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NUCLEAR
Security forum backs bid to solve nuclear crisis
Missile test
Pyongyang complains of Japan, U.S. moves
Powell, N. Korean Diplomat Meet
1.2 Million Yucca Mountain Nuclear Documents Searchable Online
Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant Applies for Power Increase
Cost likely to rise for Hanford waste plant construction
Hanford workers remove last canister from 1 basin
Truckers Hauling Highly Hazardous Materials Need New Permit
DOE waste truck cited in Oliver Springs
MILITARY
Afghan Elections May Be Delayed Again
7 Held on Arms-Export Charges
British GI Faces Charge in Iraq Shooting
Warheads found in Iraq not chemical weapons, military says
Poland says 'terrorists' were looking for poison gas warheads
New Guard Force Finds Welcome on Streets of Baghdad
New Swell of Insurgent Violence Rolls into Baghdad
Ex-Occupation Aide Sees No Dent in 'Saddamists'
Israeli Court Again Halts Work on Part of Barrier
Israel Will Ignore World Court Barrier Ruling
New Cuba Travel Limits May Sway Voters
Disappearing Prisoners
'What law, what resolution formed this court?'
Defiant Hussein Hears Charges in Court
Hussein, in Jail, Reportedly Said Little of Value
Defiant Hussein Rebukes Iraqi Court for Trying Him
Hawaii judge had role in Cassini trip to Saturn
Iraq Far Behind on U.N. Dues
Army Report Criticizes Training and Practices at Prisons
Saddam Could Call CIA in His Defence
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Hawaii judge had role in Cassini trip to Saturn
Refugees Moved Before Annan Visit
Sudan Camp Is Moved Before U.N. Visit
Lawyers Seek Access To 53 at Guantanamo Letter to Rumsfeld Faxed Yesterday
POLITICS
Cheney, Bush Tout Gains in Terror War
Warfare in urban centers
Our Saudi friends
Pop Culture and the 2004 Election
Going Left on K Street
US lawmakers request UN observers
OTHER
Alaska Natives Say Warming Trend Imperils Villages
Large-Scale Air Quality Study Launched
'Western' Diet Raises Stroke Risk - US Study
WHO warns 10,000 may die in Darfur
ACTIVISTS
Huge Crowd Marches Again For the Vote in Hong Kong
Huge Rally in Hong Kong Calls for Democratic Elections
Thousands march for full democracy
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- asia
Security forum backs bid to solve nuclear crisis as US and North Korea meet
JAKARTA (AFP)
Jul 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040702123342.5cyv9o22.html
A major Asia-Pacific security forum gave strong support Friday to new efforts aimed at ending the North Korean nuclear crisis, as the US and North Korean foreign ministers held rare talks on the sidelines of the meeting.
Members of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), in a statement after their annual meeting, "emphasised the importance of a step-by-step process of 'words for words' and 'action for action'."
The ARF foreign ministers also condemned terrorism as a worldwide threat, agreed to work together to improve transport security and urged army-ruled Myanmar to move towards democracy.
Their statement on the North Korean issue followed a promise from US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Thursday to match North Korea "deed for deed" in the process of dismantling its nuclear weapons programme.
Powell and his North Korean counterpart, Paek Nam-Sun, met privately early Friday and both sides indicated some progress was made.
It was the first face-to-face cabinet-level contact since 2002 between the United States and the secretive communist state, which Washington has branded as part of an "axis of evil."
Powell spoke of an "opportunity for concrete progress" after his 20-minute meeting with Paek.
The North Koreans said that if the United States intended to improve relations, "the DPRK (North Korea) also will not regard the US as a permanent enemy."
Paek in a statement said the North was still committed to denuclearising the Korean peninsula peacefully.
ARF, whose membership rose to 24 after Pakistan joined on Friday, includes all parties involved in separate "six-party" talks on resolving the nuclear crisis -- the United States, China, Japan, Russia and North and South Korea.
At the latest round of those talks last week, the US presented a new plan which gives North Korea three months to shut down and seal its nuclear weapons facilities in return for economic and diplomatic rewards.
ARF ministers supported the commitment of the six parties "to the goal of denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and underlined the need to take first steps toward the goal as soon as possible."
Their closing statement described terrorism as "a threat to all peoples and countries" but also called for the battle against extremism to be waged in accordance with human rights.
Terrorism should not be identified with any religion or ethnic group, the ministers said.
ARF links the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) with 13 other Asia-Pacific states and the European Union. Southeast Asia has been hard hit by terrorism in recent years, with the Al Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah staging bombings in Indonesia and the Philippines.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda told reporters ARF members also discussed maritime threats.
The piracy-prone Malacca Strait, through which about half the world's oil supplies pass, has been of particular concern, with the narrow waterway widely regarded as a potential terrorism target.
Wirayuda stressed the nations that border the Malacca Strait -- Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore -- had sovereign rights in the waterway, following a now defused row over US suggestions earlier in the year it was considering deploying forces to patrol the area.
On controversial member Myanmar, ARF ministers emphasised the continued relevance of the ARF chairman's statement last year -- which urged Myanmar to lift restrictions on democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
They also "urged Myanmar to take every action that would add substance to the expression of its democratic aspiration."
Powell and the EU had been pressing ASEAN to take a tougher line on Myanmar. The Southeast Asians, at their own meeting Wednesday, dropped public calls for the junta to release Aung San Suu Kyi.
Aung San Suu Kyi's party won elections in 1990 by a landslide but has never been allowed to rule and she has been excluded by a national convention that began in May and is tasked with drafting a new constitution.
AFR ministers also welcomed the reassertion of Iraq's sovereignty and emphasised the United Nations role in building democracy. They underlined the need for global co-operation in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
-------- korea
Missile test
Inside the Ring
July 02, 2004
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
North Korea test-fired a cruise missile June 23, the latest sign of the reclusive communist state's continuing missile development.
Data from the cruise missile test still are being evaluated, said a U.S. official familiar with the test. The missile was fired from a mobile launcher near the coastal town of Tanchon in northeastern North Korea. It flew into the East Sea/Japan Sea. The missile is believed to be a new North Korean anti-ship cruise missile, believed to have a range of 100 miles, that has been tested several times in the past.
----
Pyongyang complains of Japan, U.S. moves
July 02, 2004
Washington Times
Briefly
http://www.washtimes.com/world/briefly.htm
JAKARTA, Indonesia - North Korea chided Japan yesterday for trying to impose sanctions after foreign ministers of the two nations met here on the sidelines of a regional forum.
Paek Nam-Sun also told his Japanese counterpart, Yoriko Kawaguchi, there could be no progress on talks to end its nuclear program unless the United States did more to establish trust. He told Miss Kawaguchi that recent legislation allowing Tokyo to ban North Korean ships from Japanese ports was "detrimental to improved relations."
The North Koreans also painted a gloomy picture of relations with the United States. "We told the Japanese delegation that between North Korea and the United States, there's no trust," said Chung Sung-il, a North Korean Foreign Ministry official. "The United States has to understand it needs to build trust if it wants to continue talking about nuclear weapons."
----
Powell, N. Korean Diplomat Meet
'Useful' Discussion Held on Nuclear Dismantlement Proposals
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22176-2004Jul1.html
JAKARTA, Indonesia, July 2 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell held talks Friday morning with North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun, the highest-level meeting between the U.S. and North Korea since the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions erupted 20 months ago.
The 20-minute conversation, held in a room on the sidelines of a regional security conference here, occurred one week after the administration advanced a more detailed proposal for ending the impasse at six-nation talks held in Beijing.
Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry has strongly criticized the administration's handling of the North Korean situation, especially the refusal to engage in direct talks with Pyongyang. Kerry has argued that the administration, by avoiding direct negotiations, has wasted precious time while allowing North Korea to dramatically increase its nuclear arsenal.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Powell "emphasized the administration's proposals to move forward on dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear programs," and that "there was an opportunity for concrete progress."
Boucher said the "discussion was useful to help clarify each side's proposals."
North Korea, which normally does not quickly comment on such meetings, issued its own statement that quoted Paek as saying, "If the United States is of the position to improve the bilateral relations, [North Korea] also will not regard the U.S. as a permanent enemy." Paek said "simultaneous actions" were needed to resolve the crisis in a situation "in which there is no trust" between North Korea and the United States.
Under the U.S. proposal offered in Beijing, U.S. allies such as South Korea could provide immediate energy assistance while North Korea would have three months to reveal its programs and have its claims verified by U.S. intelligence. Then, the United States would participate in written security assurances and participate in a process that might ultimately result in direct U.S. aid. After the Bush administration offered its proposal last week, North Korea countered with a request for immediate assistance from the United States once it freezes its programs.
On Thursday, Powell reiterated the United States would not provide any assistance to the insular communist state until after "it is absolutely clear" that North Korea "is taking irreversible steps" that will lead to the dismantling of its nuclear programs. "We have to see deeds before we are prepared to put something on the table," Powell said at a news conference.
Friday's meeting, which took place at 8:15 a.m., was not on Powell's official schedule, but the Pyongyang government, which wants direct negotiations with the United States, had said it would welcome such a contact.
Powell had coffee with Paek for five minutes at this regional forum two years ago, just days after the Bush administration concluded that North Korea was violating a 1994 agreement to freeze its nuclear programs by creating a clandestine effort to produce highly enriched uranium. The administration confronted North Korean officials in October 2002, and said the North Koreans admitted to the uranium program, which led to a breakdown of the 1994 deal and North Korean's decision to restart a shuttered nuclear reactor. North Korea has since denied it has a uranium enrichment program, and three rounds of six-nation talks have proven inconclusive.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
1.2 Million Yucca Mountain Nuclear Documents Searchable Online
July 2, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-02-09.asp#anchor3
Approximately 1.2 million documents totaling some 5.6 million pages regarding the Yucca Mountain geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste are now available to the public and searchable online. The documents are available on the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) website, and will be included in the the agency's license application for the repository to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC).
DOE expects to submit a license application for Yucca Mountain to the NRC by December. Following submittal of the license application, the Commission will conduct a full and public adjudicatory process on the license application, for which federal law contemplates a three to four year time period.
The Energy Department is aiming to open Yucca Mountain in 2010 to receive spent nuclear fuel and waste from Defense Department nuclear weapons production now stored at sites in states.
The Yucca Mountain site is located in Nye County, Nevada, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas on the western edge of the Nevada Test Site where nuclear bomb tests have taken place, both above and below ground, for decades.
As of 2003, the United States accumulated about 49,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors. In addition, there will be about 22,000 canisters of solid defense-related radioactive waste for future disposal in a repository. The DOE says if stacked side-by-side and end-to-end, it would cover an area about the size of a football field to a depth of about 10 feet.
Currently, spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste are stored in temporary facilities at some 129 sites in 39 states - in cities, suburbs, and rural areas.
The waste would be transported by rail and road to Yucca Mountain, should it ever be licensed, a process that is expected to take years. The state of Nevada has mounted a number of legal challenges to Yucca Mountain, which will be heard by a federal court sometime this summer.
In the United States today, more than 161 million people reside within 75 miles of temporarily stored nuclear waste. Most are located near large bodies of water.
The documents represent the scientific studies, evaluations, and opinions of more than 20 years of scientific study of Yucca Mountain.
The DOE is cautioning readers to consider all documents in context and as part of the entire set before drawing conclusions about the scientific information in the license application. "Selective use of individual documents or portions of documents by any user, including DOE, outside the context provided by other relevant documents is likely to result in inappropriate, faulty, or misleading conclusions," the agency said.
If the 5.6 million pages searchable on the Internet were stacked one on top of the other, the stack would reach a height of approximately 1,800 feet - some three times the height of the Washington Monument. Laid end-to-end, these 5.6 million pages would extend approximately 1,000 miles or almost half the distance from Washington, D.C. to Las Vegas, the DOE said.
DOE's Yucca Mountain documents may be accessed today at http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov, and will be available through the NRC's LSN web site at http://www.lsnnet.gov.
Those without access to the Internet may use the public access computers at the Las Vegas Yucca Mountain Information Center - 4101B Meadows Lane, Las Vegas, Nevada; at the public reading room (1E-190), U.S. Department of Energy, Forrestal Building, 1000 Independence Avenue, SW, Washington, DC; or at most libraries worldwide.
-------- vermont
Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant Applies for Power Increase
July 2, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-02-09.asp#anchor2
Entergy Nuclear Operations has applied to increase the maximum power level at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is doing a detailed safety inspection and opening a public hearing and comment process before deciding on the application.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Thursday announced the opportunity for concerned parties to request a hearing on the application.
The Vermont Yankee is still off-line after two fires at the plant June 18 required a hot shutdown of the plant. The fires were extinguished without injury or release of radioactivity into the atmosphere, federal and Entergy officials said.
The Vermont Yankee plant is located in Windham County near Vernon, Vermont, and the proposed change represents an approximate increase of 20 percent over the current maximum authorized output - from 1,593 megawatts thermal to 1,912 megawatts thermal. This would represent an increase of 100 megawatts electric.
The NRC informed the Vermont Public Service Board Monday it will only approve the request by the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant to produce higher levels of electricity if the agency finds that the plant can operate safely at that level.
"The NRC has already received significant public comment on issues related to the review," said Bill Ruland, the NRC power uprate manager. "The NRC staff will pursue these issues. We will not approve the uprate unless we are satisfied it can be done safely."
The agency said it will conduct additional safety inspections at Vermont Yankee for three weeks in August as part of a new pilot program to enhance engineering inspections of the nation's operating nuclear reactors.
"The expanded engineering inspection will provide additional confirmation, beyond the routine inspection program, of the Vermont Yankee plant design as we consider whether or not we should approve the power uprate," Ruland told the Board.
"Entergy must provide sufficient justification to prove to us that safety is maintained," Ruland said. "They aren't there yet."
Brian Holian, the NRC manager responsible for inspection oversight at the plant, said the independent inspection team would include at least seven people. The team's leader will come from outside the NRC's Region I office, which oversees Vermont Yankee. The team will include NRC inspectors who have not worked at the plant in recent years, and private sector nuclear engineering experts, he said.
The Vermont Yankee is also the nuclear power plant that lost two spent nuclear fuel rods, which have yet to be recovered.
A notice of the opportunity to request a hearing was published July 1 in the Federal Register, and anyone wishing to request a hearing must file a petition by August 30. Petitions may be filed by anyone whose interest may be affected by the power increase and who wishes to participate as a party in the proceeding.
A request for a hearing and a petition for leave to intervene must be filed by sending it to the Secretary of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission at: hearingdocket@nrc.gov.
-------- washington
Cost likely to rise for Hanford waste plant construction
By SHANNON DININNY
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Friday, July 2, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/aplocal_story.asp?category=6420&slug=WST%20Hanford%20Construction%20Costs
YAKIMA, Wash. -- A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers report concludes there is a significant risk of construction cost increases for the Hanford nuclear site's waste treatment plant, the government's largest construction project.
The report was requested by members of the U.S. House, which approved full funding for Hanford cleanup as part of a major spending bill last week despite the study's conclusions. But lawmakers noted in the bill that the corps report reveals that the "uncontrolled cost growth" for the project also is apparent at other sites managed by the U.S. Department of Energy.
For 40 years, the Hanford reservation made plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal. Today, work there centers on a $50 billion to $60 billion cleanup, to be finished by 2035.
About 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste from World War II and Cold War-era plutonium production sits in 177 aging underground tanks at Hanford, less than 10 miles from the Columbia River. The waste treatment plant will use a process called vitrification to turn most of the waste into glass logs for permanent disposal in a nuclear waste repository.
Plant construction was estimated at $4.35 billion before the contract was awarded in 2000. The current estimate is close to $5.7 billion, an increase of more than 30 percent.
"The committee has little confidence in the accuracy of the current cost and schedule baselines for these projects and even less in the ability and motivation of DOE and its contractors to control these costs," the bill said.
Erik Olds, spokesman for the Energy Department's Office of River Protection in Richland, said the agency has worked to greatly refine cost and schedule estimates for the waste treatment plant in the past two years, as well as the frequency and quality of its briefings to Congress.
"We have also provided the final corps report to our contractor and will be looking for any opportunities presented in that report to continue the quality of our cost and schedule estimates," he said Friday.
About 1,700 people have been working to build the plant, which will stand 12 stories tall and be about the size of four football fields when completed. Bechtel National is the contractor.
The plant is being designed as it is being built, and the Energy Department has said improvements to meet regulatory deadlines altered the design.
In a recent tour of the construction site, John Eschenberg, project manager for the River Protection Office, noted that only 10 percent of the building's design was complete four years ago. By the end of this year, the design is expected to be 75 percent complete, he said.
The plant is scheduled to be running by 2011.
"With each increment of design completed, you gain more precision in estimating the costs to build," Eschenberg said. "I treat this like my own money. I'm stingy."
Eschenberg also said Congress has allowed $5.781 billion for the project overall, and the current estimate remains under the allowance.
The House last week approved full funding for Hanford cleanup in 2005 as part of its massive spending bill, which still requires Senate approval. The bill does not include specific funding levels for Hanford, but it was in line with the Bush administration's request of $2.19 billion for cleanup at the 586-square-mile site.
In the bill, lawmakers said the corps review identified several problems that are likely "systemic with DOE's cost and schedule baselines: inadequate government estimating, inadequate government contract management, and inadequate contingency amounts."
The bill directs the Energy Department to notify, in writing, immediately when there is a projected increase of 10 percent or more in the total estimated cost for all construction projects in excess of $20 million.
Such notification will require the department to provide a detailed justification for the cost increase and identify how it will pay for the increased costs, the bill says.
The corps report found that overall, cost estimates for the Hanford project were good, but said not enough money had been set aside for construction contingencies or problems that might arise getting the plant up and running, said John Britton, spokesman for Bechtel National, the contractor building the plant.
"It all comes down to whose crystal ball is clearer. We've got our best estimate in there, and it'll come down to 2011 to see who's right," he said.
Other major DOE projects cited in the report for having uncontrolled cost growth are located at the Savannah River site in South Carolina, a plant in Paducah, Ky., and in Russia, where new power plants will be built to replace nuclear plants that generate weapons-grade plutonium.
----
Hanford workers remove last canister from 1 basin
By Associated Press
Jul 02, 2004
http://www.tdn.com/articles/2004/07/02/area_news/news09.txt
YAKIMA -- Workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation have finished removing spent nuclear fuel from the K East basin, a water-filled pool that has leaked water and sludge into the soil, threatening the Columbia River just 400 yards away.
The last canister of fuel was removed Thursday and transferred to the K West basin for processing, the U.S. Department of Energy announced.
"Emptying this basin is more than just a project milestone -- it's a critical step in risk reduction at Hanford," Keith Klein, manager of the Energy Department's Richland operations office, said in a news release.
Moving the roughly 2 million pounds of fuel is the first step in emptying the basin altogether so that it no longer poses a risk to the environment, Klein said.
About 2,100 metric tons of spent fuel, including 4 tons of plutonium, have been stored underwater in the K Basins, two big indoor pools built in the 1950s with a planned use life of 20 years.
Most of the highly radioactive fuel rods came from the N Reactor, which was used to make plutonium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The irradiated uranium fuel in the K Basins represents about 80 percent of the nation's remaining inventory of spent nuclear fuel.
Removal of the fuel turned out to be difficult work, because much of it was so badly corroded, said Ron Gallagher, president and chief executive officer of contractor Fluor Hanford.
A computer-control failure on a crane delayed the final removal of fuel from K East basin by two days.
"Now that the fuel canisters are out, we can turn our focus to getting the K East basin ready for demolition," Gallagher said in a news release.
Last month, workers began removing from the pools radioactive sludge, dust, dirt and sloughed material from the basin walls.
The Energy Department missed a legal deadline established under the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement -- the legal pact governing cleanup at Hanford -- to begin removing the sludge by Dec. 31, 2002. But the agency reached a new agreement with regulators in May.
Under the new agreement, sludge from the K East basin must be removed by Jan. 31, 2006. Sludge from the K West basin must be removed by June 30, 2006.
More than three-fourths of the 50 cubic meters of sludge inside the basins is located in the leak-prone K East basin.
All fuel, debris and water will be taken out of the K East basin, and the basin itself will be removed by March 31, 2007. The other basin will be removed by spring 2009.
The previous plan called for total removal by July 2007.
-------- us nuc waste
Truckers Hauling Highly Hazardous Materials Need New Permit
July 2, 2004
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jul2004/2004-07-02-09.asp#anchor1
Trucking companies planning to haul highly hazardous materials must have a special safety permit, beginning January 1, 2005, the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) announced Wednesday.
The safety permit will be required for motor carriers hauling certain types and amounts of radioactive materials, explosives, toxic inhalant materials and compressed or refrigerated liquid methane or natural gas.
"This regulation will promote the safe and secure transportation of the most dangerous hazardous materials," said FMCSA Administrator Annette Sandberg.
She said the special permit is needed because these highly hazardous materials would be dangerous in crashes or if used in terrorist attacks.
Under guidelines outlined in a final rule issued Wednesday, the nation's approximately 3,100 hazardous materials carriers must meet all federal operational, safety and security standards and must communicate regularly with drivers by phone or other electronic device.
Carriers with poor safety ratings will be prohibited from transporting the hazardous materials requiring these special permits. Temporary safety permits may be issued to carriers without safety ratings for a period of 180 days pending the outcome of a compliance review, a measure the agency said would "prevent unnecessary interruptions of commerce."
FMCSA is implementing a process to deny, suspend and revoke safety permits in this final rule. Safety permits will be denied if a carrier does not have a "Satisfactory" safety rating.
Permits will be suspended or revoked from carriers failing to comply with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, Hazardous Materials Regulations or similar state requirements.
The FMCSA estimates that the annual safety benefits to the U.S. economy resulting from fewer accidental releases of hazardous materials will be $3.7 million.
This final rule is online at http://fmcsa.dot.gov. It also can be viewed in the DOT Docket Management System, http://dms.dot.gov by searching for docket number FMCSA-97-2180.
----
DOE waste truck cited in Oliver Springs
OLIVER SPRINGS MAYOR: 'I've got a major, major, major problem with (this).'
Paul Parson and Stan Mitchell
July 2, 2004
Oak Ridger (TN)
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/070204/new_20040702026.shtml
A truck driver hauling Department of Energy-related waste was recently ticketed in Oliver Springs for following too closely.
Ronnie Hurd of Eidson was cited on Tuesday. He was pulled over on East Tri-County Boulevard near Strutt Street.
The truck was reportedly transporting depleted uranium hexafluoride - a byproduct of an operation where uranium was ultimately processed into nuclear reactor fuel and weapons-grade material.
Stored in cylinders at the Oak Ridge K-25 site, some of the material is being transported through Oliver Springs en route to Interstate 75 where it heads to the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio.
DOE's environmental manager, Bechtel Jacobs Co., oversees the shipments, which are handled by a subcontractor.
"Drivers are responsible for obeying all traffic rules," said Dennis Hill, a spokesman for Bechtel Jacobs.
Hill said no disciplinary action has been taken against the ticketed driver, adding officials will likely wait until the issue is settled in court.
Recently, a vehicle ran into one of the transport trucks while it was preparing to turn onto Highway 61 to go to Clinton. The driver of the cylinder truck wasn't at fault, and neither the transport truck nor its load was reportedly damaged.
Regardless, Oliver Springs Mayor Ed Kelley said he has a problem with waste cylinders coming through his town instead of Oak Ridge.
Officials opted not to use the Oak Ridge route when that plan was met with controversy last year.
"I've got a major, major, major problem with the fact that if you follow this whole thing from the beginning to now, I have never understood how in the hell the city of Oak Ridge can stop them from coming down the Turnpike and they (DOE) would send them the most indirect route Š through my town," Kelley said. "I don't understand that."
Kelley also said he doesn't understand why DOE doesn't help Oliver Springs as it does Oak Ridge.
"As far as I know, DOE has never contributed anything to the Oliver Springs community since they have been over there," he said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Elections May Be Delayed Again
Reuters
Friday, July 2, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22163-2004Jul1.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 1 -- The United Nations suggested Thursday that Afghanistan's elections may have to be postponed beyond September, but said a delay of a few days should not be seen as a major problem.
Election officials said that because the election date must be announced 90 days in advance, an announcement would have to be made Friday or Saturday if elections are to be held in September.
Mohammed Azam, a spokesman for the U.N.-backed Joint Electoral Management Body, said an announcement should not be expected Friday, a day of rest in the Muslim country, but insisted the deadline would be met. "We have no information about a delay," he said.
Earlier, the spokesman for the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said at a news conference that there was a continuing debate about the election date.
"If elections are to take place in September, a date is needed very shortly," Manoel de Almeida e Silva said. "Of course, if the debate goes on, that would evidently have an impact on the election date, which if it is a matter of days or so shouldn't be seen as a major drama."
The elections, originally scheduled for June, have already been postponed because of security worries and slow voter registration. Unless they are held by mid-October, the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan and the onset of winter could force their postponement until next spring.
-------- arms
7 Held on Arms-Export Charges
Suspects Accused of Helping Chinese Obtain Technology
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21842-2004Jul1.html
Federal agents arrested seven people yesterday in two suburban New Jersey towns and charged them with exporting millions of dollars' worth of sensitive military technology and components to China. The arrests were the latest in a crackdown on what authorities believe is a clandestine network purchasing weapons technology across the United States for the communist power.
The men and women arrested yesterday are connected to two companies and are accused of sending the Chinese military several shipments of weapons systems, including radar, smart bombs, electronic warfare and communications equipment. According to the complaints, the items were routed through Hong Kong by various means, and the defendants tried to conceal their activities by identifying the receiver as a U.S. corporation.
"Today's arrests are the latest in a series of cases in which we've found sensitive U.S. weapons technology being illegally exported to China," said Michael J. Garcia, who oversees the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Department of Homeland Security. Garcia said a major priority for the bureau, which sent teams to Iraq last year to investigate possible weapons transfers to the former government of Saddam Hussein, was "preventing American military technology from falling into the wrong hands."
Agents also seized $76,000 in cash during the arrests, at the homes and businesses of the defendants in Mount Laurel and Cherry Hill. All seven defendants made an initial court appearance in Camden, N.J., yesterday and were charged with one count each of conspiracy, wire fraud and violation of the Export Administration Act, which requires exporters of military items to register and obtain a license from the State Department. The charges carry a combined maximum penalty of 15 years in prison and $1.2 million in fines. Five of the suspects are naturalized U.S. citizens of Chinese origin, and two others, also Chinese, are permanent legal residents who risk deportation.
Since October 2002, investigations have led to a dozen indictments, most in California, against individuals and companies suspected of weapons transfers to China. It is unclear whether any of the individuals charged in separate cases were working together and who their contacts were in China. In some cases, ICE believes that the equipment was being shipped to the military or to research labs connected to China's defense establishment.
The investigations have led to three convictions, and proceedings are continuing in the other cases. In addition, the State Department settled a civil case against Hughes Electronics Corp. and Boeing Satellite Systems Inc., for illegally sharing sensitive satellite technology with China.
-------- britain
British GI Faces Charge in Iraq Shooting
July 2, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Iraq-Soldier-Charged.html?pagewanted=all
LONDON (AP) -- A British soldier will face court-martial over the shooting of a 13-year-old Iraqi boy, the government said Friday.
Pvt. Alexander Johnston of the King's Own Scottish Borderers will face court-martial for unlawful wounding in a Sept. 15 shooting incident at al-Uzayr, south of Amarah in southern Iraq. He also could face an alternative charge of negligent handling of a weapon, Attorney General Lord Goldsmith said.
The Ministry of Defense would not give more details about what happened or say how badly the boy was wounded. Military sources said the shooting occurred while the soldier was on guard duty.
No date was set for the court-martial, which the government said is likely to be held in Iraq.
(SUBS overline to correct that boy was not killed; LEADS thruout to UPDATE with soldier's full name and correct spelling of last name to 'Johnston' sted 'Johnson', alternate charge possible, more details)
-------- chemical weapons
Warheads found in Iraq not chemical weapons, military says
BAGHDAD (AFP)
Jul 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040702181116.ctvlrxgf.html
Multinational forces in Iraq said on Friday that more than a dozen missile warheads said to contain mustard gas or sarin have tested negative for chemical agents.
Washington had announced the find by Polish troops on Thursday, which was later confirmed by Warsaw.
The head of Poland's military intelligence service also said on Friday that "terrorist" groups were seeking to acquire the weapons.
But the 122mm warheads, found in late June, have been found not to contain the deadly chemicals, a statement from multinational forces here said.
"Those 16 rounds were all empty and tested negative for any type of chemicals," it said.
Two other warheads found in mid-June were found to contain an insignificant amount of sarin gas. The armaments were left over from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the statement said.
"Due to the deteriorated state of the rounds and small quantity of remaining agent, these rounds were determined to have limited to no impact if used by insurgents against coalition forces."
Washington justified leading the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 by claiming the country was harbouring weapons of mass destruction. However, none has yet been found.
----
Poland says 'terrorists' were looking for poison gas warheads found in Iraq
WARSAW (AFP)
Jul 02, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040702144519.jnzjpbf3.html
"Terrorist" groups were seeking to acquire the warheads containing mustard or sarin gas which Polish troops recently discovered in Iraq, the head of Poland's military intelligence servicesaid on Friday.
"In late May, we obtained information that... terrorists were looking to buy these warheads and were offering 5,000 dollars (4,000 euros) per unit (to potential sellers)," General Marek Dukaczewsky told a news conference.
"Among the names of potential buyers that were circulating, we identified those of people linked to terrorist activities," he said.
"We do not have information indicating that terrorists have any (such weapons) in their possession but the fact they were seeking them allows us to suppose that they do," the general said.
Washington announced on Thursday that Polish troops had discovered more than a dozen warheads containing mustard or sarin gas in Iraq, a report later confirmed by Polish Defence Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski.
In late June, Dukaczewsky said, Polish military intelligence services were offered a chance to purchase chemical weapons and proceeded to buy 17 Soviet-manufactured 122-milimetre warheads, all of which are thought to contain sarin gas.
He said the warheads "could be used as chemical mines or in suicide attacks".
"It is important to note that this ammunition was transported from some depot and buried in order to avoid discovery by United Nations inspectors," the intelligence chief said.
Dukaczewsky said that research was continuing into the banned weapons.
No weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq, seriously undermining what was the central argument for the United States and Britain for launching their invasion of the country in March 2003.
Poland, one of the staunchest supporters of the US in the Iraq war, patrols a large swathe of the country south of Baghdad, heading a 6,500-strong multinational force including 2,500 Polish troops.
-------- iraq
New Guard Force Finds Welcome on Streets of Baghdad
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22001-2004Jul1?language=printer
BAGHDAD, July 1 -- A large Iraqi flag flapping on his Soviet-era jeep, 1st Lt. Shehab Abdul-Jabbar led an Iraqi National Guard patrol down Baghdad's heavily commercial Karrada Street. As he passed, merchants and shoppers smiled and waved their greetings. "Way to go," one man shouted from behind the small charcoal stove where he was grilling a splayed fish for lunch.
"People are comfortable with this," said Abdul-Jabbar, 38, an officer freshly minted from a U.S.-provided training course for the 35,000-man paramilitary force designed to bring internal security to Iraq.
The Iraqi guardsmen -- venturing out for the last several days in their own vehicles and flying the Iraqi flag conspicuously -- have found a warm welcome from most residents, some of whom have showered them with chocolates. Judging by their comments on seeing Abdul-Jabbar's patrol come by Thursday, Baghdadis seem relieved to see their own soldiers taking over from U.S. occupation troops after nearly 15 months of foreign domination and violent disorder.
"It's the best thing that could happen," said Bilal Ismail, 34, a taxi driver who had just been stopped at a checkpoint and patted down by Abdul-Jabbar's men.
The eagerness to see Iraqis back in charge of the streets of Baghdad suggested that replacing U.S. soldiers with Iraqis could go a long way toward reducing popular resentment directed at the U.S. military presence here. That resentment has helped nourish a campaign of bombings and other attacks against American soldiers and Iraqis seen to be cooperating with them, particularly police and National Guard recruits.
For many Iraqis, including influential Islamic spiritual leaders, the killing of fellow Iraqis by insurgents has gone too far, particularly since many attacks were carried out in the name of an international anti-U.S. jihad identified with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. A wave of coordinated assaults that shook the country a week ago prompted denunciations in many mosques during last Friday's prayers. One militantly anti-U.S. Shiite Muslim leader, Moqtada Sadr, specifically called on his followers to cooperate with Iraqi police to prevent a recurrence of what he termed foreign terrorism.
Since then, the attacks have dropped sharply in number and effectiveness. In particular, the transfer of political authority from the U.S. occupation to an interim Iraqi administration this week, two days earlier than scheduled, has gone off without a widely expected insurgent offensive.
U.S. security officials have warned that intelligence shows spectacular new attacks are still being planned, including more kidnappings of foreigners. But the people along Abdul-Jabbar's route made it clear that, while they have no desire to see the Americans stay around, they want no more of the car bombings and attacks on police stations that killed scores of Iraqi civilians in recent weeks.
"Anything you might hear, something in a cafe or on the street, any information about a terrorist planning something, or anybody trying to do something, just let us know," Abdul-Jabbar told a young man being searched for weapons at the checkpoint.
"Right," said the man, Haidar Abbas Hamdoun, 24, who just graduated from Baghdad University's language department. "These explosions, we are the ones getting it in the street. You guys, you are our countrymen. We are with you."
The sight of Iraqi paramilitary troops riding down the street, standing with a weapon in the back of an open four-wheel-drive vehicle, has become a key symbol of renewed nationhood in the three days since the transfer of political authority, said Ahmed Hussein, who recently resigned from the National Guard to become a translator for U.S. forces.
"The Americans can't stay here for a hundred years," he added. "They want to go home, and Iraqis have to be in charge. So we want to show the people that we are taking charge. It's natural."
Nevertheless, the Iraqi National Guard patrols on Baghdad's streets this week have been small and largely symbolic, mixed with U.S. troops who serve as backup and mentors. Moreover, according to U.S. military officials, only a fraction of the Iraqi National Guard roster has received enough training and equipment to mount even symbolic patrols in the still-dangerous streets of the capital.
Thursday's patrol, for instance, stuck to the Karrada neighborhood, a middle-class stretch of shops and cafes near the Tigris River. Karrada has not been a source of recruits for the anti-occupation insurgency; it is considered one of Baghdad's least dangerous areas for foreigners and Iraqis associated with them. Few people seemed to mind, for instance, that the Iraqi guardsmen wore uniforms identical to those of U.S. soldiers and dark green Kevlar flak helmets without covers that resembled those worn by foreign security guards.
But even there, soldiers said, patrol members were nervous that they had been ordered to maintain a checkpoint for two hours instead of the usual 20 minutes. That gave plenty of time for would-be attackers to note the position, get their weapons and mount an assault.
Two Humvees from the U.S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division traveled along with Abdul-Jabbar's two Iraqi military vehicles, which carried a total of nine men armed with AK-47 assault rifles. And 1st Lt. Timothy Stith, 32, of Jonesboro, Ark., retained the final say on what to do. But Stith, a National Guardsman who at home is an account executive for an environmental safety firm, said he tries to stay in the background while Abdul-Jabbar commands the patrols.
His U.S. troops huddled in the shade, about 20 yards away, while the Iraqi guardsmen checked cars at random. When the patrol moved along the streets, the Iraqi vehicles were at the front and rear of the four-vehicle convoy, with the Humvees in the middle.
"It's a difficult transition, from being told everything to do, to doing and deciding for themselves," Stith said.
Abdul-Jabbar's unit, from the 302nd Battalion of the 40th Iraqi National Guard Brigade, is one among a 120-man pool of trained troops for the central Baghdad sector. Together, they have for the last three days mounted about 20 patrols a day of 10 men each, Stith estimated.
U.S. military officials have cited training and equipping Iraqi police and National Guard personnel as their most important task here after trying to maintain security. The schedule fell drastically behind during nearly 15 months of occupation, however, and Iraqi security units on several occasions in the past have backed down when asked by U.S. commanders to confront the insurgency.
Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, has vowed to crack down on insurgents since taking office a month ago, suggesting emergency rule might be declared in some areas. To make that easier, he has put the National Guard, formerly the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, under Defense Ministry command alongside the army.
Indications have grown over the last week that many Iraqis would follow Allawi's leadership in the direction of tougher tactics if he had sufficient security forces to back up his threats. Samir Abdul-Karim, who owns a small grocery store across the street from Abdul-Jabbar's checkpoint, said he was one of them.
U.S. soldiers have been ineffective during the last 15 months, he said, in part because they did not consider stopping common crime to be one of their jobs. Merchants who went to them to complain of robberies were shooed away, he said. His store, in a middle-class neighborhood, has been robbed twice since the war, he added.
"The best thing is the Iraqi patrols," said Abdul-Karim, 48. Asked why, he replied: "Security. Robbers. Crooks. Bombs."
"The Iraqis will be tougher on the criminals," Abdul-Karim predicted. "The Americans arrest robbers and then they let them go again a week later. The Iraqis won't do that."
--------
New Swell of Insurgent Violence Rolls into Baghdad
July 2, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/international/middleeast/02CND-MAYH.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 2 - A new swell of insurgent violence in Iraq rolled into Baghdad today, as a botched rocket attack on two hotels used by foreigners paralyzed the city center.
Deadly attacks over the past two days show that the insurgency is still robust despite the formal transfer of sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government on Monday and the formal beginning of Iraqi legal proceedings on Thursday against Saddam Hussein, whose image on television transfixed people throughout the country.
This morning, about 3,000 Shiites rallied here calling for the execution of Mr. Hussein, according to the Agence France-Presse news agency. And in the Sunni stronghold of Samarra, north of here, hundreds demonstrated against what some marchers called the "ridiculous" trial of Mr. Hussein, and pledged support for the ex-president, the news agency reported.
In the heart of the capital this morning, insurgents in a bus used a homemade launcher to fire rockets next to a mosque in Firdos Square, where in April 2003 a towering statue of Mr. Hussein was pulled down by American troops as they took the city. One of the launchings misfired and destroyed the bus, according to Iraqi police and private security officials.
The explosion set the bus aflame and shattered its windows around 7:30 a.m. here, but it was unclear how many people were injured. Initial reports said the driver was killed and that a second man was thrown from the bus, then jumped into a red car that was in the area and sped away.Fliers were scattered around the area from a group calling itself the Karbala Jihadist Group, referring to the holy city where American forces fought Shiite militiamen in May.
At the same time, explosions also struck outside the Baghdad Hotel, hundreds of feet north of the square. The police said that rockets had been fired at the building, which is popular with foreigners. Police officials said three security guards were injured.
Foreign security contractors stood guard around the hotel's concrete blast walls while private Iraqi guards directed traffic and pedestrians away.
"It was expected," said Georgis Ishad, 43, the owner of a tiny cafe nearby. "The terrorists are here, and they needed to assert themselves to say, `We are here.' "
In an early sign of welcome for the interim government from an Arab nation, the Jordanian leader, King Abdullah II, said he might be willing to send troops to Iraq.
In an interview with the BBC on Thursday, King Abdullah of Jordan said, "I presume that if the Iraqis ask us directly for help, it would be very difficult to say no." In the past, Jordan has declined to send soldiers.
"If we don't stand with them, if they fail, then we all pay the price," King Abdullah said.
Foreign ministry officials from Yemen said that their country is also willing to send peacekeeping soldiers to Iraq if the deployment was backed by the United Nations and was under the control of the world body, The Associated Press reported today.
In the northern town of Mosul, a roadside bomb ripped into a military convoy on the southern outskirts of the city on Thursday, killing an American soldier and wounding two others, the American military said. It also said a marine had been killed in western Iraq, possibly around the volatile city of Falluja, but gave no details.
Falluja has become a safe haven for anti-American fighters who answer to hard-line Sunni clerics. Foreign jihadists, Hussein supporters and disaffected young men roam the streets, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47 rifles. Insurgent groups have kidnapped and occasionally killed foreign civilians passing through the area.
At least 855 American soldiers have died since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Television images of the Mosul bombing showed American soldiers in full battle gear and Iraqi policemen carrying AK-47's standing amid wreckage as a wounded Iraqi man was loaded into a Red Crescent ambulance, which raced off beneath rows of palm trees. A small pool of blood stained the road.
American commanders in some provinces said insurgents had recently increased their use of roadside bombs.
At least one such bomb exploded in Baghdad on Thursday, killing three Iraqis in the Khadra neighborhood, near a perilous stretch of highway that leads to the airport, said Col. Adnan Abdul-Rahman, an Interior Ministry official.
A different kind of bomb killed Ihsan Karim, the head of the Finance Ministry's audit board, said Colonel Abdul-Rahman. A magnetic device hidden on the underside of a car in Mr. Karim's convoy exploded after 8 a.m. in the Yarmouk neighborhood in central Baghdad, the colonel said.
Mr. Karim died of his wounds at a nearby hospital, a relative said. Two of his bodyguards were also killed; two bystanders were wounded.
Mr. Karim, who was in his mid-50's, had worked in the Finance Ministry under both Mr. Hussein and the American occupation.
The attack was the latest in a string of killings of senior Iraqi officials since June 1, when the slate of the new government was announced, led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, a former exile with longstanding ties to Washington. The killings, clearly aimed to create fear among those working for the interim Iraqi government, also demonstrate that the insurgents do not view it as a legitimate governing body.
In the southern city of Najaf, militiamen loyal to the rebel cleric Moktada al-Sadr agreed Wednesday to trade 16 policemen they had captured this week for two insurgents jailed by the government, said Brig. Gen. Ghalib al-Jazaeri, the police chief. Nine other policemen remain in the hands of the militia, the Mahdi Army. General Jazaeri said some of the policemen had been captured in their homes and others while on duty.
General Jazaeri also said a man arrested Wednesday - a Libyan named Muhammad Hussein Muhammad al-Turki - had confessed to coming to Iraq to fight the Americans. He was carrying documents showing he had traveled through Egypt and Syria to get to Iraq, General Jazaeri said.
He said that Mr. Turki had objected to being arrested by Iraqi officers and that he said, while handcuffed and blindfolded, "I am here to help you and to fight the Americans, so how can you arrest me?" The general said the prisoner had been taken to Baghdad for questioning.
--------
ANTI-INSURGENCY
Ex-Occupation Aide Sees No Dent in 'Saddamists'
July 2, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/politics/02PREX.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 1 - More than a year of intensive efforts by the American military and the Central Intelligence Agency to destroy the insurgency in Iraq has failed to reduce the number of ``hard-core Saddamists'' seeking to destroy the interim Iraqi government, a former senior official of the just-dissolved American-led occupation authority said in an interview on Thursday. The senior official, speaking with a small group of reporters near the White House, said he was repeatedly ``disappointed we haven't had better insight into the command and control of the insurgents.''
The official was touching on one of the continuing mysteries of the insurgency: how has a relatively small rebel force organized, and how can it be broken? In recent days, other officials have offered varying assessments on this question. Last Friday, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, speaking at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: ``Someone's giving general orders, and other people are following them. I think that's clear.'' But Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a few minutes later that ``whether it's a central nervous system or some other form of coordination'' was an open question and that ``the intelligence community, as far as I know, will not tell you, will not give you an answer, because they can't give me an answer.''
On Thursday, the former senior occupation official estimated that the number of insurgents had stayed constant at 4,000 to 5,000, suggesting that as soon as they are killed or captured, they have been replaced. ``I have seen no evidence that the number has changed,'' he said, adding that ``the intelligence on this stuff is not as good as it should be.''
Moreover, said the former senior official, who has spent more than a year in Iraq and had access to the highest-level intelligence, American officials had found it ``almost impossible to penetrate'' the network organized by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is believed responsible for many of the suicide bombings that have killed both American troops and Iraqis.
The official also said that over the last year, both Iran and Syria had stepped up their activity in Iraq, and that the Iranians might have been financing Moktada al-Sadr, the young radical cleric whom the Bush administration first promised to capture or kill, then decided had to be spared to avoid urban warfare in Najaf, his stronghold. The Iranians have ``become more active over time, and not helpful,'' the official said, though he said intelligence indicated that far more foreign fighters were coming over the border from Syria than from Iran. Taken together, the description of the paucity of intelligence still available to the 138,000 American troops in Iraq and the assessment of how few inroads have been made at reducing the insurgency sounded a very different note from the optimistic-sounding messages that President Bush has been sending all week about the prospects of the new Iraqi government.
In fact, when officials speak on the record - from Baghdad to Washington to New Orleans - they describe an Iraq that is making significant political and economic progress, despite the insurgency. A specific cause for optimism involved economic policy, in the view of former American administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, who left Baghdad on Monday. He said in Washington that he was convinced that the just-disbanded occupation authority had ``accomplished quite a lot,'' and had succeeded in ``introducing the concept of a devolution of power and the balance of power'' for a new Iraqi government.
``We have tried to find ways to make sure that not all decisions are made in Baghdad, as they have been for the past thousand years,'' he said.
On Thursday in Washington, Mr. Bremer ticked off a series of economic reforms that he enacted before leaving Baghdad: balanced budgets - a contrast, he acknowledged with a grin, to the deficits run by the United States - a new currency and openness to foreign investment.
Yet the insurgency, Mr. Bremer said, ``will be very hard to root out,'' and ``stopping corruption is going to take time.'' But he concluded: ``Can they get security enough under control to hold that credible elections will be held in January? I believe they can.''
While Mr. Bremer spoke in Washington, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a political speech at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans, argued that the Clinton administration, which he never actually named, allowed a series of crises to brew, all of which, he argued, the Bush administration had to tackle after Inauguration Day in 2001.
``When we took office,'' Mr. Cheney said, Pakistan was in danger of falling to Islamic extremists, ``terrorists were also receiving support in Saudi Arabia,'' and Libya, North Korea and Iran were acquiring arms from A.Q. Khan, the former head of Pakistan's main nuclear laboratory. ``All of these dangers were gathering,'' he said. ``In short, this was the situation when President Bush and I came to office: a world where terrorists were emboldened by years of being able to strike us with impunity.''
The former senior occupation official, speaking in Washington on condition of anonymity at the request of the White House, described a situation in which efforts to cut off the influx of foreign terrorists entering Iraq had been only partly successful. He said that the Syrian border ``was the most important one where foreigners were coming in, and terrorists,'' but that the number could not be reliably quantified. The captured fighters were ``mostly Syrian - there were Sudanese, Yemenis, some Saudis and then the odd Egyptian and Moroccan.'' Many of the foreign fighters had contacts both with former Hussein forces, he said, and with Mr. Zarqawi's network, but it was unclear who was coordinating their entry, if anyone.
He appeared less concerned about the appeal of the Zarqawi fighters, who he said were reviled in much of Iraq. The Hussein insurgents are a more significant threat, he said, in part because they are supported by an outer ring of ``less hard-core'' supporters, including teenagers and others paid to shoot rocket-propelled grenades at passing American troops.
Mark Glassman contributed reporting from New Orleans for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Court Again Halts Work on Part of Barrier
July 2, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/international/middleeast/02mide.html
JERUSALEM, July 1 - Israel's Supreme Court froze construction Thursday on part of the barrier Israel is building on the southeastern edge of Jerusalem. A day earlier, the same court had ordered the rerouting of another segment of the contentious barrier.
The ruling Thursday was seen as further evidence that the judiciary is prepared to take an active role in cases where Palestinians have petitioned the court arguing that the West Bank barrier is causing great disruption to everyday life.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon gathered senior ministers and security officials on Thursday evening to discuss the implications of the court rulings. Zeev Boim, the deputy defense minister, told Israeli Army Radio that "we are going to implement the Supreme Court's decision, but we hope that in the future things will not drag on too long and will allow us to get on with building this project, which is a necessity for security."
The three-judge panel issued a restraining order that temporarily suspends construction on the barrier near Har Homa, a large Jewish neighborhood that has been established over the past few years. The petition was filed by Palestinian residents from the nearby village of Nuaman. The judges gave no indication whether they were likely to order a new route or let the existing one stand, court officials said.
Israel captured the eastern part of Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war and claims the entire city as its capital. The Palestinians want eastern Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.
In its decision on Wednesday, the high court had ordered the Israeli government to reroute about 20 miles of the barrier that was going up inside the West Bank, to the northwest of Jerusalem. In the court's first major ruling on the barrier's route, the judges said the government needed to balance security concerns with the needs of the Palestinians. The court did not dictate a new path, and Israeli officials said they would begin working out a new route.
Israel says the barrier is intended to stop Palestinian suicide bombers, and hopes to complete it by the end of next year. But this week's court rulings could slow the project, which is about one-quarter complete.
"We do not have any opinion about the route of the fence," said Ilan Tsion, the head of the private Israeli group, Fence for Life. "We just want the fence finished as soon as possible." Opinion polls show that most Israelis support this position, he said. But Palestinians view the barrier as an attempt to confiscate West Bank land they are seeking for a state.
In violence on Thursday, Israeli forces operating in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, shot and killed a 9-year-old Palestinian boy, according to Palestinian security officials. The Israeli military said it was searching for Palestinian weapons-smuggling tunnels in the area.
Also, Israeli forces remained in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanun for a third day, in what is expected to be an extended stay aimed at preventing Palestinian rocket fire from the area.
The Israeli forces killed a member of the militant group Hamas on Wednesday night, according to Palestinian security officials.
At least a dozen Palestinians were wounded on Thursday, seven in a pair of missile strikes in Beit Hanun, and five in a gun battle with Israeli troops on the southern fringe of Gaza City, according to the security officials and the Israeli military.
Israeli troops entered Beit Hanun on Tuesday, a day after Palestinian rocket fire killed two Israelis, including a 3-year-old boy, in the town of Sederot, just outside Gaza. The Palestinians have not fired any rockets from the area for the past two days, the military said.
And in an arrest sweep, Israeli troops detained more than 30 people suspected of being militants during a rare incursion into Jericho.
In another development, Israeli officials have presented the United States with a list of 28 unauthorized settlement outposts in the West Bank, an American Embassy official said. Israel has pledged to remove all settlement outposts erected since March 2001, when Prime Minister Sharon came to power. But Israel has torn down only a small number of the outposts, most of them consisting of just a few mobile homes.
The Israeli move came as Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom headed to the United States for talks with the Bush administration on issues including the West Bank barrier and Israel's plan to withdraw from Gaza.
--------
Israel Will Ignore World Court Barrier Ruling
July 2, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast-barrier-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israel's foreign minister said on Friday his government would not accept a World Court ruling on the legality of its West Bank barrier and pressed for U.S. support to block any U.N. action against the Jewish state.
The International Court of Justice, also known as the World Court, will render its judgment in a public hearing on July 9, one of the most high-profile rulings in its 58-year history.
``We believe that Israel can deal with this issue by itself,'' Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said at the White House after talks with U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. ``We can't accept any external involvement from the International Court of Justice.''
``We don't believe it's the place that this issue should be discussed. It should be discussed between the two parties -- the Israelis and the Palestinians -- with other members that are involved in the peace process,'' he told reporters.
The U.N.'s top court said it would hand down an ``advisory opinion.'' Such a ruling is non-binding, but Israel fears the General Assembly, where pro-Palestinian sentiment is strong, could use it to lobby for sanctions against the Jewish state.
Shalom said he was asking the United States to do ``everything it can'' to block passage of a Palestinian-backed U.N. resolution on the barrier.
-------- latin america
New Cuba Travel Limits May Sway Voters
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22227-2004Jul1?language=printer
Carlos F. Lazo, an American military medic on 15 days' leave from Iraq, wanted to see his teenage sons in Cuba. He flew to Miami, only to be told that new Bush administration rules designed to punish Cuba made it impossible.
"I just wanted to see my children for one day. In the next eight months in Iraq, who knows what could happen?" Lazo said yesterday. "I got very mad. I am not voting for George Bush this year."
Lazo's anger is at the heart of a charged debate over Cuba policy and Florida politics that could prove pivotal in the Nov. 2 election. In a gamble designed in part to capitalize, Democratic challenger John F. Kerry is taking a position different from that of hard-line Cuban exiles courted most often by both parties and considered the Cuban Americans most likely to vote.
Opponents of the measures include the Cuban American National Foundation, a no-nonsense anti-Castro organization at the forefront of U.S. policy toward Cuba for two decades. The group issued a statement saying the administration's new measures "created a greater divide" among Cuban Americans.
President Bush chose Wednesday, barely four months before the election, to impose some of the most restrictive measures ever on Americans' travel to Cuba and on Cuban Americans' practice of sending money to relatives on the island.
The goal is to squeeze Cuban President Fidel Castro by denying hard currency to his wheezing economy. But the first to cry out have been Cuban Americans, who now can visit only once every three years, with no exceptions. Money can be sent only to immediate family members.
"We're not waiting for the day of Cuban freedom, we are working for the day of Cuban freedom," Bush said May 6 in accepting the recommendations of a government commission headed by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. A Powell adviser called the 423-page document a "decisive and integrated strategy."
Many critics and supporters alike viewed the policy as a play for Cuban American voters, whose greatest concentration is in Florida, a state that gave Bush a 537-vote victory margin and the White House in 2000. But Democrats see an opening in a combination of changing demographics and the Bush administration's policy.
"There's going to be the kind of recoil that they haven't really seen before," predicted Dan Gelber, a Democratic member of the Florida House. Kerry supports an economic embargo against Cuba, but favors lifting travel restrictions and increasing remittances.
"If the Democrats want to make the new Cuba travel regulations a referendum on President Bush's candidacy in November, all I can say is bring it on," said state Rep. David Rivera, a Republican who criticized Bush last year for being too soft.
"The initiative will serve to galvanize and motivate Cuban American voters to turn out in support of the president," Rivera said. "The people who vote are older people, and the people who are most supportive of these measures are the hard-core, historic exiles."
Miami pollster Sergio Bendixen is among the specialists attempting to test that tried-and-true view. He estimates about 250,000 voters in Miami-Dade County fit Rivera's designation of "historic exiles," those who arrived between Castro's triumph in 1959 and the late 1970s.
"It's two theories," Bendixen said. "We won't know who's right until Election Day."
Conducting a poll last month for the centrist New Democratic Network, he found that 89 percent of that cohort favored Bush, 8 percent chose Kerry and 3 percent were undecided. The results from two other groups he polled were quite different.
A second group of Miami-Dade Cuban Americans, numbering about 75,000, is composed of men and women who fled the island in the 1980s and '90s. This group has closer ties to Cuba and more relatives back home.
"They like to go back for weddings, for when someone gets sick, for the birthdays, for the graduations. They send remittances," Bendixen said. "They would never be supportive of Fidel Castro in any way, but they're not obsessed with his removal."
Bendixen's poll suggested that 40 percent of that group supported Kerry and 28 percent backed Bush. Thirty-one percent were undecided.
A third group contains about 50,000 Cuban American voters, Bendixen estimates. As American-born children of Cubans who left the island, the segment has for the first time become large enough to poll during this election cycle.
"We are finding that Cuba policy is of no special interest to them," Bendixen said. Respondents in this group backed Kerry over Bush by 58 percent to 32 percent, with 10 percent undecided.
Overall, Bendixen's poll found that 69 percent of Cuban Americans favored Bush to 21 percent for Kerry, with 10 percent undecided. If accurate, that would be a fat Republican margin -- but a significant drop for Bush, who received an estimated 80 to 85 percent of the Cuban American vote in Miami-Dade in 2000.
A Florida International University poll of Cuban American registered voters in Miami-Dade and neighboring Broward County found earlier this year that about 60 percent supported Bush, while about 25 percent said they remained undecided. The poll was conducted for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and NBC-6.
Lazo, a counselor for the developmentally disabled, left Cuba on a raft 12 years ago. After a stay in Miami, he moved to a town north of Seattle. He is now a Washington National Guard medic.
Deployed to Iraq, he followed Cuba policy over the Internet. On leave, he flew to Miami in hopes of visiting his sons before new licenses were required.
"Nobody knows whether I'm going to give my life, but at the same time, the president doesn't let me go to Cuba to see my children," he said. "I think that's not fair."
-------- prisoners of war
Disappearing Prisoners
Are they dead? Are they alive? Where is the media? Does anybody out there care?
by Nat Hentoff,
July 2nd, 2004
Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0427/hentoff.php
In a front-page article December 26, 2002, The Washington Post revealed that prisoners at a CIA interrogation center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan were being subjected to abuses that veered on torture:
"The picture that emerges is of a brass-knuckled quest for information . . . in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred."
The media largely ignored the story, with the notable exceptions of The Economist and the indispensable Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker.
What was happening at Bagram Air Base soon disappeared from the news, but the revelations of our repellent abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib interrogation cells, where Saddam Hussein's torturers had previously operated, raised widespread questions about American adherence to the Geneva Conventions and other international human rights standards. The first whistle-blower was a soldier, specialist Joseph Darby: "I didn't want to see any more prisoners being abused, because I knew it was wrong."
However, in the rush of reports, the CIA and its then leader, George Tenet, were hardly mentioned. But a startling probe on ABC's Nightline on May 13, 2004, "The Disappeared," focused on super-secret CIA interrogation operations overseas, about which ABC News' Chris Bury said:
"We don't know where they are being held. We don't know how many of them there are. We don't know what the rules are."
This prison system is "so secret that its very existence is classified. The inmates are believed to make up a who's who of the top Al Qaeda leadership. But even their names are classified. Some of them may never be released. For all practical purposes, they have just disappeared." They are called "high-value" detainees.
As Chris Bury continued, these prisons, set up after 9-11, "may be unprecedented in American history. They operate entirely outside the U.S. judicial system, according to a set of rules approved by the Justice Department [that] are also top secret." (Emphasis added.)
Clearly, the others accountable for this wholly hidden gulag include Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush. Without going into Nightline's in-depth analysis of "the disappeared," Newsweek, in its superb report, "The Roots of Torture . . . The Road to Abu Ghraib" (May 24, 2004), provided background to the CIA's secret prison system:
By early 2002, the president, assured by his counsel, Alberto Gonzales, and other administration lawyers that he could approve secret, unsparing rules for interrogations, "signed a secret order granting new powers to the CIA. . . . [T]he president's directive authorized the CIA to set up a series of secret detention facilities outside the United States, and to question those held in them with unprecedented harshness.
"Washington then negotiated novel 'status of forces agreements' with foreign governments for the secret sites. These agreements gave immunity not merely to U.S. government personnel but also to private contractors."
On the May 13 Nightline broadcast, reporter John McWethy noted, "This system was both approved and heartily endorsed by President Bush." And George W. Bush himself appears briefly and states, "You need to have a president who understands you can't win this war with legal papers. We've got to use every asset at our disposal."
As McWethy pointed out, The New York Times, on the day of the broadcast, had revealed one technique being used on the CIA's prisoners: "water boarding." Al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was, said the Times, "strapped down forcibly, pushed under the water and made to believe he might drown." Nightline also noted "three investigations into the deaths of prisoners who were being interrogated by CIA agents in Iraq and Afghanistan."
But except for "water boarding, we know nothing specific of what is being done to the other unnamed prisoners in the CIA's secret cells. They have, as Chris Bury said, "in effect disappeared. . . . Since when are people in American custody allowed simply to disappear into a black hole?" On May 11, The Washington Post reported that this system is no longer limited to "senior Al Qaeda detainees."
Also on Nightline was Jack Cloonan. After 27 years in the FBI, Bury said, Cloonan "was the senior agent on the FBI's bin Laden squad in New York, and he headed the investigation of senior Al Qaeda official Khalid Shaikh Mohammed."
One day, from his New York office, Cloonan was giving directions to interrogators at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The target was giving information about Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid.
"I told them," Cloonan said on the program, "that I wanted them to follow their procedures that we had adopted as if they were talking to this person in New York. . . . I had a suspicion that things like [what we're talking about] were going to happen. . . .
"What are we going to do with these people [in the secret CIA cells] when we're finished exploiting them? Are they going to disappear? Are they stateless? . . . What are we going to explain to people when they start asking questions about where they are. Are they dead? Are they alive? What oversight does Congress give?"
On the front page of the June 27 Washington Post, Dana Priest reported: "The CIA has suspended the use of extraordinary interrogation techniques approved by the White House pending a review by [the] Justice Department. . . . The 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' as the CIA calls them, include feigned drowning."
The decision applies to such CIA interrogation centers "as those around the world." But many are utterly secret. So how will we know what's being done there?
----
'What law, what resolution formed this court?'
02 July 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=537293
The following is an edited transcript of the translators' words as Saddam Hussein answered questions from judge Ra'id Juhi. Some parts of the conversation are missing, as the microphone failed to pick up everything the translators said
The Judge opened proceedings by asking Saddam for his name:
SADDAM: ...Hussein Majid, the president of the Republic of Iraq.
The judge then asks his date of birth
SADDAM: 1937.
JUDGE: Profession? Former president of the Republic of Iraq?
SADDAM: No, present. Current. It's the will of the people.
JUDGE: The head of the Baath Party that is dissolved, defunct. Former commander and chief of the army. Residence is Iraq. Your mother's name?
SADDAM: Sobha. You also have to introduce yourself to me
JUDGE: Mr Saddam, I am the investigative judge of the central court of Iraq.
SADDAM: So that I have to know, you are an investigative judge of the central court of Iraq? What resolution, what law formed this court?
The judge's response could not be heard.
SADDAM: Oh, the coalition forces? So you are an Iraqi that - you are representing the occupying forces?
JUDGE: No, I'm an Iraqi representing Iraq.
SADDAM: But you are...
JUDGE: I was appointed by a presidential decree under the former regime.
SADDAM: So you are reiterating that every Iraqi should respect the Iraqi law. So the law that was instituted before represents the will of the people, right?
JUDGE: Yes, God willing.
SADDAM: So you should not work under the jurisdiction of the coalition forces.
JUDGE: This is an important point. I am a judge. In the former regime, I respect the judges. And I am resuming and continuing my work.
SADDAM: So, please let me - I'm not complicating matters. Are you a judge? You are a judge? And judges, they value the law. And they rule by the law, right? Right? Right is a relative issue. For us, right is our heritage in the Koran, sharia, right? I am not talking about Saddam Hussein, whether he was a citizen or in other capacities. I'm not holding fast to my position, but to respect the will of the people that decided to choose Saddam Hussein as the leader of the revolution. Therefore, when I say president of the Republic of Iraq, it's not a formality or a holding fast to a position, but rather to reiterate to the Iraqi people that I respect its will.
JUDGE: If there is evidence, then I'll defer it to a court of jurisdiction.
SADDAM: Let me understand something. Who is the defendant? Any defendant when he comes to a court, before that there should be investigation.
JUDGE: I'm investigating, interrogating you. Second, the president is a profession, is a position, is a deputy of the society. That's true. And originally, inherently, he's a citizen. And every citizen, according to the law in the constitution, if this person violates a law has to come before the law. And that law you know more than I do. So the crimes, the charges: intended killing by using chemical weapons in Halabjah.
SADDAM: No.
JUDGE: Second, intended killing of a great number of Iraqis in 1983. Three, intended killing of a number of members of political parties without trials. Fourth, intended killing of many of the Iraqi religious people. Fifth, intended killing of many Iraqis in Anfal without any evidence against it.
Details of the sixth charge are not picked up
JUDGE: The seventh charge was against Saddam Hussein as president of the republic and the commander-in-chief of the army. And the army went to Kuwait.
SADDAM: Even though this was not an invasion. Will the law judge Saddam Hussein because he defends Iraq?
Saddam refers to Kuwaitis as "dogs".
JUDGE: You are in a legal hearing and we will not allow you to speak in any way that is disrespectful to this court.
SADDAM: Then in the formal capacity, is it permissible to charge an official title? And the person is to be dealt with in violation of the guarantees that are afforded by the constitution. This is the law that you're using to use against me now.
JUDGE: I would like you to sign these documents formally, and this will go into the record. Answer to those charges. This is investigation. Answer. If you read the minutes, we say that we postpone the investigation.
SADDAM: Then please allow me not to sign anything until the lawyers are present.
JUDGE: That is fine. But this is your...
SADDAM: I speak for myself.
JUDGE: Yes, as a citizen you have the right. But the guarantees you have to sign because these were read to you, recited to you.
SADDAM: Anyway, why are you worried? I will come again before you with the presence of the lawyers, and you will be giving me all of these documents again. So why should we rush any action now and make mistakes because of rushed and hasty decisions or actions? JUDGE: No, this is not a hasty decision-making now. I'm just investigating. And we need to conclude and seal the minutes.
SADDAM: No, I will sign when the lawyers are present.
JUDGE: Then you can leave.
SADDAM: Finished?
JUDGE: Yes.
THE CHARGES THE DICTATOR FACES
Invading Kuwait, 1990
On 2 August 1990, 100,000 Iraqis invaded Kuwait. Agovernment was set up and Saddam threatened to turn Kuwait City into a "graveyard" if any country dared challenge the takeover by force.
Suppressing Kurdish and Shia uprisings, 1991
After the Gulf war, Saddam's government seemed on the verge of collapse. Shias and Kurds in the north revolted, killing many Sunni Arabs. Saddam's regime responded with a bloody crackdown.
Anfal ethnic cleansing campaign against Kurds, 1987-88
The Anfal (spoils of war) campaign was the Iraqi government's genocidal campaignto reassert control over Kurdish areas. It involved mass summary executions.
Gassing Kurdish villagers in Halabja, 1988
Halabja was a town of 50,000 people, near the Iranian border. It was target of chemical attacks ordered by Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid - Chemical Ali.
Killing political activists
A UN report in 1998 stated that Iraq had executed at least 1,500 people during the previous year.
Killing thousands of the Kurdish Barzani clan, 1983
Iraqi security forces killed 8,000 Barzani men and boys in revenge for Kurdish collusion with Iranian forces in July 1983.
Sam Inglesby
--------
Defiant Hussein Hears Charges in Court
Eleven Lieutenants Are Also Arraigned Before Iraqi Judge
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19746-2004Jul1?language=printer
BAGHDAD, July 1 -- Former president Saddam Hussein was brought before an Iraqi judge on Thursday and was formally accused of ordering mass killings and other atrocities while he ruled this nation, but he refused to recognize the court and insisted he was still the leader of Iraq.
Hussein's 26-minute court appearance, similar to an arraignment in the United States, was the first step in a lengthy process aimed at putting him on trial for crimes against humanity, genocide and other offenses. He was followed by 11 of his top former deputies, who were accused of roles in many of the same atrocities.
Hussein's presence before the court was intended to be a brief procedural formality, a chance for the investigating judge to inform the former president of his status as a criminal defendant and of his rights to legal counsel. But Hussein stretched the proceeding into a 26-minute event replete with feisty exchanges with the judge, who sat behind a wooden desk just a few feet away.
Hussein questioned the judge's credentials. He insisted he deserved immunity because he had been acting in an official capacity. And he challenged the legitimacy of the special tribunal set up to judge him and his associates, saying that "everyone knows this is theater by [President] Bush, the criminal, in an attempt to win the election."
When he walked into the small courtroom, escorted by two burly Iraqi bailiffs, he appeared a diminished man. His meaty build had grown thinner even than at the time of his capture by U.S. forces near Tikrit on Dec. 13. The shaggy beard and unkempt mane he grew during eight months as a fugitive had been trimmed. Instead of the posh Italian suits he once wore, he was clad in off-the-rack slacks and a sport coat purchased by the U.S. military for his court appearance.
Although Hussein, 67, looked nervous and confused as he entered, his eyes darting warily at the judge and two dozen spectators in the room, his mood quickly shifted to one of exasperation and contempt, then to outright defiance and anger. After a few hesitant minutes at the outset, he peppered the judge with skeptical questions and recalcitrant answers. His sullen demeanor quickly gave way to finger-wagging, animated hand gestures, hectoring comments and contemplative stroking of his salt-and-pepper beard.
The 11 other defendants, who included former deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz and former vice president Taha Yassin Ramadan, were far less combative than Hussein. Some of them remained visibly fearful throughout their brief appearances, invoking God on repeated occasions. All of them signed a document acknowledging they had been read their legal rights, something Hussein refused to do.
Like Hussein, many of them appeared far different than they had during their days in power. Ali Hassan Majeed, also known as Chemical Ali for allegedly giving the orders to use chemical weapons against Kurdish separatists in the late 1980s, used a walking stick to enter the courtroom. Aziz, known for his fiery debates on American television talk shows, sat with his shoulders hunched forward, his head down, his hands clasped. The once cleanshaven former presidential secretary, Abid Hamid Mahmud, showed up with a 10-inch-long beard.
[Two nearly simultaneous blasts reverberated across Baghdad just after 7:30 a.m. on Friday. One of the explosions was caused by an apparent car bomb adjacent to Firdaus Square, where jubilant Iraqis pulled down a statue of Hussein in April 2003, but there were no immediate reports of casualties.]
The proceedings were conducted on the grounds of one of Hussein's former palaces. The opulent collection of buildings, surrounded by an artificial lake near the Baghdad airport, is now a U.S. military base called Camp Victory. Hussein's appearance, which was videotaped but not broadcast live, gave Iraqis their first look at their former ruler since his capture by U.S. soldiers seven months ago.
It was not possible for journalists to obtain a full English translation of the proceeding on Thursday because the judge, whose name was not announced for security reasons, ordered that audio recordings of the proceedings not be released immediately. A small pool of journalists in the room took notes, but their accounts of the exchanges between Hussein and the judge had slight variations. Some television networks also broadcast short portions of the proceeding with sound from footage provided by a CNN camera in the courtroom.
There were fewer than 30 people in the chamber. Other than the journalists, there were a handful of Iraqis present, including a representative of the interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, and the president of the tribunal, Salem Chalabi.
"It demonstrates that the accountability process is starting," Chalabi said of Thursday's proceedings. "For a long time people did not believe this, but it has happened. A psychological barrier has been broken."
Despite differences in some reports from the courtroom, there was no mistaking the strident attitude of the former president, who asserted that he had been "elected by the people" and asked the judge at one point, "What law formed this court?"
Hussein, who is being held in a U.S.-run detention facility at an undisclosed location, was brought to the court in an armored bus with blacked-out windows escorted by U.S. soldiers. But when he entered the courthouse, handcuffed to a chain around his waist, uniformed U.S. military personnel withdrew so Hussein would see only Iraqi guards. As he was led to the courtroom, people inside could hear the clanking of his chains, which were removed only when he was outside the wooden door to the chamber.
The proceeding began with the judge asking the former president to state his name. "I am Saddam Hussein, president of the Republic of Iraq," he responded.
When the judge asked whether he was the former president of Iraq, Hussein insisted that he was the "present" and "current" president.
He then was asked a series of questions: Where was he born? Was he once the leader of the Baath Party? Was he once the leader of the armed forces?
He responded to some questions verbally and shook his head affirmatively to others. He also demanded that the judge introduce himself. The judge informed Hussein that he was the investigating judge for Iraq's special tribunal, set up to try cases of major crimes committed while Hussein was president.
"You are representing the occupying forces?" Hussein asked.
"No," responded the judge. "I'm an Iraqi representing Iraq." He went on to say he had been appointed as a judge "by a presidential decree under the former regime," meaning by Hussein himself, and was resuming his duties.
Hussein made his most defiant comments after the judge read a list of seven atrocities the former president is alleged to have ordered: the use of chemical weapons against the Kurdish village of Halabja in 1988; the killing of members of a prominent Kurdish family, the Barzani clan, in 1983; the murder of political party leaders over a 30-year period; the murder of religious leaders; a campaign of brutal attacks against Kurds in the 1980s; the violent suppression of Kurds and Shiites after the 1991 Persian Gulf War; and the event that prompted that war, Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. When the judge mentioned Kuwait, Hussein became agitated.
"I'm surprised you're charging me with this as an Iraqi, when everyone knows Kuwait is part of Iraq," Hussein told the judge, repeating an argument that his government used to justify the invasion. Hussein asserted later in the hearing that he was protecting the Iraqi people from Kuwaiti "dogs." He charged that oil-rich Kuwait had been turning Iraqi women into "10-dinar prostitutes" and that he had sought to "defend Iraqi honor" and revive Iraq's "historical rights" to Kuwait. The judge cut him off, saying, "You are in a legal hearing and we will not allow you to speak in any way that is disrespectful to this court."
Later, when he was told that he could have a court-appointed lawyer if he could not afford one, Hussein scoffed. "According to the Americans," he said, "I have millions of dollars in Geneva, so I should be able to afford one."
At the end of the proceeding, after the judge had informed him of his rights, including the right to be represented by a lawyer and the right to remain silent, Hussein refused to sign a brief document indicating that he had been read his rights.
"Please allow me not to sign until the lawyers are present," he said. "Anyhow, when you take a procedure to bring me here again, present me all these papers with the presence of lawyers. Why would you have me behave in a manner that we might call it hasty later on?"
In one finger-wagging exchange, Hussein told the judge: "It doesn't really matter whether you convict me or not. That's not what's important. But what is important is that you remember that you're a judge. Don't mention anything about the occupying forces. This is not good. Judge in the name of people. This is the Iraqi way."
Legal analysts say the most likely path to a conviction of Hussein for committing genocide or crimes against humanity is to establish his command responsibility for the institutions of Iraqi government, including the military, and the security services that killed thousands of ordinary Iraqis from 1968 to 2003.
In Washington, a former senior administrator of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority said Thursday that during Hussein's seven months in captivity, he provided "very little, almost nothing" during interrogations. He also did not provide any information on his government's relationship with al Qaeda or other extremist groups in the Middle East, U.S. officials said.
Hussein was so uncooperative that senior U.S. officials in Iraq concluded that neither he nor his aides were going to be helpful, according to the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing White House ground rules.
If convicted, Hussein and his deputies could face the death penalty.
References to the death penalty provision in Iraqi law, mentioned several times during Thursday's proceedings, appeared to unnerve several of the defendants.
Chalabi said he planned to speak with Hussein and the 11 other men, who now are in Iraqi legal custody, over the next few days to arrange legal representation. He said additional hearings before an investigative judge could be held within a few weeks, but he has said that it could take months before any of them are formally indicted. Trials are not expected to begin until late this year or early next year.
The court appearances for each of the 11 other men were far shorter than Hussein's. They all followed a similar script, with the judge reading out the crimes they are accused of committing and the defendants making various proclamations of innocence. Most of them also asked for non-Iraqi Arab lawyers to represent them.
After the judge told Majeed that he was being investigated in connection with the Halabja massacre, the invasion of Kuwait and the suppression of the 1991 Shiite uprising, he seemed almost relieved. "I'm happy with the accusations put forward because I'm innocent of them," he said. Later, as he walked out of the courtroom, he told national security adviser Mowaffak Rubaie that he was pleased.
Rubaie quoted Majeed as saying: "I thought the charges would be much worse."
Aziz, who was accused of "deliberate killings" in 1979 and 1991, sought to draw a distinction between personal acts and command responsibility. "If I am a member of a government that made a mistake in killing someone, there can't be a direct personal accusation against me. If there is a crime, the moral responsibility rests with the leadership, but a member of the leadership cannot be held personally responsible. I never killed anybody by any direct act."
After Hussein's appearance was finished, he was escorted out of the courtroom by two guards. As they grabbed him by the arms, he admonished them.
"Take it easy," he said. "I'm an old man."
Staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
INTELLIGENCE
Hussein, in Jail, Reportedly Said Little of Value
July 2, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS and DAVID JOHNSTON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/politics/02SADD.html?hp
WASHINGTON, July 1 - In the nearly seven months that he was held captive by American forces, Saddam Hussein revealed little of what his interrogators most wanted to know, about his weapons programs and the insurgency in postwar Iraq, senior officials involved in his custody said in a series of recent interviews.
But Mr. Hussein would occasionally provide startling comments and observations, they said, as when he spoke about his reasons for invading Kuwait in 1990, and precipitated the first gulf war.
Mr. Hussein told his interrogator on one occasion that a principal reason for invading was his belief that he needed to keep his army occupied.
One senior intelligence official familiar with that interview said Mr. Hussein seemed to suggest that he distrusted what his restive officer corps might do if they were not otherwise distracted.
When charged in connection with the Kuwait invasion, Mr. Hussein told the judge, "I'm surprised you're charging me with that as an Iraqi when everyone knows that Kuwait is part of Iraq."
From his partial answers to questions about the recent war, intelligence officials said they came to believe that Mr. Hussein was surprised when the United States began its invasion in March 2003.
One official said that Mr. Hussein had implied that ambiguity over whether his government possessed illegal weapons "would keep the neighbors at bay, while the U.S. would be hung up in interminable debate at the U.N."
On Wednesday, Mr. Hussein was formally transferred to the custody of the new Iraqi government. Along with 11 former aides, he was formally charged on Thursday with crimes against humanity, including genocide, in connection with several major events during his rule.
He was interrogated principally by one intelligence officer in Arabic, the officials said. The authorities did not use any physically coercive methods, an official said, adding that psychological tricks were employed, like questioning him for several hours and then leaving him for a while, returning to ask just a brief question, only to leave him alone again for a while.
Mr. Hussein chided his interrogators at one point, saying that while he was on the run during the war, American soldiers had forced some people who were helping him hide to shame themselves by refusing to shelter him any longer because the pursuit was so intense. He said his hosts had been embarrassed that they could not provide him with the hospitality that is an important custom in the Arab world.
Officials said he also seemed to boast at one point that he had infiltrated the Iraqi National Congress, the exile organization headed by Ahmad Chalabi, that was instrumental in pressing the Bush administration to invade Iraq.
And in one curious session, an official said, he related how his son Uday had beaten to death someone who had annoyed him by playing music too loudly.
Mr. Hussein said that after the beating, he had Uday imprisoned in solitary confinement for a time to teach him a lesson.
It was unclear whether he was referring to an incident in 1988, in which it was widely reported that Uday bludgeoned to death his father's valet and food taster, supposedly because he had introduced Mr. Hussein to the woman who became his mistress and replaced Uday's mother in his affections. Both Uday and Mr. Hussein's other son, Qusay, were killed in a firefight with American forces last July.
But for all the intriguing comments and surprising observations, Mr. Hussein's information was of little use, the officials contended. He behaved as if he were still Iraq's ruler, a posture he maintained Thursday when he appeared before the Iraqi judge.
"We got very little, I would say almost nothing," said one former senior official with the occupation authority.
The official said that interrogators "like to work in ways that gain the confidence" of the person being questioned, an approach that did not fit Mr. Hussein's situation.
The official said Mr. Hussein had willingly discussed the roots of the Baath Party in the 1970's but became uncooperative when the questions turned to illegal weapons or links to Al Qaeda.
"I never saw anything useful," the official said.
Mr. Hussein was initially held under the supervision of the Central Intelligence Agency, the officials said.
After a time, when officials decided he would not cooperate with them, the Federal Bureau of Investigation assumed a greater role in his interrogations.
Although Mr. Hussein can speak a halting English, he refused to speak anything but Arabic.
His military guards for an extended period were reservists from Puerto Rico, who were instructed to speak only Spanish in his presence.
Mr. Hussein was circumspect about his whereabouts while in hiding. He did not satisfy his interrogators' curiosity as to where he was, particularly during the first days of the war, when the United States tried to kill him by bombing various locations where he was thought to be hiding, the officials said.
David E. Sanger contributed reporting for this article.
--------
Defiant Hussein Rebukes Iraqi Court for Trying Him
July 2, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/international/middleeast/02IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
CAMP VICTORY, Iraq, July 1 - A defiant but visibly shrunken Saddam Hussein dominated the opening of court proceedings on Thursday against 12 of the highest-ranking officials of Iraq's ousted dictatorship, declaring himself Iraq's lawful president and questioning the legitimacy of the Iraqi court.
"I am Saddam Hussein, president of the Republic of Iraq," Mr. Hussein declared when asked to identify himself after settling into the black leather chair behind the balustrade that served as a makeshift dock at the courtroom, specially built on this United States military base near Baghdad airport. After six months' imprisonment, his hair was unkempt, his beard gray and straggly, and his favored Italian hand-stitched suits replaced by cheap store-bought jacket and pants provided by the Americans for the occasion.
The 67-year-old former ruler seemed 15 to 20 pounds lighter than when he last appeared, after his capture by American troops in an underground bunker near Tikrit last Dec. 13. He began nervously, like a hunted man in alien terrain. His eyes swiveled back and forth, his voice was weak, and his fingers stroked his beard and touched his bushy eyebrows. But halfway into his 26-minute appearance he appeared to find his pitch, and he ended with a string of finger-wagging admonishments for the court's temerity in putting him on trial.
At the start, the young Iraqi investigative judge, his identity shielded from disclosure by Iraqi and American officials fearful of his assassination, stared straight back at Mr. Hussein, barely 10 feet away, and said plainly, "former president."
"No, present," Mr. Hussein said. "Current. It's the will of the people."
"Write down, in brackets, `former president,' " the judge told the court clerk.
Several times, Mr. Hussein interrupted as the judge outlined his legal rights and Mr. Hussein sought to resume a political diatribe. Several times, the judge cut him off.
Mr. Hussein's point, repeatedly, was that it was unthinkable for him to be charged for his actions as Iraq's leader, since that gave him immunity, and, he implied, the defense that even murder or military aggression was justified if he deemed it in Iraq's interest. "I can't believe that you, as an Iraqi, would say that was a crime," he told the judge, speaking of a count in the charges against him based on Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
From the moment that clanking chains announced Mr. Hussein's arrival outside the courtroom, the proceedings were a tableau of Iraq's dramas under Mr. Hussein's repressive rule and the American invasion that ended it 15 months ago. If Mr. Hussein cast himself as the usurped champion of Iraq's nationhood, falsely accused of heinous crimes against his people, he met his match in the judge, who admonished him to restrain his occasionally vitriolic language and respect the court's authority.
Mr. Hussein and his co-defendants, including men accused with him of crimes that include the Kuwait invasion, the 1988 use of poison gas against Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja, and the widespread killings of political opponents, arrived for their arraignments from the secret detention center where they have been kept by American guards. They returned there aboard American helicopters, according to accounts circulating at the base, when the five hours of hearings were completed.
Their trials before the American-financed special tribunal are not expected to begin for months, Mr. Hussein's possibly not for a year or more. The hearings on Thursday were not the beginnings of trials, but the Iraqi equivalent of grand jury proceedings, at which evidence is weighed by a judge in the presence of the accused. If the judge finds that there is a case to answer, the charges are framed in detail, and the case goes to trial, with the judge commonly joined in a panel by other judges.
Once Mr. Hussein settled in, he became more his old self, speaking with a strengthening voice to declare Kuwait rightly a part of Iraq, to rebuke the judge, as an Iraqi, for daring to countenance charges that Kuwait was not Iraqi territory, and to describe Kuwait's rulers as "animals" who had tried to turn Iraqi women into "10-dinar prostitutes." He told the judge, "You know that this is all a theater by Bush, to help him win his election." He then refused to sign court papers and walked out brusquely, saying, "Khalas!"- an Arabic term meaning "finished."
The contrast with several of the men who formed his inner coterie was stark. After Mr. Hussein entered and left the courthouse alone, the 11 others arrived together, similarly manacled with handcuffs locked to heavy waist chains. One by one, they filed meekly in to take the seat vacated by Mr. Hussein. They radiated an alarm bordering on fear. The one exception was Barzan Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, a 53-year-old half brother of Mr. Hussein's, who shouted angrily and threatened to strike a courtroom guard for holding him too tightly as he approached the dock.
Several of the former leaders had glistening eyes, as if verging on tears, and appeared especially shaken when the judge told them that the killings they were accused of carried the death penalty under Iraqi criminal law. They were held incommunicado in American custody until Wednesday. They had no access to lawyers, nor to anybody besides interrogators and prison guards. All spent long minutes during the hearing exploring their legal rights, and discussing the lawyers they favored to represent them. Many made a point of saying they wanted lawyers from other Arab countries, including Jordan and Egypt, as well as Iraqi lawyers, perhaps because lawyers from outside Iraq are thought by the defendants to be less likely to be swayed by emotions arising from Mr. Hussein's brutalities at home.
The issue of lawyers provided one of the moments for Mr. Hussein's sarcasm, when the judge told him that his counsel would be paid for if he could not afford one. "The Americans say I have millions hidden in Switzerland," he said. "How can I not have the money to pay for one?" Mr. Hussein's first wife, Sajida, to whom he remains married in addition to a second marriage, has said from her refuge outside Iraq - most recently, in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar - that she has appointed several lawyers, from Jordan and France, among other countries, to represent her husband.
President Bush did not initially watch the television coverage of Mr. Hussein's court appearance, but at around midday he stepped out of the Oval Office into an adjoining room to watch a short portion of the tape that was being replayed by one of the news networks, Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said. He said Mr. Bush had no particular reaction to Mr. Hussein's comments. "Saddam Hussein is going to say all sorts of things during this trial," Mr. McClellan said. "What's important is that Saddam Hussein and his band of oppressors are facing justice from the Iraqi people in an Iraqi court. And today this is case No. 1: the people of Iraq versus Saddam Hussein."
Thursday's hearings were held under conditions of iron-tight security, in line with Mr. Bush's decision to insist on maintaining the so-called "high-value detainees," or H.V.D.'s, in military parlance, under American guard, even after transferring them to Iraqi legal custody on Wednesday. Camp Victory is the American military headquarters for Iraq, a complex of lakeside palaces formerly used by Mr. Hussein and his family. It is 10 miles southwest of central Baghdad, and was the scene, shortly before the hearings began, of an elaborate change-of-command ceremony at which Gen. George W. Casey, the former vice chief of the army, took control of the force of 165,000 allied troops, 140,000 of them Americans, from the departing Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez.
In the courtroom, Mr. Hussein showed an insistent contempt for the American "occupiers," as he referred to them, and for what he implied was an attempt to dress up an American show trial as Iraqi justice. When the hearing began, the former Iraqi ruler seemed distracted by a two-tiered bench to his right, where officials of the new Iraqi government were seated with three American reporters and three American officials: two lawyers advising the Iraqi judge, and a United States Navy admiral acting as a spokesman who attended in tan chinos and a yellow, short-sleeved sportshirt.
During the long months that most of the defendants had been held, they appeared to have had little or no information about what was happening in Iraq. One man, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, 56, a former bodyguard and secretary to Mr. Hussein, named the Iraqi he would like as his lawyer, only to look puzzled at the chuckles about him in the court. The man in question, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, was named justice minister recently in Iraq's new interim government.
There were echoes of past war crimes trials at Nuremberg after World War II, and at The Hague after the wars of the 1990's that ravaged the former Yugoslavia, when one after another of the men argued that he could not be held personally accountable for actions ordered by others, or carried out in the name of the "leadership," meaning Mr. Hussein and a handful of men in his innermost circle. All they had done, several defendants argued, was to follow orders or assent to actions they had no power to halt, even as high-ranking military or intelligence officials or as members of the Revolutionary Command Council, the country's most powerful and feared political body.
One who took this approach was Tariq Aziz, the 68-year-old former deputy prime minister, a Chaldean Christian who conducted many of Iraq's foreign negotiations, including the failed efforts to head off the Persian Gulf war after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Mr. Aziz cut a figure of unshakable self-confidence in power, stalking the marble halls of Baghdad's palaces pulling on a cigar, boasting until the last weeks before the American attack in March last year that he and other government leaders would be "shadows" by the time American troops arrived in Baghdad, uncatchable. In fact, he gave himself up shortly after Mr. Hussein's government was toppled.
At Thursday's hearing, he, like many others, was a shadow, in another sense, of his former self. His shoulders bowed, his head forward, he mopped his brow, bit his lip, blew his nose, and wrung his hands. He sat through the hearing with the chain used to manacle him dangling at his waist. Once a man who prided himself on his well-cut suits, he seemed not to notice the chain nestling against his ill-fitting, American-bought suit.
The charges against Mr. Aziz, as against all of the defendants, were drawn only vaguely for the arraignment, and were stated as involving "deliberate killing" of innocent Iraqis in 1979, when Mr. Hussein began his presidency with the execution of dozens of senior Baath Party officials who opposed his seizure of power, and in 1991, when tens of thousands of Shiites in southern Iraq were killed after an abortive uprising that followed the gulf war.
"What I want to know is, are these charges personal?" Mr. Aziz asked. "Is it Tariq Aziz carrying out these killings? If I am a member of a government that makes the mistake of killing someone, then there can't justifiably be an accusation against me personally. Where there is a crime committed by the leadership, the moral responsibility rests there, and there shouldn't be a personal case just because somebody belongs to the leadership." He added: "I never killed anybody, by the acts of my own hand." The judge cut off Mr. Aziz, telling him brusquely that he would proceed with an investigation of the charges, and Mr. Aziz slumped back in his chair. He was told, like most of the other defendants, that his case would be considered under Article 406 of the Iraqi criminal code, the one that provides the death penalty for premeditated killing. Legal executions in Iraq, under Mr. Hussein, were usually carried out by hanging or firing squad in cases involving military officers or some high-ranking officials.
Salem Chalabi, executive director of the Iraqi Special Tribunal, the court set up to try former government leaders by the American occupation and financed by the United States, said after Thursday's hearing that the death penalty, suspended during the occupation, would be restored. Mr. Chalabi, a nephew of the former American ally Ahmad Chalabi, said capital punishment would be available to the judges in the special tribunal's trials, even if it were formally restored after the current hearings began.
Mr. Chalabi, who attended the hearings on behalf of the interim government along with Muwaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, said Mr. Aziz appeared convinced as late as Wednesday that he was about to be released. Mr. Chalabi said Mr. Aziz seemed to shrink within himself when he was told, at a court hearing transferring legal custody of the defendants to Iraq, that he was to be arraigned Thursday.
Another former leader who argued that he should not be held accountable for crimes committed under Mr. Hussein was Sultan Hashim Ahmed, the 54-year-old former defense minister. Mr. Hashim was the general who signed a truce with American commanders at the Iraq-Kuwait border in March 1991. The crimes he was told he would be investigated for today included the use of chemical weapons against Halabja, and other atrocities committed during the so-called Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980's.
Mr. Hashim protested, but did not contend that there had been no atrocity at Halabja, only that he had not been responsible for it. He told the judge that he had arrived in northern Iraq, as the corps commander in the area, a month after the Halabja attack. He said that in nearly 40 years in the Iraqi Army he had "never hurt anybody." He then added: "As an army commander, there is a certain procedure. You have to follow orders, unlike an ordinary citizen. It's a little bit different, when you get an order, you carry it out. Sometimes, when you do it, you ask yourself if this can really be true."
The heavyset Mr. Hashim appeared to be struggling to maintain his composure during his 10 minutes before the judge. Like many of the other leaders, he appeared suddenly ordinary, in his ill-fitting jacket and trousers. Under Mr. Hussein, even high-ranking civilian leaders like Mr. Aziz liked to wear olive-drab military-style uniforms signifying their rank in the Baath Party. But today, stripped of the inhibiting effect the uniforms lent them, they appeared commonplace. Without the black berets they once wore, many of them, like Mr. Mahmud, Mr. Hussein's former secretary, turned out to be mostly bald, though in the case of mr. Mahmud, who used to stand eagle-eyed behind Mr. Hussein at all palace meetings, pistol strapped to his waist as a last line of defense, the absence of hair was offset by a 12-inch, Islamic-style beard..
One of the biggest surprises was Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali for his alleged role in ordering the Halabja attack. Once the most feared man in Iraq after Mr. Hussein, Mr. Majid, 58, had jet-black hair, and an air of sinister purposefulness, under Mr. Hussein; he was filmed several times directing summary executions, especially during the 1991 Shiite uprising, and laughingly congratulating the men who carried them out.
Today, he seemed plumper, unlike most of the other men, and his hair was close-cropped and mousey-grey. He entered limping, with a walking stick like a shepherd's crook, the result, Iraqi officials said, of an advanced case of diabetes. But the greatest difference was in his demeanor: in the courtroom, he was the essence of congeniality and cooperation. The judge told him that he stood accused of crimes in the Halabja attack, in the Kuwait invasion, and in the suppression of the Shiite uprising after the gulf war.
Mr. Majid listened, smiling, seemingly intent on doing nothing to provoke courtroom disfavor. "I'm happy with the accusations, because I'm innocent of them, and as you will see, justice will prevail," he said, in an even tone that had something of the quality of a man concerned that he has been overcharged for his car repair, but unwilling to make much of it. Read his legal rights, including the right to remain silent, he said to the judge, "Thank you." Then, still in good-fellow mode, he remarked audibly to a courtroom guard as he left that he was surprised that the charges had not been worse.
-------- space
Hawaii judge had role in Cassini trip to Saturn
By Associated Press
Friday, July 2nd, 2004
http://www.kpua.net/news.php?id=2563
(Honolulu-AP) -- The world is marveling at the ``mind-blowing'' pictures of Saturn's rings being beamed back to earth.
But the launch of the three (b) billion-dollar international mission at one time was in the hands of a federal judge in Hawaii.
In October 1997, U-S District Judge David Ezra denied a motion by environmentalists who wanted to halt the launch of the plutonium-powered space probe. They argued that federal criminal charges showed there might be substandard computer parts on board.
Ezra denied the motion and the appeals court in San Francisco quickly concurred, allowing the spacecraft to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida a few hours later.
The Hawaii Green Party and a Florida group claimed that the spacecraft during a 1999 gravitational acceleration swing back around earth might malfunction. They said it could hit the atmosphere and contaminate wide areas of the world with radioactive plutonium.
Government attorneys discounted that possibility.
-------- un
Iraq Far Behind on U.N. Dues
Reuters
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22280-2004Jul1.html
UNITED NATIONS, July 1 -- Although it formally regained political power this week, Iraq cannot yet resume voting at the United Nations because it has fallen far behind in its U.N. dues payments, the General Assembly said Thursday.
Baghdad must pay at least $14.6 million to regain its vote, the 191-nation U.N. assembly said in a report to Secretary General Kofi Annan. Under U.N. rules, member states lose their vote if their dues go unpaid for two or more years.
The assembly can decide to let a country continue voting if it is satisfied that the dues have gone unpaid "due to conditions beyond the control of the member." But such a decision would not come before the new assembly session opens in September, a U.N. spokeswoman said.
The General Assembly is the main U.N. deliberative body, composed of representatives of all U.N. members, each of which normally has one vote. Even before last year's U.S.-led invasion, Iraq had not kept up with its dues because of U.N. economic sanctions imposed on it in 1990 over Baghdad's invasion of neighboring Kuwait.
Iraq has had no U.N. ambassador since Saddam Hussein's government fell. Mohammed Aldouri, its top envoy before the war, fled New York as the invasion got underway. The rules require that an ambassador's credentials be issued by a nation's head of state, head of government or foreign affairs minister.
-------- us
PRISONER ABUSE
Army Report Criticizes Training and Practices at Prisons
July 2, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/politics/02ABUS.html?hp
WASHINGTON, July 1 - A broad new Army report concludes that serious problems in training, organization and policy regarding military detention operations in Iraq and Afghanistan contributed to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, senior defense officials said Thursday.
The inquiry, by Lt. Gen. Paul T. Mikolashek, the Army inspector general, criticizes Army policy on detainee operations as a cold-war relic better suited to dealing with Soviet military prisoners on a European battlefield than with insurgents and Islamic jihadists fighting in Iraq, officials said. It cites inadequate training for military jailers and interrogators. And it describes poor leadership, overcrowded cells and poor medical care for Iraqi prisoners.
Taken together, these and many other of the 30 major findings paint a sobering picture of conditions, policies and practices that left the Army ill prepared to hold and question thousands of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, officials said.
Earlier drafts found no systemic abuse at American-run prisons in Iraq or Afghanistan, and officials said that had not changed in the final report. The report will probably not assign blame to senior American officers in Iraq, defense officials said. That task, officials said, will be left to one or more of the half-dozen other inquiries under way.
General Mikolashek is putting the finishing touches on his report, which the acting Army secretary, Les Brownlee, is expected to make public in the next couple of weeks, officials said. Descriptions of the report's findings were provided by defense officials familiar with its general contents, but the report has not yet been made available to Congress for an independent assessment.
"It's going to be a tough report," said one defense official who has been briefed on the outlines of the report, which is based on a four-month review. "It will show that these various problems helped to create and contribute to an environment that left room for human error and possibly misconduct by soldiers."
The report will also make a series of recommendations that include overhauling Army policies to deal with detainee operations in counterinsurgencies. The doctrine, for instance, has yet to catch up with the need for a partnership between military police and interrogators in questioning captured insurgents in places like Iraq, officials said.
The recommendations will also urge revising the training for military police and military intelligence specialists who interrogate prisoners, and revamping medical guidelines, like the number of medics assigned to units working at prisons, officials said.
Revising the policy is significant, Army officials said, because changing policies has an important ripple effect on training, developing leadership skills, and even on fielding proper equipment.
Army officials said commanders at training facilities around the country and overseas were already beginning to change their procedures. "We are continuously collecting and rapidly applying lessons learned into our training, leader development and, as appropriate, our doctrine," one Army official said.
General Mikolashek, a former commander of land forces in the Middle East, and a team of military specialists have examined at least 16 different areas, including military intelligence and military police operations and their training, officials said.
Investigators interviewed military and civilian personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait, and at Army training centers at Fort Polk, La., and Fort Irwin, Calif., officials said.
In a confidential Feb. 10 memorandum, Mr. Brownlee ordered General Mikolashek to "identify any capability shortfalls with respect to internment, enemy prisoner of war, detention operations, and interrogation procedures and recommend appropriate resolutions or changes, if required."
Many of the inspector general's findings are consistent with a preliminary assessment that Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, described to the Senate Armed Services Committee on May 19.
At that hearing, General Abizaid said the Army itself would have to share some blame for not keeping pace with the kind of combat, stability operations and nation-building duties soldiers face today.
"Our doctrine is not right," General Abizaid told senators. "There are so many things that are out there that aren't right in the way that we operate for this war."
General Abizaid said that according to a briefing he had received, the inspector general found no "pattern of abuse" of prisoners in the Central Command's area of responsibility.
The officer who conducted the first major inquiry of abuse at the prison, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, also identified problems that the inspector general cited. "There is a general lack of knowledge, implementation and emphasis of basic legal, regulatory, doctrinal and command requirements" in the military police at Abu Ghraib, his report said.
The emerging details about the inspector general's report come as many of the other major inquiries are making fitful progress. The Army announced last Friday that Lt. Gen. Anthony R. Jones, deputy commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, had been assigned to interview Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez - who led the military forces in Iraq from just after the invasion until his replacement on Thursday - as part of a far-reaching inquiry into the role of military intelligence specialists at Abu Ghraib.
Another investigation by a four-member panel, headed by former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger, has interviewed two dozen military officers and civilian defense officials in Iraq, Europe and Washington as part of its inquiry to oversee all the other reviews.
The panel, whose report is due by the end of July, has already interviewed the Pentagon's top civilian intelligence official, Stephen A. Cambone, and General Sanchez. When it meets on July 8, members will interview General Abizaid and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the 800th Military Police Brigade commander at Abu Ghraib, an official said.
-------- war crimes
Saddam Could Call CIA in His Defence
(IPS)
Sanjay Suri
Jul 2 2000
http://ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=24480
Evidence offered by a top CIA man could confirm the testimony given by Saddam Hussein at the opening of his trial in Baghdad Thursday that he knew of the Halabja massacre only from the newspapers.
LONDON, Jul 2 - Evidence offered by a top CIA man could confirm the testimony given by Saddam Hussein at the opening of his trial in Baghdad Thursday that he knew of the Halabja massacre only from the newspapers.
Thousands were reported killed in the gassing of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja in the north of Iraq in March 1988 towards the end of Iraq's eight-year war with Iran. The gassing of the Kurds has long been held to be the work of Ali Hassan al-Majid, named in the West because of that association as 'Chemical Ali'. Saddam Hussein is widely alleged to have ordered Ali to carry out the chemical attack.
The Halabja massacre is now prominent among the charges read out against Saddam in the Baghdad court. When that charge was read out, Saddam replied that he had read about the massacre in a newspaper. Saddam has denied these allegations ever since they were made. But now with a trial on, he could summon a witness in his defence with the potential to blow apart the charge and create one of the greatest diplomatic disasters the United States has ever known.
A report prepared by the top CIA official handling the matter says Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the massacre, and indicates that it was the work of Iranians. Further, the Scott inquiry on the role of the British government has gathered evidence that following the massacre the United States in fact armed Saddam Hussein to counter the Iranians chemicals for chemicals.
Few believe that a CIA man would attend a court hearing in Baghdad in defence of Saddam. But in this case the CIA boss has gone public with his evidence, and this evidence has been in the public domain for more than a year.
The CIA officer Stephen C. Pelletiere was the agency's senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. As professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, he says he was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.
In addition, he says he headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States, and the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.
Pelletiere went public with his information on no less a platform than The New York Times in an article on January 31 last year titled 'A War Crime or an Act of War?' The article which challenged the case for war quoted U.S. President George W. Bush as saying: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured."
Pelletiere says the United States Defence Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report following the Halabja gassing, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need- to-know basis. "That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas," he wrote in The New York Times.
The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja, he said. "The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. "The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time."
Pelletiere writes that these facts have "long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned."
Pelletiere wrote that Saddam Hussein has much to answer for in the area of human rights abuses. "But accusing him of gassing his own people at Halabja as an act of genocide is not correct, because as far as the information we have goes, all of the cases where gas was used involved battles. These were tragedies of war. There may be justifications for invading Iraq, but Halabja is not one of them."
Pelletiere has maintained his position. All Saddam would have to do in court now is to cite The New York Times article even if the court would not summon Pelletiere. The issues raised in the article would themselves be sufficient to raise serious questions about the charges filed against Saddam - and in turn the justifications offered last year for invading Iraq.
The Halabja killings were cited not just by Bush but by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to justify his case for going along with a U.S. invasion of Iraq. A British government dossier released to justify the war on Iraq says that "Saddam has used chemical weapons, not only against an enemy state, but against his own people." An inquiry report in 1996 by Lord Justice Scott in what came to be known as the arms-to-Iraq affair gave dramatic pointers to what followed after Halabja. After the use of poison gas in 1988 both the United States and Britain began to supply Saddam Hussein with even more chemical weapons.
The Scott inquiry had been set up in 1992 following the collapse of the trial in the case of Matrix Churchill, a British firm exporting equipment to Iraq that could be put to military use.
Three senior executives of Matrix Churchill said the government knew what Matrix Churchill was doing, and that its managing director Paul Henderson had been supplying information about Iraq to the British intelligence agencies on a regular basis.
The inquiry revealed details of the British government's secret decision to supply Saddam with even more weapons-related equipment after the Halabja killings.
Former British foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe was found to have written that the end of the Iraq-Iran war could mean "major opportunities for British industry" in military exports, but he wanted to keep that proposal quiet.
"It could look very cynical if so soon after expressing outrage about the treatment of the Kurds, we adopt a more flexible approach to arms sales," one of his officials told the Scott inquiry. Lord Scott condemned the government's decision to change its policy, while keeping MPs and the public in the dark.
Soon after the attack, the United States approved the export to Iraq of virus cultures and a billion-dollar contract to design and build a petrochemical plant the Iraqis planned to use to produce mustard gas.
Saddam Hussein has appeared so far without a lawyer to defend him. A Jordanian firm is reported to be speaking up for him. But the real defence for him could be waiting for him in Washington and London.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Hawaii judge had role in Cassini trip to Saturn
By Associated Press
Friday, July 2nd, 2004
http://www.kpua.net/news.php?id=2563
(Honolulu-AP) -- The world is marveling at the ``mind-blowing'' pictures of Saturn's rings being beamed back to earth.
But the launch of the three (b) billion-dollar international mission at one time was in the hands of a federal judge in Hawaii.
In October 1997, U-S District Judge David Ezra denied a motion by environmentalists who wanted to halt the launch of the plutonium-powered space probe. They argued that federal criminal charges showed there might be substandard computer parts on board.
Ezra denied the motion and the appeals court in San Francisco quickly concurred, allowing the spacecraft to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida a few hours later.
The Hawaii Green Party and a Florida group claimed that the spacecraft during a 1999 gravitational acceleration swing back around earth might malfunction. They said it could hit the atmosphere and contaminate wide areas of the world with radioactive plutonium.
Government attorneys discounted that possibility.
-------- immigration / refugees
Refugees Moved Before Annan Visit
U.N. Leader Arrives to Find Sudan Camp Emptied of Residents
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20096-2004Jul1?language=printer
MESHKEL, Sudan, July 1 -- After U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan visited one of the best-maintained refugee camps in this war-rattled region of western Sudan on Thursday, he climbed back into an SUV and headed down a bumpy desert road.
He was scheduled to tour a scene of even greater desperation in what has been called the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, this time a camp that has not received any international aid.
But when his convoy arrived at the settlement, the 3,000 people who had been living there Wednesday afternoon were gone. Instead, there was only a muddy field with a few soldiers stepping through the muck.
In a move that befuddled U.N. officials, the Sudanese villagers in the camp were moved overnight and in the morning, said Jan Egeland, the U.N. undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs. They were loaded into government trucks "apparently to be dumped," he said, at the gates of the already overcrowded Abu Shouk camp, 12 miles away, where 40,000 people live in a stretch of open desert. A U.N. team confirmed that the villagers had been moved to Abu Shouk.
The Sudanese government's social affairs minister, Ahnoun Mohammed Ebrahim, said the villagers were moved to protect them from possible flooding and disease in the low-lying area when the seasonal rains come. He dismissed suggestions that they were transported to lessen the impact of the crisis for Annan's visit to the Darfur region, where more than 1 million people have been left homeless by a government-backed Arab militiamen terrorizing the area.
"Every day we move people," Ebrahim said to reporters.
But Egeland said: "I can't imagine why they were spontaneously moved. Probably these people will be back tonight."
U.N. officials conceded that upcoming rains could threaten the area, but also said the government was aware that Abu Shouk was too crowded to accept more refugees.
"Of course it's a concern," Annan said, referring to the movement of the refugees at Meshkel camp. "We are trying to sort it out. The team on the ground is following it up actively."
The movement of the refugees highlighted an ongoing concern among aid workers here that the government is working hard to play down the crisis in Darfur as a string of high-level international delegations arrive.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who visited Abu Shouk on Wednesday, said any efforts to cover up the crisis were ultimately futile because he had a clear picture of what was going on. He stressed at a news conference after visiting the camp that the Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, "had to be broken," and he said the government in Khartoum must take action "within days or weeks" to deal with the crisis. The United States began circulating a draft U.N. resolution Wednesday that would place sanctions on the militiamen and ban the Sudanese and other governments from arming, equipping or training them.
During his visit, Annan also emphasized that security was the top priority and told the governor of El Fasher it was vital to assure the displaced villagers that no one would force them to return home without guarantees of protection from the marauding Arab militias. Annan traveled to neighboring Chad on Thursday night to meet with officials about the conflict, which has spilled over the border. About 150,000 Sudanese refugees have left Darfur for Chad.
The search for land is one of the main factors behind the violence in Darfur. Farming tribes that largely view themselves as African have long clashed with the Arab tribes, which are predominantly camel herders. The current conflict began when two African groups attacked military installations in early 2003, saying that the Arab central government had failed to develop the area. The government responded by arming the Arab militias and bombing villages, causing an exodus of civilians, according to the United Nations and human rights groups. An estimated 30,000 people have been killed in the conflict.
"The massacres have stopped. But there is still killings and rapes. The only thing there is an abundance of in Darfur is weapons," Egeland told reporters traveling with Annan.
Later, Egeland said that if Sudan's government could not disarm the militias, the crisis would "go on forever. The next few months will be a moment of truth for Sudan."
Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamid, Sudan's humanitarian affairs minister, said the camps were safe and free of attacks. "From my knowledge there is no such phenomenon," he said.
On Thursday when Annan visited Zam Zam camp, 11 miles south of El Fasher, no militiamen were in sight. Smiling and waving women riding donkeys lined the road to the camp to greet him. But on Sunday, the Janjaweed roamed the area, riding horses and camels while cradling guns.
Annan requested a private meeting with a group of women in the camp. In contrast to other discussions Annan had throughout the day, government representatives were kept away as he sat on a straw mat under a tree and quietly asked the women about their lives since the crisis began.
"We lost our houses. They were burned. Some of the Janjaweed rode horses and camels using guns, and then there were bombs," one woman said.
Another woman said her sister was riding a donkey when her village was bombed.
"Her body was divided in half," she said. "Now I must care for her 11 children."
A midwife said she knew of 20 rape victims at the camp.
Annan told the women: "Most of you want to go home as soon as possible. What does the government have to do to make that happen?"
Several women replied, "Security."
"I agree with you. . . . Nobody is going to force you to go home without security," Annan said, touching his heart. "As long as you are in this camp we are going to do everything we can to protect you."
The women clapped and called out in Arabic, "God willing."
--------
Sudan Camp Is Moved Before U.N. Visit
July 2, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/international/africa/02suda.html
AL FASHER, Sudan, July 1 - There were only donkeys milling around in a soggy, trash-strewn lot on Thursday afternoon when the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, and his entourage arrived at what was supposed to be a crowded squatter camp here in the troubled Darfur region of Sudan.
Gone were the more than 1,000 residents of the Meshtel settlement. Gone as well were their makeshift dwellings. Hours before Mr. Annan's arrival, the local authorities had loaded the camp's inhabitants aboard trucks and moved them.
Aid workers who had visited the camp earlier said that before its sudden evacuation, Meshtel was a desperate place in which displaced people lived packed together in makeshift shelters on ground flooded from recent rains.
"Where are the people?" Mr. Annan was overheard asking a Sudanese official who was accompanying his tour of Darfur, the region in western Sudan where the government has been accused of unleashing armed militias on the local population to quell a rebel uprising.
Al Noor Muhammad Ibrahim, minister of social affairs for the state of North Darfur, explained that the camp on Mr. Annan's itinerary no longer existed. He said the government had relocated its residents the evening before, sometime after United Nations officials had paid a visit at 5 p.m. on Wednesday in preparation for a stop by Mr. Annan.
"It's not because the secretary general of the United Nations is here that we moved them," Mr. Ibrahim insisted as incredulous United Nations officials looked on. Mr. Ibrahim said the conditions were too grim for the people there and that humanitarianism, not public relations, had motivated him to act. "We did not like seeing people living like that," he said.
Mr. Annan, who did not leave his vehicle, stayed silent as visibly agitated aides argued with the Sudanese authorities about the sudden relocation. The government urged Mr. Annan to visit another settlement, a nearby camp with far better conditions which Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had toured Wednesday during his brief stop in Darfur.
"Of course, it is of concern," that the government had moved so many people so suddenly, Mr. Annan said later in an interview. "We are trying to sort it out."
It remained unclear whether the decision to move the displaced people was made by local authorities trying to put the best face possible on conditions here or by senior officials in the capital, Khartoum. The same camp had been closed several weeks ago because the government did not want settlements popping up so close to town. But people drifted back.
Mr. Annan bypassed the Abushouk camp, which has become a regular stop for visiting dignitaries and is known widely among aid workers as the "tourist camp" because of its relatively good condition.
In meetings with Mr. Annan earlier on Thursday, the Sudanese authorities had insisted that the situation in Darfur, which the United Nations has labeled the world's most severe human crisis, had been greatly overblown.
The local governor, Othman Muhammad Kiber, read a long statement in Arabic to Mr. Annan, that said the health situation was not as dire as some outsiders maintained.
"We believe this is a good chance for you to see the situation on the ground," he told Mr. Annan.
Perhaps because the government has been accused of trying to hurriedly improve the condition of camps in advance of high-profile visitors, the governor added, "We promise you, we'll be very transparent, very honest."
At the Meshtel camp that was abandoned when Mr. Annan arrived, United Nations officials had planned to give Mr. Annan a firsthand view of the grim conditions facing many of those driven from their villages.
The million or so displaced people of Darfur have gathered in more than 100 settlements across the vast region, which is as large as France. Aid agencies have begun offering food, water and shelter in some of the camps to try to reduce the desperation.
But there are only 300 international aid workers in Darfur, 50 of whom work for the United Nations, said Jan Egeland, the United Nations under secretary for humanitarian affairs.
The task they face is huge. A million or more residents, most of them farmers who grow their own food, now live in makeshift homes far from their land. More than 100,000 others are living in rugged refugee camps across the border in Chad.
Even in normal years, 20,000 to 30,000 people die in Darfur from preventable diseases like malaria, cholera and diarrhea. United Nations officials expect far more people to die this year with residents clustered together in camps and the rainy season already begun.
At least 50 camps in Darfur are receiving no aid, Mr. Egeland said. Meshtel had been one of those.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Annan had visited a more established camp, known as Zam Zam, outside El Fasher, where more than 40,000 refugees have congregated. He plopped down on a straw mat to hear some elders plead for more aid. He inspected a well sponsored by the United Nations and joined a group of 50 women under an acacia tree to hear the day-to-day struggles they face since being chased from their homes.
It was during his talk with the women that Mr. Annan's entourage again found itself butting heads with the local authorities.
Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamid, the minister for humanitarian affairs, wanted to join in the open-air event, as did other government officials. But aides to Mr. Annan said that they wanted the women to speak freely, and that it was best if Mr. Hamid and his colleagues stayed away.
"We would request that the government permit us to have a frank discussion with the women," Mr. Egeland told the officials.
After much give and take, the authorities agreed but stood nearby as a woman described how 20 camp dwellers had been raped during the attacks on their villages.
Mr. Annan put his hand to his heart and said: "No one is going to force you to go home without security. As long as you're in this camp, we'll do everything we can to protect you."
The women, in unison, praised Allah.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Lawyers Seek Access To 53 at Guantanamo Letter to Rumsfeld Faxed Yesterday
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21841-2004Jul1.html
A group of lawyers who represent 53 detainees at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, demanded yesterday that the Pentagon grant them unfettered access to their clients, saying that a U.S. Supreme Court decision this week leaves no doubt that the detainees have that right.
Lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents two of the detainees involved in the Supreme Court case, made the demand in a letter faxed to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday afternoon.
They asked for access "as expeditiously as possible," contending that under the Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush "there is no question of the right of each of them to file petitions for habeas corpus and to have access to counsel in order to do so."
The center's legal director, Jeffrey E. Fogel, said yesterday that its lawyers have never been allowed contact with the more than four dozen captives they represent at Guantanamo Bay and that such contact is vital to representing their rights in court.
In the letter, Fogel also asked Rumsfeld to allow a delegation of lawyers into Guantanamo Bay to inform the detainees about the Supreme Court decisions, which granted the alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters held there access to U.S. courts to contest their detentions.
Pentagon officials said yesterday that they have made no decisions on the impact of the Supreme Court rulings and that there is no plan for informing the nearly 600 detainees about their new rights. Lawrence DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman, also said that there has been no decision to grant lawyers access to the detainees.
DiRita told reporters yesterday that lawyers with the Defense and Justice departments are still analyzing the decisions to "see what the intent of the rulings was."
He said that Pentagon officials hope to release some detainees through a previously established military review process that is in its beginning phases.
"There's a range of things that are under examination to determine what is the best way to ensure that we're operating consistent with the ruling in the case of Guantanamo. But . . . everybody has a desire not to hold people that need not be held," DiRita said.
Fogel said he believes it is obvious, based on the Supreme Court decisions, that each detainee has the right to an attorney. He accused the Pentagon of trying to delay access, likening the decision-making process to the series of legal memos the government produced in trying to define how far interrogation tactics for enemy combatants could go.
"I think they're doing the same kind of thing they were doing in all those memos," Fogel said. "They're doing the best thing they can to circumvent the law."
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
Cheney, Bush Tout Gains in Terror War
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22281-2004Jul1.html
With scenes of violence and mayhem in Iraq replaced by more favorable images of the new Iraqi leaders taking charge and former president Saddam Hussein in the dock, top Bush administration officials launched an effort yesterday to ease the public's concern that the war has increased the threat of terrorism against the United States.
In speeches, briefings, interviews and an online chat, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and others used the events surrounding this week's handover of political autonomy in Iraq to rebuild their case that Iraq is experiencing a "historic transformation" and Americans are safer as a result.
"After decades of rule by a brutal dictator, Iraq has been returned to its rightful owners, the people of Iraq," Cheney said in a speech in New Orleans, which made the case that Bush had reversed a terrorist threat that grew unchecked before he came to office. "America is safer, and the world is more secure, because Iraq and Afghanistan are now partners in the struggle against terror, instead of sanctuaries for terrorist networks."
Administration officials were clearly delighted by the developments in Iraq since Monday's handover; Bush watched some of the television footage of Hussein's combative arraignment in Iraq. While warning that more violence was certain to come, officials were hopeful that this week's events would begin to reverse the growing concerns about the Iraq war among the American public.
By 51 percent to 14 percent, Americans believe the threat of terrorism has increased rather than decreased since the invasion of Iraq, according to an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll released yesterday. Thirty-four percent said the threat remained the same.
The impression that the Iraq war has hindered the fight against terrorism has some military concurrence. An Army War College study argued in January that the Bush administration had mishandled the war on terrorism by invading Iraq, which the study called a "a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al Qaeda."
Bush officials fanned out yesterday to make the case that the war in Iraq has broad international support and has improved the security of the United States.
Returning to the main justification for the Iraq war, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in an interview released by the Pentagon, said forbidden chemical weapons were found in Iraq in recent days. Rumsfeld said the Polish defense minister told him this week "that his troops in Iraq had recently come across -- I've forgotten the number, but something like 16 or 17 -- warheads that contained sarin and mustard gas."
Rumsfeld added: "I have not seen them and I have not tested them, but they believe that they are correct that these, in fact, were undeclared chemical weapons."
Bush, in a ceremony swearing in John C. Danforth as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, touted the agreement by NATO to train Iraqi security forces. Bush also said the United Nations -- with whom he has often feuded -- is serving "great purposes" in Iraq by helping to prepare for elections and a constitution.
Rice, in a chat on the White House Web site, said that although not safe, "we are safer today" than before Sept. 11, 2001.
Jim Wilkinson, who directs communications for the National Security Council, said it is important to keep "realistic expectations" that the assumption of sovereignty in Iraq will be rocky.
Still, Bush aides were jubilant yesterday after seeing the images of Hussein, with trim beard and open collar, in an Iraqi courtroom. "Today, this is case number one: the people of Iraq versus Saddam Hussein," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.
Cheney, at the New Orleans D-Day Museum, delivered the most extensive defense of the administration's Iraq policy. "This week, only 15 months after the liberation of Iraq, we reached an important milestone, as the world witnessed the arrival of a free and sovereign Iraqi government," he said.
Countering the staff of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, which found no "collaborative relationship" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda, Cheney renewed his accusation that they had "long-established ties." He listed several examples and stated: "In the early 1990s, Saddam had sent a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service to Sudan to train al Qaeda in bombmaking and document forgery."
Senior intelligence officials said yesterday that they had no knowledge of this.
In an indication of the political significance of the wars against al Qaeda and Iraq, Cheney placed blame for the spread of terrorism on the Clinton administration.
"This," Cheney said, "was the situation when President Bush and I came to office: a world where terrorists were emboldened by years of being able to strike us with impunity, where unprecedented new attacks were being planned, where outlaw regimes provided terrorists sanctuary without cost or consequence."
The campaign of Bush's Democratic challenger, Sen. John F. Kerry, said Cheney's speech showed that Bush's campaign is "running scared" because Americans "are losing confidence" in Bush's terrorism policies.
But Cheney spoke of the war as a triumph. "It is a historic transformation for that nation," he said, adding: "This is a proud moment for the United States, as well."
Staff writers Thomas E. Ricks and Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
--------
Warfare in urban centers
washtimes
By Austin Bay
July 02, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040701-085558-4374r.htm
China's great sixth century B.C. strategist, Gen. Sun Tzu, had a poet's knack for the epigram - the ability to "write tight" and sneakily sinking the infinitely complex into a single phrase. His "Art of War" is a diamond mine of insight.
"All warfare is based upon deception," Sun Tzu wrote, simultaneously succinct and voluminous. Italy's Renaissance political genius, Niccolo Machiavelli, added: "Though fraud in other activities may be detestable, in the management of war it is laudable and glorious, and he who overcomes the enemy by fraud is as much to be praised as he who does by force."
Sun's and Machiavelli's soundbites are the "deep background" for a Rand pamphlet titled "The Art of Darkness: Deception and Urban Operations" (see the Rand Web site, www.rand.org). Written by Scott Gerwehr and Russell Glenn for the U.S. Army and published in 2000, the short study examines the role of deception in city and suburban security operations.
The immediate relevance to Iraq is obvious. Follow the train of headlines - U.S. Marines in Fallujah, the British in Basra, the U.S. Army in Najaf, Iraqi police in Baghdad.
However, the global scope of urbanization has put a Mogadishu, if not a Los Angeles, in virtually every corner of the planet. As early as the 1960s, European strategists began to see Western Europe as an extended city. For French strategist Pierre Gallois, urbanization meant "a nation's human and material assets are now concentrated in relatively small spaces and their annihilation would require only a handful of missiles."
"The Art of Darkness," though pre-September 11, 2001, presciently addresses urban fighting in its 21st century War on Terror context. Messrs. Gerwehr and Glenn note: "many of the advantages held by U.S. forces are curbed or eliminated by the distinctive qualities of the urban environment." Cities are ripe with opportunities for an enemy to "deceive" U.S. sensors and soldiers. They also offer opportunities for the United States and its allies to employ deception - if troops are trained for it.
In urban terrain:
• The scope for deception is greater than in any other.
c "Background noise" (the bane of city life) "hampers" sensors and "counterdeception" operations. "Urban clutter" also limits the employment of certain technologies.
c The "presence and proximity of noncombatants" complicates intelligence operations. Noncombatants and "important sociopolitical institutions" (e.g., mosques in Najaf) also complicate the politics, which complicates combat operations. The complications are reflected in what the military calls ROE, the Rules of Engagement, which tell soldiers when and what to shoot.
The authors' analysis of the Chechens' deception operations in the defense of their capital of Grozny against Russian forces (January 1995) has resonance for Fallujah-type operations. The Chechens used Red Cross vehicles to move troops and "co-mingled forces with noncombatant crowds and activities when moving in advance or retreat." Russian soldiers were frightened and confused. I thought the Ba'athists intended to turn Fallujah into a Grozny. They failed. What looked like political reluctance in Fallujah may well have been operational caution by U.S. forces to ensure accurate intelligence.
Put another recent Rand studies on the must-read list. Published in 2003, "America's Role in Nation-Building, From Germany to Iraq" is a balanced, multiauthor historical survey of U.S.-led nation-building efforts since World War II.
This caveat, in the "Lessons Learned" chapter, adds to the debate on troop strength: "Postconflict nation-building, when undertaken with adequate numbers of troops, has triggered little violent resistance. Only when the number of stabilization troops has been low in comparison to the population have U.S. forces suffered or inflicted significant casualties."
The book has a succinct and dead-on discussion of challenges faced in Iraq. "The military, security services and bureaucracy need to be radically reformed and purged." A working justice system must be created, the economy overhauled.
"Any attempt to achieve transformation in Iraq would have had to face these challenges," but the United States must "cope with unsympathetic neighbors - Iran, Syria, and Turkey. All have an interest in shaping Iraqi politics and perhaps destabilizing a smooth transition."
--------
Our Saudi friends
washtimes
By Paul Greenberg
July 02, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040701-085559-3771r.htm
World wars make strange bedfellows. In the last one, the Western democracies had good reason to be grateful to Our Fighting Russian Allies, and scrambled to find something good to say about Comrade Stalin, a k a Uncle Joe.
That strange alliance required Westerners to consign the Nazi-Soviet Pact to the memory hole. Forgotten were the pictures of V.M. Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop making nice as they affixed their signatures to the deal that ushered in the Second World War. New circumstances required new allies.
To make history, a lot of history has to be forgotten, or at least put aside for the time being. Despite all its outward politesse, diplomacy can be a brutal sport, especially when survival is at stake. Asked why he was suddenly saying nice things about the Bolsheviks after excoriating them for years, Winston Churchill, that old Tory, explained that if Adolf Hitler invaded hell he might find some nice things to say about the devil, too.
And so, too, year in and year out, crisis after duplicitous crisis, Saudi royalty and American leaders have found nice things to say about one another. The survival, or at least the interests, of both depend on it, even though our values have about as much in common as our starkly different geographies.
But each society needs the other. The Saudi oiligarchy carefully calibrates the price of its petroleum to keep the rest of the world, developed and still developing, addicted to the stuff. Too low, and the Saudi princes might no longer be able to live in the ridiculously grand style to which they've long been accustomed. Too high, and the rest of the world might get serious about turning to other sources of energy, and all those thousands of Saudi nobles might have to work for a living.
So the Saudis have made a science of charging what an ever-larger market will bear - a calculation not entirely unlike the drug dealer who needs to keep his customers hooked. He doesn't want to price himself out of the market, but he wants to get as much as he can for his stuff.
The Saudis have been just as cagey when it comes to the Islamic brand of terrorism. They have long financed the Wahhabi brand of religious extremism in exchange for the recipients' kindly keeping their violence outside the kingdom itself. They've as much as told the fanatics they can operate freely within Saudi Arabia if they only do their terrorizing elsewhere.
Consider these words of Abdul-Mohsen al-Akkas, a member of the Saudis' appointed parliament, after the latest series of terrorist attacks within the kingdom. One way to get rid of the terrorists, he told the Associated Press, was to point out that "there are lots of occupied territories that require resistance." He specifically pointed toward Afghanistan, Iraq, Chechnya and Israel - in short, anywhere but Saudi Arabia.
At various times, other Islamic nations have played the same double game, including our friends the Egyptians and Pakistanis. But of late the suicide bombers have come home to roost. Instead of Saudi terrorism being for export only, the number of attacks within the kingdom has mounted steadily. Now an American oil worker from New Jersey has been beheaded in the accepted al Qaeda fashion. More are sure to come, Saudi and Western.
Clearly, the Saudis' longstanding, tacit agreement with the nutcases - we'll support your cause if you'll kindly refrain from killing us or our guests - is beginning to fray.
The loose-knit, highly decentralized terrorist network waging this latest world war, a k a jihad, is increasingly attracted to soft targets, and Saudi Arabia, with its oil riches, its holy sites, and its weak regime of uncertain legitimacy, is one of the softest and most inviting.
By repeating the extremists' propaganda over the years, and by sympathizing with terrorism elsewhere, the Saudi establishment has disarmed itself morally. The question is no longer whether the terrorists will attack Saudi targets but when and where. And how long can this regime last?
Let's hope that in a drawer somewhere in Washington, there's a contingency plan for when the House of Saud begins to topple. Terrorists vying for control of Iraq and Muslims conducting a genocidal war against Christianity in the Sudan - these are perilous enough situations. But a terrorist band sitting atop the world's largest pool of petroleum and in control of the holiest sites of one of the great and most volatile world religions - that's another thing entirely.
However tricky an ally Saudi Arabia has proved to be, the West dare not let it be seized and transformed into an open enemy - which is the aim of all these attacks that seek to destabilize the kingdom. Some Saudis may still think they can ride this tiger indefinitely, but tigers have a way of devouring their riders.
-------- us politics
Pop Culture and the 2004 Election
Movies and Books Could Help Choose a President
By Paul Farhi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21980-2004Jul1.html
When movie theaters began playing a Hollywood-produced newsreel backing the candidacy of Republican presidential challenger Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, Harry S. Truman didn't sit still. Threatening the studios with an investigation, the president demanded -- and got -- equal time. Voters later said they found Truman's hastily compiled newsreel to be more persuasive than Dewey's in the whisker-close election that fall.
Contending with the popular culture was a lot easier in those days. Now, a spate of pointedly political movies and books -- most prominently Michael Moore's cinematic assault on President Bush, "Fahrenheit 9/11," and former president Bill Clinton's best-selling memoir, "My Life" -- have the presidential campaigns and pundits pondering an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, question: Can the popular culture influence an election?
Moore's and Clinton's works, in particular, have become bona fide news events, crowding out other stories and clouding -- if only temporarily -- the campaigns' efforts to sell their daily messages. Bush's campaign and that of his opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), are convinced the buzz is fleeting, but they acknowledge that it has become another factor to contend with.
"Fahrenheit" is striking in its popularity, tone and timing. No movie or television show with so searing a political point of view has been released to such widespread embrace so close to an election. The movie was the most popular film in America in its first five days of release, seen by almost 6 million people through Wednesday. It has also become the subject of intense media coverage, making its controversial claims about Bush a subject of chatter in workplaces, in gathering spots and at dinner tables across the country.
Apart from the dueling Dewey-Truman newsreels, the closest parallel to the Moore movie may be the 1983 release of "The Right Stuff," which came as Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), the former astronaut whose exploits were depicted in the dramatic movie, was preparing to run in the presidential primaries. But that film was not nearly so partisan, and Glenn's character was one of several in the movie. (Glenn lost badly in the primaries to Walter F. Mondale.)
Clinton's memoir may be the publishing industry equivalent of Moore's movie. As of Sunday, after six days in release, it was the top-selling volume in America, with sales of 935,000 copies. Its timing, too, has little precedent. John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning "Profiles in Courage" was published four years before Kennedy beat Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 race. Barry Goldwater's "Conscience of a Conservative," which sold 3.5 million copies and raised Goldwater's national profile, was published four years before he became the Republican presidential candidate in 1964.
Alongside the Clinton and Moore blockbusters are a cluster of recent or forthcoming political works, most taking a strongly anti-Bush line. Clinton's book was preceded on the bestseller lists by volumes written by former counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, journalist Bob Woodward and former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill. Lesser-known documentaries critical of the administration include "Control Room," "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception" and "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War." Opening in September is filmmaker John Sayles's "Silver City," a fictional tale about a corrupt, grammatically challenged gubernatorial candidate. Another documentary, "The Hunting of the President," recounts conservative-led investigations of Clinton's conduct in office.
Few suggest these works will turn the election, but the profusion of Bush-bashing projects may suggest something about the mood of the country, says Mandy Grunwald, a Democratic consultant who devised Clinton's strategy of using appearances on MTV and "The Arsenio Hall Show" as a publicity tool in 1992. Grunwald recalls that the bestseller lists and talk radio were brimming with invective against Clinton before the 1994 midterm elections, which led to huge Republican gains that year. "The popular culture was reflecting where the country was at that moment," she said. "Now the culture is going the other way. I think it's telling us that the country is moving Democratic."
Bush representatives say they have taken a purposely low profile on "Fahrenheit" and "My Life" to avoid fueling the publicity. One campaign official dismissed the idea that their popularity could hurt Bush, saying that the most likely reader or viewer is already committed to Kerry, anyway. "We don't think people are going to be distracted from the big issues in this campaign by someone trying to sell a book or a movie," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Conservative supporters of the president have been more active. One California-based organization, Move America Forward, has urged people to avoid the movie and has asked theaters not to show it. (That effort appears to have failed; the film is to play on about 1,700 screens this weekend, about twice its current number.) In perhaps the oddest twist, Citizens United, a group based in Washington, argued before the Federal Election Commission last week that TV ads for the film would violate the McCain-Feingold law prohibiting "independent expenditures" for a candidate if the ads continue after Kerry accepts the Democratic nomination in late July.
If anything, Kerry's campaign has been more reluctant than its rival to engage with the subject -- a hesitance that has surprised supporters who think Kerry should try to exploit the anti-Bush tone. Asked for comment, Kerry spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said: "It's something independent of the campaign. We have nothing to say."
But one Kerry campaign source, who asked not to be identified because he is not a primary spokesman, explained that it would be risky for Kerry to associate himself with such harshly critical portrayals of his political rival. "For the faithful, [Moore] is a prophet; for the other side, he's a lightning rod," he said. "You might influence someone in the middle, but you could also turn people off if you do it in too strong a fashion."
But it's harder to make the case that any book or movie will persuade swing voters. Scholars who study public opinion say people form opinions and make judgments based on a complicated series of factors. Further, any message must be repeated and reinforced over and over, so any movie, book or TV show, in isolation, is unlikely to have much effect.
S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, recalled studies done in the wake of ABC's 1983 telecast of "The Day After," a popular film about the aftermath of a nuclear war. The movie became a rallying point for nuclear-freeze groups and the subject of news-discussion programs. Yet surveys taken before and after the program aired indicated little change in public opinion about U.S. nuclear and defense policy.
"One event doesn't change opinions," Lichter said, "particularly an event that comes several months in advance of an election."
Moore's film has exposed millions of people to two hours of unrebutted argument -- the most persuasive kind of speech, said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. Although she says it's "an open question" whether anyone has been persuaded by the film, she points out that the sheer number of people seeing the film is remarkable during a political campaign. "If millions of people came to a stadium to hear an anti-Bush speech, you'd say that was an amazing moment," she said.
The only comparable phenomenon, she said, is talk radio, which is dominated by conservative hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Laura Ingraham. "In battle of one-sided communication," Jamieson said, "the right is way ahead."
--------
Going Left on K Street
More Democrats Hired to Lobby Despite GOP Efforts to Shut Them Out
By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A21972-2004Jul1?language=printer
After a long hiring drought, Democrats are coming back into vogue on K Street.
The latest sign came yesterday when the Motion Picture Association of America chose a Democrat -- former Kansas congressman and agriculture secretary Dan Glickman -- to succeed its president of 38 years, Jack Valenti.
The recent selection of Glickman and several other Democrats for prominent lobbying jobs indicates a waning of the vaunted power of the "K Street Project," whose goal was to transform Washington's persuasion industry into a Republican bastion. It's also a tip-off that people who make their livings watching government and politics are keeping close tabs on the horse race that is election 2004.
Author and lobbying scholar Michael D. Watkins likens the recent uptick in Democratic employment to a military tactic called "forward placement of supplies." Lobbying managers, anticipating a possible switch in partisan leadership, are simply planning accordingly, he said. "It's also a market indicator of what's going to happen in the election," Watkins added. "People are looking at the tea leaves, and maybe they're beginning to hire from both parties just in case there's a Kerry administration."
This spring the Republican-leaning Business Roundtable ignored well-publicized entreaties by GOP activists and hired a former aide to a Democratic senator to lead its efforts on two of its highest priorities: corporate governance and tort reform. "He was the perfect fit," said Johanna Schneider, spokeswoman for the organization of big-company chief executives.
The Equipment Leasing Association, which represents more than 850 corporations, also disregarded public pressure by prominent GOPers to hire only Republicans and in February named a former Democratic staffer from the Senate. Of his new hire's partisan leaning, Michael J. Fleming, the association's longtime president, said, "I can't say it made much difference."
The choices are part of a broad pattern. According to a review of job listings in Influence.biz, a lobbying newsletter, more than 40 percent of lobbyists with identifiable party backgrounds hired in the past six months have been Democrats. During the same period a year earlier, Democrats constituted only 30 percent of those hired.
During a press conference yesterday, Valenti and Glickman insisted that neither political prognostication nor partisan affiliation had anything to do with the trade association's decision. "This is not a partisan job," Glickman said. But he also said he would "reach out" to congressional Republicans to soothe any wounded feelings. "Some of my closest friends in Congress are Republicans," he added.
K Street Project spokesman Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, fumed that the Glickman hiring was "a mistake. It's goofy. It's a studied insult." The Motion Picture Association's "ability to work with the House and Senate is greatly reduced because they've decided to hire a guy whose claim to fame is that he is a retired Clinton hire," Norquist said.
The K Street Project, which was conceived by Republican leaders in Congress and GOP activists elsewhere, identifies loyal Republican lobbyists and campaign contributors and then encourages lawmakers to welcome them into their offices to the exclusion of others.
The Business Roundtable, one of the capital's most important corporate lobbies, hired Thomas J. Lehner in April to lobby on such high-profile issues as asbestos liability and shareholder rights. Lehner served as chief of staff to Democrat Charles Robb of Virginia while he was in the Senate and is a former treasurer of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The fact that he had Democratic connections was actually a plus.
"We interviewed Republicans and Democrats and this person was the right fit," said spokeswoman Schneider. "Regardless of the outcome of the election, it was important that we get someone who was respected by both Republicans and Democrats equally."
The Arlington-based Equipment Leasing Association retained Democrat David Fenig, aide to Democrat Spark Matsunaga when he was a senator from Hawaii, as its vice president of federal government relations early this year. Fleming, the group's president, said that given the history of regularly changing partisan control in Congress, he decided not to pick from among the hundred applicants someone who was "one-dimensional."
The Recording Industry Association of America and the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association each recently added Democrats to their staffs. So did the American Psychiatric Association and the Retail Industry Leaders Association.
"After the midterm election, it was pretty difficult to find a job as a Democrat," said Camille Osborne, the new communications director for the satellite association and a former Democratic Senate aide. "But I think that's balancing out now. From what I've seen, Democrats are having a little bit more success."
Lobbying firms and corporate offices have been adding Democrats as well. In December, Quinn Gillespie & Associates LLC hired Michael Hacker, a former top staffer to Rep. John D. Dingell of Michigan. And in May, Loeffler Jonas & Tuggey LLP, a law firm founded by a retired Republican congressman, Thomas G. Loeffler of Texas, hired a well-known Democrat and a former target of the K Street Project to lead its lobbying practice in the District. Julie Domenick was named managing principal and oversees the work of a dozen or so lobbyists there.
Last year, when Domenick was executive vice president of the Investment Company Institute, Michael G. Oxley (R-Ohio) chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, pressured the ICI -- the mutual fund industry's trade association -- to replace her with a Republican. ICI did hire a Republican lobbyist, but didn't replace Domenick, and Loeffler has only compliments for his new manager. "[Loeffler] was attracted by her talent and her capability, and that was the sole criteria," said Julian Read, spokesman for the firm. "If [her Democratic affiliation] turns out to be an advantage, I'm sure that's a plus."
Corporations such as Viacom Inc. and Amgen Inc. also recently hired Democrats as staffers in their D.C. offices. Amgen, the Thousand Oaks, Calif., biotech company, in fact, named a former senior aide to Al Gore to head its office. David W. Beier, Amgen's new senior vice president for global government affairs, was the vice president's chief domestic policy adviser.
Beier's move to Amgen in December angered K Street Project spokesman Norquist. "That's not very wise on their part," he said. Speaking of key Republican leaders, Norquist added ominously, "People are aware that this has happened. It's going to be treated seriously."
In March, Amgen brought in a big-name Republican, Rodger Currie, a former lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, as Beier's deputy and vice president of government affairs. But the company isn't backing away from Beier as boss.
What's more, Democrats in general are feeling upbeat about their prospects as lobbyists these days. Fred Hatfield, chief of staff to Sen. John Breaux (D-La.), is looking for work since Breaux is retiring. "I haven't noticed a great problem," he said. "From my perspective, there's no lack of interest."
Republicans are still being retained as senior lobbyists in impressive numbers and for an obvious reason: The House, Senate and White House are run by Republicans. Gaining access to them is pivotal to the success of any legislative or regulatory campaign. The GOP-leaning National Association of Manufacturers just named a Republican former governor of Michigan, John M. Engler, as its new president.
But with Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) running neck and neck with President Bush in most polls and with the outlook for the Senate a tossup, a wide range of interest groups are filling some of their lobbying and public relations openings with Democrats -- just in case the center of influence switches.
"There is some bet-hedging going on that wasn't going on a year and a half ago," said Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. of Patton Boggs LLP, one of Washington's largest lobbying-law firms.
There are a variety of theories for this new hiring pattern. One is that no matter who wins the White House, the Senate will likely be controlled by so narrow a majority that both Republicans and Democrats will be needed to pass any legislation. Since Republicans have been the favored hires for so long, lobbying groups and firms are adding Democrats to make sure they have access on both sides of the aisle.
"The natural tendency [of lobbying firms] is to be bipartisan," said Joel Jankowsky, who heads the lobbying practice at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. So lately, he said, "there's a balancing going on."
Other lobbyists say the pace of hiring has slowed in general. Uncertainty about the election's outcome is the primary reason. "There's been a general cooling off," said Mark Isakowitz, president of the fast-growing GOP lobbying firm Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock. "Some people are waiting until after the election and will staff up accordingly."
"There are a lot more people looking [for work as lobbyists] than there are people willing to hire," agreed Fleming of the Equipment Leasing Association. Many of his fellow association chieftains, he said, "want to wait and see what kind of government will be coming in, so [they] are waiting until after the election."
"Everybody is very conscious of the fact that the Democratic outlook is better than it was seven or eight months ago," he added.
But proponents of the K Street Project don't see the same signs. The project "is alive and well and even spreading to the states," Norquist said.
-------
US lawmakers request UN observers for November 2 presidential election
Fri Jul 2, 2004
AFP
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=1521&u=/afp/20040702/pl_afp/us_vote_congress_040702062257&printer=1
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Several members of the House of Representatives have requested the United Nations to send observers to monitor the November 2 US presidential election to avoid a contentious vote like in 2000, when the outcome was decided by Florida.
Recalling the long, drawn out process in the southern state, nine lawmakers, including four blacks and one Hispanic, sent a letter Thursday to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan asking that the international body "ensure free and fair elections in America," according to a statement issued by Florida representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, who spearheaded the effort.
"As lawmakers, we must assure the people of America that our nation will not experience the nightmare of the 2000 presidential election," she said in the letter.
"This is the first step in making sure that history does not repeat itself," she added after requesting that the UN "deploy election observers across the United States" to monitor the November, 2004 election.
The lawmakers said in the letter that in a report released in June 2001, the US Commission on Civil Rights "found that the electoral process in Florida resulted in the denial of the right to vote for countless persons."
The bipartisan commission, they stressed, determined "that the 'disenfranchisement of Florida's voters fell most harshly on the shoulders of black voters' and in poor counties." Both groups vote predominantly Democratic in US elections.
The commission also concluded, the lawmakers added, that "despite promised nationwide reforms (of the voting system) ... adequate steps have not been taken to ensure that a similar situation will not arise in 2004 that arose in 2000."
Thirty-six days after the November 7, 2000 presidential election, after several state court interventions and vote recounts in numerous Florida counties, the US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Republican George W. Bush, awarding him all of Florida's 25 electoral votes.
The ruling tipped the balance against Democratic contender and then vice president Al Gore, who with 267 electoral votes lost to Bush's 271, only one more than the minimum 270 needed to clinch the presidential election.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Alaska Natives Say Warming Trend Imperils Villages
Story by Yereth Rosen
REUTERS ALASKA:
July 2, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25812/story.htm
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A warming climate is bringing expensive and potentially dangerous erosion and floods to Native Alaskan villages, representatives of those communities told federal officials.
Storms tear off chunks of beach once shielded by permafrost or Arctic pack ice. Buildings are in danger of toppling into the sea, and many have already been moved, at great expense.
Airstrips are swamped and ice cellars that once stored food in the permafrost are filling with water, residents say.
"As the calming hand of the ice on the Arctic Ocean grows more fragile, so does our coastline," Barrow Mayor Edith Vorderstrasse told members of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee during a two-day field hearing in Anchorage. "We are at a crossroads. Is it practical to stand and fight our mother ocean? Or do we surrender and move?"
Fixing the problems by expanding seawalls or relocating entire towns could cost hundreds of millions of dollars for each village, according to General Accounting Office estimates presented at the hearing.
Of the 213 Native Alaskan villages, 184 face flooding and erosion problems, with very serious problems in about 20, the GAO says.
Tough rules for securing federal aid, requiring local matching funds and cost-benefit analyzes, leave many villages out in the cold, local officials say.
For residents of Shishmaref, a coastal village of 600 with severe erosion problems, abandoning their ancestral homeland with its traditional food supply "would have a devastating impact on how we exist and who we are," said Luci Eningowuk, chairman of the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition.
Residents have already moved 18 homes and two National Guard buildings. Two years ago they voted to move the entire town inland but have not yet secured the money to relocate.
Senator Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who chairs the committee and called the hearing, said villagers' complaints about standards for federal aid were valid.
"There's no tax base. Most of them have absolutely no industrial base at all," he said during a break in the hearing.
And it is unfair to blame the Native Alaskans for living in what are now vulnerable spots, Stevens said.
He cited the Inupiat village of Point Hope, established 2,600 years ago on the northwestern Alaska coast. Flooding problems will likely force the village of 725 people to move, or build a costly road offering an escape route.
"It's been there since before the birth of Christ. You can't quite say the decision to locate their village, when it was made, was right or wrong," Stevens said.
Vorderstrasse, whose town of 4,400 is the northernmost community in the United States, has no doubt that global warming is behind the erosion, which disrupts whaling and goose hunting.
"We've had rain in January. We had a real early spring in April," she said. "Our weather pattern is really different. It's not consistent like it used to be."
The earth's warming trend, which most scientists say is accelerated by the trapping of pollutants in the atmosphere, is more dramatic at polar latitudes.
Scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks say air temperatures in Alaska, Siberia and Canada have risen 1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade, compared to the global average of 0.6 degree Celsius (1.2 degrees Fahrenheit) per century.
"Whether it's natural or global climate change, our state is having an impact greater than any other part of the United States," Stevens said.
But a colleague, Senator Conrad Burns, rejects the idea that pollution-induced global warming is to blame for the erosion in rural Alaska.
"I haven't bought off on global warming yet," the Montana Republican said. "I don't think it's man-made. The earth is in constant change all the time."
Still, he said, federal aid will get to the Native villages. "Congress responds, as a rule, to disasters and catastrophes. They just do it, because we're a compassionate country," he said.
--------
Large-Scale Air Quality Study Launched
Scientists Will Examine How Pollutants Move Across the Continent, Atlantic Ocean
By Jonathan Finer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21839-2004Jul1.html
DURHAM, N.H. -- A multinational team of climatologists embarked yesterday on what it says will be the most extensive study of air quality ever conducted, providing valuable data about the origins and content of pollution as it moves across North America and the Atlantic Ocean.
Scientists leading the project, slated to last until late August, said it will improve their ability to forecast poor air quality as easily as they predict the weather, and to better understand how pollution produced in one region affects air quality in other places.
Much of the research will be focused on New England, sometimes referred to as "America's tailpipe" because of the heavily polluted air passing over it and out to sea.
"This number of people and organizations, aircraft and ships involved will lead to a truly unprecedented data set," said Robert Talbot, director of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New Hampshire's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space, located in Durham, a few miles from a former Air Force base that will serve as headquarters of the study.
The massive collaboration, dubbed the International Consortium for Atmospheric Research on Transport and Transformation, brings together a host of air quality experiments already underway. Each agency will conduct its own experiments and pool the results.
Led by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and hundreds of academic and government scientists from the United States, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, the collaboration will include 12 airplanes, one 274-foot research ship at sea, dozens of balloons equipped with sensors, satellite imaging and a network of ground-based stations for measuring air quality.
Such an assembly of equipment will allow scientists to track 40,000-foot-high columns of air for thousands of miles, and determine when and where they acquire pollutants -- such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, gas-phase mercury, hydrocarbons and methane -- and distribute them to remote locations.
Sensitive equipment at fixed ground stations throughout the Northeast and on board the research craft will measure the chemical composition of the air. Planes will circle separate geographic areas on flights lasting as many as nine hours. Balloons launched daily will gather samples from points higher up in the atmosphere.
"When people develop strategies in dealing with adverse air qualities, we want to be able to provide accurate information about how pollution on a regional scale impacts global air quality," said Jim Meagher, air quality program manager for NOAA. "There are important public health implications and climate implications, and we'd like to improve our ability to give people advance warning when bad air is headed their way."
The findings, which will not be known until later this year, will be of particular concern to policy-makers in states such as Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, which occasionally experience extremely poor air quality. Acadia National Park, for example, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, periodically experiences severe air pollution.
Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) played a major role in securing $5.75 million for the New England portion of the project and $9 million for efforts to improve air quality forecasting. "This is a big issue for us, because we consider a pure and pristine environment an important element of our quality of life," he said.
Scientists have long hypothesized that pollutants emitted in the midwestern Rust Belt and large East Coast cities converge on northern New England, are carried by prevailing winds and are then distributed across the Atlantic Ocean, harming both the marine environment and air quality in western Europe.
But that explanation has never been fully proved and quantified by research, Talbot said, adding that scientists want to determine how different pollutants enter the air and where they go.
"We are after hard numbers that show what's happening up there," said Talbot, who oversees several ground-based monitoring stations, including one atop Mount Washington, New England's highest peak, and another in a Durham field a few miles from the UNH campus. "We'll know how species X got here, where it's from and where it goes. We have also never really measured intercontinental transfer of pollutants."
Environmental advocacy groups applauded the initiative but said it would likely confirm what they believe is already evident: Pollutants produced in one region have a significant impact on those downwind.
"We may not have tracked every molecule, but there's no doubt that pollution crosses state and national lines," said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of Clean Air Trust, a Bethesda-based watchdog. The study "may give us a broader understanding and help pinpoint things, and I think that's for the best."
Related experiments will measure the public health effects of days in which pollution levels are high. One will monitor about 550 people scattered throughout the Northeast, who will breathe daily into small devices that look like inhalers and measure the effect of the air on their respiratory system.
A smaller study of pollution in the northeastern United States was conducted two years ago, involving UNH's monitoring stations, a ship provided by NOAA and one or two aircraft. Organizers said they hoped to conduct another round of collaborative research in 2006.
-------- health
'Western' Diet Raises Stroke Risk - US Study
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
July 2, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25815/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Add stroke to the list of health problems caused by a Western diet rich in red meat, white flour and sugar, researchers said yesterday.
A study of more than 71,000 nurses found those who ate a "prudent" diet rich in fruits, vegetables, fish, legumes and whole grains were less likely to have strokes than nurses eating a more typical American diet.
Writing in the journal Stroke, the team at the Harvard School of Public Health said its study was the first to examine overall dietary habits and stroke risk.
Health experts already say a diet high in animal fat, especially red meat, and low in fiber, fruits and vegetables raises the risk of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers and obesity.
Stroke is the third-leading cause of death in the United States, killing nearly 170,000 people in 2003.
"Several foods and nutrients have been linked to the risk of stroke; therefore, dietary modification may be an important way to reduce the risk of stroke," said Teresa Fung, an assistant professor of nutrition at Simmons College School for Health Studies in Boston, who led the study.
"Because nutrients and food are consumed in combination, their cumulative effect on disease risk may be best investigated by considering the entire eating pattern."
The researchers began studying 71,768 female nurses aged 38 to 63 in 1984 who had no history of heart disease or diabetes. They followed them until 1998, dividing them into two groups - "prudent" and "Western" eaters.
Each group was further divided into fifths, depending on a woman's reported eating pattern.
There were 791 strokes during the 14-year study period.
The women who ate the "worst" Western diet had a 58 percent higher risk of stroke than women who ate the healthiest diets.
The nurses with Western eating habits were also more likely to smoke, less likely to take vitamins and to be less active, the researchers found.
-----
WHO warns 10,000 may die in Darfur
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
July 2, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25824/story.htm
GENEVA - Some 10,000 people in Darfur could die of cholera and dysentery in July alone unless a massive aid operation can be set up to helicopter in food and medicines, the World Health Organisation (WHO) ahs said.
A cholera epidemic could break out within weeks now that heavy rains have begun, striking 200,000 to 300,000 of the more than one million displaced in the troubled western area of Sudan, a top WHO official told a news briefing yesterday.
Darfur has become the world's worst humanitarian crisis after Arab militias drove African farmers from their villages on a campaign of ethnic cleansing, the United Nations says.
"We anticipate that if things go ahead as at the moment, 10,000 people will die in the next month," David Nabarro, head of WHO's unit for health action in crises, told a news briefing in Geneva after a trip to Darfur.
"However, if we can get a strong, effective relief operation in place then we can bring that death rate down to less than 3,000 people in the next month," he said.
Nabarro said this could be done by preparing for diarrhoea, cholera, dysentery, malaria and other infectious diseases.
Cholera is an extreme form of watery diarrhoea which killed tens of thousands of Rwandans who fled genocide in 1994, according to the WHO. Dysentery, a bloody form of diarrhoea which is harder to treat, and malaria, a mosquito-borne disease, would be expected to follow in August.
BIGGER THAN IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN
The WHO, a United Nations (U.N.) agency, has stepped up its response and hopes to deploy 50 international staff this month in Darfur, Nabarro said. He praised work by aid agencies including Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).
A veteran of hotspots, Nabarro said the aid operation needed 20 helicopters and high-frequency radios for communication between workers at the more than 100 camps for the displaced.
"The challenge facing us is that the sheer scale of the operations needed in terms of relief personnel, helicopters, trucks and communications equipment is really way beyond what we as the U.N. ourselves can do," he said. "It is bigger than the Balkans, and certainly bigger than Iraq and Afghanistan."
Revamping Darfur's 13 hospitals and bringing them up to "basic standards" to perform operations and treatment in hygienic conditions has become WHO's top priority, Nabarro said.
"We want water, sanitation, electricity, waste disposal and fly netting in hospitals ... We have got to make sure that people don't have to bribe their way into health facilities, paying charges here and there, because that is the ultimate cruelty."
"To me this is the best sign that we can give to the people of Darfur that actually the world cares about them," he added.
The WHO has spent $4 million (2.2 million pounds) from the United States on health projects in Darfur, and will require another $4.5 million for the next three months, he said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, on a visit there yesterday, assured the displaced they would not be forced home.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Huge Crowd Marches Again For the Vote in Hong Kong
Demonstrators Renew Call for Beijing to Increase Democracy
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 2, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22174-2004Jul1.html
HONG KONG, July 1 -- Hundreds of thousands of people marched in sweltering heat and humidity through the valleys of Hong Kong's gleaming skyscrapers Thursday in a bold and spirited protest of China's refusal to expand elections in this former British colony.
Sweating through white shirts, carrying colorful banners and chanting slogans such as "Return power to the people" and "Fight for democracy," the immense but orderly crowd stretched more than two miles, from a spacious downtown park to a government building in the city's central business district.
The demonstration's main organizer, the pro-democracy Civil Human Rights Front, estimated that 530,000 people participated the procession, nearly a quarter-million more than expected. Police issued an early crowd estimate of 200,000 as people were still arriving for the demonstration, which lasted five hours on one of the hottest days of the year.
The protest was by far the largest in this city of 6.8 million since a huge anti-government rally last year attracted a crowd of more than 500,000, and leaders of the pro-democracy movement said it showed that the people of Hong Kong would not back down from their demands for universal suffrage in the face of the Chinese government's hard-line position on the matter.
"This demonstration shows the unwavering aspiration of the people for democracy," said Martin Lee, a lawmaker and former chairman of the Democratic Party who was vilified by Chinese officials earlier this year. "Even though Beijing has already said no, people are still marching."
In April, China's Communist leadership declared it would not allow Hong Kong to elect its next chief executive in 2007 or to expand legislative elections in 2008, prompting complaints it was violating the high degree of autonomy promised the city when it returned to Chinese rule seven years ago. Hong Kong's chief executive and many of its legislators are now chosen by small groups that are stacked in Beijing's favor.
"We want democracy. We want elections," said Vincent Siu, 43, a clerk at a trading company, as he marched alongside his wife and two young daughters, Gigi, 10, and Cora, 7, on one of the city's main thoroughfares. "We hope the government will listen."
China's state news media barely mentioned the demonstration, but at a news conference in Beijing, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry, Zhang Qiyue, defended Hong Kong's political system, saying the territory's residents already "enjoy real and unprecedented democracy."
A few hours after the march concluded, Hong Kong's unpopular chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, read a statement suggesting the protesters were primarily concerned about his performance and noting that the city's economy was finally recovering from a long recession.
"To those who have participated in the rally and to all my fellow citizens of Hong Kong, I clearly hear your views. I understand your aspirations," he said. But he insisted that the territory's political system should be changed only gradually and according to the limits laid out by Beijing.
The march took place on the anniversary of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule, a public holiday. A similar march on the same date last year stunned the Chinese leadership and prompted Tung to withdraw a stringent internal security bill endorsed by the Chinese government.
This year, Tung and officials in Beijing were prepared for a large turnout, and few expect them to back down like they did last year. In recent weeks, though, several Chinese officials have taken a softer tone when speaking about Hong Kong and signaled a willingness to open a dialogue with the pro-democracy camp.
Some leading democrats in Hong Kong have responded by proposing reconciliation, and Lee and several others carried olive branches during the march. Lee said he hoped officials in Beijing would view the demonstration as an expression of the public's desire for democracy rather than a protest against the central government, and he urged the leadership to set a timetable for introducing elections in Hong Kong.
"We have to sit down and work out the road map to universal suffrage," said Jimmy Lai, publisher of Hong Kong's pro-democracy newspaper, the Apple Daily, who also carried an olive branch. "We have to get a date, and work it out with China."
But other pro-democracy activists were less conciliatory. And while protesters in last year's march focused their anger against Tung and chanted for his resignation, the target this year was the Communist leadership in Beijing. Some participants distributed flyers mocking China's influential former president, Jiang Zemin, and urging people to "Stomp on Jiang."
"We dare to say no to the ruler," Jackie Hung, spokeswoman for the Civil Human Rights Front, told a large crowd before the march began. "The ruler cannot take away our rights. We want our rights back."
Many protesters expressed anger at what they said were signs of growing interference in Hong Kong affairs by the Chinese government and efforts to intimidate the public before the march and ahead of key legislative elections in September.
Three popular radio talk-show hosts in Hong Kong who were outspoken democracy advocates quit in May, citing threats of violence and pressure from Beijing. Many people in the procession wore T-shirts with pictures of the hosts and the words, "Please come back!"
"They represent us, and they represent Hong Kong's courage," said Sandy Wang, 50, a housewife wearing one of the shirts. "We're worried about what happened to them, and what could happen to all of us. We're worried about our freedom of speech."
Special correspondent K.C. Ng contributed to this report.
--------
Huge Rally in Hong Kong Calls for Democratic Elections
July 2, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/02/international/asia/02hong.html?pagewanted=all
HONG KONG, July 1 - Despite sweltering heat and severe smog, hundreds of thousands of people marched here on Thursday to demand democracy and, to an extent not seen in previous marches, to criticize Beijing.
In earlier rallies, demonstrators carried balloons and placards demanding the resignation of Tung Chee-hwa, Hong Kong's chief executive. But on Thursday, Mr. Tung was barely mentioned as protesters showed a new boldness in denouncing mainland China for banning general elections here and, in their view, trying to intimidate democrats.
Wearing white T-shirts that soon became plastered to their bodies with sweat, the demonstrators carried many placards with fairly broad slogans like "Democracy for Hong Kong." But also visible were a variety of bolder signs, including: "End One-Party Rule. Establish a Democratic China."
Organizers said 530,000 people had made the two-mile march from palm-fringed Victoria Park to the high steel fences ringing the main government offices here. The police estimated the crowd at 200,000.
Whatever the exact figure, the crowd included a substantial number of the city's 6.8 million inhabitants. The turnout was even more surprising because the march was mostly limited to fairly fit adults who felt they could withstand several hours packed together on a 95-degree day with very high humidity, no breeze and severe air pollution.
Zhang Qiyue, the spokeswoman for China's Foreign Ministry, said at a news conference in Beijing that Hong Kong was already democratic. "The residents of Hong Kong enjoy real and unprecedented democracy, which can be witnessed by the international community," she said.
Ms. Zhang warned other countries against criticizing the Chinese government's handling of Hong Kong, on the ground that doing so would be interfering in China's internal affairs. Britain returned Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997, and Thursday was a public holiday here to mark the seventh anniversary of the transfer.
The government-controlled news media in China largely ignored the protest on Thursday, and it was not clear how quickly word of it would spread on the mainland. China drastically reduced the number of mainlanders allowed to visit Hong Kong this week, and mainlanders were not apparent in the crowd on Thursday.
At a brief news conference on Thursday night under the crystal chandeliers of the former mansion of British colonial governors here, Mr. Tung echoed mainland leaders in saying the "ultimate aim" for Hong Kong was universal suffrage. But he set no timetable, saying it should be instituted in an orderly way and in keeping with a recent decision by Beijing, which bars general elections for at least the next eight years.
"Let us work together to build a prosperous, stable, free, democratic, harmonious and united Hong Kong," he said.
China promised before the transfer that it would allow Hong Kong to retain considerable autonomy for 50 years. But many here say that this autonomy is being undermined.
Florence Chang, 36, a financial planner, took turns with several friends carrying a sign that read "No to the Central Government Interpreting the Law." She said she was angrier at the central government than at the Hong Kong government.
Britain severely restricted civil liberties through almost all of its 150-year rule here, introducing limited democracy only in the years leading up to the transfer of control to Beijing.
Hong Kong's chief executive is chosen by an 800-member committee of prominent citizens, many with investments on the mainland. In elections on Sept. 12, the public will be allowed to choose 30 of the 60 members of the territory's legislature. Industries and professions, most of them pro-Beijing, choose the rest.
The crowd on Thursday appeared somewhat smaller than the one that gathered last year, on the sixth anniversary of the transfer, to protest the local government's attempt then to enact stringent internal security legislation. The police put that crowd at "many more'' than 350,000, while organizers estimated it at 500,000 to 680,000. The security legislation was subsequently withdrawn.
Earlier this week democracy activists warned that the absence of an urgent issue this time like the security legislation would lower the turnout. They predicted that anywhere from 50,000 to 300,000 people would show up.
Many of the demonstrators on Thursday carried umbrellas for protection against the sun. Quite a few of the umbrellas were dark blue with "Universal Suffrage'' written in English and Chinese.
A month ago Chinese security officers shut down the factory in the mainland city of Shenzhen that was producing the umbrellas.
While democracy was the main theme on Thursday, advocates of gay rights, women's rights, the poor, labor unions, medical workers and others joined the march as well.
In April, Beijing issued a legally binding interpretation of Hong Kong's laws in which it barred general elections for the selection of Mr. Tung's successor in 2007. The interpretation also said the proportion of generally elected seats in the legislature would not be allowed to increase in the next elections, in 2008. The subsequent elections for chief executive and the legislature are not until 2012.
Many protesters were reluctant to give their full names, citing what they described as a growing fear of political repression. Three popular radio talk show hosts quit this spring and two of them fled the territory after receiving what they described as threatening phone calls.
Some talk show callers have complained that their relatives on the mainland were being contacted by security officers and told to make sure that family members in Hong Kong did not vote for democrats in September. Some of the callers have said their relatives are being asked for photos of ballots as proof of how family members voted.
Leola Ng, 42, a human resources manager, marched Thursday for what she said was the first time in her life, and she said she had done so for her 3-year-old son, Curtis. "I hope my son can still have freedom of speech, freedom of religion," said Ms. Ng, who attended a Catholic and Protestant prayer ceremony before the march.
A similar ceremony drew many thousands of people before last year's march, as the Roman Catholic Church energetically opposed the security legislation as a threat to religious freedom. The ceremony was much smaller this year, and Bishop Joseph Zen delivered a mildly worded message reminding protesters to follow the biblical admonition to turn the other cheek if struck.
Minutes before Bishop Zen gave his blessing, the Chinese Army held military drills for the public at Stanley Fort, on the other side of Hong Kong Island. Col. Wen Jiankun, the fort's commander, described it as the largest display of military hardware since the transfer.
The fort, opened to the public for the day, was built by the British. It still has high-ceilinged colonial barracks with broad balconies and a royal crest from 1937 in the stonework over the entrance. The topiary at the center of the fort, however, has been trimmed to show the Chinese characters for "China-Hong Kong."
Pro-Beijing labor unions bused thousands of members and their families to the event, while others took public transportation. Many in Hong Kong remain reluctant to take political stands of the sort now expressed so publicly by democracy activists.
Ho Wei-tak, 65, a retired carpenter happily picking up brochures about tanks and fighter jets, said he had never paid much attention to politics and did not plan to start doing so.
--------
Thousands march for full democracy
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Dirk Beveridge
July 02, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040701-102040-6528r.htm
HONG KONG - Hundreds of thousands of people marched through downtown Hong Kong yesterday, demanding full democracy and venting anger at China's communist leaders for denying them the right to elect their government directly.
About 530,000 people participated, protest organizers said, although the police count was 200,000 partway through the rally, which lasted a little more than five hours.
"Only democracy can save Hong Kong," said Cheuk Kuang, 65. "The communist government is intervening too much in Hong Kong, and it's trying to shut down all opposition voices."
The march came on the seventh anniversary of the former British colony's transfer to Chinese sovereignty and a year after a protest by a half-million people stunned China's leaders and forced Hong Kong's government to withdraw an anti-subversion bill that many had viewed as a threat to freedoms.
Marchers filled all four lanes of a major downtown thoroughfare, peacefully chanting slogans, displaying signs and waving inflatable dolls of their unpopular leader, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, as they made their way toward the fenced-off Hong Kong government headquarters.
Mr. Tung later said he had listened to the people's complaints and understood their hopes for full democracy. He held out no prospects for quick change, however, saying any political reforms must be "gradual and orderly" as China has insisted.
Tempers have flared here since Beijing ruled in April that ordinary citizens cannot elect Mr. Tung's successor in 2007 or all lawmakers in 2008.
But the mood seemed less angry than last year. Thousands of the protesters were fanning themselves on the hottest day of the year, with temperatures hitting 94. Police said 42 persons were hospitalized for heat exhaustion or other problems.
Washington said it respected the Hong Kong people's right to seek political reforms.
"It is up to the Hong Kong people and the government of Hong Kong to determine the pace and scope of democratization," said Susan N. Stevenson, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Consulate.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said in Beijing that her government is "resolutely opposed to foreign interference" and added that Hong Kong's political system gives its citizens "real and unprecedented democracy."
Mr. Tung and other dignitaries stood at attention in the morning as the Chinese and Hong Kong flags were raised to mark the anniversary of the territory's transfer. Outside, a dozen activists tried to carry a mock black coffin toward the ceremony, but were held back by police.
A mainland visitor, 30-year-old accountant Bob Zhuang, watched the early morning demonstration for a few minutes and called the activists "stupid."
"Should such a protest really be allowed in this territory?" Mr. Zhuang asked, waving a red Chinese flag.
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