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NUCLEAR
Experts Try to Affect Romanian Nuke Laws
Tehran's contemptuous response
Iran Lawmakers Seek Uranium Enriched Again
U.S. Flies Radioactive Items Out of Iraq
Inside Israel's secret campaign to deny Saddam the bomb
IAEA chief wants Israelis, Arabs to work together for nuclear-free zone
New bid to end Israel's nuclear secrecy
Israel bars entry to British journalist who broke Vanunu story
US, Israel highlight Iran's nuclear weapons program
UN nuclear chief plays down hopes of breakthrough on Israel trip
Concern over Israel's nuclear arsenal
Israel Energy Commission Unveils Web Site
ElBaradei Will Not Pressure Israel on Nuclear Issue
U.N. Nuke Watchdog Chief Visits Israel
Nuclear fuel reprocessing tests should be frozen.
Australia to sign missile defence deal with US
Australia, U.S. to Work Together on Missile Defense
Ukraine gets 42-million-dollar EBRD loan for nuclear reactor safety
Ohio Wants U.S. to Freeze Nuclear Waste Removal
MILITARY
Ex-Minister Leads In Indonesian Vote
Blair Says Iraqi Arms May Never Be Found
U.S. ENDS SANCTIONS ON RUSSIAN DEFENSE FIRMS
China's web surfers
Voters in Much of Europe Seem to Want the Ins Out
Iraqi president answers questions
US troops kill Iraqi preparing wedding feast
Iraqi family disputes U.S. military account of man's death
Few Detainees in Iraq Are Foreign-USA Today
Iraqi: U.S. Soldiers Laughed at Drowning
Uneasy Allies on Patrol in Baghdad
U.S. Raid Targets Militant Network
Car Bomb in Town North of Baghdad Kills 13
15 Miles Offshore, Safeguarding Iraq's Oil Lifeline
Zarqawi group claims deadly attack on US marines in western Iraq: Internet
Israel's Parliament Debates Settlements
Six Palestinians and Israeli Killed in Clashes
Gaza Plan Foes Could Try to Kill Sharon - Minister
U.S. Presses Israel on West Bank Outposts
Landmine kills 13 in Nepal
World War Two Mines Found Off Spanish Coast
Exiled Saudi Is Dissident to Some, Terrorist to Others
U.S. Says Israel Not Involved in Iraq Interrogations
Saudi secret service 'riddled' with al-Qa'ida
U.S. Army Changed by Iraq, but for Better or Worse?
Mexicans Disrupt Marine's Funeral
Abducted Marine Is Free, His Brother Says
Pilot in Mistaken Bombing Reprimanded
Brother Says Missing Marine in Iraq Freed
Lawyer: Saddam trial `illegal'
Bush should be charged for war crimes
Clinton's Life: In the Grip of Mass Murder
Milosevic's Ill Health Delays Defense Case
Milosevic Trial to Resume on July 14, Judges Say
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Security Intensifies for Political Conventions
Airport Screeners' New Guard
U.S. Bars 42 Ships July 1 - 5 for Security Flaws
Coast Guard Withdraws Barred Ships Data
You've Got Mail (and Court Says Others Can Read It)
Few Detainees in Iraq Are Foreign Fighters
Life at Guantanamo Bay different from Abu Ghraib
POLITICS
Sept. 11 Panel Repeats Iraq - Osama Tie Weak
C.I.A. Held Back Iraqi Arms Data, Officials Say
Parties to Allow Bloggers to Cover Conventions for First Time
OTHER
European Environmental Rules Propel Change in U.S.
H.I.V. Infection Rate in Asia Increases Sharply, U.N. Finds
The terror of AIDS
Air crews look at radiation risk from flying
ACTIVISTS
US deserter's Canadian campaign
Accommodating the Protesters
'60s Redux: Cops at the Peace Rally
Art suppressed yet honed by war
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- europe
Experts Try to Affect Romanian Nuke Laws
July 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Romania-Nuclear-Seminar.html
CLUJ, Romania (AP) -- Romanian and French scientists met Tuesday in a seminar that aims to harmonize Romania's nuclear legislation with EU standards for safety and environmental protection.
Some 130 scientists, experts and Romanian government officials were taking part in the five-day seminar that opened Monday in the Transylvanian city of Cluj.
The seminar, organized by the city's Babes-Bolyai University, gives nuclear and environmental experts a forum for sharing information, said Iustinian Petrescu, head of the university's department of environmental studies.
Among those participating was the head of legal affairs at the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, as well as Romanian government officials for nuclear issues.
Romania is aiming to improve its nuclear legislation, as it hopes to join the European Union in 2007.
However the Eastern European country has never suffered any nuclear accidents, and for decades has not had a Soviet-era nuclear plant on its soil.
A Canadian-designed nuclear power plant, opened seven years ago in the southeastern city of Cernavoda, provides 10 percent of the country's electricity with only one of its four reactors in use.
-------- iran
Tehran's contemptuous response
July 06, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040705-095033-8373r.htm
The latest rebuke from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last month has done nothing to alter Iran's continuing pursuit of an illicit nuclear weapons program. If anything, it appears to have intensified the regime's defiant response to the concerns of the United States and its European allies. Tehran announced last week that it will resume building centrifuges - a sure sign of its determination to go forward with its atomic-weapons program. During a visit to Mexico on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi declared that Iran has a legitimate right to produce these nuclear components. The issue is but the latest example of Tehran's acting in bad faith.
Last fall, Iran reached an agreement with Britain, France and Germany to suspend its uranium processing and enrichment activities. But in January, the regime brazenly announced it was building centrifuges - wrongly asserting that the agreement didn't apply to them. Then, on April 9, Iran promised to suspend production of centrifuge parts. But, as the IAEA reported last month, Tehran decided to apply the suspension only to three state-run facilities (while centrifuge work continued at three private companies). Instead of rectifying the situation by stopping the illicit activity, Iran effectively is telling the IAEA that it will do whatever it pleases.
Mr. Kharrazi's statements are illustrative of Tehran's long-standing approach to international concern about its nuclear-weapons program: Cheat for as long as possible. When caught in the act, promise to reform. When caught breaking this promise, act defiantly and tell the international community to get lost.
This sort of behavior has been going on in one form or another for decades. In November, the IAEA issued a 30-page report showing how the Islamist regime in Tehran has been deceiving the world about its nuclear efforts since the mid-1980s.
The effort by the so-called "EU 3" - Britain, France and Germany - to put together a compromise in which Iran ends its effort to develop nuclear weapons is essentially dead. While the United States has taken a somewhat tougher stance, it has shown no stomach for setting a deadline for Iran to comply with its commitments under the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The toughest action that Washington seems prepared to take right now is to try to muster support for a U.N. Security Council resolution denouncing Tehran's noncompliance. That would not occur before September - when the next meeting of the IAEA's governing board will take place.
In House testimony last month, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton emphasized the fact that Iran's nuclear program is at the center of a dangerous military-industrial complex. Tehran is forging ahead with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and developing the means to deliver deadly payloads to targets in Western Europe, Israel and Turkey. The question now is whether Washington and its allies have a strategy - beyond moral suasion and the threat of U.N. condemnation - that will stop Iran from making this arsenal more dangerous in the months ahead.
--------
Iran Lawmakers Seek Uranium Enriched Again
July 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Lawmakers have launched a bill pushing the Iranian government to resume uranium enrichment, a move that would put Iran at loggerheads with Western nations who fear its nuclear program aims to produce weapons.
The government does not need the bill to resume enrichment and has already indicated its defiance of Western pressure by declaring that it will resume building centrifuges used to enrich uranium.
The purpose of the bill, which has been passed by the foreign relations subcommittee, appears to be to apply pressure on the government to pursue the nuclear program.
The United States suspects Iran is covertly building nuclear weapons. Iran has long denied this, saying its program is strictly for generating electricity. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. watchdog, has rebuked Iran for failing to declare certain aspects of its nuclear activities and has demanded greater transparency from the country.
``The committee approved the bill a few days back. If approved by the parliament, the government will be required to restart enrichment,'' lawmaker Kazem Jalali told The Associated Press Tuesday.
The bill must still be endorsed by the parliament's national security and foreign policy committee. Jalali said that committee will consider it next week. If accepted, the bill will go before the full parliament for a vote.
After being passed by parliament, the bill could still be vetoed by the Guardian Council, a hardline body that vets legislation. However, it is unlikely that the council would reject this bill.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment -- and the building of centrifuges -- under pressure from the IAEA and in a deal with Britain, Germany and France, which have been looking to resolve the standoff.
Tehran decided to resume building centrifuges after the IAEA rebuke and it charged that the three European nations did not live up to their end of the deal.
If Iran were to enrich uranium to a high level, it could use the output for a nuclear bomb. Iran denies this intention, saying it wants to control the whole nuclear fuel cycle -- from extracting uranium ore to enriching it to a low grade for use as reactor fuel.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Iran was prepared to restart building centrifuges June 29, but he and other officials have refused to say whether Iran actually did so or not.
-------- iraq
U.S. Flies Radioactive Items Out of Iraq
July 6, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Iraq-Dirty-Bomb.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a secret operation, the United States last month removed from Iraq nearly two tons of uranium and hundreds of highly radioactive items that could have been used in a so-called dirty bomb, the Energy Department disclosed Tuesday.
The nuclear material was secured from Iraq's former nuclear research facility and airlifted out of the country to an undisclosed Energy Department laboratory for further analysis, the department said in a statement.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham described the previously undisclosed operation, which was concluded June 23, as ``a major achievement'' in an attempt to ``keep potentially dangerous nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists.''
The haul included a ``huge range'' of radioactive items used for medical and industrial purposes, said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Much of the material ``was in powdered form, which is easily dispersed,'' said Wilkes.
The statement provided only scant details about the material taken from Iraq, but said it included ``roughly 1,000 highly radioactive sources'' that ``could potentially be used in a radiological dispersal device,'' or dirty bomb.
Also ferried out of Iraq was 1.95 tons of low-enriched uranium, the department said.
Wilkes said ``a huge range of different isotopes'' were secured in the joint Energy Department and Defense Department operation. They had been used in Iraq for a range of medical and industrial purposes, such as testing oil wells and pipelines.
Uranium is not suitable for making a dirty bomb. But some of the other radioactive material -- including cesium-137, colbalt-60 and strontium -- could have been valuable to a terrorist seeking to fashion a terror weapon.
Such a device would not trigger a nuclear explosion, but would use conventional explosives to spread radioactive debris. While few people would probably be killed or seriously affected by the radiation, such an explosion could cause panic, make a section of a city uninhabitable for some time and require cumbersome and expensive cleanup.
Nuclear nonproliferation advocates said securing radioactive material is important all over the world.
A recent study by researchers at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies concluded it is ``all but certain'' that some kind of dirty bomb will be set off by a terrorist group in the years ahead. There are just too many radioactive sources available across the globe, the report said.
``This is something we should be doing not just in Iraq,'' Ivan Oelrich, a physicist at the Federation of American Scientists, said when asked to comment on the Energy Department announcement.
Oelrich hesitated to characterize the threat posed by the uranium and other radioactive material secured in the secret U.S. operation because few details were provided about the material. The Energy Department refused to say where the material was shipped.
But Oelrich said it is widely believed that medical and industrial isotopes can be used in a dirty bomb.
The low-enriched uranium taken from Iraq, if it is of the 3 percent to 5 percent level of enrichment common in fuel for commercial power reactors, could have been of value to a country developing enrichment technology.
``It speeds up the process,'' Oelrich said, adding that 1.95 tons of low-enriched uranium could be used to produce enough highly enriched uranium to make a single nuclear bomb.
On the Net:
Energy Department: http://www.energy.gov/
Federation of American Scientists: http://www.fas.org/
----
Inside Israel's secret campaign to deny Saddam the bomb
By Ellis Shuman
July 6, 2004
http://web.israelinsider.com/bin/en.jsp?enPage=ArticlePage&enDisplay=view&enDispWhat=object&enDispWho=Article%5El3822&enZone=Culture&enVersion=0&
When the United States invaded Iraq last year, one of the main objectives was to deny Saddam Hussein the use of weapons of mass destruction. More than two decades earlier, Israeli intelligence sources had already confirmed that Hussein was conducting a secret atomic weapons program and gearing up to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
When Israeli Air Force pilots staged a daring military operation and bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, world reaction was harsh and the United States joined in the universal condemnation of Israel. The world would not be as safe today if these brave men had failed in their mission.
Now, for the first time, it is possible to read an inside account of one of the most daring military operations in recent history.
Raid on the Sun (Broadway Books, April 2004), by Rodger W. Claire, tells the story of Hussein's relentless attempts to achieve nuclear weapons as part of his plan to obliterate Israel, and of the small group of Israeli pilots whose complicated, and nearly impossible mission would be to cripple that plan in efforts to safeguard their country.
For more than two decades, details of the attack, as well as the identities of the pilots, remained classified. But Claire, an investigative reporter, gained access to the Israeli commander who planned the raid and subsequently was the first journalist to speak to the pilots.
Raid on the Sun reads like an exciting thriller; in the tradition of Black Hawk Down it captures all the details of the behind-the-scenes political intrigue, the state-of-the-art fighter bombers and the personal stories of the pilots whose mission faced seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Claire spoke with David Ivry, the former Israeli Air Force commander who later became Israel's Ambassador to the United States. Claire interviewed the IAF pilots who participated in the raid. One of the pilots with whom Claire spoke by phone was Ilan Ramon. Ramon agreed to get together with Claire for an extensive follow-up interview after he returned from participating in the Columbia space shuttle mission in 2003 as Israel's first astronaut. Tragically, that meeting never took place.
"You must be successful, or we as a people are doomed," then-IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Rafael Eitan told the mission pilots before they left on Operation Babylon.
Flying to the east, with the setting sun behind them, the IAF pilots beat the odds and leveled the Osirak reactor in just one minute and twenty seconds.
Raid on the Sun, an extraordinary true story of Israel's successful air raid that destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor, is fast-paced, suspenseful, and an exciting read.
Claire is a former magazine editor at Playboy and Los Angeles magazines. His the author of numerous articles and two screenplays, and lives in Los Angeles.
Raid on the Sun By Rodger W. Claire Broadway Books April 2004
-------- israel
IAEA chief wants Israelis, Arabs to work together for nuclear-free zone
CAIRO (AFP)
Jul 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040706151115.mh3x4n4n.html
The head of the UN atomic energy watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, said Tuesday he wanted to convince Israel and Arab countries to work together to build a nuclear-free region.
"The aim of discussions with Israeli officials is to close the gap between Israel's position and that of other countries in the Middle East," ElBaradei told reporters in Cairo before boarding a flight to Tel Aviv.
Israel is allegedly the only state in the region to have the bomb.
Arab countries want the Jewish state to disarm its nuclear capabilities as a "precedent to peace" and "a step towards building trust in order to accelerate the peace process", said ElBaradei.
"The aim of my visit to Israel is to discuss the possibility of establishing strategic peace talks in the region," said ElBaradei, expected to meet with senior Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Many foreign experts believe Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal of around 200 warheads.
The Jewish state has refused to sign up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty that would allow UN inspectors to conduct snap inspections of its atomic sites and programmes.
----
New bid to end Israel's nuclear secrecy
06.07.2004
REUTERS
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?reportID=56522&storyID=3576661
VIENNA - The head of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, Mohamed ElBaradei, goes to Israel tomorrow to try to persuade it to open up its nuclear programme.
But yesterday, officials said Israel was not ready to scrap its atomic arsenal.
Under its policy of "strategic ambiguity", Israel neither admits nor denies having nuclear weapons.
But it is assumed to have up to 200 warheads, based on estimates of the amount of plutonium Israeli reactors have produced.
No breakthroughs are expected, but one Western diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency said ElBaradei would meet senior Israeli officials, possibly including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said it would be partly a "routine visit", but ElBaradei intended "to promote the concept of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East".
Israel welcomes the idea of a Middle East free of weapons of mass destruction.
But it says disarmament has to wait until peace has been achieved in the region.
"We need ... to rid the Middle East of all weapons of mass destruction," ElBaradei said recently. "Israel agrees with that, but says it has to be after peace agreements.
"My proposal is maybe we need to start to have a parallel dialogue on security at the same time as we're working on the peace process."
A diplomat close to the agency went further, saying: "No Middle East peace process can work until we deal with the issue of weapons of mass destruction."
Until recently, diplomats in Vienna were saying that ElBaradei might try to persuade Israel to acknowledge it had nuclear weapons, as a first step towards disarmament. But Israeli officials and diplomats in Vienna now say this will not happen.
Asked if Israel was ready to abandon its strategic ambiguity policy, a senior Israeli official said: "Absolutely not. The policy has served the country well for decades against very hostile Middle East neighbours.
"Only when that regional situation improves can we seriously consider a change of policy."
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said a nuclear weapons-free Middle East would be possible only when the threat to Israel from Arab and Islamic countries was gone.
"Then we can put a great deal more pressure on Israel to abandon its undoubted nuclear weapons programme, which has been there ... for defensive purposes," Straw said.
Analysts said the timing of the trip was significant.
The Middle East peace process has stalled, other nations are increasingly suspicious of the atomic programme of Iran, a declared enemy of Israel, and other Middle East states have demanded that the atomic energy agency put pressure on Israel.
Analysts cited a belief in the Middle East that Israel has been given special treatment by its ally the United States.
Tehran insists its nuclear programme is peaceful but has been subjected to intense scrutiny from the atomic agency because of US-led allegations that it is secretly trying to build nuclear weapons in breach of Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations.
Israel has never signed the treaty, and is the only Middle Eastern state that has not done so.
The weapons
Analysts concluded Israel had produced as many as 200 nuclear weapons on the basis of disclosures from nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu to a British newspaper in 1986 - making Israel the world's fifth biggest nuclear power.
Recent United States intelligence assessments put the arsenal at around 80 missiles.
There have been no serious security leaks since Vanunu gave information about the reactor in the desert town of Dimona.
- Delivery systems
Analysts believe Israel developed two rudimentary atomic bombs before the 1967 Middle East war.
Since then, Israel has gained long-range delivery systems such as missiles, submarines and warplanes, according to analysts citing satellite images.
Some experts believe Israel also has "tactical" nuclear arms - mine-sized bombs that could turn battles without causing widespread devastation.
- "Strategic ambiguity"
Israel maintains a policy known as "strategic ambiguity" around its non-conventional capabilities to ward off regional foes while trying to avoid an arms race.
Iraq and Libya are known to have unsuccessfully pursued nuclear weapons and Israel is believed to be the only country in the Middle East to have them.
Israel and the US accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons, a charge that Tehran vehemently denies.
- Inspections
Like India and Pakistan, Israel did not sign the 1970 United Nations Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, so the International Atomic Energy Agency has no mandate to inspect its Dimona facility.
According to historians, Israel received US assurances in 1969 that it would not be pressured to sign the treaty if it refrained from conducting a nuclear test.
----
Israel bars entry to British journalist who broke Vanunu story
JERUSALEM (AFP)
Jul 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040706162428.fbc1o75v.html
British journalist Peter Hounam, who is trying to help nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu appeal against restrictions imposed on him since his release from prison, was barred from entering Israel Tuesday.
The district court in Jerusalem upheld a previous decision by the interior ministry to prevent the investigative reporter from entering Israel "for security reasons".
Vanunu was released in April at the end of an 18-year prison sentence for revealing details of Israel's top secret Dimona nuclear to Britain's Sunday Times for which Hounam used to work.
Hounam was expelled from Israel on May 28. Senior security officials said he had secured an exclusive interview with Vanunu for the BBC, in violation of the restrictions.
Lawyers for Vanunu have filed a petition with the supreme court appealing for the curbs imposed on his release from prison to be eased. Vanunu is currently forbidden from travelling abroad or associating with foreigners.
----
US, Israel highlight Iran's nuclear weapons program
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jul 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040706184242.dbdffjpq.html
The United States and Israel highlighted Tuesday Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program as the UN's atomic energy agency moved to probe Tel Aviv's nuclear strength.
"Iran is the country that have announced that one missile toward Israel will destroy the Jewish state. So we should be concerned about the Iranians' efforts to develop nuclear weapon," Israel Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told reporters after holding talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
He said that Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who arrived in Tel Aviv to persuade the government to reveal its nuclear secrets, should instead step up his probe on Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Shalom charged that Iran, regarded as the Jewish state's number one enemy, was trying to develop "a new missile that will include Berlin, London and Paris, and the southern part of Russia in its range.
"So if we would have to do something with ElBaradei, is to ask him to continue with his efforts to push the Iranians to put an end to its effort to develop a nuclear weapon," Shalom said.
ElBaradei is expected to hold talks with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Wednesday, but the premier had earlier indicated that Israel's policy of refusing to confirm or deny that it has nuclear weapons would continue.
Most foreign experts believe that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal, comprising around 200 warheads, although it has stuck to a policy of "ambiguity" for the last 40 years.
Powell, speaking alongside Shalom, said the Bush administration had been pointing out Iran's nuclear weapon capability to the international community for the last three-and-a-half years.
He noted that European foreign ministers had made trips to Iran to convince it to give up its nuclear arms program but without much success "even though they have received some commitments which have been unfulfilled."
"So the United States will continue to press in every way that we can, use all of the diplomatic and other resources at our disposal, to make sure the international community stands unified behind the effort to stop Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons development, or worse, acquiring a nuclear weapon," Powell said.
Under an understanding with the United States dating back to 1969, Israel has committed itself to abstain from any comment on its nuclear potential and not carry out nuclear tests.
In return, Washington does not pressure Israel to adhere to the NPT, which would oblige its nuclear facilities to submit to international supervision by the IAEA.
Experts have said that ElBaradei's mission was more of a political gesture to convince Arab states the IAEA is as concerned about Israel as it is about Iran, being investigated on suspicions of harbouring a secret atomic weapons program.
----
UN nuclear chief plays down hopes of breakthrough on Israel trip
TEL AVIV (AFP)
Jul 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040706175043.faots3u9.html
The head of the UN's atomic energy agency began a visit to Israel Tuesday by playing down prospects of a breakthrough in efforts to persuade the government to reveal its nuclear secrets and rid the Middle East of nuclear weapons.
"I have no illusion that things could happen overnight but I believe that the earlier we start a security dialogue, the better," Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told reporters after his arrival in Tel Aviv.
ElBaradei is expected to hold talks with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Wednesday, but the premier had earlier indicated that Israel's policy of refusing to confirm or deny that it has nuclear weapons would continue.
Most foreign experts believe that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal, comprising around 200 warheads, although it has stuck to a policy of "ambiguity" for the last 40 years.
Israel is not a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) but ElBaradei also said that he hoped to persuade Sharon's government to sign up to other agreements with his agency.
He is expected to push for an agreement that would involve Israel informing the IAEA about Israeli imports and exports of nuclear-related material.
ElBaradei said that it was "a long path to travel. We should not have any illusions that these things... will change overnight.
"We need to take the first step," he said, adding that this could be Israel "concluding an additional protocol with the agency.
"I obviously don't have a magic wand, nor do I have a power of prescription but... I have the power of recommending, or advising.
"We need to understand the different viewpoints of Israel, of the other parties in the Middle East and that's what I'm asked to do -- consult with all the parties and see how we can move things forward," he said.
Experts have said that ElBaradei's mission is more of a political gesture to convince Arab states the IAEA is as concerned about Israel as it is about Iran, being investigated on suspicions of harbouring a secret atomic weapons program.
Israel is expected to use ElBaradei's visit as an opportunity to put pressure on the fundamentalist Islamic regime in Tehran which is regarded as the Jewish state's number one enemy.
The government continues to cloak its two nuclear plants at Dimona and Nahal Sorek in a heavy veil of secrecy, despite the revelations by former technician Mordechai Vanunu who blew the whistle on the inner workings of Dimona in 1986. "I don't know what he is coming to see" in Israel, Sharon said of ElBaradei's first trip to Israel in six years.
"Israel is obliged to hold in its own hands all the force components needed for its defence," he said in a statement.
"Our policy of ambiguity on nuclear arms has proved its worth, and it will continue," Sharon added.
Under an understanding with the United States dating back to 1969, Israel has committed itself to abstain from any comment on its nuclear potential and not carry out nuclear tests.
In return, Washington does not pressure Israel to adhere to the NPT, which would oblige its nuclear facilities to submit to international supervision by the IAEA.
India and Pakistan, two other relatively new nuclear powers, have also refused to sign the NPT, of which long-established nuclear states China, Britain, France, the United States and Russia are founding members.
----
Concern over Israel's nuclear arsenal
Australian Broadcasting
Tuesday, 6 July, 2004
Reporter: Mark Willacy
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2004/s1147499.htm
TONY EASTLEY: The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency arrives in Israel today to promote the policy of a nuclear weapons-free Middle East. Mohammad El Baradei is expected to urge Israel to sign up to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, pressure Israel will certainly resist.
The UN's nuclear watchdog has told AM, that when it comes to nuclear weapons Israel remains a big concern. It's believed that Israel has the world's sixth largest arsenal of nuclear warheads - an estimate Israel refuses to confirm or deny, as Middle East Correspondent Mark Willacy reports from Jerusalem.
MARK WILLACY: As a small state in a hostile neighbourhood, Israel has adopted an unconventional approach to discourage its enemies from launching an attack. The experts call it the policy of "nuclear ambiguity".
GERALD STEINBERG: Don't ask, don't tell, we're not going to declare but we're going to have the capability just in case somebody decides that they're going to try to destroy us and take us off the map.
MARK WILLACY: Gerald Steinberg is Israel's representative on the International Atomic Energy Agency's academic board. Today the Chief of the UN's nuclear watchdog Mohammad El Baradei arrives in Tel Aviv for talks with Israeli officials.
Doctor El Baradei's spokesman is Mark Gwozdecky.
MARK GWOZDECKY: Dr El Baradei's made no secret of the fact that he thinks the Middle East is the one region in the world where we have the biggest and highest number of nuclear challenges.
We have ongoing challenge in Iran. But of course, Israel remains a big concern and, you know, we think that the Middle East nations need to begin a serious strategic dialogue on nuclear issues.
MARK WILLACY: But instead of dialogue Israel will continue to maintain its silence on just how many nuclear weapons it has in its arsenal. International analysts estimate that Israel has somewhere between 150 and 200 atomic warheads.
Israeli analyst Gerald Steinberg says this policy of "nuclear ambiguity" is the only thing standing in the way of states like Iran carrying threats to push Israel into the sea.
GERALD STEINBERG: Iran clearly is hell-bent, one could say, on becoming a nuclear power. So a country that supports terrorism, that argues for the destruction of Israel that is developing nuclear weapons is a very serious threat, and therefore a lot of the focus will be on Iran, and how do we prevent Iran from developing a nuclear capability.
MARK WILLACY: The issue of Iran's nuclear designs is certain to be raised by Israel during the talks with Mohammad El Baradei.
International Atomic Energy Agency spokesman Mark Gwozdeky.
MARK GWOZDEKY: But he's also going to promote this concept of a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East. That's an objective, a long-term objective that all the states of the IAEA share, and each year they ask him to pursue a dialogue with the Middle Eastern countries to try to promote that idea.
MARK WILLACY: But as long as Israel is surrounded by states committed to its destruction, there will be no dialogue, let alone disarmament.
This is Mark Willacy in Jerusalem for AM.
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Israel Energy Commission Unveils Web Site
July 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Atomic-Web-Site.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel offered a faint glimpse into its secretive nuclear program Sunday when its atomic energy commission launched a Web site.
However, Internet surfers hoping to find details of the country's nuclear secrets or even a clear picture of the reactors will be disappointed.
Until now, Israel has kept its two nuclear facilities shrouded in secrecy and refused to discuss speculation it has developed one the world's largest atomic arsenals, saying only that it would not be the first country to introduce such weapons in the region.
The unveiling of the Web site comes just days before Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the U.N. atomic watchdog agency, is to arrive in Israel for a two-day visit. ElBaradei is expected to press Israel for at least a tacit acknowledgment that it has nuclear weapons or the means to make them.
However, Gideon Shavit, spokesman for the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, said the timing of the Web site launch was coincidental and that it was not a harbinger of a new, more open Israeli nuclear policy.
The site does not mention Israel's nuclear capabilities.
``We are not going to put everything on the site,'' Shavit said, adding that the commission wanted to keep a low profile. ``No company does that.''
The English version of the site gives a short history of the IAEC and shows two pastoral pictures of the Dimona and Sorek reactors, peeking out in the distance from behind lush flower beds and a palm tree.
The Hebrew site is more developed, with links to research publications, commission press releases and even a section on community involvement -- features that will soon be added to the English site, Shavit said.
Israel has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, so it does not formally have to declare itself a weapons state or agree to curbs on its nuclear activities.
Israel has covered its tracks well, apparently developing much of any weapons program in the laboratory or buying knowledge instead of relying on testing and other easily detectable activities.
ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has said Israel should start talking seriously about a Middle East free of nuclear arms whether or not it owes up to owning them. Earlier this year, he condemned the imbalance caused in the Middle East because of ``Israel sitting on nuclear weapons.''
Israel's doctrine of ``nuclear ambiguity'' -- never formally confirming or denying it has such weapons -- is meant to scare rivals while denying them the rationale for developing their own nuclear deterrent.
But this ambiguity suffered a setback in 1986 when nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu sold photographs taken inside the Dimona reactor to The Sunday Times of London. Based on the pictures and Vanunu's testimony, experts concluded that Israel had the world's sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
The new site emerges about a month after Israel's Mossad intelligence agency launched its own Web site.
Security officials have said the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency, also is considering unveiling a Web site.
``More and more organizations have Web sites and now so do we,'' Shavit said.
On the Web:
http://www.iaec.gov.il/
--------
ElBaradei Will Not Pressure Israel on Nuclear Issue
July 6, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-israel.html
TEL AVIV (Reuters) - U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Tuesday he did not intend to pressure Israel but would try to encourage it to begin a dialogue to rid the Middle East of its nuclear weapons.
Under its policy of ``strategic ambiguity,'' Israel neither admits nor denies having nuclear arms. But international experts believe Israel has from 100 to 200 warheads, based on estimates of the amount of plutonium its reactors have produced.
Israel is the only Middle East country not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This means it does not have to open up its nuclear program to U.N. inspectors.
``I would like to see Israel supporting the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,'' ElBaradei said, adding that he would like to see Israel sign an additional agreement committing it to disclose information on any potential nuclear-related exports.
But the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director said he did not intend to push the Jewish state on the nuclear issue. ``It's not a question of pressure. I have no power to pressure,'' he said.
ElBaradei had wanted to get the Israelis to abandon their policy of ambiguity, Western diplomats said. But Israel says this is impossible at present given the continued hostility of the neighboring Arab world and Iran.
``There are no signs of a policy change in Israel,'' said a diplomat close to the IAEA.
His spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said ElBaradei realized ``the objectives are ambitious and are not going to be achieved overnight. But he is willing to invest the time necessary to make progress.''
Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, freed in April after an 18-year jail term for spilling Israel's nuclear secrets, urged ElBaradei to press for access to the reactor at the heart of the nuclear program.
NO VISIT TO KEY REACTOR
ElBaradei arrived in Israel Tuesday to start his three-day visit during which he will tour Israel's atomic facilities -- except the reactor in the desert town of Dimona that independent experts believe has produced plutonium.
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said in Washington Israel would cooperate with ElBaradei. ``We are working ... with each other but the main problem is Iran,'' he said.
Israel and the United States accuse Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies. Libya and pre-war Iraq are also known to have tried unsuccessfully to build up atomic arsenals.
Top Israeli analyst Gerald Steinberg, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said hostility to Israel in the Middle East remained a reason not to sign the NPT.
In an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Steinberg said focusing some attention on Israel might undercut critics who accuse the IAEA of ignoring Israel's atomic bombs while putting undue pressure on Iran.
Former nuclear technician Vanunu, who took 60 pictures inside the Dimona reactor and gave them to Britain's Sunday Times newspaper in 1986, said Israel should make its reactor public.
``The Israeli government should change its policy and open the reactor,'' he said. ``They should stop cheating the world, stop cheating Israeli citizens and stop cheating the Arab citizens.''
----
U.N. Nuke Watchdog Chief Visits Israel
July 6, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Nuclear.html
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said Tuesday he had no ``magic wand'' to persuade the Jewish state to at least tacitly acknowledge it has atomic bombs or the means to make them.
Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, came to Israel to pitch for a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.
But ElBaradei said he had low expectations of getting Israel -- widely believed to have a considerable nuclear arsenal -- to stray from its secretive nuclear policy.
Israel does not comment on its nuclear capabilities, and its leaders have said they see no reason to change that policy.
``I have the power of recommending, of advising and I have no reason to believe that I will not have an open and frank discussion,'' ElBaradei said. ``We need to strengthen security in the Middle East and I think everybody understands that.''
ElBaradei has said Israel should start talking seriously about a Middle East free of nuclear arms whether or not it acknowledges it has them. Earlier this year, he condemned the imbalance in the region because of ``Israel sitting on nuclear weapons.''
On Tuesday, Israel Army Radio rebroadcast May comments by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in which he said he would not change the country's policy.
``I don't know what he (ElBaradei) is coming to see. Israel has to hold in its hand all the elements of power necessary to protect itself, by itself,'' Sharon said. ``Our nuclear policy has proven itself and will continue.''
Israel's doctrine of ``nuclear ambiguity'' is meant to deter its enemies, while denying them the rationale for developing nuclear weapons.
In 1995, former Prime Minister Shimon Peres declared, ``Give me peace, and we will give up the atom. If we achieve regional peace, I think we can make the Middle East free of any nuclear threat.''
Israel is believed to be the only country in the region with nuclear missiles ready to launch. Experts say Israel may have as many as 300 warheads and can quickly build more.
The evidence behind such an arsenal is overwhelming, much of it based on details and pictures leaked in 1986 by Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, as well as research and statements made by Israeli leaders.
Vanunu was freed in April after spending 18 years in prison for espionage and treason for divulging that information.
Sharon planned to take ElBaradei on a helicopter trip Wednesday, the IAEA said. Israel often takes dignitaries on such tours to illustrate the country's small size and security concerns.
However, ElBaradei was not expected to have access to Israel's two nuclear reactors: the main facility near Dimona in the southern Negev Desert and the smaller Nahal Sorek near Jerusalem.
Vanunu urged ElBaradei to persuade Israeli leaders to allow him into the Dimona plant.
``Now, after 18 years that my revelation has gone to all the world and I come out of prison and report to all the world, he, too, must go and demand to be inside Dimona and to report to IAEA and to all the world,'' Vanunu said on Israel's Channel One TV.
Because it has resisted international pressure to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Israel does not formally have to declare itself as a weapons state or agree to any curbs on its nuclear activities.
ElBaradei, an Egyptian, said he hoped to persuade Israeli leaders to back the treaty by signing a separate protocol with the Vienna-based IAEA.
``I'd like to see Israel supporting the Nonproliferation Treaty. I'd like to see the beginning of a dialogue on how a ... nuclear security free zone could look,'' ElBaradei said. ``If I get the parties closer on the need for a dialogue, I think I'll be successful.''
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell met with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom. Powell pointed to Iran as the main security problem in the region and renewed his demand for international pressure on Iran to stop developing nuclear weapons.
Shalom repeated concerns he registered last week with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice about Iran's missile program, saying Israel and Europe could be targeted if the program was left unchecked.
On the Net:
Israel Atomic Energy Commission, www.iaec.gov.il/
International Atomic Energy Agency, www.iaea.org
-------- japan
Nuclear fuel reprocessing tests should be frozen.
EDITORIAL: Hiding vital facts, data
The Asahi Shimbun,
July 6, 2004
http://www.asahi.com/english/opinion/TKY200407060097.html
Mysteriously, a vital document on nuclear power policy that was compiled 10 years ago has suddenly turned up at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Improbably, ministry officials said the document was found in a locker.
The document contains a cost analysis comparing the recycling of spent nuclear fuel with burying radioactive waste deep underground.
For decades, Japan has pursued a policy of establishing a full recycling system that involves reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to extract plutonium for reuse. The estimated cost of this approach, however, is nearly twice as high as that for the so-called once-through cycle, according to the newly ``discovered'' document.
In an Upper House Budget Committee session in March, a senior METI official said no such cost estimations existed. This turned out to be a barefaced lie.
This episode reminds us of the scandal involving the former Ministry of Health and Welfare over lost documents concerning HIV infection among hemophiliacs due to tainted blood products. More recently, new demographic data showing lower-than-expected birthrates in Japan-figures which cast serious doubt on the government's pension reform-were belatedly released. These events suggest the government has a propensity to hide facts and data that contradict official policy. The latest revelation further undermines already weak public confidence in the government's nuclear power policy.
The Atomic Energy Commission has just started work on revising the government's long-term nuclear development program. The focus of this review is on economic comparison of the two options, which was also the key issue 10 years ago when the ``lost'' document was written. The results of the new cost analysis should have a major impact on the future of the reprocessing plant in Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture, which is almost complete.
The commission should first examine the government's long-hidden cost estimations. Looking back on the situatioin 10 years ago makes clear the importance of the figures in the document.
In 1994, nations started coming around to the view that the recycling option was too costly, so some countries started abandoning plans to set up recycling systems.
In Japan, too, METI's predecessor, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), was already voicing skepticism about the government's policy choice. MITI distanced itself from the position taken by the then Science and Technology Agency, which championed the recycling option. At a government meeting held to discuss the cost estimates in question, MITI argued that the data should be made public, while the science agency and representatives of the electric power industry took the opposite view, saying it would create social confusion.
Construction of the Rokkasho plant had started the previous year. Initially, it was projected to cost 760 billion yen. But that figure has been revised repeatedly and the price tag for the project is now over 2 trillion yen. The Monju prototype fast breeder reactor, the key facility for fuel recycling, was just about ready to start operations.
If the results of the cost comparison had been published, it would have triggered legitimate debate over fuel recycling from the economic point of view and Japan's nuclear energy policy could have taken a much different course. This makes the concealment of the data all the more serious.
Despite the disclosure of hidden cost data, the government shows no sign of changing its position that nuclear fuel recycling is indispensable for a stable energy supply.
While the Atomic Energy Commission starts to discuss the cost aspect of the policy, moves toward nuclear fuel recycling operations continue inexorably.
At the Rokkasho plant, preliminary test operations using uranium are scheduled to start this summer. They will be followed by full trial operations using real spent nuclear fuel next year. Once spent fuel is introduced into the facility, we will have passed the point of no return.
The series of planned test operations should be frozen, for a while at least. In the meantime, the government should ponder the nation's nuclear future from a new perspective. If it sticks to the current recycling option in order to avoid changing a policy decision made long ago, the credibility of its nuclear policy will suffer another major blow.
-------- missile defense
Australia to sign missile defence deal with US
UNITED NATIONS (AFP)
Jul 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040706212451.stukltn2.html
Australian Defence Minister Robert Hill will be in Washington on Wednesday to sign an agreement with the United States to help develop a controversial missile defence shield.
The Australian government's commitment comes amid strengthening political opposition to the programme, which Hill defended in remarks to reporters Tuesday at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
"From an Australian perspective, we're looking well into the future," he said. "We don't have any threat against us from ballistic missiles at this time, but the day might come when we have."
Hill is to sign a memorandum of understanding that will commit Australia to working with its close ally on the programme, including assistance with research, over a 25-year period.
Critics have charged that the US programme is the next version of former US president Ronald Reagan's failed "Star Wars" missile defence shield, but Hill cautioned against understating the programme's possibilities.
"The new technologies have meant that there is the potential to protect against incoming ballistic missiles, and in the past that hasn't been possible. So why not take advantage of that?" he said.
"We will identify what's of particular interest to us, and where we can make a contribution, where our defence industry might be able to provide value."
Australia's opposition Labor party has said it fears the programme might prompt an arms race by China and India.
--------
Australia, U.S. to Work Together on Missile Defense
July 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-arms-missiles-australia.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Australia on Tuesday defended plans to help the United States develop a costly and controversial missile defense system, although it faces no current threat from ballistic missiles.
``From an Australian perspective, we are looking well into the future. We don't have any threat against us from ballistic missiles at this time. But the day might come when we have,'' Australian Defense Minister Robert Hill told reporters.
He spoke during a visit to U.N. headquarters before going to Washington on Wednesday to sign a memorandum of understanding committing Australia to work with its U.S. ally on research over the next 25 years on missile defense systems.
U.S. officials said the pact would cover the development, testing and potential future operation of a missile defense system that Washington hopes will ward off attacks; however, critics believe it may never work and could spark an arms race in space.
The U.S. officials said that in the near term Australia may be involved in developing advanced radar systems that can help detect ballistic missiles soon after they are launched.
``The new technologies have meant that there is the potential to protect against incoming ballistic missiles, and in the past that hasn't been possible. So why not take advantage of that potential?'' Hill said.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has strengthened ties with the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijack attacks on the United States and the Bali bombings in October 2002, which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.
Hill said Australia's contribution to the missile defense initiative could include applications of new technology as well as research projects.
Australia's opposition Labor party has signaled it would end or renegotiate the missile defense agreement if it wins power in an election expected within months, arguing it was unclear such a system would work or leave Australia safer.
President Bush has made building a missile defense system one of his top priorities despite the shift of the security focus to terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The initial U.S. system, costing more than $50 billion over the next five years, is designed to shoot down any inbound North Korean ballistic missiles that could be fitted with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads.
In coming years, the Pentagon plans to broaden the system and to layer in interceptors based at sea, chemical lasers aboard modified jumbo jets and possibly space-based rockets that could attack all three phases of an enemy missile's flight.
-------- ukraine
Ukraine gets 42-million-dollar EBRD loan for nuclear reactor safety
KIEV (AFP)
Jul 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040706151249.ibg79yb8.html
The Ukraine has received a 42 million dollar loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to improve safety at two new nuclear reactors in the country which are to enter service by the end of the year, the EBRD said Tuesday.
The European Community was to provide a further 83 million dollars as part of the project which also aims improve security at the country's 13 other reactors, EBRD spokesman Anton Ossov here said.
The Ukraine accepted to close the Chernobyl power plant, where one of the worst nuclear accidents ever occured in 1996, in exchange for international aid to build new reactors.
But the EBRD said that "this financing is no longer under consideration".
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- ohio
Ohio Wants U.S. to Freeze Nuclear Waste Removal
July 6, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/national/06nuke.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 5 - A 12-year, $4.4-billion effort to clean up a nuclear weapons plant near Cincinnati was set to enter its final phase this week, with a contractor delicately removing some of the nation's oldest nuclear garbage, left over from production of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and preparing it for disposal.
But the State of Ohio, after years of pushing for the cleanup, is demanding that the waste be left where it is, in silos at the Fernald Feed Materials Production Center, because the dump in Nevada where the uranium ore was supposed to go may no longer be available. A legal standoff is threatening to idle about 240 workers and extend a cleanup that costs $1 million a day.
Uranium ore was mined in what was then the Belgian Congo, and was spirited out of Belgium by an executive of the government-owned mining company a step ahead of the invading Nazis in 1940. It was stored for a time in Staten Island, and then processed at various locations around the United States to remove the uranium, providing a major help to the Manhattan Project, the wartime program to beat the Germans and the Japanese to an atomic bomb. Nevada has traced the 1940 ore shipment to Fernald.
The remnants, called mill tailings, were shipped by the Atomic Energy Commission to Fernald, a plant 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati that was established in 1951 to process uranium for use in making nuclear weapons fuel for the cold war.
While the uranium was mostly stripped out of the ore, the "daughter products" into which uranium decays - some of them much more radioactive than the uranium itself - are present in extraordinarily high concentrations, in three half-century-old concrete silos that are crumbling and have been repeatedly patched. The material includes thorium, polonium, radium and one product that is much more familiar, radon, but at concentrations hundreds of times higher than in a bad basement.
"It is the basement from hell," said Jeffrey Wagner, a spokesman for Fluor Fernald, the contractor selected by the Energy Department to do the disposal work.
The Energy Department wants to bury the materials at the Nevada Test Site, 65 miles north of Las Vegas, an area that planners say is appropriate for milling waste. The plan is to turn most of the waste into a form of low-density cement, which officials say would hold the radioactive material in place. "Put a piece of cement in the desert and it'll be there forever," said Dennis J. Carr, director of the silo project for Fluor Fernald.
Nevada argues that because the Belgian Congo mine was the world's richest source of uranium, the waste is far more radioactive than most mill tailings. The Nevada attorney general, Brian Sandoval, argued in a letter to the Energy Department that the material was so radioactive, and would be that way for so long, it resembled high-level waste. According to Nevada, trucking it across the country is not safe and burying it in unlined trenches without subsequent monitoring would "create an extraordinary public health and environmental hazard."
Mr. Sandoval sent letters to 16 states through which the shipments might pass, seeking support, and the governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, then wrote to the Energy Department, asking it not to send the shipments through her state.
The Energy Department maintains that the disposal is legal and safe, but a spokesman, Joseph Davis, said he could not discuss the details about the dispute because of talks in progress with Nevada and Ohio about transporting the material. But a spokesman for Mr. Sandoval said there were no discussions with the Energy Department.
Nevada is already suing the Energy Department over plans to bury high-level waste at Yucca Mountain, 25 miles north of the Nevada Test Site, contending that much of that plan is illegal. Tom Sargent, the spokesman for Mr. Sandoval, said, "We're not negotiating with a federal agency that refuses to obey the law."
The contractor plans to start emptying one silo late this week. But the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency wants the waste left where it is, rather than contaminate the equipment that would be used to process it. Graham E. Mitchell, chief of the Ohio environmental office that oversees polluted federal sites, said, "Our worst-case scenario is they get it out and they have no place to send it, and it stays here."
There is a disadvantage to waiting, though. "If they can't start this process up, they're going to have to lay off workers," he said. "They will lose the trained workers who've been working for a long time on this project. It's not a good situation all around."
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has agreed that the processing should not go forward until a destination is clear.
Lisa Crawford, who lives near the plant and is president of the Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health, which monitors the site, said: "We didn't anticipate this. Now, we may wind up with nowhere else to ship it, and the D.O.E. has no other disposal options."
Mrs. Crawford said she blamed the Energy Department. "The D.O.E. has been thumbing its nose at the states and now the states are fighting back," she said.
In fact, the Energy Department has faced intermittent crises in which it has promised one state it will clean up, but is blocked by another that does not want to accept the waste.
Fernald, on 1,015 acres in the farmland of southern Ohio, was one of the dirtiest of the Atomic Energy Commission plants. Workers there were exposed to unusually large amounts of uranium dust, and the plant contaminated the wells of Mrs. Crawford and two other residents with uranium. In 1989 the Energy Department, the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission, settled a suit by the plant's neighbors for $78 million.
In the 1990's, the Energy Department planned to mix the waste with molten glass, but in an experiment the test material ate through the piping.
In April, officials of the Energy Department and the contractor, Fluor Fernald, organized a tour for area residents and elected officials to show them the containers to be used to ship material from the silos to Nevada. Fluor officials say that if they cannot begin emptying a silo this week, they can do other work in the cleanup, but that a continued delay would soon affect the completion date, now estimated for late 2006.
But further delay would not be unusual.
"We're still dealing with the Manhattan Project wastes today, six decades later," said Stephen I. Schwartz, publisher of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the author of the book "Atomic Audit," an extensive history of the nuclear weapons program from 1940 to the 1990s. "I don't have a lot of confidence that the stuff we produced in the cold war will be cleaned up six decades from now."
Albert Salvato contributed reporting for this article from Cincinnati.
-------- MILITARY
-------- asia
Ex-Minister Leads In Indonesian Vote
Former Security Official Yudhoyono, Critic of President, Headed for Runoff
By Alan Sipress
washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29642-2004Jul5.html
JAKARTA, Indonesia, July 6 -- The former chief security minister, Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, was projected to finish first in Indonesia's balloting for president Monday, according to a quick count of sample districts, as he capitalized on disillusionment with incumbent Megawati Sukarnoputri's stewardship of the country's transition to democracy.
But Yudhoyono failed to win an outright majority and was headed to a Sept. 20 runoff, with Megawati competing for the other spot in the second round, based on an estimate by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute.
The projections showed Yudhoyono winning 34 percent of the vote while Megawati and the former armed forces commander, Gen. Wiranto, were in a statistical dead heat for second with about 25 percent each. The estimates, based on results from 1,583 polling stations in all of Indonesia's provinces, indicated that two other contenders would finish far behind.
With about 12 percent of the ballots counted by Indonesia's election commission, Yudhoyono was leading Tuesday morning with 33 percent of the votes. Megawati was second with 26 percent and Wiranto trailed with 23 percent. Election officials said they hoped to complete an informal canvass later this week.
The relatively smooth conduct of the election, held at 575,000 polling stations on thousands of islands, marked a milestone for a country that emerged only in 1998 from 32 years of autocratic rule under President Suharto. The vote was Indonesia's first direct election for its leader. Previously, the country's parliament chose the president through a process characterized by backroom dealmaking.
Yudhoyono, 54, had been a strong favorite to win the race ever since he bolted from Megawati's cabinet in March, complaining he had been slighted by the president and her influential husband. He was considered a firm and thoughtful leader by many Indonesians, and his resignation earned him widespread sympathy among a public irritated by the perceived arrogance of Megawati and her inner circle.
Yudhoyono, in his position as chief security minister, had established a working relationship with U.S. and other foreign leaders in confronting terrorism. Some critics called him indecisive, but diplomats said the retired general, if elected, would likely heighten Indonesia's determination to address Islamic extremism.
Speaking to reporters while walking to his polling station in a Jakarta suburb, he said he was confident of a place in the runoff. "I have traveled the country and seen the people's support for me," said Yudhoyono, commonly known by his initials SBY.
Although the campaign has been peaceful, he warned that a runoff could provoke tension. "Supporters will face each other and there is potential for confrontation," he said. "The key is for the candidates and their supporters to restrain themselves."
Megawati, 57, declined to talk to reporters while casting her ballot in southern Jakarta, but her husband and chief political adviser, Taufik Kiemas, sounded upbeat. "I'm optimistic that Mega will win. The most important thing is that everything must be according to the rules," he said, quoted by the Indonesian news portal detik.com.
If Megawati fails to make the second round, it would set up a showdown between retired generals, which could raise the fears of some Indonesians that the military is planning to reassert control over the country's politics. So far, most of the concern has centered on Wiranto, who has been indicted on charges of crimes against humanity by a U.N.-supported tribunal in connection with a 1999 wave of militia violence in East Timor.
Speaking to reporters after voting in eastern Jakarta, Wiranto, 57, said he was prepared to abide by the electorate's wishes. "Whatever the result will be, we will accept it gracefully," he said.
At many polling stations, turnout started slower than predicted, but officials said this did not reflect voter apathy. They attributed it to the weariness of millions of Indonesians who had stayed up until 3:30 a.m. Monday to watch the televised finals of the European soccer championship in Portugal.
"This election is fascinating for us because people are really being asked for their choice and we can decide based on our own heart," said Thian Sian Bing, 52, after voting in northern Jakarta.
By midday, nearly three-quarters of the eligible voters in his Gunungsahari Utara district had passed through the makeshift polling station, located deep down a concrete alley too narrow for a car.
This district, with many ethnic Chinese and Indian residents, had delivered an overwhelming majority for Megawati's party in the parliamentary contest of 1999, the last year Indonesians voted in national elections. According to election officials, she carried the district again , winning more than half the votes.
Other districts that had rallied behind Megawati five years ago abandoned her wholesale, according to officials. Near the heart of Indonesia's main island Java, Yudhoyono won nearly two-thirds of the votes in the Pandean Lamper, a ramshackle district where in 1999 practically every voter had endorsed Megawati.
Special correspondents Noor Huda Ismail in Pandean Lamper and Natasha Tampubolon contributed to this report.
-------- britain
Blair Says Iraqi Arms May Never Be Found
July 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Iraq.html?pagewanted=all
LONDON (AP) -- Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday that Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq, but insisted the dictator had posed a threat to the world.
Saddam's alleged chemical and biological weapons programs served as London and Washington's chief stated reasons for going to war. However, the Iraq Survey Group's hunt for evidence has proved largely fruitless.
``I have to accept that we have not found them, that we may not find them,'' Blair told a committee of lawmakers Tuesday. ``We do not know what has happened to them. They could have been removed, they could have been hidden, they could have been destroyed.''
Blair rejected any suggestion that the stockpiles never existed and that Saddam had not been a danger to the world.
``To go to the opposite extreme and say therefore no threat existed from Saddam Hussein would be a mistake,'' he told the House of Commons Liaison Committee.
He said the survey group had already shown that Saddam had the ``strategic capability, the intent and was in multiple breaches of the United Nations resolutions.''
``I genuinely believe that those stockpiles of weapons were there,'' Blair added.
In September 2002, Blair's government published a dossier of intelligence about Iraq. At the time, Blair told the Commons that Saddam's ``weapons of mass destruction program is active, detailed and growing.'' Blair said some of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons ``could be activated within 45 minutes.''
Even after no weapons were found during the war, Blair insisted they would be found. A year ago, he told one critic the search was continuing, and results would be published. ``I think that when we do so, the honorable gentleman and others will be eating some of their words,'' he said in Commons.
Serious questions have been asked about the quality of Britain's prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons. An inquiry, instigated by the government, will publish its report on July 14.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan responded to Blair's comments by saying the search for weapons has not been completed.
``Obviously the Iraq Survey Group continues to do its work so that we can learn more about what happened to the weapons of mass destruction,'' McClelland said. ``We know from the work of the Iraq Survey Group that Saddam Hussein's regime continued to have the intent and capability.
``As as prime minister blair pointed out, Saddam Hussein's regime was a threat. The international community recognized his regime was a threat. So we want to let the Iraq Survey Group continue to do its work and see what they find.''
-------- business
U.S. ENDS SANCTIONS ON RUSSIAN DEFENSE FIRMS
WASHINGTON [MENL]
06 Jul 2004
http://menewsline.com/stories/2004/july/07_07_3.html
-- The United States has begun to roll back sanctions imposed on Russian defense firms that assisted Iran's missile programs.
The State Department said it had waived sanctions on six Russian companies deemed as suppliers to Iran's intermediate-range missile programs. The department, in a notice published in the Federal Register, said the waivers were based on U.S. national security interests.
Officials said the waivers marked the first formal recognition that Russian defense firms had reduced their assistance to Iran's missile and weapons of mass destruction program. They said that over the last three years such countries as China, North Korea and Pakistan had supplanted Russian suppliers.
The State Department identified the Russian companies whose sanctions were lifted as Europalace 2000, Grafit, MOSO Company, the Scientific Research and Design Institute of Power Technology, TZNII Central Scientific Research Institute of Precision Machine-Building and the Volsk Mechanical Plant. Sanctions on these companies were first imposed in 1998 when the U.S. intelligence community acknowledged the progress of Iran's Shihab-3 intermediate missile program.
-------- china
China's web surfers
washtimes
By Jacob Sullum
July 06, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20040705-095032-6121r.htm
A few months ago, China Daily published a letter on its Web site from "D.H.," a reader who reported being both "extremely frustrated" and "pleasantly surprised" while surfing the Web in China. Although certain sites, such as Time magazine's, remained blocked, he said, others that seem at least as subversive, such as the online version of the pro-independence Taipei Times, were accessible.
"Overall," D.H. said, "the general trend has been clear - the list of Web sites blocked in China has been getting shorter and shorter." He concluded by offering "kudos to China for continuing to grant more and more freedom to the people within her borders."
I'm not sure "kudos" are in order when a repressive government decides to be a little less repressive. But my experience during two weeks in Beijing, Changsha and Guangzhou jibes with D.H.'s impression in the sense I encountered a puzzling mixture of sites that seemed to be blocked for political reasons and sites that were accessible even though they offered essentially the same information.
Internet connections are notoriously unreliable in China, and you never see a screen that announces "This page blocked by the Bureau of Censorship," so caution is appropriate when discussing the government's filtering. A page that does not come up the first nine times you try to connect may finally load after the 10th attempt.
But when you're unable to visit a site from different locations at different times on different days, even while other sites load with no problem, it's reasonable to surmise the government is blocking it. Although D.H.'s letter claimed the government's BBC News block had been lifted, for instance, I was unable to open any pages from news.bbc.co.uk.
Even when articles from that address showed up in Google searches, when I tried to read them, all I got was "The page cannot be displayed." Likewise, as D.H. mentioned, Time was consistently inaccessible.
Yet many other news sources were available, including CNN, Newsweek, The Washington Post and the New York Times. I suppose it's possible the BBC and Time provide damning information about the Chinese regime you just can't get elsewhere, but it seems unlikely.
Trying to understand the source of Chinese censors' grudges against the BBC and Time may be a fruitless endeavor. But it does seem the government's choices about which sites to block are more a matter of retaliating for perceived offenses than limiting the flow of information in any meaningful way.
Last year, the Web site of Reporters Sans Frontieres was blocked shortly after the group issued a statement criticizing the imprisonment of Chinese dissident Liu Di. Yet while in China, I was able to visit the sites of other organizations that support press freedom, including pages discussing the government's Internet censorship.
Similarly, the Web sites of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Freedom House appeared to be blocked, although their pages were listed in Google results. At the same time, numerous less conspicuous critics, including blogs operated by people in China, were accessible.
Google itself was at one time blocked, but I used it extensively in China, where it's available in Chinese as well as English. Then again, I had trouble with certain searches. I could never get results for "Falun Gong," the banned religious group, even when searches on less sensitive topics worked fine.
This sort of censorship (assuming that's what it was) is more insidious than simply blocking a Web site. Even so, a Chinese Web-surfer could still get information about Falun Gong from one of the many news and commentary sites that have not met the hazy criteria for blocking.
The strange, half-free condition of Chinese Internet-users was reflected in the response to D.H.'s China Daily letter. The comments included several supporting greater freedom and one saying the BBC and Time sites should be blocked, given these news outlets' "extreme right-wing views."
But the most interesting comment came from D.H. himself, who warned his letter as published did not accurately reflect his views. "I wrote an article praising less censorship in China," he said, "and it got censored. I hereby retract my praise."
Whether because China's censors are sloppy or because they want to feign openness, D.H.'s complaint is still available online, even in China.
-------- europe
Voters in Much of Europe Seem to Want the Ins Out
July 6, 2004
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/international/europe/06germ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BERLIN, July 3 - Germany's Social Democratic Party, which has headed its governing coalition for six years, has always been the party of the country's working class. That is why when the leader of the country's biggest trade union called the government a failure the other day, it seemed as if something was fundamentally out of kilter in German politics.
Things seem to get worse and worse for the Social Democrats and for Germany's beleaguered chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. He is widely regarded as one of Europe's canniest politicians, but he is not only setting record lows in German public opinion polls but also seems in danger now of losing his core constituency, the labor unions.
His one consolation, however, is that he has good company in Europe. Whatever their ideology or position on the spectrum, the governing parties of many countries, certainly the biggest ones, are experiencing troubles similar to his.
In France and Italy, governed by conservative parties, and in Britain and here in Germany, governed from the traditional left, the governing parties have been soundly defeated in recent local or European elections, as their rankings in the polls have continued to decline.
The fact that both leftist and rightist governing parties are in such trouble suggests that something deep is at work in Europe, a general distrust of traditional parties that transcends ideology and bespeaks a pessimism about the ability of the standard politics of either the left or the right to work in the future.
"There's a tremendous amount of disillusionment with politics altogether," said Timothy Garton Ash, the Oxford University historian and commentator. "People feel that the mainstream parties don't represent them, and this is strong right across Europe, old and new, and that's why you get these extraordinary protest votes, which was dramatic in Britain."
"We live in a slightly paradoxical time," he continued, "when people are disillusioned with politics, but they also don't think that politics matter that much anyway. They feel they're going to live comfortably anyway, so they can afford a protest vote."
The situation, not surprisingly, is different in each of the biggest European countries. In Spain, the Socialist Party took power in March when voters turned out the conservative government after it appeared to have withheld information about the Madrid terror bombings that killed 191 people. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair's political troubles have a great deal to do with his support for the war in Iraq.
In other words, while in Germany and France the governing parties are getting no reward for their opposition to the Iraq war, in Britain Mr. Blair has clearly been punished because of his firm support of it, with the failure of the occupying forces to find illicit weapons hurting his standing perhaps more than any other issue. The irritation at Mr. Blair is well summed up by his widespread portrayal as President Bush's poodle, a lapdog who is viewed as having deceived the public to justify Britain's participation.
"The feeling was that Iraq had gone wrong," David Blunkett, Britain's home secretary, said recently, after Mr. Blair's Labor Party got a scant 26 percent of the vote in local elections, compared with the Conservatives' 38 percent. Two days later, Mr. Blair's party received less than 23 percent of the vote in the European parliamentary elections.
Those elections were a stunning reprimand too for leaders of the other big European countries. In Italy, the party of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi got just 21 percent of the vote after he loudly predicted that it would get 25 percent. Mr. Schröder's Social Democrats received 23 percent, the party's worst national showing in 50 years, and the conservative party of President Jacques Chirac of France got a mere 16.6 percent of the votes, compared with 29 percent for the Socialists. Three months earlier, moreover, Mr. Chirac's party was drubbed in local French elections, losing control of all but one of the 12 regional governments it controlled before the election.
This does not mean that any of those four leaders are in imminent danger of losing office. Indeed, France, Italy and Germany do not have national elections for at least two years. The British Labor Party, though suffering in the polls, is still seen as likely to win the next general election, possibly next year, in part because of disarray in the ranks of the conservative opposition. Moreover, the leaders in question are tough political tacticians who have battled back from difficulties in the past.
But the election results, and the persistent low standings of major European leaders in the polls, reflect an anti-incumbent mood in Europe that, experts in the various countries say, reflects two elements in the picture. One is a widespread public perception that things are going badly even as governments are asking for sacrifices from ordinary people. The other is the failure of the governing parties to enunciate a vision - to find a "Churchillian language," Mr. Ash said, worthy of the moment - that can overcome the public's pessimism.
"The main problem for Schröder is that there are no results," said Klaus Hillenbrand, the editor of tageszeitung, a small, often satirical daily in Germany. "People have to work longer hours, and they get less social security, and all this was done because the government said we need more jobs, but there are no more jobs."
The labor leader who criticized Mr. Schröder, Frank Bsirske, who heads the 2.6 million member United Services Union, known by its German abbreviation as Ver.di, said in an interview with the newspaper Welt am Sonntag, "Measured against his claim that he would create jobs, reduce joblessness and pep up the economy, Gerhard Schröder has been a failure."
There are paradoxes in the European leaders' current situation, among them that among the four leaders, Mr. Blair's economic record is probably the best. Mr. Schröder, Mr. Chirac and Mr. Berlusconi are staking their governments on economic reform programs intended to make their countries more competitive, but none have shown strong results.
On Sunday, 40 German trade union and leftist members of the Social Democrats, united in opposition to what they see as his pro-business agenda, took the first step toward forming a new far-left party.
All parties, in other words, are struggling to deal with a new era in Europe, where social protections have become too expensive and a globalized economy, with jobs being outsourced to Poland, Slovakia and, especially, China, has made vigorous economic growth almost a memory.
"In theory, and according to polls, people are in favor of reforms," said Peter Lösche, a professor of political science at Göttingen University. "In reality, however, if they feel hurt by the reforms, they are opposed to the current government in power. It's as simple as that."
In Italy, where Mr. Berlusconi has long promised lower taxes, a streamlining of the bureaucracy and more competition in protected areas of economic life, including many who previously supported him, have defected, saying they are disillusioned that, contrary to his promises, the reforms have not been carried out.
"There is a specific problem with the leadership of Mr. Berlusconi," Paolo Gentiloni, a member of the center-left opposition, said in an interview just before the European elections. "For many years, he was considered a sort of magician, who could take a very difficult situation and change it for the good. He seems to be no more capable of this. His communication tricks are not working."
All of the leaders in political difficulty are in partnership with other parties to form governing coalitions, and that has meant that ideological differences are often more intense inside the governing group than between it and the formal opposition.
In Germany, for example, Mr. Schröder's party, as Mr. Bsirske's criticism shows, is deeply divided internally, with much of the traditional labor union constituency of the party demanding that the government deal with the country's economic stagnation by increased spending and by higher taxes on the rich.
"He has an old party that clings to old values that they want to re-establish," said Wolfgang Nowak, a former adviser to Mr. Schröder who is now an official at Deutsche Bank. "Schröder can't give a design for the future, because if he does, the party will break into pieces. It is no longer a motor for change."
-------- iraq
Iraqi president answers questions
Tue Jul 6, 2004
USA Today
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=676&ncid=676&e=9&u=/usatoday/20040706/ts_usatoday/iraqipresidentanswersquestions
The interim Iraqi government took power last week from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority. The new government faces challenges including an insurgency by Sunni Muslim extremists and Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) loyalists in Fallujah and other cities, unrest among the followers of firebrand Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, a Jan. 31 deadline for holding national elections, rampant street crime and sporadic electricity and other services. The interim government is led by Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. President Ghazi al-Yawer, 45, and two deputy presidents must unanimously approve any legislation proposed by Allawi's government. Yawer is a popular tribal leader and a business executive. USA TODAY reporter Paul Wiseman spoke with him Sunday at his heavily guarded office inside Baghdad's Green Zone compound. The bespectacled Yawer wore traditional Arab robes and a headdress and spoke in near-perfect English. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What were your impressions of Saddam Hussein's appearance in court last week? Are you worried he will use his platform in an open trial to stir up divisions in Iraqi society?
Answer: The most important principle we are following in the new Iraq (news - web sites) (is) that the law is the highest level in the government or in the new Iraq. We do not intend to make Saddam's trial a political one. This should be according to the law and according to the procedures of the legal system. Right now in Iraq we have a judicial system that's separate from the government, and we have great trust and confidence in our judges. We do not want to influence the trial, and he should have a fair chance in defense. But the government has to have a fair chance in presenting the charges. And whatever the law says ... definitely we will abide by that and respect it. What we want really is for justice to be served.
Q: Did you watch the televised proceedings? What were your impressions of Saddam Hussein?
A: I watched it. He was trying to tickle people's feelings. Iraqis know better. Personally, I have no personal comments.
Q: Do you expect that elections will be held by January as scheduled?
A: We in the interim government are very committed to make sure, to spend all our efforts, exert all our efforts so that we can meet the deadline set by the Transitional Administrative Law. It does not serve anybody to try to delay these elections. But definitely this has to depend heavily on the security situation. In Iraq, we are trying to rebuild our security forces as fast as we can in a way that does not reduce the quality of their training. I am very optimistic that things will start improving drastically because we have no other choice but to move forward.
Q: If the security situation gets worse, could elections be delayed?
A: I think we've been through the worst part of it. ... This is turbulence. This is random killing. This is terrorism. Terrorism can never prevail. That's why I am very confident.
Q: How is the fight against the insurgency changing now that Iraqis are taking a bigger role and U.S. forces are pulling back?
A: The multinational force's mission is to help us maintain stability and defend the sovereignty of Iraq. Iraqi security forces can help in a very different way because, after all, preserving law and order is a police job. It depends heavily on intelligence information. In order to infiltrate the bad people, you have to have the same complexion and speak the same language. Definitely, it will help a lot having Iraqis working there. But we need to keep cooperating with the multinational forces in order to enhance the level of training of our security and military forces.
Q: A spokesman for Prime Minister Iyad Allawi suggested over the weekend that the new government may offer amnesty to insurgents who fought against U.S. forces.
A: It's not like that. (The amnesty would apply to) people who have been deluded into participating or causing some problems. This will exclude rapists, hostage takers and killers.
Q: Is the government planning to impose martial law or grant itself other emergency powers to deal with the insurgency?
A: Every government all around the world has the right to have the option of imposing martial law. We in Iraq do not want to go to that extreme, given the fact that we are really keen to build democracy in Iraq. Our main mission is to make life more positive and very comfortable to Iraqi people, their dignity preserved. However, we are reaching half-way (toward martial law) by having what we call the Public Safety Law. That will (target) bad elements who are (performing) acts which are illegal or which destabilize and terrorize the country. We are very careful about doing it in a way that will not make things difficult for law-abiding citizens. We are not going to incriminate anybody by their ideologies. We are going to incriminate people by their deeds if they are wrong.
Q: What would be some of the powers the government would get under that law?
A: It's like the prime minister can move armies to certain areas. For instance, he can seal off a city. All these things will come out when it's been signed and it's going to be signed very soon - a couple of days.
Q: Do you expect to run for office yourself when elections are held?
A: Well, it depends on seeing what I have done during this time. If I feel I am doing something really productive to the national cause and if definitely I see that people are approving my performance and if I see that my private situation allows me, I would be pleased to run for office.
Q: Under this interim government, what is your role as president and what is your relationship with the prime minister?
A: It's more like the Turkish style. This is where the prime minister goes to the daily duties, and the council of ministers will draft a law. It will be passed to the president. The president and the vice presidents have to unanimously approve it in order for it to be effective. We will have a major role in drafting the strategies of this country, whether in foreign relations, economy, oil, national security - most of the issues. It's the macro part of the government we are involved in.
Q: The presidency has been described as largely ceremonial.
A: No, it's not. We are trying to help each other. This is a national salvation government. This is more like a coalition, where everybody is jumping in to help the save the country.
Q: Are you worried about Iran's influence in Iraq?
A: If we're talking about Iran as a government, they understand clearly that any instability in Iraq will have a very negative impact on all our direct neighbors. They are very logical people. They would understand that. But definitely there are insurgents coming. They might come from anywhere else also. But the public in Iraq feels that our own problems are our own problems, and we don't really appreciate any interference in our own domestic business, the same as others don't want us to interfere in their business.
Q: Do you feel that Iran is interfering in Iraq's affairs?
A: I didn't say that. I said the government of Iran (is) smart enough to act very cooperatively with us. But probably there are elements who are out of the government. It might come from anywhere else. I have great confidence in our neighbors in Iran and their willingness to build a healthy positive relationship with Iraq.
Q: How would you describe the insurgents? Who are they?
A: It's no mystery. The best description of them is that they are the enemies of the Iraqi public. They go and do an atrocious act and kill foreigners and Iraqis. And those Iraqis are not top-ranking officials. These are people who go out in the morning, like a fisherman, to bring food home for his kids by the end of the day, and (they are) children going to school. These are murderers. Some of them might be wrongfully oriented in religion or they might be some of the Saddam loyalists, remnants who want to take Iraq back to the Dark Ages. But the whole Iraqi public understands now that these are their enemies; these are our enemies as Iraqis.
Q: Who is the government going to resolve Kurdish claims for autonomy?
A: Kurdish people are part of our society. They are the second major ethnic group in Iraq (after Arabs). The Kurdish leaders are Iraqi leaders. When Baghdad was liberated, among the first leaders to arrive in Baghdad were the two major Kurdish leaders, (Masoud) Barzani and (Jalal) Talabani. We have drafted the Transitional Administrative Law in which we Iraqis have great pride. We all signed it duly. It gives Kurdistan federalism, which will regulate the relationship between the central government and the regional government. There is no turning back on that. Federalism for Kurdistan is a fact and it's going on.
Q: What do you think of the United Nations (news - web sites) decision not to recognize the Kurdish federalism plan when it passed a resolution acknowledging the interim government?
A: What happened in the UN, I was not pleased. It was part of a compromise of superpowers. It was a game that was played between the superpowers. We were in the crossfire there. But definitely federalism for Kurdistan is a fact, and I'm one of the biggest supporters of it.
Q: What role will clerics play in politics?
A: (Grand Ayatollah Ali) Sistani should be our role model. We are blessed to have such a guy.
Q: What about (radical Shiite cleric) Muqtada al-Sadr?
A: He has first to rid himself of the charges against him, then he must dissolve his army.
Q: Will U.S. support of Israel cause tension between the United States and Iraq?
A: We in Iraq have big problems of our own... But the Israeli-Palestinian issue has to be resolved in a fair way for the stability of the Middle East and the whole world ... The U.S. did us a big favor (by getting rid of Saddam). We count on the U.S. as the superpower.
Q: How would you evaluate the U.S. occupation?
A: The media has been very unfair to the occupation. Eighty-five percent of the things they did were good. Look at it. We can speak out now. We have 120 newspapers. Under Saddam people were told what to eat. Now Iraqis are free. People can criticize us daily. We go out and speak to the people. Iraqis deserved much better than the way they were treated by Saddam. Even Hitler didn't kill his own people.
----
US troops kill Iraqi preparing wedding feast
The victim was en route to a hotel for wedding arrangements
Tuesday 06 July 2004,
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8EA14D15-F0B0-4E57-A2FE-9DE99AE1559F.htm
US forces killed an Iraqi motorist at close range in Baghdad, then left the scene without any comment, according to eyewitnesses.
The motorist had overtaken a military convoy on his way to the hotel where he was making final preparations two days ahead of his wedding, police and relatives said.
The unidentified man, who had a passenger in the vehicle, was shunted into a wall by a Humvee as he was about to turn his car around to enter the hotel, one hotel guard said.
"They bumped his car until he lost control, crashed into the wall and then the Americans shot him three times at close range," the guard said.
The survivor of the crash, his hand stained in blood, said they were about to go to the hotel to make the reservation for his friend's marriage on Thursday.
Standing by the corpse lying on the street, his face covered with a blood-soaked cloth, the dead man's brother cursed and punched his own head.
He shouted, "There is no honest man among Iraqis! We let the Americans do this to us and even you (police), from now on every policeman on the street is my enemy because you did not stand up for us."
"You are all bastards."
Cursed
The dead man's father said: "He was the groom. He was going to get married. Why did they kill him. He is an engineer."
"God curse the Americans! God curse the Americans!"
Victim's father The father vowed to join the resistance against US occupation troops in Iraq.
"God curse the Americans! God curse the Americans!", he shouted.
A policeman at the scene said the US soldiers apparently thought the two Iraqis in a burgundy Nissan vehicle had been trying to attack them. However, no weapons were found.
US soldiers from the two Humvees involved in the incident stood in the street, gripping their weapons, nervous and uncertain what to do.
They refused to comment and left the scene, witnesses said.
----
Iraqi family disputes U.S. military account of man's death
Chicago Tribune
BY LIZ SLY
Jul. 06, 2004
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news/world/9088386.htm
BAGHDAD - (KRT) - The Americans came for Sajid al-Bawi at 3 a.m., ramming his gate with a Humvee, breaking down the front door with their rifles and bursting into his living room, where, his family says, he was sleeping with his wife and five children.
"That's Sajid," said a masked Iraqi who was with them, pointing. The soldiers took al-Bawi into an adjoining room for interrogation and an hour later they left, accompanied by a hooded man the family said it assumed was al-Bawi.
It was only after the soldiers left, family members said, that they discovered al-Bawi's bullet-riddled corpse wedged beside a refrigerator in the room in which he was questioned. A crude attempt was made to hide the body under a pile of mattresses and blankets, said his family, surmising the soldiers didn't want the killing to be discovered until they were well clear of the area.
The U.S. military disputes the family's story, and says an investigation into the killing found no wrongdoing on the part of U.S. soldiers.
But the family doesn't accept that finding and is seeking answers to the circumstances of al-Bawi's death at the hands of U.S. soldiers in the predawn hours of May 17.
In an initial statement announcing the investigation, the U.S. military said soldiers went to al-Bawi's home in the Kamalaya neighborhood because of a tip that he was "an anti-Iraqi forces operative who bragged to his neighbors about murdering a 1st Cavalry soldier at a checkpoint."
The investigation found that a soldier had acted "in self defense, in accordance with the rules of engagement," shooting al-Bawi when he tried to resist detention, a subsequent statement said.
"When a soldier attempted to handcuff Sajid, Sajid struggled to break free and grabbed the soldier's weapon. Sajid grabbed the soldier's pistol grip and rotated the selector switch from `safe' to `fire.' The soldier, fearing that his life and the lives of his fellow soldiers were in imminent danger, drew his pistol from its holster and shot five rounds into Sajid," the statement said.
No attempt was made to hide al-Bawi's body, a military spokesperson said, adding that the family had given conflicting accounts of the killing to U.S. soldiers and the media.
"The soldiers were detaining Sajid and were in the process of handcuffing him to remove him for detention when they discovered he had died from his wounds," said the spokesperson, on condition of anonymity. The soldiers departed, "leaving Sajid where he was lying on the floor in plain view. He was not lying behind a refrigerator under some mats."
In the chaotic, violent aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the death of a single suspect during a raid might well have gone unnoticed, and the real reasons why al-Bawi died may never be known.
But al-Bawi's family has determined that this death should not be allowed to pass without some form of redress from the U.S soldiers they had once welcomed as liberators from Saddam Hussein's tyranny.
Al-Bawi's brother Qassem, 40, an agricultural lecturer, has taken on full time the task of finding out why his brother died; he has badgered the U.S. military, tracked down human-rights organizations, called on the media and hired a lawyer to press his case in the Iraqi courts. It has proved a frustrating but also revealing quest, illuminating some of the many contradictions of life in the new Iraq.
Qassem al-Bawi said he can't understand why it was necessary for U.S. soldiers to shoot an unarmed man in his own home.
"They told me, `One of your neighbors tipped us off that Sajid colluded with the resistance,'" said Qassem al-Bawi, recalling one of his many visits to the nearby American base. "I said, `Are you allowed to kill according to a tip-off? Why didn't you arrest him and take him to prison? Why didn't you make certain first that he was guilty?'"
A report from the Iraqi medical examiner said al-Bawi was shot from two directions, and his brother said the family found two kinds of bullet casings in the room, calling into question the military's assertion that he was shot by one soldier. And if his brother had indeed lunged for a soldier's weapon during his interrogation, Qassem al-Bawi wonders whether the soldiers could not have restrained him.
"There were at least 12 soldiers with him," he said. "I think they didn't have to shoot him."
Under Saddam's regime, families would never have dared ask such questions when loved ones were taken away or executed. Now they are free to do so.
But the family is frustrated and despondent that its questions have not been answered. Because American troops enjoy immunity from prosecution in Iraq - and will continue to do so now that an Iraqi government is in charge - the family's hope for an open trial is unlikely to be realized.
"In America, can a soldier shoot a civilian without going before a court?" asked Qassem al-Bawi.
Al-Bawi's death raises questions about the treatment of suspects, human-rights observers say.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 70 to 90 percent of Iraqis detained by U.S. forces are eventually found not guilty, suggesting a pattern of faulty intelligence, said Marc Garlasco, of New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Al-Bawi family members insist that whatever intelligence the U.S. may have received about Sajid al-Bawi must have been wrong.
Like most Shiites, the family suffered under Saddam's regime; two cousins were executed for belonging to the outlawed Dawa Party. Haidar al-Bawi, 27, another of Sajid al-Bawi's brothers, recalls joining the crowds who thronged the streets when U.S. troops first appeared in the neighborhood.
"We were so happy to see them," he said. "We thought they were bringing freedom, but what kind of freedom is this?"
His family insists al-Bawi had no involvement with the insurgents active in the area, a poor Shiite neighborhood near the notorious Sadr City. They describe Sajid al-Bawi, 42, as a deeply religious family man who earned a living renting out chairs and tables for functions.
In the living room of their 2-story home, decorated with pictures of Shiite religious leaders, family members recounted the ordeal of that night.
After the soldiers had taken his brother into a neighboring room, said Haidar al-Bawi, who was among those present, they rounded up the three other men in the house, bound them and forced them to kneel. The children, a dozen in all, were gathered in the living room, where soldiers kept guard over them, allegedly with guns to their heads.
"I was afraid. It was dark, and they put a flashlight in my eyes so I couldn't see," recalled Sajid al-Bawi's eldest son, Ali, 12. "All the time, there was a gun pressing on my head."
Qassem al-Bawi said his brother had no enemies, but wonders if someone who was being paid for tips may have falsely accused him. On one visit to the American base, he was offered money to identify insurgents in his neighborhood. "They told me it would help prove my sincerity," he said.
On another visit, he was offered $1,500 in compensation for his brother's death, the maximum amount payable under U.S. policy. But in return for the money, he said, he was told to sign a form relieving the U.S. military of responsibility in the killing. He refused.
"All I want is justice," he said, "For justice, I am prepared to give my blood and my soul."
-----
Few Detainees in Iraq Are Foreign-USA Today
(Reuters)
July 6, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5597759
WASHINGTON - Fewer than 2 percent of the captives held in Iraq as security threats are suspected foreign fighters, undercutting Bush Administration assertions of the big role of non-Iraqis in the insurgency, USA Today said on Tuesday.
Of the approximately 5,700 people considered to be enemy fighters or security risks held captive by coalition forces in Iraq, 90 are non-Iraqis, according to information from the U.S. military command handling detention facilities in Iraq, the newspaper reported.
The numbers suggest that some Bush administration officials overstated the role of holy warriors, or jihadists, in the insurgency, which disrupted efforts by the U.S.-led occupying force to stabilize the country since last year's invasion.
But even though there are relatively few non-Iraqis in custody, U.S. officials believe non-Iraqis are involved in organizing or financing attacks against U.S. forces. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian al Queda operative, has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings and assassinations in Iraq.
"Any number of foreign fighters is troubling," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told USA Today last week.
Of the 90 foreign captives, more than half are Syrian, the report said. Syria borders Iraq.
------
Iraqi: U.S. Soldiers Laughed at Drowning
By HAMZA HENDAWI
Associated Press Writer
Jul 6, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_DEATH_ON_THE_TIGRIS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
SAMARRA, Iraq (AP) -- The 19-year-old Iraqi's swimming skills were no match for the Tigris. "Marwan, save me!" Zaidoun Fadel Hassoun screamed to his cousin, himself struggling to stay afloat. The teenager drowned; his cousin made it to shore. "I could hear them laughing," Marwan Fadel Hassoun said, recalling how U.S. soldiers pushed the young men into the river. "They were behaving like they were watching a comedy on stage."
The U.S. military said last week that three soldiers, now back in their base at Fort Carson, Colo., have been charged with involuntary manslaughter in the Jan. 3 drowning of an Iraqi detainee. A fourth soldier faces charges of pushing a second man, who survived, into the same river.
The military identified the victims only as Mr. Fadel and Mr. Fadhil. The four soldiers face between 5 1/2 years and 26 1/2 years in prison if convicted on all charges.
Thousands of Iraqi civilians have died since the Iraq war began in March 2003. Some of them perished in the U.S.-led air and ground campaign. In the 15 months since the fall of Baghdad, many more have died in car bombings, or when caught in the crossfire as American troops battled insurgents or were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
With every such death, Iraqis point to what they see as the heavy-handedness of the U.S. military. The resentment is deeper when the victims are relatives, friends or neighbors.
Zaidoun Hassoun was to have finished high school this year. Three weeks before his death, he got engaged to a cousin, and he hoped to start a family in Samarra, a trade and agriculture center whose name means "pleasant to those who see it."
For Marwan Hassoun, a bearded and burly 23-year-old who attends a teachers' college, the death robbed him of a companion and a childhood friend. Zaidoun's voice pleading for help still echoes in his ears.
"Every time I see an American soldier, a Humvee or a tank I become agitated. Many emotions rush into my mind: confusion, fear and rage. I am constantly thinking of how I could have helped Zaidoun. I feel so much guilt, but prayers and reading the Quran keep me going," he said.
Sometime between Jan. 3 and the discovery of Zaidoun's body on the river bank 13 days later, Zaidoun's mother wrote an open letter addressed to President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
"Any measure you take will not return my son to life. But I, with an overwhelming sense of bereavement, expect you to end the agony of mothers in my country," Widad Mahmoud Nadeem, 40, wrote in the two-page letter.
"We are harvesting misery and unhappiness because of the actions of American soldiers who pay no heed to human life, dignity and the values and traditions of our society," she wrote. Trouble for Zaidoun and Marwan began about 10:45 p.m., 15 minutes before curfew came into force in Samarra and only 200 yards from their home at the end of a 100-mile journey.
The trip, which should have been routine in a pickup truck loaded with Italian-made bathroom fixtures from Baghdad, was made longer because of a recurring engine problem that Marwan had to fix along the way.
They were stopped and searched at an Iraqi checkpoint on Samarra's outskirts and allowed to enter town. Minutes later, a U.S. patrol - Marwan believes it was made up of four Bradley fighting vehicles - crossed the median and blocked their path.
They quickly searched the cargo and checked their identity documents, he said at the family's store that sells Chinese-made appliances, stationery and books.
He remembered one soldier happily greeting them with Arabic phrases.
The soldiers told them they were free to go, but just after they got back into the truck, the soldiers ordered them to step out. This time, they handcuffed them and took them into one of the Bradleys.
"What's happening?" a terrified Zaidoun whispered to his cousin. The Bradley drove for a few minutes before the two were ordered out at a bridge across the Tigris that also serves as a dam, several miles north of Samarra.
The soldiers - Marwan remembers four or five of them - removed their handcuffs and led them to a concrete ledge. Ordered to jump into the water, Marwan begged for mercy.
"Why? why?" he pleaded. "Shut up, shut up!" yelled the soldier who spoke some Arabic.
Zaidoun was pushed first. He held on to a soldier, who managed to free himself. Other soldiers joined in and pushed Zaidoun away. When Marwan turned to look at his cousin, he was pushed from behind.
"We are not great swimmers, but we knew enough not to drown," he said. Marwan swam to Zaidoun and grabbed his hand, but they slipped apart. "I lost him. He went under and then resurfaced near an open dam gate. Water was rushing and not even a good swimmer could resist that current."
"He was shouting 'Marwan, save me,' and I yelled back 'Try to swim, try to swim,' but he went under again and that was it. I could hear them (the soldiers) laughing. They were behaving like they were watching a comedy on stage," he said.
Standing at the scene Tuesday, he pointed to a cluster of bamboo at the water's edge. "These are the plants that I held onto to save my life," he said. "I climbed back up to the shore, but they pointed a gun at me, so I went back down and waited."
His tormentors drove off, but he continued to huddle in fear. Only when he reached an Iraqi checkpoint, more than two hours after his ordeal began, did he feel safe.
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Uneasy Allies on Patrol in Baghdad
Tensions Flare When U.S.-Trained Iraqis Assert Their Independence
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29637-2004Jul5?language=printer
BAGHDAD, July 5 -- After rumbling through Sadr City for much of the morning, a column of six U.S. military vehicles and a flatbed truck carrying Iraqi National Guard soldiers stopped in traffic next to an outdoor market. A child emerged from the roadside stalls, carrying a cardboard poster of Moqtada Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose strident criticism of the U.S. presence in Iraq has whipped up a large following.
On tiptoes, the child handed the poster to the Iraqi soldier manning a machine gun, as U.S. soldiers watched in dismay. The Iraqi soldier, part of a nascent security force trained and funded by the United States, held Sadr's picture aloft for a gathering, cheering mob. The convoy began moving through smoke rising from piles of burning trash on the streets of the Baghdad slum.
"If we took it from them now, this whole place would explode," said Sgt. Adam Brantley, 24, of Gulf Shores, Ala., watching from behind the wheel of a Humvee.
A week after the official handover of political authority from the United States, the Iraqi security forces are asserting, in disconcerting ways, their independence from the American soldiers who continue to serve as their protectors and patrons. Unable to shoulder Iraq's security responsibilities on their own, the Iraqi forces are nonetheless testing the limits of their new relationship with U.S. troops, including openly expressing sympathies for the most resolute enemies of the United States.
The Iraqi National Guardsmen who displayed the Sadr poster said they did so under threat of attack, and as a group they provided a useful security perimeter for the U.S. soldiers. In other regions of Iraq, more seasoned guard units have been given high marks by U.S. soldiers with the important task of training the new Iraqi security forces. On Sunday, in the city of Baqubah, 35 northeast of Baghdad, Iraqi National Guardsmen discovered a car bomb and two passengers fitted with suicide vests. In the ensuing gunfight, the car caught fire but did not explode. Both of the alleged attackers were killed.
The scene in Sadr City came a day after Sadr called on his followers to rise up against the interim Iraqi government and the foreign troops that remain in Iraq, reversing his previous stance. Sadr called the week-old interim Iraqi government "illegitimate," and promised to "continue resisting oppression and occupation to the last drop of our blood." But a Sadr aide, Mahmoud Soudani, said in Sadr City that a tenuous cease-fire with U.S. troops would remain in place, although the militia would not be disbanded until the Americans left the country.
The mixed messages left uneasy the soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division based on an Army post at the edge of Sadr City. Earlier in the day, commanders received information from informants that Sadr's militia, known as the Mahdi Army, intended to end the cease-fire reached June 4 after two months of intense combat with U.S. forces. The fighting, which flared first in Sadr City, killed an estimated 1,500 Mahdi Army militants. The Iraqi police and national guard, then known as the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, fled rather than fight.
Many of Sadr's surviving militants congregated in Sadr City, a desperate slum of at least 2 million people named for Moqtada's slain father, a revered ayatollah. The end of the cease-fire would likely signal a fresh round of fighting at a time when U.S. forces are determined to maintain a lower profile on the streets, hoping to give the new government and its security forces time to establish their independence in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis. But doing so is posing its own challenges as notions of sovereignty bump up against U.S. security interests.
As the crowd thickened along the narrow market street, chanting and clapping at the encouragement of the Iraqi soldiers, a shower of rocks rained on Brantley's Humvee in a staccato clatter. The convoy sped away from the market, stopping beyond the crowd's view at the edge of a dump. Sgt. 1st Class Craig Allen, 34, called down the sweating Iraqi squad leader and demanded that he hand over the poster. Finally, after an angry toe-to-toe exchange, Allen had Sadr's picture in hand.
"We wonder how these guys would react in a firefight," Brantley said, shaking his head. "Most likely drop their weapons and run away."
Since the handover, U.S. commanders with responsibility for Sadr City have required that all patrols include members of the Iraqi National Guard, a paramilitary force envisioned as an auxiliary to the Iraqi police. Only recovery missions and escort operations can be carried out without Iraqi soldiers present.
Capt. Douglas Chapman, commander of Bravo Company attached to the division's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment, moved out Monday morning with four Humvees and two Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Sandwiched among them was a flatbed truck, boarded after a delay for breakfast by 15 of the newest Iraqi National Guard recruits on the post.
The convoy weaved among traffic-choked streets before parking on a wide concrete median strewn with garbage. Car repair shops lined one side of the busy road, and on the other a ditch the size of a football field opened up where a street once ran. A U.S.-funded water project began there two weeks ago, but there was not a single worker at the site.
An Iraqi interpreter, wearing sunglasses and a bandanna to conceal his identity, told Chapman that the workers had abandoned the project three days earlier. The disappearance served as a warning sign to U.S. commanders trying to fathom a murky urban war. In addition, the neighborhood children refused soldiers' offers of candy, dispensed from cargo pockets. One of them accepted a Blow Pop, only to hurl it at an Iraqi soldier.
"Ten minutes on, 10 minutes off," a shop owner lamented, referring to unreliable electricity supplies. Another man in a gray straw hat chimed in with his belief that the power is being diverted to other parts of Sadr City because of bribery. He brandished a thick stack of Iraqi dinars from his pocket to illustrate the point.
"Iraq's a sovereign nation now," Chapman told him. "This has always been up to your Ministry of Energy."
Then the children, who swarmed around the convoy, began chanting "Yes, yes, Sadr" as the troops headed toward the Humvees.
"They usually say this when we go," said Lt. Zach Swanson, 24, of Chicago. "They think it's some kind of victory."
Chapman, a 29-year-old from Great Valley, N.Y., said he was determined to resolve the electricity problem -- it was a "crucial quality of life" issue, he said, as summer temperatures push toward 120 degrees.
The convoy pulled up in front of a power station on the edge of Sadr City a half-hour later. Chapman, Swanson and the masked interpreter headed toward the entrance, where an Iraqi police officer in a pressed uniform manned the gate.
"Do you have permission to be here?" the officer asked Chapman, who if surprised did not show it. He replied yes, and a minute later the group walked toward the main building.
The three men inside the control room appeared unhappy to see Chapman, who greeted them politely before asking to see their handwritten logbook charting the amount of electricity going to each neighborhood. The antique dials and switches on the control panels gave the room the feeling of a vintage James Bond movie.
To encourage a greater sense of independence, Chapman scheduled a stop at the Habibiya police station to deliver a gift to the chief, Maj. Awad Fatlawi. It was an Iraqi flag, and Fatlawi unfolded it like a child unwrapping a Christmas present, then ordered a "Pepsi party" in his air-conditioned office while his officers jury-rigged a flag pole.
Chapman, Swanson and the interpreter, who kept the bandanna firmly on his face, sipped the cold sodas on couches lining the walls. A few floors above, several Iraqi police officers kissed the red, white and black flag before fixing it to a long stick and wiring it to the railing.
"No one gives us any weapons," Fatlawi complained to Chapman. "It is the same in every police station. We all need weapons."
Further questioning revealed that Fatlawi had a number of AK-47 assault rifles, but that there are no bullets for the 9mm pistols tucked in his officers' waistbands. Fatlawi made clear, however, that he wanted rocket-propelled grenade launchers and heavy machine guns to be able to hold off an attack. Chapman grimaced, but indicated those supplies would now come, if they come at all, through Iraq's Interior Ministry.
"Have there been any civilians helping at the checkpoints?" Chapman asked.
"No, we don't need any help," Fatlawi said, brushing away the suggestion. "Maybe they were only helping direct traffic."
Chapman made his rounds like a cop working a beat, taking the good with the bad. Then the convoy passed through the market in the center of the neighborhood, and the Iraqi soldiers gleefully waved Sadr's poster. U.S. soldiers, furious at the display, believed the demonstration incited the crowd against them.
"They've got to at least put it down," yelled Pfc. Austin Twombly, 20, of Deerfield, N.H., from the Humvee's gunner's nest as people pressed closer to the convoy. He yelled at them to do so, but they did not.
Later, defending himself in the face of several angry U.S. soldiers, the Iraqi squad leader said the child warned him to take the poster or the convoy would be attacked. "Weak leader," Allen, the sergeant, screamed at him. Chapman stepped between the men.
Back at the camp, Chapman described the challenge he faces in placing limits on Iraqi troops in a country not his own.
"They can move forward however they want," Chapman said. "We just asked them to stop displaying the picture. They can support whoever they want on their personal time."
The poster, folded in half, remained in the back of Brantley's Humvee.
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U.S. Raid Targets Militant Network
As Many as 15 Killed in Fallujah
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28972-2004Jul5.html
BAGHDAD, July 5 -- U.S. aircraft bombed a house in the restive city of Fallujah on Monday evening in another attack on the network of Islamic militant leader Abu Musab Zarqawi, U.S. officials said. Local reports said from five to 15 persons were killed.
Also Monday, there was ongoing uncertainty about the fate of a U.S. Marine hostage, Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun. Al-Jazeera satellite television said it had received an announcement from a militant group that Hassoun, 24, had been taken "to a place of safety" and that he had promised to quit the Marines. Relatives in Lebanon of Lebanese-born Hassoun said the same statement had been faxed to them, the Reuters news agency reported.
Al-Jazeera did not say whether the announcement was accompanied by a videotape. A series of statements broadcast over the Internet in recent days have made conflicting claims about whether Hassoun was killed. He was taken hostage sometime after his June 19 disappearance from his unit in Iraq.
The U.S. military has carried out a series of air attacks since mid-June on what military officials described as safe houses for Zarqawi's fighters. They said they did not believe any of those attacks killed the Jordanian-born extremist. He is described by officials as the number one wanted man in Iraq, and is thought to have orchestrated a series of kidnappings, murders and suicide bombings in Iraq. U.S. authorities have offered a $25 million reward for him.
Iraqi public sentiment appears to have shifted against Zarqawi and other foreign fighters, but such attacks also generate anger against the continued exercise of U.S. military might. U.S. soldiers fought intense battles in Fallujah before retiring from the city without routing the insurgents last month.
The U.S. military confirmed that the attack on Monday night was made with precision-guided weapons. A military statement said the bombing "underscores the resolve to jointly destroy terrorist networks within Iraq." There was no comment about the outcome of the air raid.
In another incident involving U.S. forces near Fallujah, a U.S. helicopter was hit by gunfire while ferrying a patient to a hospital for surgery. The pilot and co-pilot were wounded, but the craft landed safely, according to Reuters. The military declined to name the pilots. An Army spokesman said the craft was attacked with antiaircraft fire, rocket-propelled grenades and light arms.
Meanwhile, Iraqi officials reported that a section of Iraq's oil export pipeline system had been cut. On Saturday, a fire in another section of the pipeline in southern Iraq had reduced Iraq's export of crude oil. There was no claim of responsibility for either breach.
Iraq's pipelines have been a regular target of saboteurs, as well as thieves trying to steal oil. In the past, the government has moved to repair the lines within days.
For the second time in two days, the new Iraqi interim government did not announce details of its plan for emergency laws and amnesty for Iraqis. There was no explanation given for the last-minute cancellation of a news conference in which the laws were to be announced.
Officials expect Ayad Allawi, the interim prime minister, and his cabinet ministers to announce laws that would authorize the death penalty and permit the imposition of curfews and a form of martial law. The Iraqi army would be used to enforce them. The package may include an amnesty for those who have opposed the U.S. occupation in Iraq.
But officials have been backing away from a statement from the prime minister's spokesman that even insurgents who had killed American soldiers might be given amnesty because their cause was "legitimate."
Now, according to reports here, the amnesty may be granted only to those who did not take part in attacks on occupation or Iraqi forces.
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Car Bomb in Town North of Baghdad Kills 13
July 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A car bomb exploded Tuesday in a town northeast of Baghdad, killing 13 people who were attending a wake for the victims of a previous attack, hospital officials said.
The bombing in Khalis came two days after gunmen fired at a building belonging to a city council official, killing two people and wounding two. Tuesday's attack targeted the wake for those killed Sunday.
``So far, we've received five of the dead,'' said Dr. Nasser Jawad Kadhim, the head of the morgue at Baqouba General Hospital. ``Thirty-five of the injured have been hospitalized.'' Other hospital sources said 13 were killed.
The nearby city of Baqouba was the scene of fierce fighting between American soldiers and insurgents who tried to seize government buildings and police stations only days before power was handed over by U.S. occupation authorities to the interim government June 28.
Guerrillas have been targeting officials who are seen as collaborating with coalition forces.
Also Tuesday, a group of armed, masked Iraqi men threatened to kill Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi if he did not immediately leave the country, accusing him of killing innocent Iraqis and defiling the Muslim religion.
The threats revealed the deep anger many Iraqis feel toward foreign fighters, whom many consider as illegitimate a presence here as the 160,000 troops of the U.S.-led coalition.
In a videotape sent to the al-Arabiya television station, a group calling itself the ``Salvation Movement,'' questioned how al-Zarqawi could use Islam to justify the killing of innocents, the targeting of government officials and the kidnapping and beheading of foreigners.
``He must leave Iraq immediately, he and his followers and everyone who gives shelter to him and his criminal actions,'' said a man on the video.
The video marked the first time an Iraqi group made such a public threat against al-Zarqawi.
It was issued a day after U.S.-led coalition forces, who have been targeting al-Zarqawi, launched an airstrike in the restive city of Fallujah on a suspected safe house used by his followers. The attack killed 15 people, witnesses said.
In the video, three men, their faces covered with Arab headscarves, were flanked by rocket propelled grenades and an Iraqi flag. The man speaking had a clear Iraqi accent.
``We swear to Allah that we have started preparing ... to capture him and his allies or kill them and present them as gift to our people.'' the man said. ``This is the last warning. If you don't stop, we will do to you what the coalition forces have failed to do.''
Al-Zarqawi, said to be connected to al-Qaida, is believed to be behind a series of coordinated attacks on police and security forces that killed 100 people only days before U.S. forces handed over power to an Iraqi interim government.
His followers have also claimed responsibility for the beheading of American businessman Nicholas Berg and South Korean translator Kim Sun-il.
In Tripoli, Lebanon, the family of a Lebanese-born U.S. Marine held hostage in Iraq said it was confident that Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun had been freed and was well, although relatives have not heard directly from him.
``We have received reliable information the guy is free,'' his brother, Sami, told The Associated Press.
Although he had not spoken with his brother, who was serving as a translator with the U.S. Marines in Iraq when he disappeared June 20, Sami Hassoun said ``we received a sign from my brother reassuring us.''
He would not elaborate, but said the family received credible information from a person who came to their Tripoli home.
Lebanese Foreign Ministry officials said in Beirut that its embassy in Baghdad said Hassoun was still alive. They gave no further details.
Hassoun's alleged captors have claimed he was romantically involved with an Arab woman and was lured away from his Marine base and captured.
Hassoun's family in Tripoli and in Utah have had their hopes dashed and raised with conflicting information about the 24-year-old Marine's fate coming from his purported captors and Lebanese officials.
The insurgents' attacks in Iraq have led to fears that religious fanatics and Saddam loyalists may be joining forces to fight both the multinational force and the new Iraqi government, increasing violence that has wracked the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein 14 months ago.
The military said three U.S. Marines assigned to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were killed in western Iraq. Two died in action Monday in Anbar province, while a third died of his wounds later in the day.
In the town of Latifiya, 25 miles south of Baghdad, two police officers were seriously injured Tuesday when gunmen opened fire on their patrol car before fleeing, said police Lt. Hazim Abdul-Kadhim.
In Baghdad, the U.S. military said Tuesday that troops had fired on a car that failed to heed warnings to stop at a checkpoint, killing one child and wounding a second.
NATO officials met Tuesday with Iraqi Defense Minister Hazem Shaalan on a possible future role for the alliance in the country.
The interim government of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi has been trying to find a way to stem violence.
On Monday, U.S forces dropped two tons of bombs on a purported militant safe house in Fallujah, killing 15 members of one family, according to witnesses, and turning the building into a 30-foot-deep pit of sand and rubble.
The Fallujah attack was the fifth airstrike in two weeks in the area where the U.S. military says al-Zarqawi's network has safe houses.
Men gathered at the pit where the house had been and pulled out clothes, including a young child's shirt, from the rubble.
``Is this acceptable to the Iraqi government?'' asked an angry man at the scene. ``Where are human rights?''
Yasser Abed, 17, said 15 members of his family, including 12 children, were killed in the air strike. Abed, his father and a brother were out of the house at the time of the attack, he said. Hospital officials said at least 10 people were killed. Previous U.S. airstrikes in Fallujah have killed dozens.
Allawi issued an unprecedented statement saying his government provided intelligence for the location of the al-Zarqawi safe house so the strike could ``terminate those terrorists, whose booby-trapped cars and explosive belts have harvested the souls of innocent Iraqis without discrimination, destroying Iraqi schools, hospitals and police stations.''
Allawi appealed to Iraqis to report the activities of insurgents.
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MARITIME DEFENSE
15 Miles Offshore, Safeguarding Iraq's Oil Lifeline
July 6, 2004
By JAMES GLANZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/international/middleeast/06OIL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
KHOR AL AMAYA OIL TERMINAL, Iraq, July 1 - The oil wealth that Iraq is counting on as its best hope for a stable future flows through rattling pipelines to lonely, rusting depots 15 miles offshore, so isolated that an armada of American, British and Australian warships is circling them to prevent the threat of waterborne suicide attackers.
Even little fishing dhows that ply the waters of the Persian Gulf have been guarded against, since attackers in three boats sped toward Khor al Amaya and its larger sister terminal, Al Basra, and blew themselves up on April 24.
The vulnerable site is crucial to Iraq's economic future, and an attack could be catastrophic to the environment as well as the Iraqi oil industry, American military and industry officials say.
"Every day I tell them - I say, look, guys, in the grand scheme of things there may be no other place where our armed forces are deployed that has a greater strategic importance," said Capt. Kurt Tidd, commander of the Fifth Fleet task force that is protecting the terminals, as he bounced over the waves on a small rigid-hulled inflatable boat toward the Khor terminal's platform.
"We can't win the war here, but we can lose it in a flash," Captain Tidd said.
The April attacks cost the lives of two American sailors and a coast guardsman but did not cause extensive damage to the terminals. The coordinated attacks served notice that someone with deep knowledge of the Iraqi oil industry has cast a malignant eye on its jugular.
Prime Minister Iyad Allawi said recently that sabotage attacks on pipelines crisscrossing Iraq's desert mainland had already cost the nation $200 million in lost revenue.
For a country with Iraq's profound social and political needs and devastated civil infrastructure, that cost is formidable. But a broken pipeline can be fixed in a few days - quite unlike any severe damage to the giant, isolated oil terminals, which are already in a state of seedy disrepair.
Workers struggled Monday to repair a crucial pipeline shut down after sabotage over the weekend by looters, The Associated Press reported. Exports were cut nearly in half because of damage to the pipeline, which feeds the Basra and Khor al Amaya terminals.
Since the two terminals reopened in March 2003 after the American-led invasion, 287 tankers had been filled in the deep waters at the two terminals as of late June. That accounted for 65.6 million metric tons of crude oil and revenue of more than $12 billion, according to figures provided by the Fifth Fleet, which is operating in the Persian Gulf.
This strangely disconnected place on the glittering waters of the gulf may in the end tell as much about the course of the war as the grim battles on the desert mainland.
The scale of the security effort indicates the American commitment. Captain Tidd can call into play some 20 ships and 2,000 sailors and other personnel, not to mention helicopters, advanced surveillance equipment and weaponry aboard the platforms themselves.
The task force tries to enforce "exclusion zones" of 2,000 meters, or more than a mile, around the terminals where traffic is no longer allowed. "We kind of form a band of steel right around the exclusion zone," said Cmdr. Steven A. Mucklow of the Cushing, an American destroyer that is part of the task force.
Yet vessels from swarms of a hundred or more fishing and cargo boats still intrude. About once a week, some boat ignores the klaxons and radioed warnings from the patrolling ships, which then fire flares and warning shots across the vessel's bow.
Since April 24 no boat has motored directly at the platforms, and sailors say they are unsure whether the boats are testing the new defenses or just looking for a prime fishing spot.
"One of the challenges is to try to decide what is innocent behavior and what is potentially criminal or worse," said Capt. Adrian Cassar, commander of the Grafton, a British frigate in the task force.
Hanging over the entire effort is uncertainty about the wishes of the new Iraqi government. No high-ranking officials have visited the area, and Captain Tidd said his main Iraqi contacts were the local managers of the platforms.
"Our direction from our bosses," he said, referring to the Fifth Fleet's commanders, was, `Keep doing as you're doing until you're told otherwise.' "
A visit to the Khor al Amaya terminal begins with a 50-foot climb up from the water on an old rope ladder that is missing one of its wooden rungs.
Up top is a scene that could have come from the movie "Waterworld": misshapen catwalks with pieces of scrap metal tossed over gaping holes, heaps of parts from broken pumps and cranes; bullet holes and shell damage from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and the 1991 Persian Gulf war; a row of big pressure gauges on a series of pipes that read dead zero. A humbled Manitowoc 3900 crane looks as if it has not been painted in 30 years. It was once red.
The southern section of the platform is not used at all, because it was heavily damaged in one conflict or another. But elsewhere a black and red Indian tanker called the Gandhar is riding high in the water, taking on oil, patrolled by a lone man in a blue hard hat way up on the deck.
Amid the wrecked equipment and the welter of useless piping on the oil platform, it is hard to find the live pipeline that is feeding the tanker.
But finally, there it is: a dirty gray pipe sporting a pressure gauge that reads 40 pounds per square inch rather than zero. An ear to the pipe turns up a groaning, knocking noise, as if this great artery of wealth were in need of an angioplasty.
Followed backward, the pipe arches downward and plunges into the water around the barnacle-choked underbelly of the platform with no more ceremony or protection than a big sewage conduit might have.
"This is the Iraqi future trying to get on its feet," Captain Tidd said hopefully.
Nearby, one of just two Iraqi oil workers seen during the roughly two-hour visit was fishing off the side of one of the catwalks. But Iraqi security workers stopped two of the three boats involved in the April attack with a hail of gunfire and caused them to explode prematurely, and now there is plenty of American security visible here as well.
Joel Miranda, a 19-year-old sailor from Orlando, Fla., with a fresh white toothbrush emerging from a pocket in his flak jacket, can see bits of wrecked ships poking up from Iranian territorial waters from where he stands at a gun emplacement on the northern edge of the platform.
Just the week before, he said, he watched as a dhow crept inside the exclusion zone and did not turn back until a patrol boat fired 10 warning shots over its bow.
"To me it looked like someone testing us," he said, "to see how far we'd let him go."
The boat never got close enough for him to be authorized to fire his gun. "At 500 yards is where we take 'em out," he said.
Elsewhere on the platform, in an air-conditioned room jammed with electronics, two technicians keep track of 40 to 50 nearby boats simultaneously with radar, optical imagery and other equipment.
The sophistication and scale of the operation raises the question of when, or whether, the Iraqis can safely take over the job from the United States and its allies. A Fifth Fleet spokesman said the Iraqi navy effectively consisted of five Chinese-made patrol boats.
Two Iraqi officers were aboard the Cushing recently for training, and a fact sheet made available by United States Naval Forces Central Command said 200 Iraqis received training earlier this year for the newly formed Iraqi Coastal Defense Force.
The Iraqis have "an embryonic patrol capability," said Captain Cassar of the Grafton.
For now, said Sgt. Fergy Gask of the Royal Marines, who leads one of the teams that carries out boarding operations, the maritime operation reminds him of nothing more than Britain's struggle with the Irish Republican Army.
"We were doing a very similar job in Northern Ireland before we came out here," Sergeant Gask said. "Obviously it's going to be a very prolonged operation. But what isn't these days?"
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Zarqawi group claims deadly attack on US marines in western Iraq: Internet
DUBAI (AFP)
Jul 06, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040706194543.ligu7ba5.html
An Islamist website on Tuesday carried a statement attributed to the group of suspected top Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi claiming a deadly attack in western Iraq.
"With God's help, about 100 of the Omar battle lions laid an ambush Monday for the soldiers of Satan, the Americans, in Al-Saqlawiya region, west of Baghdad," said the statement signed by Tawhid wal Jihad's military wing.
"Thanks be to God, the toll was two helicopters down, including an MH-47 Chinook, and two Humvees destroyed with their occupants on board," it said on the site http://www.alezah.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=3267.
It was impossible to verify the authenticity of the claim.
The US military said earlier that three marines were fatally wounded in action Monday in the restive western province of Al-Anbar "while conducting security and stability operations".
-------- israel / palestine
Israel's Parliament Debates Settlements
July 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Palestinians.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel's parliament called a special debate Tuesday on the threat posed by Jewish extremists opposed to settlement evacuation, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for the first time acknowledged publicly that he feels at risk.
In new fighting, an Israeli commando and seven Palestinians were killed in a series of clashes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian officials and the army said.
The violence erupted hours before envoys of the so-called Quartet of Mideast mediators -- the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia -- were to meet in Jerusalem. The talks focused on Israel's planned withdrawal from Gaza.
A diplomat in Jerusalem, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the participants said the withdrawal should be part of the ``road map,'' a broader peace plan aimed at creating an independent Palestinian state by 2005.
The participants also discussed the dire humanitarian situation in the Palestinian areas with World Bank representatives, the diplomat said. The diplomats are scheduled to meet with Palestinian officials on Wednesday.
Sharon's plan to uproot all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza -- as well as four isolated enclaves in the West Bank -- has met resistance from hard-liners in Israel. Many settlers are religious Jews who believe the West Bank is theirs by divine promise.
While most settler leaders have said they will use only non-violent resistance, some rabbis and settler representatives have warned that violence could break out.
``The leadership of the rabbis and the settlement residents' leaders are not interested in a civil war. But it won't be possible to stop the train right at the edge of the abyss,'' Rabbi Shlomo Breen, head of a Jewish seminary in the West Bank, told Israel Radio on Tuesday.
Sharon, a patron of settlers for most of his career, has become the target of verbal attacks since announcing his withdrawal plan in February. He wants to complete the pullout by September 2005.
Sharon acknowledged Monday that he feels at risk, although government officials said there have been no specific warnings against him.
Sharon met with Justice Minister Joseph Lapid and asked legal authorities to act swiftly to quell any incitement, an official in the meeting said.
``It saddens me that one who has spent his whole life defending Jews in Israel's wars now needs to be protected from Jews out of fear that they will harm him,'' an official quoted Sharon as saying.
The Israeli parliament scheduled Tuesday's debate after Avi Dichter, the head of the Shin Bet security service, warned this week that he was concerned about growing militancy among opponents to settlement evacuation.
The threat of violence strikes a deep chord in Israel. Many politicians and security officials still blame themselves for ignoring the warning signs ahead of the 1995 assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an ultranationalist Jew opposed to Rabin's peace efforts.
In the months leading up to the assassination, Jewish extremists branded Rabin a ``traitor'' for handing land to the Palestinians, and some rabbis issued religious rulings later seen has having encouraged the killing of the prime minister.
In the latest fighting, four Palestinians and an Israeli commando were killed during a military raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Nablus. The army said a fierce gunfight erupted after the soldiers moved into the area, and helicopter gunships fired three missiles.
Two leaders of the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were killed. An unarmed university professor, Khaled Sallah, and his 16-year-old son were also killed in their home.
Relatives said the professor was shot as he tried to negotiate an exit from his home, and the boy was killed as he tried to rescue his father.
The army said the civilians had apparently been hit unintentionally during one of the missile strikes. ``We regret that very much, but any time the terrorists use civilians as cover, these things happen,'' said Maj. Sharon Feingold, an army spokeswoman.
In the Gaza Strip, a 15-year-old Palestinian was killed in the Khan Younis refugee camp when Israeli tanks opened fire in the area, Palestinian officials said.
The army also said its soldiers had shot and killed two Palestinians who attacked an army post with gunfire and hand grenades. The Islamic Jihad militant group claimed responsibility for the attempted attack.
--------
Six Palestinians and Israeli Killed in Clashes
July 6, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
JERUSALEM, July 6 - The Israeli military shot dead six Palestinians, and an Israeli officer was also killed during a pair of clashes today, one in the West Bank, the other in the Gaza Strip.
The Palestinian dead included four militants, but the military also acknowledged the deaths of "two innocent Palestinians," identified as an American-educated professor and his teenage son.
In the West Bank city of Nablus, Israeli forces staged a nighttime raid to arrest two wanted Palestinians. But the forces encountered heavy fire that killed Capt. Moran Vardi, and wounded three other soldiers, according to the Israeli military.
The Israelis shot dead one of the wanted Palestinians taking cover in a shed, but the second gunman escaped to a nearby apartment building, and fired at the Israeli troops as he worked his way to the rooftop, a military spokeswoman, Maj. Sharon Feingold, said.
An Israeli helicopter unleashed a missile at the gunman, but he continued to return fire until he was killed by ground troops, Major Feingold said. The two dead gunmen belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The shootout also claimed the lives of two residents of the building, Khaled Salah, who was in his 50's and taught in the engineering department at An-Najah University in Nablus, and his 16-year-old son Muhammad.
Mr. Salah's daughter, Diana, 23, told The Associated Press that the family took cover during the intense shooting. She said her father and brother were each hit by a single bullet after the shooting died down and the army called on residents to come out of the building.
Major Feingold said the military did not know the exact circumstances, but regretted the deaths.
Dr. Salah received a doctorate in engineering from the University of California at Davis in 1985, and was an American green-card holder, according to An-Najah University and the United States Consulate in East Jerusalem.
In the Gaza Strip, two Palestinian attackers threw grenades and opened fire on cars traveling along a road used by Jewish settlers, the military said. Soldiers patrolling the area shot and killed the two gunmen, the military added.
In another development, Israel's public security minister, Tzahi Hanegbi, said he feared that Jewish extremists would try to kill senior Israeli leaders in an attempt to halt the government's plan to dismantle Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Mr. Hanegbi told Israeli television that he believed that "there are people who have already decided that, when the time comes, they will save the people of Israel."
"They will assassinate a prime minister, a minister, a military officer or a police officer," Mr. Hanegbi said. "They don't always succeed and they don't always have the means to carry out the acts. But we are not lacking extremists."
For the past three days, Israel has been holding a fierce debate on the threat posed by hard-line Israelis. Avi Dichter, head of the Shin Bet security agency, raised the issue at a cabinet meeting on Sunday. Since then, many commentators have raised the 1995 assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister killed by a Jewish extremist.
Before Mr. Rabin's assassination, some had called him a "traitor" for giving land to Palestinians that Israeli had occupied since the 1967 Mideast war.
The Yesha Council, which represents settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, announced on Monday that it was launching a campaign to work against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's evacuation plan. The group says it supports only peaceful and lawful opposition. However, some settlers have warned that violence may break out.
Rabbi Shlomo Breen, who heads a Jewish seminary in the West Bank, told Israel radio that settlers "do not, of course want a civil war, heaven forbid," adding, "But it will be impossible to stop the train once it reaches the brink of the abyss."
Meanwhile, a member of Israel's opposition Labor Party accused Mr. Sharon's government of expanding West Bank settlement outposts that the government had pledged to dismantle.
"This government is evading a promise it made to the United States," said Ephraim Sneh, a legislator who previously served as the deputy defense minister.
The Mideast peace plan, known as the road map, calls on Israel to take down all settlement outposts erected since Mr. Sharon came to power in March 2001.
The Israeli government recently presented the United States with a list of 28 such outposts. However, the monitoring group Peace Now says it has documented 53 outposts.
Most consist of just a few mobile homes on West Bank hilltops. However, Mr. Sneh said that the government was permitting the outposts to expand and in some cases was providing services, such as roads and electricity.
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell met with Israel's foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, and afterward called for the Israelis to take down the outposts.
"I explained to the minister that we have some disappointment in the rate at which outposts have been removed, and the minister gave me assurances they are hard at work on that," Mr. Powell said.
In Israel, Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, arrived today for a visit. Israel has always refused to confirm or deny that it has nuclear weapons. Mr. ElBaradei, who plans to meet with Mr. Sharon and other senior Israeli officials, recently called for talks on making the Middle East a region free of nuclear weapons.
Mr. ElBaradei said he would like to see Israel sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, but added that he was not in a position to pressure Israel on that or other issues.
"I have the power of recommending, of advising, and I have no reason to believe that I will not have an open and frank discussion," Mr. ElBaradei said. "We need to strengthen security in the Middle East and I think everybody understands that."
--------
Gaza Plan Foes Could Try to Kill Sharon - Minister
July 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-israel-threat.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - A top Israeli minister said on Tuesday he had ``no doubt'' there were Jewish radicals ready to assassinate Prime Minister Ariel Sharon or other top officials to stop his Gaza pullout plan.
Internal Security Minister Tsachi Hagnebi spoke to Channel Two television a day after Sharon ordered action to quell inflammatory statements by opponents to the plan.
``There are those who have already made the decision, that when the time comes, they will save the people of Israel,'' Hanegbi said. ``They will try to kill a minister, prime minister, a policeman, a military officer, I have no doubt.''
Sharon's personal security was bolstered recently to prevent a repeat of premier Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in 1995 by an extremist trying to halt peace talks with the Palestinians. He is now serving a life sentence.
``There is a serious escalation here, and we can't ignore it,'' said Hanegbi. ``It is our obligation as a government to do all we can to avoid a repetition of November 1995.''
Sharon has won cabinet approval for the Gaza pullout, which calls for the uprooting of all 21 Jewish settlements in the coastal strip and four others in the West Bank. A second vote is necessary before implementation.
Israel's parliament held a special debate on warnings of violence issued by Jewish radicals who oppose ceding any land taken in a 1967 war.
Jewish settlers and religious extremists say the territory is part of a heritage bestowed by God and reject Sharon's plan.
A Jerusalem rabbi last week said anyone handing part of Israel to a non-Jew could be killed under the historic law of ``Rodef,'' a license to kill someone who intends to kill someone else.
Lawmakers warned that such talk endangered Israel's democracy. Ofir Pinuz-Paz, of the center-left Labour party, called for all factions to adopt a resolution condemning the incitement.
Israel's attorney-general is due to meet the head of the Shin Bet internal security agency Avi Dichter and other security officials this week to discuss legal ways to prevent incitement.
Polls show most Israelis back the pullout plan, but Jewish settlers feel betrayed by Sharon, once their most avid champion.
--------
U.S. Presses Israel on West Bank Outposts
July 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Mideast.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a conversation he described as ``candid'' -- a diplomatic way of saying there was disagreement -- Secretary of State Colin Powell told Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom on Tuesday to pick up the pace of dismantling outposts on the West Bank.
Going public with his complaint, Powell told reporters he had ``explained to the minister that we have some disappointment in the rate at which outposts had been removed.''
Shalom said the remaining outposts, which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had promised President Bush would be dismantled, had been reduced to 28 and that Israel was working with the United States to make good on its commitment.
At their meeting, Shalom told Powell that 12 of the 28 were in the process of being removed from the West Bank and that Israel was waiting for a decision from its Supreme Court on the 16 other outposts.
The outposts are makeshift encampments that critics contend could develop into full-blown settlements and strengthen Israel's hold on the West Bank, which the Palestinians claim for a state.
Lewis Roth, executive director of Americans for Peace Now, accused the Sharon government of ``playing games'' with the Bush administration.
Roth said his private group has made aerial surveys of the West Bank and found there were 52 outposts at the end of June. Further, Roth said, new outposts were being built while some of the outposts taken down had been moved to new locations.
On another sensitive topic, Shalom said Israel would continue to build a security fence that, he said, has brought a sharp decline in terror attacks.
Bush and senior U.S. officials have urged Israel to route the barrier in a way that does not interfere with Palestinians living on the West Bank.
Shalom said the fence has made it possible for Israel to cancel 80 roadblocks, giving more freedom to the Palestinians.
The Bush administration had made a point of appealing to Israel to give Palestinians more freedom of movement.
Powell claimed progress, meanwhile, on two fronts -- the U.S.-backed roadmap for peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians and on Egypt helping to strengthen Palestinian security forces in Gaza.
With U.S. support, Sharon hopes to withdraw all Israeli forces from Gaza and dismantle all settlements in the territory in which 7,500 Israeli Jews live.
The Israeli Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that national elections would be held in November 2006, a year earlier than originally planned, in a decision that could complicate Sharon's withdrawal plan.
But Powell said: ``The prime minister is quite skilled politically, and from everything I have been able to see, he is moving forward on the plan. And I expect that he will be successful with the ups and downs that come from working in a democratic political system.''
Stephen Hadley, Bush's deputy national security adviser, and Elliott Abrams, the senior Mideast specialist on the National Security Council, plan to go to Israel later in the week to check on progress.
-------- landmines
Landmine kills 13 in Nepal
AFP
July 06, 2004
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10053693%255E2703,00.html
KATHMANDU: Twelve police and a civilian were killed yesterday when a police vehicle tripped a landmine planted by Maoist rebels in southern Nepal.
The ambush took place in Birgunj district near Bindhibasini village, south of Kathmandu, when police mounted an operation to rescue a businessman kidnapped for ransom by rebels last week.
"The incident occurred when the police van tripped the landmine set up by the rebels," Home Ministry spokesman Gopendra Bahadur said.
"A hectic search has been launched to locate the rebels involved."
Police superintendent Madan Khadka said the police were killed before they could take any action against the rebels.
In another incident, two Maoists were killed in a clash with security forces on Sunday night at Rupendahi, south-west of Kathmandu.
The Maoists have been fighting for a communist republic since 1996 and the uprising has claimed more than 9500 lives.
----
World War Two Mines Found Off Spanish Coast
REUTERS SPAIN:
July 6, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/25866/newsDate/6-Jul-2004/story.htm
MADRID - Two mines thought to date from the Second World War were found off the Spanish coast after a swimmer spotted one device nestling on the seabed, police said Sunday.
Bomb disposal experts cordoned off the beach to deactivate the first mine which measured some 20 inches in diameter.
They then found another mine nearby, a police spokesman in the northeastern city of Girona said. The second mine was due to be deactivated Monday.
"The first one appeared on July 2 and it was deactivated ... today they found another one 500 meters (1,640 ft) away from the first," he said.
"It looks like they come from the Second World War," he added.
Spain did not take part in the 1939 to 1945 Second World War but the stretch of the Mediterranean where the mines were found is close to the French border.
-------- mideast
Exiled Saudi Is Dissident to Some, Terrorist to Others
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29641-2004Jul5?language=printer
LONDON -- The man in the soundproof broadcast booth wearing headphones and an intense gaze is discussing Saudi Arabian history with radio listeners this evening, but it's not the kind the Saudi government would endorse.
Saad Faqih recites a list of "massacres and assassinations" that he alleges were carried out by the late Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, modern Saudi Arabia's first king, in his rise to power nearly 100 years ago. Then Faqih pauses to take calls from listeners phoning in from his homeland to offer their own impassioned accounts of the royal family's alleged transgressions.
Just a few years ago, Faqih headed a small splinter group of Saudi exiles armed with a lone fax machine, a telephone and a dwindling list of contacts back home. These days, however, thanks to the Internet, satellite television and radio, cell phones and the largess of confidential benefactors, Faqih's message of dissent is beamed 3,000 miles to Saudi Arabia in a live three-hour broadcast every evening.
He describes that message as moderate and nonviolent, but at the same time he refuses to condemn al Qaeda and says that the United States brought the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on itself through "arrogance."
The recent wave of violence against foreigners inside Saudi Arabia has enhanced his reputation as a well-informed observer and critic of the forces at work there. Academics, journalists and intelligence analysts beat a path to his home in north London.
Faqih's archenemy, the Saudi government, calls him a terrorist who is conspiring to overthrow the royal family and replace it with a strict Islamic government acceptable to Osama bin Laden. In a dossier shared with officials in Washington and London, the Saudis seek to link Faqih to a long list of suspected terrorists and accuse him of inciting violence.
Now the Saudis have produced a new allegation. They accuse Faqih of taking $1.2 million from an operative of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi to help arrange the assassination of Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, Crown Prince Abdullah. The Saudis are pressing British authorities to detain Faqih on suspicion of terrorism and shut down his broadcasts to the kingdom.
Faqih, 45, who was a surgeon in Riyadh before he fled Saudi Arabia a decade ago, denies all the allegations. Increasingly, he inhabits a twilight world where the line between dissident and terrorist sympathizer is blurred beyond recognition.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon , he has become more influential but also more of a target, as he himself acknowledges.
Faqih asserts that one member of the royal family hired two local thugs who attempted to kidnap him from his doorstep a year ago, in what Saudi officials insist was an unauthorized operation.
"I can assure you that the Saudi regime is using every means possible to attack me," he says. "They are bombarding the British authorities with false stories. And there are elements in the American administration who are conspiring with the Saudis to incriminate me." An Unlikely Rise
The nerve center of Islah ("Reform") Radio is a small room in the back of an anonymous duplex, crammed with five computers, a few telephones, two sound mixers and an isolation booth constructed from plywood, plexiglass and duct tape. Faqih, who arrives just before 7:30 p.m., is dressed in a full-length, crisp white thobe, or shirtdress, of the type common on the streets of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. But he expresses views that would earn him immediate arrest if he set foot there.
The country, he tells a visitor, is on the verge of collapse, and a number of factors -- intensifying violence, conflict within the royal family, economic crisis -- could soon bring it down. "This is a crippled and corrupt regime," he declares. "I think the next few months are crucial."
His callers tonight are in complete agreement. A man from Jiddah phones in to denounce the "shameful acts of the royal family." A man who says he is a policeman complains about the lack of pay and equipment and says police are ordered to forgo fighting drugs and crime to focus on protecting the country's rulers. And a woman who identifies herself as "Reform Lover" takes a moment to praise Islah as "the voice of freedom."
Faqih is a slight man with a neatly trimmed beard, wire-rimmed glasses and a soft handshake. While he doesn't lack self-confidence, he sounds a little amazed as he recounts his rise from little-known exile to a sounding board for a nation's grievances.
He was already a successful surgeon when at age 30 he began dabbling in dissent. At first he wrote letters about unemployment and other social issues to friends who were close to the powerful interior minister, Prince Nayef. That was the accepted way, he says -- confidential, friendly, constructive. The letters, he says, were ignored.
After the Persian Gulf War, he and other reformers went public. There was a 12-point petition in 1991, followed by a 44-page program of reform the following year. Then the government cracked down. Faqih was among 18 academics and professionals imprisoned in 1993. He was released after four weeks, and six months later left the country with his wife and four children.
North London, the place where Karl Marx settled after fleeing continental Europe 150 years ago, is now nicknamed "Londonistan" for the many political exiles from the Muslim world who have taken up residence here. "First, it is the capital of the world in terms of media," says Faqih. "Second, the British are very subtle and stable. They deal with facts, and they are not influenced by politics, not influenced by emotions."
The first years were difficult. He and a fellow exile, Mohammed Massari, founded a small organization. But Massari was a high-profile activist who made common cause with extremists. Faqih says he himself wanted a lower profile and more control. While Massari has appeared at public events honoring the purportedly glorious achievements of the Sept. 11 hijackers, Faqih has avoided such platforms.
In 1996 he formed his own group, the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, on a shoestring budget. He insists his vision of a Saudi Islamic republic is benign: power-sharing, accountability, judicial independence, freedom of expression and freedom of assembly are his watchwords. "We honor the common belief of the nation, which is Islam, but we are against the monopoly of interpretation of Islam," he says.
But he has not totally avoided contact with al Qaeda. He became friends with Khalid Fawwaz, a Saudi dissident who in effect functioned as bin Laden's London-based spokesman in the 1990s. Following the 1998 car bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Fawwaz was arrested under an extradition request from the United States. Faqih says he visited him in prison and helped look after Fawwaz's wife and children.
At the trial of four suspects in the bombings, it emerged that Faqih's credit card had been used to purchase a satellite phone that Fawwaz passed on to bin Laden, who allegedly used it to help plan the attacks.
Faqih says a merchant who did business with both him and Fawwaz mistakenly credited the purchase to his account. "The authorities know all the facts," he says. A British government spokesman who spoke on condition of anonymity could not confirm his account.
While Faqih says he advocates nonviolence, he blames "extreme American arrogance" for bringing about the Sept. 11 attacks. And besides, he concedes, "support for al Qaeda is so immense in my country right now that it would be politically incorrect to denounce them."
The Internet gave Faqih a new means of communication, the cell phone another. People in Saudi Arabia can buy cell phone cards that allow them to make anonymous calls. Faqih established a Web site and began posting Saudis' comments and complaints, creating an interactive platform for discussion and debate.
But the real breakthrough came last year when he started the nightly radio broadcast. Nearly 60 percent of Saudi families own satellite dishes, he says, and they have become a prime-time audience for the broadcasts, which can be heard on satellite television.
"This regime survives on secrecy and hypocrisy," he says. "With the radio we broke the barrier of secrecy and we created a means for people to speak not just to us, but to each other."
The extent of his newfound influence was apparent last fall when his call for public demonstrations in Saudi Arabia for reforms brought out protesters and led to hundreds of arrests. This further raised his profile and made him a champion to fellow dissidents of many political stripes.
"Although I disagree with him on many things, I admire his courage and his values," says Ali Ahmed, director of the Washington-based Saudi Institute and a secular critic of the royal family who says Faqih's broadcasts have been groundbreaking.
"He is a pioneer in this sense," says Ahmed. "He has elevated the ceiling of free expression in Saudi Arabia and all over the Middle East, and he has become one of the most popular figures in the country."
Ahmed says Saudi officials are using terrorism as an excuse to attempt to crack down on Faqih and other reformers. "The problem isn't Saad al-Faqih," he says. "The real problem is the Saudi government." 'One Little Mosquito'
"Do you know how you get malaria?" asks Ferej Alowedi, deputy head of mission of the Saudi Embassy in London. "One little mosquito carries the disease. And that's the way we look at al-Faqih. He's just one little insect, but he can do great damage."
Saudi officials say they have been monitoring Faqih's activities ever since he left Riyadh a decade ago. They contend he has been involved in numerous illegal activities, collecting money for terrorist causes and inciting violence. They keep tapes and transcripts of his Islah broadcasts and material from his Web site, saying he has urged listeners to take revenge for alleged crimes against dissidents by assassinating members of the royal family, including Crown Prince Abdullah and Prince Nayef, the interior minister. Faqih's Web site has posted messages from the Voice of Truth, a militant group, offering 1 million riyals (about $267,000) each for the assassination of the country's top six leaders.
British officials here have reviewed the dossier the Saudis have submitted about Faqih's activities, but say that so far they have seen no evidence that would merit his arrest.
"We're well aware of the Saudi concerns over al-Faqih," said a spokesman for the British Foreign Office. "We have got strict laws which prohibit incitement to terrorism but we can only act when those laws are violated. As of today we do not have any violation which we can drill down into." Under British government policy, spokesmen speak on condition of anonymity.
U.S. officials, who have tracked Faqih's alleged al Qaeda connections for several years, have also conveyed concerns about him. Frances Fragos Townsend, meeting with British officials six months ago during her time as deputy national security adviser, voiced concerns about Faqih, according to National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack.
But Saudi officials say that their new set of allegations should compel the British to take action. They contend that a Libyan intelligence officer, Col. Mohamed Ismael, working under the cover of a charitable foundation in Tripoli, the World Islamic Call Society, came to London at least four times last year to meet with Faqih to discuss a plot to kill Abdullah and other members of the royal family. The sessions were allegedly arranged by Abdurahman Alamoudi, an American Muslim leader based in Northern Virginia.
During the meetings, the Saudis contend, Ismael gave Faqih 1 million euros (about $1.2 million) for his broadcast activities and personal use. At the final session last October, they allege, Faqih gave Ismael the names of four radicals in Saudi Arabia who he said would carry out the assassinations.
By this account, about $1 million was transferred into the country through a travel company in Mecca, which was told the money was for the use of Gaddafi's wife during a pilgrimage there. But the Saudis had monitored the London meetings and were able to arrest the suspected radicals before they could carry out the attacks.
Ismael fled to Cairo, where he was arrested and returned to Riyadh. Alamoudi was stopped by British authorities last August with $340,000 inside a valise and the following month was arrested in the United States when he returned there. He is being held in an Alexandria jail on charges related to cash smuggling.
The Saudis say their information comes from interrogations of Ismael, Alamoudi and 13 others they are holding in the alleged plot. Alamoudi's attorney, James P. McLoughlin Jr., has confirmed that his client "is cooperating with the government in its investigation."
Faqih says the charges are ridiculous. He insists he never met with Ismael, received no money from Libya and did not put the alleged conspirators in contact with assassins inside the kingdom. He says he met several times with Alamoudi, and referred him to a British lawyer after Alamoudi's cash was confiscated at Heathrow Airport. But he says he always kept a distance from the American Muslim leader. "Because he was classified as being too pro-American, it was in my interest not to associate myself with him," Faqih says.
Faqih says he knows he is being watched and that he has to be circumspect: "I am intelligent enough to know that I am surrounded by a crowd of intelligence." Whenever he receives calls from people calling for assassinations, he says, he tries to head them off. "I tell them this is not our approach," he says. "You can change the situation without bloodshed."
Faqih refuses to say where his organization gets its funding. "Much of the money comes from sympathetic individuals," he says. "We are keen for money that is politically, legally and religiously clean. In this dangerous world it's very dangerous to give any details."
Saudi officials say they understand that every time they single out Faqih, his stature increases among militants back home. But they stand by claims that the danger is real. "This man has almost no support inside Saudi Arabia," says a senior security official. "But it only takes one person to make a killer or a terrorist."
Last June, Faqih says, two men arrived at his home claiming to be plumbers. When he opened the door, they sprayed him with gas and tried to drag him outside. He says he cried out for help and fended them off with a small stool. The men fled, after one them knifed him in the leg. The British authorities say two men were later arrested for assault but the charges were dismissed.
Faqih says he believes the assault was orchestrated by Prince Nayef, but Saudi officials strongly deny this. One Saudi official said a prince in the royal family had attempted a rogue kidnap operation -- similar to the abduction of Prince Sultan bin Turki, a nephew of King Fahd, in Geneva a year ago -- without the government's knowledge or consent.
After the incident, Faqih says, he was told by British officials that they had issued a strong warning to the Saudi Embassy here. Still, he says: "I don't feel secure. They have a rogue state over there and they have enough money to do these things. I take my precautions."
-------- prisoners of war
U.S. Says Israel Not Involved in Iraq Interrogations
Tue Jul 6, 2004
Reuters
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5600606
WASHINGTON - The U.S. military on Tuesday denied that Israel had been involved in any interrogations of prisoners held in Iraq.
The comment came after a U.S. Army general, once in charge of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, said on Saturday that she met an Israeli interrogator during her time there, appearing to confirm speculation that Israel might have helped the U.S.-led coalition.
"I can definitely say that ... Israel has not been involved in interrogations here in any way, to include providing interrogators," Army Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the U.S. detainee operations in Iraq, said in an e-mail response to a query from Reuters.
Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, who was responsible for Iraqi prisons at the time photographs were taken showing naked Iraqi detainees being abused and sexually humiliated by the U.S. military, told the BBC in an interview that 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 told BBC radio.
The United States has long denied Israeli involvement in Iraq, an issue that would likely anger the Arab world.
"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. She has not been charged with any crime.
"He didn't elaborate any more than to say he was working with them," Karpinski said.
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Saudi secret service 'riddled' with al-Qa'ida
The Times
July 06, 2004
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10053683%255E2703,00.html
SAUDI Arabia's intelligence agencies are so infiltrated by al-Qa'ida sympathisers that the kingdom's counter-terrorist campaign is failing and militant operations are spreading into neighbouring states, senior Arab and Western officials have warned.
The main Saudi intelligence organisation responsible for combating al-Qa'ida at the Interior Ministry is riddled with agents linked to the militants, the officials say.
"Their staff is 80 per cent sympathetic to al-Qa'ida," one senior Arab source said.
"All Saudi intelligence agencies are compromised. To fight al-Qa'ida they will need to start from scratch. I'm not hopeful the Saudis will win this one."
The level of penetration in the security forces is highlighted by the number of former police and military men on the Interior Ministry's list of the 26 most-wanted terrorists. They include Othman al-Amri, a former sergeant, who was No21 on the list and handed himself in last week as part of a royal amnesty, and Saleh al-Oufi, the leader of an al-Qa'ida cell, who is a former police officer.
Saudi Arabia has been shaken by a series of terrorist attacks over the past year that have targeted foreign workers. Now there is evidence the campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings and shootings is spreading from the kingdom to neighbouring countries, where many expatriates have moved for safety.
The Pentagon is preparing to evacuate 650 non-essential personnel and families from Bahrain, where the US Fifth Fleet is based.
The US embassy in Manama has urged all US citizens to consider leaving Bahrain because of "information" that extremists are planning attacks against US and other Western interests.
"I'm most concerned about Bahrain. If I was a Bahraini, I would worry," said a senior Arab official from one of Saudi Arabia's neighbours.
"After that, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates are also vulnerable."
Evidence has emerged that Saudi Arabia is al-Qa'ida's main regional hub for recruiting, training, funding and arming its militant cells.
Several Saudi volunteers who slipped across the border into Iraq have been killed fighting US forces in the Iraqi city of Fallujah.
Militants on both sides of the border have adopted identical tactics, such as suicide bombings, beheading Western hostages and dragging victims behind cars.
"We're sure these are not copycat tactics being used here. This is a co-ordinated operation," said a senior Saudi official. "These groups do not just exchange information - they also reinforce each other with trained personnel."
Jordan, too, is in the firing line. The Jordanians have intercepted several al-Qa'ida teams that have infiltrated the country from Saudi Arabia with the aim of whipping up opposition to Jordan's leadership among the southern clans, which have tribal links across the border.
Although the FBI, the CIA, British intelligence, Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist squad and other foreign agencies are collaborating with the Saudis, they still face obstruction from local security services in investigating terrorist attacks.
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U.S. Army Changed by Iraq, but for Better or Worse?
Some Military Experts See Value in Lessons Learned;
Others Cite Toll on Personnel, Equipment
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29619-2004Jul5?language=printer
Not long ago, a report surfaced on a Friday that a roadside bomb in Iraq had been hidden inside a dead dog. By the following Monday, the general who oversees the Army's training centers recalled, Army trainers back in the United States had copied the trick.
"It's a truly dynamic curriculum" at the training centers, changing as new tactics emerge in the fighting in Iraq, Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace said in an interview.
Fifteen months of combat in Iraq are leaving an imprint on the U.S. military. All the services are changing, but the Army especially is undergoing radical change as a result of the unexpectedly difficult occupation, in which it has suffered nearly 6,000 casualties.
The strain on Army troops, families and equipment has been extensively reported and is likely to intensify as some units head back to Iraq for a second tour. "The war in Iraq is wrecking the Army and the Marine Corps," retired Navy Capt. John Byron asserts in the July issue of Proceedings, the professional journal of Navy officers. "Troop rotations are in shambles and the all-volunteer force is starting to crumble as we extend combat tours and struggle to get enough boots on the ground."
The latest indication of the psychic toll was a recent study by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research that found that about 16 percent of soldiers who have served in Iraq are showing signs of combat trauma.
Overall, "this kind of stress causes change -- some of it good, some of it not so good," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a former Army officer who serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Indeed, other, less visible changes also are occurring -- and some of them are for the better. A generation of younger Army officers has been seasoned by a year of combat in a harsh and unpredictable environment, for example. And as the Army seeks to adjust to waging a counterinsurgency campaign 7,000 miles away, innovation in how it trains new recruits and structures forces for deployment is now rippling through the service.
"Iraq is accelerating the pace of change in the military -- the Army particularly," said retired Army Lt. Col. James Jay Carafano, a defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "It is forcing them to look at a lot of things they had pushed off because they were hard to do."
In the other services, the changes seem to be mainly financial. At the Navy's big East Coast base in Norfolk, fewer tugboats will be on call this summer to help steer warships to their berths, a result of a decision to tighten base budgets to free up $300 million to help pay for Navy and Marine operations in Iraq. The sea service also is deferring purchases of some spare parts until the new federal fiscal year begins, in October.
"There may be some degradation of readiness as a result," said Vice Adm. Cutler Dawson, deputy chief of naval operations for resources. He also said he thought the effect would be short-term.
At the Air Force, trims are being made in the budgets for travel, transfers, and some purchases of parts and supplies. "We're attempting to minimize any of the readiness impacts," said Maj. Gen. Steve Lorenz, the Air Force's budget director. "We won't know until the end of the year how it all shakes out."
There is no question that the Army personnel system is stressed. "I think the Army is in terrible shape," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, who served last year as the Bush administration's first administrator in postwar Iraq. "I think people are worn out, equipment is run down and we've overstressed the reserves. We're drastically short [of] infantry and MPs because the Army is too small."
Other experts worry about the hidden costs of using up equipment in the extreme heat and abrasive dust of Iraq. Helicopters, armored vehicles and Humvees will have shorter service lives than the Army planned. "Equipment's taking a beating. Aircraft and high-cost tank engines are accumulating lots of hours," said retired Army Lt. Gen. Leonard Holder.
In the Army, the biggest long-term changes may be in how it trains -- if the lessons learned in counterinsurgency stick. After the Vietnam War, noted retired Army Lt. Col. Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., who wrote a book on the Army and Vietnam, "we got out of the counterinsurgency business."
Historically, the National Training Center, the Army's premier combat training facility, has focused on simulating combat between tank-heavy mechanized forces in open, high-desert terrain. But over the past year, it has added urban areas, hired some Iraqi Americans to work in them and interact with troops, and even put caves up in the hills where those playing opposing guerrilla forces can hide weapons and other supplies.
If Army soldiers treat the "locals" well in the urban areas, they learn more about those weapons caches. If they don't, they find out about the weapons the hard way. New training scenarios also require Army commanders to handle everything from combat operations to refugee relief simultaneously.
The Army also has added 8,000 slots to the normally 25,000 infantrymen it trains annually at Fort Benning, Ga. To handle the surge, and to replace drill sergeants deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan to train locals there, it has mobilized about 100 reservists to drill the new soldiers.
Even mechanics and clerks now are given training in combat operations, such as defending a convoy or reacting to an ambush, said Bob Seger, acting deputy chief of staff for operations at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. "This is introductory training for everybody, not just infantry or cavalry scouts," he said. "From initial entry training of soldiers all the way up to general officers, we are designing new courses and doing everything we can to get people ready to go."
Wallace, who is head of the Army's Combined Arms Center, said the changes in Army training are the most significant since the "training revolution" of the early 1980s, when the service came out of its post-Vietnam funk and based its training on realistic mock combat against a professional opposing force with trained observers.
Not everyone is as sanguine. Army insiders report quiet worry in the service about the recent decision to deploy to Iraq the opposing forces from two of the Army's three major training centers. "To move our best trainers to the combat zone proves to you how stretched the Army is," said retired Army Col. John Antal.
Moves like that indicate that the service may be eating its seed corn. "We need to keep our eye on this," said one senior Army general, who worries about the possibility of keeping tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for years. "We'll survive in the short term, but we have to be careful not to inadvertently cut our collective throat in the long term."
The greatest long-term effect of the difficult environment in Iraq may be on the generation of younger officers and soldiers who have led platoons and companies there over the past year. "The complexity, unpredictability and ambiguity of postwar Iraq is producing a cohort of innovative, confident and adaptable junior officers," said retired Army Lt. Col. Leonard Wong, an expert in military personnel issues.
Wong has just completed for the Army War College a study for which he interviewed more than 50 lieutenants and captains serving in Iraq. His conclusion: "Our troops aren't just competent; Iraq also is teaching them capacity -- they can handle a lot more. With all the incredibly bad-news stories you hear out of Operation Iraqi Freedom, this is a good-news story -- if we leverage it correctly."
His concern, he said, is that the Army will not know what to do with those agile, intellectually creative officers, and on their return will simply put them back into the lockstep of garrison life, rather than seek to find ways to nurture their newfound skills. One captain who recently returned from a year of combat in Iraq noted that he was returned to "restrictive training limitations of the past era," making it more difficult to convey some of the hard-earned knowledge he brought back.
But retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, who left the Army last month, has a darker view of the choices those younger officers are likely to make. He said he believes that the situation in Iraq is such a mess, with the Army pursuing "wrongheaded tactics," that, "in the end, our best soldiers, sergeants, lieutenants and captains will leave in disgust, and we will be unprepared for the future regional Middle Eastern war that our weak performance in Iraq now makes inevitable."
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Mexicans Disrupt Marine's Funeral
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29661-2004Jul5.html
MEXICO CITY, July 5 -- Armed Mexican soldiers interrupted the burial of a Mexican-born U.S. Marine killed in Iraq and briefly detained at least a dozen Marines participating in the ceremony Sunday. U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza said he was "outraged" over the July 4 incident, which involved a dispute over two ceremonial, non-working rifles carried at the cemetery by a Marine color guard.
The incident occurred at the burial of Lance Cpl. Juan Lopez Rangel, 22, who was killed in an ambush in Ramadi on June 21. Lopez, a legal permanent resident of the United States who was granted citizenship posthumously, had moved to Georgia when he was 15 from his home town of San Luis de la Paz in central Guanajuato state, where his funeral and burial were held.
Lopez's family had requested that he be buried with full U.S. military honors, which normally include a 21-gun salute. But the Mexican Defense Ministry, citing the prohibition on foreign troops carrying weapons in Mexico, turned down a request for the Marines to carry guns for the salute, said Jim Dickmeyer, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.
The Iraq war is an emotional subject in Mexico, where President Vicente Fox and the vast majority of the public opposed the U.S.-led invasion. The Mexican media have reported that at least 17 Mexican-born U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, along with at least 13 more born in the United States to Mexican parents.
While there has been great public sympathy for the dead soldiers -- including several thousand mourners who turned out Sunday -- the deaths have created even more resentment about the war.
The six pallbearers, all Marines from Lopez's unit who had flown in from Camp Pendleton in California, carried no weapons, Dickmeyer said. They were joined by a Marine color guard from the embassy made up of two flag-bearers accompanied by two Marines carrying only the ceremonial M-14 rifles, which do not fire ammunition, Dickmeyer said.
Problems began as the six pallbearers were folding the U.S. flag in preparation to hand it to Lopez's widow, said Dickmeyer, who was present. A Mexican Army captain, backed by at least 10 soldiers in combat uniforms and helmets, demanded to see documents giving the Marines permission to carry the guns in Mexico, he said.
Dickmeyer said he suggested the captain wait until the ceremony was over to discuss the matter. But the officer continued demanding to see documents and confiscate the guns, even as a U.S. Marine played taps on his bugle, Dickmeyer said.
When taps was finished, the color guard turned about-face and marched back to the three embassy vans in which they had arrived. They put the flags and guns in the vehicles. Mexican soldiers stood in front of the vehicles and would not permit them to leave, Dickmeyer said.
Photographs in Mexican newspapers Monday showed a Mexican soldier jabbing his finger toward the face of a Marine officer in an apparently heated discussion.
For at least 40 minutes, the Mexican captain and U.S. Embassy officials made phone calls to try to resolve the matter, Dickmeyer said. Finally, he said, the captain and his troops simply walked away, without explanation, and the Marines drove back to Mexico City.
"I am outraged that this would take away from the ceremony honoring U.S. Marine Juan Lopez Rangel, whose family requested that he be buried in his town of birth with full military honors," Garza said in a statement issued Sunday night.
The Mexican Defense Ministry had no comment Monday. Salvador Musalem, a spokesman for the Mexican Foreign Ministry, said Mexican Defense Minister Gerardo Vega Garcia and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were scheduled to discuss the matter by telephone Monday.
Lopez's cousin, Octavio Lopez Torres, said Monday that the Mexican soldiers had shown a "lack of respect."
"Maybe they were just doing their jobs, but they have to respect that it was a painful moment," Lopez said. "The family was just trying to get through the moment. They could have waited."
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Abducted Marine Is Free, His Brother Says
July 6, 2004
By EDWARD WONG and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/international/middleeast/06CND-MARI.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 6 - A United States marine held by an Iraqi militant group is alive and has been released, the marine's brother said today.
The group, Islamic Response, issued a statement on Monday saying that it had taken Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, the marine it had earlier threatened with beheading, to a "place of safety" after he promised to abandon the American military.
Today, Corporal Hassoun's older brother, Sami Hassoun, said, "We received a sign that he is alive and he is released and everything is O.K."
"The sign is something that came directly from him, there is something that nobody else could possibly know," Mr. Hassoun said in a telephone interview from Tripoli, Lebanon. "It's a certain clue. He is alive and he is released."
Mr. Hassoun said that relatives had not spoken to Corporal Hassoun himself, and he did not know whether his brother was still in Iraq or where he would eventually turn up.
The statement by Islamic Response, which was given to the Arab satellite network Al Jazeera, did not say where Corporal Hassoun had been taken. It indicated only that he had not been killed.
The 24-year-old Lebanese-born corporal has been missing since June 20, when he did not report for duty at a Marine base near Falluja, 35 miles west of Baghdad.
Corporal Hassoun, a truck and Humvee driver, mysteriously disappeared from his base. Some military officials have said he may have been trying to desert to Lebanon, where his father lives.
On June 27, Al Jazeera broadcast a videotape of Corporal Hassoun blindfolded, with a sword held above his head. In that tape, Islamic Response said it would behead him if the Americans did not release all of their prisoners.
Then, last Saturday, two Islamist Web sites carried a message attributed to the leader of another militant group, the Army of Ansar al-Sunna, saying it had beheaded Corporal Hassoun and would shortly release images of the decapitation. That message, addressed to President Bush, also said the corporal had been involved in a romantic relationship with an Arab woman and had been lured off his base.
But on Sunday, Ansar al-Sunna posted an Internet message saying that it had not killed Corporal Hassoun and that someone had put a phony message on the two Web sites.
Ansar al-Sunna is a radical off-shoot of Ansar al-Islam, a hard-line group based until last year near the northern Iran-Iraq border. At the start of the war, Kurdish militiamen and American Special Forces soldiers invaded the group's villages, forcing survivors to scatter. Months later, Ansar al-Sunna, apparently based in the Falluja area, announced its formation.
In a town northeast of Baghdad today, 13 people were killed when a car bomb exploded, The Associated Press quoted hospital officials as saying. An American military spokesman said he had no immediate information about the report.
The victims had been attending a wake in the town, Khalis, for people killed in a previous attack, the officials said. "So far, we've received five of the dead," the head of the morgue at Baquba General Hospital, Dr. Nasser Jawad Kadhim, said. "Thirty-five of the injured have been hospitalized."
Insurgent groups have been waging a campaign of attacks against foreign troops in Iraq and their Iraqi allies, including the new Iraqi government.
Falluja has become a haven for some of the groups since the marines halted their invasion of the city in late April. Arab fighters and loyalists to the former ruling Baath Party roam the streets at will while hard-line Sunni clerics stir up hatred against the Americans. Foreigners are regularly kidnapped.
The American military launched an airstrike in Falluja on Monday evening, dropping four 500-pound bombs and two 1,000-pound bombs on what the military called a "mujahedeen safe house." Residents and hospital officials said at least 10 people had been killed, the A.P. reported. It was the fifth such attack in the last several weeks, and the first one since the Americans transferred authority to the interim Iraqi government on June 28.
Early today, the office of Prime Minister Iyad Allawi issued a statement saying that Iraqi security forces had provided the American military with "clear and compelling intelligence" that the house was an insurgents' hideout.
Corporal Hassoun is a Muslim, and so far most foreign Muslims taken hostage by the insurgents have been released. Corporal Hassoun's family had appealed to Muslim clerics to intervene on his behalf.
In the videotape of Corporal Hassoun, Islamic Response said it was the security arm of the National Islamic Resistance-1920 Revolution Brigades. That name is an apparent reference to a largely Shiite-led revolution against British colonialists after European powers dismembered the Ottoman Empire after World War I and annexed parts of it. The Shiites staged an unsuccessful revolt in what was then called Mesopotamia, leading to the installation by the British of a Sunni Arab monarchy.
The corporal's relatives in Utah have said he would not have deserted the marines, though Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, an American military spokesman, said last week that the corporal was on "an unauthorized absence."
A senior military official said in an interview that the military did not believe Corporal Hassoun was being held under great duress. He pointed out that he was clean-shaven in the video released June 27 and did not look like a man about to be killed.
In West Jordan, Utah, a spokesman for the Hassoun family, Tarek Nosseir, said on Monday, "If he is still in captivity, we remind the captors of the saying of our beloved prophet: Be merciful to those on earth and mercy will descend upon you from heaven."
In the airstrike on Falluja, the American military dropped the bombs in an eastern neighborhood, The A.P. reported. Ambulances raced to the scene while residents of the area pulled bodies from the debris. Military officials have said the previous four airstrikes were launched to destroy safe houses of fighters linked to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant whom the Americans are blaming for some of the most spectacular car bombings in Iraq.
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from Cairo for this article.
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Pilot in Mistaken Bombing Reprimanded
July 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Mistaken-Bombing.html
NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- A U.S. fighter pilot who mistakenly bombed Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan in 2002, killing four, was found guilty Tuesday of dereliction of duty and was reprimanded and docked a month's pay, or nearly $5,700.
Maj. Harry Schmidt, 38, ``acted shamefully'' during the episode, ``exhibiting arrogance and a lack of flight discipline,'' Air Force Lt. Gen. Bruce Carlson wrote in the reprimand.
Schmidt, a former instructor at the Navy's ``Top Gun'' fighter pilot school, had blamed the bombing on the ``fog of war,'' saying he mistook the Canadians' gunfire for an attack by Taliban forces. He said his superiors never told him that the Canadians would be conducting live-fire exercises near Kandahar airport that night.
He was originally charged with manslaughter and aggravated assault, but the charges were reduced last year to dereliction of duty.
Carlson said Schmidt had become impatient waiting for permission from air controllers to attack what he believed was Taliban artillery. He was warned to ``make sure it's not friendlies'' before firing.
The reprimand said Schmidt should have taken evasive action rather than attack and accused him of lying about his motivation for the bombing, using ``the inherent right of self-defense as an excuse to wage your own war.''
Charles Gittins, Schmidt's civilian lawyer, said he is considering an appeal and repeated his claim that Schmidt was made a scapegoat for his commanders' poor planning. He said the reprimand amounted to an unfair conviction for murder.
``If what Gen. Carlson claimed were true -- that Harry used self defense as a pretext and recklessly released ordnance without legal justification -- that constitutes unpremeditated murder,'' Gittins said in a prepared statement.
Gittins also has said an Air Force-issued amphetamine given to pilots to help them stay awake on long missions might have impaired the pilot's judgment. However, Col. Richard Harding, a judge advocate general with the Air Force, said Gittins presented no evidence regarding the pills in last week's hearing.
Schmidt's mission commander, Maj. William Umbach, who was in a second F-16, also was charged with assault and manslaughter. Those charges were dismissed last summer, and he was reprimanded for ``leadership failures'' and allowed to retire.
The case against the two Illinois National Guardsmen has been closely watched in Canada, where many were outraged by the bombing and the two days it took President Bush to publicly apologize.
The four soldiers who died were the first Canadians killed in combat since the Korean War. Eight others were wounded.
Maureen Decaire, mother of one of the Canadians injured in the bombing, said she understands that Schmidt did not intend to cause harm, but the decision still leaves her unsatisfied.
``I would like to see him accept responsibility, which I don't think has happened,'' she said from Winnipeg.
Schmidt was found guilty after a closed, non-judicial hearing held last week at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. The Air Force had announced last month that it would not court-martial Schmidt; he could have gotten up to six months in prison if convicted at a court-martial.
Schmidt remains in the Air National Guard but has agreed never to fly Air Force jets again.
In videotape of the mission taken from Schmidt's F-16, he can be heard telling air controllers that he and his mission commander were under attack and requesting permission to open fire with his 20 mm cannon.
``Hold fire,'' an air controller responded.
Four seconds later, Schmidt said: ``It looks like a piece of artillery firing at us. I'm rolling in, in self-defense.''
He released a 500-pound, laser-guided bomb 39 seconds after the ``hold fire'' order.
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Brother Says Missing Marine in Iraq Freed
Associated Press Writer
By BASSEM MROUE
July 6, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_MARINE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) -- The family of Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun said Tuesday they had received word that the Lebanese-born U.S. Marine - who was kidnapped in Iraq and at one point was reported beheaded - was free and well.
A Lebanese government official also said Hassoun was released, though his whereabouts were unknown. The kidnappers freed the 24-year-old Marine after he pledged not to return to the U.S. military, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The two statements were positive signals for Hassoun's relatives in Lebanon and the United States, who have seen their hopes rise and plummet amid contradictory Internet messages by Iraqi militants over Marine's fate.
The U.S. military initially said Hassoun was absent without authorization since June 20. They later said he was "captured."
Hassoun's brother in the north Lebanese city of Tripoli said Tuesday he is confident his brother is free, although he has not spoken to him.
"We have received reliable information the guy is free," Sami Hassoun told The Associated Press. "We received a sign from my brother reassuring us."
Sami Hassoun said the family had received credible information from a person who came to their Tripoli home. The person, whom he did not identify, did not say where the Marine was, Sami Hassoun said.
Since Cpl. Hassoun's abduction, the family in Tripoli - where his father Ali lives - has been in touch with politicians and Muslim clerics in Lebanon and Islamic groups in Iraq to try to secure the Marine's release.
Foreign Ministry officials in Beirut said that Lebanese diplomats in Iraq had told them Hassoun is alive. They gave no further details.
On Saturday, a militant group calling itself the Ansar al-Sunna Army claimed on a Web site that it had beheaded Hassoun and promised to release a video to prove it.
The video never emerged, and in a statement posted on another Web site, the group said Sunday it did not issue the statement about Hassoun being beheaded.
On Monday, a group calling itself "Islamic Response" told Al-Jazeera television that Hassoun was safe at an undisclosed location. It claimed Hassoun had promised not to return to the American military.
The statement was issued in the same name used in the original kidnapping claim - a June 27 video that showed Hassoun blindfolded with a sword brandished over his head. The group calls itself "Islamic Response," the security wing of the "National Islamic Resistance - 1920 Revolution Brigades." The name refers to an uprising against the British after World War I.
Another insurgent group on Tuesday said it had kidnapped an Egyptian truck driver, releasing a video to the al-Jazeera television station. The group calls itself the "Iraqi Legitimate Resistance." The man identified himself as Alsayeid Mohammed Alsayeid Algarabawi. He was captured while driving a fuel truck for U.S. forces from Saudi Arabia, the group said.
In West Jordan, Utah, home of Cpl. Hassoun's eldest brother, Mohammed, family spokesman Tarek Nosseir said after Monday's statement, "We pray that the news of his safe release is true."
There were no signs of activity Tuesday at the Hassoun's home in the Salt Lake City suburb. The blinds of the house were drawn, and about 30 American flags and a Marine flag were planted in the lawn.
Hassoun's alleged captors have claimed he was romantically involved with an Arab woman and was lured away from his Marine base and captured.
A Marine spokesman in Washington said they were pursuing all angles in the investigation.
"Clearly any information that comes available is of extreme interest to us as we pursue the investigation," said Capt. Dan McSweeney, a Marine spokesman.
The New York Times, citing a Marine officer who spoke on condition of anonymity, reported Hassoun had been traumatized after seeing one of his sergeants killed by an explosive and was trying to make his way back to Lebanon. The officer told the paper Hassoun had sought the help of Iraqis at his military base, but was betrayed and handed over to extremists.
Mohammed Hassoun has denied the Times report.
-------- war crimes
Lawyer: Saddam trial `illegal'
By YASUNORI KAWAKAMI:
The Asahi Shimbun
July 6, 2004
http://www.asahi.com/english/world/TKY200407060109.html
AMMAN, Jordan-The Iraqi Special Tribunal that will try Saddam Hussein is ``illegal'' because it was established under the U.S.-led occupation, says the chief defense attorney for the ousted Iraqi leader.
Jordanian attorney Mohammed Rashdan dismissed all seven charges against Hussein, including the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. He would not elaborate.
Rashdan, who heads a 30-member defense team, made the comments during an interview here Sunday with The Asahi Shimbun.
The multinational team was appointed by Saddam's wife, Sajida, and three daughters after U.S. forces captured the deposed strongman in December.
After watching TV images of Saddam at the tribunal, Rashdan said his client looked strong and apparently had no psychological problems, despite reports he had been abused during his six months in captivity.
Rashdan has yet to enter Iraq because the interim Iraqi government has not given permission.
The lawyer indicated the defense team will question the legitimacy of the tribunal itself as well as the just-ended occupation by U.S.-led forces.
``It was established on the basis of a decision by the Coalition Provisional Authority, which monopolized the three powers of administration, judiciary and legislation during the occupation,'' Rashdan said. ``This runs counter to international law.''
He said the U.S.-led attack on Iraq violated international law, making the ensuing occupation illegal as well.
The occupation authorities also revised many Iraqi laws, which Rashdan said violated the Geneva Conventions.
While flatly denying the charges against Saddam, Rashdan said he will decide on specific defense strategies after talking with his client and confirming the former president's intentions.
Rashdan said the defense team will also question the United States' war responsibility.
He accused both President George W. Bush and his father of using depleted uranium weapons in Iraq during the latest war and the first Persian Gulf War.
The younger Bush also falsely claimed that Iraq had threatened U.S. security interests with weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be nonexistent, he added.
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Bush should be charged for war crimes
07/06/2004
Pravda
by Andy D.
http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/98/395/13283_Bush.html
Dear Editor:
I agree with the opinion that Bush, Blair and their military, political and financial accomplices should be charged for war crimes of the most heinous nature. They are, by any measure, the most evil of men. Men without a conscience. They are the monsters of the 21st century! Why? Because they did not hesitate to use nuclear weapons in the form of depleted uranium (DU) on the innocent populations of Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq and did so on a massive scale. The disastrous ecological and genetic repercussions of these evil acts will last forever as DU remains radioactive for billions of years. On the former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark's web site you can witness the horrific genetic damage done to Iraqis from the first Gulf war of 1991. DU destroys DNA and kills by stealth. Will the populations of these countries survive into the future? Does anyone have an answer? What about all those dumb coalition troops?
Intellectually challenged Bush would never have initiated a war on Afghanistan and Iraq if he wasn't prodded to do so by the international bankers who engaged the US in a proxy war for resources and geopolitical reasons. They may have over estimated the ability of the US to achieve the bankers' objectives. Iraq is not yet conqured. The world is awash in paper currencies. They won't buy so much as loaf of bread if people perceive them a worthless. If the US controls Middle East oil, the US dollar will continue as a reserve currency. And if not, then the dollar collapses. These wars are always about power and money and resources. And of course the brunt of the dying is always among the civilian populations.
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Clinton's Life: In the Grip of Mass Murder
By Kurt Nimmo,
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Press Action
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/nimmo07062004/
People are fascinated with criminals. For instance, John Dillinger and Al Capone. Dillinger and Capone, however, are small time crooks when compared to former presidents such as Bill Clinton, who recently packed in the curious during a book-stop in Philadelphia.
Clinton was magnanimous enough to take a few pre-approved questions from audience members during an interview conducted by Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. "I am ashamed to this day for the personal mistake I made," Clinton said about his two-timing with Monica Lewinsky, "but I am proud I did not break under what they tried to do to me for seven years, because you would be worse off. You would be worse off. We were just in the grip of madness."
I don't recall this madness, or do I see how Clinton's impeachment, if the Senate had not acquitted him, would have made America worse off. I was all for Clinton's impeachment, although not because of anything he did with an intern or the lies he told about it, but rather for what he did to the people of Iraq and Serbia.
Like the serial war criminal Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton does not deserve to walk free. I'm all for him writing books-so long as he writes them from a cell adjoining the one holding Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague. In fact, the crimes of Slobodan Milosevic are nothing in comparison to the crimes of Bill Clinton. Slick Willie is responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands-no, millions-of Iraqis, Serbs, and Sudanese.
So eager was Clinton to follow in the footsteps of Bush, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman-that is to say, so eager was Clinton to kill people in the name of so-called national security-he fired a bevy of cruise missiles into Baghdad on June 26, 1993, not long after taking office.
Historians like to say Clinton launched this sneaky attack on a sovereign nation in response to an assassination plot against former president Bush-a plot never conclusively proven-but the real reason Clinton killed dozens of Iraqis, including internationally renowned artist Layla al-Altar, was to demonstrate to the world he was a tough guy like his predecessor. Bush, as a retiring tough guy, ordered air strikes and dispatched a salvo of cruise missiles into Iraq on January 17-19, 1993, killing scores of people. It was a sort of perverse farewell.
If Saddam did indeed attempt to assassinate Bush Senior while he visited Kuwait in April of 1993, he likely believed there was ample reason since Bush's sendoff bombing specifically targeted the Iraqi dictator, who was thought to be at the al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad at the time (instead of Saddam, the bombs killed two hotel service employees).
Clinton's premeditated mass murder gave him a popularity spike in America. Public-opinion polls showed his approval rating climbed by eleven percentage points on June 27th, the day after the attack, and more than two-thirds of those polled approved of the bombing. Americans like it when their presidents kill people a faraway lands, especially after they whop the tar out of them in lopsided wars. It is easy to stomach mass murder when it is presented as a video game on CNN and Fox News.
Clinton's desire to kill people was not restricted to Iraqis. He also had it out for Seventh-day Adventists. On April 19, 1993, Clinton gassed and burned to death 86 of them-men, women, and children-at the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas, a couple months before he bombed the helpless civilians of Baghdad. Bush Junior likes to go on about the threat posed by Saddam's chemical weapons-Saddam's non-existent chemicals weapons, as it turns out - but actually Americans have more to fear from the likes of Bill Clinton, the BATF, and the FBI than Saddam Hussein.
Of course, 80 or so ill-fated Americans, incinerated and gassed for not obeying the federal government, is mere peanuts when compared to what Clinton did when he continued imposing comprehensive economic sanctions on the Iraqi people.
By the time Clinton left office, he had managed, with the enthusiastic help of Britain and the United Nations, to kill around a million Iraqi children under the age of five, according to UNICEF reports. In 1999, between 4,000 and 5,000 children were dying a month in Iraq from malnutrition and entirely preventable disease. As John and Karl Mueller point out in Foreign Affairs (May/June 1999), Clinton's "sanctions of mass destruction" caused "the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction [nuclear and chemical] throughout all history." In short, Clinton is one of most active and scurrilous war criminals of recent times. It is nothing short of absurd that he is walking around free, allowed to pedal a best-selling book, and the only criticism he receives centers around an adolescent relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
Killing unimaginable numbers of innocent Iraqis, however, was not enough for Clinton. He teamed up with NATO to bomb the civilian infrastructure of the former Yugoslavia-hospitals, homes, trains, schools, power stations, even TV stations. As Edward S. Herman writes in Z magazine (December 1999), "60 percent of NATO targets were civilian, including 33 hospitals and 344 schools, as well as 144 major industrial plants and a large petro-chemical plant whose bombing caused a pollution catastrophe." John Pilger writes that the list of civilian targets included "housing estates, hotels, libraries, youth centers, theatres, museums, churches and 14th century monasteries on the World Heritage list. Farms have been bombed and their crops set afire."
In all, according to Human Rights Watch, over 500 Serbian civilians were killed in 37,465 bombing sorties over a period of 78 days. Of course, this does not take into account the number of Serbs who will die as a result of depleted uranium munitions used by NATO and the U.S. A British biologist, Roger Coghill, believes 10,000 additional people will die from cancer. "Throughout the Balkan region, I calculate that there will be an extra 10,150 deaths from cancer because of the use of DU. That will include local people, K-FOR personnel, aid workers, everyone," Coghill told the BBC in 1999.
During Bush's latest homicidal adventure in Iraq-as if to make certain Clinton's crimes against the Serbs paled in comparison-the U.S. military left behind a staggering 75 tons of DU, enough to plague the beleaguered nation with epidemic cancer and horrendous birth defects for years to come. Bush has ensured a nightmarish future for millions of Iraqis, most of who hated Saddam and never lifted a finger against America.
"We see further into the future," Clinton's Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, told the New York Times at approximately the same time Coghill made his dire prediction for the people of Serbia and Kosovo. If Serbian and Iraqi children die from leukemia, it is because "we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall."
In Philadelphia, Clinton said his "greatest regrets in foreign policy" were his failure to go after Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and the "collapse" of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at Camp David in 2000. (Instead of collapsed, Clinton should have said sabotaged by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and himself.)
Clinton has no "regrets" or is he "ashamed" of his blood-spattered complicity in the killing of a million people, most of them children. As a sociopath he is more worried about what a meager sexual affair with an insecure intern will do to his reputation than a mountain of dead bodies or the countless victims yet to suffer from cancer and birth defects.
As for Osama bin Laden, he is an amateur sociopath in comparison to an old pro like William Jefferson Clinton.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is the author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, a collection of essays published by Dandelion Books. Visit his weblog at KurtNimmo.com.
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Milosevic's Ill Health Delays Defense Case
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29644-2004Jul5.html
THE HAGUE, July 5 -- Four days after former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was brought before a judge in Baghdad, Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia complained of mistreatment to the U.N. tribunal trying him, asserting that it has jeopardized his health and made it impossible for him to conduct his defense.
Milosevic's defense case, which had been scheduled to begin Monday, was postponed, and the brief session was taken up by questions about the 62-year-old ousted leader's health, including whether he would be fit enough for the trial to continue. Doctors who examined him this morning once again found his blood pressure dangerously high, because of the strain of conducting his own defense, and said his most pressing need this week was to rest.
"The time has come for a radical review of the trial process and the continuation of the trial," said presiding Judge Patrick Robinson of Britain. He said the court would issue a decision soon "bearing in mind the health problems of the accused, which are clearly chronic and recurrent."
Judicial observers said the most logical next step would be for the court to impose a defense lawyer on Milosevic -- which the prosecutors again urged Monday, but which Milosevic again rejected.
"This is out of the question, as you know, nor will I ever accept it," Milosevic said.
Referring to his worsening health and the court-ordered medical report that showed him suffering from "organ damage" due to his high blood pressure, Milosevic said, "Such a deterioration is a result of your decision not to give me adequate time for my preparation."
Dismissing suggestions that he consider making his opening defense statement in writing, or have a live video link to his jail cell so he would not have to attend every session, Milosevic said, "I will examine my witnesses, and I will be in this room."
"What you have done Monday is a classic example of maltreatment of prisoners," he added. "This kind of decision-making is something we know from the Inquisition in the Middle Ages."
The trial schedule, which has been repeatedly delayed, has already been cut to three days a week to allow Milosevic to rest. But he said those three days should include the time he needs to prepare his defense. Milosevic, who is facing charges of war crimes and genocide from the 1990s wars in Bosnia and Croatia, and for the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo in 1999, has said he intends to call about 1,400 witnesses, including former president Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He has 150 working days for his defense.
The trial began in February 2002, and the prosecution finished its case two years later. The original presiding judge, Richard May of Britain, left because of illness -- he died last week -- and was replaced. If any other judge on the three-member panel leaves or cannot continue, the trial would have to be stopped.
Judith Armatta, who has been monitoring the trial for the Washington-based Coalition for International Justice, a legal advocacy group, said Robinson's remarks about the need for a "radical review" suggested a tougher line in trying to keep the case on track -- even if that meant forcing Milosevic to accept a defense lawyer against his will.
"They've lost one judge already, 2 1/2 years into it," she said. "What we see here is a firmer response from the court" than in the past.
Armatta said it was essential that the trial continue, noting that many following the legal proceedings against Saddam Hussein will be looking to Milosevic's trial for examples of how to handle a huge, complex case involving a former head of state and multiple charges spanning many years. "People will look here -- they have to, because they're both heads of state, and they both don't recognize the legitimacy of the tribunals," she said.
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Milosevic Trial to Resume on July 14, Judges Say
July 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-milosevic.html?hp
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Judges declared Slobodan Milosevic fit enough on Tuesday for his much-delayed war crimes trial to proceed but warned they might have to impose a defense lawyer on the ailing former Yugoslav president.
``There is no evidence that the accused is not fit to stand trial at all, but there is evidence that the health of the accused is such that he may not be fit to continue to represent himself,'' the judges wrote in a statement.
Milosevic, who has been defending himself in a court he does not recognize, had been expected to launch his defense on Monday in a case widely regarded as Europe's biggest war crimes trial since top Nazis were tried at Nuremberg after World War II.
But new concerns about his high blood pressure and heart problems forced yet another delay to the case that started in February 2002, with a lawyer appointed to ensure Milosevic gets a fair trial questioning whether the case could continue.
The trial judges called on Tuesday for a cardiologist to examine the 62-year-old accused to determine if he was fit enough to continue to conduct his own defense and said the case would resume on July 14, subject to the state of his health.
Milosevic, who had been due to start his defense case after a lengthy prosecution accusing him of genocide and other crimes during the 1990s breakup of Yugoslavia, said on Monday he would never agree to the imposition of a defense counsel.
Vladimir Krsljanin, a Belgrade-based supporter who provides him with legal assistance, said forcing one on him would make his health problems worse.
``That would only increase his stress and antagonism and effort to follow everything a lawyer he does not trust is doing,'' he said. ``They are achieving what they wanted to achieve from the start -- to prevent him from saying what he wants.''
RADICAL REVIEW
The imposition of a defense counsel against the will of an accused is not unprecedented at the tribunal. Judges have done so in the case of Serb ultra-nationalist Vojislav Seselj, who faces charges of crimes against humanity in the Balkans.
The judges said it was time for a ``radical review,'' noting that 66 trial days had been lost due to Milosevic's ill health.
``It is in the interests of the accused and the broader interests of justice that this trial be conducted and concluded within a reasonable period of time,'' the judges said.
They said they might have to assign a defense lawyer to ensure the trial is completed, who would either assist Milosevic in the preparation and presentation of his defense or -- in exceptional circumstances -- take over the defense.
The defiant former Serbian strongman, charged with genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, accused the court of ``maltreatment of prisoners'' on Monday for making him attend a hearing on his health.
The court heard on Monday that Milosevic has suffered from high blood pressure especially when under stress as well as damage to his heart, with doctors recommending regular rest.
Since the prosecution wrapped up its case in February after calling around 290 witnesses, Milosevic has been working on his defense from an office with a computer, fax, telephone and filing cabinets in the tribunal's detention center.
The Belgrade Law Faculty graduate wants to summon more than 1,000 witnesses including former U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the 150 working days allotted for his defense.
He says the tribunal is guilty of inherent bias against him and the Serb people, branding it an illegal institution designed to cover up what he says were NATO war crimes sponsored by the United States and Britain.
He describes himself as a peacemaker and has declined to enter a plea to the charges. Pleas of not guilty were entered on his behalf by the trial's three judges.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Security Intensifies for Political Conventions
Events in N.Y., Boston Seen as Terror Targets
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29636-2004Jul5?language=printer
Convinced that terrorists are determined to disrupt the presidential election by attacking the United States, the government is mounting a massive homeland security effort as the run-up to the two presidential nominating conventions begins.
Unprecedented security arrangements have been made for the conventions in Boston and New York, where authorities believe al Qaeda may see an opportunity to disrupt and perhaps alter the outcome of the Nov. 2 election. But the planning extends to "symbolic events" such as Labor Day weekend, when large crowds will gather, and to Election Day.
"These events will bring to bear more protective measures than any in history, and while many of these measures can be seen, others like weapons of mass destruction detection equipment won't be seen," Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said of precautions for the conventions. The effort stems from intelligence officials' conclusion that al Qaeda and like-minded groups, buoyed by the March 11 Madrid train bombings and the electoral defeat of Spain's government days later, are determined to launch something similar in this country. They base their conclusion on what they call incontrovertible classified intelligence that apparently includes electronic surveillance.
U.S. government officials say they have no intelligence specifying the time or place of an attack. Nor have they raised the color-coded threat index, or issued a dire warning such as the one Attorney General John D. Ashcroft gave before Memorial Day.
Federal agents will inspect sewers and weld shut manholes around the two convention centers, and remove mailboxes and most trash cans. Coast Guard craft will survey waterways for out-of-place boaters. Police officers will guard the ventilation systems of hotels where delegates stay, and dozens of highly trained emergency response teams will wait in warehouses in case of chemical or biological attack.
In Boston, some major highways, bridges and tunnels will be closed completely, including one interstate only feet from the FleetCenter, where the Democratic convention will be held July 26 to 29. That has prompted city officials to urge downtown workers to stay home that week. Riders of the city's subways will be subject to random searches of their bags.
New York, where Republicans will gather from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2, will be patrolled by more than 10,000 uniformed officers, and thousands of additional federal personnel on the streets, in the air and on the water.
At the same time, government officials fear that terrorists may avoid that security buildup and strike "soft" targets such as hotels or department stores -- across town or across the country -- as the conventions are underway.
Homeland security officials believe New York is a far more likely target than Boston because al Qaeda has consistently set its sights on that city, and because terrorists are galvanized by the prospect of striking the nation's top political leadership, from President Bush on down, U.S. officials said.
While Bostonians are preparing for grievous inconvenience during the Democratic convention, federal officials said they view the GOP convention as considerably more challenging for security personnel.
Immense crowds of anti-Bush protesters -- estimated by organizers at 250,000 to 1 million -- are expected in New York. City officials say the 10,000 officers on duty will be engaged in a delicate balancing act, simultaneously trying to guard against a terrorist attack and civil disobedience, while guaranteeing the First Amendment rights of demonstrators and trying to minimize disruption to New Yorkers.
Organizers of the largest protests express deep mistrust of the federal government and New York police for sounding what they believe are overblown alarms about terrorism to justify repressive security procedures and stifle dissent.
"There's an element of lies and deception," said Tanya Mayo, national organizer for Not in Our Name, a group organizing one of the biggest antiwar rallies.
The conventions have been designated National Special Security Events, which gives the U.S. Secret Service the lead in coordinating security. The Secret Service has long-standing expertise in heading off violence through intelligence-gathering and thorough planning, officials said.
Authorities are not simply hardening targets. The FBI and the Homeland Security Department recently established the "2004 threat task force." Armed with intelligence information, the FBI is trying to develop sources by interviewing people in the Muslim community and is reviewing previously collected intelligence to try to connect it to the current threat. The bureau also is making a major effort to locate seven suspected al Qaeda associates who it has said have the ability or intent to harm the United States.
U.S. intelligence officers said they noted a sharp increase in electronic "chatter" among al Qaeda followers about election-related attacks in the United States after the bombings of Spanish commuter trains killed 191 people and contributed to the fall of Spain's government.
U.S. officials say the current intelligence warnings in some respects resemble threats picked up in December, which led to the Dec. 21 imposition of an orange, or "high risk," terror alert that lasted three weeks. The intelligence, which officials said was gathered from several independent sources, indicated that al Qaeda sought to launch a terrorist strike that would cause at least 100,000 U.S. casualties, officials said.
That led officials to ratchet up security at nuclear and chemical plants, and to dispatch teams with special equipment in search of nuclear weapons or radioactive material in several cities.
At this summer's Boston and New York gatherings, federal officials say they will so "harden" the FleetCenter and Madison Square Garden convention sites -- by extending security perimeters for blocks around both buildings, strictly limiting access to credentialed people, and other measures -- that they doubt an attack could be mounted on the buildings.
Boston and New York will host the largest collection of bomb-sniffing dogs in history, officials say. Coast Guard boats will ply their waters, including the Charles River, which runs only blocks from the FleetCenter. Other teams will check delegate hotels for explosives, prompted by an attack in May that killed the Chechen president and 13 others with bombs embedded earlier in a stadium reviewing stand.
Guards will be added at New Jersey chemical plants upwind of Manhattan and other facilities near both cities. Both regions will deploy medical surveillance systems that require clinics to report sore throats and pharmacies to report drug sales -- both possible early warnings of biological attacks.
Delegate hotels, the sites for many of the 2,000 parties scheduled during those weeks, are, for security purposes, almost extensions of the convention sites themselves. Jimmy Chin, who chairs the New York Hotel Association's safety panel, said hotel security teams will work closely with law enforcement to spot protesters who might try to sneak into lobbies or book rooms.
The security plans for the two conventions differ in some ways. Although New York plans to close a few streets around midtown Manhattan during the late afternoons and evenings, Boston will shut down 40 miles of roadways. One reason is the need to close Interstate 93, whose guardrails are only 10 feet from the FleetCenter's walls. That led in part to decisions to close or place restrictions on other major regional roadways, the Tobin Bridge, the Sumner Tunnel from Logan International Airport and a small stretch of Interstate 90, the Massachusetts Turnpike.
Boston officials say they must reduce traffic by half to avoid gridlock and are urging companies to allow employees to work from home. Hospitals are being urged to postpone non-emergency surgery, and tenants have been asked to delay apartment moves. Mayors of surrounding towns such as Somerville have threatened to bar overflow traffic if it ties up their streets.
"Yes, traffic will be slower than usual," Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino said, "but I predict this city will work.
The Secret Service never proposed closing New York's Penn Station, which sits directly below Madison Square Garden, where the Republican convention will be held. It is the nation's busiest rail hub, with 425,000 passengers a day moving through on subway and rail lines to Long Island, New Jersey and elsewhere.
Instead, New York is using the sheer size of its police force -- 36,000 uniformed officers as opposed to Boston's 2,200 -- to keep Penn Station open. Along with hundreds of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut state troopers, thousands of NYPD officers, many with trained sniffing dogs, will ride the rails day and night during the convention.
"Our greatest asset is our size, which gives us tremendous flexibility and visibility," said Paul Browne, NYPD's deputy commissioner of public information.
With hundreds of bridges, tunnels, tourist attractions and critical infrastructure sites to protect, the NYPD is canceling days off during the convention. It doesn't help that the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens overlaps with the GOP gathering.
But New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has repeatedly said that the convention will register barely a blip in the city. "If you don't live or work in the Garment District, you won't even know there's a convention in town," he has said.
U.S. officials said they fear terrorists will somehow make use of the rallies -- either by hiding their activities while surrounded by protesters, or blowing up tightly packed crowds of demonstrators. Some antiwar groups have announced plans for "direct action" protests that include trashing businesses such as Starbucks and the Gap.
Despite complaints by the New York Civil Liberties Union, authorities said they likely will once again set up barricades to separate protesters from outsiders and search knapsacks and other bags carried by demonstrators.
Staff writer Susan Schmidt contributed to this report.
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Airport Screeners' New Guard
Private Security Firms Want to Replace Government in 2005
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29585-2004Jul5?language=printer
After suffering sharp ridicule from the public and near extermination by the federal government more than two years ago, the airline screening industry is seeking a comeback at U.S. airports.
The federal law passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that banned private companies from airports allows them to return by 2005 if they are approved by the government. The provision has led a few security firms -- many of them new to the business -- to begin pitching themselves to undecided airports as a class above the old guard of airport screening companies such as Argenbright Security Inc., which took the brunt of criticism after 9/11.
"The business prior to 9/11 didn't have the best reputation," said Nancy Montgomery, vice president of strategic accounts at Barton Protective Services Inc., a company that employs security guards at office buildings and would like to get into the airport security business. "It's a very different program now."
Three companies have an advantage in the new industry because they are already operating security checkpoints at the San Francisco, Kansas City, Mo., Rochester, N.Y., and Tupelo, Miss., airports, which are participating in a $127 million pilot project. One of the companies, FirstLine Transportation Security Inc., worked in airline security before 2001 and has changed its name. Another, McNeil Technologies Inc., based in Springfield, is a minority-owned firm that, like many new contenders, has traditionally provided security services for government agencies.
Some new entrants already work in related businesses. Gate Safe Inc., an Atlanta company seeking checkpoint security contracts, screens airline food and other supplies before they are loaded onto planes. "It's a natural extension of the way that we've grown our business," said Larry P. White, director of marketing and sales at Gate Safe.
Airports also can get into the business by forming a subsidiary company to perform security screening, as the Jackson Hole Airport Authority has been doing through a test program with the government at its Wyoming airport.
Excluded from the business are many of the companies, including Huntleigh USA Corp., Wackenhut Corp. and Argenbright -- now known as Cognisa Security Inc. -- that employed a majority of the screeners three years ago. Those companies are units of larger firms based overseas and are now prohibited under federal law from working at security checkpoints. "The overwhelming majority of Huntleigh's business has been wiped out," said company spokesman Robert H. Bork Jr. "What little they have is not profitable."
At least one firm, Wackenhut, is lobbying to be let back in to airport screening.
Department of Homeland Security officials estimate that as many as 25 percent of the nation's 429 airports may eventually sign on with the private security firms. For now, airports say they are interested in the option but are hesitant to decide until the government clarifies how much liability they will take on in the event that a company's security screener or the airport is blamed for another terrorist attack. Officials at Baltimore Washington International, Dulles International and Reagan National airports say they are undecided.
"It's premature to make any conclusions," said James E. Bennett, chief executive of Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which operates Dulles and National. "We will certainly review the criteria and see if it is something we feel would enhance the effectiveness and efficiency at our airports."
Hiring a private company to conduct airport screening is attractive to many airports because they have seen poor or inconsistent performance by the Transportation Security Administration, which employs 45,000 screeners at more than 400 airports. Although the government raised the standards and recruited better-paid and better-trained employees at the checkpoints, several airports said the agency has been slow to hire enough screeners and has had difficulty retaining them.
Dulles, for example, suffers from a 21 percent attrition rate, among the highest in the country. Other airports, such as Las Vegas's McCarran International Airport, at one time had passengers waiting for three hours in security lines because the TSA did not have enough workers at the checkpoints to match the increase in traffic as travelers resumed flying.
Sometimes, the District-based federal bureaucracy hinders operations, airports say. Every time a security screener leaves the job, the TSA headquarters sends its contractor to the city to set up a recruiting, testing and training program, which can take weeks. Even TSA managers stationed at each airport cannot hire or fire employees, even though the TSA said it is working to change that model.
"It takes so long to replace someone" who leaves the job, said Randy Walker, director at the Las Vegas airport. "It is so painful . . . and the local manager has no control."
Security firms working at the pilot airports say they have more flexibility to hire and train employees quickly. None of those airports plans to part with the private companies.
Jackson Hole Airport director George Larson said he was pleased by his airport-run pilot program. He said he is able to turn a 10 percent profit by assigning screeners other airport tasks, such as cleaning and directing passengers to their gates, when the security lines are slow. Larson said he recently gave a talk about his security model at an airport conference in Las Vegas.
"It was standing-room only," he said.
If private security firms win approval, they will be required to maintain the government's standards, ensuring that each security screener speaks English, has a high school diploma or equivalent and passes a background check.
Security screeners working for private firms must be paid a compensation package at least equal to the $12.50-an-hour wage plus benefits that the federal government offers, and the firms must give TSA employees priority in hiring.
In the battle for new screening contracts, U.S. companies are touting their made-in-the-U.S.A. quality to airports. The year-old Coalition of American-owned Security Companies, which is trying to recruit members, said U.S. airports should be served by U.S. companies. "There was doubt at some point that there aren't enough [U.S. firms] out there," said Montgomery, of Barton Security. "We want to show a strong front. You don't need to look elsewhere. There are enough to choose from."
The foreign-based companies insist there is no danger in employing a U.S. affiliate of an overseas operator. "You ought to come up with some sort of system to allow these contracts to be awarded to the very best security firms," said Jay Stone, a lobbyist who represents Wackenhut, whose parent company is based in Copenhagen. "Don't exclude them because they happen to be associated with a foreign [country], which is Denmark, one of our closest allies. Why should you punish them?"
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U.S. Bars 42 Ships July 1 - 5 for Security Flaws
July 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-shipping-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States denied entry to 42 foreign ships and detained 38 in port from July 1 to 5 under tough new United Nations security rules designed to thwart terrorist attacks, the Coast Guard said on Tuesday.
``The foreign vessels detained or denied entry failed to comply with the requirements of the International Ship and Port Facility Security Code,'' the Coast Guard said in a statement, referring to the UN regulations that came into force on July 1.
The statement did not say where the ships came from or what cargo they were carrying.
Washington, fearing an attack or infiltration by al Qaeda from the sea, has vowed to police the new rules strictly by turning away ships that are not security-certified or delaying ones that have called at ``contaminated ports.''
The regulations, signed by 147 governments, require ports, stevedoring companies and owners of ships larger than 500 tons to draw up plans for responding to a terror threat, implement tighter security around facilities and train staff.
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Coast Guard Withdraws Barred Ships Data
July 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-security-shipping-withdrawal.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Coast Guard on Tuesday withdrew a statement saying 42 foreign ships had been denied entry and 38 had been detained in port from July 1-5 for security flaws, saying the information was incorrect.
``The figures in the statement are wrong. We will issue a new statement later,'' a Coast Guard spokesperson said.
The Coast Guard has been strictly enforcing the United Nations' new International Ship and Port Facility Security Code, which came into force on July 1 and is designed to thwart seaborne terrorist attacks.
Washington fears an attack or infiltration by al Qaeda from the sea and has vowed to turn away ships that are not security-certified or delay ones that have called at ``contaminated ports.''
The regulations, signed by 147 governments, require ports, stevedoring companies and owners of ships larger than 500 tons to draw up plans for responding to a terror threat, implement tighter security around facilities and train staff.
-------- justice
You've Got Mail (and Court Says Others Can Read It)
By SAUL HANSELL,
July 6, 2004
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/technology/06net.html?ei=1&en=87d2a3ecc255fd00&ex=1090213959&pagewanted=print&position=
When everything is working right, an e-mail message appears to zip instantaneously from the sender to the recipient's inbox. But in reality, most messages make several momentary stops as they are processed by various computers en route to their destination.
Those short stops may make no difference to the users, but they make an enormous difference to the privacy that e-mail is accorded under federal law.
Last week a federal appeals court in Boston ruled that federal wiretap laws do not apply to e-mail messages if they are stored, even for a millisecond, on the computers of the Internet providers that process them - meaning that it can be legal for the government or others to read such messages without a court order.
The ruling was a surprise to many people, because in 1986 Congress specifically amended the wiretap laws to incorporate new technologies like e-mail. Some argue that the ruling's implications could affect emerging applications like Internet-based phone calls and Gmail, Google's new e-mail service, which shows advertising based on the content of a subscriber's e-mail messages.
"The court has eviscerated the protections that Congress established back in the 1980's," said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group.
But other experts argue that the Boston case will have little practical effect. The outcry, said Stuart Baker, a privacy lawyer with Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, is "much ado about nothing."
Mr. Baker pointed out that even under the broadest interpretation of the law, Congress made it easier for prosecutors and lawyers in civil cases to read other people's e-mail messages than to listen to their phone calls. The wiretap law - which requires prosecutors to prove their need for a wiretap and forbids civil litigants from ever using them - applies to e-mail messages only when they are in transit.
But in a 1986 law, Congress created a second category, called stored communication, for messages that had been delivered to recipients' inboxes but not yet read. That law, the Stored Communications Act, grants significant protection to e-mail messages, but does not go as far as the wiretap law: it lets prosecutors have access to stored messages with a search warrant, while imposing stricter requirements on parties in civil suits.
Interestingly, messages that have been read but remain on the Internet provider's computer system have very little protection. Prosecutors can typically gain access to an opened e-mail message with a simple subpoena rather than a search warrant. Similarly, lawyers in civil cases, including divorces, can subpoena opened e-mail messages.
The case in Boston involved an online bookseller, now called Alibris. In 1998, the company offered e-mail accounts to book dealers and, hoping to gain market advantage, secretly copied messages they received from Amazon.com. In 1999, Alibris and one employee pleaded guilty to criminal wiretapping charges.
But a supervisor, Bradford C. Councilman, fought the charges, saying he did not know about the scheme. He also moved to have the case dismissed on the ground that the wiretapping law did not apply. He argued that because the messages had been on the hard drive of Alibris's computer while they were being processed for delivery, they counted as stored communication. The wiretap law bans a company from monitoring the communications of its customers, except in a few cases. But it does not ban a company from reading customers' stored communications.
"Congress recognized that any time you store communication, there is an inherent loss of privacy," said Mr. Councilman's lawyer, Andrew Good of Good & Cormier in Boston.
In 2003, a federal district court in Boston agreed with Mr. Councilman's interpretation of the wiretap law and dismissed the case. Last week, the First Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-to-1 decision, affirmed that decision.
Because most major Internet providers have explicit policies against reading their customers' e-mail messages, the ruling would seem to have little effect on most people.
But this year Google is testing a service called Gmail, which electronically scans the content of the e-mail messages its customers receive and then displays related ads. Privacy groups have argued that the service is intrusive, and some have claimed it violates wiretap laws. The Councilman decision, if it stands, could undercut that argument.
Federal prosecutors, who often argue that wiretap restrictions do not apply in government investigations, were in the somewhat surprising position of arguing that those same laws should apply to Mr. Councilman's conduct. A spokesman for the United States attorney's office in Boston said the department had not decided whether to appeal.
Mr. Baker said that another federal appeals court ruling, in San Francisco, is already making it hard for prosecutors to retrieve e-mail that has been read and remains on an Internet provider's system.
In that case, Theofel v. Farey-Jones, a small Internet provider responded to a subpoena by giving a lawyer copies of 339 e-mail messages received by two of its customers.
The customers claimed the subpoena was so broad it violated the wiretap and stored communication laws. A district court agreed the subpoenas were too broad, but ruled they were within the law. The plaintiffs appealed, and the Justice Department filed a friend of the court brief arguing that the Stored Communications Act should not apply.
In February, the appeals court ruled that e-mail stored on the computer server of an Internet provider is indeed covered by the Stored Communications Act, even after it has been read. The court noted that the act refers both to messages before they are delivered and to backup copies kept by the Internet provider. "An obvious purpose for storing a message on an I.S.P.'s server after delivery," the court wrote, " is to provide a second copy of the message in the event that the user needs to download it again - if, for example, the message is accidentally erased from the user's own computer."
Calling e-mail "stored communication" does not necessarily reduce privacy protections for most e-mail users. While the Councilman ruling would limit the applicability of wiretap laws to e-mail, it appears to apply to a very small number of potential cases. The Theofel decision, by contrast, by defining more e-mail as "stored communications," is restricting access to e-mail in a wide range of cases in the Ninth Circuit, and could have a far greater effect on privacy if courts in the rest of the country follow that ruling.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Few Detainees in Iraq Are Foreign Fighters
July 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-detainees.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Only 90 of the more than 5,700 people in custody in Iraq as security risks are foreign fighters, defense officials said on Tuesday, a figure that suggests the Bush administration may have overstated the role of outside militants in the deadly insurgency.
The officials, who asked not to be identified, said the U.S. military command handling security detention facilities in Iraq confirmed a report in USA Today that fewer than 2 percent of those in custody were foreigners.
The small percentage indicates the war in Iraq may not have attracted very many Islamic militants from other countries.
The Bush administration has insisted that foreign insurgents are playing a key role in Iraq, led in part by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Jordanian-born Zarqawi is leader of the Jama'at al-Tawhid and Jihad, which has claimed several deadly suicide bombings, assassinations of Iraqi officials and the kidnapping and beheadings of a South Korean and an American hostage.
Of the 90 foreign captives, about half are from Syria and others are from Arab countries including Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, defense officials told Reuters.
POROUS BORDERS WITH SYRIA, IRAN
The administration has repeatedly accused both Syria and Iran of giving support to the insurgency by making it easy for foreign fighters to cross their borders with Iraq.
Private defense analysts told Reuters the issue was not the number of foreigners in custody, but whether they represented impressionable suicide candidates or hard-core, well-trained ``terrorists'' who opposed the United States and its allies everywhere.
``The question here is not how many foreign fighters are involved, but who are they?'' said Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute, a private Washington think tank.
``Are they chiefly your average Joe from the Syrian mosque or the British mosque caught up in all the rhetoric?'' Goure asked.
``Or are they people we should be more deeply concerned about -- perhaps with military and intelligence training from Syria and elsewhere? If these are serious, committed, well-trained ex-bin Laden jihadists, it's a significant factor,'' said Goure, using the term jihadists to mean militant Muslims battling the West.
Even though there are relatively few non-Iraqis in custody, U.S. officials believe those foreigners are involved in organizing or financing attacks against U.S. forces, one senior defense official said.
``I think these people (foreign fighters) give backbone, a ruthless drive, to the insurgency,'' one senior defense official told Reuters. ``They recruit. They organize. They finance.''
But analyst Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington said that ``the overwhelming mass of those involved in the insurgency are Iraqi nationals who are simply opposed to the U.S. invasion and foreign occupation.''
``That doesn't mean that there are not small, dispersed cells of foreign fighters, including some loosely affiliated with al Qaeda,'' Cordesman said, adding that it was doubtful if such groups around the country had ``a central nervous system.''
USA Today reported that U.S.-led military forces had detained 17,700 people -- including some 400 foreign nationals -- in Iraq since last August who were considered to be enemy fighters or security risks. Most were freed after a review board found they didn't pose significant threats, the newspaper said.
--------
Life at Guantanamo Bay different from Abu Ghraib
Conditions are much different from Abu Ghraib where troops are accused of abusing detainees, tour finds
The Associated Press
July 6, 2004
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usguan063882774jul06,0,6292757.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba -- Sliding a knight into attack mode, a terrorism suspect teaches his interrogator chess, pausing briefly to look at a manual U.S. officials believe holds key intelligence and which they hope he will decipher.
Next door, a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit pours tea from a thermos and smokes a cigarette while he laughs with a female interrogator, who hands him a mugshot of a man with piercing ebony eyes.
A two-day tour of Guantanamo Bay afforded The Associated Press the most extensive access allowed independent journalists to date, allowing views of 50 detainees, including those in maximum security.
The AP witnessed three interrogations through mirrored glass with the intercom turned off. No armed guards were present at interrogations, and officers said they were never used. They said each detainee is generally questioned twice a week, with sessions usually lasting two to four hours for a maximum of 15 hours a day.
The scenes were vastly different from those at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where troops are accused of abusing detainees. Yet the techniques used here were recommended for Abu Ghraib by Guantanamo's former commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller. Miller and others have denied Guantanamo detainees have been mistreated. "This is a wholly different environment," said Brig. Gen. Jay Hood, who succeeded Miller in March.
In one session observed by AP, a problem detainee had asked to see his interrogator. Although the detainee appeared silent much of the time, the interrogator viewed the session as a success, saying the man finally talked.
After the interrogator and linguist left, the bearded young man laughed and talked to what could have been another detainee, next door in the shower.
"Sometimes, this detainee is very funny; other times, he is not funny at all," said a female interrogator, who often brings the prisoners mint tea and cookies. "Sometimes, they are very pleasant at one moment, and then they tell you calmly and proudly about how they killed someone."
The interrogators spoke on condition of anonymity.
"We've learned about recruiting, how terror cells are financed, their capabilities and plans that have been sitting on the table for attacks," she said.
Last month, one prisoner unwilling to talk for more than a year opened up, the interrogator said. The burly chess player has been steadily cooperative.
"He often tells his chess opponents, 'Attack, attack, attack!' You learn an awful lot about some of these people from very simple methods," she said.
Supreme Court rules
The first detainees arrived 2 1/2 years ago, shackled and blindfolded. Most were captured in Afghanistan, accused of links to the Taliban or al-Qaida.
Officials believed the base's remote location on foreign soil would deny prisoners U.S. constitutional protections, but the Supreme Court ruled last week that the 595 prisoners from 42 countries - all but three held without charge and denied lawyers - can challenge their detentions in U.S. courts.
Questions about the fairness of tribunals and the treatment of detainees have multiplied since photographs were published of U.S. troops mistreating prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Two Guantanamo guards were disciplined after one hit a detainee with a radio and another sprayed one with a hose.
"The photos that came out of Abu Ghraib were so terrible that I think it causes people to stop and wonder," Hood said. "The only way to overcome it is to invite people here and to have them look for themselves."
However, officers reviewed the AP's photo portfolio and would not allow the publication of pictures they said might reveal detainees' identities.
Activists criticize enclosures
The Guantanamo camp was criticized when it opened after pictures showed prisoners locked in enclosures that rights activists compared to animal cages. Twenty-one detainees have tried to kill themselves.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the only independent group allowed to visit detainees, publicly rebuked conditions in October, contending the prolonged detention harmed detainees' mental health.
Two interrogators said most detainees know counter-interrogation techniques, making it tedious to extract information.
Miller instituted a reward system to encourage cooperation from detainees.
One is a field trip held in medium-security Camp 4, where detainees can exercise every day and keep more items, including letters and books, in their cells.
AP journalists were allowed inside a room with four prisoners during a trip to an area called Camp Iguana, named for the lizards ambling about.
One prisoner asked a commander in English if he could speak to the visitors. When told no, he said he and his friend were journalists, too. The Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera has said one of its cameramen is detained wrongfully at Guantanamo.
The mood was less relaxed in the other camps, where open-air cell blocks made of chain-link fences allow detainees to see one another and chat. Most prisoners turned their backs to avoid being photographed. Some looked curious or nodded in greeting.
Angry detainees have been known to throw feces at guards.
Detainees in Camp 5, which holds about 50 detainees considered uncooperative or of high-intelligence value, stay in air-conditioned cells closed with metal doors and a strip covering an internal window.
A commander peeled back the tape in one cell, where a man was curled up asleep, a prosthetic leg lying below his mattress. The commander said the men have developed routines. Some clean their cells and wash their jumpsuits each day. Many reread letters from home or study the Quran, Islam's holy book. Most observe the call to prayer crackling over the loudspeaker five times daily.
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
Sept. 11 Panel Repeats Iraq - Osama Tie Weak
July 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sept-11-Commission.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Sept. 11 commission is standing by its finding that al-Qaida had only limited contact with Iraq before the terrorist attacks, a determination disputed by Vice President Dick Cheney.
The 10-member, bipartisan panel issued a one-sentence statement Tuesday saying it had access to the same information as Cheney, who suggested strong ties between ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.
Those ties were a central justification the Bush administration gave for going to war with Iraq and were called into question after the commission released a preliminary report last month. The report cited contacts between Saddam's regime and Osama bin Laden but said there was no ``collaborative relationship.''
Cheney questioned the commission's finding in an interview with CNBC and said there ``probably'' was information about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission members did not learn during their 14-month investigation. The commission statement disputed that.
``After examining available transcripts of the vice president's public remarks, the 9/11 commission believes it has access to the same information the vice president has seen regarding contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq prior to the 9/11 attacks,'' the commission said.
The commission invited Cheney to offer any evidence that he thought it didn't have but never received any information.
Cheney's spokesman, Kevin Kellems, said on Tuesday the vice president was satisfied the panel had all relevant information to make an accurate determination. Cheney's main concern was about some media reports suggesting that al-Qaida and Iraq had no ties whatsoever, he said.
``We are pleased with today's statement from the 9-11 commission, which puts to rest a non-story,'' Kellems said. ``As we have said all along, the administration has provided the commission with unprecedented access to sensitive information so they can perform their mission.''
The commission, which faces a July 26 deadline to issue its final report, is winding down its 1 1/2 year investigation into what went wrong and why.
Commissioners already have submitted substantial portions of the report to the White House for review and are meeting this week to hash out recommendations into how to prevent future attacks. Proposals under consideration include creating a domestic intelligence agency modeled after Britain's MI5.
On the Net:
Sept. 11 panel: http://www.9-11commission.gov
--------
INTELLIGENCE
C.I.A. Held Back Iraqi Arms Data, Officials Say
July 6, 2004
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/politics/06INTE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 5 - The Central Intelligence Agency was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the C.I.A. failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.
The existence of a secret prewar C.I.A. operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists - and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers - has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons and plans to release a wide-ranging report this week on the first phase of its inquiry. The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the C.I.A. and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Mr. Hussein had illicit weapons.
C.I.A. officials, saying that only a handful of relatives made claims that the weapons programs were dead, play down the significance of the information collected in the secret debriefing operation. That operation is one of a number of significant disclosures by the Senate investigation. The Senate report, intelligence officials say, concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programs, and that analysts at the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies did an even worse job of writing reports that accurately reflected the information they had.
Among the many problems that contributed to the committee's harsh assessment of the C.I.A.'s prewar performance were instances in which analysts may have misrepresented information, writing reports that distorted evidence in order to bolster their case that Iraq did have chemical, biological and nuclear programs, according to government officials. The Senate found, for example, that an Iraqi defector who supposedly provided evidence of the existence of a biological weapons program had actually said he did not know of any such program.
In another case concerning whether a shipment of aluminum tubes seized on its way to Iraq was evidence that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb, the Senate panel raised questions about whether the C.I.A. had become an advocate, rather than an objective observer, and selectively sought to prove that the tubes were for a nuclear weapons program.
While the Senate panel has concluded that C.I.A. analysts and other intelligence officials overstated the case that Iraq had illicit weapons, the committee has not found any evidence that the analysts changed their reports as a result of political pressure from the White House, according to officials familiar with the report.
The Senate report is expected to criticize both the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, and other senior C.I.A. officials, for the way they managed the agency before the war. Mr. Tenet has announced his resignation, effective July 11, and Mr. McLaughlin will serve as acting director until a permanent director is appointed. The C.I.A. has scheduled a farewell ceremony for Mr. Tenet on Thursday, just as the reverberations from the Senate report are likely to be hitting the agency.
The possibility that Mr. Tenet personally overstated the evidence has been investigated by the Senate panel, officials said. He was interviewed privately by the panel recently, and was asked whether he told President Bush that the case for the existence of Iraq's unconventional weapons was a "slam dunk."
In his book about the Bush administration's planning for the war in Iraq, "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward reported that Mr. Tenet reassured Mr. Bush about the evidence of the existence of Iraq's illicit weapons after Mr. Bush had made clear he was unimpressed by the evidence presented to him in a December 2002 briefing by Mr. McLaughlin. "It's a slam-dunk case!" Mr. Tenet is quoted as telling the president.
In his private interview with the Senate panel, Mr. Tenet refused to say whether he had used the "slam-dunk" phrase, arguing that his conversations with the president were privileged, officials said.
In hindsight, the Senate panel and many other intelligence officials now agree that there was little effort within the American intelligence community before the war to question the basic assumption that Mr. Hussein was still seeking to produce illicit weapons. Evidence that fit that assumption was embraced; evidence to the contrary was ignored or seen as part of a clever Iraqi disinformation campaign.
Yet there were some people inside the intelligence community who recognized the need for better evidence, according to intelligence officials. In 1998, the United Nations withdrew its weapons inspectors from Iraq, severely hampering the C.I.A.'s ability to monitor Iraqi weapons efforts. In response, Charlie Allen, the agency's assistant director for collection, began searching for new sources of information, the intelligence officials said.
He pushed for several new collection programs, including one that called for approaching members of the families of Iraqi scientists believed to be involved in secret weapons programs, the officials said. At the time, the C.I.A. had no direct access to important Iraqi scientists, and using family members as intermediaries seemed like the next best thing.
Beginning in 2000, the C.I.A. contacted the relatives and asked them what they knew or could learn about the work being conducted by the scientists. Officials would not say how or where the relatives were contacted.
The relatives told the agency that the scientists had said that they were no longer working on illicit weapons, and that those programs were dead. Yet the statements from the relatives were never included in C.I.A. intelligence reports on Iraq that were distributed throughout the government. C.I.A. analysts monitoring Iraq apparently ignored the statements from the family members and continued to issue assessments that Mr. Hussein was still developing unconventional weapons, Senate investigators have found.
At the time, C.I.A. analysts were deeply cynical about statements from Iraqis suggesting that Mr. Hussein had no illicit weapons, and assumed that such talk was simply part of an Iraqi denial and deception program, several intelligence officials said.
In response, a C.I.A. spokesman said, the families' statements were "not at all convincing."
"There was nothing definitive about it," the spokesman said. "No useful information was collected from the family members, and that's why it wouldn't have been disseminated."
The agency's handling of intelligence on biological weapons has also drawn Congressional criticism. In fact, the C.I.A. relied heavily on four Iraqi defectors to reach its conclusion that Iraq had developed mobile biological weapons laboratories.
But one defector, an Iraqi scientist, said he had been working on a technical program known as a "protein slurry," and that his work was unrelated to biological weapons. He said he did not know of any other biological weapons activity under way in Iraq. Senate investigators did not discover that his statements contradicted the view that Iraq had an active biological program until they read the original reports of his debriefings from before the war, officials said. A C.I.A. official said the agency still had good reasons to use the defector's information, and has been trying to explain that to the Senate committee. The official would not elaborate.
There were problems with the handling of the other defectors used to buttress the biological weapons case. Information from one was used even though the Defense Intelligence Agency had warned in the spring of 2002 that he had fabricated information. The C.I.A. took statements that another defector had given to German intelligence without knowing his identity or learning that he had ties to the Iraqi National Congress, the Iraqi exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi. Mr. Chalabi, until recently a close ally of the Pentagon, fell into disfavor with the Bush administration after it became clear that his organization had provided disinformation to the United States and had exaggerated the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.
One of the most sensitive elements of the Senate investigation relates to the C.I.A.'s handling of intelligence about the shipment of aluminum tubes seized by the United States in 2001 on its way into Iraq.
Senior C.I.A. analysts became convinced that the shipment was strong evidence that Mr. Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program. The agency concluded that the aluminum tubes were to be used as spinning rotors in a centrifuge that could enrich uranium for bombs.
But other government experts, particularly at the national laboratories and in the State Department, were skeptical. They argued that the tubes seemed designed for use in conventional military rockets.
The technical debate reached a peak in 2002, just as the intelligence community was preparing a comprehensive National Intelligence Estimate, an interagency assessment of the status of Iraq's unconventional weapons.
Seeking to prove its case, the C.I.A. hired outside experts to conduct technical tests, spinning the tubes at high speeds to determine whether they could withstand the stress of a centrifuge.
But the Senate panel investigated the way in which the C.I.A. selectively sought to prove its case with the outside experts in the face of the skepticism from analysts at other agencies. For example, in the National Intelligence Estimate, the C.I.A. disclosed the initial - and successful - test results to support its assertion that the tubes could be used to help produce nuclear weapons. Only later did the C.I.A. report results that showed that the tubes ultimately failed in testing.
C.I.A. officials said in response that only the initial test results were reported in the intelligence assessment because those were the only results available at the time. When later results were available in January 2003, they were reported to the rest of the intelligence community, the officials said. The C.I.A. officials added that nearly all of the subsequent test failures were a result of failures of testing equipment, and that the few failures of tubes were at speeds that exceeded those required for centrifuges. The agency had asked the outside experts to push the tubes to their limits in the stress tests, and so their failure did not mean that the tubes could not be used in a centrifuge, the C.I.A. officials say.
The C.I.A.'s views on the tubes ultimately prevailed inside the Bush administration. Although the State Department's own analysts issued a dissent in the National Intelligence Estimate, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell went with the C.I.A. In his presentation to the United Nations in February 2003 laying out the administration's case against Iraq, he relied on the aluminum tubes to show that Mr. Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program.
-------- us politics
Parties to Allow Bloggers to Cover Conventions for First Time
By Brian Faler
The Washington Post
Tuesday, July 6, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29588-2004Jul5.html
More than 15,000 people will converge on Boston later this month to cover the Democratic National Convention -- including, for the first time, bloggers.
The Democratic Party plans to give media credentials to a select group of bloggers who want to cover the event, where Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) is expected to accept his party's presidential nomination. The group has not announced which bloggers might get the passes, but that information will come in the "next few weeks," an event spokeswoman said. The convention begins July 26.
But officials said whoever gets credentials will have the same opportunities to cover the four-day event that journalists enjoy. "We want to treat them just the same as other reporters," said Mike Liddell, the convention's director of online communications. "We're even planning to do a breakfast for them the first day of the convention."
The Republican Party recently decided that it will also give bloggers credentials for its convention later this summer. A spokesman for the event said it is still working out details.
The Web sites, which are essentially online journals, have become a prominent campaign tool this election season -- ever since former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's official blog caught on. Since then, scores of other candidates have developed similar sites. Some candidates have begun advertising on other independent blogs -- especially sites that feature commentaries, usually partisan, on the political news of the day.
But neither party has ever allowed bloggers to cover one of its presidential conventions firsthand -- and the decision seems to promise a clash of two very different cultures. The conventions have become carefully staged productions intended, primarily, to reintroduce the parties' nominees to the general public. Independent blogs -- especially those focusing on politics -- are far more freewheeling, their authors mixing fact with opinion and under no obligation to be either fair or accurate.
Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Dean's campaign, said he supports the decision but that it presents some risk to the Democrats. He said many bloggers are more liberal than Kerry -- and may feel free to vent their frustration with the candidate if, for example, he presents himself at the convention as a centrist.
"They're much tougher, I think, from an ideological bent than mainstream press," Trippi said. "You're not going to take any flak from the mainstream press for tacking to the center on a given issue." But he and other Democrats said the plan also gives the party a chance to reach a larger audience. Although television networks have cut back on their coverage of the conventions -- saying they yield little news -- some bloggers have attracted sizable audiences. Lina Garcia, a spokeswoman for the convention, said she hopes the bloggers will help the party reach young people. "A lot of young people blog now, and they're important to us," she said.
Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, a Berkeley, Calif.-based lawyer who runs one of the most popular liberal blogs -- Dailykos.com -- predicted that many bloggers will beam a reliably pro-Democratic message back to their readers. "We're all partisan. We don't pretend to be otherwise and would not be constrained by bounds of having to balance out what we write with the other side," he said. "So it's a much more direct way to get out the party's message to its constituents and potential constituents."
It is not clear how the Democratic Party will decide among the more than 60 bloggers who have applied for credentials. Convention officials said they are considering three criteria: the size of the blogger's audience, the "professionalism" of the site and the amount of original material it includes. It is subjective and a little vague. But then again, Liddell said, no one has tried this before. "We don't have a guide to go by," he said.
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
European Environmental Rules Propel Change in U.S.
July 6, 2004
By OTTO POHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/science/earth/06euro.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BRUSSELS - When Darcy White of Raytown, Mo., chose to breast-feed her baby daughter two years ago, she had never heard of brominated flame retardants. But after randomly participating in a study, she learned that her breast milk carried unusually high levels of the chemicals.
Since then, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced an agreement with chemical manufacturers to phase out the worst of these toxic compounds, which are present in a wide variety of consumer goods like furniture and computer monitors, and Congress is considering legislation to make the ban permanent.
But it was only after the chemicals had been banned here in Europe that sufficient political pressure built for a phaseout in the United States.
That cycle was no accident. Globalization has often been condemned as encouraging a race to the bottom as multinationals seek the cheapest and least regulated place to do business. But increasingly, American environmental and public health advocates see globalization as a way to start a race to the top. They are taking their issues to the European Union, hoping to use regulations there as a lever for regulations in the United States.
"We are putting more resources into Europe than we otherwise would have done," says Charlotte Brody, coordinator of Health Care Without Harm, a Washington-based group attempting to reduce harmful substances in hospital supplies. "We desperately need the E.U. to be raising the bar and show what is possible."
Environmental groups, too, are working more closely with European lawmakers.
"We feel that Europe is a real opportuni ty," says Ned Helme, executive director for the Center for Clean Air Policy in Washington. Once Europe moves ahead on programs to curb the gases believed to cause global warming, Mr. Helme believes, it will promote change in the United States. "We're pushing where the opportunity for innovation is greatest," he said.
The regulations affect a broad range of American chemical, energy and electronics companies, and industry groups say bureaucrats they did not elect are wielding unprecedented power over them, based on insufficient evidence of harm.
"The E.U. is going where no man has gone before," says James Lovegrove, managing director of the European division of the American Electronics Association, a United States industry lobby. "The moment the ink hits the paper in Europe it becomes a global piece of legislation.''
The generally stricter European laws reflect a different philosophical approach to regulation, says Dr. Indra Spiecker, a lawyer specialized in comparative law and assistant professor for American law at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. American lawmakers primarily look to cost-benefit analysis, which holds that the benefit of imposing regulation should outweigh its cost. European nations have more readily embraced what is called the precautionary principle. Essentially, Europeans emphasize the cost of inaction, while Americans tend to focus on the cost of action.
"Fifteen years ago consumer issues would start in the United States and sweep over to Europe," says Ursula Schliessner, a product safety lawyer at McKenna Long & Aldridge in Brussels. "Now when there are consumer issues in the E.U. they trigger reactions in the United States."
In the case of the flame retardants, scientists from the Environmental Working Group, researching the prevalence of the chemicals in American mothers, discovered that Ms. White, an outwardly healthy 31-year-old practicing nurse, had some of the highest levels ever recorded. Studies have shown that, in laboratory animals, the chemicals can cause severe damage to the brain, especially in the first months of life. No one has proved that the substances are dangerous to humans, and Ms. White's daughter, Katelyn, is thriving.
Although concerned, Ms. White does not warn expectant mothers who come to her maternity ward to be tested for the chemicals. "You don't want to freak out mothers more than they already are," she says.
But Dr. Linda Birnbaum, director of the experimental toxicology division at the E.P.A., says the risk identified in the European studies, which then triggered additional research in America, was high enough to warrant action.
A co-author of the current legislation in Congress, Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, also says the European action against the substance was important to raise the issue in the United States. "The fact that the E.U. is taking steps really helps give us an argument" to ban the substances, she said.
European legislation can have an even more immediate impact in an area like consumer electronics. Because of the global nature of the electronics business, a multinational that redesigns its product to eliminate a substance banned in the E.U. often finds it cheaper to sell that product worldwide.
One such law that came into force last year limits or eliminates metals used in electronics considered particularly noxious when they leach into the environment.
The E.U. is now considering sweeping new regulation of its chemical industry that has unleashed what analysts here say is the biggest lobbying effort in Brussels ever mounted by American industry.
The new law, known as Reach, would place the burden of proof of safety on the producers before its sale, rather than waiting for problems to spur regulation later. It would force American chemical companies to comply with the legislation in order to continue exporting to Europe - and raises the fear of similar legislation in the United States.
The chemical industry points out that few if any of the unregulated chemicals are causing obvious health crises and says the legislation is overly bureaucratic and expensive. The American Chemical Council has marshaled its members to alter or derail the legislation.
But American environmental groups are eagerly supporting the law. "This is the place where the action is," says Tony Long, director of the World Wildlife Fund European policy office. He sees the potential effects of Reach broader than its technical jurisdiction. "This will have results around the world," he says.
-------- health
H.I.V. Infection Rate in Asia Increases Sharply, U.N. Finds
July 6, 2004
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/health/06CND-AIDS.html
BANGKOK, July 6 - The proportion of the world's new H.I.V. infections occurring in Asia has risen sharply over the last two years as the global epidemic has outstripped efforts to stop it, the United Nations said in a report released here today.
The size of the increase surprised United Nations health officials, who said that 1 in 4 -- nearly 1.2 million of the estimated 4.8 million new infections in 2003 -- occurred in Asia. That figure rose from one in five - or about 910,000 of the 4.4 million new infections in 2001.
Worldwide, the rate of new H.I.V. infections in 2003 was the highest of any year since the epidemic was first recognized more than two decades ago, the report said. Since 1981, more than 20 million people have died of AIDS, 2.6 million of them in 2003.
Kathleen Cravero, the deputy executive director of the United Nations AIDS program, said that a small window of opportunity exists to stop the H.I.V. epidemic in Asia and elsewhere.
"If we miss it, it will slam shut forever" and "we will see an epidemic the likes of which we never imagined, despite what has happened in Africa," Ms. Cravero said at a news conference here today.
Eastern Europe also has a fast-growing epidemic, the United Nations said.
The United Nations updates the state of AIDS in the world every two years in advance of the International AIDS Conference. The 15th conference opens here on Sunday. Many health officials have repeatedly warned that Asia faces an H.I.V. epidemic that could rival Africa's. al
The epidemic is expanding rapidly in Asian countries, particularly in China, Indonesia and Vietnam, nations that account for 50 percent of Asia's population. So even small percentage increases can represent large numbers of people.
For example, about 1 percent of India's population is living with H.I.V. But that represents 5.1 million infected people, leaving India poised to overtake South Africa as the country with the most infected people, 5.3 million.
In a separate news conference conducted by telephone from London tonight,Ms. Cravero's boss, Dr. Peter Piot, the director of the United Nations AIDS program, speculated that some Asian countries might reach the level of 20 percent or more already reported in some African countries. However, Dr. Piot said he doubted that the Asian continent would experience as devastating an epidemic as the African continent.
Many epidemiologists say that when more than 1 percent of a country's population is living with H.I.V., the country is in a general epidemic that is much harder to stop than if the prevalence was less than 1 percent, Ms. Cravero said.
In Asia, Ms. Cravero said, "many countries have prevalence rates less than 1 percent and some are hovering around 1 percent. So that is where the window of opportunity comes.
"You either drive it down now through maximum scaling up of prevention or you spend exponentially more money and energy trying to drive it down," she said, adding that the H.I.V. epidemics in Asian countries began largely among injecting drug users, prostitutes and gay men, but now "are fast moving into the general population."
To stop the rise, countries need to vastly increase their efforts for prevention and treatment, Ms. Cravero said. But in Asia, current prevention strategies largely miss women and girls, who lack the option of abstaining from sex and have little control over whether their husbands use condoms or have extramarital sexual contacts, she said.
Health workers have less than half of the $12 billion that is needed for treatment and prevention by the end of 2005, if the course of the epidemic is to be reversed, Ms. Cravero said. More than 22 percent of the $12 billion is needed for Asia alone.
In response to questions raised by political leaders, scientists and advocates, the United Nations used newer statistical methods to derive the latest infection estimates of 37.8 million people. Using those methods, the number could vary from 34.6 million to 42.3 million, the United Nations said.
The figures were lower in Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe and higher in Senegal. But the new figures do not represent real changes in the numbers of people infected, the United Nations said.
If the United Nations had continued to use its older methods to calculate the current figure, the estimate would have been 43 million, Dr. Piot said.
Because there is no logistical and ethical way to test everyone, the United Nations based many of its earlier estimates on surveys conducted in antenatal clinics and assumed that the figures represented a broader population. But experience has shown that such surveys lead to overestimates in urban areas and underestimates in rural areas.
The United Nations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta have conducted workshops training epidemiologists from 130 countries in the newer statistical methods that have allowed countries to use more detailed data in generating their own estimates, often based on house-to-house surveys.
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The terror of AIDS
washtimes
July 06, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040705-095034-7030r.htm
The HIV/AIDS epidemic has become so pervasive in some parts of the world that it has evolved from a humanitarian concern into a security threat in the eyes of top U.S. officials.
Speaking at the NATO summit in Istanbul, Turkey, last week, President Bush said: "We face the challenge of corruption and poverty and disease, which throw whole nations into chaos and despair. These are the conditions in which terrorism can survive." AIDS is causing this wreckage in entire continents and regions, and is in turn exacerbating poverty in already desperate areas.
Outgoing CIA Director George J. Tenet said last year that AIDS "threatens to rob South Africa of generations of leaders and workers, of farmers and educators - with devastating effects on economies and societies. Is this a security issue? You bet it is." About three months ago, U.S. and Vietnamese military officials met in Hanoi - not to discuss defense issues, but rather the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS.
On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, chaired by Sen. Mitch McConnell, will propose how much should be spent on preventing AIDS and other diseases worldwide. Mr. Bush should be commended for proposing an increase next year in overall spending on AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, from a total of $2.4 billion to $2.8 billion. Still, last year's spending and this year's proposal come up short of the $3 billion a year in funding that Congress and the president had proposed spending over the next five years.
Also unfortunate is a significant decrease in proposed funding for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. While $546 million was contributed last year, this year the president has proposed sending only $200 million. Mr. McConnell has the opportunity to increase this amount to at least match last year's level. U.S. contributions to the fund have an exponential effect on funding, since other countries feel greater pressure to do their part, said David Bryden, communications director for the Global AIDS Alliance.
Health workers around the world have been impressed with the performance of the fund. In its July newsletter, the Global AIDS Alliance published an interview with Dr. Simon Mphuka, director of programs for the Churches Health Association of Zambia. Working with the fund allows physicians and others to cut "big intermediary steps," he said. Mr. Mphuka said the fund's resources represent "a big opportunity for faith-based groups."
The Bush administration has identified the security threat AIDS has become and has bolstered America's commitment to combat the disease. It should also leverage the opportunity of pressuring other countries to contribute their share by giving generously to the Global Fund.
--------
Air crews look at radiation risk from flying
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TRAVEL/07/06/life.radiation.reut/index.html
DALLAS, Texas -- Airline crews already have their hands full with concerns about stepped up security, congested airports and tipsy travelers.
One more item to add to that list may be radiation exposure.
The union for pilots at American Airlines is trying to increase awareness among air crews that they are being exposed to enough cosmic radiation to fall into a U.S. government regulated category of radiation workers.
The longer a person travels on a jet, the higher the jet travels and the closer the jet flies to the north or south poles, increase exposure to cosmic radiation, which comes from deep space and the sun. The Earth's atmosphere largely shields us from cosmic radiation, but planes fly where the atmosphere is thin.
"It is clear that there are health risks associated with a career of flying," Federal Aviation Administration researchers wrote in a 2002 report on radiation exposure of air crews.
Some of the routes that had the highest radiation exposure included flights between Tokyo and New York, London and Los Angeles, as well as between Athens and New York, it said.
The exposure levels for air crews fall well within federal guidelines for safe exposure for a healthy adult but the Allied Pilots Association said the radiation exposure could present risks for the fetus of a pregnant woman. A fetus has developing cells that are more likely to be damaged by exposure to radiation than an adult.
"For your average passenger, who flies occasionally, it is not an issue. For air crew members who fly more than 75 hours or more a month, that certainly adds up," said Capt. Joyce May, an American Airlines pilot who is the deputy chairwoman of the APA's Aeromedical Committee. Higher altitudes, increased risk
The problem has become more acute recently as jets are flying at higher altitudes. The high-altitude flights help to cut down on jet fuel use, but they also increase exposure to cosmic radiation.
May said that total radiation exposure doubles with every 6,500 feet of climate altitude.
"For a jet cruising at 39,000 feet, the total radiation is about 64 times higher than at sea level. If you drop down to 33,000 feet, it is only about 35 times greater than sea level," she said.
May and the union are calling for more thorough training for air crews so that they better understand their exposure risks to radiation. They are asking for better tracking of the radiation exposure of crew members and studies to see if the exposure presents any long-term health risks.
A typical air crew member may experience about 200 millirems to 400 millirems more exposure to ionizing radiation than the general population per year. The pilots and flight attendants working routes over the Pacific or Atlantic Ocean will likely top 500 millirems of radiation exposure.
Galactic cosmic radiation is high energy and penetrates all parts of an aircraft equally, scientists said. It is also ionizing radiation, meaning it can penetrate the human body and disrupt the healthy function of cells. Radiation workers
The United States does not have any regulations for air crews pertaining to radiation exposure, but several European countries classify air crews as radiation workers and monitor their exposure levels.
There are no definitive studies linking cosmic radiation exposure for air crews with health risks, May said, but she did note one medical study showed that pilots had three to four times the rate of malignant melanoma -- a type of skin cancer -- than the general population.
In order to give some perspective, workers at the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, have an annual safety limit of 2,000 millirems of exposure, while the preeminent nuclear research lab tries to limit radiation exposure for a pregnant woman to 500 millirems for the term of her pregnancy.
Other federal agencies have a safe, annual exposure level of 5,000 millirems.
Tom Buhl, a top health physicist at Los Alamos said that while air crews may meet the U.S. minimum standard of radiation workers, he does not think they should be classified as such because they do not face the risk of a large, unexpected dose of radiation. "On an airplane, the radiation field is pretty well known. You have a pretty good understanding of what that radiation is," Buhl said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
US deserter's Canadian campaign
By Jeff Gray In Toronto
Tuesday, 6 July, 2004,
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3867481.stm
"I'm coming for you," reads one threatening e-mail, laced with racism and obscenities. "Desserters [sic] should get shot in the back especially at war time," reads another.
Hinzman will make his case on Wednesday (Photo: Mark Laking)
Vicious messages, mostly from Americans, have flooded the inbox of 25-year-old Jeremy Hinzman, an American soldier who deserted to seek refugee status in Canada after refusing to participate in the war in Iraq, which he has called a "criminal enterprise".
Mr Hinzman, one of at least two US Army deserters to have fled north, now lives in a Toronto apartment with his wife and two-year-old son, awaiting a refugee hearing on Wednesday, when he will plead with Canadian authorities to allow him to stay.
The former paratrooper said he feels the e-mail vitriol, sent to an address posted on a web site set up by Canadian supporters, can only bolster his case to stay north of the border.
"As far as I'm concerned that solidifies our refugee claim," he told BBC News Online, adding that the United States "is a more freewheeling society, with all kinds of access to weapons".
But many experts believe that Mr Hinzman and his fellow deserter, 18-year-old Brandon Hughey, have little hope of being granted refugee status here, despite Canada's reputation as a generous nation for asylum seekers.
Looking for a home
Americans in trouble have been running to Canada for centuries.
First, in the wake of the American Revolution, thousands living in the new United States who wanted to stay loyal to the British Crown were forced to flee and start new lives to the north.
After the British empire abolished slavery in 1833, British Canada was the destination for the celebrated Underground Railroad that spirited escaped American slaves to freedom.
And in the 1960s, as many as 60,000 young American men dodged the draft by crossing the 49th parallel, hoping to avoid killing or getting killed in the jungles of Vietnam.
Things have changed since then, when Canadian university campuses and the coffee shops of Toronto's Yorkville hippie enclave were crawling with young Americans who had burned their draft cards.
Most of those draft dodgers simply applied for landed immigrant status once in Canada, which opposed its southern neighbour's military adventures in Vietnam.
But immigration rules have been tightened since the Vietnam era, making would-be migrants apply from their home countries. This has pushed Mr Hinzman and Mr Hughey into Canada's refugee system.
Canada is diverse, and half of the people would probably like to send us back on the next bus if they could Jeremy Hinzman In the past, Canada has refused to return asylum seekers who would face the death penalty back to the United States. Technically, the death penalty remains on the books for deserters, although the last such execution took place during World War II.
Observers say the two soldiers would only face five-year prison sentences if sent home.
Master Sergeant Pam Smith, a spokeswoman for Mr Hinzman's 82nd Airborne Division stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, said the soldier's name had been placed in database for law enforcement and border guards in case they come across him.
But the Army does not actively seek out deserters, she said.
Sgt Smith said if Mr Hinzman was caught or turned himself in, it would be up to his unit to decide whether he should be disciplined, discharged or court-martialled.
In late May, a court martial sentenced another US soldier, Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, to a year in prison for deserting his unit in Iraq.
US officials said the sentence would send other would-be deserters a stern message. Sgt Mejia had called the Iraq war an "oil-driven" conflict.
Mixed feelings
Left-wing activists and writers in Canada have welcomed the two deserters and urged the government to accept their refugee claims.
Mr Hinzman, who decided he opposed the Iraq war while serving in Afghanistan, has spoken to peace groups and even addressed a large anti-war rally in Toronto in March.
Mejia received a one year jail term for desertion
But some, including the editorial page of the conservative National Post newspaper, have argued that the pair should have known what they were getting into when they signed up for the US Army, and should be sent home to face justice.
Mr Hinzman says he has no illusions about the country where he has asked for refuge: "Canada is diverse, and half of the people would probably like to send us back on the next bus if they could."
Canadian officials have said little about the two soldiers, leaving their cases to the arm's-length refugee process.
But south of the border, right-wing commentators such as Bill O'Reilly of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News TV network have seized on the case, even calling for a boycott of Canadian goods if the pair are not extradited quickly.
Their choice?
Besides the numbers, the main difference between those who fled the United States in the Vietnam era and these two soldiers is, of course, the draft.
The US Army is now a volunteer force, although critics point out that many soldiers come from poor rural backgrounds and see the service as the only way to get a job or a college education.
The lawyer acting for the two deserters reportedly gets calls every day from US soldiers looking for a way out of serving in Iraq.
And some US politicians have recently floated the notion of bringing back the draft, a move Mr Hinzman warns would send a wave of deserters across the border to join him.
"I think if that happens they might as well build housing developments here" for draft dodgers, he said.
--------
Accommodating the Protesters
July 6, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/06/opinion/06TUE2.html
It does not require extensive polling to predict that when the Republican convention comes to New York, there will be a lot of protesters. If the city wants to be the host of a convention - and Mayor Michael Bloomberg vigorously pursued this one - it has to give reasonable access to those with alternative views. The city has not been forthcoming in its offers of protest sites, and it has been unduly dismissive of the free-expression interests at stake. It should do a better job of coming up with an acceptable site for the protesters.
For well over a year, a group called United for Peace and Justice has been seeking a Central Park permit for a protest that it expects could draw 250,000 people. The city offered a park in Queens, hardly appropriate when the convention is in Manhattan. Now it is offering the West Side Highway, but the organizers are understandably unhappy. A highway is hardly a natural setting for a rally. Since the space is narrow, a "rally" there could end up being a three-mile string of people, many of them unable to see the stage or hear the speakers.
The mayor has acted as if demonstrators are an annoyance, to be shunted as far away as possible. Recently, he unfairly accused organizers of trying to gum up the negotiations in the interests of getting publicity. But New York City has a long and proud history of welcoming peaceful protests and political dissent. This tradition, and the First Amendment, cannot be tossed aside simply because a political convention has come to town.
Both sides should work harder to forge a compromise. When the city rejected a permit to use the Great Lawn in Central Park, saying that costly renovation had made the site too fragile to handle a protest, organizers said they would take the North Meadow, but the city rejected that location, too.
All of Central Park should not be off limits. The city should consider whether there are ways to make it accessible, while limiting damage. If the park isn't feasible, the city should do better than offering the highway. One alternative is Times Square, a central location with a history of accommodating crowds.
The city is already rolling out the red carpet for the Republicans, with an ad campaign urging New Yorkers to "make nice" to the delegates. People who want to take exception to Republican policies are also a legitimate part of convention week, and the city needs to make nice to them, too.
----
'60s Redux: Cops at the Peace Rally
In some Cities, Police are up to their Old Tricks, Infiltrating Legal Groups
by Paul Chevigny
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
Los Angeles Times
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0706-04.htm
Police surveillance of political groups is, unfortunately, nothing new. There were police "Red squads" active in Chicago as early as 1886 in the aftermath of the Haymarket Riot. In 1906, the New York Police Department established an "anarchist squad" to keep tabs on potential subversives. At the height of the Cold War, communist organizations and those of their sympathizers were routinely monitored and infiltrated by local police forces, and in the 1960s and 1970s police watched and kept detailed files on members of the NAACP, the ACLU and groups protesting the Vietnam War.
So it should perhaps come as no surprise that the county sheriff's office in Fresno is apparently doing it again; it has been accused of employing an undercover detective to infiltrate an anti-Iraq-war organization called Peace Fresno. The Sheriff's Department - although refusing to confirm or deny the accusation - says it reserves the right to conduct surveillance and collect intelligence on "terrorist and organized crime organizations."
So what's wrong with that? Well, the main problem is that the Fresno sheriff appears to be going after an organization that, as far as anyone can tell, is neither criminal nor terrorist. Just as the groups monitored in previous eras were often not truly subversive, Peace Fresno is described by The Times as merely a mix of retirees, teachers, college students and social workers who stage a monthly antiwar protest at a Fresno intersection.
The news of the infiltration is particularly dispiriting because it comes 30 years after a national backlash that was supposed to curb such harassment against peaceful, noncriminal groups. In 1975, a Senate select committee led by Frank Church began investigating the domestic spying practices of federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA; its powerful final report stated clearly that those agencies had interfered with the lives of individuals who had committed no crimes, branding them undesirables, making them suspects in future cases, spreading distorted information about them and generally chilling their political action.
But it wasn't just federal agencies. Across the country, similar tactics had been pursued by police departments in major cities. In Los Angeles, charges of abuses by the Red squad ran back to the 1920s. In millions of pages of secret intelligence files, the LAPD kept tabs on "the Wobblies in the '20s to the labor agitators of the '30s, the interned Nisei of the '40s, the alleged subversives of the '50s and some antiwar demonstrators of the '60s," according to the Los Angeles Police Commission. Police Chief William H. Parker's right-wing politics drove his obsession with intelligence; it was widely rumored that he had the goods on everybody. And he built a system that continued long after he left.
Such evils had not been foreseen in the U.S. Constitution, and in the years since, the Supreme Court has never found anything inherently suspect about surveillance by police (as distinguished from electronic eavesdropping) and has fashioned no controls such as those imposed on searches, arrests and interrogations.
But in the 1970s, lawsuits to curb police infiltration were mounted in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Memphis and Detroit. In each of those cities, police ultimately agreed to restrict themselves to criminal investigations and not to engage in the policing of opinion. For the first time, there was a received view about spying in America: Surveillance without "a criminal predicate," as California Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer's office puts it in the Fresno case, was not a proper police function.
It is this view that is coming apart at the present time. In the post-9/11 age of terrorism, police have begun to argue that they have to be able to look into all sorts of activities, not otherwise suspicious, to find possible webs of conspiracy. Because the basis for terrorism is sometimes religious, they have to be able to infiltrate religious organizations. It is said that the time has come for "general intelligence" not limited to criminal investigations.
In New York, a judge last year loosened restrictions. "We live in a different, more dangerous time than when the consent decree was approved in 1985," said current New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. "This ruling removes restrictions from a bygone era." This sounds good, and many of us are sympathetic. When we remember Sept. 11, it is tempting to believe that almost any intrusion is worth the price if it offers a chance of foiling another such act of terror.
But in the end, I don't think we really do believe that. "General intelligence" would cover an enormous range of activities. The net of "intelligence" has no natural boundaries; its margins are entirely up to the investigator. On the other hand, the collection of intelligence is never neutral; there has to be a guiding idea, and the investigator is going to look for conspiracy in antiwar groups before softball teams.
We might say we just have to trust to the judgment of the investigator, but if the history of abuses tells us nothing else, it tells us that would be a sad mistake.
Paul Chevigny is a professor of law at the New York University School of Law.
----
Art suppressed yet honed by war
Poetry: Censored and silenced by Saddam Hussein, the poets of Iraq are again raising their voices.
By Todd Richissin
Sun Foreign Staff
July 7, 2004
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.poets07jul07,0,1384669.story?coll=bal-news-nation
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The poet's voice was sure and strong, his reason for writing explained simply and honestly.
"People say poetry is from the soul but I disagree in my case," said Ali Al-Ghazali, a poet who at 70 is free to speak openly in the lyrical voice muffled for so many years under the dictator Saddam Hussein. "In my case, all of me - every part of me - is put into my writing. It is my gun, my cannon, my flower."
During the decades under Hussein, poets and other creative writers practiced their craft secretly or not at all. For all his brutality, Hussein was intelligent enough to recognize the power of language when infused with ideas and with passion, and he silenced writers suspected of using words as their weapons to oppose his regime.
Oppression still exists in Iraq, for bombings have made many people afraid to leave their homes, and fundamentalists who would oppose the honesty of literature that touches on the honesty of humanity - sensuality, sexuality, religious skepticism, spiritual exploration - remain a threat.
But in the steamy, broken building that serves as the offices of the Iraqi Writers Union, in the capital's busy Karada District, poets, novelists, essayists and short-story writers now gather daily to read their work aloud. They share photocopied versions of manuscripts that under Hussein would have led to a slashed tongue, a severed hand, years of prison, maybe death.
Outside the two-room building, a maxim painted on a wooden placard remains from the days of Hussein: "The nation without great poets will not have great politicians."
Inside those rooms, though, much of the talk, writing, ideas and passion are about the honesty suppressed under Hussein, about the war that still echoes.
"We still are not free but we are freer," said al-Ghazali, who was jailed for four years for his work. After his release he wrote secretly, hand-lettered pages of poems and short stories taped to the back of artwork hanging on the walls of his house.
"I was an expert at hiding it," he said. "I kept my thoughts hidden against the wall."
When Baghdad fell to U.S. troops in April 2003, his voice was no longer hushed. Hand to pen, pen to paper, he wrote:
Love and a sweet start
The dictatorship nightmare is over
Our eyes shut to it
Now open to peace
We will rebuild our factories
We will sow our fields
The bats have gone away
And we have the love of our children dancing
Singing free.
For all of human history, poets have been inspired by war and the courage and cowardice that it brings, the whispers of tenderness to parents suddenly childless, the victory of the battlefields, the ultimate failure of man. And perhaps because of so many wars in its history, Iraq has long been recognized as home to many of the best poets writing in Arabic.
Even under Hussein writers were held in esteem. On Martyr's Bridge Road stands a statue of the Iraqi poet Ma'ruf al Rusafi, a monument to verses in which he blamed Arab leaders for failing their people.
He wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, though, and those who could make their verse public under Hussein were forced to bury their honesty deep within the layers of prose or, in the case of others, submit to the dictator, dressing his propaganda in the clothing of art.
"If you were to write freely under Saddam, the ideas had to be his, not yours," said Kareem al-Walii, 54, who said friends warned him in 1979 that a short story he wrote and published in London questioning Hussein's regime had Iraq's secret police asking questions about him. "Real writers disappeared, either their bodies or their words. Liars got control of the art."
Al-Walii rarely left his house after he learned he was being investigated, he said. A work that the regime apparently feared was called "The Face," a story of two Iranian soldiers facing each other, rifles in hand, in a standoff. In the end, they put their guns down, recognizing that winning their argument meant losing their lives, an undisguised commentary on the Iraq-Iran war that Iraq launched in 1980.
"After that, I had to disappear," al-Walii said. "For 25 years I disappeared, and that makes you a tired old man."
Many of Iraq's best-known and most admired poets - Saadi Yousef, Abdel Wahab Bayati - went into exile and in that way avoided compromising their work. Some within Iraq simply disappeared and are thought to have been executed. Still others, like Hamid al-Mukhtar, spent years in prison.
During Hussein's reign, the writers union was the headquarters for poets salaried by the state, who could be relied upon to praise the leader, but also a place for other, less obedient writers to meet one another.
Members of the writers union hope to revive the art in Iraq, using their new freedom to critique one another's work and disseminate it more widely than was possible under Hussein, when writers who dared could use only one another as audiences, their ideas swapped only among those whom they most trusted.
"It's like a new day for us," said Hassan Abid Radhi, 38, who serves as a director for the writers union. "We have more than 1,000 members now, which means millions of ideas."
The writers range in age from 19 to 76. Although none receives money from the government, as 280 who passed the regime's muster did under Hussein, they have hope that the new open press in Iraq will be enough to provide a living writing.
Not all the poetry sings of freedom.
Sa'ad Sahib, 45, was captured by Iranian soldiers in 1982 as he fought for the Iraqi army. In prison, he was forbidden to write, but that did not stop him. Inmates were given syringes and capsules of Rifadin, used to ward off tuberculosis. The capsules, when emptied, made for ink, the needles for pens. Sahib emptied the tobacco from cigarettes, used the wrapping for paper to write on.
"Small messages, one verse, we would use to give to friends as gifts," he said. "We wrote of nostalgia, of longing for Iraq. War is what made me a poet."
The capsules and cigarette papers did not give much room for thought. But the necessity of poetry for Sahib led to another invention.
He would pour shampoo on a plastic crate, he said. Scraps of paper - labels from cans, some of the cigarette papers, anything they could get their hands on - were smoothed over the shampoo. Then he used a toothbrush to impress letters onto the paper. When enough people read his verse, he would pull the paper up, the letters would disappear, and he could write again, on a shampoo-clean slate.
He was released by the Iranians on March 18, 2003, and returned to his family in the poor Baghdad neighborhood now known as Sadr City. Two days later, the United States began bombing Iraq.
"All I have known is war," he said. "All I still know is war."
He wrote:
I came from prison
From small prison to large
I am still as I was
A war prisoner
My bedroom is now my cell
My country is as it was
Its green land still a graveyard
The Arabic horse with one eye.
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