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NUCLEAR
Mounting costs of Iraq war
A Critical Nuclear Moment
Chemicals Not Found in Iraq Warheads
Scandal Emerges Over Japan's Nuke Program
Suppressed nuke study gave program's true cost
Powell discusses nukes with N.K.
Mutual distrust clouds US-Korea negotiations
Pyongyang's bomb and the media hype
Powell, N. Korean Talk, But Progress Is Elusive
Powell Says He Restated Views on Arms With North Korean
U.S. to Pull 9 From U.N. Peacekeeping Missions
Hanford's waste plant cost to rise
Highway bill's secret rules start debate
MILITARY
British Soldier to Be Tried Over Shooting
Chemicals Not Found in Iraq Warheads
Iran Is in Strong Position to Steer Iraq's Political Future
Iraq rebuilding fund largely unspent
U.S. accused of depleting Iraq fund
Sadr Tells Iraqis to Sustain Resistance
Insurgents Fire Rockets at 2 Baghdad Hotels; 3 Hostages Are Freed
Israeli interrogators 'in Iraq'
Alleged Israeli Informer Killed in West Bank
Chief Says Iraq and Afghanistan Are Doomed Without World Cooperation
Spain to Send More Troops for Afghans
NATO to send fact-finding mission to Iraq next week
Afghanistan will need 10,000 NATO troops for election duty, minister says
Capture of Hussein Aides Spurred U.S. Interrogators
U.S. Investigates New Afghan Abuse Allegation
U.S. General Says Met Israeli Interrogator in Iraq
Soldiers Charged in Drowning Iraqis Reportedly Forced Into River
U.S. Army Charges 4 Soldiers in the Drowning Death of an Iraqi Man
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Disclosure of Authorized Interrogation Tactics Urged
Lawyers Seek Relief for 5 Detainees
Bomb Was Uncovered Before NATO Summit
POLITICS
Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue
In Iran, the Staying Power of the Press
ACTIVISTS
Citizen Carlos
March Gives Impetus to Hong Kong Democracy Movement
Delgado: I don't stand for "God Bless America"
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Mounting costs of Iraq war
July 3, 2004
ABS/CBN
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/NewsStory.aspx?section=Focus&oid=54285
"Following are the key findings of a study by the Institute for Policy Studies and Foreign Policy in Focus."
I. COSTS TO THE US
A. Human costs
US MILITARY DEATHS: Between the start of war on March 19, 2003 and June 16, 2004, 952 coalition forces were killed, including 836 U.S. military. Of the total, 693 were killed after President Bush, declared the end of combat operations on May 1, 2003. Over 5,134 US troops have been wounded since the war began, including 4,593 since May 1, 2003.
CONTRACTOR DEATHS: Estimates range from 50 to 90 civilian contractors, missionaries and civilian worker deaths. Of these, 36 were identified as Americans.
JOURNALISTS DEATHS: Thirty international media workers have been killed in Iraq, including 21 since President Bush, declared the end of combat operations. Eight of the dead worked for U.S. companies.
B. SECURITY COSTS
TERRORIST RECRUITMENT AND ACTION: According to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, al-Qaeda's membership is now at 18,000, with 1,000 active in Iraq. A former CIA analyst and State Department official has documented 390 deaths and 1,892 injuries due to terrorist attacks in 2003. In addition, there were 98 suicide attacks around the world in 2003, more than any year in contemporary history.
MILITARY MISTAKES: A number of former military officials have criticized the war, including retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, former commander of the U.S. Central Command, who has charged that by manufacturing a false rationale for war, abandoning traditional allies, propping up and trusting Iraqi exiles, and failing to plan for post-war Iraq, the Bush Administration made the United States less secure.
LOW US CREDIBILITY: Polls reveal that the war has damaged the US government's standing and credibility in the world. Surveys in eight European and Arab countries demonstrated broad public agreement that the war has hurt, rather than helped, the war on terrorism. At home, 54 percent of Americans polled by the Annenberg Election Survey felt that the "the situation in Iraq was not worth going to war over."
LOW TROOP MORALE AND LACK OF EQUIPMENT: A March 2004 army survey found 52 percent of soldiers reporting low morale, and three-fourths reporting they were poorly led by their officers. Lack of equipment has been an ongoing problem. The Army did not fully equip soldiers with bullet-proof vests until June 2004, forcing many families to purchase them out of their own pockets.
LOSS OF FIRST RESPONDERS: National Guard troops make up almost one-third of the US Army troops now in Iraq. Their deployment puts a particularly heavy burden on their home communities because many are "first responders," including police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel. For example, 44 percent of the country's police forces have lost officers to Iraq. In some states, the absence of so many Guard troops has raised concerns about the ability to handle natural disasters.
USE OF PRIVATE CONTRACTORS: An estimated 20,000 private contractors are carrying out work in Iraq traditionally done by the military, despite the fact that they often lack sufficient training and are not accountable to the same guidelines and reviews as military personnel.
C. ECONOMIC COSTS
THE BILL SO FAR: Congress has already approved of $126.1 billion for Iraq and an additional $25 billion is heading towards Congressional approval, for a total of $151.1 billion through this year. Congressional leaders have promised an additional supplemental appropriation after the election.
LONG-TERM IMPACT ON US ECONOMY: Economist Doug Henwood has estimated that the war bill will add up to an average of at least $3,415 for every US household. Another economist, James Galbraith of the University of Texas, predicts that while war spending may boost the economy initially, over the long-term it is likely to bring a decade of economic troubles, including an expanded trade deficit and high inflation.
OIL PRICES: Gas prices topped $2 a gallon in May 2004, a development that most analysts attribute at least in part to the deteriorating situation in Iraq. According to a mid-May CBS survey, 85 percent of Americans said they had been affected measurably by higher gas prices. According to one estimate, if crude oil prices stay around $40 a barrel for a year, US gross domestic product will decline by more than $50 billion.
ECONOMIC IMPACT ON MILITARY FAMILIES: Since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 364,000 reserve troops and National Guard soldiers have been called for military service, serving tours of duty that often last 20 months. Studies show that between 30 percent and 40 percent of reservists and National Guard members earn a lower salary when they leave civilian employment for military deployment. Army Emergency Relief has reported that requests from military families for food stamps and subsidized meals increased "several hundred percent" between 2002 and 2003.
D. SOCIAL COSTS
US BUDGET AND SOCIAL PROGRAMS: The Bush administration's combination of massive spending on the war and tax cuts for the wealthy means less money for social spending. The $151.1-billion expenditure for the war through this year could have paid for: close to 23 million housing vouchers; health care for over 27 million uninsured Americans; salaries for nearly 3 million elementary-school teachers; 678,200 new fire engines; over 20 million Head Start slots for children; or health-care coverage for 82 million children. Instead, the administration's FY 2005 budget request proposes deep cuts in critical domestic programs and virtually freezes funding for domestic discretionary programs other than homeland security. Federal spending cuts will deepen the budget crises for local and state governments, which are expected to suffer a $6-billion shortfall in 2005.
SOCIAL COSTS TO THE MILITARY: Thus far, the Army has extended the tours of duty of 20,000 soldiers. These extensions have been particularly difficult for reservists, many of whom never expected to face such long separations from their jobs and families. According to military policy, reservists are not supposed to be on assignment for more than 12 months every 5-6 years. To date, the average tour of duty for all soldiers in Iraq has been 320 days. A recent Army survey revealed that more than half of soldiers said they would not reenlist.
COSTS TO VETERAN HEALTH CARE: About 64 percent of the more than 5,000 US soldiers injured in Iraq received wounds that prevented them from returning to duty. One trend has been an increase in amputees, the result of improved body armor that protects vital organs but not extremities. As in previous wars, many soldiers are likely to have received ailments that will not be detected for years to come. The Veterans Administration healthcare system is not prepared for the swelling number of claims. In May, the House of Representatives approved funding for FY 2005 that is $2.6-billion less than needed, according to veterans' groups.
MENTAL HEALTH COSTS: A December 2003 Army report was sharply critical of the military's handling of mental health issues. It found that more than 15 percent of soldiers in Iraq screened positive for traumatic stress, 7.3 percent for anxiety, and 6.9 percent for depression. The suicide rate among soldiers increased from an eight-year average of 11.9 per 100,000 to 15.6 per 100,000 in 2003. Almost half of soldiers surveyed reported not knowing how to obtain mental health services.
II. COSTS TO IRAQ
A. HUMAN COSTS
IRAQI DEATHS AND INJURIES: As of June 16, 2004, between 9,436 and 11,317 Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the U.S. invasion and ensuing occupation, while an estimated 40,000 Iraqis have been injured. During "major combat" operations, between 4,895 and 6,370 Iraqi soldiers and insurgents were killed.
EFFECTS OF DEPLETED URANIUM: The health impacts of the use of depleted uranium weaponry in Iraq are yet to be known. The Pentagon estimates that US and British forces used 1,100 to 2,200 tons of weaponry made from the toxic and radioactive metal during the March 2003 bombing campaign. Many scientists blame the far smaller amount of DU weapons used in the Persian Gulf War for illnesses among US soldiers, as well as a sevenfold increase in child birth defects in Basra in Southern Iraq.
B. SECURITY COSTS
RISE IN CRIME: Murder, rape and kidnapping have skyrocketed since March 2003, forcing Iraqi children to stay home from school and women to stay off the streets at night. Violent deaths rose from an average of 14 per month in 2002 to 357 per month in 2003.
PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT: Living under occupation without the most basic security has devastated the Iraqi population. A poll by the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority in May 2004, found that 80 percent of Iraqis say they have "no confidence" in either the US civilian authorities or in the coalition forces, and 55 percent would feel safer if US and other foreign troops left the country immediately.
C. THE ECONOMIC COSTS
UNEMPLOYMENT: Iraqi joblessness doubled from 30 percent before the war to 60 percent in the summer of 2003. While the Bush administration now claims that unemployment has dropped, only 1 percent of Iraq's workforce of 7 million is involved in reconstruction projects.
CORPORATE WAR PROFITEERING: Most of Iraq's reconstruction has been contracted out to US companies, rather than experienced Iraqi firms. Top contractor Halliburton is being investigated for charging $160 million for meals that were never served to troops and $61 million in cost overruns on fuel deliveries. Halliburton employees also took $6 million in kickbacks from subcontractors, while other employees have reported extensive waste, including the abandonment of $85,000 trucks because they had flat tires.
IRAQ'S OIL ECONOMY:Antioccupation violence has prevented Iraq from capitalizing on its oil assets. There have been an estimated 130 attacks on Iraq's oil infrastructure. In 2003, Iraq's oil production dropped to 1.33 million barrels per day, down from 2.04 million in 2002.
HEALTH INFRASTRUCTURE: After more than a decade of crippling sanctions, Iraq's health facilities were further damaged during the war and postinvasion looting. Iraq's hospitals continue to suffer from lack of supplies and an overwhelming number of patients.
EDUCATION: Unicef estimates that more than 200 schools were destroyed in the conflict and thousands more were looted in the chaos following the fall of Saddam Hussein. Largely because of security concerns, school attendance in April 2004, was well below prewar levels.
ENVIRONMENT: The U..S-led attack damaged water and sewage systems and the country's fragile desert ecosystem. It also resulted in oil well fires that spewed smoke across the country and left unexposed ordnance that continues to endanger the Iraqi people and environment. Mines and unexploded ordnance cause an estimated 20 casualties per month.
HUMAN RIGHTS COSTS: Even with Saddam Hussein overthrown, Iraqis continue to face human rights violations from occupying forces. In addition to the widely publicized humiliation and abuse of prisoners, the U.S. military is investigating the deaths of 34 detainees as a result of interrogation techniques.
SOVEREIGNTY COSTS: Despite the proclaimed "transfer of sovereignty" to Iraq, the country will continue to be occupied by the U.S. and coalition troops and have severely limited political and economic independence. The interim government will not have the authority to reverse the nearly 100 orders by CPA head Paul Bremer that, among other things, allow for the privatization of Iraq's state-owned enterprises and prohibit preferences for domestic firms in reconstruction.
III. COSTS TO THE WORLD
HUMAN COSTS: While Americans make up the vast majority of military and contractor personnel in Iraq, other U.S.-allied "coalition" troops have suffered 116 war casualties in Iraq. In addition, the focus on Iraq has diverted international resources and attention away from humanitarian crises such as in Sudan.
INTERNATIONAL LAW: The unilateral U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq violated the United Nations Charter, setting a dangerous precedent for other countries to seize any opportunity to respond militarily to claimed threats, whether real or contrived, that must be "preempted." The U.S. military has also violated the Geneva Convention, making it more likely that in the future, other nations will ignore these protections in their treatment of civilian populations and detainees.
THE UNITED NATIONS: At every turn, the Bush administration has attacked the legitimacy and credibility of the U.N., undermining the institution's capacity to act in the future as the centerpiece of global disarmament and conflict resolution. The recent efforts of the Bush administration to gain U.N. acceptance of an Iraqi government that was not elected but rather installed by occupying forces undermines the entire notion of national sovereignty as the basis for the U.N. Charter.
COALITIONS: Faced with opposition in the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. government attempted to create the illusion of multilateral support for the war by pressuring other governments to join a so-called "Coalition of the Willing." This not only circumvented UN authority, but also undermined democracy in many coalition countries, where public opposition to the war was as high as 90 percent.
GLOBAL ECONOMY: The $151.1-billion spent by the U.S. government on the war could have cut world hunger in half and covered HIV/AIDS medicine, childhood immunization and clean water and sanitation needs of the developing world for more than two years. As a factor in the oil-price hike, the war has created concerns of a return to the "stagflation" of the 1970s. Already, the world's major airlines are expecting an increase in costs of $1 billion or more per month.
GLOBAL SECURITY: The U.S.-led war and occupation have galvanized international terrorist organizations, placing people not only in Iraq but around the world at greater risk of attack. The State Department's annual report on international terrorism reported that in 2003, there was the highest level of terror-related incidents deemed "significant" than at any time since the US began issuing these figures.
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT: U.S.-fired depleted uranium weapons have contributed to pollution of Iraq's land and water, with inevitable spillover effects in other countries. The heavily polluted Tigris River, for example, flows through Iraq, Iran and Kuwait.
HUMAN RIGHTS: The Justice Department memo assuring the White House that torture was legal stands in stark violation of the International Convention Against Torture (of which the United States is a signatory). This, combined with the widely publicized mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by the U.S. intelligence officials, gave new license for torture and mistreatment by governments around the world.
Full report with citations available at: http://www.ips-dc.org/iraq/costsofwar/costsofwar.pdf Red Constantino
-------- iran
A Critical Nuclear Moment
By Brent Scowcroft
Thursday, June 24, 2004
Washington Post; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A1027-2004Jun23?language=printer
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has just rebuked Iran for failing to cooperate fully with international inspectors who are examining whether Tehran is meeting its nonproliferation commitments.
How concerned should we be about this development? What does it mean? By its own admission, Iran has been taking steps to develop the capability to enrich uranium, one of the two methods used to produce weapons-grade fissile material. While Iran says its activities are solely for peaceful production of nuclear power and are permitted by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, once enrichment capability exists, a major barrier to producing a nuclear weapon virtually vanishes. The IAEA condemnation is an indication that the world may be on the verge of a major breakdown of the nonproliferation regime, to say nothing of a huge new source of instability in a critically important region.
The absence of an effective international response to North Korean efforts to develop a nuclear weapons capability may already have resulted in the entry of another country into the ranks of nuclear-capable powers. North Korea not only can be presumed to have reprocessed enough plutonium this year for an additional six to eight nuclear weapons, it reportedly also is working on a uranium enrichment capability to accompany its existing ability to reprocess plutonium from spent fuel rods.
Should Iran now be permitted to develop the capability to enrich uranium, it is almost impossible to imagine that other countries could be dissuaded from creating their own enrichment capabilities and consequently the capacity to produce weapons-grade material for nuclear weapons.
We are at a critical moment. Are we serious in our efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation, or will we watch the world descend into a maelstrom where weapons-grade nuclear material is plentiful and unimaginable destructive capability is available to any country or group with a grudge against society?
Staring into that abyss should stir us to action. What can we do? The United States, Britain, France and Germany have already shown an encouraging, if insufficient, degree of cooperation with respect to the Iranian nuclear program. Russia has been the principal source of assistance in the development of Iranian nuclear power. But Russia has already informed Iran that it would expect spent nuclear fuel from the Bushehr plant to be returned to Russia, appearing to indicate that it too has no interest in allowing Iran to develop a nuclear weapons capability.
This situation should allow these five powers to deepen their cooperation to the point of presenting a united front to Iran. They could announce that they would be prepared to give Iran full assistance in developing nuclear power generation capability, under appropriate safeguards. They could offer to guarantee an adequate supply of nuclear fuel for Iranian power reactors at favorable rates and to remove spent nuclear fuel from Iran. In return, Iran would be required to forswear any attempt either to enrich uranium or to reprocess spent nuclear fuel.
It must be acknowledged that this would be a difficult offer for the United States to make, requiring it to put aside its serious concerns about a range of other objectionable Iranian behavior. But the nonproliferation stakes are so great that they warrant addressing this issue separately.
If Iran is sincere in its protestations that it seeks nuclear energy only for power generation, this would be by far the most efficient and economical way for it to reach that goal. Agreement could also pave the way for discussions on broader issues of concern among the parties, including security questions.
Should Iran reject such an offer, it would be clear that its objective is the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In that event, the issue should be taken to the U.N. Security Council, and the most serious forms of sanction and isolation should be applied.
But while Iran is an urgent matter, we will not succeed in dealing with it if we treat it as an isolated case. Like Iran, Brazil has announced its intention to construct a uranium enrichment facility. If we give Brasilia a pass at the same time that we are bearing down on Tehran, it not only will send exactly the wrong message to would-be proliferators but will sharply diminish any prospects for success with Iran.
Acquiescing in the Brazilian enrichment program would have the effect of dividing nuclear power aspirants into good guys and bad. Such an approach would provide a powerful weapon to Iran as it seeks to rally international support for its "peaceful" nuclear program and split us from the Europeans and the Russians.
Our goal instead should be to delegitimize the spread of uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing facilities to any country, because these capabilities are the linchpin of any program to develop nuclear weapons.
Put simply, the way Brazil is dealt with could prove to be one of the keys to dealing with the Iranian nuclear problem, either by persuading Tehran to abandon its nuclear weapon ambitions or by rallying the international community to crack down on Iran if it does not. We therefore should make the same offer to Brazil as to Iran and make clear the consequences if Brazil turns down that offer.
These steps are certainly no substitute for a carefully thought-out general program to enhance the safeguards of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and otherwise improve the effectiveness of the nonproliferation regime. But if we do not act swiftly and decisively now, attempts to provide a future comprehensive framework will be worse than fruitless.
Now is the moment of truth.
The writer was national security adviser to presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. He is president of the Forum for International Policy.
-------- iraq / inspections
Chemicals Not Found in Iraq Warheads
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24403-2004Jul2.html
Sixteen rocket warheads found last week in south-central Iraq by Polish troops did not contain deadly chemicals, a coalition spokesman said yesterday, but U.S. and Polish officials agreed that insurgents loyal to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and foreign terrorist fighters are trying to buy such old weapons or purchase the services of Iraqi scientists who know how to make them.
The Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad said in a statement yesterday that the 122-milimeter rocket rounds, which initially showed traces of sarin, "were all empty and tested negative for any type of chemicals." The statement came just hours after two senior Polish defense officials told reporters in Warsaw, based on preliminary reports, that the rocket rounds contained deadly sarin and that actions by the Polish unit in Iraq kept them from being purchased by militants fighting coalition forces.
Yesterday's coalition release also said that two other 122-milimeter rounds, found by the Poles on June 16 with help from an Iraqi informer, tested positive for small quantities of sarin but were "so deteriorated" that they would have had "limited to no impact if used by insurgents against coalition forces."
The Poles' discoveries generated renewed talk that prewar claims about Hussein's stock of unconventional weapons might yet prove true. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, for example, told an interviewer on Wednesday that the Polish defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, told him about the weapons last weekend at the NATO meeting in Turkey. Though Rumsfeld made it clear he had no personal knowledge of test results, he said that the Poles "believe that they are correct that these, in fact, were undeclared chemical weapons -- sarin and mustard gas."
Szmajdzinski told Polish radio that the rockets and mortars had probably been hidden from United Nations inspectors. "Our predictions and reports that Saddam Hussein did not come clean with a large sum of weapons, artillery shells and of weapons of mass destruction were proven true," he said. "Some of those warheads were old, but it could not be ruled out some could still be used."
Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, told Fox News on June 24 that "some" old sarin and mustard rounds have been discovered in scattered places, demonstrating "that the Iraqi declarations were wrong at least in . . . amount." But Duelfer cautioned he was not ready to make any judgment whether there were any "still concealed" military-capable stockpiles.
Duelfer said the current danger he sees is that some anti-coalition forces and foreign terrorist groups are trying to tap into Iraq's weapons expertise for use against the United States. "Former experts in [Hussein's] weapons-of-mass-destruction program," he said, "are being recruited by anti-coalition groups." As a result, he said, his Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) is "keeping a very close eye on some anti-regime people."
In Warsaw yesterday, Marek Dukaczewski, Poland's chief of army intelligence, told reporters: "We were mortified by the information that terrorists were looking for these warheads. . . . An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine."
Dukaczewski said the Polish unit in Iraq paid an undisclosed sum of money to buy the rockets last month after an informer there told the Poles that militant groups were seeking to buy such weapons for up to $5,000 apiece. "We bought all the shells available," Dukaczewski said.
In Washington yesterday, a senior intelligence official said he was unaware that the Poles purchased rather than found the weapons. He said the United States had been told they were discovered at several sites, mixed in with conventional 122-milimeter rockets and without any distinctive markings.
Duelfer, who as CIA Director George J. Tenet's personal representative directs the ISG's weapons search, told Fox News that the rocket rounds were found in former depots but that so far "we're not able to establish how these rounds got to where we found them" or "who had custody of them, if anyone."
In January 2003, U.N. inspectors discovered a dozen old 122-milimeter rockets that chief inspector Hans Blix described at the time as "designed to carry chemical weapons." Iraq later turned up several more, and all were destroyed. Blix later said he was not sure whether Iraq mentioned them in the 12,000-page weapons declaration it submitted in December 2002.
Correspondent Craig Whitlock in Berlin contributed to this report.
-------- japan
Scandal Emerges Over Japan's Nuke Program
By KENJI HALL
Associated Press Writer
July 4, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/J/JAPAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TOKYO (AP) -- It was supposed to help revive Japan's troubled nuclear program - and curb the country's heavy reliance on energy imports. But as Tokyo considers long-term plans to switch to an experimental, recycled nuclear fuel, it is also facing new allegations that officials misled the public in the past about less pricey alternatives.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry acknowledged Saturday that a study it conducted in 1994 showed that reprocessing radioactive waste into a plutonium-uranium fuel would cost twice as much as burying it at a disposal site.
The study wasn't publicly released until after reports about it surfaced Saturday in the national Asahi and Mainichi newspapers.
"It was originally for internal decision-making purposes only," ministry official Tadao Yanase told The Associated Press.
Yanase said the ministry wasn't even considering directly disposing of nuclear waste from commercial reactors a decade ago.
The allegations that policy-makers concealed data about reprocessing fuel costs marked the latest setback for the nation's nuclear program, which has been plagued by recent safety violations, reactor malfunctions and accidents.
They come as the Atomic Energy Commission, which draws up energy policy, prepares to meet in coming weeks to discuss scaling back plans to use reprocessed fuel - known as mixed oxide, or MOX - for reactors in the face of opposition from local residents and criticism from nuclear experts.
Japan's 52 nuclear plants account for nearly 35 percent of its energy supply.
Officials say future expansion of the nuclear grid is crucial: It would lower resource-poor Japan's dependence on oil, natural gas and coal imports, they say.
A policy blueprint calls for building 11 new plants and raising electricity output to nearly 40 percent of the national supply by 2010. As many as 18 electricity-generating reactors would use MOX as a transition to more advanced fast-breeder reactors, which run on plutonium and can also generate extra plutonium fuel.
"MOX is more efficient than current technology. We could recycle spent uranium fuel, not just burn through it once like we do now," said Osamu Goto, a Cabinet Office energy policy official.
Experts say the MOX program would solve another problem: a shortage of nuclear waste-storage space.
With no permanent nuclear waste disposal site in Japan, domestic nuclear plants are forced to hold onto spent fuel rods, said Tatsujiro Suzuki, a nuclear researcher at the Central Research Institute of the Electric Power Industry.
Media reports say those waste-storage pools will be full within a decade.
"If nuclear plants can't send their waste to a repository, they will have to shut down once their pools are filled," Suzuki said.
But a string of safety problems since the country's worst nuclear accident in 1999 has left the program in a shambles and undermined public faith in nuclear energy.
Japan's only plant designed to run on MOX, the Fugen reactor, has been permanently shuttered since March 2003 due to high operating costs.
The country's first experimental fast-breeder reactor, Monju, also has been off-line since 1995, when more than a ton of volatile liquid sodium leaked from its cooling system. A bungled cover-up of the damage led Japanese courts to order the facility permanently closed.
Currently, the fate of Tokyo's MOX program rests on a major fuel reprocessing plant being built in northern Aomori prefecture (state).
Already years behind schedule following a radioactive water leak in late 2002 and protests from local officials, the Rokkasho village plant won't be operational until 2006, Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. officials say.
It's not clear if Saturday's revelation about the 1994 study will influence the Atomic Energy Commission's discussions about whether to revise policy. Commission officials weren't available for comment.
"The assumptions of the study are far different from the actual situation now," Yanase, the ministry official, said.
But Steve Fetter, a University of Maryland professor who advised the commission against reprocessing in a presentation in Tokyo last month, said it would be expensive to operate the Rokkasho plant, and that Japanese consumers would see higher electricity bills.
He also warned about the security concerns of stockpiling so much plutonium, which could be diverted and used to make nuclear weapons.
"Instead of reprocessing fuel, it would be wise for Japan to establish an interim storage space for spent fuel," like the U.S.-proposed site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, Fetter said.
On the Net: Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan: http://www.japannuclear.com/
-----
Suppressed nuke study gave program's true cost
Nuclear fuel recycling program is twice as costly as the alternative
The Asahi Shimbun,
July 3, 2004
http://www.asahi.com/english/politics/TKY200407030197.html
The industry ministry has admitted it suppressed a crucial 1994 study showing that its proposed nuclear fuel recycling program would be twice as costly as simply burying spent nuclear fuel.
Officials of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and its predecessor, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), had long insisted that no comparative cost study on this issue had ever been done.
As recently as March 17, Kazumasa Kusaka, then director-general of the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, stated that ``there is no comparison based on cost estimates.'' He was replying to a question in the Upper House Budget Committee put by Mizuho Fukushima, head of the Social Democratic Party.
However, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry officials told The Asahi Shimbun that documents were presented at a ministry study group meeting held Feb. 4, 1994, that demonstrated the exact opposite.
One document focused on costs to be incurred from recycling spent nuclear fuel as opposed to simply burying spent fuel.
The results of the study are expected to influence discussions at the Atomic Energy Commission of Japan, which is to start debate this month on revising the Atomic Energy Long-Term Plan.
The study found that reprocessing spent fuel at a facility now under construction in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, and using extracted plutonium as fuel in nuclear reactors would require an additional 2.3 yen per kilowatt-hour in electricity bills if average annual interest was assumed to be 5 percent. If the spent fuel was simply buried, the additional electricity cost would be 1.23 yen per kilowatt-hour.
Reprocessing the spent fuel at an overseas facility would have meant an additional cost of 1.59 yen.
At that time, research overseas had found that recycling spent nuclear fuel would be more expensive, leading many Western nations to review the wisdom of nuclear recycling programs.
MITI officials had wanted to publicize the study results as a means of generating public debate, the sources said. But some members of the study group wanted to withhold the information on grounds that including a comparison with the burial option, which had never been considered, would only create confusion.
Others said the recycling program was essential from a long-term perspective even if it meant slightly higher electricity bills.(IHT/Asahi: July 3,2004) (07/03)
-------- korea
Powell discusses nukes with N.K.
By Choi Soung-ah and agencies
2004.07.03
Korea Herald
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2004/07/03/200407030026.asp
Two sides agree on peaceful settlement of nuclear issue through dialogue
In the highest-level meeting between the two countries in two years, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell held one-on-one talks in Jakarta yesterday with North Korean Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun on the prolonged standoff over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program.
Meeting on the sidelines of the annual forum of ASEAN foreign ministers in the Indonesian capital, the two top foreign policymakers discussed proposals each side put forward at the latest round of six-nation talks, which ended last Saturday in Beijing, a U.S. State Department spokesman said.
"The secretary emphasized the administration's proposals to move forward on dismantlement of North Korean nuclear programs," spokesman Richard Boucher said. "The secretary said there was an opportunity for concrete progress."
Following the 20-minute meeting in the morning, the North Korean delegation released a statement saying the two sides agreed a peaceful settlement of the issue through dialogue "will contribute to peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and the rest of the region."
The statement quoted Paek as saying that if the United States intended to improve bilateral relations, "the DPRK (North Korea) also will not regard the United States as a permanent enemy, and that the prospect of the DPRK-U.S. relations entirely depends on the switchover in the U.S. hostile policy on the DPRK."
"Paek told Powell that the DPRK would maintain its goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and reaffirmed that there is no change in the DPRK's position to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully through dialogue," the North's statement said.
Paek also said "simultaneous actions" were the only way to resolve the issue under the present situation "in which there is no trust between the DPRK and the United States," according to the statement.
"Particularly, he emphasized the importance of the United States making a commitment to renouncing its hostile policy on the DPRK and taking measures to reward directly by accepting the DPRK proposal on 'reward for freeze.'"
Just a day earlier at the opening of the Asia-Pacific regional security meeting Thursday, Powell warned that North Korea's "false hopes" for more economic benefits from the United States would be a waste of its own time unless the communist regime started showing that it intended to dismantle its nuclear programs.
He told a news conference that Washington did not want a repeat of the experience that grew out of a 1994 U.S.-North Korean agreement designed to ensure that Pyongyang would not be a nuclear threat.
A major obstacle at the six-nation talks has been North Korea's continued denial that it produces or possesses a uranium-based nuclear weapon, in addition to a plutonium-based weapon that it readily acknowledges.
During the last round of six-nation talks involving the Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, all parties showed signs of flexibility and agreed the talks were the "first step" to Pyongyang's denuclearization.
While the overall talks ended without concrete progress, all sides agreed to meet again before the end of September.
The United States presented a new plan at the Beijing talks, which gives North Korea a three-month grace period to shut down and seal its nuclear weapons facilities in return for economic and diplomatic rewards, as well as a provisional security guarantee. Washington said it expected the North to study its proposal.
The last time Powell and Paek met was in Brunei in 2002 on the sidelines of the ASEAN Regional Forum.
South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, also attending the ARF, met Powell yesterday soon after the rare session between the United States and North Korea.
During the 20-minute meeting, Ban and Powell briefed each other on their talks with North Korea's Foreign Minister Paek, according to Seoul officials.
Powell explained to Ban that the North expressed willingness to settle its nuclear issue in the same way that the two countries resolved their 1997 dispute over Geumchang-ni.
Geumchang-ni is a village north of Pyongyang, where Washington alleged there might be a secret nuclear site but failed to find any proof.
Powell told Ban that he explained Washington's proposal to his North Korean counterpart, the same one that was presented at last week's six-party talks, and reassured the North's diplomat that the United States had no intention of attacking the communist state, according to the officials.
Powell was also quoted as telling Paek that the two countries could cooperate in important areas even if their ideologies and systems were different.
He also stressed to Ban that the two countries should work together for an early convening of working-level six-party talks, officials said.
Other topics covered at the Ban-Powell meeting included Seoul's plan to dispatch troops to Iraq, the U.S. plan to realign its forces in Korea and the recent beheading of a South Korean hostage by Islamic militants in Iraq, the officials said.
Powell thanked Seoul for standing by its troop commitment to Iraq and supporting the U.S. plan to redeploy some of its troops from South Korea to the Arab country.
He also expressed regret over the death of the Korean hostage brutally killed after Seoul rejected the kidnappers' demand to withdraw its troop deployment decision.
Ban asked for more details on the U.S. plan to cut its troop levels in South Korea and stressed that any change to the U.S. military presence should never undermine deterrence against the North, the officials said.
(bluelle@heraldm.com)
----
Mutual distrust clouds US-Korea negotiations
John Aglionby in Jakarta
Saturday July 3, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/korea/article/0,2763,1253055,00.html
North Korea said yesterday it did not trust the US after the two sides' foreign ministers held their highest-level talks since Washington described Pyongyang as part of an "axis of evil".
Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, said after meeting his North Korean counterpart Paek Nam-sun in Jakarta that great mistrust existed between their countries.
Both countries sought to put a positive spin on the discussions, held on the sidelines of a regional security conference. But aides said the two men were no closer to a solution over US demands for Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme.
"There is no trust between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and the United States," Mr Paek was quoted as saying in an official statement.
"[However] if the United States is of the position to improve bilateral relations, the DPRK will not regard the US as a permanent enemy."
Mr Powell was equally forthright. "These are difficult negotiations. It just doesn't happen overnight," he said afterwards in a meeting with Indonesian students.
His spokesman, Richard Boucher, said Mr Powell told his counterpart there was an opportunity for "concrete progress" in the continuing efforts to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons. But Washington wanted "words not deeds" on disarmament before it started making concessions.
Mr Paek said his government would budge only if it saw "simultaneous actions" from Washington.
When officials from the two sides met last month in Beijing, along with representatives from China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, they put forward contrasting proposals to move the stalled six- party peace talks forwards. The US said Pyongyang would receive aid and security guarantees if it agreed to a step-by-step dismantling both of the plutonium weapons that it admits to, and the uranium bomb programme that its neighbours are convinced it is developing.
Assistance would come first from South Korea and Japan and then, once North Korea has shown long-term commitment to the deal, from the US.
North Korea has offered to freeze rather than dismantle its weapons programmes if it receives guarantees of vital energy supplies to make up for serious shortfalls.
Washington's offer, which is being seen as a conciliatory step, is thought to have been partly prompted by criticism at home from the Democratic presidential contender, John Kerry, over the lack of progress in the negotiations.
Mr Powell's meeting with Mr Paek was short on substance, according to Byungki Kim, an associate professor of international relations at the Korea University in Seoul. "This meeting was an important symbolic sign that both parties will continue to talk," he said. "But in terms of substance, it won't have much impact."
He said there would be little progress before the American presidential election in November. "North Korea won't be making any substantive proposals [soon] because of the elections," he said.
----
Pyongyang's bomb and the media hype
2004-07-03
Taiwan News, Contributing Writer
By Jonathan Power
http://www.etaiwannews.com/Opinion/2004/07/03/1088823310.htm
The main thing we've learnt so far about the Bush Administration's self proclaimed ambitions to curb nuclear proliferation is its all too obvious ability to influence how the press treats the issue. If it wanted to whip up hysteria on Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" the press was a willing, if now rueful, victim. If it wants to blow hot about North Korea's ambitions to have a nuclear-armed rocket that can strike Alaska it can do that too.
It can also do cold. Watch it right now as it moves, after three years of outright hostility to North Korea, to start using the soft touch in time to meet the imperatives of the electoral calendar when it wants to be crisis free. Too much of the media (European too) follows its given cues as meekly as a well trained circus dog. The latest round of talks last weekend with North Korea, when for the first time the Bush Administration offered negotiating concessions, was thriftily covered. Yet the North Korean bomb has not gone away. And North Korea's bomb research is much more advanced than it was when Bush first characterized the regime as part of the " axis of evil."
Nuclear bombs are a good scare story - when the administration wants it to be. It plays on fears we all have. I'm embarrassed to say that years ago I wrote a column saying if North Korea got a nuclear weapon it should be bombed. When the CIA first spooked former U.S. president Bill Clinton with its carefully leaked revelation that North Korea had a nuclear weapon he had Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Robert Gates on his back telling the press loudly that the North's stock of spent fuel rods should be bombed before they were reprocessed into plutonium. But none of them could provide an answer what to do if in retaliation North Korea made use of the nuclear bombs they said it already possessed. And when Clinton, all wound up and ready to order an invasion of North Korea, consulted the Pentagon he found that war might lead to the deaths of 50,000 American soldiers and the obliteration of Seoul he too pulled back.
Then ex-president Jimmy Carter, briefly seizing the headlines, bravely ventured into Pyongyang and mapped out with the old dictator Kim Il Sung a trade off between nuclear armaments and economic aid. Clinton happily grabbed the deal, and then the press largely went quiet until when, years later, Bush ratcheted up the rhetoric and confrontation.
And today the press seems content to be spoon fed the lie pushed by the Bush Administration that it was the North Koreans who broke the trust of Washington when they reneged on the undertakings made to Carter/Clinton and admitted (in 2002) that whilst they closed down its plutonium-based bomb producing line they had opened up an alterative uranium-enriched one.
In fact the trust - that precious ingredient of all deals - was broken long ago. The 1994 agreement was clear: the North agreed to close its plutonium plant and seal up the cooling rods from which weapons grade plutonium could be extracted. In return the U.S. with Japan and South Korea agreed to build two modern, non-plutonium producing nuclear power stations to be in production by 2003. Also the U.S. agreed that it would end its economic embargo and help the North with food, oil and electricity.
Militant Republicans in Congress managed to sabotage the implementation of the American side of the bargain, pushing the administration to slow food supplies and oil deliveries on a number of occasions. There was a successful effort in Congress to break the promise of ending sanctions, delaying action on this until 1999 when they were finally but only partially lifted. Not least, was the slowdown on the building of the new reactors, with the prospect of them being completed five years behind schedule in 2008.
Then when George W. Bush came to power the U.S. leant on South Korea to slow down its so-called "Sunshine" policy of reconciliation. It also refused to talk about other sources of electricity supplies and prohibited South Korea from honoring a promise to send electricity to the North. Later, after the North's "confession," it froze both oil supplies and reactor building.
Given the reflex hostility of both the American government and media it should not surprise us that North Korea returned to its bad old ways. Confrontation, Pyongyang reasoned, was the only way to get results. And, after three years of it, it is indeed producing results. Bush is ready to negotiate, but quietly. And the press has gone quiet in lockstep. Yet still North Korea has the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq didn't.
Jonathan Power is a London-based columnist and a long-term contributing writer to the Taiwan News.
--------
Powell, N. Korean Talk, But Progress Is Elusive
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24411-2004Jul2.html
JAKARTA, Indonesia, July 2 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's decision to meet with the North Korean foreign minister at a regional economic conference here Friday signifies a growing willingness by the Bush administration to demonstrate diplomatic progress in the impasse over North Korea's nuclear ambitions. But, despite months of negotiations, it appears that neither the United States nor North Korea has altered its bottom-line demands, leaving a wide gap between the two countries.
Both sides profess to want a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula and have shelved their harsh rhetoric. But the administration insists it will not provide any tangible benefits to North Korea until after the insular communist state has renounced nuclear weapons, identified its programs and had its claims verified. North Korea, by contrast, has said it wants the United States to reward it immediately for formally pledging to freeze and ultimately dismantle its programs.
It is unclear how the two sides can bridge that divide, especially in the time remaining before the U.S. presidential election. Powell told reporters Thursday that because North Korea violated a 1994 agreement, "we have to see deeds before we are prepared to put something on the table." North Korea, in a statement after the Powell meeting, lamented the lack of trust.
Powell said he and his North Korean counterpart, Paek Nam Sun, did not negotiate but sought "clarity" in each other's positions. "These are difficult negotiations. It just doesn't happen overnight," Powell told a group of Indonesian students after meeting with Paek. "There is a great deal of mistrust between the United States and North Korea."
The Bush administration is eager to show progress in the North Korean crisis. The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, has made the administration's North Korea policy a central part of his critique of President Bush's foreign policy. Kerry has argued that Bush's refusal to hold direct talks with the North has needlessly delayed diplomacy and allowed the country to rapidly build its nuclear arsenal.
Internally, the Bush administration has often been divided over how to deal with North Korea, also hampering diplomatic efforts. But with the election season in full swing, the tempo of U.S. actions has quickened.
Last week, after prodding from U.S. allies, American negotiators presented a more detailed plan for ending the crisis. Then Powell met with Paek on the sidelines of a Asian security forum. Next week, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice will travel to Seoul, the South Korean government announced Friday, and North Korea is expected to be a prominent topic.
Under the new U.S. proposal, South Korea and other U.S. allies could provide immediate energy assistance to North Korea, which would have three months to reveal its programs and have its claims verified by U.S. intelligence. The United States would then join in written security assurances and participate in a process that might ultimately result in direct U.S. aid.
In interagency discussions on the proposal, U.S. officials said, Powell suggested offering provisional security assurances at the same time South Korea began energy assistance, giving North Korea at least a symbolic reward. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld persuaded Bush to withhold the assurances until North Korea displayed its nuclear materials and U.S. intelligence verified that Pyongyang wasn't holding anything back.
--------
Powell Says He Restated Views on Arms With North Korean
July 3, 2004
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/international/asia/03powe.html?pagewanted=all
JAKARTA, Indonesia, July 2 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who had a rare meeting with his North Korean counterpart on Friday at a conference on Asian-Pacific security, said afterward that the two envoys essentially restated their current positions on talks aimed at disarming North Korea rather than engaging in negotiations.
Mr. Powell, who met later on Friday with Indonesian students for a discussion at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum, said he had briefed the other parties to the talks - China, Russia, South Korea and Japan - about his 20-minute session with the North Korean foreign minister, Paek Nam Sun. The forum groups together the 10 members of the association, or Asean, and 13 other Asia-Pacific countries and the European Union.
Mr. Powell cautioned against seeking instant solutions and said he looked forward to another round of discussions on North Korea's nuclear program in the early fall. "In my brief discussions today with the North Koreans, they reaffirmed that they want to continue with the six-party framework, and they reinforced the positions they gave to us last week, and we reinforced our position," Mr. Powell said.
"These are difficult negotiations; it just doesn't happen overnight," he said. "There's a great deal of mistrust between the United States and North Korea. We'll have to work our way through this."
Asked about the court appearance on Thursday of Saddam Hussein, Mr. Powell recalled a litany of abuses during the former Iraqi leader's rule, but said people should have an open mind as the legal proceedings begin. "I think the people of the world should watch carefully and listen carefully, presume he's innocent if you will, and let the Iraqi people through their courts decide," he said.
Mr. Powell expressed regret over the number of impediments put before foreigners seeking to visit the United States. He said Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security, agreed on the need to "start backing off" of some of the more onerous requirements.
"We have to move the visa process along," Mr. Powell said. "We suffer when we don't have students such as you wanting to study in the United States because we've made it too difficult. We suffer when Indonesians are reluctant to come and go to Disneyland or Disney World or to use our hospitals or just to go see Grand Canyon or visit Washington, D.C., as tourists."
He was not specific about what changes were under consideration.
"You will see in the months ahead that these policies will get back to a more normal set of standards," he added. "But we have to know who is coming into the country."
As he has in many of his travels, Mr. Powell took time to meet with students and seek to bridge the gap with Muslim nations. He referred to "our Muslim brothers and sisters," and said the United States was a force for good. "There is a lot of anti-Americanism in the world today because people, I don't think, fully understand what we are trying to do in Iraq or with respect to the Middle East peace process," he said.
-------- u.n.
U.S. to Pull 9 From U.N. Peacekeeping Missions
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24820-2004Jul2.html
UNITED NATIONS, July 2 -- The Bush administration has decided to withdraw nine U.S. soldiers serving in United Nations peacekeeping missions in Africa and the Balkans, citing the U.N. Security Council's refusal this month to renew a resolution shielding Americans from prosecution by the International Criminal Court, U.S. and U.N. officials said Friday.
The decision to withdraw the troops, who are serving in two U.N. operations in Ethiopia and Eritrea and in Kosovo, followed an interagency review on the potential risks to U.S. personnel working in U.N. peacekeeping missions. A Pentagon official said the United States singled out those missions because they are based in countries or territories that have not signed agreements with the United States pledging not to surrender U.S. personnel to the court.
Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said in a briefing Thursday that the United States will "evaluate" the importance of U.S. participation in U.N. missions on a case-by-case basis in light of "the risks of U.S. exposure" to prosecution by the court. "But in these two particular cases, it was determined . . . that the risk was not appropriate to our forces."
Di Rita said the United States will immediately withdraw six of the troops, leaving behind three officials with senior positions in the Ethiopia and Eritrea mission until the United Nations can find replacements.
A U.N. spokesman, Farhan Haq, said the United Nations had been notified of the U.S. decision and that it "took note of it with regret." U.N. officials said that while the U.S. action sends a troubling signal about Washington's continued support for U.N. peacekeeping, it will have limited practical impact on U.N. operations.
About 25 U.S. military observers and troops serve in U.N. peacekeeping missions, a small fraction of the more than 50,000 U.N. peacekeepers employed in more than 15 missions worldwide. More than 400 police officers, employed under a contract with a U.S. security company, also serve in U.N. missions, primarily in Liberia and Kosovo.
Experts on the court said the decision to target the U.N. mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea was peculiar because neither country has ratified the 1998 treaty establishing the international criminal court. The court has jurisdiction only over crimes committed in countries that have ratified the treaty or over individuals from countries that have ratified the treaty.
"U.S. servicemen participating in these missions were not at risk of prosecution," said Richard Dicker, an expert on the court at the New York-based advocacy group, Human Rights Watch. "This seems to be a petulant response to the Bush administration's failure to ram through the Security Council a resolution exempting Americans from prosecution by the court."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- washington
Hanford's waste plant cost to rise
The Associated Press,
July 3, 2004
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/07/03/b3.cr.hanford.0703.html
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.
-------- us nuc waste
Highway bill's secret rules start debate
Two lines in document would seal information to public on nation's rail, highway systems
By Douglas Fischer, STAFF WRITER
Saturday, July 03, 2004
San Mateo County Times (CA)
http://www.sanmateocountytimes.com/Stories/0,1413,87~11268~2250780,00.html
Deep in a 1,381-page highway spending bill now before Congress are two sentences that would override state open-records laws and let federal authorities seal now-public information about the nation's rail and highway systems -- including records relating to the transport of hazardous waste through communities.
The language, requested by the Bush administration, would give the U.S. Department of Transportation and state and local governments power to determine what information about the nation's transportation grid should be kept secret.
The broadly written clause allows the department -- and local governments -- to prohibit the release of any information deemed "detrimental to the safety of passengers in transportation."
Depending on how the administration interprets such concern, critics say, that could be everything from reports detailing poor railroad track maintenance in a particular community -- thereby raising the risk of derailments -- to the customary disclosure of rail and road routes used to ship nuclear waste.
Government watchdog groups call the language part of a continued erosion of open-records laws occurring under President George W. Bush's watch that, in this case, could put communities at risk.
"There's a danger ... that information of importance to communities will become unavailable -- so that 'national security' will trump community safety," said Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, a nonprofit group monitoring activities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The exact timing of a nuclear materials shipment, for instance, is already a secret, she said. Keeping the route secret would give the public no say in a decision that has a potentially huge effect on their neighborhood.
"That's going to have a negative impact on democracy and on community safety," Kelley said.
The sentences are tucked in the Senate version of a highway spending bill authorizing billions of dollars in roadway projects across the country. The House version lacks the language, and lawmakers from the Senate and House are slated to meet after the July 4 holiday recess to hammer out the differences.
The Senate bill's secrecy clause was requested by the Bush administration to protect information that could aid terrorists, said Virginia Davis, an aide to Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala.
The Transportation Security Administration already has authority to seal sensitive information related to airports. This language, Davis said, is intended to extend that protection to state and local governments.
But Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, sees it going deeper. Until now, information subject to secrecy has largely dealt with airline transportation -- flight safety, airline and airport security and so forth.
This would extend that scope throughout the nation's transportation network -- to every street, road and railway in the country.
"Who knows -- maybe they would do the right thing and say all this information should be in the public domain," he said. "But if they didn't want to, this law would say they wouldn't have to."
Some state regulators say the open flow of information is crucial when making decisions. The state Energy Commission, for instance, is one of several agencies overseeing the transport of nuclear fuels through the state. The selection of those routes traditionally undergoes a vigorous public airing.
"You will always need to discuss, in my opinion, these routes with local governments," said commission spokeswoman Claudia Chandler. "You have to have the local government's input -- your local fire department, your sheriffs."
The change could be far-reaching, critics add. Current law, for example, requires the Department of Transportation to publish annual reports on hazardous materials incidents. The new law could trump that requirement.
Similarly, someone researching how many drivers of Bay Area school buses or hazardous material trucks have been convicted of drug or alcohol violations could find that information blocked, since the law extends the cloak of secrecy to "transportation employees."
"This administration's penchant for secrecy has gone beyond the need for medication," said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Alamo. "There are very benign ways (to deal with the security risk). You don't have to have a red alert whenever you truck something through town."
And secrecy has its risks, too.
It was a Freedom of Information Act request that alerted Tri-Valley CAREs to a federal plan to ship plutonium pellets from the former Rocky Flats weapons lab in Colorado to the Lawrence Livermore lab, Kelley said.
To make the job easier, the government planned to transport the nuclear cargo in lightweight containers that could be crushed in an accident, she said. The group successfully sued to stop the shipments.
"All of the communities between Colorado and California, as well as our own community here in Livermore, were made safer because that information was made available," she said.
"The public really is the entity that stops a lot of stupid government ideas," Kelley said.
Contact Douglas Fischer at dfischer@angnewspapers.com .
-------- MILITARY
-------- britain
British Soldier to Be Tried Over Shooting
July 3, 2004
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/international/middleeast/03BRIT.html?pagewanted=all
LONDON, July 2 (Agence France-Presse) - A British soldier will be court-martialed in connection with the nonfatal shooting of a 13-year-old boy in Iraq, the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, said Friday.
The soldier, Pvt. Alexander Johnston, of the First Battalion of the King's Own Scottish Borderers, is charged with "unlawful wounding" in the shooting in September, Lord Goldsmith announced in a written statement to Parliament.
A Ministry of Defense spokesman declined to reveal details of the boy's condition, citing patient confidentiality.
Private Johnston becomes the fifth British soldier to face a court-martial over events in Iraq since the American-led invasion of the country last year.
Britain also plans to court-martial four Royal Fusiliers accused of beating and sexually abusing prisoners in Iraq.
-------- chemical weapons
Chemicals Not Found in Iraq Warheads
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24403-2004Jul2?language=printer
Sixteen rocket warheads found last week in south-central Iraq by Polish troops did not contain deadly chemicals, a coalition spokesman said yesterday, but U.S. and Polish officials agreed that insurgents loyal to former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and foreign terrorist fighters are trying to buy such old weapons or purchase the services of Iraqi scientists who know how to make them.
The Coalition Press Information Center in Baghdad said in a statement yesterday that the 122-milimeter rocket rounds, which initially showed traces of sarin, "were all empty and tested negative for any type of chemicals." The statement came just hours after two senior Polish defense officials told reporters in Warsaw, based on preliminary reports, that the rocket rounds contained deadly sarin and that actions by the Polish unit in Iraq kept them from being purchased by militants fighting coalition forces.
Yesterday's coalition release also said that two other 122-milimeter rounds, found by the Poles on June 16 with help from an Iraqi informer, tested positive for small quantities of sarin but were "so deteriorated" that they would have had "limited to no impact if used by insurgents against coalition forces."
The Poles' discoveries generated renewed talk that prewar claims about Hussein's stock of unconventional weapons might yet prove true. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, for example, told an interviewer on Wednesday that the Polish defense minister, Jerzy Szmajdzinski, told him about the weapons last weekend at the NATO meeting in Turkey. Though Rumsfeld made it clear he had no personal knowledge of test results, he said that the Poles "believe that they are correct that these, in fact, were undeclared chemical weapons -- sarin and mustard gas."
Szmajdzinski told Polish radio that the rockets and mortars had probably been hidden from United Nations inspectors. "Our predictions and reports that Saddam Hussein did not come clean with a large sum of weapons, artillery shells and of weapons of mass destruction were proven true," he said. "Some of those warheads were old, but it could not be ruled out some could still be used."
Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, told Fox News on June 24 that "some" old sarin and mustard rounds have been discovered in scattered places, demonstrating "that the Iraqi declarations were wrong at least in . . . amount." But Duelfer cautioned he was not ready to make any judgment whether there were any "still concealed" military-capable stockpiles.
Duelfer said the current danger he sees is that some anti-coalition forces and foreign terrorist groups are trying to tap into Iraq's weapons expertise for use against the United States. "Former experts in [Hussein's] weapons-of-mass-destruction program," he said, "are being recruited by anti-coalition groups." As a result, he said, his Iraqi Survey Group (ISG) is "keeping a very close eye on some anti-regime people."
In Warsaw yesterday, Marek Dukaczewski, Poland's chief of army intelligence, told reporters: "We were mortified by the information that terrorists were looking for these warheads. . . . An attack with such weapons would be hard to imagine."
Dukaczewski said the Polish unit in Iraq paid an undisclosed sum of money to buy the rockets last month after an informer there told the Poles that militant groups were seeking to buy such weapons for up to $5,000 apiece. "We bought all the shells available," Dukaczewski said.
In Washington yesterday, a senior intelligence official said he was unaware that the Poles purchased rather than found the weapons. He said the United States had been told they were discovered at several sites, mixed in with conventional 122-milimeter rockets and without any distinctive markings.
Duelfer, who as CIA Director George J. Tenet's personal representative directs the ISG's weapons search, told Fox News that the rocket rounds were found in former depots but that so far "we're not able to establish how these rounds got to where we found them" or "who had custody of them, if anyone."
In January 2003, U.N. inspectors discovered a dozen old 122-milimeter rockets that chief inspector Hans Blix described at the time as "designed to carry chemical weapons." Iraq later turned up several more, and all were destroyed. Blix later said he was not sure whether Iraq mentioned them in the 12,000-page weapons declaration it submitted in December 2002.
Correspondent Craig Whitlock in Berlin contributed to this report.
-------- iran
Iran Is in Strong Position to Steer Iraq's Political Future
July 3, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/international/middleeast/03IRAN.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 2 - With the chaos of the occupation and now the loosening of American control here, Iran has moved into its best position in decades to influence the political shape of Iraq, Western and Iraqi officials say.
Already, the Iranian government has quietly strengthened its presence in Iraq by providing financial backing to a range of popular Shiite Muslim groups and by flooding the country with intelligence agents, the officials say. Movement across the 900-mile border is much freer than under the rule of Saddam Hussein, as evidenced by the droves of Iranian pilgrims flocking to the Shiite holy cities of southern Iraq and the daily smuggling of goods and people.
Most worrisome to American officials are Iran's close ties to powerful Shiite clerics like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who was born in Iran, and Moktada al-Sadr, who led a fierce rebellion against American forces for nearly three months this spring. American officials believe that Iran might have partly financed Mr. Sadr's movement.
Though Shiites are a majority in both nations, Iraqis are torn between religious and national loyalties. Just how much sway Iran will exert over a new Iraq is far from clear. But some warn that Iran, the world's dominant seat of Shiite Islam, could be the silent power broker as Iraq heads toward elections in January.
Iran's aim, Iraqi and Western officials say, is to shape an Iraq run by religious Shiite politicians who could serve as proxies of the clerics in both countries.
"They want a failure of America in Iraq, but they hope the country will be stable enough not to destabilize Iran," said a Western diplomat in Baghdad with extensive experience in the region. "The best thing for them would be a stabilized Iraq with a friendly Shia power in Baghdad created in opposition to the occupation forces."
With the toppling of Mr. Hussein's secular dictatorship, competition for the heart of Shiite Islam in the region has broken open. For American policy makers, one of the greatest fears has long been an Iraq ruled by Shiites vulnerable to Iranian influence. That was one reason the United States did not support a Shiite rebellion after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
The White House now hopes that secular-minded Shiites like Iyad Allawi, the interim prime minister, will govern a democratic Iraq that will in turn transform Iran, which President Bush included in the "axis of evil" with Iraq and North Korea.
Since the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Western diplomat said, the Iranians "have the feeling that they're surrounded by Americans or friends of the Americans."
Some experts say Iran's seizure in June of three small British Navy boats on the Shatt al Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran was in part a petty but prominent way for Iran to emphasize that its interests in the region would not be ignored.
Iran has expressed both hostility toward and guarded acceptance of the interim Iraqi government, reflecting the internal battles in Iran's own leadership. For years, the two major camps in the Iranian government - the reformers led by President Mohammad Khatami and the hard-liners who follow Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini - have pursued separate foreign policies.
But many Iraqis already suspect Iran of wielding enormous influence over the most prominent Shiite political parties here. A poll conducted in May for the Coalition Provisional Authority showed that the most popular political and religious leaders in Iraq were Shiites with strong Iranian ties.
"It seems clear that the Iranians are trying to butter both sides of the bread and all four crust edges," said Prof. Juan Cole, an expert on Shiite Islam at the University of Michigan.
The Shiite parties contend that they remain independent of the Iranian government, but also point out that Iran was the only country willing to harbor them in exile during Mr. Hussein's rule, and so it is not surprising that their ties to Iran remain strong.
At the same time, Iranian meddling is not without its risks. As many as half a million Iraqis died in the eight-year war with Iran in the 1980's, and the wounds and hostilities linger. When ordinary Iraqis talk about bombings and assassinations here, they often blame Iranian agents after pointing the finger at the United States and Israel.
Partly because of those sentiments, Shiite parties once exiled in Iran under Mr. Hussein - most notably the Dawa Islamic Party and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, known as Sciri - contend that they no longer have direct ties to their former host, despite a history of generous financial support from Iran's government.
Officials here and in Washington say otherwise.
A senior American military official said in an e-mail message that the United States Army has observed "a large amount of U.S. currency being passed by Iran" to Sciri, which was founded in 1982 by an Iraqi ayatollah exiled in Iran. The money was exchanged for "the supposed purpose of paying salaries and maintenance of vehicles and facilities," the official said.
Humam Bakr Hamody, a senior Sciri official, played down the link. "Sciri is not related to the Iranian government and has different positions and opinions," he said.
The party had received money from sources in many Middle Eastern countries, including Iran, he added, and the funds had come from individual donors rather than governments. Money is delivered to the party over the Iranian border because there is no reliable way to wire money to Iraq, he said.
A senior Iraqi Shiite official familiar with the security situation here confirmed that financial transactions were taking place between Iran and various Shiite parties. Those include the militia led by Mr. Sadr, the 31-year-old Shiite cleric who is more popular than ever in Iraq after leading his spring rebellion against the occupation forces.
The American military, seeking to avoid street-to-street fighting in Najaf, a city held sacred by Shiites for its shrines, has backed down from its promise to kill or capture Mr. Sadr.
American soldiers seized large stashes of Iranian currency during arrests of Mr. Sadr's aides, an American military official said. But it was unclear whether that indicated direct involvement by the Iranian government in the insurgency.
In May, when anti-American fighting peaked in the city of Kufa, the main mosque there, a Sadr stronghold, broadcast pleas for blood donations in both Arabic and Persian, the language of Iran. At the time, Iranian pilgrimages to the city had dried up, and the calls for aid in Persian fueled suspicions that Iranian fighters had joined Mr. Sadr's militia.
A resident of Kufa said in an interview at the time of the uprisings that he opened his door one day to find two Persian-speaking militiamen setting up a mortar outside.
Mr. Sadr has been open about his allegiance to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. Last month, a Sadr aide said in a sermon at the Kufa mosque that Mr. Sadr "promises God and Muslim countries" that he will "keep following Khomeini" as long as he lives. One of the most zealous units of Mr. Sadr's militia is named after Ayatollah Khomeini.
Mr. Sadr's fealty to the late ayatollah stems from long family ties across the border and a history of adversity under Mr. Hussein's rule.
His patron, Ayatollah Kazem al-Haeri, still lives in the Iranian city of Qum, arguably the foremost seat of Shiite theocratic learning. The offices of both clerics in Najaf acknowledged that Mr. Sadr operated as his patron's spiritual representative in Iraq and that substantial money flowed between them.
Mr. Sadr's deceased uncle, Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, one of the last century's most respected Shiite thinkers, was close friends with Ayatollah Khomeini and took an active role in Iraqi politics by opposing the ruling Baath Party. Mr. Hussein had him killed in 1980.
Mr. Hussein also ordered the killing of Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, the father of Moktada, who before his death in 1999 named as his successor Ayatollah Haeri. The ayatollah's office in Qum has organized donations for Moktada al-Sadr and his militia, the Mahdi Army.
Despite indications of Iranian support for Mr. Sadr, prominent Iranians appeared wary when he led his followers to open rebellion, with its potential of destabilizing Iraq. In late April, as Mr. Sadr was urging the militia on in its attacks against the Americans, Ayatollah Haeri issued a statement saying he did not support the actions.
In mid-April, Iran sent envoys to Najaf in what it said was an attempt to negotiate an end to Mr. Sadr's insurgency, possibly because the fighting was jeopardizing American plans eventually to hand power to Shiite parties. An Iranian diplomat was assassinated in Baghdad at the time, and senior American officials said they did not want Iran interfering in Iraq.
Iran said the "iron fist policy" of the United States had led to the delegation's failure. At a recent sermon in the golden-domed Shrine of Ali in Najaf, a leader of Sciri, Sadr al-Din al-Kubanchi, criticized the Iranian government for not reining in the mercurial Mr. Sadr.
The single most powerful cleric in Iraq remains Ayatollah Sistani, a 73-year-old Iranian who moved to Najaf in his early 20's. In the 1990's, his organization began making substantial financial contributions to clerics in Iran, which brought him closer to the top religious leaders there.
But Ayatollah Sistani's relationship with Iran's mullahs is not necessarily one of subservience or even ideological allegiance. The pipeline of money flows both ways, and associates say the ayatollah receives donations gathered by his Qum office.
Ayatollah Sistani's mentor in Najaf, Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qassim al-Khoei, promoted the "quietist" school of Shiite Islam, which advocated that religious leaders remove themselves from direct involvement in politics - a view that ran counter to that of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Close associates of Ayatollah Sistani have said he is intent on transforming Najaf into a Shiite power center to rival Qum, which was strengthened in the 1980's by an influx of clerics fleeing Najaf during Mr. Hussein's rule.
Iran's influence can be felt even beyond its direct ties to Iraq's clerics, religious parties and the strongly Shiite south.
Iran is suspected of having close ties to Ahmad Chalabi, the former exile and secular Shiite politician once backed by the Pentagon.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has opened an investigation into charges by American intelligence officials that Mr. Chalabi told Iranian officials that the Americans had broken a code used by Iran. Mr. Chalabi has denied the charges.
In northern Iraq, Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste, commander of the First Infantry Division, said, "There has definitely been an effect from Iran since we've been here." The general declined to provide details. Another senior American military official said Iranian intelligence agents were operating in the division's command area, which is slightly larger than West Virginia and shares a long border with Iran.
In February, before Iranian pilgrims flooded into Iraq for the Shiite festival of Ashura, American military officials said they were monitoring Iranian intelligence agents working out of central Baghdad.
"Iran is the regional hegemon," the senior military official said. "They're trying to set the stage for the Shia to take power."
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article.
-------- iraq
Iraq rebuilding fund largely unspent
The biggest unutilised amounts concern power and oil equipment
Saturday 03 July 2004,
Al Jazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/FEAE5295-423B-469F-BF2F-57D07A544796.htm
The Bush administration has spent only two percent of the huge amount of money it set aside to rebuild Iraq.
A White House report shows that only $366 million has been spent of the $18.4 billion President George Bush and Congress provided last year.
The figure, in the latest quarterly report released on Friday by the White House budget office, marks the first time the administration has said how much of the money has been spent.
Despite the administration's initial emphasis on speedy reconstruction in Iraq, the amount is less than two percent of the rebuilding money lawmakers provided. The data cover expenditures through 22 June.
The funds are meant to finance everything from training Iraqi police to starting small businesses to rebuilding the country's electric, water, health and oil production facilities.
'Show me the money'
The money was part of an $87 billion package Bush signed on 6 November, mostly for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The measure was approved after weeks in which administration officials and congressional Republican leaders said the money was needed quickly to hasten work, stabilise Iraq and improve the security of US troops there.
Much of the Iraq money promised by Bush has yet to be distributed
Until now, the administration has provided data only on the amount of money obligated, which means spent or owed for specific contracts.
But Friday's report said nearly $5.3 billion is now owed or has been spent - compared with $2.2 billion as of the last report, for the period through 24 March.
When the White House filed its first report in January, it estimated $10.3 billion would have been spent through 30 June.
Patrick Clawson, a former World Bank official now deputy director of the bipartisan Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said while understandable, the spending rate was too slow for the battle to win support from Iraqi citizens.
Money promised like 'IOU'
"The amount of money actually spent is what Iraqis have seen," Clawson said. He said the US money committed to contracts is simply "a promise to Iraqis that we plan to do something".
The report said reconstruction in Iraq is moving forward, citing money that also has been spent from other accounts. It cited the immunisation of 85% of Iraqi children, rebuilding of 2,500 schools and the provision of telephone service to 1.2 million Iraqis, 50% above the pre-war total.
The $366 million in expenditures includes $194 million for Iraq's police and armed forces and $109 million for the country's electrical system.
Iraqi police and security forces have received nearly $200 million
Of the $5.3 billion committed to contracts, the largest amounts are owed for work on electricity, oil equipment, police and armed forces, the civil government and water.
Congress provided $2.48 billion for rebuilding in April 2003. Of that, $2.4 billion has been committed to specific contracts and $1.44 billion has been actually spent, the report said.
Money trickling out
In addition, $1.1 billion has been spent out of $13 billion in multi-year pledges in aid and loans from other countries, according to the report.
And other money is coming from seized Iraqi assets and the country's oil revenue, though much money from oil sales is being used to run Iraq's fledgling government.
The report also said it will cost about $1.5 billion over the next 15 months to operate a US Embassy in Iraq. That excludes the costs of building a huge, secure new embassy in Baghdad, which by some estimates could cost another $1 billion.
The figures exclude US war-fighting costs in Iraq, which the administration said in May were $97 billion to date.
The White House has said it expects 2005 military costs in Iraq to exceed $50 billion, though lawmakers of both parties have said they expect a total closer to $75 billion.
----
U.S. accused of depleting Iraq fund
Money is intended for rebuilding use; international board plans to do audit
By Mark Matthews
Baltimore Sun National Staff
July 3, 2004
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.money03jul03,0,5386955.story?coll=bal-iraq-headlines
WASHINGTON -- U.S. officials in charge of the Development Fund for Iraq drained all but $900 million from the $20 billion fund by late last month in what a watchdog group has called an "11th-hour splurge."
An international monitoring board is planning an audit of money from the fund that was spent on contracts for Iraq's reconstruction that were approved without competitive bidding.
The fund, made up largely of Iraqi oil revenue, is intended to pay for the rebuilding of Iraq. Critics have charged that U.S. officials have failed to account properly for money spent so far.
In a report this week, the General Accounting Office said that "contracts worth billions of dollars in Iraqi funds have not been independently reviewed." It also questioned what control over U.S.-approved contracts would now exist with the handover of formal sovereignty to Iraqis.
Beth Marple, a U.S. spokeswoman in Baghdad, said the rapid spending was agreed on between the now-dissolved Coalition Provisional Authority and Iraqi officials. She said that "the unfunded needs of the Iraqi people demanded that these dollars be put to work."
U.S. authorities have not identified all the contractors hired. But they have told international monitors that some of the contracts were awarded without competitive bidding to Halliburton, the Texas-based company formerly led by Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton has been at the center of Pentagon and congressional inquiries.
Some critics have suggested that American authorities tapped the Iraqi money to avoid the stricter controls Congress demanded on the spending of U.S. tax dollars, after reports last year of overcharges by Pentagon contractors.
"Perhaps they prefer to have the flexibility to give away contracts to whichever companies they want on whatever terms they want," said Svetlana Tsalik, director of the George Soros-funded Revenue Watch, part of the Open Society Institute. Soros, a billionaire financier, is a harsh critic of the administration and has contributed heavily to groups seeking to defeat President Bush.
In recent reports, Revenue Watch and the British-based group Christian Aid faulted the Coalition Provisional Authority for making commitments on spending of Iraqi oil revenue that will outlast the occupation. Revenue Watch referred to the spending as "the CPA's 11th-hour splurge."
Christian Aid faulted U.S. occupation authorities for failing to disclose full details of the spending. The group said the authorities may also have understated by up to $3 billion the amount of Iraqi oil revenue that went into the development fund.
"This lack of accountability creates an environment ripe for corruption and theft at every level," Christian Aid said in a report titled Fueling Suspicion: the Coalition and Iraq's Oil Billions.
The Development Fund for Iraq was set up by the United Nations Security Council last year after Bush declared major combat over in Iraq. Besides the new Iraqi oil revenue, it includes leftover oil revenue that was put into the U.N.-run Oil for Food program before the United States invaded Iraq.
Diverse spending
The development fund has been spent in several ways. As of May, more than half the money had gone to operate Iraqi ministries. The rest went to relief and reconstruction projects; out of that money, about $350 million was put at the discretion of U.S. military commanders for projects intended to improve relations with Iraqis.
Until the handover, the provisional authority had the ultimate say over how the money was used. Decisions were made in meetings with Iraqi officials appointed by the provisional authority and the U.S.-picked Iraqi Governing Council.
Noting the latest reports by the provisional authority, Joseph Christoff, who directs the GAO's international affairs section, said that of the $20 billion in the fund, all but $900 million had been committed as of late June. The GAO is an investigative arm of Congress.
"They clearly spent [development fund money] at a much faster pace than the appropriated dollars," Christoff said in a telephone interview. The GAO report said that as of April, the provisional authority had spent nearly $13 billion from the fund on reconstruction activities.
By that time, the authority had spent only $8.2 billion out of U.S. tax dollars -- money that would likely invite greater congressional scrutiny.
The Security Council created an International Advisory and Monitory Board for Iraq to watch how the development fund was spent. The board is made up of representatives of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development.
In February, the board began to question the awarding of no-bid contracts awarded by the provisional authority with money from the development fund, according to minutes of the board's meetings.
The next month, the board was told that Halliburton won some of the contracts without competitive bidding. The provisional authority "indicated that as a general rule, effective January 2004 contracts were no longer awarded without competitive bidding," according to the board's minutes.
The board demanded that the provisional authority turn over audits of the uncompetitive contracts. None had been provided by its June meeting. The board then delivered a public rebuke of the U.S. authorities.
In a statement issued June 22, the board said it "regrets, despite its repeated requests, the delay in receiving reports on audits undertaken by various agencies on sole-sourced contracts" paid for by the development fund. The board chose to launch an audit "to determine the extent of sole-sourced contracts."
In a telephone interview from Baghdad, Marple said she could not immediately explain why the provisional authority used development fund money for no-bid contracts or why it had been slow to provide information to the monitors.
New-government role
The new Iraqi government is now in control of deciding how Iraqi oil revenue is spent, though the international monitoring board will continue an oversight role.
Rend al-Rahim, Iraq's chief representative in Washington, argued in a speech this week that too much money had been spent on costly infrastructure and high-tech projects that did not employ large numbers of Iraqis.
Noting that the new government "will now have a lot of authority in awarding contracts from the Development Fund for Iraq," she said it must focus on projects "that can employ tens and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and get money into the pockets of Iraqis and again give them a stake in the new Iraq."
----
Sadr Tells Iraqis to Sustain Resistance
Cleric's Shift Tests New Government
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24645-2004Jul2?language=printer
BAGHDAD, July 2 -- Moqtada Sadr, the rebellious Shiite Muslim cleric, insisted Friday that the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq had not ended with the recent handover of limited political powers to an interim government, and called on his followers to continue resisting the large presence of foreign troops in the country.
"I want to draw your attention to the fact there was no transferring of authority," said Jabir Khafaji, a top Sadr lieutenant, reading from a letter from the cleric during Friday prayers at a mosque in the southern city of Kufa where Sadr commonly preaches. "What has changed is the name only."
Khafaji also demanded that the new Iraqi government defer to the Shiite religious leadership based in the neighboring holy city of Najaf. He asserted that the Mahdi Army, Sadr's black-clad militia group that was recently decimated in two months of battle with U.S. forces, was "the army of Iraq."
"I ask the Iraqis to keep rejecting the occupation and call for independence," Khafaji said.
Sadr's comments, echoed by another of his top aides in Baghdad, appeared to signal a shift away from the conciliatory calls for unity he made last week after coordinated insurgent attacks killed more than 100 Iraqis. His stance could present an early test for Iraq's unelected government, which is seeking to shore up its legitimacy following Monday's handover of political authority after 15 months of occupation.
Since intensive fighting between U.S. forces and Sadr's militia in several southern cities ended in a cease-fire last month, Sadr has announced plans to form a political party and participate in national elections scheduled for January. More recently, Sadr condemned the foreign influence within Iraq's diffuse insurgency, as ordinary Iraqis continue to account for the bulk of the death toll in urban bombings.
A move now by Sadr's forces would strain Iraq's embryonic security forces and likely require the intervention of some of the 138,000 U.S. soldiers who remain in the country as the chief guarantors of the interim government's stability. U.S. forces are trying to maintain a lower profile in the wake of the handover, but Sadr and simmering trouble spots are testing their ability to do so.
"They are supposed to be reducing their troops," Aws Khafaji, a representative of Sadr's from southern Iraq, said during a sermon before 2,000 worshippers in Baghdad's Sadr City, a downtrodden Shiite neighborhood named for Moqtada Sadr's slain father, a revered ayatollah. "We do not want to break the oars of the interim authority." Later, he called on Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, to use "faithful, nationalist Iraqi oars and don't use oars that have written on them 'Made in the USA.' "
The U.S. military reported that a Marine was killed in combat Friday and a second died of wounds sustained Thursday in a restive province west of Baghdad that contains the city of Fallujah, the target of several U.S. airstrikes over the past week. On Thursday, one Marine was killed in combat in the same area.
For the first time, Arab countries offered to send troops to join the multinational military force in Iraq, but U.S. officials cautioned that the first two proposals -- from Jordan and Yemen -- were conditional and did not mean either nation would end up dispatching forces.
On Thursday, King Abdullah of Jordan said in an interview with the BBC that it would be "very difficult" to turn down an Iraqi request for help. "My message to the president and prime minister is 'Tell us what you want, tell us how we can help and we have 110 percent support for this,' " he said.
Iraqi officials, however, have long insisted that they do not want troops from neighboring countries deployed in Iraq. The Iraqi government did not comment on the offer Friday.
Yemen announced Friday that it, too, was willing to deploy troops to Iraq, but only if they were members of a force under U.N. control, Yemen's Foreign Ministry told the Associated Press.
In Washington, Yemen's ambassador, Abdulwahab Hajjri, said his country was willing to play "any role" that Iraq and the United Nations wanted it to play. In a telephone interview, Hajjri said Yemen had created a special peacekeeping force with enhanced equipment and training assistance from the United States.
The ambassador said Yemen did not yet have a "confirmed official position" on the conditions for such a deployment. But he noted that "Yemen has always been a great advocate of a strong role for the United Nations with Iraq."
A State Department spokesman, J. Adam Ereli, said: "We certainly commend both countries for their offers of assistance. We've long said that it's important that the international community do what it can to support Iraq as it . . . moves to establish security and democratize."
Insurgents affirmed Friday morning that they would continue striking targets associated with the occupation, firing rockets at hotels housing foreign journalists and U.S. government contractors.
Shortly after 7:30 a.m., a rocket struck the Sheraton Ishtar Hotel in downtown Baghdad, sending debris clattering from the upper floors. The rocket damaged the hotel's 10th floor, but no one was injured. A second rocket hit the nearby Baghdad Hotel, where several people were reportedly wounded.
Moments later, with city streets nearly empty on the Muslim day of worship, a minibus exploded in flames near the hotels in Firdaus Square, where U.S. troops pulled down a statue of former president Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003. There were conflicting reports regarding the attack, but U.S. and Iraqi officials eventually said the bus had been used to fire the rockets and tipped over from the force of the launch, detonating more weapons inside.
U.S. officials said the insurgents' target may have been the Green Zone, the heavily fortified compound that houses the U.S. Embassy, across the Tigris River from the hotels. Two other rocket attacks occurred later in the day, one near another hotel used by foreigners and the other near the headquarters of an Islamic party, where a guard was reportedly wounded.
Also Friday, two Turkish civilians who had been missing for more than a month were freed by insurgents. The hostages -- an air-conditioner repairman and his assistant -- were released after their company agreed to stop doing business in Iraq. A Pakistani driver was also released, Iraqi officials said.
There was also evidence that Iraqis were coming together behind their new interim government.
At the Mother of All Villages Mosque in Baghdad, Sheik Ahmad Abdul Ghafoor called on nearly 2,000 worshippers to "close ranks and unite, because in unity there is strength and in division weakness." Ghafoor, who leads the Sunni Muslim mosque, warned that the months between now and January, when Iraqis are to elect a transitional government, will be difficult ones.
"This will be a test period," he said. "These months will end, but good deeds and patriotic fervor shall remain far longer."
Staff writers Robin Wright and William Branigin in Washington and special correspondents Khalid Saffar and Hoda Lazim in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Kufa contributed to this report.
--------
MILITANTS
Insurgents Fire Rockets at 2 Baghdad Hotels; 3 Hostages Are Freed
July 3, 2004
By IAN FISHER
The New York Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 2 - Two Turks and a Pakistani kidnapped here last week were released Friday, as insurgents launched rockets that hit two hotels where foreign workers and journalists stay. Three security guards were injured after one of the rockets dropped into the parking lot of one of the hotels.
Also on Friday, Yemen became the second Arab country to offer to send troops to Iraq, now that formal sovereignty has been officially passed to a new Iraqi government. On Thursday, King Abdullah of Jordan, which borders Iraq to the west, said he would be willing to send troops to help quell violence in Iraq.
But Hamid al-Bayati, the interim deputy foreign minister, said Friday that it was unlikely that Iraq would accept the offers. He said that he was grateful for the offers of training and equipment but that Iraqi policy generally did not allow troops from any neighboring countries to enter Iraq, for fear of interference in its internal affairs.
"We have sensitive issues with Turkey," he said in an interview. "We have sensitive issues with Iran, which might want to send troops. It's quite complicated."
The new government, which took power on Monday, did not make any official statement about the two offers. In the past, Iraqi officials have said they did not want to play host to troops from neighboring countries and, in fact, actively blocked an American plan last year to bring Turkish troops here.
On the Muslim day of rest and prayer, at the end of a momentous week in which sovereignty was officially transferred to Iraqis and Saddam Hussein was arraigned on charges of crimes against humanity, hard-line clerics preached skepticism.
While seeming to stop short of rejecting outright the new government, several clerics mocked the idea that American forces would not continue to exercise broad control in Iraq and warned the new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, to look after Iraqis' interests first.
"You rulers have to fear God when treating your Iraqi people, and not be on the occupier's side," Abdul Satar al-Samarai, a leading Sunni Muslim cleric, told worshipers at the Um al-Qura mosque in the Ghazaliya neighborhood.
While many Iraqis were jubilant at the sight of Mr. Hussein in the prison dock on Thursday, Mr. Samarai condemned the court proceedings as illegal.
"The court emerged from an interim government, not a legal one, and will not gain legality unless there is an established law coming from an elected government," Mr. Samarai said in an interview. The new government, appointed by a group of Americans, Iraqis and United Nations diplomats, is charged with organizing full elections for a national assembly by Jan. 31, 2005.
In Kufa, an aide to the rebel Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose militia suffered heavy losses in battles with American forces over the last two months, mocked the idea that the nearly 140,000 American troops in Iraq would play a different role under the new government.
In a sermon on behalf of Mr. Sadr, the aide, Jabber al-Khafaji, belittled the new name announced by American officials for the foreign troops in Iraq, now called the "multinational" troops rather than the "coalition."
"They have just changed the name," he said. "I call on the Iraqi people to keep rejecting occupation and demanding independence on one hand and democracy on the other to ensure full justice."
The two Turkish hostages were among thousands of Turkish workers who have found jobs in Iraq since the American invasion last year. They were released Friday after apparently agreeing to quit their jobs. Their captors had threatened to behead them unless Turkish companies left Iraq entirely, but in a video broadcast on the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera the captors said they had reduced their demands.
On the tape, one of two masked kidnappers read a statement - as the two workers knelt before them - saying that the kidnappers did not accept any ransom but were releasing the men "to honor the Muslim Turkish people, and upon the repentance of the two hostages, and their pledge not to do such a thing again."
Turkish officials confirmed the release of the two men, air-conditioner repairmen identified as Soner Sercali and Murat Kizil.
In Pakistan, the family of a Pakistani man, Amjad Hafeez, told reporters that he had called from Iraq on Friday to say he had been set free. Last Sunday, insurgents released a videotape on which they said they had kidnapped Mr. Hafeez, who drove a truck for an American food services business in Iraq.
While the insurgents had continued to attack American and Iraqi forces in the days before the transfer of power, they had not, as anticipated, carried out any spectacular attacks to show their power. The thunderous rocket attack this morning, in one of the centers for foreigners in Iraq, seemed to be such an attempt.
About 7:30 a.m., the police and other security officials said, insurgents launched 60-millimeter rockets from the rear of a mini-bus near a mosque off Firdos Square, where American marines toppled a statue of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. One rocket slammed into an upper story of the Sheraton hotel, which is surrounded by huge concrete blast walls to protect the many foreigners who stay there. No one was injured.
A second rocket wounded three security guards at the Baghdad Hotel, a frequent target for attack. The van itself burst into flame, apparently when one of the rockets exploded inside it, and sent thick clouds of black smoke into the air before Iraqi firefighters doused the blaze. In the light traffic of the early morning, no bystanders were injured.
"This was only the calm before the storm," said a 43-year-old store owner near the Baghdad hotel, who would give his name only as Yousef, referring to the relative quiet of the last week. Like many Iraqis, he said he did not believe that the transfer of formal sovereignty would significantly reduce the number of attacks.
"The big storm is coming," he said.
On Friday, the American military announced the deaths of two marines, both killed in combat in Falluja, the city west of Baghdad that has become the center for the insurgency in Iraq. One of the soldiers was killed on Friday "while conducting security and stability operations," a military statement said. The second marine died Friday after being wounded the day before.
Terrorists in Iraq may have been close to obtaining munitions containing the deadly nerve agent cyclosarin that Polish soldiers recovered there last month, the chief of Poland's military intelligence said Friday, according to The Associated Press.
But the American military said trace amounts of the nerve agent found in a cache of rockets dating from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war were so deteriorated they would have had "little to no impact if used by insurgents," The A.P. reported.
Iraqi employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Najaf and Baghdad for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli interrogators 'in Iraq'
Saturday, 3 July, 2004,
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3863235.stm
Members of Karpinski's (l) brigade have been accused of abuse The US officer at the heart of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal says she has evidence that Israelis helped to interrogate Iraqis at another facility.
Brig Gen Janis Karpinski told the BBC she met an Israeli working as an interrogator at a secret intelligence centre in Baghdad.
A BBC reporter says it is the first time a senior US officer has suggested Israelis worked with the coalition.
The Israeli foreign ministry said the reports were completely untrue.
Intelligence access
Gen Karpinski was in charge of the military police unit that ran Abu Ghraib and other prisons when the abuses were committed. She has been suspended but not charged.
She told BBC Radio 4's Today programme she met a man claiming to be Israeli during a visit to an intelligence centre with a senior coalition general.
"I saw an individual there that I hadn't had the opportunity to meet before, and I asked him what did he do there, was he an interpreter - he was clearly from the Middle East," she said in the interview.
"He said, 'Well, I do some of the interrogation here. I speak Arabic but I'm not an Arab; I'm from Israel.'"
Images of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison sparked global outrage Until a 1999 ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court, Israeli secret service interrogators were allowed to use "moderate force".
The US journalist who broke the Abu Ghraib scandal told the programme his sources confirm the presence of Israeli intelligence agents in Iraq.
Seymour Hersh said that one of the Israeli aims was to gain access to detained members of the Iraqi secret intelligence unit, who reportedly specialise in Israeli affairs.
'Convenient scapegoat'
The BBC reporter, Matthew Grant, says that whatever the truth, these allegations could cause anger in the Arab world.
Photographs of naked Iraqi detainees being humiliated and maltreated first started to surface in April, sparking shock and anger across the world.
One soldier has been sentenced and six others are awaiting courts martial for abuses committed at Abu Ghraib jail.
Gen Karpinski has said she was being made a "convenient scapegoat" for abuse ordered by others.
--------
Alleged Israeli Informer Killed in West Bank
Reuters
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24429-2004Jul2.html
QABATIYA, West Bank, July 2 -- Palestinian guerrillas on Friday executed a suspected collaborator with Israel after onlookers in the town square here called for him to die.
Hundreds of spectators surrounded four gunmen from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades as the four shot Muhammad Rafiq Daraghmeh, 45, a father of two.
Militants had hustled Daraghmeh into the town's main square before the assembled crowd and asked him: "Are you a collaborator with the Israeli intelligence?" Daraghmeh said: "Yes." He was also asked if he had sexually molested his two daughters as reported by relatives who said they had disowned him. Daraghmeh answered, "Yes."
A gunman turned to the crowd and asked: "What should his sentence be?"
The crowd chanted, "Execution! Kill him, kill him!" as other residents of the town whiled away the time in nearby cafes.
The militants pushed the cowering Daraghmeh to the ground, riddled him with machine-gun fire, got into a car and sped off.
Palestinian groups have killed at least 30 people accused of being informers for Israeli forces fighting an almost four-year revolt in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, lands Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Daraghmeh was accused of guiding soldiers to hideouts of militants, where the militants were captured or killed.
"It was necessary to make [Daraghmeh] an example for others to deter them from collaborating," said Jamal Abu Rab, local commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.
A cousin of Daraghmeh said: "What he did was shameful. We considered him no longer one of us."
He said relatives recently tried to kill Daraghmeh to redeem the family's honor. Daraghmeh bore signs of stab wounds that the cousin said were inflicted by an angry brother.
Palestinian Authority officials criticized the killing. "We want every act to be carried out via legal channels and oppose anyone who behaves otherwise. However, we are incapable of enforcing law and order in Palestinian areas [subject to] occupation," said Local Government Minister Jamal Shobaki.
-------- nato
ALLIES NATO
Chief Says Iraq and Afghanistan Are Doomed Without World Cooperation
July 3, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/international/europe/03NATO.html?pagewanted=all
BRUSSELS, July 2 - NATO's top civilian official warned Friday that Afghanistan and Iraq were doomed to be failed states if the United States and the international community did not find a way to work together to save them.
Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, NATO's secretary general, also sharply criticized what he described as the Bush administration's abandonment of NATO as an alliance and use of it when it suits Washington's interests.
"Can we afford two failed states in pivotal regions?" Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said in an interview. "It's both undesirable and unacceptable if either Afghanistan or Iraq were to be lost. The international community can't afford to see those countries going up in flames. There would be enormous repercussions for stability, and not only in those regions."
Afghanistan, he said, risked "falling back under the Taliban," the authoritarian, fundamentalist regime that provided a haven for Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda, until the United States overthrew it after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
He said the security situation and the risk of terrorism spreading from those countries was so serious that the United States had to come together with international organizations including NATO, the European Union, the United Nations and the international donor community to forge a common strategy.
Mr. de Hoop Scheffer's bleak analysis of the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq contrasts with the rosier view held by the Bush administration, which has portrayed the countries as well on the road to becoming stable democracies that will serve as models for the region.
The Bush administration badly wants more foreign troops in Iraq but has failed to win the support of NATO to send troops there. At the NATO summit meeting in Istanbul earlier this week, the United States won only tepid backing for a proposal for NATO to train Iraqi military and police forces, with President Jacques Chirac of France demanding that training would be conducted by individual nations and not under a NATO flag.
But Mr. de Hoop Scheffer made clear that his top priority as secretary general is not Iraq but Afghanistan, NATO's first military operation outside its historic area of operations.
He has never endorsed the American view that NATO troops should be in Iraq. But he said he would do all he could to fulfill the request by Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, for NATO to train Iraq's security forces.
"This should be a NATO operation in Iraq," he said, but stressed that the United States had to be fully engaged in the NATO mission to make it a success and not treat it as an operation that is somehow a separate project for the Europeans.
He was particularly critical of the Bush administration's contention that the military mission defines what kind of international coalition of countries it puts together, adding that if the United States does not work within NATO, the Europeans would move toward creating their own security structures.
"If the mission defines the coalition, then you don't need NATO," he said. "You will then see the Europeans falling into each other's arms."
He said he had a "simple message" for Washington regarding NATO: "Get engaged."
The Bush administration has criticized an initiative by a number of European countries, led by France and Germany, to create a European defense and security arrangement, saying it would be an unnecessary duplication of NATO functions.
But Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said he had no problem with the European Union's fledgling efforts to build its own defense coalition as long as it complemented NATO. Mr. de Hoop Scheffer, from the Netherlands, was once his country's foreign minister, but is little known outside the narrow corridors of power in Brussels.
Since taking over the NATO post earlier this year, he has spent much of his time pleading with the United States and the 25 other alliance countries to deliver the troops, military equipment and money that are needed to fulfill the ambitious political goals they set for the organization, most dramatically in Afghanistan.
"I have felt like a beggar sometimes," he said, "and if the secretary general of NATO feels like a beggar, the system is wrong."
He called on the United States to help reorganize the mission in Afghanistan in which the United States leads one force that is designed to hunt down Osama bin Laden and Qaeda terrorists, but does not participate in the main NATO force that is trying to the country.
"The Afghan model is not a model I like," he said.
He also criticized the Bush administration for not committing troops to the NATO Response Force, an emergency force that was set up following an initiative by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld two years ago.
At the NATO summit meeting, as President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan strongly urged NATO to send more troops. But while the United States and NATO's military planners argued that the new response force should be used in Afghanistan, Mr. Chirac, whose country is a major contributor to the NATO force and will soon command NATO operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, insisted that the force stay on standby for emergencies.
--------
NATO MISSION
Spain to Send More Troops for Afghans
July 3, 2004
By RENWICK McLEAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/international/europe/03SPAI.html?pagewanted=all
MADRID, July 2 - Less than a week after pulling its last remaining forces from the American-led mission in Iraq, Spain's new Socialist government announced Friday that it had approved doubling the number of Spanish troops assigned to the NATO mission in Afghanistan.
The increase would take the total number of Spanish soldiers to the mission to nearly 1,000, the Defense Ministry said.
Spain now has about 150 soldiers in Afghanistan, a defense official said. An additional 300 are in the region and involved in the mission, according to a Foreign Ministry official.
Members of the opposition Popular Party have accused Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his Socialist Party of a double standard in deciding to send troops abroad shortly after withdrawing them from Iraq.
Mr. Zapatero was elected three days after the March 11 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people. He campaigned largely on a pledge to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq.
His government says there is a clear distinction between the mission in Iraq, which it describes as a unilateral action taken by the United States, and the one in Afghanistan, which it says was approved by the United Nations.
The new Spanish deployment would include peacekeeping troops, as well as medical and transportation forces.
A Foreign Ministry official said 400 to 500 of the troops would probably return to Spain after the Afghan elections later this year.
Aides to Mr. Zapatero said he would appear before Parliament, probably on Tuesday, to explain his plan and submit it for a vote. He is also expected to discuss a plan to send about 100 soldiers to join a United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti, which has been in turmoil since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced from power in late February.
Mr. Zapatero does not need legislative approval to send troops abroad, but one of his advisers said the prime minister would reconsider his position if Parliament voted against him.
--------
NATO to send fact-finding mission to Iraq next week
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Jul 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040703101737.6xtdib6i.html
NATO is to send a fact-finding team to Iraq as early as next week as part of its commitment to help train Iraqi security forces, a spokesman said on Saturday.
"It's a fact finding mission, because we are in the planning process," the NATO spokesman said, referring to the nuts and bolts of the aid NATO has promised Iraq to help it confront the destabilising and ever-increasing violence there.
He refused to confirm media speculation that the mission would be led by NATO's top commander in Europe, US General James Jones.
However he said the team would be composed of about a dozen people from NATO's regional base in Naples rather than from the command centre in the Belgian city of Mons, where Jones is based.
NATO leaders formally agreed at their summit in Turkey on Monday to assist Baghdad in the organisation of its security forces.
Officals at NATO headquarters in Brussels must now define the parameters of the assistance by juggling notably with the differing views of the United States and France on the form it should take.
-----
Afghanistan will need 10,000 NATO troops for election duty, minister says
BERLIN (AFP)
Jul 03, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040703102901.fv5226t2.html
Afghanistan will need the 10,000 NATO troops to ensure security for its presidential and general elections in September, the country's reconstruction minister Mohammed Amin Farhang said Saturday on German radio.
"We need a security force of 10,000 men until the elections are over because some parts of the territory are still very instable. I hope that officials in the international community will understand," he said on DeutschlandRadio, after welcoming NATO's decision at its Istanbul summit to send in reinforcements.
The minister also said his country would need 50 million dollars in international aid to hold the elections, but this sum had not yet been reached.
"There could be big technical problems" if the money is not forthcoming, he said. But he added that the government did not intend to put back the elections because of the security problems.
"The situation with regard to security is variable. It is very quiet in some regions and there are other problems in others. But that will not stop us following the plan decided in 2001 at the conference in Saint Petersburg," he said.
Recent attacks by Taliban and Al-Qaeda had had the effect of speeding up the process of voter registration, he explained. More than five million Afghans have already registered on electoral lists, "which is a good sign, positive," he said.
NATO announced on June 29 that it was sending another 1,500 troops to Afghanistan, in addition to the 6,500 already there in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which NATO took charge of in August 2003.
Another contingent of 2,000 soldiers will be on emergency stand-by if needed.
-------- prisoners of war
INTELLIGENCE
Capture of Hussein Aides Spurred U.S. Interrogators
July 3, 2004
By ANDREA ELLIOTT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/international/middleeast/03PRIS.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON - Within days after Saddam Hussein's capture last December, the American military jailers at Abu Ghraib prison received an important new batch of prisoners: bodyguards and other loyalists who tended to Mr. Hussein in his final weeks on the run, passing messages to his confederates and shuttling him to safe houses and secret meetings in battered taxis.
According to military intelligence officers and soldiers at the prison, the capture of the bodyguards led to an all-out push for information about close supporters of Mr. Hussein who were suspected of plotting against the American occupation of Iraq.
It would be a race against time before those supporters found other hiding places, so a group of interrogators was given greater latitude to use tactics on the new prisoners that had previously required the signed approval of senior officers, said military intelligence soldiers who asked to remain unidentified for fear of harming their careers.
They said the tactics included sleep and food deprivation, extended isolation and the use of menacing dogs. "It was `Do whatever you have to do, find out where they are and let's get 'em fast,' " said a military intelligence analyst. "We needed to get them before they got away."
While it is not clear whether the intensified intelligence gathering led to mistreatment of prisoners, the disclosure about the loosening of rules after Mr. Hussein's capture adds a new element to the evolving picture of abuses in Abu Ghraib prison.
It also shows the role of a previously unreported military intelligence unit at the prison, known as the special projects team, which was assembled to interrogate Mr. Hussein's loyalists, sometimes for 10 hours at a time.
The Army's top intelligence officer in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Barbara Fast, met with the team several times to get updates, according to a military officer and soldiers interviewed.
Military officials in Baghdad did not comment on the special projects team. But they acknowledge that the arrival of the new prisoners set off an urgent interrogation effort.
"After Saddam's capture, we worked quickly to find others who were part of his network," said Col. Jill E. Morgenthaler, chief of public affairs at military headquarters in Baghdad. "We prioritized the interrogation of these personnel in order to gain insights on the reinstitution of the regime or development of an alternative organization and the personalities associated with such an effort."
As a result, senior officers pressed analysts to produce more intelligence reports, interrogations became more intense and a greater number of high-level Iraqis were captured, according to interviews with senior military officers, officials and military intelligence soldiers.
The worst known abuses at Abu Ghraib occurred in October and November, before Mr. Hussein's capture, and involved members of the military police who have said their actions were encouraged by officials at the prison.
But the mistreatment of prisoners continued into December, according to Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba of the Army, who investigated abuses at the prison. Several other inquiries are under way to determine the extent of mistreatment and how it occurred at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The American military commander in Iraq at the time, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, has testified that he alone had the authority to approve harsh interrogation tactics at Abu Ghraib, and that he authorized the isolation of only 25 prisoners for extended periods.
But military intelligence soldiers who were recruited for the special projects team shortly after Mr. Hussein's capture said they were no longer required to get General Sanchez's approval to use harsh tactics.
While one officer and an interrogator said they did not recall a loosening of the rules, others said Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the prison's chief intelligence officer, had told them that they had his advance approval to use those tactics and no longer needed to submit interrogation plans for him to sign.
"He said: `We want this info. Do what you have to do to get it,' " said one analyst who worked on the team and is now back in the United States. "He had a lot of pressure on him, so he put a lot of pressure on us."
Others recalled that they were still required to obtain signed approval, but that it could come from sergeants in the prison's military intelligence operation instead of the colonel, which shortened the approval process. "It made things a little bit quicker," said one analyst.
Through a spokeswoman, Colonel Pappas declined a request for an interview. General Taguba's report blamed the colonel, who has returned to Germany with the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, for allowing conditions that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
Last week, Capt. Donald Reese, a company commander of the military police soldiers charged with abusing detainees at the prison, testified that Colonel Pappas was in the cellblock the night a prisoner died during an interrogation last November. Captain Reese's testimony, at a hearing in Baghdad, suggested that Colonel Pappas had been aware of efforts to conceal the prisoner's death.
As the American occupation came under increasing attack by insurgents in 2003, the interrogations at Abu Ghraib had produced, at best, infrequent bursts of useful information, members of military intelligence said. But in the days immediately after Mr. Hussein's arrest on Dec. 13, things changed.
"There was the prison before the capture and the prison after," a military intelligence analyst said.
More than a dozen Iraqis were captured with Mr. Hussein on a farm near Tikrit, in the province of his tribal homeland.
These prisoners had shepherded Mr. Hussein through as many as 40 different hide-outs. They included a family of fishermen who owned some homes where he stayed, bodyguards - known as himaya, or protection - and other helpers, who did everything from cooking and installing air conditioning in his rooms to carrying messages from him, according to military intelligence officers.
While Mr. Hussein was handed over to C.I.A. officers, the helpers went directly to Abu Ghraib. Only the soldiers who had captured the prisoners spoke to them before they arrived at the prison, according to a military officer.
That meant that interrogators would get a rare first crack at talking to prisoners of high intelligence value - the kind that did not usually land at Abu Ghraib unless they had been interrogated elsewhere.
The prison's military officers responded to the challenge by forming a group of some 20 interrogators, analysts and linguists.
"As soon as we became `special projects,' the heat was turned up," said a soldier who worked with the unit. "It was do what you needed to do to get the information. Usually we just did our own thing."
In some instances, the team used harsh interrogation tactics like feeding prisoners only one meal a day, allowing them only four hours of sleep a day, placing them in isolation cells for 30 days and using military dogs during interrogations, several soldiers said in interviews.
"Just having the dog in the room worked pretty effectively," said one intelligence analyst.
One officer said the team had felt immense pressure to perform well, partly because senior officers had expressed keen interest in the results of the interrogations. General Fast met directly with the low-ranking interrogators at least twice in December and asked for information about each detainee, the officer and a soldier said in interviews.
The new prisoners produced good leads, which resulted in more raids and arrests of other high-level prisoners, including former Iraqi generals, senior Baath Party officials and tribal leaders who were aligned with Mr. Hussein, a military officer said.
Most helpful were the bodyguards, at least two of whom drove Mr. Hussein to meetings with former Baath party officials. "They knew where he went," said one analyst who assisted in interrogating the prisoners. "We got lots of names. We were on the tails of other big people."
The analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity, belonged to the Fusion Analyst Cell, a unit in the prison that produced reports on information gleaned from interrogations. Some of the best intelligence in the reports resulted from interrogations with the himaya detainees, several members of the military said.
The reports were sent to interrogators and officers within the prison starting in October and eventually were shared with the C.I.A., the State Department, the American detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and Defense Department officials, military personnel and officials said.
The reports were usually about insurgency groups, terrorist organizations or "attack cells" - groups that carried out attacks on American and allied forces - according to several military intelligence people interviewed.
The unit's analysts became experts on hundreds of those groups, including Ansar al-Islam, which was active in Kurdish areas of northeastern Iraq, and the fedayeen, former members of Iraqi paramilitary units who attacked American forces during the initial assault on Baghdad.
Eric Schmitt and Kate Zernike contributed reporting for this article.
--------
U.S. Investigates New Afghan Abuse Allegation
July 3, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-afghan-usa-abuse.html
KABUL (Reuters) - The U.S. military, under intense scrutiny for its treatment of Islamic militant suspects, is looking into a new allegation of prisoner abuse in Afghanistan, a spokesman said on Saturday.
Major Jon Siepmann declined to give details but told reporters the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, which has responsibility for the U.S. Marines as well as the Navy, was carrying out the investigation.
There are about 2,000 Marines on combat duty in Afghanistan.
``Because it is currently under investigation, we cannot provide any specific details regarding the allegation,'' Siepmann said. ``(We) will take appropriate action based on the outcome of the investigation.''
Revelations of ill-treatment of military prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval base in Cuba have tarnished the reputation of U.S. forces.
The military says it has investigated five deaths of prisoners in Afghanistan since August 2002.
News of the fresh investigation comes just weeks after a CIA contractor was arrested on charges of beating a detainee who died in 2003, the first brought in connection with prisoner abuse in Afghanistan.
After news broke concerning treatment of prisoners in Iraq, the U.S. military announced a sweeping review of its prison system in Afghanistan, a report on which is expected this month.
The review was launched after allegations of abuse by former detainees, including a former policeman who said he was beaten and sexually abused.
SEEKING ANSWERS
The U.S. Justice Department is pressing the CIA to publicly reveal the specific interrogation methods authorized by the Bush administration for a handful of senior al Qaeda captives, the Washington Post reported on Saturday.
The interrogation methods have been classified since they were first used in questioning al Qaeda suspects picked up in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The U.S.-based rights group Human Rights Watch has called abuse of detainees in Afghanistan ``systemic,'' and criticized the U.S. decision not to grant suspected militants prisoner-of-war status that would give them rights under the Geneva Conventions.
This month the military allowed the International Committee of the Red Cross -- which has a global role in checking on conditions for war detainees -- access to a detention facility in Kandahar that had been thought to be only a transit post.
Siepmann said he understood ``there have been generally positive reports of that visit thus far.''
News of the latest investigation came as U.S.-led forces have been conducting operations in southern and central Afghanistan aimed at increasing security for elections later this year.
Siepmann said about 12 militants has been killed and a similar number captured in operations in the past week.
In a previous drive launched in late May, the U.S. military said it killed more than 80 guerrillas and detained about 90 suspects, but militants attacks have continued.
-------- us
U.S. General Says Met Israeli Interrogator in Iraq
July 3, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-israel.html
LONDON (Reuters) - The U.S. general who was in charge of Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison said on Saturday she had met an Israeli interrogator in Iraq, a claim Israel denied but which was likely to irritate many in the Arab world.
Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, who was responsible for military police guarding all Iraqi jails at the time prisoners were abused by U.S. troops there, told the BBC she met the Israeli at a Baghdad interrogation center.
``He was clearly from the Middle East and he said: 'Well, I do some of the interrogation here and of course I speak Arabic, but I'm not an Arab. I'm from Israel','' she said.
``My initial reaction was to laugh because I thought maybe he was joking, and I realized he was serious,'' said Karpinski who has been suspended from her command for failings at Abu Ghraib but has not been charged with any wrongdoing.
A U.S. military spokesman in Washington said he had no information and Israel denied it.
``There is no basis or support in the reports regarding the alleged involvement of Israeli interrogators in interrogating prisoners or captives in Iraq. These reports are firmly denied,'' Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office said in a statement.
An Israeli security source told Reuters: ``Israel was not and is not involved in the interrogation of anyone in Iraq.''
Israeli involvement in Iraq could anger Arabs who accuse Washington of favoring the Jewish state in its conflict with the Palestinians and in wider disputes with its Arab neighbors.
Israel has denied similar reports in the past of involvement in U.S. operations in the Middle East. Last month, it denied a report in the New Yorker magazine that it was training Kurdish fighters in Iraq to counter Shi'ite militias there.
Photographs of military police abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib and other reports of abuse have led to hearings in Congress and fueled Arab and international outrage.
-------- war crimes
Soldiers Charged in Drowning Iraqis Reportedly Forced Into River
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24620-2004Jul2.html
The Army charged three soldiers with manslaughter and a fourth with assault in connection with an incident in January in which they forced two Iraqi detainees to jump into the Tigris River.
Lt. Jack M. Saville, Sgt. 1st Class Tracy E. Perkins and Sgt. Reggie Martinez of the 4th Infantry Division were charged with manslaughter, assault and making false statements. The fourth soldier, Spec. Terry Bowman, was charged with assault. Saville and Perkins also face charges of conspiracy, making false statements and obstruction of justice.
Documents released by the Army name several superior officers, including the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, as unindicted co-conspirators. Sassaman has been one of the highest-profile officers in the Army for years because he quarterbacked West Point's football team to its first bowl game, the 1984 Cherry Bowl against Michigan State University.
The incident marks the first time that Army troops who served in Iraq have been charged with manslaughter or murder in connection with the handling of detainees. But similar charges have been brought against other soldiers and reservists involving the treatment of Iraqi detainees.
According to the Army, Saville, a West Point graduate from Virginia, ordered his subordinates on the night of Jan. 3 to drive two Iraqi detainees to a bridge over the Tigris River in the Iraqi city of Samarra, in the Sunni Triangle. Saville, 24, then ordered his men to push the detainees into the river as punishment for breaking curfew. One of the Iraqis drowned, the Army said.
When questioned about the incident, the Army said, Saville and the others told military investigators that they had released the Iraqis and seen them walking away. The Army said Saville and Perkins also conspired with Sassaman, their battalion commander; Capt. Matthew Cunningham, their company commander; and one other officer to impede the criminal investigation.
Saville faces up to 26 years in jail. Perkins, a veteran of 13 years in the Army from Scott City, Mo., faces an equal term. Martinez, a five-year veteran from New York City, faces up to 15 years. Bowman could get a maximum of five years.
Army posts in the United States generally were closed yesterday for the Fourth of July holiday, and none of the four soldiers charged or the others named as co-conspirators could be reached for comment. Army officials declined to release the names of their military attorneys.
The 4th Infantry Division, based at Fort Hood, Tex., spent most of 2003 and early 2004 in Iraq. The charged soldiers were all from the division's 3rd Brigade, which is based at Fort Carson, Colo.
Col. Brian Jones, who recently took over as commander of that brigade, said he does not think charges will be brought against other soldiers in the matter. "For this incident, that's all you can expect," he said in a brief telephone interview.
Army officials previously disclosed that Sassaman received a nonjudicial reprimand this year. One Fort Carson soldier familiar with the incident in Samarra said he has been told that Sassaman will serve out his command of the battalion and then retire from the Army. But Jones, Sassaman's immediate superior, said he could not confirm that.
The soldiers are the latest to be charged in incidents involving detainee abuse. Two Marine reservists were charged with negligent homicide in the death of an Iraqi detainee in June 2003. The seven Army reservists charged in the torture scandal of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison face lesser charges, such as abuse. Also, a former CIA contractor, David Passaro, has been charged with assault in connection with the June 2003 beating death of a detainee in Afghanistan.
More recently, Army Capt. Rogelio M. Maynulet, 29, was charged with murder and dereliction of duty for the suspected killing of an Iraqi man near Kufa in May. The charge was made public last month, but without identifying the charged officer. The Army named Maynulet yesterday as the officer and also disclosed some details of the case. It said the charges stem from an incident in which Army soldiers chased a car believed to contain militia forces. The soldiers shot the driver and a passenger. "Shortly thereafter, the wounded driver was shot and killed at close range," the Army said in a statement yesterday.
Maynulet, a Chicagoan who commanded a company in the 2nd Battalion of the 27th Armored Regiment in the 1st Armored Division, could not be reached for comment. Earlier this year, Armor, a professional Army journal, carried an article by him on how to command a company in peacekeeping operations. He counseled that commanders "need to think creatively, be flexible, and empower their subordinates."
Researcher Robert E. Thomason contributed to this report.
--------
ABUSE
U.S. Army Charges 4 Soldiers in the Drowning Death of an Iraqi Man
July 3, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/international/middleeast/03ABUS.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, July 2 - Four American soldiers have been charged in the drowning death of an Iraqi detainee who was pushed off a bridge north of Baghdad along with another Iraqi man in January, the Army said Friday.
Three of the soldiers, including one officer, face manslaughter charges, while the fourth has been charged with assault in the nighttime incident that happened on a bridge over the Tigris River in Samarra, 60 miles north of the Iraqi capital. All four soldiers were also accused of making false statements about the incident.
The new charges filed against the four soldiers, who are with the Fourth Infantry Division, come just two weeks after a captain in the First Armored Division was charged with murder and dereliction of duty in the shooting death of an Iraqi civilian on May 21 after a chase in Kufa, in south-central Iraq.
Word of the charges was reported in Colorado newspapers on Friday after the Army issued a news release locally, and the full details of the charges were released by the Army later in the day.
The Army has now opened investigations into the deaths of at least 40 Iraqi detainees, and the new charges announced reflect a widening pattern of prisoner abuse, including deaths and assault, that took place beyond the confines of the Abu Ghraib prison.
Two military intelligence soldiers with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, based in Fort Carson, Colo., are expected to face criminal charges in the death of a senior Iraqi officer, Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, who died last November at a detention center run by the unit, a senior Army official said Friday.
The soldiers had acknowledged to investigators that interviews with the general involved "physical assaults," but investigators later determined that General Mowhoush died after being shoved head-first into a sleeping bag and smothered during questioning.
With the transfer of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government this week, the charges also raise new questions about the legal authority over American soldiers who are accused of crimes against Iraqis. Despite an agreement to consult on military matters, Iraq and the United States lack a formal accord governing the status of foreign forces and are relying on an American occupation directive covering several important matters. But no commander believes American troops will be subject to Iraqi justice at this time.
The incident on the bridge in Samarra had been under investigation by the Army Criminal Investigative Command for five months. Initially, the soldiers involved told investigators that they were part of a patrol that detained two Iraqi men for a late-night curfew violation on Jan. 3, according to Army documents released Friday. The two Iraqis were identified in the documents only as "Mr. Fadel" and "Mr. Fadhil."
The soldiers said they had stopped the two men, searched them and then released them at the side of the road, near the river, according to the documents. But investigators concluded that the soldiers had transported the two Iraqis to the bridge and pushed them off. Mr. Fadhil drowned, and Mr. Fadel swam ashore and later filed a formal complaint, the Army said. Military officials at Fort Carson and Pentagon later offered conflicting reports about whether any detainee actually died in the bridge incident.
Lt. Jack M. Saville and Sgt. First Class Tracey E. Perkins were charged with manslaughter, assault, conspiracy, making false statements and obstruction of justice. Sgt. Reggie Martinez was charged with manslaughter. Specialist Terry Bowman was charged with assault. Sergeant Martinez and Specialist Bowman were also charged with making a false official statement.
Sergeant Perkins was further charged with pushing another Iraqi civilian off a different bridge into the Tigris near Balad, Iraq, on or about Dec. 8, 2003.
The four soldiers are from the Third Brigade of the Fourth Division, based at Fort Carson, Colo. Among various assignments, the 5,000-member brigade conducted scouting and security missions in and around the Sunni triangle region north of Baghdad.
At least four senior officers, including the soldiers' battalion commander, Lt. Col. Nate Sassaman, were reprimanded for impeding the investigation into the incident, Army officials said.
The four soldiers charged now face what the armed forces call an Article 32, the military equivalent of a grand jury proceeding, which will be held at Fort Carson at an unspecified date, the Army said. At the conclusion of the proceeding, the investigating officer will recommend whether the charges should be referred to court-martial.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- justice
Disclosure of Authorized Interrogation Tactics Urged
Justice Dept. Concerned About Public Perception
By Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24875-2004Jul2?language=printer
The Justice Department is pressing the CIA to publicly reveal the specific interrogation methods authorized by the Bush administration for a handful of senior al Qaeda captives, senior department officials said.
Department officials said they believe the disclosure will help put to rest what they describe as a public misperception that Justice officials approved interrogation methods that bordered on torture.
The specific interrogation tactics have been classified since they were first used in questioning al Qaeda suspects picked up in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Much attention has focused on an August 2002 opinion from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that torture might be justified in some cases -- an opinion the department repudiated last week. The purpose of the 50-page opinion was to provide an overall legal framework for the interrogation of captives who might have information about planned attacks on the United States.
But the specific tactics authorized for individual interrogations were detailed in separate documents drafted about the same time by the CIA and approved by lawyers in the deputy attorney general's office and the department's criminal division, the senior Justice officials said. The department has refused to release the documents because they are classified, but officials said they did not violate U.S. law barring the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering.
The rules in question concern the interrogation of senior al Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaida and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who are held at undisclosed facilities operated by the CIA. The rules do not apply to the prisoners held by the military in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq and elsewhere.
In previous Washington Post interviews, former intelligence officials and U.S. national security officials, including several people who had witnessed the handling of prisoners, said some prisoners were subjected to "stress and duress" techniques. Some of the specific tactics have been made public in news reports, and they included sleep deprivation, the disorientation of detainees and tricking captives into believing they had been or would be taken for questioning to countries where they would be tortured.
One person involved in the Justice Department's effort to set rules for CIA interrogators said the methods approved in the documents involved the use of psychological manipulation, fear and "low grade physical stuff" that did not inflict injury. "It was not drugs or pain. We had to draw the line," said this source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.
The harshest interrogation technique approved for any captive, according to two people familiar with the authorized methods, was intended to elicit information from Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. The classified technique includes covering a captive with wet towels to cause discomfort and a drowning sensation, the sources said.
The CIA first asked the Justice Department to approve specific interrogation methods in late spring or early summer of 2002, after the capture of Zubaida, al Qaeda's operations chief, that March, said current and former government officials. In August 2002, the two agencies developed a list of approved techniques tailored to each high-value captive.
"The capture of a person prompted it," said the person knowledgeable about the rules set by the department. "We knew who the people were and what they had." This lawyer said that the CIA wanted guidance on harsh methods either because "they were worried or they wanted to try some different techniques."
A CIA spokesman said he would not comment on the techniques.
Zubaida was shot in the groin during his March 2002 capture, and some U.S. officials have suggested that his pain medication was manipulated in the early days of his interrogation to try to elicit information. During his initial questioning, Zubaida told interrogators what he thought they already knew and offered false leads, including one that caused an alert for a possible attack on the U.S. banking system, U.S. officials have said.
Still, much of Zubaida's information has proved valuable, officials have said, including information that led to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the U.S. citizen who allegedly planned to blow up apartment buildings in the United States.
In the months after the interrogation plan was developed for Zubaida, other specific plans -- all of them still classified -- were approved as more top al Qaeda leaders were captured, current and former Justice officials said.
The list of approved interrogation techniques for high-value captives is similar to a list approved by the Pentagon for the interrogation of al Qaeda and Taliban suspects at Guantanamo Bay, sources said. But the wet-towel technique approved for CIA use was not on the Pentagon list, they said.
These officials said that the Zubaida memo and the list of interrogation techniques were reviewed and edited by, among others, then-Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson and lawyers in the criminal division, including then-division chief Michael Chertoff, now a federal appeals court judge, according to current and former Justice Department officials.
Department officials said last week that they plan to brief Congress about the contents of those classified documents and hope they would be declassified soon.
The CIA has suspended the use of extraordinary interrogation techniques on al Qaeda captives after the controversy over the language of the Office of Legal Counsel memo. Current and former CIA officers said aggressive tactics have been halted to protect interrogators while lawyers from the Justice Department review and rewrite their broad legal opinion on the limits of techniques to be used in al Qaeda interrogations -- even as authorities warn that al Qaeda is planning a major attack on the United States in the coming months.
The FBI decided early on not to participate in interrogations of al Qaeda leaders because FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III knew they could be harsh, and he feared participation by his agents could be used to impeach their testimony in future court cases, law enforcement sources said. The CIA asked the bureau for help with Zubaida in March 2002, but Mueller refused to involve his agents, they said.
All the agencies involved agreed that senior al Qaeda members taken captive were combatants outside the U.S. criminal justice system, and that they were not going to be read Miranda warnings and given lawyers. But the FBI officials worried that if the captives were subjected to harsh treatment, they could never be brought before military tribunals after they had been wrung dry of information.
"Nobody really paid attention to what would happen at the end of the day," a former law enforcement official said.
Others involved in reviewing the information gleaned from al Qaeda captives said that the urgent need to get information to protect against additional attacks guided the decision making on interrogations, which have aided in the capture of a string of senior al Qaeda operatives. These include Ramzi Binalshibh and Mohammed in Pakistan, Omar al-Farouq in Indonesia, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Kuwait, Muhammad al Darbi in Yemen and Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin in Thailand.
"Lots of investigations we have been able to initiate and resolve are coming from interrogations of high-value targets," said Mike Rolince, a senior FBI counterterrorism official. "Some [information] comes quickly; some takes a lot of time."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Lawyers Seek Relief for 5 Detainees
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24878-2004Jul2.html
Lawyers filed petitions in federal court in Washington yesterday on behalf of five men detained for the last two years at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, demanding that the government release them or prove that it has reason to continue their captivity.
The Center for Constitutional Rights called the filings only the first round of habeas corpus petitions it would file on behalf of as many as 53 Guantanamo detainees, some of whom have been held for more than two years without attorneys.
The move came after a Supreme Court ruling that granted detainees the right to contest their incarcerations in U.S. courts. "This is just the beginning," said Barbara Orlansky, the organization's deputy legal counsel.
Also yesterday, government attorneys agreed during a telephone conference with lawyers for 12 detained Kuwaitis that the Pentagon would "move as expeditiously as possible" to allow them access to their clients at Guantanamo Bay, said Tom Wilner, one of the attorneys who took part.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly urged the government to move quickly in granting the defense lawyers access.
"I'm happy the government is finally acting reasonably, and we're grateful for that," said Wilner, who sued on behalf of the Kuwaitis two years ago.
Maj. Michael Shavers, a Defense Department spokesman, said yesterday the petitions do not alter the government's effort to determine how to comply with the ruling.
"The Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the administration are still working together to determine how we're going to comply with the Supreme Court direction," Shavers said. "No decision has been made at this point."
In Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court ruled that the 595 alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay have the right to ask a U.S. judge to set them free or justify why they are being detained.
Orlansky said her group scurried to file "as many petitions as were humanly possible" after the Supreme Court ruling. She contended that the government cannot make a case against these five detainees or many others. Some were arrested in Bosnia and Gambia, yet were accused of armed conflict in Afghanistan.
Staff writer John Mintz contributed to this report.
-------- terrorism
Bomb Was Uncovered Before NATO Summit
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24402-2004Jul2.html
ISTANBUL, July 2 -- Fourteen pounds of powerful explosives were found at Istanbul's airport on June 25, two days before President Bush arrived for a NATO summit and two hours before Turkey's prime minister landed at the heavily guarded facility, police confirmed on Friday.
The bomb was defused after being discovered in a parking garage, packed in a spare tire beside a parked car and linked to a cell phone for detonation by remote control, according to security officers and media reports. A U.S. law enforcement official said such a bomb "would have had a devastating effect."
Turkish and U.S. officials had repeatedly denied reports of the discovery, apparently in an effort to contain embarrassment at the security breach on the eve of a summit attended by more than 40 prime ministers and presidents.
The discovery was confirmed by a police spokesman on the day a car bomb killed at least six people in the eastern city of Van. That attack targeted the motorcade of the provincial governor, who escaped unharmed.
Police initially blamed Kurdish separatists, but the Kurdistan Workers' Party -- the guerrilla group that, using the new name Kurdistan Freedom and Democracy Congress, recently resumed attacks on government forces in southeastern Turkey -- denied blame.
The flurry of bombings has revived security concerns across Turkey, whose vital tourist industry was hurt when four massive car bombs killed more than 60 people in Istanbul last November. Those blasts, which were attributed to Turkish militants funded by al Qaeda, raised concerns that Islamic radicals might target the NATO summit last Monday and Tuesday.
But leftist groups asserted responsibility for three small blasts that marred the gathering, including an explosion aboard a Turkish Airlines jet about three hours before Bush left from the same airport.
Explosives hidden in a woman's wallet blew off the fingers of the cabin cleaner who found it after passengers left the plane. The device was apparently the first bomb smuggled aboard a commercial airliner since Richard Reid tried to ignite a bomb hidden in his shoe on a Miami-bound American Airlines flight in December 2001.
A Marxist group said it was responsible for the Turkish Airlines bomb and for the device found in the parking garage, boasting of its ability to best Turkish security efforts. The bombs reportedly were fashioned from the same unstable explosive amalgam used by Reid.
"We went in there despite the intensive security measures called 'zero risk,' " said a statement issued by the Armed Forces of the Poor and the Oppressed.
-------- POLITICS
-------- propaganda wars
Army Stage-Managed Fall of Hussein Statue
David Zucchino,
Sat Jul 3, 2004
Los Angeles Times
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=6&u=/latimests/20040703/ts_latimes/armystagemanagedfallofhusseinstatue
The Army's internal study of the war in Iraq criticizes some efforts by its own psychological operations units, but one spur-of-the-moment effort last year produced the most memorable image of the invasion.
As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel - not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images - who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.
After the colonel - who was not named in the report - selected the statue as a "target of opportunity," the psychological team used loudspeakers to encourage Iraqi civilians to assist, according to an account by a unit member.
But Marines had draped an American flag over the statue's face.
"God bless them, but we were thinking ... that this was just bad news," the member of the psychological unit said. "We didn't want to look like an occupation force, and some of the Iraqis were saying, 'No, we want an Iraqi flag!' "
Someone produced an Iraqi flag, and a sergeant in the psychological operations unit quickly replaced the American flag.
Ultimately, a Marine recovery vehicle toppled the statue with a chain, but the effort appeared to be Iraqi-inspired because the psychological team had managed to pack the vehicle with cheering Iraqi children.
--------
In Iran, the Staying Power of the Press
New Paper Pegs Survival to Discretion
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 3, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24440-2004Jul2?language=printer
TEHRAN -- The time does not appear auspicious for launching a newspaper in Iran.
In the country that the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders calls "the Middle East's largest prison for journalists," those dailies still available on newsstands brim with courtroom accounts of less fortunate publications, their editors summoned to the dock by the religious government that has closed more than 100 papers in the past four years.
At last month's meeting of the official press committee, a government monitoring board that includes representatives of Iran's news media and of its ruling clerics, a senior mullah named Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei threw two sugar bowls at an editor, then came around the table and bit him on the shoulder -- drawing blood, said the editor, Isa Saharkhiz, who pulled down his shirt to show the scab.
"There's no security for me," Saharkhiz said, "and therefore none for the press."
So why is Emadeddin Baghi, a veteran of three years in prison and seven shuttered papers, beaming as he goes about the business of launching an eighth publication?
Jumhuriyat, coming Sunday to newsstands up and down the sycamore-lined streets of Tehran, illustrates both the core resilience and the discreet new trajectory of the progressive impulse in Iran, where politics is not what it used to be.
"After all this repression, it would be a sign of hope to people," said Baghi, from a corner of a crowded table in a room swarming with young reporters. "We are still alive. We are still trying.
"We want to show that such a thing is still possible here."
The newspaper is arriving just when the reform movement in Iran is giving every appearance of being on the run, if not actually finished.
Earlier this year, the religious hard-liners who control Iran's judiciary and appointive offices used their unchecked powers to take over the country's elected parliament, disqualifying more than 2,000 mostly reformist candidates before February's elections. In the process, the right wing also completed the marginalization of the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, who proved powerless to prevent the disqualifications.
The struggle between reformists and hard-liners, which had long preoccupied Iran's political class, took a back seat to the debate over which wing of the ascendant right would consolidate political clout -- "pragmatic" conservatives or hard-liners such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
"If I want to be honest and talk about the future, it's somewhat confusing to me as well," said Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a jocular cleric who, as one of Khatami's vice presidents, stands to be out of a job next year. But the frown that clouded his amiable features lasted only a moment.
"In the social context," he added, "the future is very bright."
As it happens, the social context is where Jumhuriyat aims to thrive. Baghi trained as a sociologist, and his newspaper is founded on the widely held belief that most Iranians stopped caring about politics years ago, shortly after Khatami's 2001 reelection failed to produce either economic revival or changes in the way Iran is ruled. By the time the conservatives pushed aside the reformers, people had already stopped paying attention to a process that had little effect on their lives.
"People are sick of political debate," said Ali Reza Kermani, who has weathered the closing of three newspapers and quit his day job to join Jumhuriyat. "They want their voices to be heard, not just political debate expressed in jargon they don't understand."
Kermani, for example, will cover civic organizations, citizens' groups formed to address problems such as galloping drug abuse. Pages will be devoted to making sense of culture, entertainment and other topics for a population that remains disaffected but no longer sees hope in organized politics.
"There is a possibility this newspaper might be able to express the voice of the majority of the citizens who have never had a voice," said the paper's political editor, Parvin Emami, a former political prisoner who shows not a single hair from under her black head scarf.
"I've been told our job is to support certain rights in general without getting involved with political struggle inside the state," she continued. "I believe this is a step forward for Iranian journalism."
The strategy plots a backdoor route to making daily newspapers relevant in Iran to an extent not felt here since Khatami was swept into office in 1997 with almost 70 percent of the vote. With his landslide came scores of newspapers, an explosion of free expression that turned every Tehran intersection into a newspaper kiosk, with vendors staggering under the weight of a dozen dailies drivers clamored to buy.
"In my entire life I have never experienced free journalism the way we experienced it after Mr. Khatami's election," said Goli Emami, a book publisher and translator not related to the editor. "This is one credit I will give him. We used to buy six newspapers! Six! And we enjoyed reading them. My God, such interesting articles. So much zest."
The vibrant press was intimately connected to the reform movement, sometimes to strong effect. In the late 1990s, Baghi wrote a series of articles on what became known as the serial murders case. His reporting exposed hard-liner hit squads as assassins of prominent reformers.
For his trouble, Baghi served three years in prison. But the killings stopped, and the country's main intelligence agency came under Khatami's control.
"We knew this was the most vulnerable point for the conservatives," Baghi said. "It was going to show who they really are. And after that, they stopped, because of public outrage.
"Three years in prison is nothing," he said.
It was, however, three years when Baghi was not publishing. Eleven other journalists remain in prison on a variety of charges, and many more have fled abroad. The minimum requirement for a free press is that journalists avoid running afoul of the law, a fact underlined when conservatives passed the draconian press law that was used to close Iran's 100-plus papers and even some Web sites.
Whether Jumhuriyat can avoid the chopping block is a topic of intense discussion in the three crammed rooms where the staff labors.
"I'm not very optimistic," said Marzyeh Soleymany, a translator who said she had seen five previous papers shut down. "And also knowing the editors here, it would be very hard to confine themselves to subjects that are not sensitive."
In Iran, everyone knows the red lines. A newspaper will be shuttered for directly criticizing Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who as supreme religious leader holds ultimate authority in Iran. Also forbidden is any serious suggestion that it might be better to abandon the world's only theocracy in favor of representative democracy.
Both ideas are discussed openly among Iranians, and in a recent news meeting Baghi scoffed at an article noting that all political parties must pledge fealty to Khamenei. "What's the point of having different political parties but saying they're all obedient to the leader?" he asked. "They are different parties. They should have different positions."
But it's something else to print such sentiments. In Iran, even the name of the new newspaper is "very provocative," Baghi acknowledged. "Jumhuriyat" is the Farsi word for "Republic." Baghi noted that another newspaper had already taken the more acceptable "Islamic Republic."
"Working in the field of journalism in Iran is just like being an acrobat," he said.
Yet as the staff prepared a series of dummy issues in advance of Sunday's debut, senior editor Mohammed Alipour professed less worry about overstepping boundaries than about producing a bland paper. The public will expect certain things of Jumhuriyat, he said.
"Everybody knows us," said Alipour, whose weekly magazine was among 13 publications closed on May Day in 1999, when the four-year crackdown officially began. "They expect us to provide them with good quality material."
He rustled a sheaf of papers. Reporters write in longhand, right to left, in Farsi, then hand the sheets to an editor before carrying the copy next door to a composing room lined with desktop computers and typists. Too much of what he was seeing, Alipour said, was mealy-mouthed.
"After all these newspaper closings, there is no need to tell reporters what not to write. They have got this censoring device in their minds. They are very, very careful. It's bad. They're not very curious about what they're writing about.
"They always have this fear: If they lose their job, what else are they going to do? This becomes part of their nature, part of journalism in Iran. And nobody can do anything about it."
The fear does not seem to have affected Baghi, a tall, bearded man with a quiet charisma. Like most of Iran's leading journalists, he goes about his day with a suspended sentence hanging over his head, one year in prison that conservative officials can impose whenever they like. On the sidewalk outside the newspaper office, he reached into his pocket. A summons had come in the day's mail.
"I didn't tell anyone," Baghi said, with a shy smile. "I don't want to disappoint them. After we publish, I'll tell them."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Citizen Carlos
Jays' Delgado fights for justice on Puerto Rican island Vieques ravaged by six decades of U.S. weapons testing
GEOFF BAKER SPORTS REPORTER,
Jul. 3, 2004
Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1088806210136&call_pageid=969907739730&col=970081600908&tacodalogin=no
VIEQUES, Puerto Rico-For more than a year Carlos Delgado has been staging his own private protest. Its origins are rooted on the tranquil shores of this picturesque island, until recently a testing site for bombs and missiles used by the United States in Iraq.
When "God Bless America" is played during major league baseball games in some U.S. cities, the staunchly anti-war Blue Jays first baseman refuses to stand outside the dugout.
"I never stay outside for `God Bless America,'" Delgado said. "I actually don't think people have noticed it. I don't (stand) because I don't believe it's right, I don't believe in the war."
Delgado was the first high-profile athlete to speak out against the U.S. Navy's six-decade presence in Vieques, where it used the lush green hillsides and pristine beaches as the prime testing facility for the weapons of the entire Atlantic Fleet.
The Jays slugger had heard some of the island's 9,300 residents complaining about how uranium-depleted shells used in the tests were causing abnormally high rates of cancer and other serious illnesses. By the time the Navy finally did pull out of Vieques on May 1, 2003, it left behind a community terrified by health concerns, dealing with unemployment close to 50 per cent and facing unresolved development and cleanup issues.
Small wonder that Puerto Rican native Delgado shows little patience today for the flag-waving, pro-military pageantry seen at major league games since the Sept. 11 terror attacks and U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
While the conflict in Iraq and the problems confronting Vieques are separate issues, they are also intertwined. That's because the fishermen, farmers and shopkeepers of this island unwillingly paid a huge price so the U.S. could certify the weaponry used in Iraq.
Delgado was already "anti-war" before being involved in Vieques and now has some choice opinions about U.S. foreign policy and the Iraq conflict.
"It's a very terrible thing that happened on Sept. 11," Delgado said. "It's (also) a terrible thing that happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. I just feel so sad for the families that lost relatives and loved ones in the war.
"But I think it's the stupidest war ever," he said. "Who are you fighting against? You're just getting ambushed now. We have more people dead now, after the war, than during the war. You've been looking for weapons of mass destruction. Where are they at? You've been looking for over a year. Can't find them. I don't support that. I don't support what they do. I think it's just stupid."
The Jays and Delgado were in Puerto Rico last night to open a three-game series against the Montreal Expos. While an injured Delgado won't play in the series - and heads to Syracuse tomorrow for a Triple-A rehabilitation assignment - he is attending the first two games to sign autographs and deal with a slew of local media requests.
Delgado didn't get involved in Vieques - 20 kilometres off the southeastern tip of mainland Puerto Rico and accessible only by small plane or a thrice-daily ferry - because of his anti-war views. But he flies back every winter from his mainland hometown in Aguadilla, and sees first-hand the cost of testing America's weapons.
"You're dealing with health, with poverty, with the roots of an entire community, both economically and environmentally," he said. "This is way bigger than just a political or military issue. Because the military left last year and they haven't cleaned the place up yet."
Large sections of the former Navy base, which took up two-thirds of the island's 13,000 hectares, remain sealed off because of unexploded shells and contamination by heavy metals. The reopened part is now a wildlife preserve.
Having so much underdeveloped land gives Vieques a soothing calmness beloved by its handful of frequent visitors, who fear a future influx of tourist hordes more than any talk of contamination further up the island. There are no traffic lights in the two towns of Esperanza and Isabel II, where children ride on horseback alongside cars, country-style inns are the norm and 10 p.m. is the preferred closing time.
Activists who'd spent previous years fighting the Navy are now lobbying for a development plan that will help the economy, give locals control of the land and curb massive resort projects.
The struggle by those activists to push the Navy out ever since it expropriated the land in 1941 enjoyed brief moments of media attention. International wire photos in 1979 showed local fishermen in tiny yola boats using slingshots to fire rocks at U.S. Coast Guard vessels, while some activists got noticed for draping the Vieques flag over the Statue of Liberty in New York City.
But it wasn't until civilian David Sanes was killed by an errant bomb during Navy manoeuvres on April 19, 1999 that the Vieques protests made political headway. Delgado saw news about the death on television and, like many Puerto Ricans, wanted to do something.
His father, Carlos Sr., a man with political connections throughout the U.S. protectorate of Puerto Rico, introduced him to an old Socialist Party pal named Ismael Guadalupe.
The high school teacher, a leading figure in the island's protest movement, had spent six months in prison in 1979 for trespassing on the Navy base.
"He wanted to help out with more than just the situation with the Navy," Guadalupe, 59, said of Delgado. "He wanted to help the people there. He wanted to help the children."
Delgado was from a different world than the resourceful, street-tough activists of Vieques, like Carmelo Felix Mata, who built a ramshackle home on hillside land belonging to the Navy in 1989. When authorities came to arrest Mata, he unleashed swarms of bees from hives he'd kept and chased them back down the hill.
More homes sprouted up in what became a rebellious neighbourhood known as "Mount Carmelo."
"I've had 178 court cases against me and I've never spent a day in jail," Mata, 66, said defiantly this week as he limped around his hilltop property, in a neighbourhood strewn with signs depicting cartoon-like bees that salute his triumph.
Guadalupe and fellow activists would sneak onto the Navy base at night by cutting holes in a perimeter fence alongside Mata's disputed property. They'd walk a 10-hour route towards the target area, wait for the weapons testing to start and then halt it immediately by firing flare guns to signal their unwanted presence.
The activists needed Delgado outside of jail, so they couldn't risk taking him along for their land and sea incursions on to the Navy base.
His biggest contribution was in lending the cause his name - joining other high-profile supporters like the Dalai Lama, Hillary Clinton, singer Ricky Martin and actor Martin Sheen. Delgado, together with Martin and boxer Felix Trinidad, took out full-page advertisements about Vieques in The New York Times and Washington Post. He has also donated $100,000 (U.S.) to youth sports, schools and activists on the island.
"He's a well-known person, based in the United States, and he has a lot of fans," Guadalupe said. "That's why he is so important to us. It's not going to make him more famous to be involved in the Vieques struggle. He might actually lose popularity because of it."
Delgado didn't fear reprisals for his newspaper ads critical of the Navy in April of 2001. "What are they going to do, kick me out of the game?" Delgado said. "Take away my endorsements?"
But since the Sept. 11 attacks, baseball players have gone even more out of their way to avoid criticizing the government, or military.
"We're not doing anything wrong," Delgado countered. "Sometimes, you've just got to break the mould. You've got to push it a little bit or else you can't get anything done."
Robert Rabin, the Boston-born director of the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques, the island's main activist group, shares that sentiment.
"I know that people will ask why Carlos Delgado would want to engage in some anti-American activity like the struggle in Vieques," said Rabin, who moved to the island in 1980 to write a college thesis, married a local and now runs the historical museum. "I hear this all the time, but consider it my duty to speak out when I think my government is being unjust. People say that's anti-American. I say that's what being an American is about."
Rabin has been arrested three times and served five months in jail in 2002 for engaging in civil disobedience. He used part of a $20,000 (U.S.) donation by Delgado in 2000 to fund youth sports leagues in Vieques and a permanent "Peace and Justice" protest camp directly across from the main Navy gates.
Rabin figures his job was only half done when the Navy pulled out and says an upcoming fight over the development and cleanup phase of Vieques is equally important.
The Navy pullout was bittersweet for Guadalupe, who found out days later that his wife, Norma, had breast cancer.
Guadalupe fears the Navy's shells made his wife sick. A pending class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Vieques residents, but the Navy denies it caused the illnesses.
"She had no history of cancer in her family," he said, sadness on his face. "My brother is also a cancer patient and we don't have a family history either."
Delgado can't make such pain vanish with his money. He instead focuses on the personal ways he can make a difference, like visiting a school, or hiring a helicopter to fly him from Aguadilla to Vieques each January for a special Three Kings Day celebration. At this year's event, he handed out gifts to children and ran a baseball clinic.
"You'll need millions and millions of dollars to clean Vieques up," Delgado said. "So, we try to make (the money) as effective as we can. We make it work for kids. I can't clean up Vieques by myself. It's going to take a lot of people."
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March Gives Impetus to Hong Kong Democracy Movement
July 3, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/03/international/asia/03HONG.html?pagewanted=all
HONG KONG, July 2 - The unexpected size of a march here on Thursday has put renewed pressure on the local government and Beijing to allow greater democracy, but little change is likely until after legislative elections on Sept. 12, politicians, activists and analysts said Friday.
The enormous crowd, estimated at 200,000 to 530,000 protesters, was evidence that the Chinese government's efforts to dampen democratic sentiment here have not succeeded. But with Beijing having issued a legally binding restriction in April on further moves toward democracy, any changes will have to be negotiated with the central government, which seldom makes decisions quickly.
Democracy advocates and Beijing supporters alike are now gearing up for a rarity in China: what seems certain to be a hard-fought election campaign. No more marches are planned before the elections for the Legislative Council, democrats said on Friday. Instead, politicians and activists will focus on winning votes and increasing the turnout.
"The ball is in Beijing's court now," said Joseph Cheng, the convener of Power for Democracy, one of the groups that organized the march.
But he also acknowledged that "any meaningful change of strategy on the part of Beijing will probably not appear until after the election."
China's leaders have sought to contain the push for more democracy here, and prevent it from spreading to the mainland, while helping their favorite candidates in the coming elections. They have mobilized the mostly pro-Beijing business leaders to speak out and have emphasized Chinese cultural ties through gestures like sending a relic of one of the Buddha's fingers to be exhibited here this spring.
Michael Davis, a professor of law and public affairs at Chinese University of Hong Kong, said that based on his recent visit to Beijing, word of the march on Thursday would spread on the mainland despite the government's efforts to prevent it. "I lectured a room full of prosecutors on the mainland, and they were all cheering democracy in Hong Kong," he said.
Some of the signs and chants at the march were directly critical of Beijing. On Thursday night, the official New China News Agency reported, an unidentified mainland official said, "Some posters and slogans put up by some organizers of the rally are improper and go against the common wishes of Hong Kong residents for seeking stability, development and harmony."
During a meeting with the legislature on Friday, Donald Tsang, Hong Kong's chief secretary and second-ranking official, turned down a request by Democratic Party lawmakers that he ask Beijing to reconsider its ban on general elections here for the chief executive in 2007 and for all lawmakers in 2008.
The standing committee of the National People's Congress, China's Parliament, ruled that universal suffrage should not be granted for the next few years because it might damage Hong Kong's prosperity and stability and aggravate social divisions. Mr. Tsang urged lawmakers to pursue greater democracy within the restrictions laid out by Beijing.
The standing committee's ruling left open two options for giving Hong Kong's people a greater say in their future. One is to expand the Election Committee, which chooses the chief executive and now consists of just 800 prominent citizens, most of whom have ties to the mainland. The second option is to expand the so-called functional constituencies, which represent industries and professions and elect half of the seats in the legislature. The general public elects the rest based on where the voters live.
As soon as it gained control of Hong Kong in 1997, Beijing disbanded the legislature and shrank voter rights in the functional constituencies so that most of them would be controlled by business leaders with investments on the mainland.
Martin Lee, the founding chairman of the Democratic Party, said broadening functional constituencies and the Election Commission was already under discussion but was no substitute for general elections. "Those who participated in the demonstration will not be happy with that," he said.
In an odd game of managing expectations, Beijing's allies here are now predicting that democrats will capture a majority of the legislature for the first time in the September election, while the democrats are predicting that they will not.
Ma Lik, the chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, the biggest pro-Beijing party, said the march had given pro-democracy candidates "a very big chance" of securing a majority.
But Lee Cheuk-yan, a pro-democracy lawmaker, who is not related to Martin Lee, said a pro-democracy majority was unlikely. Functional constituencies elect 30 of the legislature's 60 members, and only five of those seats are occupied by pro-democracy activists.
To win a majority of the legislature, the democrats need to hold on to those 5 functional constituency seats and win 26 of the 30 directly elected seats. Mr. Lee said that would not be possible unless 70 to 80 percent of the population voted. Turnout has been around 45 percent in previous elections and is higher among pro-Beijing voters.
But Mr. Ma predicted that the willingness of so many people to demonstrate on Thursday despite extreme heat, humidity and air pollution showed public enthusiasm for change.
"This is why they bore the heat instead of staying at home," Mr. Ma said.
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Delgado: I don't stand for "God Bless America"
Saturday, July 03, 2004
http://www.benmaller.com/archives/2004/july/03-delgado_i_dont_stand_for_god_bless_america.html
For more than a year Carlos Delgado has been staging his own private protest. Its origins are rooted on the tranquil shores of this picturesque island, until recently a testing site for bombs and missiles used by the United States in Iraq.
When "God Bless America" is played during major league baseball games in some U.S. cities, the staunchly anti-war Blue Jays first baseman refuses to stand outside the dugout.
"I never stay outside for `God Bless America,'" Delgado said. "I actually don't think people have noticed it. I don't (stand) because I don't believe it's right, I don't believe in the war."
Delgado was the first high-profile athlete to speak out against the U.S. Navy's six-decade presence in Vieques, where it used the lush green hillsides and pristine beaches as the prime testing facility for the weapons of the entire Atlantic Fleet.
The Jays slugger had heard some of the island's 9,300 residents complaining about how uranium-depleted shells used in the tests were causing abnormally high rates of cancer and other serious illnesses. By the time the Navy finally did pull out of Vieques on May 1, 2003, it left behind a community terrified by health concerns, dealing with unemployment close to 50 per cent and facing unresolved development and cleanup issues.
Small wonder that Puerto Rican native Delgado shows little patience today for the flag-waving, pro-military pageantry seen at major league games since the Sept. 11 terror attacks and U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
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