce Committee, will hold Congressional hearings soon on the Pentagon's revolving door, the first on the subject in nearly a dozen years. Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, tried to insert a provision into the 2005 Pentagon spending bill last week to tighten ethics laws, but his effort was beaten back by stiff opposition.
"The potential for abuse is enormous.'' said Senator Byrd, who added that the relationship between military contractors and the Pentagon is "too close, too chummy.''
Under current law, government officials who make contracting decisions must either wait a year before joining a military contractor or, if they want to switch immediately, must start in an affiliate or division unrelated to their government work. One big loophole is that these restrictions do not apply to many high-level policy makers, like Mr. Aldridge, who can join corporations or their boards without waiting.
Senator Byrd's proposal would have extended the waiting period to two years, and made it apply to many policy makers like Mr. Aldridge. The proposal would also have eliminated the provision exempting government employees from the waiting period if their new jobs were in a division unrelated to their government work.
Even the Bush administration, which has been criticized for its close ties to corporate America, is siding with some of the critics. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has called for the Pentagon general counsel's office to look into the rules and regulations governing negotiations between top-level government officials and the military contractors who might want to hire them.
The White House issued an executive order this year making it more difficult for senior administration officials seeking employment with government contractors to get waivers exempting them from many of the ethics rules as they negotiated their post-government jobs.
"The president is committed to the highest standards of ethical conduct, including avoiding financial conflicts of interest," said Andrew H. Card, White House chief of staff, who drafted the executive order. "Compliance with the highest standards in connection with negotiations for post-government employment" is a "particularly important aspect" of a civil servant's duties, Mr. Card said.
The study from the Project on Government Oversight is the most comprehensive on the subject, and a comparison with previous years is difficult. But, Danielle Brian, executive director of the project, said that at the Pentagon, "It's a given that the second half of one's career will be in industry, and it wasn't always that way.
"We don't want our government filled with people who are using their government positions as a steppingstone to making money in the private sector,'' she said. "Yet this issue has been off everyone's radar screen for so long, it's turning into the normal protocol with military contractors."
The steady march along the Potomac from the Pentagon to military contractors has its defenders. Steven Kelman, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said the revolving door enabled hard-working government employees to accept low wages, if they knew there was a future benefit. Moreover, Mr. Kelman said, the large number of Pentagon officials working at military contractors infuses those companies with a sense of public purpose.
"Given the lower salaries in government for senior people," said Mr. Kelman, who also works for the Accenture Corporation as a lobbyist promoting closer links between business and government, "if you prevented them from having careers after they left government in the area where they worked, it would be harder to recruit and retain civil servants."
Like baseball teams vying for superstars, top military contractors can each boast of their generals, admirals and Pentagon civilian brass. For instance, Lockheed lays claim to Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Boeing has Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is a member of the boards of other military contractors, including United Defense Industries and L-3 Communications. Boeing also has Rudy F. deLeon, former deputy secretary of defense.
Over at Northrop, there is Gen. John T. Chain, a retired commander of the Strategic Air Command, while General Dynamics has Paul Kaminski, a former defense under secretary, and former Lt. Gen. David K. Heebner, who was an Army assistant vice chief of staff.
To some, this is all for the better.
"Personally, I'm offended by the criticism," said Thomas Jurkowsky, a Lockheed spokesman and a former rear admiral and chief of naval information. "I interpret it as someone questioning my integrity. At Lockheed, there are ethics policies and rules in place, and certainly they are more than sufficient. People know what is right and what is wrong."
The swiftness of the opposition to Senator Byrd's efforts shows how hard it will be for him to tighten existing rules - even as he vows to press on.
"We don't want to make people unemployable in whole industries," said Alan Chvotkin, general counsel of the Professional Services Council, a trade group representing government contractors.
Moreover, the revolving door does not just go in one direction, adding another potential area of conflict.
When he took office, Mr. Rumsfeld made clear his preference for corporate expertise in the Pentagon and named executives from military contractors as heads of the three services: James Roche, the secretary of the Air Force, is a former vice president of Northrop Grumman; Gordon England, the secretary of the Navy, is a former executive at General Dynamics; and Thomas P. White, a former secretary of the Army, came from Enron.
It was the first time in recent memory that heads of all three services came directly from government contractors.
A study by the World Policy Institute, a nonprofit research group at the New School University, found that the Bush administration, in its first year and a half, named 32 appointees who were former executives, paid consultants or major shareholders of top military contractors to top policy-making positions.
William Hartung, author of the study, said a rough comparison showed this exceeded the number of industry-related appointees in either the Clinton administration or the administration of the first President Bush.
"There's a danger when you have too many folks from the corporate world advising you," Mr. Hartung said. "It can lead to inbred decision making that is pro-corporate and anti-taxpayer."
Two members of the influential Defense Policy Board, a quasi-governmental board that advises Mr. Rumsfeld on military strategy, were hired by Boeing as consultants while it was seeking Pentagon approval for a $20 billion contract for aerial refueling tankers.
An internal Boeing e-mail message indicated that the men, Adm. David Jeremiah, a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a member of five corporate boards, and Gen. Ronald Fogleman, who retired from the Air Force, were to lobby Mr. Rumsfeld's office.
General Fogleman, in an interview, confirmed he was a Boeing consultant, but said he never contacted anyone at the Pentagon on the company's behalf. Still, he did endorse portions of the Boeing tanker plan at a variety of public events. Admiral Jeremiah declined to comment.
Finally, there is Mr. Aldridge. On joining the Lockheed Board, Mr. Aldridge was immediately named by Mr. Rumsfeld to a blue-ribbon panel studying how the Pentagon should buy weapons - including those made by Lockheed, which has received $142 billion in government contracts in the last seven years.
For nearly a decade, Mr. Aldridge, who prefers to be called Pete, was also a member of the Defense Science Board, another influential group that advises Mr. Rumsfeld on military strategy and whose members are privy to classified information.
Mr. Aldridge recently left the Defense Science Board because it posed a conflict with his role as a director of Global Crossing. Recently, a majority stake in Global Crossing, a telecommunications company emerging from bankruptcy, was acquired by Singapore Telecommunications, which is controlled by the Singapore government.
In fact, Mr. Aldridge's presence at Global Crossing eased government concerns about the sale of the company - and its critical telecommunications networks - to a foreign buyer.
The Singapore deal, which will bring $100 million to Global Crossing, received Justice Department approval last year after Mr. Aldridge agreed to sit on a special Global Crossing committee to monitor United States security concerns and to give up his work on the Defense Science Board, a powerful but nonpaying seat.
"When I wanted to leave the Pentagon, I first went to the lawyers to see if there were any restrictions, and I had none," said Mr. Aldridge, explaining these moves. Besides, multibillion-dollar military contracts are reviewed by so many people at the Pentagon that "there is no way to be so blatant and show favoritism,'' he said.
"The system doesn't allow it."
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U.S. Expels 2 Guards at Iran U.N. Mission
Tue Jun 29, 2004
By EDITH M. LEDERER,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&ncid=716&e=4&u=/ap/20040629/ap_on_re_mi_ea/un_iran_expulsions
UNITED NATIONS - The United States expelled two security guards at Iran's U.N. mission for photographing "sensitive" sites in New York after two previous warnings about such picture-taking, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Iran's U.N. Mission denied the charges, saying that the guards photographed only typical tourist attractions in the city.
The United States took action after the FBI recently observed the pair videotaping, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said in Washington. The incident occurred in May, a note to the Iranians said.
"These individuals were moving around New York City and essentially surveilling, taking photographs of a variety of New York landmarks and infrastructure and the rest," said Stuart Holliday, the U.S. deputy ambassador to the United Nations.
"This is something which obviously isn't part of protecting their missions here in New York," he said.
The United States had warned Iran twice before about such photography, Ereli said. Since the Iranians persisted, he said, the United States had no choice but to expel the guards.
"It was the appropriate action to take," he said.
Holliday said the guards were "engaged in activities that were not consistent with their duties" - diplomatic language for spying.
The two guards, who were not identified, left Saturday evening, Holliday said.
The Iranian Mission called the expulsions unjustified.
"The guards in question never failed to observe any `no photography' signs, and the videotapes and photos they shot consisted of obvious and popular tourist attractions in New York City which are of interest to any visitors in this city, such as the Central Park museums, parades and the like," it said in a written statement.
"We categorically deny that they ever took any photos of anything of security or sensitive nature," it said.
Holliday, asked about the Iranian contention that the guards were acting like tourists, said "the threshold is different for people ... assigned to sensitive activities here at the United Nations."
"We have, I think, great confidence in the ability of local and federal law enforcement to determine what actions and behavior is typical and what is atypical," Holliday said.
According to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity, the first photographing incident by Iranian guards took place in June 2002 and the second in November.
New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in November that two Iranian citizens were questioned while taking video images of the subway tracks on the No. 7 line in Queens.
He said the two men, stopped by a transit officer, claimed diplomatic immunity and were ultimately not charged with any wrongdoing. The commissioner declined to label their behavior suspicious, but called it "unusual."
Iran is one of seven nations branded by the U.S. State Department as a country that supports terrorism.
The United States also accuses Iran of trying to build nuclear weapons. Secretary of State Colin Powell hinted last week that Iran faced the prospect of U.N. economic sanctions if it did not prove to the world it has no nuclear weapons.
Earlier this month, the U.N. nuclear agency rebuked Iran for covering up its nuclear programs and warned the country that it had little time left to disprove the allegations.
The United States broke off ties with Iran in 1979 after militant students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held its staff hostage for 444 days. The students were protesting Washington's refusal to hand over the deposed Shah of Iran for trial.
Hard-liners and reformers in Iran have long been split over whether to resume full ties with the United States.
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U.S. Hands Authority To Iraq Two Days Early
Fear of Attacks Hastens Move; Interim Leaders Assume Power
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13049-2004Jun28?language=printer
BAGHDAD, June 28 -- The United States transferred political authority to an interim Iraqi government in a five-minute surprise ceremony Monday morning, accelerating the planned handover by two days in an effort to avoid attacks by insurgents thought to be plotting to mar the event.
At the hastily arranged ceremony, held inside a high-security compound controlled by the American military, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer handed a signed document to the chief judge of Iraq's highest court announcing the dissolution of the U.S. occupation administration and the conveyance of political authority to the interim government.
The low-key handover marked the end of direct American control over Iraq's political affairs that began after the U.S. military toppled the government of President Saddam Hussein in April 2003. Bremer flew out of Baghdad on a military transport plane two hours after the ceremony. The new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, arrived here Monday night and reestablished diplomatic ties that had been severed since Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Iraq's interim government, led by a prime minister who had been a CIA-supported opponent of Hussein, faces the challenge of running a country wracked by a violent insurgency, hobbled by economic stagnation and riven by religious and ethnic disputes. Although feared insurgent attacks did not occur after the handover was announced, there was little celebration by ordinary Iraqis, who remain deeply skeptical about the continuing U.S. role in their nation and the ability of the new government to address their problems.
Although Bremer's document stated that the interim government "will assume the complete sovereignty on behalf of the Iraqi people," it will still lack many of hallmarks of other sovereign nations. More than 130,000 U.S. troops will remain, with wide latitude to mount combat operations and detain Iraqis. A temporary constitution will restrict the interim government's power largely to the areas of basic civil administration and preparations for national elections scheduled for January. The country's oil revenue will be subject to international oversight. American personnel will continue to work out of Hussein's Republican Palace. And the government itself is supposed to be in power for only seven months, until national elections are held.
The interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, acknowledged that his government faced "a hard task, a complex task." He called for national unity and cooperation in combating insurgents, who he vowed will "end up in disgrace and failure."
"The transformation will not take place in weeks or days or months, but this transformation will take years," he said in a televised address after he took an oath of office, standing in front of a bank of red-white-and-black Iraqi flags.
Despite the sober tone of the day -- there were no parades or public celebrations -- Allawi and other members of the interim government hailed the handover of political authority as a milestone in Iraq's transformation from dictatorship to democracy.
"This is a historic, happy day, a day that all Iraqis have been looking forward to," the interim president, Ghazi Yawar, said. "It's a day we take our country back."
Bremer said he had "confidence that the Iraqi government is ready to meet the challenges that lie ahead."
"You are ready now for sovereignty, and we think it's an important part of our obligation as temporary custodian to return the sovereignty to you," Bremer told Allawi and Yawar before handing over the document.
The handover, which had been scheduled to occur on Wednesday, was accelerated after discussions between Bremer and Allawi over the weekend, a senior U.S. official said. Both men were concerned that insurgent attacks timed to coincide with the handover would distract from, and possibly disrupt, the ceremony.
As the day approached for the handover, insurgents had escalated a campaign of car bombings, kidnappings and other violence in an attempt to interfere with the transfer. Apparently coordinated attacks across the country last Thursday killed more than 100 people. Insurgents have also captured and threatened to behead a U.S. Marine and four foreign civilians over the past two days.
Bush administration officials are hoping that the transfer of political authority will sap support for the insurgency among ordinary Iraqis. "You may not see a change right away, but over time there will be a significant transformative effect on the security situation," a senior administration official said.
President Bush, speaking in Istanbul at a NATO summit meeting, called it "a day of great hope for Iraqis and a day that terrorist enemies hoped never to see."
"The Iraqi people have their country back," Bush declared. "We have kept our word."
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who dispatched the second-largest military contingent in last year's U.S.-led invasion, struck a more circumspect tone, saying in Istanbul that the transfer of power was "an important staging post on the journey of the people of Iraq toward a new future."
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a statement welcoming "the state of Iraq back into the family of independent and sovereign nations."
On the streets of Baghdad, reaction was muted. While many people praised the transfer of authority, they also voiced doubts about whether it would result in improvements to their lives.
"I feel happy about this handover of authority," said Ghazwan Ali, a sidewalk fishmonger. But he questioned whether Iraq's sovereignty would be "complete and genuine."
"Genuine sovereignty means reconstruction, development and true independence," he said.
A few doors down, Khalil Mohammed Dawood, a 72-year-old retiree, insisted that sovereignty was "not complete as long as American soldiers are on our land."
Under an agreement with Allawi's government, U.S. forces will continue to conduct military activities across the country, although commanders have promised to have their troops adopt a less prominent posture and a more deferential style. The relationship that develops between U.S. commanders and the interim government, which has asked to be consulted before major operations are undertaken, could prove crucial in shaping public support for the new administration.
Despite the restrictions on his government, Allawi has promised to use his new authority to take more aggressive actions against insurgents. He said he would announce new security measures in the coming days. He and some of his cabinet ministers have suggested that a state of emergency may be declared in violent areas, allowing local authorities to impose curfews, ban public demonstrations and take other steps to restore order.
"The security of the country lies in our hands," he said.
But his ability to do more than make declarations will be limited at the outset. Iraq's new army has only 4,000 soldiers, and tens of thousands of policemen still have not been trained and properly equipped. That means that the responsibility for fighting the insurgency, at least for the foreseeable future, will rest with the U.S. military.
Officials expect Allawi's government to ask the U.S. military to hand over custody of Hussein and his top lieutenants, who are being held in U.S.-run detention facilities. Because the Iraqi government does not have prisons deemed secure enough, U.S. officials likely will offer to transfer legal, but not physical, custody.
Other than the handful of senior officials participating in the handover ceremony, which was not broadcast live on television, Iraqis had no knowledge of it as it was happening. The ceremony was so secretive that even members of Bremer's senior staff did not know about it until two hours before it began, an official said.
As Bremer turned over the document, Baghdad residents went about business as usual. It was not until 30 minutes later that the first news bulletins ricocheted across the capital, startling residents as they saw the news in cafes and office buildings. There was no noticeable celebratory gunfire, which often occurs during memorable moments in Iraq.
The brief ceremony occurred in a nondescript room in Allawi's new office. Other than Bremer, Allawi and Yawar, only three people participated: Chief Justice Mahdi Mahmoud, Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih and British envoy David Richmond. They sat on chairs upholstered in gold fabric as a dozen aides and a score of journalists stood off to the side.
Bremer noted that Allawi's government, which includes 32 cabinet ministers appointed this month, had taken control of all of Iraq's ministries over the past few weeks. "You have moved very quickly to assume the authority," Bremer said.
The participants then stood and Bremer opened a blue portfolio to read from the document. "The task of the Coalition Provisional Authority will end on the 28th of June, and at this time, the occupation will end and the interim Iraqi government will assume the complete sovereignty on behalf of the Iraqi people," he said. "We welcome the steps of Iraq toward assuming its legitimate role among all free countries of the world."
Bremer said the document was signed by "Paul Bremer, ex-administrator," prompting chuckles from everyone in the room.
Allawi and the other members of his government were sworn in six hours after the handover, in a ceremony attended by several dozen people and televised live. Placing their right hands on a Koran, Allawi, Yawar and the others pledged to uphold a unified and democratic government.
After he took the oath of office, Allawi made an appeal for national unity and said he would invite members of Iraq's disbanded army and Hussein's Baath Party to return to public life. "Baathists who have not taken part in crimes will be rehabilitated," he said. The old army, he said, "is an army of Iraq, not of Saddam. They are our brothers and sons."
Allawi said he would reconstitute elements of the old army to combat the insurgency, which he blamed on outsiders. They are "mercenaries that come into Iraq from different countries to attack the Iraqi people," he said.
"Our dear Iraq is now at a setback, but it is a very temporary setback," he said. "We will rise up after that like mountains, standing up very firm. And we will protect all the people regardless of religion, color or any other consideration, so every Iraqi will have the right to their unified, united Iraq where brotherhood and justice prevail."
Correspondent Doug Struck and special correspondent Khalid Saffar contributed to this report.
--------
The Missing
Iraqi Militants Allege Slaying of U.S. Soldier Identity Unclear From Video, Officials Say
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12915-2004Jun28.html
Al-Jazeera television received a video yesterday that militants said showed the execution of an American soldier who had been taken hostage in April, but U.S. military officials said the camera angle made it impossible to be certain of the victim's identity.
U.S. military officials said they had notified the family of Pfc. Keith M. Maupin of Batavia, Ohio, that the videotape had surfaced, but told them they did not know whether Maupin was the man shown.
Al-Jazeera said yesterday that it had received the video along with a statement from an Iraqi militant group, which said it had killed the soldier because the U.S. government had not changed its policies in Iraq.
The network aired a portion of video showing a blindfolded man sitting on the ground who was identified as Maupin in the accompanying statement, the Associated Press reported from Baghdad. Al-Jazeera said that in the next scene, gunmen shoot the man in the back of the head, in front of a hole dug in the ground, according to AP, which said the station did not broadcast the killing.
U.S. military officials said they had seen the tape within the past 24 hours.
Lt. Col Pamela Hart, an Army spokeswoman at the Pentagon, said the videotape appeared to show a U.S. soldier being shot in the head, but that it was unclear who the victim was, or whether the tape was genuine.
Other government officials said the man on the tape may be Maupin, but that they could not be sure. "We cannot be 100 percent certain," said one official, because the video was shot from behind the man and did not show his face.
Maupin was assigned to the Army Reserve's 724th Transportation Company, based at Bartonville, Ill. He was one of two soldiers and seven contractors who were traveling in a fuel-truck convoy on April 9 when they were ambushed with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades in a western suburb of Baghdad.
Bodies of four of the contractors were later found, as was the body of the second soldier, Sgt. Elmer C. Krause of Greensboro, N.C. One of the contractors, Thomas Hamill of Macon, Miss., later escaped from his captors and returned home.
Maupin and two others have been missing since then, though Maupin was shown in a video broadcast on Arab television on April 16.
The video showed a soldier, who gave his name as Keith Matthew Maupin, squatting on the ground, surrounded by six masked men, several of them with rifles. He appeared unharmed.
The new videotape received by al-Jazeera contained some of that previously shown footage, U.S. officials said. Hart said U.S. military officials overseas and in the United States were studying the new tape for evidence, and that Army officials continued to work with Maupin's family.
Staff writers Josh White and Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.
--------
Iraq to Take Legal Custody of Hussein on Wednesday
June 29, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/international/29CND-TRIA.html?hp
raq's new prime minister said today that the new Iraqi government would take over legal custody of Saddam Hussein on Wednesday to start proceedings leading to an open trial in the next few months.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi spoke at a news conference in Baghdad that was broadcast live on television a day after the United States handed over formal sovereignty to Iraqis two days earlier than expected, to foil any possible disruptions by insurgents.
"We would like to show the world that the new Iraq government means business and wants to do business and wants to stabilize Iraq and put it on the road toward democracy and peace," Dr. Allawi said. "We want to put this bad history behind us and move toward a spirit of national unity and reconciliation in the future."
The Americans will retain physical custody of Mr. Hussein, but Dr. Allawi said that Mr. Hussein and 11 top Baathist officials would be transferred to Iraqi legal control and be charged by an Iraqi judge the next day.
The Iraqi Special Tribunal later announced it had issued arrest and detention warrants for Mr. Hussein and the 11 others. They include Ali Hasan al-Majid, also known as "Chemical Ali" for his role in chemical weapons attacks against the Kurds; Taha Yassin Ramadan, the former Iraqi vice president, and Tareq Aziz, the former deputy prime minister and former foreign minister.
Others on the list - which was not read out at the news conference but released later and carried by news agencies - include Aziz Saleh al-Numan, Baath Party Baghdad regional command chairman; and Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, a presidential adviser and Saddam's half brother.
Dan Senor, a former adviser to the occupation authorities, said the request to keep Mr. Hussein under American guard had come from Dr. Allawi.
"I think he just made a very realistic assessment of the state of the Iraqi security services, that they are not in a position right now to handle all of these responsibilities themselves," Mr. Senor said in an interview on the NBC "Today" program. "Compromise in the security around Saddam Hussein would be an enormous setback for the Iraqis."
"We want to make sure that Saddam Hussein is alive for his trial," Mr. Senor added "We want to make sure he is actually there for his trial."
Mr. Hussein and the others would have the right to legal counsel, and the state would pay for it if the accused could not; Mr. Hussein would also have the right to represent himself, if he chose. The trial will not begin for several months, Dr. Allawi said.
"They will be afforded rights that were denied by the former regime," Dr. Allawi said."I urge the Iraqi people to be patient."
The trial "will show that justice will prevail ultimately," he added.
In the first attack since the handover of formal sovereignty, three American soldiers were killed in a bomb attack today, the American military, quoted by news agencies, said.
Iraqi militants released three Turkish hostages today, shortly after another group of kidnappers claimed to have executed an American soldier captured nearly three months ago, according to The A.P.
There was no new word from the American military about a report by an Arab television network Monday that Spec. Keith M. Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, had been killed by a militant group. The network, Al Jazeera, broadcast a videotape showing a blindfolded man identified by his captors as Maupin sitting on the ground, The A.P. said.
--------
Roadside Bomb Kills 3 U.S. Troops in Iraq
June 29, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A roadside bomb ripped through a U.S. military convoy Tuesday, killing three Marines and providing graphic evidence that the formal end of the U.S. occupation has not halted attacks on American forces in Iraq.
The roadside blast in eastern Baghdad was the first fatal attack on U.S. troops since American administrators transferred sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government.
Two Marines were also wounded in the blast, which occurred on a four-lane highway in the Rustamiyah district. Also Tuesday, assailants fired on a U.S. patrol in Baghdad's Azimiya district, once a stronghold of Saddam Hussein's Baath party.
The Iraqi Interior Ministry said an Iraqi civilian was killed in the Azimiya attack, but there were no American casualties.
With Iraqis now in formal charge of their country, Prime Minister Iyad Allawi announced that Saddam and 11 other top members of his regime will be handed over to Iraqi custody, then arraigned before an Iraqi judge Thursday.
U.S. authorities will retain physical custody of Saddam until Iraq is able to guard him, Allawi said.
Despite the end of the occupation, about 160,000 foreign troops -- most of them Americans -- remain in Iraq to provide security and train Iraq's new security services. Some Iraqis believe genuine sovereignty won't resume until foreign troops leave.
U.S. officials had warned that the transfer of sovereignty would not stop the anti-American insurgency right away. However, officials hope that in time, Iraqis will accept that they are in charge of their country and the attacks will subside.
Also Tuesday, a police officer and a civilian were killed when assailants attacked a police station in Mahmoudiyah, 20 miles south of Baghdad. Witnesses said gunmen recited verses from the Quran before the attack.
A roadside bomb exploded Tuesday in the northern oil center of Kirkuk as a Kurdish district police chief was heading to work. The police chief and two others were wounded and his bodyguard was killed, police said.
Insurgents fired five mortar rounds Tuesday at a U.S. base near Balad, 50 miles north of Baghdad, wounding five Iraqis, said Sgt. Wayne Marlow, a military spokesman.
In Baghdad, Allawi told his first press conference since the transfer of sovereignty that the Iraqi Cabinet was discussing emergency measures to cope with the security crisis. He said he would announce details later this week.
Iraqi media have speculated the measures could include curfews and curbs on public demonstrations -- at least in areas of the country where the insurgency is active.
Meanwhile, the newly sovereign government took steps to shore up its international standing.
In the new government's first official event, President Ghazi al-Yawer accepted the credentials of three ambassadors from countries that have troops in Iraq, including U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte.
With the move, the United States and Iraq restored full diplomatic relations, which were severed shortly before the 1991 Gulf War, when a U.S.-led coalition drove Saddam's forces from Kuwait.
Other ambassadors presenting their credentials were Neil Mules of Australia and Torben Gettermann of Denmark.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi extremist group freed three Turkish hostages, Turkey's Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul said. Al-Jazeera TV reported the group was releasing the hostages ``for the sake of their Muslim brothers.''
Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose followers killed American Nicholas Berg last month and South Korean Kim Sun-il last week, claimed to have abducted the Turks.
Another militant group announced that it had killed Spc. Keith M. Maupin, 20, of Batavia, Ohio, because the United States had not changed its policy in Iraq. The U.S. military said it could not confirm whether the man shown in a murky videotape was Maupin.
Another U.S. service member, Marine Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, was also reported kidnapped in a tape sent to Al-Jazeera.
--------
INSURGENTS
Iraq Videotape Seems to Show Killing of a G.I.
June 29, 2004
By THOM SHANKER and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/politics/29MARI.html
WASHINGTON, June 28 - An Arab-language satellite channel broadcast a videotape on Monday that it said showed the execution of a captured American soldier, but United States military spokesmen in Iraq and at the Pentagon said they could not confirm that the soldier had been killed.
Al Jazeera, the television network that has been first to receive a number of videos showing the killing of Americans, said a group in Iraq announced that it had killed Specialist Keith Matthew Maupin, who disappeared in an ambush of his convoy near Baghdad on April 9.
A military spokesman in Baghdad said by telephone late Monday that there had been no confirmation that Specialist Maupin had been killed. "Our latest is that his status remains unknown," the spokesman said.
The Army officially informed Specialist Maupin's family of the videotape and its images of a man, his back to the camera, being shot, Pentagon officials said. But the officials said the Army had told the family, in Glen Este, Ohio, that there was still no evidence to change the soldier's status from an official classification of "captured."
Maj. Willie Harris, the public affairs officer for the Army's 88th Regional Readiness Command, said Monday that there was "no indication so far that the video contains footage of Matt Maupin or any other Army soldier."
On a day that American and Iraqi officials had hoped would be dominated by images of the transfer of formal sovereignty to a new Iraqi government, military officials also confirmed that the marine whose captors have threatened him with beheading had been missing for more than a week.
The officials said they had been reluctant to publicize the disappearance of the marine, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, because the area in western Iraq where he was stationed is so anti-American. They also said they had suspected that he had deserted his Marine outpost.
Bush administration policy makers and military officials had warned in recent days that Saddam Hussein supporters and foreign terrorists in Iraq would try to stage major attacks to mar the transfer of sovereignty, which had been scheduled for Wednesday. They also said they feared that kidnappers would kill hostages when the transfer occurred.
"We knew we had a missing marine out there, but in a hostile area like this where you're surrounded by the enemy, the last thing you want to do is raise a flag and broadcast this," said Maj. T. V. Johnson, a Marine spokesman.
Marine officials said they had little further information on the situation of Corporal Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Muslim who appeared blindfolded and with a sword hanging over his head in a video released Sunday night on Al Jazeera.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the occupation forces' deputy director of operations, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying Corporal Hassoun had gone "on an unauthorized absence."
"Based on his personal situation, there was reason to suspect that he was heading over to Lebanon," General Kimmitt said, without providing details. Many of Corporal Hassoun's relatives live in Lebanon.
In an interview with The Associated Press in Tripoli, Lebanon, his father, Ali Hassoun, said, "I appeal to the kidnappers and to their conscience and faith to release my son."
His mother, who lives in in a suburb of Salt Lake City, was in seclusion Monday. Imam Shuaib Din of the Khadeeja Mosque, where the family sometimes prays, said she was already mourning.
Marine officials said Corporal Hassoun, 24, was last seen on June 19. He was a truck and Humvee driver at a Marine outpost in western Iraq.
Major Johnson said that when Corporal Hassoun did not report for duty on June 20, his commanders began an investigation, with troops scouring the area and questioning other marines about where he was last seen and who was with him.
On Sunday night, a little-known group called the Islamic Reaction said on a video that it had lured Corporal Hassoun from an American military base and abducted him. In the short, grainy video, the camera lingers on his Marine identification card, which reads, "Hassoun, Wassef Ali" and "Active Duty."
Marine officials, who were reluctant on Sunday to confirm that Corporal Hassoun had been kidnapped, said Monday that he was most likely the blindfolded man in the video.
"From all we know, watching that video, comparing it to pictures we have and other information, we have great reason to believe that, yes, the man in the video is Corporal Hassoun," Major Johnson said.
But the mystery remains: How did Iraqis capture a marine, apparently without firing a shot? Marines are almost never alone and rarely stray from their bases unless ordered.
The kidnappers threatened to kill the corporal unless the United States released all Iraqi prisoners. They did not set a deadline.
Major Johnson said there was no room for negotiation. "We don't negotiate with terrorists," he said.
Four other men, three Turks and a Pakistani, are in similar circumstances, with kidnappers saying their hostages will be beheaded unless their demands are met.
In the case of Specialist Maupin, his fate after the April 9 convoy attack remained uncertain for a week, until his captors sent to Al Jazeera a video with images of him as a captive of militants.
A member of the Army Reserve's 724th Transportation Company, from Illinois, Specialist Maupin was shown in that initial video sitting down, dressed in his military fatigues amid armed guerrillas.
The grainy video showed the light-haired soldier wearing a floppy Army hat, a few days growth of stubble on his chin. A voice in Arabic then said Specialist Maupin was being held to trade for Iraqi prisoners of American forces.
The soldier, nervous but unharmed in the earlier video, can be heard saying, "I am a soldier from the First Division," adding that he was married and had a 10-month-old son.
Thom Shanker reported from Washington for this article, and Jeffrey Gettleman from Baghdad. Nick Madigan contributed reporting from Salt Lake City, and Albert Salvado from Glen Este, Ohio.
-------- israel / palestine
Israelis Roll Into Gaza to Find Rocket Sites
June 29, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/international/worldspecial/29CND-MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, June 29 - Israeli tanks rolled into the northeastern corner of the Gaza Strip today with the aim of silencing Palestinian rocket fire. But militants lofted several salvos at a nearby Israeli town, including two that struck during a visit by Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
Today's rockets injured one Israeli man in the town of Sederot, just outside Gaza's border fence. Mr. Sharon was not near the scene of the attacks, according to aides, and the prime minister said Israel's security forces would act against Palestinians responsible for the persistent fire.
The prime minister traveled to the town a day after Palestinian rockets killed two Israelis in Sederot, including a 3-year-old boy on his way to kindergarten.
"We don't plan to ignore what happened here. The security services have begun taking actions whose aim is to prevent the firing of these missiles," said Mr. Sharon, who paid a condolence call on the family of Afik Zahavi, the boy who was killed.
"We are determined to take wide-ranging action to ensure that what happened here yesterday will not happen again, not now, not during the evacuation of the Gaza Strip and not afterwards," he said.
The prime minister said he remained committed to his plan to withdraw Jewish settlers from Gaza by the end of 2005.
Mr. Sharon's trip to Sederot was not announced in advance, so it seemed unlikely that the Palestinians were aware of his presence. The two rockets that landed during his visit fell in open fields and caused no damage, the military said.
The Palestinian rocket fire comes mostly from the area of Beit Hanun, and Israeli armored vehicles sealed off the roads leading in and out of the town early today. Soldiers shot at a number of armed Palestinians, injuring several, according to the Israeli military and Palestinian security officials.
During the operation, a Palestinian man from the Islamic faction Hamas killed himself when a bomb he was planting went off prematurely, according to Hamas.
Also, a 15-year-old Palestinian, Muhammad Abu Ebaid, was shot dead by Israeli forces in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis, Palestinian security officials said. Israel's military said it shot a Palestinian atop an abandoned building that has been used recently by militants to fire on Israeli soldiers.
In recent years, Israel has staged repeated incursions into Beit Hanun, sometimes staying for weeks. The Israelis have flattened buildings and orange groves used as cover by the militants firing the rockets at Sederot. The raids have reduced or halted the rocket fire temporarily, but it has always resumed following Israeli withdrawals.
The Palestinians have launched more than 300 Qassam rockets out of Gaza in the past few years, most of them fired by Hamas. The crude, homemade rockets are extremely inaccurate and the range is limited to about five miles. The rockets have small payloads, and while they have caused some damage and injuries, Monday marked the first time they killed Israelis.
Israel's latest incursion was not large in scale, but Israeli officials indicated the military was likely to maintain an extended presence in the area.
"We will take control of the launching sites and stay for as long as necessary," said Israel's defense minister, Shaul Mofaz.
In other violence today, a 63-year-old Israeli man was shot dead in a truck while traveling near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the military said, adding that the circumstances surrounding the killing were unclear.
Israel has barred its citizens from traveling in Palestinian areas amid the current violence, which began nearly four years ago.
--------
Palestinians Fire Rockets As Sharon Visits
Associated Press
By PETER ENAV
June 29, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
SDEROT, Israel (AP) -- Palestinian militants rocketed this Israeli border town Tuesday during a visit by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, underscoring Israel's helplessness in stopping the crude projectiles launched from the Gaza Strip.
Five rockets hit Sderot, even though Israeli soldiers reoccupied parts of the northern Gaza Strip earlier in the day to prevent such barrages. One Sderot resident was hurt. Sharon, who was more than a mile from where the rockets struck, was unharmed.
The military operation in Gaza came in response to the deaths of a 3-year-old boy and a 49-year-old man Monday, the first Israelis to be killed by rockets from Gaza. Since 2002, militants have fired more than 200 rockets at Israeli targets, but most have missed.
Military officials and experts warned that the militant Hamas group, with the help of Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas, has managed to increase the range and deadliness of the rockets.
A new threat from Gaza could complicate Sharon's plan to withdraw from the coastal strip by September 2005. More rocket attacks could undercut popular support for the plan.
Sharon visited Sderot, a working-class town two miles from Gaza, to try to reassure panicked residents. While he visited a community center, three rockets fell more than a mile away. It was not clear if the militants were aware of Sharon's presence.
The prime minister promised "wide-ranging actions to ensure that what happened here yesterday will not recur," but was met with skepticism.
"I want to ask you how it can be that a child goes to nursery school and doesn't come home again, how ?" Yitzhak Ohayon, the father of the toddler killed Monday, asked a grim-faced Sharon.
Wearing a black skullcap, Ohayon sat on the floor in a traditional Jewish sign of mourning. He held up a newspaper with the story on his son, Afik, filling the front page.
"This is the most terrible thing that could happen," replied Sharon. The prime minister lost one of his sons in a shooting accident when the boy was 12.
"There is no cure for this pain, which will follow you all your life," Sharon said.
In the Gaza Strip, Israeli tanks encircled the town of Beit Hanoun, home to 21,000 Palestinians. Bulldozers tore up the main road in the eighth major Israeli military operation there since the outbreak of fighting in 2000.
Troops advanced about 700 yards into town, meeting no armed resistance, only sporadic stone-throwing by teenagers, residents said. A local hospital said 17 of the youngsters were wounded by army fire, one critically.
Beit Hanoun resident Ramadan Shabat, 39, said he had stocked up on supplies after Monday's deadly attack on Sderot.
As he spoke by telephone, machine-gun fire could be heard in the background, and he said that at one point bullets hit one of his windows. He said bulldozers were digging up the street outside his home, and that a sewage pipe had been broken.
"The real war has started against Beit Hanoun people," he said. "There is nothing we can do except pray to God to save our lives and those of our families."
An army spokesman said he was unaware of any damage to property or infrastructure and that the aim of the operation was to stop the firing of missiles. A military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said army bulldozers built earthen ramparts on some roads to keep militants from bringing in rocket launchers in vehicles and to block their getaway routes.
Palestinians reported hearing loud explosions near tanks operating in the area, similar to the sound of roadside bombs that have ripped tanks apart in the past. The army said it was unaware of any such attacks.
In the last major raid in May 2003, troops flattened orchards, demolished 15 homes, knocked over garden walls, tore up streets and damaged the sewage, water and electricity systems. Thousands of trees have been uprooted on the outskirts of Beit Hanoun.
"I oppose those who are firing rockets, and I don't like violence at all," said Jaber Saeda, a 42-year-old farmer who said his greenhouses had been destroyed by Israel last year.
"But how can I convince my children and myself that the Israelis are serious about peace when I see them uprooting trees and destroying houses and killing our children?" he said.
Five Palestinians were wounded by Israeli gunfire, Palestinian security sources said. The militant group Hamas said one of its members died accidentally while handling explosives. The Israeli army had no comment.
Elsewhere in Gaza, troops killed a 15-year-old boy in the Khan Younis refugee camp, Palestinian hospital and security sources said. Relatives said the boy had been on the roof of his house. The army said it fired at a suspicious figure on the roof of an abandoned building used by militants.
In the West Bank, meanwhile, an Israeli man was found shot dead in his truck. The Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades claimed responsibility, saying it was avenging Israel's killing of its leader last weekend.
-------- latin america
Oviedo held on return to Paraguay
BBC
29 June, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3849399.stm
Paraguay's former army chief Gen Lino Oviedo has been arrested at Asuncion airport after returning from five years of exile in Brazil.
Gen Oviedo was taken under tight security to the Vinas Cue military prison on the outskirts of the capital.
He fled the country in 1999 after being accused of involvement in the assassination of Vice-President Luis Maria Argana.
He also faces a 10-year jail sentence for leading a failed coup in 1996.
Supporters of the former military commander staged another unsuccessful coup in 2000, but the general denied involvement in the uprising.
He was arrested on the orders of President Nicanor Duarte Frutos, the AFP news agency reported.
'Crucifix'
The former army chief insists that he is the victim of a political conspiracy and had said he wanted to return to clear his name.
He had given notice of his intention to return by plane from the southern Brazilian town of Foz do Iguacu on Tuesday in the knowledge that he would be arrested when he arrived.
"I will take a crucifix, a pencil and a small notebook," he said. "They have always helped me."
Gen Oviedo initially rose to prominence in Paraguay in February 1989, when he played a prominent part in the uprising that overthrew the regime of Gen Alfredo Stroessner and set the country on the path back to civilian government.
In recent years, he has sought to further his political ambitions, first within the governing Colorado Party and then as head of his own Unace (National Union of Ethical Citizens) political movement.
Earlier this month, the general told a Brazilian newspaper that he wanted to regain his political rights with the aim of running for the Paraguayan presidency in 2008.
-------- nato
ALLIES
NATO Agrees to Help Train Iraqi Forces
June 29, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT and SUSAN SACHS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/international/europe/29PREX.html?pagewanted=all
ISTANBUL, June 28 - NATO leaders agreed Monday to help rebuild Iraq's security forces just hours after the American-led occupation forces transferred formal sovereignty to Iraq. But for NATO, many crucial details remain unresolved.
Bush administration officials heralded the training accord and an agreement to increase NATO troops in Afghanistan to bolster security for elections there in September as proof the alliance could overcome divisions to reach consensus on contentious issues far beyond its members' national borders.
"We have decided today to offer NATO's assistance to the government of Iraq with the training of its security forces," Mr. Bush and the other 25 national leaders said in a statement.
But the accord fell far short of the administration's original goal to dispatch NATO ground troops to join American-led forces in Iraq, which France and Germany flatly opposed. In a sign of lingering rifts, the statement said the alliance would only "encourage nations to contribute to the training of the Iraqi armed forces."
The United States and other allies have provided some training inside and outside Iraq for months, and a three-star American general was recently assigned to help improve the training and equipping of Iraq's 206,000 fledgling security forces. But Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, had appealed to NATO earlier this month for additional help.
NATO planners will now meet with Iraqi officials to decide on training priorities, then match the requests with the alliance or alliance members willing to help. They were also ordered to report back on other possible assistance for Iraqi security institutions. But the timing, location and numbers of trainers involved remain unanswered. "How this training will be worked out I do not know yet," Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's secretary general, told reporters on Monday.
With so much about the NATO training offer still undecided, including which countries might provide it and where, alliance forces already in Iraq are expected to remain the bulwark of security for the foreseeable future.
Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said the NATO accord showed that the alliance had closed ranks on the need to assist the fledgling Iraqi government, despite the continuing differences among NATO members over the war.
"Everybody sitting around the table is hopeful that democracy will serve as an agent of change in this part of the world," Mr. Bush said at a news conference.
NATO leaders opened the two-day meeting under tight security and to the surprising news that the transfer of formal sovereignty in Iraq had been moved up 48 hours. Large swaths of this city of 15 million people were blocked off, and Turkish warships patrolled the Bosporus.
Still, hundreds of protesters took to the streets in several locations across the city, but were kept far from the conference center in central Istanbul where NATO leaders gathered. Demonstrators hurled paving stones at police, who responded with batons, tear gas and water cannons. At least 48 police officers and demonstrators were injured, according to the authorities here.
Inside the conference hall, alliance leaders sought to play down tensions over Mr. Bush's Iraq policy, but they remained divided over how to carry out the training plan.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has insisted that the bulk of the training should be conducted inside Iraq. But French and German officials said they would not send instructors to Iraq, preferring instead to train Iraqis at elite military academies in their own countries. President Jacques Chirac of France said any training should be left to individual NATO nations, not the alliance as a whole. "Any NATO footprint on Iraqi soil would be unwise."
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany said: "The engagement of NATO is reduced to training and only training. We have made clear that we don't want to see German soldiers in Iraq."
Some independent security analysts expressed skepticism over the training accord. "It's a political declaration with no real practical meaning," Ivo Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said in an e-mail message. "Countries that will provide training were doing so before the declaration, and I doubt that countries that were not will now be so inclined."
Allied officials said training is expected to be coordinated with the efforts now led by Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, a former commander of the 101st Airborne Division who is now helping Iraqi officials oversee the training of their forces.
Military planners at NATO headquarters in Brussels are already rushing to examine how alliance members can meet the Iraqis' requirements. Senior military officers in Iraq applauded NATO's new commitment to training and suggested approaches the alliance could follow to best meet their needs.
"They could individually or collectively contribute everything from slots at their military schools for Iraqi soldiers to sets of equipment to mentors/advisors to drill sergeants," one senior military officer in Iraq said in an e-mail message. "Better yet might be money that the Iraqis could use to buy additional equipment over that which we're purchasing for them."
NATO leaders also announced Monday that the alliance would expand its security role in Afghanistan, fulfilling a political pledge the alliance made months ago. They have cobbled together enough forces and equipment - including helicopters, cargo planes and quick-reaction forces - to honor the agreement. Under the plan, NATO would expand to about 10,000 troops from the 6,500-member force in and around Kabul, the Afghan capital, to operate a total of five provincial civilian-military reconstruction teams.
NATO leaders also announced Monday that the alliance would end its decade-long military operation in Bosnia and replace its troops with police officers and troops commanded by the European Union. NATO would keep a small headquarters in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital.
Reserve Call-Up Set, Officials Say
WASHINGTON, June 28 (Reuters) - The Army is planning an involuntary mobilization of thousands of reserve troops to maintain adequate force levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense officials said Monday.
Roughly 5,600 reserve soldiers, mainly troops who have completed their active-duty obligations, will be notified of possible deployment this year, including some who will be notified within a month, an Army official said.
A senior Defense official said the mobilization would not involve units but rather individuals "to fill specific shortages for specific jobs."
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Afghanistan set for centre stage at NATO summit
ISTANBUL (AFP)
Jun 29, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040629012048.ysk84a80.html
Afghanistan takes centre stage Tuesday on the second and final day of a NATO summit after leaders pledged to beef up its peace force there as the country gears up for crucial elections threatened by violence.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is due at the talks in Turkey's largest city Istanbul where leaders have pledged to take command of five military-civilian reconstruction teams in the north and send more troops to help ensure security during September's planned ballot.
"NATO is meeting its commitments to provide increased security to support the Afghan government, to support the upcoming electons," a senior NATO official said.
He added that the NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer "will deliver that message personally to President Karzai tomorrow morning."
Shortly after Iraq's interim government unexpectedly took over power from the US-led occupation coalition in Baghdad Monday, two days earlier than planned, NATO leaders also pledged to help train Iraq's new army.
After deep divisions over last year's invasion of Iraq plunged the military alliance into the worst crisis of its 55-year history, NATO members were keen to stress their unity in support for the Iraqi people.
Tensions rose outside the highly-guarded NATO conference centre too where left-wing protestors clashed with police who used water cannon, tear gas and plastic bullets to disperse them.
But the focus was set Tuesday to return to Afghanistan which has already welcomed NATO's 'major expansion' of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) by September polls.
"On the one hand any additional deployment at this stage, given the security situation and the upcoming elections, is good news," Foreign Ministry spokesman Omar Samad told AFP.
"But on the other hand, it obviously needs to be in adequate numbers to ensure a relatively free and fair election."
Karzai, as well as the United Nations and other agencies have repeatedly called on the alliance to expand its force from the current level of 6,500 ahead of the presidential and legislative polls.
A series of violent attacks in recent days targeting electoral workers and people registered to vote have come as Afghanistan is set to announce the exact date of the historic elections within days.
NATO took over ISAF last August in its first-ever mission outside Europe, complementing US-led forces there since the 2001 fall of the Taliban, but it has struggled to expand the force beyond the capital, Kabul, because of a shortfall in resources.
ISAF will now take command of additional military-civilian teams known as Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in four northern areas of the country where it already runs one PRT in the city of Kunduz.
PRTs are small units of troops and civilian experts whose job is to improve security, foster reconstruction work and boost the influence of the central Kabul government in the provinces.
A senior official said here that the number of international peacekeepers would be boosted to potentially 10,000 during the elections, but that not all of these soldiers would be based in Afghanistan.
Details still need to be fleshed out but sources close to NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said the expansion would break down into 500 troops for the PRTs and the deployment of a batallion of about 1,000 troops to help ensure the ballot is secure.
That would bring the forces' strength to about 8,000 troops, sources said.
Two other batallions are also due to be on standy outside Afghanistan.
NATO leaders also turn their thoughts to cooperation with non-member Ukraine on Tuesday on issues such as fighting terrorism, defence reform and civil emergency planning.
President Leonid Kuchma, who is also expected to attend, said earlier this month that the former Soviet republic was not yet ready to join NATO despite its wish to do so.
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Karzai's plea to Nato on troops
BBC
29 June, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3848895.stm
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has addressed Nato leaders at a summit in Istanbul, urging them to send promised extra peace-keepers immediately.
Nato has agreed to increase its forces from 6,500 to 10,000 to bolster security during September elections.
Mr Karzai thanked the leaders, but added: "I would like you to please hurry... come sooner than September."
He again insisted the polls must be held on time despite a UN warning that security concerns might force a delay.
Unstable areas
Mr Karzai was addressing the leaders of the 26-member military alliance on the second and final day of their summit in Istanbul.
He said: "I welcome very much your decision yesterday to send us security forces to help us with the elections.
"But... we need security forces today in Afghanistan to provide a secure environment for elections for the Afghan people and beyond."
BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus, in Istanbul, says Nato's credibility is now on the line, with Afghanistan emerging as the central test for the alliance's future.
Nato's Afghan credibility test
He says Nato governments have dragged their feet on honouring commitments in Afghanistan and must now come up with the goods.
Nato's extra troops are set to bolster security in the capital, Kabul, and the more stable north of the country.
Mr Karzai had wanted extra peace-keepers for the more unstable areas, particularly the south and east.
But correspondents say those areas are likely to be left to a 20,000-strong US-led combat force.
Mr Karzai had earlier rejected suggestions that the additional troops would make no difference to security in Afghanistan.
"Kabul has about 5,000 troops and Kabul has been a very safe place for Afghanistan and for the international community," he said.
"If the strength goes to 10,000 troops and if that's deployed around the country, where we don't have Nato forces right now, that will bring about a lot of difference to the security of life, to the citizens of Afghanistan where they're deployed."
During the summit France rejected a request by the US that a recently formed Nato rapid reaction force be deployed during the September elections.
"It's not made for that, French President Jacques Chirac told reporters.
Most of the troops in the unit are French.
Long fight
Mr Karzai pronounced himself "happy" with the Nato arrangement, but said the Afghan people were looking for more help.
He told the Nato leaders: "The Afghan people keep coming to me from all parts of the country and are asking for increased participation of the international assistance security forces... They trust these forces."
The response back in Kabul was more blunt.
Defence ministry spokesman General Zahir Azimy told the Reuters news agency: "It's up to... Nato, but this is not sufficient; we expect more."
Mr Karzai warned there would be a long fight against remnants of the Taleban regime but insisted again that the elections must be held in September.
He said that about 5.2m of the 9.5m electorate had been registered so far.
The leaders at the Nato summit include US President George W Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac.
A huge security operation was launched ahead of the summit, involving 20,000 police officers.
Warplanes patrolled the skies of Istanbul and Turkish commandos were patrolling the Bosphorus in boats armed with machine guns.
On Monday, police used batons, tear gas and water cannon to stop hundreds of protesters from approaching the conference centre in the centre of the city where the Nato leaders were meeting.
Protesters threw petrol bombs and stones as they clashed with security forces about 3km (two miles) from a barricaded zone surrounding the venue.
The Nato leaders were also discussing Iraq, and agreed to offer training to the security forces of the new interim government.
But the move fell well short of US hopes that Nato would assume a major military role in Iraq.
Mr Chirac repeated his opposition to a Nato role inside Iraq.
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'Boston Phoenix' IDs 'Anonymous' CIA Officer
June 30, 2004
By Editor & Publisher Staff
http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000557752
NEW YORK The active U.S. intelligence officer known only as "Anonymous," who has gained world renown this month as author of an upcoming book called "Imperial Hubris," is actually named Michael Scheuer, according to an article in the Boston Phoenix today by Jason Vest.
Speculation about his identity has run rampant since a June 23 article in The New York Times discussed the book and the background of the author. The book, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror," asserts, among other things, that Osama bin Laden is not on the run and that the invasion of Iraq has not made the United States safer.
In that June 23 piece, the Times identified Anonymous as a 22-year CIA veteran who ran the Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden station from 1996 to 1999, adding that a "senior intelligence official" held that revealing the man's full name "could make him a target of Al Qaeda." Anonymous has appeared in brief television interviews always in silhouette.
According to Vest, "Nearly a dozen intelligence-community sources, however, say Anonymous is Michael Scheuer -- and that his forced anonymity is both unprecedented and telling in the context of CIA history and modern politics."
Vest in his article notes that "at issue here is not just the book's content, but why Anonymous is anonymous. After all, as the Times and others have reported, his situation is nothing like that of Valerie Plame, a covert operative whose ability to work active overseas cases was undermined when someone in the White House blew her cover to journalist Robert Novak in an apparent payback for an inconvenient weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence report by her husband, Joseph Wilson. Anonymous, on the other hand, is, by the CIA's own admission, a Langley, Va.-bound analyst whose identity has never required secrecy.
"A Phoenix investigation has discovered that Anonymous does not, in fact, want to be anonymous at all -- and that his anonymity is neither enforced nor voluntarily assumed out of fear for his safety, but rather compelled by an arcane set of classified regulations that are arguably being abused in an attempt to spare the CIA possible political inconvenience. In the Phoenix's view, continued deference by the press to a bogus and unwanted standard of secrecy essentially amounts to colluding with the CIA in muzzling a civil servant -- a standard made more ridiculous by the ubiquity of Anonymous's name in both intelligence and journalistic circles."
When asked to confirm or deny his identity in an interview with the Phoenix, Anonymous declined to do either, explaining, "I've given my word I'm not going to tell anyone who I am, as the organization that employs me has bound me by my word."
Jonathan Turley, a national-security-law expert at George Washington University Law School, told Vest, "The requirement that someone publish anonymously is rare, almost unheard-of, particularly if the person is not in a covert position. It seems pretty obvious that the requirement he remain anonymous is motivated solely by political concerns, and ones that have more to do with the CIA."
The CIA did not respond to a call from the Phoenix, and declined to comment on the book or the author to the Associated Press last Friday.
Vest says that the man he identifies as Scheuer told him, "I suppose there might be a knucklehead out there somewhere who might take offense and do something, but anonymity isn't something I asked for, and not for that reason; it makes me sound like I'm hiding behind something, and I personally dislike thinking that anyone thinks I'm a coward."
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Court to Review Spies' Right To Sue CIA Over Broken Vow
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13194-2004Jun28.html
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to review a lower court's decision that permitted an alleged husband-wife Cold War spy team to sue the CIA for allegedly breaking a promise to provide them financial and personal security for life after they carried out espionage for the United States.
At issue is a 130-year-old Supreme Court ruling in a Civil War espionage case that said courts cannot hear cases involving disputes over spying contracts because they involve a secret enterprise and "disclosure of the service might compromise or embarrass our government in its public duties."
In his successful petition to get the justices to review the case, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson noted that since it was created in 1947, the CIA has been able "to obtain dismissal at the outset of such complaints" and said changing that practice would not only hurt foreign relations but also "impair the ability of the CIA to conduct clandestine intelligence operations."
Although the CIA has not acknowledged it hired the couple, the lawsuit filed by the pair -- under the names John and Jane Doe -- said the husband was a high-ranking Eastern European diplomat who initially wanted to defect but was persuaded to stay at his post and spy for the United States. In exchange, the couple said, the CIA promised to "arrange for their resettlement in the U.S. and ensure their financial and personal security 'for life,' " according to the opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
When their spying was over, the couple was brought to the United States under a law that permits the CIA director to waive immigration rules. The agency eventually settled the couple in Seattle with new identities, housing and other benefits, plus a yearly stipend that started at $20,000. With résumés and references supplied by the agency, the man got a job in 1987, and, as his salary increased, the CIA's stipend decreased. Within two years, his salary had hit $27,000, the amount of the stipend at that time, and the subsidy was ended. But the former spy was given assurances that if he lost his job, "his stipend would be resumed" and the CIA would "always be there" for him and his wife, according to the court opinion.
In 1997, the man lost his job and could not find another. The couple say that the CIA refused to assist in finding new employment and that eventually they turned to a lawyer.
When internal CIA appeals did not get a satisfactory result, they sued in federal court. The CIA said the 1875 Civil War ruling, known as Totten v. United States, required dismissal. In that case, the spy, William A. Lloyd, was "under a contract with President Lincoln, made in July 1861" to gather intelligence behind the South's lines for $200 a month, according to the opinion. The court ruled that Lloyd's legal action in effect broke the contract, which required secrecy.
In the current case, the district court ruled that a trial could proceed "despite the alleged existence of a secret agreement," and that national security could be protected by sealing evidence and conducting judicial review in private. The circuit court said Totten applied only when a contract exists and that the couple could continue the suit "in a manner that avoids public exposure of any secret information."
A CIA spokesman, Bill Harlow, said yesterday that the agency would not comment on the ruling.
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War on terror 'diverting spy resources'
Guardian Matthew Tempest
June 29, 2004
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/attacks/story/0,1320,1250025,00.html
The "war on terror" is causing the UK security services to lose sight of the threat from state-sponsored espionage by countries such as Russia and China, MPs warned today.
Ahead of next month's Butler inquiry into the role of intelligence in the build-up to the Iraq war, the intelligence and security committee (ISC) also revealed that the government failed to provide it with eight separate intelligence reports last year, when it was investigating the failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Publishing its annual report scrutinising MI5 and MI6, the committee also said that three employees of the intelligence and security services refused to work on the Iraq war "as a matter of conscience".
Among other concerns identified - in a dossier edited by the security services before publication - was the failure of the agencies to conduct any assessment of the threat to the UK's critical national infrastructure from electronic attack since 2002.
"We recommend that the threat to the UK's critical national infrastructure and vulnerability to electronic and other attacks should be examined by the joint intelligence committee and considered by ministers," the committee said.
The ISC (which meets in private and answers to the prime minister) said it had "considerable concern" about the omission of the eight joint intelligence committee reports, which came as it published a special report on WMD last year.
It added that its conclusions would not have been altered by the eight reports, saying "there was no deliberate attempt to withhold information from us" - but expressed concern at Cabinet Office record-keeping. An apology had been received from the government.
WMD dossier
At a press conference to launch the report this morning, the committee's chairwoman, Ann Taylor, complained that the government had "picked out the highlights" of their earlier report on WMD, and left out critical elements as "also-rans".
The ISC report was one of two last year - aside from the Hutton report - looking at the failure to find WMD. The other was conducted by the foreign affairs select committee.
In that report, the committee cleared the government of having "sexed up" its dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but said that the way some of the material - particularly the notorious "45-minute claim" - had been inappropriately presented.
Today's annual report slams the government for "emphasis[ing] only four conclusions while either rejecting or failing to address fully many of our other conclusions and recommendations". It says it finds this "extremely unsatisfactory".
While most of the criticisms in the report are addressed to the government, the main concern regarding the security services is their concentration on the war on terror at the expense of counterespionage against such states as Russia and China.
"We remain concerned that, because of the necessary additional effort allocated to counter terrorism by the security service [MI5], significant risks are inevitably being taken in the area of counterintelligence," the report said.
The report revealed that the budget for the intelligence agencies had risen from £909m in 2001-02 to more than £1.1bn in the current year, with further increases in the pipeline. But sums for counterespionage had fallen from 20% of the budget four years ago to 10% now.
Abuse of prisoners
The report also revealed some concerns among the agencies about the treatment of detainees held by the US in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.
In written evidence to the committee, Tony Blair revealed that, on one occasion when British intelligence personnel were present, a detainee was treated in contravention of the Geneva Convention.
The detainee was brought in "hooded and shackled by the US military, and remained so during the one-hour interview".
In his note to the committee, received just days before the report was signed off, the prime minister said the officers concerned had "understood these measures to be for security purposes and did not report it at the time since they were not then aware that hooding was unacceptable".
Mr Blair also told the committee that, on a "few occasions", MI6 and MI5 staff did become aware that some detainees were being held in "austere conditions or treated inappropriately".
He added that the concerns of these staff had been passed on to the US authorities either locally or through intelligence or diplomatic channels. Further investigation is to take place on the handling of detainees, the committee confirmed.
The prime minister's letter added: "None of those involved witnessed any evidence of detainee abuse of the type that the US authorities have acknowledged has occurred in Iraq.
The defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, has already admitted that British troops routinely hooded Iraqi detainees until September last year.
The report also raised concerns about the lack of sufficient secure communications with ministers which, it warned, could raise difficulties if they needed to make important decisions when they were outside London.
GCHQ whistleblower
The committee agreed that the decision to drop proceedings against GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun - who revealed that the US was bugging security council members - was dropped because of evidential reasons "and was not in any way related to the attorney general's advice on the lawfulness of invading Iraq".
The report recommends "considering" a new Official Secrets Act in the light of the Gun affair - but does not give any explicit recommendations.
The report finds that the agencies should have been alerted to the threat from al-Qaida three years earlier by the east African embassy bombings which caused some 5,000 casualties.
"Because the scale of the challenge posed by the threat at the turn of the millennium was underestimated, the agencies did not seek an increase of the size that we now see until 2003," the report said.
The committee acknowledged that the main threat facing the UK did come from international terrorism.
It warned that the number of people willing to become involved in terrorism was rising - which "some analysts" argued was a consequence of the military action by coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and a perceived failure to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Japan prepares push for place on Security Council
The Japan Times:
June 29, 2004
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20040629a7.htm
The United Nations should allow a "limited number of nations," including at least one country that does not possess nuclear weapons, to join the Security Council as permanent members, according to a report compiled Monday by an advisory panel to the foreign minister.
The report, submitted to Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi, is aimed at providing the government with fresh ammunition to achieve its longtime ambition of becoming a permanent UNSC member.
The panel also said the UNSC needs to reflect the "realities of the international community in the 21st century." It urged the government to position U.N. reform as its "most important diplomatic task" and set up a body or a new position of special envoy toward this end.
The new permanent council members should be selected by vote and be able to exercise the same veto right as the current five permanent members, the report says.
The government should urge other nations to scrap a clause in the U.N. Charter that classifies Japan and six other nations that fought against the Allies during World War II as enemy states, it says.
The charter, adopted in 1945, allows the U.N. to resort to the use of arms without UNSC approval if these "enemy" nations are believed to be invading other countries.
A meeting involving members of the U.N.'s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change is to be held in Kyoto next month. The panel was appointed to study global threats and reforms to the global organization last year.
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The Business of Rebuilding
Immunity Provision Extended for U.S. Firms With Reconstruction Contracts
By Ellen McCarthy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13297-2004Jun28.html
U.S. contractors working in Iraq will be exempted from the legal processes of the country's new interim government when they are performing official duties and most reconstruction contracts will continue uninterrupted, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Under an order signed Sunday by L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, the contractors' immunity provision covers "official acts that they perform in contracts in support of the Iraq reconstruction effort," said Scott Castle, general counsel for the occupation authority. In matters unrelated to their contract work, they will be subject to Iraqi rules.
"From our standpoint, it hasn't really changed at all, and that's a good thing. It gives us a modicum of protection," said Robert L. Rubin, senior vice president of MVM Inc., a Vienna security company. "We do have to justify every shot fired, and even this doesn't change that."
The $18.6 billion allotted by the U.S. government for the reconstruction of Iraq, money that was previously administered by the occupation authority, will come under control of the State Department. Payments on those contracts are expected to continue without interruption.
Control of contracts funded by Iraqi funds, which include oil revenue and seized assets, will be shifted to the country's interim government. Occupation officials worked with the Iraqi Finance Ministry to establish processes for paying contractors. "The bottom line here is that steps have been taken to make sure that contractors will get paid in a timely fashion," Castle said.
The contracts using Iraqi funds include termination clauses, but U.S. officials said they do not expect their Iraqi counterparts to make abrupt changes to existing reconstruction deals, although changes eventually may occur.
"Iraqis assume control of their own budgets, and so they will decide what needs to be bought and when and in what priority," said Mark J. Lumer, a contracting official in the Army's policy and procurement office. Over time, "Iraqis will be issuing their own procurement procedures," which companies will have to follow to compete for contracts, he said.
Contractors working in the country said they have been briefed regularly on the implications of the handover. While most expect a smooth transition, several legal and logistical questions about the status of their employees remain unanswered.
The extension of a mandate that gave contractors immunity in Iraq came as a relief to most companies. Some Iraqi officials had questioned why foreign contractors should be exempt from their laws.
Contractors had argued that the already-high cost of insurance premiums required to do business in Iraq would skyrocket if immunity were repealed. Under the immunity provision, if an employee of a U.S. contractor commits a crime while not performing an official duty -- by getting into a fight, for example -- he or she would be subject to Iraqi law.
That leaves a significant gray area, said Steven L. Schooner, a professor at George Washington University who specializes in government contracting law. It is unclear, for instance, what would happen if a contractor injured an Iraqi while driving recklessly to a job.
"I think that the message contractors have to take away from this is, if their people act inappropriately," they could be held accountable, Schooner said.
In addition, companies have not been told whether their employees will need visas to continue working in Iraq, said James S. Cartner, Fluor Corp.'s vice president of operations for Iraq. Executives of the Aliso Viejo, Calif., company, which has contracts to help rebuild power and water facilities, are also trying to determine how the organizational changes will affect their operations.
"Any time you have a change, you have a new cast of characters . . . so we're waiting to see how that will play out," Cartner said. Lumer said that U.S. reconstruction spending will now be prioritized by the State Department, but "99 percent" of the reconstruction contracts will be issued by the Army.
The occupation authority's program management office, which has been overseeing most of the Iraqi contracts, will be transferred to the State Department unit to ease the transition, said Gordon H. West, acting assistant administrator for the Asia and Near East bureau of the U.S. Agency for International Development. This group will help the State Department make spending decisions.
"The reporting relationships really don't change in a direct measure. . . . It won't affect the overall scope or the selection of the contractors," West said. But he added, "My guess is, there will be a lot of questions. . . . There will be things that come up, but most of those issues have been handled."
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From Occupation to 'Partnership'
Despite Threat of Violence, U.S. Soldiers Prepare to Slip Into the Background
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13220-2004Jun28?language=printer
BAQUBAH, Iraq, June 28 -- In the fluorescent glow of warehouse lights, Capt. Travis Van Hecke looked up into the face of a far larger man dressed in a gray caftan. A few others gathered around the pair, providing a running commentary of the encounter between the Army officer from Wisconsin and the shopkeeper from Howadir.
"So do you guys know that June 30 is the transfer of sovereignty?" Van Hecke asked the man, pausing to give his interpreter time to convey the question. "We'll still be here to support the Iraqi police, but the occupation ends. How do they feel about that?"
A crowd emerged from the closet-blackness enveloping the tiny town where Van Hecke had come Sunday evening on a visit in search of intelligence about the anti-American insurgency battering nearby Baqubah. Cigarettes glowed, and Van Hecke's soldiers stood ready against walls overhung by date palms.
"He says if you are still all over this town, day and night, then the problem will still be here," Van Hecke's interpreter said after much chatter from the crowd. "He says you can avoid giving the insurgents an excuse for their doings if you stay away."
The request, made only hours before Monday's surprise transfer of political power from the United States to the interim Iraqi government, underscored the challenges facing U.S. soldiers as they begin adapting to a new mission after months of serving as an occupying force. Over the course of a five-minute ceremony in Baghdad, the country changed governments. But the violence threatening the American project to bring a stable democracy to Iraq continued; while the ceremony was being held in the capital, a roadside bomb exploded near a military convoy in this city 35 miles to the northeast.
The adjustments contemplated by U.S. military commanders over the next six months, a potentially volatile period before Iraqis elect a government, involve changes in tone more than substance. Taken together, commanders say, the changes will turn the 138,000 U.S. troops, the chief guarantors of Iraq's security, into something resembling a police force called in to assist the fledgling Iraqi police and national guard.
But military commanders acknowledge those changes will be difficult to impose on troops fighting a skilled guerrilla insurgency. Nighttime patrols and intelligence gathering by Army units stationed around the country are vital to the counterinsurgency effort, commanders said.
Local Iraqi officials have asked the U.S. troops to cease the provocative military patrols -- known as "reconnaissance by fire" missions because they are intended to draw insurgent attacks -- and remain on two bases outside Baqubah unless needed. U.S. commanders here understand that if they refuse, they could undermine the new government's independence in the eyes of the ordinary Iraqis.
"We firmly believe this is going from a role of partnership and occupation -- but clearly occupation -- to one of partnership and support," said Col. Dana Pittard, commander of the 1st Infantry Division's 3rd Brigade . "To do a major operation, we will have to consult the civic authority. We could still make the kind of errors that push people toward the insurgency."
In Baqubah, an agricultural center battered by insurgents over the past week, Pittard and his officers have been working with local officials on that new relationship, but the meetings with local councils have been shaped by the continuing violence.
Last week, coordinated insurgent attacks on this city and five others in northern and central Iraq killed 100 Iraqis and three U.S. soldiers, two of them here. As the fighting swept through downtown early Thursday, insurgents took up positions in buildings near a decrepit soccer stadium.
Pittard, believing the insurgents had prepared the buildings for a long fight, decided to eliminate them. Before ordering airstrikes, he called a meeting with Abdullah Jabouri, the provincial governor, and asked permission to proceed. Pittard said Jabouri told him that if he could strike the insurgents, he shouldn't worry about damaging the buildings. Within an hour, three 500-pound bombs came down.
Pittard called the collaboration a "model" for the U.S. military's relationship with the local government in the months ahead and said "conflict management" would be one of his chief concerns after the transfer of political power.
But the demise of the occupation authority has also brought financial concerns to commanders, who will be taking on civic responsibilities that were once the authority's purview. The Coalition Provisional Authority's staff members in Baqubah left on Friday, never to return.
Before the transfer, Pittard had $24 million of reconstruction money to spend on water, electricity and employment projects. On Monday, the money -- as well as hundreds of millions of dollars across the country -- went over to an Iraqi central government whose ministries are barely functioning.
Pittard said "the funds are drying up at the wrong time" and will severely delay promised projects. Like many military commanders, Pittard said he believed public works programs were the most effective way to fight the insurgency.
Pittard also took charge of unfinished CPA programs on women's issues, education and local elections, which he hopes to have arranged by this fall to give the local government more legitimacy. Four State Department employees will be assigned to his brigade to help work on the elections, to be held next year. But he said he believed the U.S. civilian authority, in one form or another, disappeared too early.
"The elections are the most critical issue we face, so they are committing resources you wouldn't normally see," said Edward Messmer, who departed last week as the CPA coordinator for Diyala province, of which Baqubah is the capital. "This is a sovereign nation, so we had to dismantle the CPA. We needed to take these steps. But there is a six-month period here that will be very challenging."
From the soldiers' perspective, the changes that began Monday culminated weeks of preparation.
Lt. Richard Szczurowski, 23, a platoon leader from Philadelphia, said he had been attending meetings with mayors and town council members, many of whom are under threat of death.
"I don't think it will change too much," he said of his role after the handover. "Maybe we'll cut back on patrols a little bit."
But he said the soldiers, who will remain immune from Iraqi prosecution for crimes they may commit in the country, have been told they "no longer own the road." They have been ordered to begin following local traffic laws, long ignored by the convoys that rumble through town.
In addition, "hard knock" home raids, in which soldiers kick down doors, will give way to more polite requests to enter.
"We've talked about this," said Szczurowski, whose platoon was hit last week in Howadir by a roadside bomb that wounded two soldiers, one of whom lost an eye. "We'll try to follow the traffic laws. But if obeying them means putting our lives in danger, we'll do what we have to do."
Van Hecke, commander of Bravo Battery, accompanied two of his platoons on a night mission Sunday "to see if there's any impending doom." The ride offered a view of how military practices, many of them designed to promote safety, can change overnight in the midst of combat.
A dozen Humvees rumbled through the hot, close night, heading north toward Howadir. Within minutes of leaving the post, the convoy jerked to a stop on a busy street. The radio crackled with a request to fire on a suspicious box on the side of the road. Van Hecke said yes, and three sharp cracks sounded.
The box did not explode. The Humvees hopped the median to avoid it, rode briefly into on-coming traffic and crossed back over and rumbled through a mostly empty downtown, lit by a few scattered shop lights and fires from restaurants roasting lamb on vertical spits.
Minutes later the Humvees plunged into a tunnel of date palms where, at a sharp bend, Lt. Paul Lashley's platoon set up a road block to stop all traffic for Howadir.
"Don't hesitate to search vehicles," Van Hecke told Lashley, a 25-year-old from Huntsville, Ala. "Especially ones with tinted windows or no license plates."
The patrol then buzzed down dark streets, under what's known as Boom-Boom Bridge, a narrow pedestrian crossing the insurgents use to drop explosives on passing convoys. Their headlights were off, and Van Hecke used night-vision goggles to guide his driver into Mufrek, a neighborhood where insurgents took the police station last week.
The idea was to draw fire, then return it in greater quantity. But flares began rising above the government complex a mile to the east as insurgents signaled each other from distant street corners. Van Hecke moved there quickly, but his search for a fight ended unsuccessfully.
"This is a place that's hard for a city council to control," Van Hecke said. "It runs amok pretty quickly."
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Army to Call Up Retired and Discharged Troops
June 29, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Iraq-Reserve-Callup.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Digging deeper for help in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army is recalling to active duty about 5,600 people who recently left the service and still have a reserve obligation.
In a new sign of the strain the insurgency in Iraq has put on the U.S. military, Army officials said Tuesday the involuntary callups will begin in July and run through December. It is the first sizable activation of the Individual Ready Reserve since the 1991 Gulf War, though several hundred people have voluntarily returned to service since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Unlike members of the National Guard and Reserve, individual reservists do not perform regularly scheduled training and receive no pay unless they are called up. The Army is targeting its recall at those who recently left the service and thus have the most up-to-date skills.
``This was inevitable when it became clear that we would have to maintain significant combat forces in Iraq for a period of years,'' said Dan Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a think tank.
The Army is pinpointing certain skills in short supply, like medical specialists, military police, engineers, transportation specialists and logistics experts. Those selected for recall will be given at least 30 days' notice to report for training, an Army statement said.
Vietnam veteran Chuck Luczynski said in an interview Tuesday that he fears his son, Matt, who is getting out of the Army after four years, will be called back to active duty as part of the individual reserves. The son returned home in March after a one-year tour in Iraq with the 101st Airborne Division, and he's planning to start a computer programming business.
``I think that's on everybody's mind right now, that they took their turn and they would hope everybody took a turn so that a few don't carry the many,'' said the elder Luczynski, of Omaha, Neb.
The Army is so stretched for manpower that in April it broke a promise to some active-duty units, including the 1st Armored Division, that they would not have to serve more than 12 months in Iraq. It also has extended the tours of other units, including some in Afghanistan.
``It is a reflection of the fact that the (active-duty) military is too small for the breadth of challenges we are facing,'' Goure said.
The men and women recalled from the Individual Ready Reserve will be assigned to Army Reserve and National Guard units that have been or soon will be mobilized for deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan, unless they successfully petition for exemption based on medical or other limitations.
Members of Congress were notified Tuesday and a formal Army announced was scheduled for Wednesday.
Those in the Individual Ready Reserve are former enlisted soldiers and officers who have some nonactive-duty military service obligation remaining, under terms they signed when they signed on but who chose not to fulfill it in the Guard or Reserve.
The Pentagon had hoped to reduce its troop levels in Iraq to about 105,000 this spring, but because of increasingly effective and deadly resistance the level has risen to about 140,000.
Military officials have said they may need to stay at that level for at least another year or two, a commitment of forces that could not be maintained by the active force alone.
The Army frequently must integrate reservists with its active-duty forces, but it rarely has to reach into the Individual Ready Reserve. The Army has about 117,000 people in this category of reservist; the Navy has 64,000, the Marine Corps 58,000 and the Air Force 37,000.
The military has relied heavily on National Guard and Reserve soldiers in Iraq, in part because some essential specialties like military police are found mainly in the reserves rather than the active-duty force and partly because the mission has required more troops than planned.
Reserve troops make up at least one-third of the U.S. force in Iraq, and this month they have accounted for nearly half of all troops killed in combat.
In January, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld authorized the Army to activate as many as 6,500 people from the Individual Ready Reserve, drawing on presidential authority granted in 2001.
Not until May did the Army begin looking in detail at the available pool of people.
At that point some Army recruiters caused a controversy when they contacted members of the Individual Ready Reserve and suggested they would wind up in Iraq unless they joined a Reserve or Guard unit. Some complained that they were being coerced to transfer into a Reserve unit.
-------- war crimes
Croatian Serb leader jailed
BBC
29 June, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3849631.stm
Wartime Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic has been jailed for 13 years for his part in ethnic cleansing.
The Hague war crimes tribunal found him guilty in January of persecution in the Krajina Serb republic in Croatia when he was prime minister.
Hundreds died and tens of thousands of were expelled as a policy of ethnic cleansing was pursued in the area.
Babic admitted one count of persecution, in a plea bargaining deal which saw four other charges dropped. The crime was characterised by ruthlessness and savagery and had a severe impact on victims and their relatives. Their suffering is still significant Judge Alphons Orie Prosecutors had asked for a maximum 11 years' jail as part of the plea-bargaining, but the court ruled the crimes warranted a longer sentence.
"More than 200 civilians, including women and elderly persons were murdered, and several hundred civilians were confined or imprisoned in inhumane conditions," said presiding judge Alphons Orie.
"The crime was characterised by ruthlessness and savagery and had a severe impact on victims and their relatives. Their suffering is still significant."
Babic was a former close ally of ex-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, but has testified against him at his trial in The Hague.
Babic, 48, a dentist by profession, has said he feels shame and remorse over his actions.
Krajina covers about a third of Croatian territory. Babic was mayor of the town of Knin when Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991.
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U.S. Military Tribunal to Try 3 Suspects
The Associated Press
Jun 29, 2004
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=542&u=/ap/20040629/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/guantanamo_tribunals_1&printer=1
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - The U.S. military announced Tuesday that it has formed a five-member military tribunal to try three terrorism suspects held at this U.S. naval base.
The Pentagon's announcement came a day after the Supreme Court issued a ruling that about 600 prisoners at the base in Cuba should have access to appeal their detention in U.S. civilian courts.
"This is an important first step," Air Force Maj. John Smith, a lawyer who helped draft commission rules, said in a telephone interview from the Pentagon. "We'd like to have a case tried by the end of the year."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Park Police Chief Fights for Reinstatement
June 29, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-29-09.asp#anchor5
U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers filed a complaint on Monday before a federal civil service judge seeking immediate reinstatement to her job.
Chambers' filing before the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) triggers an evidentiary hearing before an administrative judge.
Prior to that hearing Chambers' lawyers will have full discovery rights to secure internal documents and question top Interior officials under oath.
The MSPB can order Chief Chambers returned to work and, if it finds illegal personnel practices, can order an investigation leading to discipline of responsible officials.
The board can also order that Chief Chambers be immediately taken off administrative leave pending the outcome of the hearing and appeals.
Chambers has been on paid administrative leave and forbidden to work since December 5, 2003 - a few days after she gave an interview to a "Washington Post," reporter in which she spoke of low staffing levels at the National Park Service.
Park Service Deputy Director Donald Murphy placed Chambers on administrative leave, stripped her of law enforcement credentials, and imposed a "gag order" barring her from granting any further interviews.
Murphy proposed to dismiss Chambers from her post, but that has been stayed until the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) completes its investigation into the matter.
The OSC serves as a referee of federal civil service rules.
In February the OSC opened an investigation into the case and in April requested that Interior stay further adverse actions against Chief Chambers for 45 days while it concluded its investigation
But those 45 days have passed and the OSC appears to be dragging its feet on the issue.
"This farce has gone on long enough; it is time for Chief Chambers to go back to work," said attorney Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which will be part of the legal team representing Chambers. "The reason the Department of Interior has not acted is that the only charges they could find to lodge against Chief Chambers do not pass the laugh test."
"For seven months, Chief Chambers has been kept in limbo without the ability to fight back," Ruch added, noting that Chief Chambers was required to wait at least 120 days after OSC's first involvement before filing directly with MSPB. "Now the fight has begun."
-------- courts
Justices Back Detainee Access To U.S. Courts
President's Powers Are Limited
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13350-2004Jun28?language=printer
The Supreme Court struck down key elements of the Bush administration's legal policy for its battle against terrorism yesterday, ruling in two cases that the executive branch does not have the authority to deprive accused members of al Qaeda or the Taliban of their liberty without giving them a day in court.
The court said the president may order a U.S. citizen detained as an "enemy combatant" -- but it soundly rejected the administration's expansive interpretation of that authority, ruling that such detainees are entitled to contest the government's case against them.
The court also ruled that each of the 595 alleged members of al Qaeda and the Taliban being held at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has the right to ask a U.S. judge to set him free.
In a third case -- that of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who is accused of taking part in an al Qaeda plot to explode a radiological bomb in the United States -- the court ruled that he would have to resubmit his petition for habeas corpus because his attorney filed it in the wrong court.
The courtroom atmosphere was tense as justices read a series of much-anticipated opinions, elaborating their strongly felt views on cases that had raised the most significant wartime civil liberties issues since World War II. Those opinions left open questions about the precise scope and practical effect of what the court had done.
But the court's bottom line was clear: Insofar as it affects individual constitutional rights, the president's conduct of the fight against terrorism is not immune to judicial review.
"Striking the proper constitutional balance here is of great importance to the Nation during this period of ongoing combat," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, in a passage that seemed to summarize the dominant view of the court. "But it is equally vital that our calculus not give short shrift to the values that this country holds dear or to the privilege that is American citizenship. It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our Nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested; and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad."
She added: "We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens."
Civil liberties organizations and their allies in Congress hailed the decisions, saying the court had validated their claims that, since Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has been sacrificing too much liberty in the name of national security.
"The Supreme Court's decisions in the Hamdi case and the case involving the Guantanamo detainees are triumphs for the rule of law," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. "The notion that the President has the unchallengeable authority to define the circumstances of a person's detention, especially that of a United States citizen, is contrary to our nation's history and experience."
The Bush administration emphasized that the court had recognized that it may detain U.S. citizens as enemy combatants, albeit under more limited circumstances.
"The Justice Department is pleased that the U.S. Supreme Court today upheld the authority of the President as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces to detain enemy combatants, including U.S. citizens," department spokesman Mark Corallo said in a statement. "This authority is crucial in times of war whether the enemy combatants are individuals who join our enemies on the battlefield to fight against America and its allies, or whether they are individuals who infiltrate our border to commit hostile and war-like acts against our nation."
In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, No. 03-6696, the issue was whether President Bush could declare Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen who was arrested while allegedly fighting for the Taliban in 2001, an enemy combatant and order him detained indefinitely by the military.
The Bush administration cited both the president's inherent powers to conduct war and the Sept. 18, 2001, congressional resolution allowing him to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
But at the Supreme Court, only Justice Clarence Thomas embraced those claims yesterday.
Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote that the Constitution forbids the president from doing anything but charging Hamdi with a crime such as treason or releasing him, unless Congress specifically authorizes executive detention. Justice David H. Souter, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, reached a similar conclusion, but based on the argument that the Sept. 18 resolution did not clearly state Congress's intent to override a 1971 federal statute barring executive detention.
A four-justice plurality of the court -- Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, O'Connor, and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer -- acknowledged that the president did have authority to designate citizens as enemy combatants, under the Sept. 18 resolution and a 1942 Supreme Court ruling that approved of the designation of a U.S. citizen fighting for Nazi Germany as an enemy combatant.
Such authority "is so fundamental and accepted an incident to war as to be an exercise of the 'necessary and appropriate force' Congress has authorized the President to use," O'Connor wrote for the group.
But the plurality concluded that the president must exercise that authority in keeping with the constitutional guarantee of due process, affording Hamdi access to a lawyer and "a fair opportunity to rebut the Government's factual assertions before a neutral decisionmaker," as O'Connor's opinion put it.
Thus, those four, plus Thomas, formed a majority of five for the proposition that U.S. citizens could be held as enemy combatants.
But there was a six-vote majority for the part of the plurality opinion that outlined a hearing for Hamdi; Souter and Ginsburg agreed to vote for it, while Thomas declined.
Scalia and Stevens wanted no part of such a compromise. Reading his opinion from the bench in a show of strong disagreement with the plurality, Scalia said that "if civil rights are to be curtailed during wartime, it must be done openly and democratically, as the constitution requires, rather than by silent erosion through an opinion of this court."
It was unclear exactly what sort of legal process the court had created for Hamdi. In a nod to the administration, the plurality recommended that the usual presumption of innocence be suspended, and that the government be permitted to introduce hearsay evidence. It even suggested that in other future enemy-combatant cases involving U.S. citizens, a military tribunal might suffice, though the Bush administration has declined to use such tribunals against citizens.
But Souter and Ginsburg withheld their approval for those parts of the opinion, so they lack the backing of a court majority.
Ultimately, O'Connor left it up to district judges to fashion "a fact-finding process that is both prudent and incremental."
Supporters of the administration said this favored them.
"They are basically upholding the whole enemy combatant status and tweaking the evidence test," said David B. Rivkin Jr., a lawyer who has advised the administration on terrorism issues. "The only difference I can see is that you are entitled to have you or your lawyer give your side of the story."
Still, the net effect was to end what some legal analysts had seen as the administration's attempt to create a parallel legal system for terrorism cases, separate from ordinary criminal justice and controlled almost exclusively by the executive.
"The Hamdi decision was better than the human rights and civil liberties groups asked for," said Joseph N. Onek, director of the Liberty and Security Initiative of the Constitution Project, a Washington-based civil liberties organization.
The court's decision to throw out Padilla's case on jurisdictional grounds was by a 5 to 4 vote.
The court ruled that his attorney incorrectly went to a New York court in search of an order releasing him after the government had moved him to a South Carolina brig.
But unless the Justice Department decides to charge Padilla, it seemed likely that there will be five votes to let him go once his case comes back up. Four justices -- Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer -- dissented from the court's refusal to decide his case yesterday, while Scalia is on record in the Hamdi case as opposing the administration's approach to enemy combatants generally.
As Stevens read his dissent from the court's procedural ruling against Padilla yesterday, his voice quavered. He hinted that the recent revelations of administration planning for harsh interrogations of terrorism detainees and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had an impact inside the court.
Referring to Padilla's two years of incommunicado detention as a "form of torture," Stevens said that "if this Nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyranny even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny."
In two consolidated cases, Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334, and al Odah v. Rumsfeld, No. 03-343, which were brought by family members of 16 British, Australian and Kuwaiti citizens currently or formerly held in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, this issue was whether the detainees may seek their freedom in U.S. courts by applying for a writ of habeas corpus.
The detainees were not charged with crimes or permitted direct contact with lawyers, and attorneys for their families called the prison a U.S.-created "lawless enclave."
Even before recent revelations that the Bush administration contemplated using harsh interrogation tactics on certain detainees there, Guantanamo had turned into a major international issue.
The administration argued that the naval base is still formally a part of Cuba, and thus outside U.S. court jurisdiction.
In response to diplomatic pressure and military determinations that some detainees are no longer dangerous, the Bush administration has released 146 prisoners from Guantanamo in the past two years, including the two British citizens involved in this case, though 12 of those released are in custody in their home countries. The administration has named six detainees for trial before a military tribunal.
But by a vote of 6 to 3 yesterday, the court said that is not good enough. Stevens wrote for the majority that federal law permits U.S. courts to entertain the prisoners' habeas corpus petitions.
The Bush administration had relied on a 1950 Supreme Court ruling that said foreign prisoners held outside the United States in connection with a war are not eligible for habeas corpus. But a subsequent Supreme Court ruling had overturned that, Stevens wrote.
Stevens left it for the lower courts to answer the question of "whether and what further proceedings may become necessary." His opinion also did not define the intended geographical scope of the ruling. The case as presented to the court concerned only the Cuba base, but Scalia, raising the prospect of lawsuits by prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, noted in dissent that the logic of Stevens's opinion "boldly extends the scope of the habeas statute to the four corners of the earth."
--------
Analysis Executive Branch Reined In
By David Von Drehle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13226-2004Jun28.html
The Supreme Court's complicated holdings in three cases involving detainees from the battle against terrorism may not result in any prisoners going free -- the justices yesterday left that for lower courts or tribunals to decide.
But the opinions, concurrences and dissents were decisive on this: They represent a nearly unanimous repudiation of the Bush administration's sweeping claims to power over those captives.
Liberal or conservative mattered little in the ultimate outcome. The court roundly rejected the president's assertion that, in time of war, he can order the "potentially indefinite detention of individuals who claim to be wholly innocent of wrongdoing," to quote the court's opinion in the case of foreign prisoners held at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In fact, the administration's claim to such power over U.S. citizens produced an opinion signed by perhaps the court's most conservative justice, Antonin Scalia, and possibly its most liberal, John Paul Stevens.
"The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive," Scalia wrote, with Stevens's support.
In this way, the court's rejection of the executive-power arguments in the cases might be seen as part of a reemergence of the other branches of government from the shadow of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As the justices suggested several times in their opinions, emergency measures that might have been within the president's power in the days and weeks just after 9/11 now must be reconciled withAmerican norms of due process. In that sense, the cases struck a chord with congressional hearings into the rules for prisoner interrogations at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Given that the administration has said its war on terrorism might stretch over generations, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote, the "indefinite detention" of a prisoner "could last for the rest of his life." And that, the court said, is too long to do without the basics of due process.
Only Justice Clarence Thomas embraced the administration's positions without reservation, referring in a dissenting opinion to "the breadth of the President's authority to detain enemy combatants, an authority that includes making virtually conclusive factual findings" that the Supreme Court is powerless to "second-guess."
Each case before the court presented slightly different facts -- there was a case asking whether foreign prisoners captured in the terrorism war had a right in U.S. courts to challenge their imprisonment, a case asking whether a U.S. citizen could be held as an "enemy combatant" without a hearing of some kind, and a case challenging the short-circuiting of a criminal case against accused terrorist Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen, by placing him in military custody as an enemy combatant.
But the justices used the cases to wrestle with one of the core dilemmas of a free society: How can strength be balanced with liberty? Or, put another way, what are the limits on a leader's power in a crisis?
"The defining characteristic of American constitutional government is its constant tension between security and liberty," Justice David H. Souter wrote.
And so the opinions drew heavily on some of the oldest and weightiest precedents in the book. Starting with King John's promise in the Magna Carta, signed in 1215, that "no free man should be imprisoned . . . save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land," the justices traced the limits on executive power through English common law, on through the Federalist Papers and down a long a line of precedents forged in some of the darkest hours of the nation, including the Civil War and World War II.
"We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens," O'Connor wrote in a painstakingly nuanced opinion ordering a hearing for U.S. citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was taken captive in Afghanistan.
The justices left unresolved exactly how tightly they intend to try to rein in the president. All of them paid deference to the heavy responsibility of the commander in chief and his duty to keep the country secure. Even as they reaffirmed the bedrock principle of checks and balances, they left Bush and his successors substantial room to operate.
They admonished lower courts to tread carefully on national security matters. They resolved the Padilla case -- which could have been the most provocative -- on narrow jurisdictional grounds. And they stopped far short of ruling that citizens who are designated enemy combatants must be charged as criminals and given the full access to the courts that would entail.
This moderation ultimately left the court's liberal wing unsatisfied. Stevens, joined by Justices Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, argued passionately that the Padilla case should have been dealt with head on. "At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free society. . . . Unconstrained Executive detention for the purpose of investigating and preventing subversive activity is the hallmark of the Star Chamber," he wrote.
Yet if, in the end, the justices could not agree on exactly how far the president can go, they were clear that he had already gone too far.
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Justices Affirm Legal Rights of 'Enemy Combatants'
June 29, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/politics/29DETA.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, June 28 - Declaring that "a state of war is not a blank check for the president," the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that those deemed enemy combatants by the Bush administration, both in the United States and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, must be given the ability to challenge their detention before a judge or other "neutral decision-maker."
Although divided in its rationale, the court was decisive in rejecting the administration's core legal argument that the executive branch has the last word in imposing open-ended detention on citizens and noncitizens alike. The justices' language was occasionally passionate, reflecting their awareness of the historic nature of this confrontation between executive and judicial authority.
Eight justices, all but Justice Clarence Thomas, said the two-year-long detention of an American citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, had either been invalid from the beginning or had become so, for constitutional or statutory reasons. The controlling opinion, by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, said that Mr. Hamdi's detention was permissible if designation as an enemy combatant proved to be correct, but that his inability so far to appear before a judge, challenge the government's evidence, and tell his side of the story had deprived him of his constitutional right to due process.
The opinion said that a citizen held as an enemy combatant was entitled to "notice of the factual basis for his classification" and a "fair opportunity to rebut the government's factual assertions before a neutral decision-maker." Writing for herself, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer, Justice O'Connor said, "These essential constitutional promises may not be eroded."
She added that "we necessarily reject the government's assertion that separation of powers principles mandate a heavily circumscribed role for the courts in such circumstances." She said that the administration's position that the courts could not examine individual detainees' cases "serves only to condense power into a single branch of government."
Mr. Hamdi, ostensibly picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan, has sought to contest his designation as an enemy combatant. The federal appeals court that heard his case ruled last year that a nine-paragraph statement filed by a Pentagon official, Michael Mobbs, was a sufficient basis for Mr. Hamdi's continued detention and that no further inquiry into his case was required.
In a second case Monday, concerning the hundreds of noncitizens confined at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, the court ruled 6 to 3 that federal judges have jurisdiction to consider petitions for writs of habeas corpus from detainees who argue that they are being unlawfully held.
The administration's position on the Guantánamo detainees was that under a World War II-era Supreme Court precedent, no federal court had jurisdiction to hear their cases because the base is outside the sovereign territory of the United States. But for a variety of reasons, the precedents the administration relied on did not govern the analysis, Justice John Paul Stevens said for the majority. A main factor was the nature of Guantánamo bay, "territory over which the United States exercises exclusive jurisdiction and control" under a 101-year-old lease, Justice Stevens said.
The majority's analysis suggested, in fact, that federal courts might have jurisdiction to hear claims of illegal detention from those held in other foreign locations as well. While Justice Stevens was not explicit on this point, his suggestion was enough to provoke Justice Antonin Scalia to complain in dissent that "the court boldly extends the scope of the habeas statute to the four corners of the earth." Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas joined the dissent.
The Supreme Court also dealt with a third case Monday, that of Jose Padilla, an American citizen picked up at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on suspicion of planning to detonate a radioactive device. This case ended with what was essentially a nonruling. Mr. Padilla's habeas corpus petition was brought in the wrong court, the Supreme Court said by a 5 to 4 majority. His lawyers said they would act promptly to refile the case, which is now considerably strengthened by the court's analysis in the Hamdi case.
The decisions in the Hamdi and Padilla cases came two months to the day after those cases were argued. Just hours after the arguments concluded on April 28, CBS television broadcast the first images of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.
While the Supreme Court cases all involved detentions resulting from the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and had no connection to Iraq, there was much speculation in the intervening weeks about what impact the revelations from Abu Ghraib might have on the court.
Not surprisingly, no justice made a direct reference to those events. But it was difficult to read some of the passages in a vacuum. For example, Justice Stevens, dissenting from the court's refusal to reach the merits of the Padilla case, noted that Mr. Padilla had been held without charges or access to a lawyer for two years, and then said:
"Executive detention of subversive citizens, like detention of enemy soldiers to keep them off the battlefield, may sometimes be justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado detention for months on end is such a procedure. Whether the information so procured is more or less reliable than that acquired by more extreme forms of torture is of no consequence. For if this nation is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny."
Justice Breyer and Justices David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined that dissent.
In her opinion in the Hamdi case, Justice O'Connor said that "indefinite detention for the purpose of interrogation is not authorized." She also said: "History and common sense teach us that an unchecked system of detention carries the potential to become a means for oppression and abuse of others."
All three decisions left important questions unanswered. In the Guantánamo case, Rasul v. Bush, No. 03-334, while it is clear that the detainees there can now bring habeas corpus petitions in federal court, the justices said little about the range of claims they could present or about how judges are to weigh those claims against the government's arguments about the need for continued detention.
Barbara Olshansky, deputy legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York legal organization representing the Guantánamo detainees, said in an interview that lawyers would move quickly to test the scope of the court's ruling. The case the Supreme Court decided was brought in the name of 16 British, Australian, and Kuwaiti detainees, two of whom have been released by the government and sent home to England. Ms. Olshansky said the case may now be expanded into a class-action suit on behalf of many others.
Justice O'Connor's opinion in the Hamdi case, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, No. 03-6696, offered a more detailed blueprint for what might happen next.
As a matter of constitutional due process, Justice O'Connor said, the lower courts must now balance Mr. Hamdi's interest in liberty against the "weighty and sensitive governmental interests in ensuring that those who have in fact fought with the enemy during a war do not return to battle against the United States."
"Striking the proper constitutional balance here is of great importance to the nation during this period of ongoing combat," she said, adding: "But it is equally vital that our calculus not give short shrift to the values that this country holds dear or to the privilege that is American citizenship."
On Mr. Hamdi's side, she said, was "the most elemental of liberty interests - the interest in being free from physical detention by one's own government."
Justice O'Connor said the Federal District Court in Richmond that first handled Mr. Hamdi's petition for habeas corpus had been too demanding on the government, requesting many records, while the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had been too quick to set aside the district court's order and dismiss Mr. Hamdi's petition.
Suggesting that the proper path lay somewhere in between, Justice O'Connor said that "enemy combatant proceedings may be tailored to alleviate their uncommon potential to burden the executive at a time of ongoing military conflict." She said that the normal rules that curbed the use of hearsay evidence might be bent and that there could be a "presumption in favor of the government's evidence" as long as a detainee had "a fair opportunity for rebuttal."
The administration had argued that if any kind of hearing was found necessary, the government's submission should be accepted according to a low standard of proof known as the "some evidence" standard, which is used in administrative proceedings to provide that as long as there is "some evidence" in the record, the government wins. This standard was "inadequate" and "ill suited" to evaluate the basis for detaining a citizen, Justice O'Connor said. She added: "Plainly, the `process' Hamdi has received is not that to which he is entitled under the Due Process Clause."
It was not clear from the opinion whether the court would insist in all circumstances that a detainee's case be evaluated by a federal judge. "There remains the possibility that the standards we have articulated could be met by an appropriately authorized and properly constituted military tribunal," Justice O'Connor said.
Four other justices who found fault with the administration's position took very different lines of attack. Justices Souter and Ginsburg said that in their view, Mr. Hamdi's detention lacked a legal basis as a matter of statutory authority. There was consequently no need to delve into constitutional issues, the two said in an opinion by Justice Souter.
This opinion relied on a 1971 federal law, the Non-Detention Act, which provides: "No citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress." There has been no act of Congress to justify the detention of Mr. Hamdi, they said.
Justice O'Connor had found statutory justification in the Authorization for Use of Military Force, which Congress passed in the days following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to authorize "all necessary and appropriate force" to pursue and prevent international terrorism. While only three other justices joined her opinion, Justice Thomas expressed a similar view of the statutory authorization in what was otherwise a dissenting opinion, thus giving a majority of five votes on the statutory question.
But Justices Souter and Ginsburg said the use-of-force law said nothing about detaining citizens. "If the government raises nothing further than the record now shows, the Non-Detention Act entitles Hamdi to be released," Justice Souter said, adding: "On the record in front of us, the government has not made out a case on any theory."
At another point, Justice Souter referred to the court's 1952 decision that overturned President Harry Truman's seizure of the steel mills. "It is instructive to recall Justice Jackson's observation that the president is not commander in chief of the country, only of the military," he said.
The remaining two justices, Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens, hardly the most likely of allies, applied a very different analysis. Mr. Hamdi was entitled to a habeas corpus petition ordering his release, they said, unless either the government prosecuted him for treason or Congress exercised its constitutional authority to suspend habeas corpus.
Justice Scalia's opinion, which Justice Stevens signed, said that the O'Connor opinion had not gone far enough to protect Mr. Hamdi's civil liberties. Deriding that opinion as too tempered, he said it embodied a "Mr. Fix-it Mentality" with a "mission to Make Everything Come Out Right, rather than merely to decree the consequences, as far as individual rights are concerned, of the other two branches' actions and omissions."
Justice Scalia added: "If civil rights are to be curtailed during wartime, it must be done openly and democratically, as the Constitution requires, rather than by silent erosion through an opinion of this court."
That left Justice Thomas alone. "I do not think that the federal government's war powers can be balanced away by this court," he said in his dissenting opinion. "This detention falls squarely within the federal government's war powers, and we lack the expertise and capacity to second-guess that decision."
The court's reliance on the use-of-force authorization did not appear to be an open-ended one. Noting that the United States still has thousands of troops in Afghanistan, Justice O'Connor said, "The United States may detain, for the duration of these hostilities, individuals legitimately determined to be Taliban combatants who engaged in an armed conflict against the United States." The clear implication was that an ongoing, generations-long global war on terrorism would not in itself be sufficient to justify detention if active hostilities had ended.
For Mr. Padilla's case, Rumsfeld v. Padilla, No. 03-1027, the path now lies in the Federal District Court in South Carolina. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Rehnquist said the case could not proceed because Mr. Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman, had filed his habeas corpus petition in district court in New York, where she had been appointed to the case, two days after the government transferred him to a military prison in Charleston.
When the proper court does consider his case, however, the Hamdi decision may well put Mr. Padilla in a stronger position to challenge his classification as an enemy combatant, given that he was taken into custody in Chicago rather than in Afghanistan.
The scene in the courtroom Monday morning was one of considerable drama as the three decisions were announced.
After Justice O'Connor explained her decision in the Hamdi case, both Justices Souter and Scalia described their separate positions. Justice Stevens also read from his dissent in the Padilla case after Chief Justice Rehnquist had explained why the majority was not reaching the merits.
The announcements went on for more than half an hour, certainly the best live theater in town although the courtroom was, surprisingly, nearly half empty. At the end of the session, Chief Justice Rehnquist announced that the court would conclude its term and announce all remaining decisions on Tuesday.
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Pundits laud 'enemy combatants' ruling
While Supreme Court decision hands Bush legal defeat, it strengthens executive role in waging war in an age of terror.
csmonitor
by Jim Bencivenga
June 29, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0629/dailyUpdate.html
In three rulings handed down Monday, the "Supremes," made clear that "enemy combatants are entitled to [have] access to US courts whether they are being held in a military brig within the US or at a terrorism prison camp" at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, reports The Christian Science Monitor.
And while the full legal implications of the Court's decisions are yet to be fully digested, editorials and opinion pieces reflecting a wide spectrum of viewpoints from newspapers both domestic and international, praised the outcome. Pundits viewed the Court as decisive, both legally, and more importantly, democratically, in asserting the role of courts as final arbiter of individual rights.
The Court rejected the Bush administration's core legal premise, that when it comes to waging war, the separation of powers principle in the US Constitution gives the executive branch final say on open-ended detention of enemy combatants. Just as important was the way in which the Court "correctly placed itself at the center of this political storm and re-emphasized the importance of the rule of law," editorialized the Times of London (subscription).
The decision by the US Supreme Court that the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have the right to challenge their captivity in American courts is wise and brave. ...The ruling should also be a rebuke to the many pundits (and film-makers) who claim that American democracy has been a victim of the political atmosphere created by the September 11, 2001, atrocities. It plainly has not. The court's firm stance in this instance echoes other occasions when its members have inconvenienced the executive in times of war.
Summing up the practical complexities of the ruling in an editorial, the UK's Independent said:
Though [Guantanamo's] Camp Delta prisoners had the right to their day in court, Mr. Bush had not acted illegally when he ordered certain prisoners to be held without charge. The court said he had been given this specific authority by Congress after the attacks of 11 September 2001.
Political fallout from the decisions handed down Monday necessarily favors Democrats, reports Knight Ridder in a syndicated column.
...the rulings are a potentially powerful addition to the argument Democrats have been trying to build that Bush has abused his powers... This time, the charges that the Bush administration overstepped its bounds in the war on terror did not come from John Kerry, Al Gore, or Michael Moore. Instead, it was the US Supreme Court, hardly a liberal institution.
Republicans, however, see the verdicts as changing few minds not already made up, writes Knight Ridder.
Charlie Black, a White House adviser, said Americans prefer the aggressive actions Bush is taking in protecting the country. 'I think the voters would say when it comes to terrorists or suspected terrorists, err on the side of being tough on them rather than being too soft on them, and if you get beaten back by the courts, then they should comply,' he said.
The Wall Street Journal praised the Court's decision for stepping "away from the chaos of making judges the arbiters of American security."
While Justice O'Connor denied a blank check to the president "when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens," she also outlined the extraordinary deference that "must give considerable deference to the executive" in waging war, even to the extent of inviting "the administration to set up a military court to hear [plaintiffs'] plea," implying "that the military is capable of adequately reviewing challenges brought by the Gitmo prisoners," wrote the Journal.
That the justices were fully engaged in these cases was evident by how their "language was occasionally passionate, reflecting their awareness of the historic nature of this confrontation between executive and judicial authority," reports the New York Times.
Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion highlights that fact:
Many think it not only inevitable but entirely proper that liberty give way to security in times of national crisis - that at the extremes of military exigency, inter arma silent leges. Whatever the general merits of the view that war silence law or modulates its voice, that view has no place in the interpretation and application of a Constitution designed precisely to confront war and, in a manner that accords with democratic principles, to accommodate it.
The verdict does present the Pentagon with a "logistical nightmare," writes The Times of London. The decisions appear to "mean that the US military may have to grant access to the high security slice of land [Guantanamo] to an army of lawyers."
The Journal advocates that Congress must "step in with legislation consolidating all of the Gitmo cases in a single court," and recommends that Arlington, Virginia, where the Pentagon is located, be the venue.
For the prisoners, the wheels of justice will continue to grind slowly. "No prisoners are likely to be released from Guantanamo Bay soon," observed the Independent.
-------- drug war
Justices Will Hear Argument on Medical Marijuana Laws
June 29, 2004
New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/politics/29scotus.html
WASHINGTON, June 28 - The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to decide whether Congress has the authority to prohibit the medical use of marijuana in states where the voters or the legislature have approved the drug's use under a doctor's care.
The case, certain to be one of the most closely watched of the court's next term, is an appeal by the Bush administration of a preliminary ruling issued last December by the federal appeals court in San Francisco. That court, finding that the federal Controlled Substances Act was "likely unconstitutional" as applied to two California patients and their suppliers of marijuana, issued an injunction that barred federal enforcement while the case proceeded.
The case was one of eight new appeals the justices granted as they began the last week of their 2003-2004 term. In addition to its implications for social policy, the case raises important federalism questions. One question is whether the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce extends to marijuana that is cultivated for noncommercial use within the borders of a single state, never traveling in interstate commerce.
California, which adopted its Compassionate Use Act in 1996, is one of nine states that permit marijuana for medical use under some circumstances. The other eight are Alaska, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont and Washington. Similar efforts are under way in other states.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has strongly opposed the state laws. The case the Supreme Court accepted began with a confrontation between sheriff's deputies in Butte County, Calif., and federal drug agents, who both showed up at the home of Diana Monson, a patient whose severe back spasms are not helped by prescription drugs but are alleviated by marijuana, which she uses under her doctor's care. The sheriff's deputies concluded that the marijuana she was growing was legal, but the federal agents seized and destroyed her plants after a three-hour standoff with the deputies.
Ms. Monson and another patient who uses marijuana, Angel McClary Raich, sued the federal government in Federal District Court, seeking an order saying the Controlled Substances Act could not legally be applied to their marijuana use. They lost in that court but won a preliminary injunction in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where a 2-to-1 majority found their marijuana cultivation and use to be noncommercial in character and outside the jurisdiction of Congress.
Appealing to the Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. Raich, No. 03-1454, Mr. Ashcroft is arguing that the appeals court's ruling "seriously undermines Congress's comprehensive scheme for the regulation of dangerous drugs." The brief adds: "Marijuana is a commodity that is readily purchased and sold in a well-defined market of drug trafficking," regardless of whether a particular use takes place within a state's borders.
These were among the other cases the justices added to their docket for the next term, which begins Oct. 4:
Death Penalty
For the second time in two years, the court accepted an appeal from a Texas death-row inmate, Thomas Miller-El, a black man who was tried and convicted of murder in 1986 by a jury from which the prosecutor had removed 10 of 11 black potential jurors by peremptory challenges.
Mr. Miller-El tried to challenge his conviction on the ground of prosecutorial misconduct and jury bias through a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, which the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit denied. In its ruling last year, the Supreme Court said in an 8-to-1 decision that the Fifth Circuit had failed to take full account of the evidence, and ordered it to reconsider the case. In the reconsideration, the appeals court again refused to grant habeas corpus, this time adopting the view of Justice Clarence Thomas, who had written a solitary dissent.
In his new petition, Mr. Miller-El's lawyer, Seth P. Waxman, the former solicitor general who also represented the inmate in the earlier Supreme Court appeal, told the justices that the latest decision "undermines this court's supervisory authority" and made it "critically important" for the Supreme Court to review the case again. The appeal is Miller-El v. Dretke, No. 03-9659.
Spy's Claim
Accepting an appeal by the Central Intelligence Agency, the court agreed to decide whether federal courts can consider a claim that the agency has wrongfully refused to keep a promise to provide a foreign agent with lifetime financial support in return for espionage services.
The case, Tenet v. Doe, No. 03-1395, began as a lawsuit by the foreign agent, a former high-ranking diplomat for a Communist country, and his wife, now both United States citizens. Their names were not revealed in the lawsuit, and the government has neither confirmed nor denied their claims. They said they initially received about $20,000 a year plus housing and health care. Eventually, both their services and the payments stopped and the couple, out of work, brought suit.
The Federal District Court in Seattle, in a ruling affirmed by the Ninth Circuit, has allowed the case to proceed to the pretrial discovery phase. In its appeal, the agency told the justices that this "unprecedented holding" was "manifestly wrong" and threatened to damage national security. The couple's lawyers argue that there is no danger because the appeals court invited the C.I.A. to invoke a "state secrets privilege" as the case goes forward. --------
Court to hear marijuana appeal
ASSOCIATED PRESS June 29, 2004 http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040628-110147-1435r.htm
The Supreme Court said yesterday it will consider whether sick people who smoke pot on a doctor's orders are subject to a federal ban on marijuana.
The court agreed to hear the Bush administration's appeal of a case it lost last year involving two California women who say marijuana is the only drug that helps alleviate their chronic pain and other medical problems.
The high court will hear the case sometime next winter. It was among eight new cases the court added to its calendar for the coming term. The current term is expected to end this week.
The marijuana case came to the Supreme Court after the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in December that a federal law outlawing marijuana does not apply to California patients whose doctors have prescribed the drug.
In its 2-1 decision, the appeals court said prosecuting medicinal-marijuana users under the federal Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional if the marijuana is not sold or transported across state lines or not used for nonmedicinal purposes.
Judge Harry Pregerson wrote for the appeals court majority that smoking pot on the advice of a doctor is "different in kind from drug trafficking." The court added that "this limited use is clearly distinct from the broader illicit drug market."
In its appeal to the justices, the government argued that state laws making exceptions for "medical marijuana" are trumped by federal drug laws.
Congress passed the Controlled Substances Act to control "all manufacturing, possession and distribution of any" drug it lists, Bush administration Supreme Court lawyer Theodore Olson wrote.
"That goal cannot be achieved if the intrastate manufacturing, possession and distribution of a drug may occur without any federal regulation."
California's 1996 medicinal-marijuana law allows people to grow, smoke or obtain marijuana for medical needs with a doctor's recommendation. Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington state have laws similar to California. Thirty-five states have passed legislation recognizing marijuana's medicinal value.
In states with medicinal-marijuana laws, doctors can give written or oral recommendations on marijuana to patients with cancer, AIDS and other serious illnesses.
The case concerned two seriously ill California women, Angel Raich and Diane Monson. The two had sued Attorney General John Ashcroft, asking for a court order letting them smoke, grow or obtain marijuana without fear of federal prosecution.
Miss Raich, a 38-year-old Oakland woman suffering from ailments including scoliosis, a brain tumor, chronic nausea, fatigue and pain, smokes marijuana every few hours. She said she was partly paralyzed until she started smoking pot.
In other news, the high court agreed yesterday to intervene in a lawsuit claiming that the CIA reneged on a promise of lifetime support to former East Bloc spies now living under assumed names in the United States.
It agreed to hear an appeal filed by CIA Director George J. Tenet, who is fighting the lawsuit filed by a husband and wife who defected to the United States from an unidentified country.
The lawsuit is at a very early stage, in which the couple - identified only as John and Jane Doe - want access to documents and other information from the government. The Supreme Court's action means that request is on hold at least until the court rules on the case sometime next year.
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Colombia coca growers protest U.S. drug spraying
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
By Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-29/s_25345.asp
BOGOTA, Colombia - Thousands of poor farmers and Indians gathered in a northern Colombian village Monday to protest government plans to spray herbicides on coca fields. Protesters said the drug spraying, which is funded by the United States as part of Washington's war on drugs, will destroy legal crops and pollute rivers and mountains in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Known for its lush jungles and home to many indigenous groups, the Sierra Nevada range has become an increasingly important center for cocaine production as government eradication efforts push growers deeper into jungles.
Colombian antinarcotics forces, with heavy U.S. funding, spray coca crops with a mixture of imported and domestic herbicides, including glyphosate which is the active ingredient in Roundup.
"They destroy our legal crops, our health, and they pollute the flora and fauna," one tribal leader told reporters.
Police said there are an estimated 24,700 acres of coca - the raw material for cocaine - planted in Sierra Nevada, a government-protected national park.
Farm leaders gathered in the village of Guachaca, 430 miles north of Bogota, want the government to allow them to eradicate coca manually and to provide economic alternatives to a plant they grow to escape grinding poverty. More than 5,000 people turned up for the demonstration, said Magdalena department Gov. Trino Luna Correa.
President Alvaro Uribe, a close U.S. ally, has stepped up aerial spraying of the world's largest cocaine industry, which fuels a bloody 40-year guerrilla war.
A U.N. survey published this month showed coca cultivation in Colombia fell 16 percent to 86,000 hectares in 2003, its lowest levels since 1997.
-------- homeland security
FBI Warns That Terrorists May Use Floating Bombs
Reuters
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13187-2004Jun28.html
Homemade bombs and mines hidden in inner tubes or other harmless-looking flotsam may be bobbing in U.S. waters, a confidential FBI bulletin warned shortly before new anti-terror shipping laws take effect.
The FBI report, issued Wednesday and titled "Potential Indicators of Floating Improvised Explosive Devices or Terrorist Improvised Mines," said the agency knew of no specific planned attack, an FBI official said yesterday. But he said the bulletin sought to warn local, state and federal authorities that such attacks could occur.
"This is information that is disseminated on a weekly basis in order to provide law enforcement with current, relevant terrorism information," the official said. "This particular one dealt with the potential indicators of floating improvised explosive devices."
U.S. officials have repeatedly voiced concerns about possible seaborne attacks since the bombings of the USS Cole in 2000 and the French tanker Limburg in 2002, both off Yemen. Fears of militant activity in the United States have increased preceding elections in November.
The warning about possible homemade explosives in suspicious floating objects came about a week before a new United Nations security code designed to avert maritime terrorist attacks comes into force on Thursday.
The FBI official said he did not know if the bulletin was specifically timed to heighten awareness before the code takes effect.
The United States has vowed to enforce compliance with the strict new regulations. Its efforts are seen as a global litmus test of the new code's effectiveness.
The United Nations' new International Ship and Port Facility Security Code and the related U.S. Maritime Transportation Security Act, which ensures U.S. compliance with the U.N. regulations, are considered the most comprehensive security measures to be imposed on the maritime industry since World War II.
Beginning Thursday, all ships must obtain special security certificates that meet new International Maritime Organization standards.
The new code also stipulates that ports visited in the complex web of trade need to be security certified, with vessels required to keep a log of the last 10 ports they have visited.
Some industry experts have expressed concern that the U.S. pledge to force compliance could slow or harm world trade. The Coast Guard says it will board every ship on its first entry to the United States after Thursday to check compliance with the new rules.
--------
U.S. Expels Iranians Accused of Filming Sites
June 29, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/nyregion/29CND-EXPE.html?hp
UNITED NATIONS, June 29 - The United States has expelled two security guards at Iran's United Nations mission after they were observed filming and photographing New York landmark buildings and parts of the city's transportation system, American officials said today.
"They were asked to leave because we were very concerned about their activities, which weren't compatible with their stated duties," said Richard A. Grenell, the spokesman for the United States mission.
The language is common diplomatic language for cases of espionage.
The two men were ordered out this past weekend after Iranian guards were seen for the third time in two years videotaping bridges, tunnels, the Statue of Liberty and other landmark buildings, according to an American diplomat who asked not to be identified.
He said the pair were not the same two men who had been seen in earlier incidents in June 2002 and November 2003. The expelled men, who were not identified, left Saturday night, the official said.
Stuart Holliday, a deputy American ambassador, said, "As we understand it, these individuals were moving around New York City and essentially surveilling, taking photographs of a variety of New York landmarks and infrastructure and the rest. But obviously this isn't something that's a part of protecting their mission here in New York."
Asked if they couldn't have been acting as tourists, Mr. Holliday said, "I think we have great confidence in the ability of federal law enforcement to determine what action and behavior is typical and what is atypical."
In Washington, Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman, said, "They had been observed by the F.B.I. videotaping various locations from New York deemed to be sensitive."
Mr. Ereli said the filming and photographing by Iranian guards had been a "recurring problem," despite repeated warnings. "So," he said, "this was the option that we were left with."
While the photographing of such sites violates no law, security officials have been particularly vigilant of apparent surveillance of public buildings in New York since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Morteza Ramandi, the press attache at the Iranian mission at the United Nations, issued a statement confirming the departure of the two men and accusing the United States of "conjuring" the surveillance complaint.
"The guards in question never failed to observe any `no photography' signs, and the videotapes and photos they shot consisted of obvious and popular tourist attractions in New York City, which are of interest to any visitors in this city, such as the Central Park, museums, parades and the like," Mr. Ramandi said. "And we categorically deny that they ever took any photos of anything of security or sensitive nature."
The state-run Iranian News Agency in Tehran said that Iran "deplored" the expulsion and quoted an unidentified foreign ministry official saying, "This is aimed at disrupting the daily routine of Iran's permanent representation office, and this is not in harmony with accepted norms."
Iran remains part of the Bush administration's "axis of evil," which included North Korea and Iraq under the rule of Saddam Hussein.
The United States has not had relations with Iran since 1980 when the American embassy in Tehran was seized and 52 diplomats taken hostages by radicals in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic revolution that brought the country's clerical regime to power. Iranian diplomats in New York represent their country only to the United Nations.
The United States, Britain, France, Germany and the United Nations are currently pressuring Tehran to renounce ambitions to develop nuclear weapons and open its facilities to full inspections by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.
-------- justice
Justice Department Says It Can't Share Lobbying Data Because Computer System Will Crash
By Ted Bridis
Associated Press Writer
Jun 29, 2004
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBDP9DE2WD.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is offering a novel reason for denying a request seeking the Justice Department's database on foreign lobbyists: Copying the information would bring down the computer system.
"Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating," wrote Thomas J. McIntyre, chief in the Justice Department's office for information requests.
Advocates for open government said the government's assertion that it could not copy data from its computers was unprecedented but representative of generally negative responses to Freedom of Information Act requests.
"This was a new one on us. We weren't aware there were databases that could be destroyed just by copying them," Bob Williams of the Center for Public Integrity said Tuesday. The watchdog group in Washington made the request in January. He said the group expects to appeal the Justice Department's decision.
Many Justice Department computer systems, especially at the FBI, are considered outdated. The FBI is spending nearly $600 million to modernize its antiquated systems.
The Center for Public Integrity sought information about lobbying activities available under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, a 1938 law passed in response to German propaganda before World War II. Database records describe details of meetings among foreign lobbyists, the administration and Congress, and payments by foreign governments and some overseas groups for political advertisements and other campaigns.
"What they're asking for is a lot, and it's not something at this particular point in time we have the technical ability to do," Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said Tuesday.
McIntyre explained in a May 24 letter that the computer system - operated in the counterespionage section of the Justice Department's criminal division - "was not designed for mass export of all stored images" and said the system experiences "substantial problems."
"It sounds like incredible negligence for an agency that is keeping public records to keep them in such a precarious condition," said Stephen Doig, interim director at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. "I've never heard the excuse that making the equivalent of a backup copy would somehow cause steam to rise out of the computer."
The government said an overhaul of the system should be finished by December and copies should be available then.
Paper copies of records still are available for review four hours each day for people willing to travel to Washington, the Justice Department noted. Williams said the index available to researchers there is at least 12 months outdated, "which kind of renders it useless."
Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered federal agencies in October 2001 to review more closely which documents they release. Ashcroft's policy lets officials withhold information on any "sound legal basis." Under looser policies issued in 1993, agencies could hold back information to prevent "foreseeable harm."
"This is an administration and Justice is an agency that does not go out of its way to make information available to the public," said David Sobel, general counsel for the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.
On the Net:
Justice Department: www.usdoj.gov/criminal/fara
Center for Public Integrity: www.cpi.org
-------- police
Police Tactic to Sidestep Miranda Rights Rejected
By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11895-2004Jun28?language=printer
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that police officers may not deliberately avoid warning suspects of their right to remain silent before beginning questioning, asserting that a law enforcement tactic of interrogating suspects twice -- before reading them their rights and then after -- undermines the familiar Miranda right.
The 5 to 4 decision affirms the rights of suspects not to speak to investigators and is intended to end what the court said was an increasing police practice of twice questioning suspects in the hope of eliciting a confession. The decision rejects what the court called "a police strategy adapted to undermine the Miranda warnings."
Writing for the majority, Justice David H. Souter said that a Missouri woman's statements about her involvement in a murder plot were inadmissible because police had arrested her at 3 a.m., elicited her confession and only then advised her of her rights. She subsequently incriminated herself again.
"The reason that question-first is catching on is as obvious as its manifest purpose, which is to get a confession the suspect would not make if he understood his rights at the outset," Souter wrote in his opinion, which was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy filed a separate concurring opinion.
"The sensible underlying assumption is that with one confession in hand before the warnings, the interrogator can count on getting its duplicate, with trifling additional trouble," Souter wrote.
The ruling came in one of two closely watched cases decided yesterday that clarify the court's landmark 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, which first established "the right to remain silent." The Justices upheld Miranda in 2000, declaring that the Constitution requires police to inform suspects of their right not to answer questions and have attorneys present before interrogations can proceed. But the 2000 decision was broad and did not address interrogation techniques or other specific components of Miranda.
In the other case yesterday, the justices ruled that prosecutors may use physical evidence against a suspect even if it was obtained by officers who had not given the suspect a Miranda warning.
Supporters of Miranda had been especially tracking the case about the questioning of suspects, Missouri v. Seibert, No. 02-1371. In the case, Patrice Seibert was convicted and sentenced to life in prison after her second confession was admitted into evidence.
Seibert had been concerned that she would be charged with neglect in the death of her severely disabled son, Jonathan, at the family's mobile home, because of bedsores on his body. Two of her teenage sons and two of their friends hatched a plan in Seibert's presence to burn the trailer. To make it seem that Jonathan, 12, had not been left alone, they left a mentally disabled youth, Donald Rector, 17, in the trailer before setting it afire. Rector died of smoke inhalation.
Richard Hanrahan, a police detective in Rolla, Mo., elicited Seibert's confession, took a 20-minute break, then read her rights to her before she confessed again. The Missouri Supreme Court threw out the confession and the state, joined by the Bush administration, appealed.
Hanrahan said that he had been trained to question before and after giving a Miranda warning by a "national institute." The International Association of Chiefs of Police said yesterday that it does not endorse the tactic and does not teach it.
In an interview, Steven D. Benjamin, a Richmond lawyer who is on the board of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the two-step process has become so common that it has a name in the criminal justice community: "interrogating outside Miranda."
"It is an institutional practice among police. It happens every day," Benjamin said.
Souter wrote that the court has no statistics on the practice. But he said that although it is not used "en masse" by police, it is taught in some police training programs and is clearly a tactic "of some popularity" among law enforcement.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote a dissent, joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
In the second case, U.S. v. Patane, No. 02-1183, the court ruled 5 to 4 that physical evidence gathered because of a suspect's statement made without a Miranda warning does not have to be excluded from a case.
In the case, a detective began advising Samuel Francis Patane of his rights when Patane, a convicted felon, was arrested. Patane interrupted the agent, saying that he already knew his rights, and then directed the agent where to find a .40-caliber pistol. Patane sought to have that evidence excluded from his trial for illegal possession of a firearm.
The Denver-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit agreed that the gun should be excluded.
But the high court overturned that ruling. Writing for the court, Thomas said that excluding physical evidence derived from an unwarned statement would be an unlawful extension of Miranda. His decision was joined by Rehnquist and Scalia.
Kennedy wrote a concurring opinion, joined by O'Connor. Souter, Stevens and Ginsburg dissented; Breyer dissented separately.
"There is, of course, a price for excluding evidence, but the Fifth Amendment is worth a price," Souter, Stevens and Ginsburg said. "There is no way to read this case except as an unjustifiable invitation to law enforcement officers to flout Miranda when there may be physical evidence to be gained."
Civil liberties advocates said the decision ending the double questioning of suspects was extraordinarily important. But they said they are worried that the Patane ruling could help erode its impact by encouraging police to avoid Miranda if they need to find crucial evidence -- a position endorsed by the four dissenting members of the court.
"It's a very mixed message," said Christopher Dunn, associate legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union and an expert on Miranda rights. "On one hand, the court has wisely closed the door on police strategies designed to induce improper confessions. On the other hand, the court may be encouraging similar strategies in cases where they care less about a confession and more about the evidence they can obtain through a coerced confession."
--------
CIVIL RIGHTS
Tactic of Delayed Miranda Warning Is Barred
June 29, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/politics/29miranda.html
WASHINGTON, June 28 - The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a police interrogation tactic designed to induce suspects to give incriminating statements after purposely delaying Miranda warnings.
The tactic, taught in police training courses, has been growing in popularity, and the Supreme Court decision, a murder case from Missouri, was consequently eagerly awaited by both prosecutors and defense lawyers.
The 5-to-4 vote against the strategy, in an opinion by Justice David H. Souter, was apparently the product of a prolonged struggle inside the court. This case and another Miranda case announced Monday, the second by a 5-to-4 vote in favor of the prosecution, were argued Dec. 9 and were the oldest undecided cases on the docket. In neither case did the five justices in the majority fully agree on a single rationale.
Under the tactic the court invalidated in the Missouri case, the police first question a suspect while withholding the advice required by the Miranda decision of the right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer before answering questions. In not giving the warnings, the police know that any incriminating statements elicited in this phase of the questioning will be inadmissible in court.
The officers then give the suspect a short break before resuming the interrogation, this time with the warnings. Typically, suspects will waive their Miranda rights and then repeat what they had said earlier, prompted by the officers' leading questions and by the sense that it is now too late to turn back.
The issue for the Supreme Court on Monday was whether the answers from that second phase of questioning could be used in court, and the majority's answer was no. Justice Souter said the facts of this case "by any objective measure reveal a police strategy adapted to undermine the Miranda warnings." He said the police had created a situation for the defendant, a woman suspected of murder, "in which it would have been unnatural to refuse to repeat at the second stage what had been said before."
The case, Missouri v. Seibert, No. 02-1371, was a variant of a case the court decided in 1985 called Oregon v. Elstad. In that case, the police went to a young suspect's house to tell his mother that they were arresting him on a burglary charge. Without receiving any Miranda warnings, the suspect gave an incriminating statement. He was then taken to the police station, received the warnings, and gave a full confession. In deciding that the evidence was admissible, the court treated the initial failure to give the warnings as inadvertent rather than strategic, based on confusion about whether the suspect was formally in custody at the time.
Justice Souter said Monday that it "disfigures that case" to regard the Oregon v. Elstad precedent as dictating the admissibility of the statements in the Missouri case. He also noted that four years ago, in Dickerson v. United States, the court rejected a challenge to the Miranda decision itself. Now, he said, "strategists dedicated to draining the substance out of Miranda cannot accomplish by training instructions what Dickerson held Congress could not do by statute."
The defendant in the Missouri case, Patrice Seibert, was interrogated after a fire in her family's mobile home killed a young man who was staying there and caring for her disabled son. Both before and after receiving Miranda warnings, Ms. Seibert admitted her role in setting the fire. The Missouri trial court suppressed the first admissions but allowed the prosecution to introduce the statements she made after receiving the warnings. Ms. Seibert was convicted of murder. The Missouri Supreme Court overturned the conviction, and the state appealed.
Justice Souter's opinion was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote separately in agreement with the result, proposing a test under which fewer statements would be likely to be excluded than under the majority's approach.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said the court's decision "devours Oregon v. Elstad," a precedent she described as requiring the opposite result. Justice O'Connor said the subjective intent of the officers should make no difference, because a suspect could not know what was in an officer's mind.
Rather, she said, the test should be the voluntariness of the second statements. If the statements were voluntary, they should be admitted, she said, while if involuntary, they should be kept out of court even if the Miranda warnings were given. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent.
The lineup in the second Miranda case was the same with the exception of Justice Kennedy, who voted on the prosecution side. The question in United States v. Patane, No. 02-1183, was whether physical evidence, a gun in this case, found as the result of statements obtained without Miranda warnings, could be admitted in court. The court's answer was yes.
Federal firearms agents went to Samuel F. Patane's home in Colorado Springs to question him about a report that he had a gun. Before the agents could finish reading Mr. Patane his Miranda rights, he interrupted them, saying that he knew his rights. He then directed them to the gun in his bedroom.
Interpreting the Oregon v. Elstad precedent, the federal appeals court in Denver said the gun could not be introduced as evidence. The Supreme Court overturned that ruling. Justice Thomas, writing for himself, the chief justice and Justice Scalia, said the Miranda rule could not be violated unless statements were actually introduced in court.
Writing separately, Justices Kennedy and O'Connor said there was no need to reach that sweeping conclusion about the underlying meaning of Miranda in order to conclude under the Elstad precedent that the gun was admissible. Justices Souter, Stevens, Ginsburg and Breyer dissented.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Attorneys for Detainees Plan Fast Action
By John Mintz and Michael Powell
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13290-2004Jun28?language=printer
Attorneys for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison said yesterday that they will quickly seek court review of their clients' detentions as the government began to consider how to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling ordering access to federal courts for the 595 captives at the military jail in Cuba.
"We'll go into federal district court [in Washington] very quickly to seek access to our clients" as a first step toward seeking court hearings, Joseph Margulies, an attorney for some of the detainees, told reporters yesterday.
Yesterday's Supreme Court decision on the alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters at Guantanamo Bay leaves it to the government to craft a plan under which federal judges can review the evidence against the captives, and officials offered few details on how that might be accomplished.
But experts agreed that the ruling undermines the U.S. government's determined effort to seal off the environment at Guantanamo Bay for interrogating detainees without interference from courts, lawyers and the outside world.
In another decision yesterday, the court similarly provided the means for U.S. citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi to contest his detention as an "enemy combatant." The court ruled that Hamdi, who was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and has spent more than two years in a South Carolina military brig, must have access to the U.S. legal system.
In a third ruling, the justices returned the case of another U.S. citizen, Jose Padilla, to lower courts on jurisdictional grounds. Padilla is expected to enjoy the benefits of the ruling in Hamdi's case. Federal public defender Frank W. Dunham Jr., who represents Hamdi, pledged to meet his client later this week to begin mapping out a strategy for an eventual habeas corpus hearing. Hamdi, who was born in Louisiana but raised in Saudi Arabia, was captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said.
Padilla's attorney, Donna R. Newman, said that she would immediately file a challenge in federal court in South Carolina. His case had been heard in federal court in New York, which the justices ruled did not have jurisdiction.
Until now, the two attorneys have met with their clients only at the discretion of the Pentagon. Military minders have attended and videotaped the sessions, and the attorneys have been prohibited from discussing the meetings publicly.
A senior Justice Department official said that an initial reading of the opinions leaves much to be determined, including the process for bringing the detainees into the federal court system and how courts will balance the need to keep sensitive military intelligence secret while protecting the rights of the accused.
The official said the rulings create the potential for an onslaught of more than 590 cases that could be filed in any number of district courts, though the official said the Justice Department probably would argue that the cases should be heard in a single court.
The official also acknowledged that hearings could interfere with the military's intelligence gathering operation, especially cases in which high-level detainees have been kept isolated and in which important classified intelligence is involved.
"There's definitely that potential, and we'll be arguing in lower courts for ways to minimize the interference with the intelligence gathering process," the official said. "There's enough language in the various opinions that shows there's a continuing need for deference to the military, and it's consistent with the military's need to handle detainees in certain ways."
Yesterday's rulings did not address the legality of the military tribunals that the government has planned for an initial group of six Guantanamo Bay prisoners, nor was it clear whether the ruling would affect an annual review procedure for the detainees established by the Pentagon.
Government intelligence experts said the court's decision would have no impact on CIA operations, including its detentions of al Qaeda detainees in undisclosed locations. "The opinion is written narrowly only to refer to Guantanamo Bay," said one government lawyer in the intelligence arena. "As for people held by the agency or elsewhere, the case is silent on that."
The next step is for the U.S. government to outline formal procedures that would grant the Guantanamo Bay inmates access to U.S. courts that human rights lawyers have sought for more than two years. Experts speculated that these could be sessions at the prison on the U.S. Navy base in Cuba or in federal courthouses in this country.
But soon after the government files its response to the Supreme Court ruling, attorneys for the detainees said they will make their case in court. "Our position is that our clients did nothing to justify their detention," Margulies said. "The decision means the government now must justify their detention in federal court."
Thomas Wilner, a Washington lawyer for 12 Kuwaiti detainees, said he will file court papers "very quickly" to demand information on his clients' physical condition and to hold the required hearings.
Eugene R. Fidell, president of the nonprofit National Institute of Military Justice, said the decision may prompt the military to demonstrate publicly that its planned annual review panels for the detainees are fair and defensible. Attorneys for the detainees have contended that these reviews and the tribunals are skewed against prisoners. One military lawyer for a Guantanamo detainee who faces a tribunal has filed a petition in federal court seeking to halt the tribunals on the grounds that they violate U.S. and international laws.
"The Supreme Court decision will have a chastening effect on the government, reminding it that it must mind its p's and q's," he said.
It is not clear that all 595 detainees or their families have lawyers. Attorneys said yesterday that U.S. military officials should feel obligated under the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling to notify all detainees that they have won the right to hearings.
Defense lawyer Margulies said he will argue in future habeas hearings that the government should not be allowed to cite evidence gathered in interrogations in which "coercive" tactics were used. U.S. officials have acknowledged high-level approval was given at various times to use physical and psychological pressure in seeking information from Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Yesterday's Supreme Court decisions did not directly address the case of Ali S. Marri, a Qatari national designated as an enemy combatant by President Bush last year who is being held at the Navy brig in Charleston along with Hamdi and Padilla. U.S. officials suspect that Marri, who came to the United States as a student, is an al Qaeda operative.
His lawyer, Lawrence Lustberg, said he plans to file a motion in the next few weeks in South Carolina, arguing that his client deserves a day in court. Lustberg said he plans to cite yesterday's Hamdi and Guantanamo Bay decisions.
"We hope to see him as soon as possible . . . and to get all the rights that the Supreme Court has now accorded him," Lustberg said.
Staff writers Josh White, Dana Priest and Michelle Garcia contributed to this report.
--------
THE DETAINEES
For Prisoners, Only Certainty Is Right to a Court Hearing
June 29, 2004
By ADAM LIPTAK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/politics/29legal.html?pagewanted=all&position=
In a matter of days, lawyers for prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay and in a naval brig in Charleston, S.C., will begin to test the limits of the victories they won in the Supreme Court on Monday.
All of the prisoners now have the right to tell their stories to a court. But how and where that will happen is not entirely clear, and the Supreme Court gave the lower courts only limited and conflicting guidance.
In the cases of the two American citizens held as unlawful enemy combatants, the Supreme Court struggled to describe what an appropriate proceeding would look like. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor suggested in the case of Yaser Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan, that military tribunals might be appropriate forums, that they might consider hearsay evidence typically barred from criminal cases and that the ordinary burden of proof might be shifted from the government to the prisoner.
But that view attracted only three other votes.
For the more than 600 prisoners at Guantánamo, the court did little more than order the government to respond to the 14 petitions before it.
"Whether and what further proceedings may become necessary after the respondents make their response," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority, "are matters we need not address now."
Even as the short-term guidance in the cases was sketchy, their long-term implications may turn out to be enormous. Lurking in the 10 separate opinions in the three cases were some broad propositions about the temporal and geographic limits of the fight against terrorism.
Some justices suggested that detentions may not exceed the duration of traditional combat operations, seeming to reject the notion that people may be held for as long as efforts to combat terrorism persist. Others said that the extraction of information from prisoners was not by itself enough justification to hold prisoners for long periods.
And several justices seemed to agree that the court had extended the right to file suits challenging the legality of detentions not only to Guantánamo Bay but to anywhere in the world that the United States holds people of any nationality captive away from the battlefield.
Lawyers for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the 14 Guantánamo prisoners in the Supreme Court case and scores of others detained there, said they would soon try to meet with their clients and file further petitions, perhaps in the form of a class action. The center of legal activity in the case will almost certainly continue to be the Federal District Court in Washington, where the original petitions were filed.
This flood of litigation, perhaps accompanied by a series of evidentiary hearings attended by the individual detainees, alarmed some of the justices.
"Each detainee undoubtedly has complaints - real or contrived," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent in the Guantánamo case, joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas. "The court's unheralded expansion of federal-court jurisdiction is not even mitigated by a comforting assurance that the legion of ensuing claims will be easily resolved on the merits."
The second man called an unlawful combatant, José Padilla, whose case is generally thought stronger than Mr. Hamdi's, was instructed to try again, but in a different federal district court.
"The court says it wants a do-over," said Jonathan Freiman, one of his lawyers, "so we'll refile in South Carolina and do it over."
Though Mr. Padilla was the only prisoner to lose his case in the Supreme Court, the loss was only a nominal one, Mr. Freiman said.
"The court made it clear," he said, "that at a bare minimum an American citizen in military prison has the right to a lawyer and a day in court. It's quite possible that the court will find that an American citizen picked up in a civilian setting cannot be put in prison at all without criminal charges being brought against him.''
The decision in the Hamdi case suggests that Mr. Padilla may not qualify as an unlawful combatant at all. For purposes of the Hamdi case, at least, the four-justice plurality considered only people "part of or supporting forces hostile to the United States or coalition partners" who "engaged in an armed conflict against the United States" as potentially subject to detention as unlawful combatants.
Mr. Padilla, who was captured at an airport in Chicago and who has been accused of contemplating various terrorist acts, may not fit that definition.
In the Hamdi case, Justice O'Connor gave the first inkling of the Supreme Court's thinking about the temporal limit of what the administration calls the war on terror. Because that war could last, she said, for generations or longer, "Hamdi's detention could last for the rest of his life."
While she did not reject that possibility outright, she appeared to rely heavily on the fact that the war in Afghanistan is continuing, suggesting that the legal landscape for people like Mr. Hamdi and Mr. Padilla would be radically different once traditional combat there ends.
That is so, she wrote, because the purpose of detaining unlawful combatants is to prevent them from returning to the field of battle to take up arms once again.
The most lasting implication in the decisions may be the apparent extension of the right to habeas corpus to noncitizens held abroad.
"From this point forward," Justice Scalia wrote in the Guantánamo decision, referring to the more than 600 prisoners there, "federal courts will entertain petitions from these prisoners, and others like them around the world, challenging actions and events far away, and forcing the courts to oversee one aspect of the executive's conduct of a foreign war."
Though the Supreme Court considered no alternative to suits in the federal courts to consider the claims of the Guantánamo detainees, Justice O'Connor wrote that "an appropriately authorized and properly constituted military tribunal" might hear Mr. Hamdi's challenge. It appears that no such tribunals are currently available.
Military commissions were created by executive order in 2001 to try unlawful enemy combatants, but they are not authorized to try American citizens.
Deborah Sontag contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Court orders due process for Guantanamo prisoners
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Guy Taylor
June 29, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040629-121624-4193r.htm
The Supreme Court yesterday reaffirmed that U.S. courts have legal authority to rule on challenges brought by foreign nationals held at Guantanamo Bay. The Bush administration had insisted otherwise.
The high court also granted access to the courts to Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan. But the president was backed some in that case, as the justices acknowledged that Congress had given him authority to hold the American as an enemy combatant.
The high court effectively side-stepped a third case - that of "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla, another American held as an enemy combatant - on grounds it was improperly filed and must go back to lower courts to start again.
In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said foreign nationals at the U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, should be allowed to challenge their treatment in U.S. courts.
"Federal court jurisdiction is permitted in these cases," said a majority opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy concurred.
The dissenters were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, who essentially agreed with the Bush administration's claims that Guantanamo lies beyond the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.
The case was brought by current and former prisoners at a massive prison built on the naval base since the September 11 attacks. The Bush administration deems some 600 suspects held there as enemy combatants.
The majority were captured in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led drive to topple the al Qaeda-supporting Taliban regime. Mr. Hamdi and Padilla also are deemed enemy combatants, though they are not held at Guantanamo.
With the exception of lengthy interrogations of men detained at the prison, the administration has afforded enemy combatants a similar set of rights to those guaranteed to prisoners of war by the Geneva Conventions.
But officials also claim enemy combatants are held outside of constitutional protections given to ordinary criminal suspects, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has announced plans to try those held at Guantanamo through military tribunals.
The Supreme Court was essentially united on the issue of whether others, particularly Americans held in places other than Guantanamo, should get the right to have their cases reviewed by the U.S. justice system.
In the Hamdi case, while separate opinions were joined by Justices Souter, Ginsburg, Scalia and Stevens, all of the justices except for Justice Thomas said Mr. Hamdi had the right to a hearing before the lower courts.
"We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation's citizens," said a majority opinion, written by Justice O'Connor and joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Kennedy and Breyer.
Mr. Hamdi, who is of Saudi descent, was born in Louisiana. Having been arrested in 2001 in Afghanistan, he was shifted about by U.S. military forces, at one point being shipped to Guantanamo for detention.
When authorities learned Mr. Hamdi was born in the United States, a petition for habeas corpus, which forces the government to say why they have arrested someone, was filed on his behalf.
The case rose to the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court denied the habeas petition, ruling the Bush administration was justified in detaining an American indefinitely.
Justice Scalia and Justice Stevens said if the government had a case against Mr. Hamdi it should charge him as a criminal, perhaps even a traitor. Citizens cannot be held as enemy combatants, each man wrote.
But in one bright spot for the government, a majority of five justices rejected that view and held that the president had authority to hold Mr. Hamdi as an enemy combatant, though Mr. Hamdi still had the right to have courts review Mr. Bush's decision.
Highlighting that holding, Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said, "The military detains enemy combatants to prevent them from continuing to wage terror and war, as well as to gather intelligence to thwart further terrorist assaults.
"Without the ability to detain these dangerous individuals, the American people and our soldiers in combat would face even greater danger from our terrorist enemies."
Legal analysts have largely lumped the Hamdi case with that of Padilla, who was arrested in the United States.
FBI agents apprehended Padilla, a former Chicago gang member and convert to Islam, at O'Hare International Airport in 2002 on suspicion he was planning a radiation-spreading "dirty bomb" attack.
His lawyers say he has been unjustly held more than two years at a South Carolina Navy brig. But the Supreme Court declined to rule yesterday, on the grounds that the case improperly named Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instead of a lower-level military official overseeing the brig.
However, Padilla supporters did not consider the development a victory for the administration.
"You have to look at Padilla in regards to the Hamdi decision," said Deborah N. Pearlstein, director of the U.S. Law and Security Program at Human Rights First, an advocacy group that filed briefs with the Supreme Court on behalf of Padilla, Mr. Hamdi and the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.
"I'm sure Mr. Padilla will file again in a lower court, and the lower court is going to be constrained by the Supreme Court's ruling in Hamdi, acknowledging 8-1 that U.S. citizens in government custody have due process rights."
"I'm popping champagne bottles about Hamdi, no question," she added.
Virginia federal public defender Frank Dunham, who made the oral argument on Mr. Hamdi's behalf before the Supreme Court in April, said that he too was popping champagne.
"I'm popping it all over the place, I ain't got enough champagne to pop," said Mr. Dunham, who describes himself as "a Republican who's a die-hard civil libertarian."
"The court resoundingly said that when the executive decides to hold someone as an enemy combatant, the court is not reduced to being a potted plant," Mr. Dunham said. "The court has a right to question the basis on which the detention is founded. More importantly, the detainee has a right to be heard with counsel before a neutral fact-finder."
Miss Pearlstein stressed the ruling was "not a victory for terrorism suspects," but "a victory for law and the power of the courts to check the executive."
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Russia releases 7 that U.S. returned as terror suspects
Americans weren't given notice the men, once held by U.S., would be freed
Los Angeles Times
By Kim Murphy
June 29, 2004
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.hoot29jun29,0,7076972.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines
MOSCOW - Seven Russians who were returned to their homeland for investigation and detention after being held by U.S. authorities in Guantanamo Bay prison have been released, Russian prosecutors confirmed yesterday.
In an action that apparently confounded U.S. officials, who were given no advance notice, the seven men accused of having been Taliban supporters in Afghanistan were released from a pretrial detention center in the North Caucasus region and allowed to return to their homes.
"The case against them has been closed," said Natalya Vishnyakova, spokeswoman for the prosecutor general's office. "In our decision, the general prosecutor's office was guided by the norms of national and international law, and also our agreement with the U.S. side. We haven't departed an iota from these provisions."
A U.S. official said Russian prosecutors gave no notice before freeing the detainees, and U.S. investigators learned of the release through media reports.
"In accordance with the Russian government's commitment to keep us informed of the results of its investigation, we have asked the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the general prosecutor for official information concerning these reports, and have not yet received a response," the U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said late yesterday.
Mark Jacobson, who helped fashion U.S. policy on detainees for the Defense Department, said officials in Washington believed the seven prisoners constituted a continuing security threat when they were transferred to Russian custody.
"We did not simply release these folks, we transferred them to the Russians because we felt they were still a threat to the U.S., and a threat to Russia," said Jacobson, a visiting scholar at the Ohio State University.
"I would think the Russians would have been as concerned about these individuals as we were," he said, in part because of purported links between Chechen separatists mounting terrorist attacks in Russia.
The men, residents of Russia's Muslim-majority republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, the Caucasus Mountain region and western Siberia, were among hundreds of people captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in autumn 2001 and held at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba.
Russia sought their transfer and pledged to conduct full investigations and court proceedings - including, as Deputy Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov said a "trial."
At the time of the handover Feb. 28, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the agreement "included assurances that the individuals will be detained, investigated and prosecuted, as appropriate, under Russian law, and will be treated humanely."
-------- propaganda wars
The Administration vs. the Administration
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13200-2004Jun28.html
White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales assembled reporters in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building last week for what has become an administration ritual: disavowing the conclusions of official documents.
Administration memos -- some of which appeared to sanction torture of prisoners -- were "unnecessary, over-broad discussions" and "not relied upon" by policymakers, Gonzales said. "In reality, they do not reflect the policies that the administration ultimately adopted."
A week earlier, it was Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's turn to step away from an official document, this one State's "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, which showed the number of terrorist incidents worldwide falling to the lowest level in more than three decades. "Unfortunately, the data that is within the report, the actual numbers of incidents, is off, it's wrong," Powell said. "And I am regretful that this has happened." A revised report showed that 625 people died in terrorist attacks in 2003, not 307 as first reported.
Before that, the administration publicly disavowed -- or at least tiptoed away from -- a budget memo calling for spending cuts next year, unrealistically upbeat reports about job growth, Medicare prescription costs and minority health care, and optimistic assumptions in a proposed regulation governing mercury emissions.
Democrats say this is no accident. "It's either political manipulation or incompetence," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a former top aide to President Bill Clinton. "I know it's not incompetence." Emanuel, with Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), alleges "a rampant pattern of crafting government reports to match the administration's political objectives."
Untrue, said White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan. "The president has set clear policies, and we are achieving real results," she said. "It's unfortunate that some Democrats would rather manipulate the facts of certain memos than work with the president to win the war on terror, build on the economic recovery and make America better."
Every administration does its best to spin its way out of trouble caused by a leaked memo, an impolitic remark or an unfavorable conclusion in an agency's policy analysis. Clinton, knowing a damaging report was being prepared, would preempt it by announcing new policies. In the latest version, Bush officials have been walking away from several conclusions produced by their colleagues.
The most embarrassing are cases in which good-news reports by the administration turn out to be based on errors, omissions or wishful thinking. As Powell did this month with the global terrorism report, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson earlier this year distanced himself from a report by his agency that played down inequalities in health care for minorities. The original version was edited to remove many uses of the word "disparity" and the description of the inequality as a national problem. "I think people just wanted this to be a more positive report and made that editorial position known," Thompson said in congressional testimony. "It was a mistake."
Likewise, just nine days after the White House Council of Economic Advisers predicted that the economy would add 2.6 million jobs this year -- an extraordinarily rosy forecast -- Bush declined to back his own economists. "People can debate the numbers all they want," spokesman Scott McClellan said.
In other cases, top Bush officials have dismissed as insignificant administration documents with embarrassing conclusions, such as the interrogation memos. For example, when the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to agencies calling for spending cuts in 2006 in education, homeland security and other high-profile domestic priorities, the White House belittled the importance of the memo, saying it was a "process document" and did not represent administration plans.
Abu Boo-Boo
President Bush seems to have inordinate difficulty pronouncing the name of Abu Ghraib, the infamous prison in Iraq that has been home to Saddam Hussein's atrocities and U.S.-sanctioned abuse. Though the correct pronunciation is "abu grayb," with a slightly guttural g, Bush last week referred to the prison as "Abu Gareff." At a speech this spring at the Army War College, Bush pronounced Abu Ghraib three ways. Reuters described them as "abugah-rayp," "abu-garon" and "abu-garah," but your correspondent distinctly heard "abu-garom."
Didn't Get the Memo?
"The country's culture is changing from one that has said, 'If it feels good, do it.' "
-- President Bush, May 14.
"I expressed myself rather forcefully, felt better after I had done it."
-- Vice President Cheney, on his bracing Senate-floor language, June 25.
-------- us politics
Pyrrhic secrecy victory
By Bruce Fein
June 29, 2004
Washington Times Commentary
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040628-092023-9246r.htm
Secrecy for the sake of secrecy awakens suspicion. President William Jefferson Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton blundered by wrapping in secrecy the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform chaired by the first lady, a folly upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Inc. vs. Clinton (1993). The health care proposals that ensued shipwrecked in Congress.
President George W. Bush might have profited from the Clinton example. But like characteristic White House occupants, the Bush administration generally forgets nothing, and learns nothing. Accordingly, Vice President Richard B. Cheney aped the Clinton blunder in a U.S. Supreme Court pyrrhic victory last week (Cheney vs. United States District Court for D.C.) that preserved the secrecy of Mr. Bush's National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPDG). There may have been better ways to reinforce public suspicion that the president and vice president skew policy to favor their business benefactors, but if there are, they do not readily come to mind.
A few days after assuming office and long before September 11, 2001, Mr. Bush appointed Mr. Cheney to chair the NEPDG, whose remaining formal membership consisted of several agency heads and assistants, all federal employees. The group was tasked to "develop[e] ... a national energy policy designed to help the private sector, and government at all levels, promote dependable, affordable, and environmentally sound production and distribution of energy for the future." It addressed nonsensitive, benumbing policy questions of the type routinely shared with Congress and regularly reported in the media. The thick financial and employment ties between the Bush administration and the energy industry, symbolized by Enron and Halliburton, made an NEPDG sunshine policy highly advisable. Energy moguls traipsing in and out of the White House on secret business would be first cousin to Mr. Clinton's infamous Lincoln Bedroom sleepovers.
Mr. Cheney could have followed the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 (FACA) to dispel nonfanciful worries of compromised advice to the president to profit business pals.
FACA's chief purpose is to inform Congress and the public of federal advisory committee activities. Their meetings must be public. Notice of them must be given in the Federal Register. Detailed minutes must be prepared. And all records, reports and documents used by the committee must be revealed unless exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. Precautions are suggested to ensure committee advice and recommendations "will not be inappropriately influenced by ... any special interest."
FACA, however, excludes from mandatory coverage advisory committees "composed wholly of full-time, or permanent part-time, officers or employees of the federal government."
Vice President Cheney rejected FACA sunshine in favor of confidentiality in preparing NEDPG's final report to the president. Mr. Cheney reasoned the group was exempt because its members were exclusively federal employees.
Following the report's publication, Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The complaint alleged a FACA violation on the theory that nonfederal employees, including private lobbyists, had become de facto members of the NEDPG in regularly attending and fully participating in nonpublic meetings.
The vice president resisted discovery of information sought by the plaintiffs.. According to Mr. Cheney, any application of FACA to the NEDPG would violate principles of separation of powers and confound the constitutional prerogatives of the president and vice president.
The district court authorized limited discovery, subject to White House claims of constitutional privilege regarding particular documents or questions. The Supreme Court disapproved. It explained that even sheepish preliminary inquiries into unclassified White House policy documents detract from the constitutional majesty of the president and his nonstop devotion to official duties.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, fretted that breaching the confidentiality of NEDPG energy records or deliberations would impair candor in communications with the president. But Mr. Cheney failed to submit even one affidavit or unsworn statement from any person consulted to support that speculation. I served in the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission under four presidents, yet never heard a syllable of concern that public disclosure would frustrate unornamented nonnational security advice.
Justice Kennedy also insisted wholesale privilege claims of the president must be presumptively honored to forestall "vexatious litigation that might distract [the Executive Branch] from the energetic performance of its constitutional duties."
The Supreme Court, however, has repeatedly disputed that the president enjoys an impermeable constitutional shield from lawsuits or judicial process, with as yet no litigation explosion.
President Richard M. Nixon was compelled to disclose incriminating tapes to special prosecutor Leon Jaworski. President Clinton was denied immunity from the sexual harassment lawsuit of Paula Jones, and was questioned under oath by the Office of Independent Counsel.
The Iran-Contra affair occasioned the testimony of President Ronald Reagan. And President Bush himself has been questioned by a U.S. Attorney concerning the leak of the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency employee.
Not a crumb of evidence suggests these occasional distractions seriously disabled presidential performance.
The Supreme Court stumbled in blindly celebrating presidential secrecy. But the Mr. Cheney stumbled more in seeking the celebration.
Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer and international consultant with Bruce Fein & Associates and the Lichfield Group.
--------
Analysis State Department Now Assumes a Greater Role
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13195-2004Jun28.html
The United States went through its own transition in Iraq yesterday, as the end of the Pentagon-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority also marked the transfer of authority for dealing with Iraq to the State Department.
The relief could almost be felt along State Department corridors after nearly two years of sporadic but bitter tension with the Pentagon. Career diplomats in charge of crafting foreign policy often grumbled about being marginalized or vetoed on Iraq policy by political appointees at the Defense Department.
"Clearly, the Department of State is taking the lead now. We will be the dominant voice," Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told National Public Radio within hours of the political handover.
The shift is reflected in the personnel changes. For the past 14 months, U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer reported to the Pentagon; the new U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, who will head the largest U.S. embassy in history, will report to the State Department.
State Department officials blame many of the problems during the 14-month occupation on disarray within the U.S.-led coalition, inexperience by young staffers in key positions and the military's lack of preparedness to run Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
"The CPA was a hybrid of military and Pentagon officials, outside contractors, Foreign Service officers and people from all over the government. There was no common culture, and it had an impact on how the system worked," said a senior State Department official with experience in Iraq. "A lot of the chain-of-command issues were unclear."
He declined to be identified under department rules limiting who may speak on the record.
State Department officials say policy had to be salvaged time and again with what they describe as last-minute "audibles" during crises or challenges -- referring to a football term to describe changes in a play called by the quarterback on the field.
"The broad difference is that we regard this as our core business. We're used to dealing with this kind of complex political situation. That doesn't automatically mean we'll be more successful, but at least we have the structures in place to deal with it," the senior State Department official said.
Despite the enormous obstacles looming in the months ahead, State Department officials were predicting yesterday how much better things will work in Baghdad -- for U.S. officials as well as Iraqis.
"There's a sense at State that the U.S. Embassy is now stood up and we're going to get it right. We have a new relationship with the [Iraqi] government, and it's going to work. We've learned a lot of lessons over the past year, and this allows us to turn over a new leaf and act on the basis of what we've learned," said another senior U.S. official familiar with Iraq policy who asked to remain anonymous because of government rules. "We're not going to fail."
State Department deputy spokesman J. Adam Ereli told reporters, "The U.S. Embassy will hit the ground running."
As during the occupation, the process will still be heavily driven by the White House, although now through a State Department prism, officials said. The Pentagon will still have a major role because of the roughly 140,000 U.S. troops likely to remain in Iraq for months, although it will adopt a lower profile, they added.
In the aftermath of showdowns in Fallujah and with the militia of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr, "military commanders will now be much more circumspect, much more restrained about undertaking actions," a senior U.S. official said.
The overall mission will also change, as the new U.S. Embassy focuses more on reconstruction now that Iraqis have assumed control of the political transition. After a lengthy battle, the State Department has wrested jurisdiction over the specifics of how about $18 billion allocated for general projects by Congress may be spent, although the Pentagon will continue to administer and manage the funds.
In Washington and Baghdad, U.S. officials stressed that American diplomats and troops will play only a support role.
"It is now our job to support this government and the democratic aspirations of the Iraqi people as they work to secure their country against those who seek to turn the clock back, and as they work to establish a functioning democracy and a fully representative government that is chosen by all of the people through free and fair elections," Ereli told reporters.
As part of the surprise early transfer of political authority, the United States had to hastily arrange for Negroponte to get to Baghdad within hours after Bremer's exit. But the transfer was happening so fast -- and abruptly -- that even the State Department seemed not to be able to keep up.
--------
THE PRESIDENT
In Classic Check and Balance, Court Shows Bush It Also Has Wartime Powers
June 29, 2004
By TODD S. PURDUM
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/politics/29bush.html
WASHINGTON, June 28 - In the fall of 2001, President Bush justified his decision to treat some captured terrorist suspects as "enemy combatants" without access to lawyers, courts or other long-established legal rights on the grounds that he could not let the United States' "enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself."
On Monday morning, the Supreme Court upended a good-sized chunk of that logic, and offered a powerful reminder that in the United States, even in wartime, no prisoner is ever beneath the law's regard, and no president above its limits.
It was Justice Robert H. Jackson who first noted 52 years ago this month, in another wartime election summer, that a president is not commander in chief of the country, only of the military. Justice Jackson wrote that in his concurring opinion overturning Harry S. Truman's seizure of the American steel industry during the Korean war, and Justice David H. Souter cited those words approvingly in his concurrence on Monday.
The effect of the current court's rulings in two related cases was to place a classic institutional and political check on Mr. Bush's effort to keep some citizens and aliens held as the most dangerous "enemy combatants" from ever having their day in any court. It is precisely the right to some such hearing, the court held, that defines the constitutional separation of powers and by extension the American governing creed.
While Mr. Bush will now have to seek explicit Congressional authorization in dealing with these terrorist suspects, that should not be an insurmountable task for this president. But it falls to him at a time when he is already facing challenges on many fronts, including the handover of sovereignty in a still-dangerous Iraq, questions about his administration's policies on interrogation of prisoners of war and polls that show slipping public support for his handling the war on terrorism and uncertain prospects for his re-election.
"It is a clear demonstration of how much our system of checks and balances, of separation of powers, continues to be an effective brake on any one branch," said the historian Robert Dallek. "After all, this is not a left-leaning court, or one dominated by justices who are left of center. But ultimately the court has a unique degree of independence from the executive and legislative branches, that even in times of great difficulty it does not lightly give up."
Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the majority in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen picked up in Afghanistan and held mostly without access to the outside world ever since. "The founders intended that the president have primary responsibility - along with the necessary power - to protect the national security and to conduct the nation's foreign relations,'' Justice Thomas wrote. "They did so principally because the structural advantages of a unitary executive are essential in these domains."
The White House chose to emphasize the parts of the majority opinions in the Hamdi case, and another involving foreign detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that supported the president's ability to detain "enemy combatants" without trial.
"The president's most solemn obligation is to defend the American people, and we're pleased that the Supreme Court has upheld the president's authority to detain enemy combatants, including citizens, for the duration of the conflict," said a White House spokeswoman, Claire Buchan. "The administration is committed to fashioning a process that addresses the court's concerns and permits the president to continue to exercise his constitutional responsibility as commander in chief to protect this nation during times of war."
In a statement, Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman, said the department was pleased that the court "upheld the authority of the president as commander in chief of the armed forces to detain enemy combatants, including U.S. citizens." The statement added that the court "also held that individuals detained by the United States as enemy combatants have certain procedural rights to contest their detention. But the court recognized that those procedures must reflect the unique context of the detention of enemy combatants and the need of the executive to prosecute the war."
Much other reaction broke down along predictably partisan lines. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, praised the decision, saying: "I have argued all along with respect to detainees that it is vital to uphold the Constitution of the United States, to respect civil liberties and civil rights, even as we protect our country. I've suggested many ways you can do that, including judicial review, different kinds of review structures."
By contrast, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution, civil rights and property rights, called the decisions "a bit of a disappointment," and added: "I am a little concerned about the new constraints that the Supreme Court has placed on the president as commander in chief. I hope that they don't represent handcuffs."
Some historians were not surprised by the court's decisions. Alonzo Hamby, a scholar of the presidency at Ohio University, noted wryly that "once upon a time, it was not assumed that presidents necessarily had to pay attention to Supreme Court decisions."
In the 1830's, when the Supreme Court declared the government's forced removal of Indian tribes from their lands illegal, President Andrew Jackson famously dismissed the ruling by the chief justice by saying: "John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it."
Mr. Hamby said, "But in the world we live in now, it's literally impossible for a president to ignore a Supreme Court decision, no matter how wrong or dangerous he may think it is."
-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Yeast Plus Agricultural Wastes Equals Ethanol
June 29, 2004
WEST LAFAYETTE, Indiana, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-29-09.asp#anchor9
A strain of yeast developed at Purdue University makes ethanol from agricultural residues more effectively than other yeast strains.
Purdue's genetically altered yeast allows about 40 percent more ethanol to be made from sugars derived from agricultural residues, such as corn stalks and wheat straw, compared with "wild-type" yeasts that occur in nature.
The agricultural residues are made up of cellulose and hemicellulose, known as cellulosic materials. These are materials such as wheat straw that would otherwise be discarded or used as animal feed.
Unlike traditional ethanol feedstocks, such as corn kernels, the cellulosic materials contain two major sugars, glucose and xylose.
Neither sugar can be fermented into ethanol by the natural yeast used by industry to produce ethanol, explained Nancy Ho, a senior research scientist and leader of the molecular genetics group in Purdue's Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering.
"It would cost too much money to separate the two sugars before proceeding with fermentation to ethanol, so being able to ferment both sugars together to ethanol is critical," she said. "To be more cost competitive with gasoline, the two sugars have to be converted together to ethanol."
A team led by Ho developed the more efficient yeast during the 1980s and 1990s. "Until we developed our yeast, no suitable microorganism could convert these two sugars together," she said.
Conventional yeast can ferment glucose to ethanol, but it cannot ferment xylose, which makes up about 30 percent of the sugar from agricultural residues. The inability to ferment xylose would represent a major loss of ethanol yield, Ho explained.
The Purdue researchers altered the genetic structure of the yeast so that it now contains three additional genes that make it possible to simultaneously convert glucose and xylose to ethanol.
The ability to ferment xylose increases the yield of ethanol from straw by about 40 percent.
The first license for the yeast has been issued to the biotechnology company Iogen Corp., which specializes in producing ethanol from cellulosic material.
Iogen is using the Purdue yeast to produce ethanol from the sugars the company derives from wheat straw.
The ethanol made in Iogen's plant is blended into gasoline at the Petro-Canada refinery in Montreal. Cars can use the ethanol-gasoline blend without any engine modifications.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Environmentalists Lose Ship Pollution Challenge
June 29, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2004/2004-06-29-09.asp#anchor8
Environmentalists suffered a defeat last week when a federal appeals court rejected their attempt to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to accelerate reductions of smog-forming emissions from large domestic and foreign marine vessels.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled the agency had not violated the Clean Air Act when it delayed until 2007 the setting of a standard for U.S. marine vessels to meet comparable international standards.
The agency had approved the marine rule for large and mid-sized vessels in 2003, after settling a suit by the conservation groups for failing to regulate emissions from these vessels.
The first phase of the EPA rule calls for an 11 percent cut in nitrogen oxide emissions from current levels, the same standard adopted by the United Nations International Marine Organization.
Earthjustice attorneys representing Bluewater Network had argued that the Clean Air Act requires EPA to force stringent emission control technologies as soon as possible for both domestic and foreign vessels operating in U.S. waters.
But the court agreed with the EPA's decision - the agency argued the delay was necessary to give the industry ample time to comply.
"We are very disappointed in this decision and worried about the long-term effects which will result as international shipping increases," said Laura Robb, an attorney for Earthjustice who represented Bluewater. "Cargo ships emit far more deadly pollution than diesel trucks or cars. This decision grants ship emissions to pollute our seaside communities and will thwart attempts to protect local residents."
According to EPA's own figures, both mid-size and large marine vessels are a significant source of ground-level ozone precursors, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and particulate matter.
For some large ports such as Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans and Corpus Christi, Texas, ships are believed to be major contributors to air pollution problems.
A single cargo ship produces as much pollution in one hour as 350,000 cars.
"This poor decision means ports will remain EPA-free zones for big polluters for years to come," said Teri Shore of Bluewater Network. "It's a travesty for anyone who must breathe the dirty air from these ship smokestacks."
----
Comment Period on Mercury Emissions to End
Issue Generates Record Response as Groups Vie to Influence Timetable for Reductions
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13188-2004Jun28.html
After a last-minute barrage of public protests and private appeals, the Environmental Protection Agency will today end its public comment period on its plan to limit mercury pollution from power plants, one of the Bush administration's most controversial regulatory initiatives.
An array of groups representing utility companies, environmental advocates, and state and local governments have flooded the EPA with nearly 540,000 comments over the past six months -- an agency record -- hoping to influence the nation's first-ever rules governing toxic mercury pollution.
League of Conservation Voters officials have gone door to door and held non-fish "fish fries" in the Midwest, hoping to mobilize citizens by warning of health dangers linked to mercury pollution in the area's waters. Edison Electric Institute officials have been busy writing lengthy technical comments to the agency. A lawyer from San Diego-based Sempra Energy flew in to Washington last week, questioning the data underlying the Bush administration's proposed mercury rules for certain utilities.
Much of the debate centers on how much reduction in mercury emissions the industry can achieve with current technology. The Bush plan aims to reduce the emissions, which total 48 tons a year, by 29 percent by 2010 and 70 percent by 2018. Democrats and some environmental groups, meanwhile, say the federal government should press for a 90 percent reduction by 2009 at the latest.
Spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt was seeking all available information to determine "how much [reduction] is possible, given the current state of technology. . . . We're looking for the best information to make sure we do it right."
Much of the agency's deliberations are taking place behind closed doors, according to interviews with several EPA officials, and with an unusual degree of White House input. Two EPA officials who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation said political appointees had prevented them from conducting analyses that could have led to different regulatory approaches, including one that would have weighed the costs and benefits of adopting more stringent rules.
"Rather than having sound analysis that informs a rational decision about a rule that would achieve mercury reductions, instead we're getting a politically driven decision propped up by limited analysis," one official said.
Congress first called for mercury emissions standards in 1990, but it took a decade before the EPA determined it could move ahead with regulations. The Bush administration had aimed to complete its rulemaking this year, but that date has slipped until March 2005. The agency twice extended the public comment period, which was set to end March 30.
John Walke, clean air director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sued the EPA in 1992 over its failure to implement the law, said "the history of mercury regulation of power plants is one of delay and inaction."
Walke is working with his colleagues on a 200-page memo he will submit to regulators today, in which the organization calls for stricter controls on emissions. "The rules they are proposing are weaker than what is technically possible," he said. "We believe the technology and the law both require 90 percent cuts by 2008."
Utility officials are preparing counterarguments. Dan Riedinger, spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, whose member firms generate 70 percent of the nation's electricity, said his group will warn that some of the technology underpinning the proposed reductions has yet to be tested. "When we install it, it has to work," he said.
Larry S. Monroe, emissions control research project manager for Southern Co., said his firm backs the administration's approach -- in which utilities will be able to "trade" pollution credits in order to meet an overall cap -- because dirtier plants will be able to comply with the law by buying credits from cleaner plants rather than investing in costly technology.
But several environmental groups are taking direct aim at the cap-and-trade approach, citing internal EPA projections that it might not produce a 70 percent reduction in emissions until as late as 2025, because some plants might continue emitting more mercury even as they buy credits from cleaner utilities.
League of Conservation Voters activists also have been making Internet appeals to demand deeper cuts: They alone generated 20,000 comments. And the environmental group Greenpeace has been hosting a series of events at hair salons in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, in which they offer free tests to determine the mercury levels in people's hair.
"When you tell people our energy choices are leading to neurotoxins in their body, they're much more likely to listen to you," said Casey Harrell, Greenpeace's energy and toxics campaigner.
----
New Mercury Rules Get Heavy Response
June 29, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/national/29mercury.html
WASHINGTON, June 28 - By the Tuesday deadline for public comment, the Environmental Protection Agency expects to have nearly 600,000 responses to proposed standards for mercury emissions from power plants. Most criticize the proposal as too weak, agency officials said.
The responses, ranging from postcards and letters sent as part of orchestrated campaigns to highly technical analyses from scientific groups, will be reviewed before the deadline for issuing the new rule on March 15, 2005.
The administrator of environmental protection, Michael O. Leavitt, said: "The process isn't complete, the agency's work is not done. We are looking forward to reviewing the comments received and will determine what additional information is needed to issue a final regulation.''
"This is the first time we've ever done this, and we want to make sure we do this right," Mr. Leavitt said.
So far, the fight over mercury standards has largely reflected a battle between the power industry, which has never been regulated for toxic emissions, and environmental groups, which are eager to see that the first standards are as stringent as possible.
Mercury is known to cause a range of adverse health effects, especially for children and pregnant women, and coal-fired power plants are its largest source, accounting for 48 tons every year.
----
Biotechs mine hardy bacteria for industrial use
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
By Paul Elias,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-06-29/s_25360.asp
PALO ALTO, California - The creatures are known as "extremophiles," and they earn the name. They live in toxic Superfund cleanup sites, boiling deep-sea rift vents, volcanic craters, and polar glaciers: some of the planet's harshest environments.
These single-celled creatures owe their hardiness to genes, and that has drawn the attention of a few biotech companies. The companies train the genes to mass produce industrial-strength enzymes for such products as better detergents, cleaner chemicals, and more effective DNA fingerprints.
Such "bio-prospecting" efforts have huge potential for good. They just might make hazardous waste cleanup more affordable, reduce pollution, and make better medicines if the microbes' genetic durability can be exploited and controlled.
But tough questions are being raised as well about the morality of allowing private companies to patent and profit from Mother Nature.
The extremophile candidates are numerous. There's Deinoccus radiodurans, dubbed Conan the Bacterium by its legions of fans because it withstands 10,000 times the amount of radiation that would kill a human. Found on radiated food, it has a unique ability to repair broken DNA.
In Chile's moonlike Atacama desert, one of Earth's driest spots, lives another extremophile scientists say could give them clues to what life might look like on Mars.
And the Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is sponsoring experiments on genetically engineering extremophiles to extend the shelf life of blood-clotting platelets in extreme conditions. The idea is to help treat battlefield wounds.
Objections to such work often come from activists who complain that Third World countries aren't properly compensated for microbes extracted from their deserts, mountains, and sea shores.
"The concern with bio-prospecting is that the people who consider themselves to be the stewards of the biodioversity in a region often aren't consulted or are ignored," said Beth Burrows of the Edmonds Institute, a environmental nonprofit based in Edmonds, Washington.
Native Hawaiians are angry over a deal between the University of Hawaii and a biotechnology company to share in potential profits gleaned from lava sludge. Now the Hawaiian Legislature is considering a moratorium on the transfer or sale of extremophiles found on public lands so environmental and profit-sharing issues can be worked out.
Antarctica is governed by an international treaty that vows to keep the continent open and free to scientists dedicated to peaceful pursuits. But some 92 patents have been filed in the United States and another 62 in Europe that claim ownership of biological property found there.
While such patent applications appear to be legal, "some scientists active in Antarctica worry about whether outright commercial exploitation and patents are within the spirit of the treaty," said Sam Johnston, who co-wrote a report on the subject for the United Nations this year.
The Edmonds Institute sued the National Park Service in 1997 after it gave San Diego-based Diversa Corp. commercial rights to prospect for extremophiles in the fabled hot springs of Yellowstone National Park. The prospecting, involving fees and royalties paid to the government, was ultimately approved by a judge on the condition that an extensive environmental review be completed.
The park service has defended the deal, which remains on hold pending the review, as a way for it to profit on scientific research without disrupting the park's environment. Four decades ago, the park service wasn't so financially savvy when a University of Wisconsin researcher discovered the extremophile Thermus aquaticus in a Yellowstone hotspring.
Today, that bacterium provides a key enzyme - polymerase - used for polymerase chain reaction, better known as PCR, a Noble Prize-winning DNA fingerprinting technique used widely by crime labs, hospitals, and university researchers. Yellowstone doesn't receive any income from sales of the PCR enzyme, now a key tool in the $300 million-a-year DNA fingerprinting business.
The companies involved say that without the ability to patent extremophiles, they can't make good on the many promises of this area of biotechnology.
David Estell, a researcher at Genencor International Inc., said bio-prospecting requires the collecting of just a few samples, which hardly disturbs the environment.
Genencor is one of the few profitable biotechnology companies in existence, earning $13 million in the first quarter of 2004 on $94 million in revenue. Genencor has the genetic material of 15,000 strains of microbes stored in deep-freeze in Palo Alto and the Netherlands. It already has 11 industrial products on the market, and is using living material - enzymes and proteins, rather than fossil fuels - to develop cleaner and cheaper ways of making industrial chemicals.
For instance, Genencor takes a gene that gives a microbe alkaline resistance and uses it to create enzymes for laundry detergent. One enzyme is used in Tide detergent, another is used to give jeans a faded look.
Both are produced by extremophiles found thriving in highly alkaline lakes in East Africa and Kenya. The extremophile genes responsible for making these enzymes are genetically engineered into commonplace bacteria, which are then coaxed to grow by the trillions in giant brewers' vats at Genencor's nine factories around the world.
"The goal is make proteins do something they've never done before," Estell said.
-------- health
Grow-your-own body parts may be available
(UPI)
June 29, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040629-030725-3339r.htm
Melbourne, Australia, Jun. 29 (UPI) -- Australian scientists are seeking investors to market a technology that lets people grow spare body parts, the Herald Sun reported Tuesday.
Researchers from the Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery at St. Vincent's Hospital and Melbourne University's chemical and biomolecular engineering department worked with polylactic glycolic acid, a naturally occurring substance in the human body.
The scientists used a pig's own body fat to grow a fist-sized breast in just a few weeks, the newspaper said.
Polylactic glycolic acid takes on the shape of a mold of the required body part, and then a three-dimensional "scaffold" mimics the body's framework, a spokesman said.
With a small amount of fat from the patient and a number of undisclosed growth factors, fat grows inside the cavity and creates the desired body part.
The Melbourne researchers are seeking financial backing to make their product commercially available.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Defiance Leads to Cellblock Senate Disruptor Won't Apologize
By Henri E. Cauvin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 29, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13559-2004Jun28.html
All Elena Sassower had to do was say she was sorry.
A jury had found her guilty in April of disrupting Congress, and yesterday a judge told her that she could be placed on probation and avoid a jail term -- if she would agree to apologize for her conduct last spring at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
But she refused to comply.
Even before D.C. Superior Court Judge Brian F. Holeman could finish outlining the proposed penalty, Sassower scoffed at the notion of writing apology letters to officials including Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah).
"I am not remorseful," she interjected. "I will not lie."
And so, she said, there will be no letters: "They will not be sent because they will not be written."
It was the same sort of brassy defiance that Sassower -- a New York-based advocate for judicial accountability and integrity -- displayed when she was on trial, accused of disrupting a confirmation hearing in May 2003 for a federal appeals court judge. Not only did she contest the charges, she also challenged the actions of the court, clashing repeatedly with Holeman, so much so that at one point he ordered her locked up for the lunch hour.
So yesterday, when the judge gave her one last chance at probation, asking if she would accept his conditions -- the apologies, the community service, the anger management counseling and the order to stay away from the Capitol -- her reply was almost predictable.
"No," said Sassower, 48, who represented herself during the trial and again at the sentencing.
Instantly, Holeman ordered her jailed for a six-month term, double the time he would have been willing to suspend had she agreed to his terms.
"Once again," he told her, "your pride has gotten in the way of what could have been a beneficial result for you."
With that, a marshal led Sassower to the cellblock behind the courtroom, her first stop en route to jail.
A co-founder of the Center for Judicial Accountability, Sassower tried to turn her misdemeanor case into a forum for how the country chooses federal judges. She contended that the public has too little input in the selection. Her arrest came after she demanded to be heard at a Senate Judiciary hearing on the nomination of Richard Wesley, a judge on New York's highest court, to the 2nd Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
In court and in letters to public officials, Sassower has alleged that her arrest stemmed from a conspiracy to keep her silent. She recently expressed an interest in performing community service to fulfill her sentence -- if it called for her to work with the judiciary committee to reform the judicial selection process.
Yesterday's swift lockup seemed to take many in court by surprise -- from the total strangers who happened upon the spectacle to a handful of Sassower supporters. "Can't you guys help get her out?" a woman asked reporters outside the courtroom. She would not identify herself, saying she feared she would be targeted by the government.
Down the hall, the prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jessie K. Liu and Aaron H. Mendelsohn, said the sentence spoke for itself.
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Mother allows photos of Calif. soldier's coffin
The Associated Press
June 29, 2004
http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/9815043p-10737570c.html
SACRAMENTO (AP) - The mother of a soldier killed in Iraq summoned news outlets to photograph her son's flag-draped casket arriving at Sacramento International Airport to protest a Pentagon policy banning media coverage of America's war dead.
Nearly a dozen reporters, photographers and television crews watched as the coffin of Army Sgt. Patrick McCaffrey, 34, was transferred to a hearse outside an airport cargo terminal shortly before midnight Sunday, officials said.
"I feel empty, hurt, numb," his mother, Nadia McCaffrey, told the Los Angeles Times. "I am not angry, I am not revengeful. I'm just hurt that my son's life is gone, and they should stop what they're doing."
Patrick McCaffrey was killed June 22 along with 1st Lt. Andre Tyson, both members of the 579th Engineer Battalion, when the two were ambushed by insurgents near Balad, Iraq.
Both were promoted posthumously on Friday, Tech. Sgt. Andrew Hughan of the California National Guard said.
The debate over whether Americans should see the coffins of McCaffrey and other troops flared last April after The Seattle Times published a front-page photograph of caskets in a cargo plane in Kuwait and a First Amendment activist posted on his Web site dozens of like images from Dover, Del., home to the nation's largest military mortuary.
Sunday night's brief ceremony, however, did not violate the policy because it applies only to military facilities. The airport and the California National Guard worked Sunday to arrange the event.
"I don't care what President Bush wants," his mother told the Los Angeles Times. Patrick "did not die for nothing ... The way he lived needs to be talked about. Patrick was not a fighter, he was a peacemaker."
The Pentagon's rules "are specifically for the airlift command, when the caskets are on the military plane," said Lt. Jonathan Shiroma, spokesman for the California National Guard. "This is a commercial jet, so it's a different jurisdiction, so to speak. We cannot stop the media from filming."
McCaffrey's casket arrived aboard a commercial flight from Atlanta and was placed in a hearse by fellow members of the 579th Engineer Battalion, Shiroma said. It was driven in a motorcade to a funeral home in his hometown of Tracy, where services were scheduled for Thursday.
McCaffrey was a manager with a collision repair company in the Silicon Valley when he enlisted in the National Guard in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But he had grown disillusioned with his mission in Iraq, his family said.
For her part, Nadia McCaffrey said she planned to continue speaking out against the war.
"This is enough," she said. "We have to react."
McCaffrey will be buried in his wife's hometown of Oceanside on Thursday.
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English Grandmother Wages War Against U.S. Military
Reuters
By Louise Knowles
Jun 29, 2004
MENWITH HILL, England (Reuters) - From a red camper van parked on a roadside, a British grandmother and veteran peace campaigner has launched her latest attack on America's military presence in Britain.
Helen John, 66, who set up camp beside a road near a huge U.S.-run listening post at the end of May, admits she plans to cause damage and says she won't be deterred.
From her vantage point near the base in northern England, John is surrounded by stunning rural landscape. Rising on the horizon are rolling hills, dry stone walls, flocks of sheep and what appear to be 20 giant white golf balls, part of the high-tech U.S. surveillance system.
"They want to brand me a terrorist because they don't like how I behave. I set out to damage property, never people, but I intend to cause damage," she said.
RAF Menwith Hill is the site of the world's largest surveillance base. From here, the United States' National Security (news - web sites) Agency operates a listening system capable of tracking communications as far away as the Middle East.
Armed with wire cutters and banners, John and a group of fellow local campaigners have been trying to damage the base for more than 10 years, arguing that it represents American imperialism and is furthering U.S. efforts to take nuclear weapons into space.
"There is not a single person in the United States that would allow a foreign base on its soil, acting against the interests of the people of that country," said John. "These Americans are not monsters, but they are involved in something monstrous."
John's move will re-establish a women's peace camp at Menwith Hill. An eviction notice in the late 1990s forced local women's campers from the site.
GREENHAM LEGACY
Camp life will be nothing new for John, who was one of a group of women who marched from the Welsh city of Cardiff to Greenham Common in Berkshire, southern England, in 1981 to protest against plans to house nuclear missiles at the base.
When they arrived at Greenham, John and three other women started a movement that grew into a full-time camp where tens of thousands of women protested against nuclear arms.
"The U.S. base commander said we could stay as long as we liked ... and we took him at his word," she said.
John lived at Greenham Common for a year while her husband looked after their five children, a decision that earned her vilification in the tabloid press as an unfit mother who had abandoned her family.
Alerted to the station at Menwith Hill, John moved to Yorkshire in 1993 to focus her energies on the base. When she arrived, around 100 women were already camped near the site in protest against its activities.
After the camp was evicted, John launched numerous attacks on the base, setting out to cause as much damage as she could.
She appears unfazed by the armed police guarding the perimeter.
PRISON TERMS
Police have arrested her many times, and John refuses to pay fines or do community service. "The only option they have is to lock me up," she said. She has served several three-month stretches in prison.
John is resigned to the fact that Menwith Hill may never attract the levels of support that Greenham did.
"Women could identify with weapons at Greenham. War is exciting, weapons are exciting, command and control is not. It just kills you."
She does not expect much support from people in the local area. "Having the Americans here pumps a lot of money into the local economy," she said.
But her resolve and devotion to the cause are unwavering.
"I came here to do a job. As long as the Americans have bases on the soil of this country, I'll be around showing opposition and actively trying to harm it in a non-violent manner."
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