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NUCLEAR
U.S. Firm Said Among Nuclear Black Market
Crazy Rumours - Bush's Nuclear Contingency
'No radiation exposure' after airplane crash
Iran cleric chides ElBaradei for Israel dialogue
Iran - Another Friday, Same Mullah Slogan
Price negotiations holding up launch of Bushehr: Russian official
Sharon affirms willingness to create nuclear-free zone
Nuclear Talks End in Israel; Cordial Tone Is Reported
US transferred 2 tons of uranium without UN approval
Burrowing nuke
NRC Hears Arguments Against Early Site Permits
Energy secretary signs 'the machine'
Yucca ruling exposes Bush lies
Science Trumps Expediency in Court Decision
US court upholds Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site
Court Deals Blow to Effort to Bury Nuclear Waste in Nevada
Huge Setback For Yucca Mountain
Nevada Loses Yucca Mt. Waste Site Appeal
Nevada officials declare victory after Yucca Mountain ruling
The Plutonium Pits of New Mexico
Pantex hits the pits in repackaging
Suit Likely if Wash. Nuclear Site Isn't Assessed
MILITARY
The Horrors of War
Afghans Allege Three Americans Ran Jail in Kabul
Bogus Agents Said to Be Antiterrorist Vigilantes
Afghan Parliamentary Elections May Be Delayed Again
Inquiry implicates Ethiopian army in killings in southwest Gambella region
Blair's Troubles Multiply
Butler to single out intelligence chiefs for blame in WMD inquiry
Butler report on war in Iraq printed in secret to avoid leaks
Rice Rebuffs China on Taiwan Arms
In Place of Gunfire, a Rain of Rocks
Five U.S. Soldiers Killed by Mortar Attack in Iraq
World Court to rule against Israel
7 Palestinians Killed In Intense Gaza Battle
World Court Says Israeli Barrier Violates International Law
Palestinian economy chokes from stranglehold of West Bank barrier
Sharon to meet Peres on Sunday to hold coalition talks
Negroponte, Honduras and Iraq
Embassies restrict spy missions
C.I.A. Director Again Disputes Hijacker's Iraqi Contact
In Valedictory, Tenet Defends CIA From Past, Present Critics
U.S. Spies Accused of Hyping Iraqi Weapons Threat
C.I.A. Officer Critiques Terror Policy
Ron Paul Continues Fight for US Sovereignty
U.S. Marine Is Safe, but Still Subject Of Mystery
Circumstances Still Murky as U.S. Marine Leaves Beirut
Other Services Eyed by Army for Recruiting
Signing On To Challenge Hugo Chavez
Ex-Guard To Face More Charges
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Saddam's case appealed to U.S. high court
Guantanamo Prisoners Must Sue in D.C.
House GOP Defends Patriot Act
Effort to Curb Scope of Antiterrorism Law Falls Short
Series of Failures Is Cited in Evacuation of Capitol
Senior al-Qaida leaders behind terror threat
Pentagon Reportedly Aimed to Hold Detainees in Secret
U.S. Looks Overseas for Clues on Terror Plans
Bin Laden Is Said to Be Organizing for a U.S. Attack
POLITICS
Defectors' Reports on Iraq Arms Were Embellished, Exile Asserts
Report Says Key Assertions Leading to War Were Wrong
Report: CIA Gave False Info on Iraq
Pentagon Says Bush Records of Service Were Destroyed
Ashcroft's magic act
U.S. News obtains all classified annexes to the Taguba report
Scientists Say White House Questioned Their Politics
Bush Wins; House Leaves Patriot Act As Is
Edwards Sets Self Apart on Foreign Policy
Kerry would keep US troops in Iraq far longer than Bush
OTHER
EPA to fine DuPont for withholding data
EPA to Fine DuPont for Silence on Teflon Chemical
E.P.A. Says It Will Fine DuPont for Holding Back Test Results
ACTIVISTS
TA Court orders American peace activist expelled
Norway rejects Israeli brothers' asylum
-------- NUCLEAR
U.S. Firm Said Among Nuclear Black Market
GEORGE JAHN
Fri, Jul. 09, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/local/9116819.htm
VIENNA, Austria - An investigation of the black market supplying nations wanting nuclear arms has spread to more than 20 firms - some of them North American - the chief of the U.N. atomic agency told The Associated Press Friday. A senior diplomat identified one of the firms as U.S. based.
Demanding anonymity, the diplomat also said the Syria and Saudi Arabia are also being investigated as possible buyer nations, beyond Iraq, Iran, Libya and North Korea - the countries known to have been in contact with Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan and members of his procurement network.
But the diplomat, who is familiar with the Vienna-based IAEA told The AP that beyond suspicions prompting a continuing investigation, "there has been no proof" on Syria and Saudi Arabia that would warrant them being reported to the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In separate comments to The Associated Press, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei avoided specifics on the locations of the firms supplying the nuclear black market beyond saying there were "over 20 countries, some of them in North America."
The diplomat said at least one of them was in the United States. He declined to elaborate, saying the agency "was not yet at the bottom of that story." But he said what is known about that company sheds new light on the activities of the network, known up to now for primarily supplying technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran as part of the process allowing them to make enriched uranium that can be used either to generate electricity or make weapons.
-------- depleted uranium
Crazy Rumours - Bush's Nuclear Contingency
by Kurt Nimmo,
Friday July 9, 2004
Another Day in the Empire
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/040708Nimmo.shtml
Rumors. Crazy rumors. No way to tell what those crazed neocons will do as November closes in and Bush looks more and more like a loser to the Kerry and his chosen running mate, the trial lawyer who made his first million suing doctors, John Edwards. But because we can assume the neocons will not go down without a fight-that is to say, they will not go down without killing a whole lot of innocent people-we can put at least some credence in the rumors floating around.
For instance, a desperate Bush will nuke either North Korea or Iran, two heavyweights on the Axis of Evil shit list. TBR News speculates that there is a "distinct possibility that Bush will start another military adventure, just before the election. Rumor at high levels has it that he will declare a state of emergency, based on faked reports, that North Korea and/or Iran are about to launch nuclear strikes against the American homeland and that he has ordered counterstrikes to defend this country."
Of course, this is insane and difficult to believe. I mean, we're talking about nukes here. But then when you consider that Bush and the Pentagon have launched two nuclear wars in the last three years-and let us not deceive ourselves, spreading tons of depleted uranium on Afghanistan and Iraq is nothing short of nuclear war, minus the dramatic mushroom clouds-you begin to get the picture. Bush and Crew are not shy when it comes to nukes. For instance, consider Bush's Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), released in January of 2002. The NPR mentions the "nuclear option," that is to say doing what was previously unthinkable-attacking "rogue nations" with nukes. "Nuclear weapons could be employed against targets able to withstand non-nuclear attack," the NPR says matter of a factly. "In setting requirements for nuclear strike capabilities, distinctions can be made among the contingencies for which the United States must be prepared. Contingencies can be categorized as immediate, potential or unexpected."
You know ... like maybe losing the election.
"North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya are among the countries that could be involved in immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies," the quite insane NPR continues. "All have longstanding hostility toward the United States and its security partners; North Korea and Iraq in particular have been chronic military concerns. All sponsor or harbor terrorists and all have active WMD and missile programs." In other words, what good are nukes if they cannot be used to "augment" the neocon plan to take on the above mentioned countries, most of them enemies because crazed Greater Israel Zionists hate them and want to rub them out? As for North Korea, the only reason they are on the list is because they are damn good at manufacturing missiles and have no problem selling them to third world countries scared shitless of the United States.
Naturally, if Bush nukes Iran or North Korea, chances are pretty good they will respond in kind. "Unfortunately, both of these countries do have the Bomb and both are capable of retaliation or, worse, preemptive strikes against our troops in South Korea, Iraq or even Japan," TBR writes. "Between Israel beating the drums for a US attack on Iran and Syria and Bush's toppling pole numbers, most of us are now seriously afraid of some Godawful adventure on the part of the 'Mission Accomplished' lad."
Not to worry, Cheney has his bunker at the Naval Observatory and Congress has its secret bunkers-or we can assume selected members of Congress have access to bunkers. I don't know if Kerry and Edwards have bunkers, but they should think about it.
Of course, this is a pretty nutty scenario - but then the neocons are a pretty nutty bunch of Straussians who will do almost anything to stay in power. I don't think there will be a nuke fest come November, but I certainly believe Bush and Crew will pull something off. If you think about it, they really don't have any choice. Folks are mighty pissed at them for wrecking the country, squandering our national treasure, dismantling large sections of the Bill of Rights, and killing their kids in wars predicated on lies and Straussian deception.
-------- europe
'No radiation exposure' after airplane crash
Expatica (The Netherlands)
9 July 2004
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=19&story_id=9360
AMSTERDAM - An investigation has determined that emergency personnel and members of the public involved in the Bijlmer airplane crash in 1992 were not exposed to radioactivity or other dangerous materials.
Leiden University Medical Centre specialists examined 20 firefighters and other emergency service personnel and Bijlmer residents in Amsterdam, but did not discover any health problems, news agency ANP reported on Friday.
An Israeli El Al cargo plane crashed into a Bijlmer apartment complex in October 1992, killing 43 people. The plane had depleted uranium on board and there were suggestions after the crash that some of the uranium might have been burned, releasing it into the atmosphere.
In 2002, Amsterdam fire brigade and the Health Ministry resolved to test 20 people involved in the disaster for possible long-term health affects. The inquiry was launched in response to ongoing concerns expressed by firefighters and residents.
-------- iran
Iran cleric chides ElBaradei for Israel dialogue
09 Jul 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/HUG941545.htm
TEHRAN, July 9 - A leading Iranian cleric on Friday criticised the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog for allowing Israel to divert attention away from its presumed nuclear arsenal by focussing talks on Iran's nuclear programme.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei ended a three-day visit to Israel on Thursday during which the Jewish state continued to refuse to admit or deny it has nuclear weapons under a policy of "strategic ambiguity".
International experts calculate Israel has 100 to 200 warheads, based on estimates of plutonium produced at its Dimona desert reactor.
During the talks, Israeli officials concentrated not on the presumed arsenal that makes Israel the region's only nuclear power, but worries that arch-foe Iran was developing an atom bomb and might one day use it on Israel.
"The Zionists have many warheads, and Mr ElBaradei goes there and instead of asking them to correct their behaviour they sit and discuss Iran," Ayatollah Mohammed Emami-Kashani said during a Friday prayers sermon in Tehran.
"These are diverting attention from Israel to Iran which is only pursuing technological aims," he said in comments broadcast live on state radio.
The United States and Israel accuse Tehran of developing nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian programme. Iran says it is not pursuing an atom bomb.
Emami-Kashani denounced as a "lie" Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's comments to ElBaradei that he could discuss ridding the Middle East of nuclear arms but only as part of a broader peace process in the future.
Emami-Kashani, who is a member of Iran's highest arbitration body the Expediency Council, said Iran would not give up its nuclear programme.
"The enemies of Iran should know that the brave and vigilant Iranian nation will not give up its right regarding nuclear issues," he said.
----
Iran - Another Friday, Same Mullah Slogan
Jul 9, 2004
Reuters
http://www.tdn.com/articles/2004/07/09/area_news/news08.txt
A leading Iranian mullah on Friday criticised the head of the UN's nuclear watchdog for allowing Israel to divert attention away from its presumed nuclear arsenal by focussing talks on Iran's nuclear programme.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei ended a three-day visit to Israel on Thursday during which the Jewish state continued to refuse to admit or deny it has nuclear weapons under a policy of "strategic ambiguity".
International experts calculate Israel has 100 to 200 warheads, based on estimates of plutonium produced at its Dimona desert reactor.
During the talks, Israeli officials concentrated not on the presumed arsenal that makes Israel the region's only nuclear power, but worries that arch-foe Iran was developing an atom bomb and might one day use it on Israel.
"The Zionists have many warheads, and Mr ElBaradei goes there and instead of asking them to correct their behaviour they sit and discuss Iran," mullah Mohammed Emami-Kashani said during a Friday prayers sermon in Tehran.
"These are diverting attention from Israel to Iran which is only pursuing technological aims," he said in comments broadcast live on state radio.
The United States and Israel accuse Tehran of developing nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian programme. Iran says it is not pursuing an atom bomb.
Emami-Kashani denounced as a "lie" Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's comments to ElBaradei that he could discuss ridding the Middle East of nuclear arms but only as part of a broader peace process in the future.
Emami-Kashani, who is a member of Iran's highest arbitration body the Expediency Council, said Iran would not give up its nuclear programme.
"The enemies of Iran should know that the brave and vigilant Iranian nation will not give up its right regarding nuclear issues," he said.
----
Price negotiations holding up launch of Bushehr: Russian official
MOSCOW (AFP)
Jul 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040709164846.y2vtf3g4.html
Negotiations over price and logistics are holding up the launch of Iran's first nuclear power plant at Bushehr that Russia is contructing despite international protest, Moscow's top nuclear official said Friday.
Alexander Rumyantsev said the 1,000 megawatt plant is now expected to go online in 2006.
Russia says it will not begin delivering fuel to the plant until Moscow and Tehran sign a contract for the return of spent fuel back to Russia.
"The principles of the contract have been decided at all levels," Rumyantsev said.
But the two sides are still negotiating over the price that Teheran will pay for Russia to store that spent fuel and the logistics of how it will be transported back, Rumyantsev said.
The talks over the contract have dragged on for years, prompting speculation that Moscow was yielding to pressure from the United States, which says the Islamic state could use fuel from the plant for a covert nuclear weapons program.
Spent fuel is highly radioactive and in some cases can be recycled for weapons use.
On a visit to Moscow in late June, Mohammed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), gave a thumbs up to Bushehr's construction that he said was "no longer at the center of international concern."
-------- israel
Sharon affirms willingness to create nuclear-free zone
July 09, 2004
By George Jahn
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040708-094845-1847r.htm
JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is ready to discuss a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East as part of future peace talks, the head of the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said yesterday.
But Mohamed ElBaradei, wrapping up a three-day trip to Israel, failed to make progress in loosening the country's taboo on disclosing its nuclear-weapons capabilities.
"The prime minister affirmed to me that Israeli policy continues to be that in the context of peace in the Middle East, Israel will be looking forward to the establishment of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East," Mr. ElBaradei said after a meeting with Mr. Sharon.
Israeli officials stressed that arms-control talks are far off. Mr. Sharon linked the talks to progress in the "road map," an internationally-backed plan for peace between Israelis and the Palestinians that has been stalled since its inception a year ago.
Nonetheless, Mr. ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said he was pleased by Mr. Sharon's comments.
"That's the first time I heard that from the prime minister of Israel," he said. "It's not a new policy, but affirming that policy at the level of prime minister I thought to be quite a welcome development."
Mr. ElBaradei was in Israel to persuade it to loosen its long-standing policy against discussing its nuclear capabilities. Israel is thought to be the only country in the Middle East to have nuclear missiles ready to launch.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, Mr. ElBaradei was eager for at least tacit acknowledgment that Israel has such arms or the means to make them.
But Israel did not budge from its stance of neither confirming nor denying that it has such weapons. It says the policy is the best way to keep Islamic foes from attacking it while denying them the rationale for also seeking nuclear weapons.
"Israel has no reason to change its policy, which has served it well," said a senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
In an interview published in the Ha'aretz newspaper yesterday, Mr. ElBaradei said the growing threat of nuclear proliferation has put a new premium on regional security arrangements.
During his visit, Mr. ElBaradei said, Israel repeatedly raised concerns about archrival Iran's nuclear ambitions.
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky described Mr. ElBaradei's "fear for the Middle East" as an important thread of his visit.
He said Mr. ElBaradei, who is Egyptian, would be happy to act as an informal bridge between the Islamic world, which resents what it considers unfair international tolerance of Israel's secret nuclear capacities, and Israel, which sees itself as facing "an existential threat" from a far larger enemy.
Mr. ElBaradei's agency is probing nearly two decades of suspect nuclear activities in Iran that the United States, Israel and others say reflect attempts to make such weapons.
Tehran insists that it wants nuclear energy only to generate power, but several IAEA reports in the past year have suggested that the Islamic republic has not cooperated fully with agency inspectors.
--------
Nuclear Talks End in Israel; Cordial Tone Is Reported
July 9, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/international/middleeast/09nuke.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, July 8 - For a nation that has never officially acknowledged its nuclear arms capacity, Israel certainly seemed like a nuclear power this week as it received the leader of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, unveiled a new Web site devoted to its atomic program and briefed reporters on its nuclear policies.
But even as Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, wrapped up a visit on Thursday, Israel said it remained committed to its longstanding policy of "strategic ambiguity" and would not confirm or deny that it possessed nuclear weapons.
By all accounts, Dr. ElBaradei's discussions with senior Israeli officials, including a session on Thursday with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, were cordial.
Dr. ElBaradei wants to open a dialogue on making the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, and Mr. Sharon reiterated the Israeli position that it would support such an effort once there was peace throughout the region.
"It's not a new policy, but affirming that policy at the level of prime minister I thought to be quite a welcome development," Dr. ElBaradei said at a news conference at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
But Israeli officials, who regard Iran's nuclear program as a potentially serious threat, emphasized that they were not prepared to hold such talks, and that Israel's policy had not changed.
"At least for now, we see no reason, justification or requirement to change it," said a senior official with Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, who spoke on condition that his name not be published. The official said Israel had not previously held such a briefing on its nuclear policies.
Israel's commission unveiled a Web site on Sunday, though it offered only general information about the country's nuclear program that was already widely known.
The Israeli official noted that the Middle East peace plan known as the road map raised the possibility of regional arms control talks in its second phase. But with violence going on, the plan stalled last summer shortly after it was introduced, and neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have met their commitments for the first phase.
Dr. ElBaradei said he hoped that Israel, India and Pakistan would join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which requires countries that sign to divulge their nuclear inventories and open up facilities to international inspections. A total of 187 countries have signed the treaty.
India and Pakistan have always refused, as has Israel. All three have cited the need to maintain a strong deterrent.
During a question-and-answer session, Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, said the greatest nuclear threat in the short term would be a terrorist group acquiring a nuclear weapon. Dr. ElBaradei agreed. "This is the No. 1 nightmare," he said.
While Israel has always kept its nuclear program shrouded, various monitoring groups have estimated that it has enough plutonium to manufacture up to 200 atomic weapons.
During his visit, the Israelis took Dr. ElBaradei on a flight over the country. His hosts emphasized its small size and lack of "defensive depth," saying this showed the need for a powerful deterrent capability.
Israel's longstanding position has been that it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Since Israel is widely assumed to have such weapons, the phrase is generally interpreted as an Israeli pledge that it would not be the first to use a nuclear weapon.
Dr. ElBaradei said that elsewhere in the region he had encountered an "emotional response" whenever Israel's nuclear program was raised. "There is a perception in the region of a security imbalance" and of a double standard favoring Israel, he said.
-------- u.n.
US transferred 2 tons of uranium without UN approval
By Edith M Ledrer,
Pakistan Daily Times
July 9, 2004
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_9-7-2004_pg4_8
American authorities did not seek IAEA authorisation to remove radioactive materials from Iraq
US nuclear authorities and UN nuclear officials appeared to disagree on whether Washington had the authority to move uranium and highly radioactive material that could be used in so-called "dirty bombs" from Iraq to the United States.
The nearly 2 tons of low-enriched uranium and approximately 1,000 highly radioactive items transferred from Iraq last month had been placed under seal by the International Atomic Energy Agency at the sprawling Tuwaitha nuclear complex, 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Baghdad, UN officials said Wednesday. "The American authorities just informed us of their intention to remove the materials, but they never sought authorization from us," said Gustavo Zlauvinen, head of the IAEA's New York office.
Under UN resolutions adopted after the 1991 Gulf War, the IAEA was authorised to oversee the destruction of Iraq's nuclear programme and monitor its activities to ensure that the programme was not revived. But Paul Longsworth, deputy administrator for defence nuclear nonproliferation in the US National Nuclear Security Administration, said Wednesday night the United States didn't need IAEA approval for the transfer.
"We believe we have the legal authority to do it," he said. "We are in custody of the material only, and we have the permission of the Iraqi government to take this out of the country." US Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham disclosed the secret airlift from Iraq on Tuesday as "a major achievement" in an attempt to "keep potentially dangerous nuclear material out of the hands of terrorists." The airlift ended on June 23, five days before the United States transferred sovereignty to Iraq's new interim government. IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said in a letter to the Security Council circulated Wednesday that Washington informed the agency on June 19, 2003, that "due to security concerns" it intended to transfer some nuclear material stored at Tuwaitha to the United States.
At the time, the agency took note of the US intention to remove the nuclear material "from agency verification... and only expressed a view on the agency's verification requirements," he said.
According to the letter, the United States informed the IAEA on June 30 that approximately 1.8 tons of uranium, enriched to a level of 2.6 percent, another 6.6 pounds (3 kilograms) of low-enriched uranium, and approximately 1,000 highly radioactive sources had been transferred on June 23. Longsworth said the US authorities had "exceptionally good" relations with the IAEA and ElBaradei didn't raise any objections. Neither did IAEA deputy director Pierre Goldschmidt, who was briefed about the transfer by US officials in Washington on June 23, Longsworth said. A UN official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there was some concern about the legality of the US transfer because the nuclear material belonged to Iraq and was under the control and supervision of the IAEA. The US Energy Department statement said "the US, consistent with its authorities and relevant United Nations resolutions, took possession of and removed the materials to ensure the safety and security of the Iraqi people."
Longsworth said the material was now at a facility where it can be examined by the IAEA.
In 1992, after the first Gulf War, all highly enriched uranium - which could be used to make nuclear weapons - was shipped from Iraq to Russia, the IAEA's Zlauvinen said. After 1992, roughly 2 tons of natural uranium, or yellow cake, some low enriched uranium and some depleted uranium was left at Tuwaitha under IAEA seal and control, he said.
So were radioactive items used for medical, agricultural and industrial purposes, which Iraq was allowed to keep under a 1991 UN Security Council resolution, Zlauvinen said. IAEA inspectors left Iraq just before last year's US-led war. After it ended, Washington barred UN weapons inspectors from returning, deploying US teams instead in a so far unsuccessful search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
An exception was made in June 2003 when Washington allowed an IAEA team to go to Tuwaitha to secure uranium after reports of widespread looting when the fighting ended. The IAEA recovered most missing material and Zlauvinen said the uranium was put in sealed containers and left for the Americans to guard. But because US authorities restricted inspections of Tuwaitha, the IAEA team was unable to determine whether hundreds of radioactive items used in research and medicine across the country were secure.
ElBaradei's letter said that an unspecified amount of nuclear material still at Tuwaitha consists mainly of natural uranium, some depleted uranium and some low enriched uranium waste, which is subject to IAEA monitoring. Some radioisotopes are also still in the country and come under the agency's responsibilities, he said. Tuwaitha is now under the control of Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
[Write the Washington Times Editor - mailto:letters@washingtontimes.com and Spencer Abraham - mailto:the.secretary@doe.gov ]
Burrowing nuke
July 9, 2004
Washington Times
Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is defending his department's work on a new earth-penetrating nuclear warhead, which is under fire from anti-nuclear activists and their supporters in Congress.
Mr. Abraham said during a meeting with reporters and editors of The Washington Times that he is "frustrated" by Congress' reluctance to fund a study of the new warhead.
The warhead, which must be able to burrow some 100 feet before setting off a nuclear blast, is needed because of the growing danger that rogue states and terrorists will build nuclear, chemical or biological weapons inside deep, hardened underground bunkers out of the reach of conventional bombs.
"We know that there are people who like to build deep underground facilities that conceivably could be used against either the United States and others. And that is a growing, 21st-century threat," he said.
"Amazingly, a lot of people in Congress want to keep fighting the Cold War," he said. "They want to maintain the large weapons systems of the 20th century and not consider threats of the 21st."
The Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator has been studied for the past two years, with funding cut in half last year by critics in Congress.
The Energy Department is seeking $27.5 million for fiscal 2005 and a House appropriations panel cut all money for the program in an Energy funding bill. Energy officials hope the Senate will keep the money for the warhead in its version.
Anson Franklin, a spokesman for Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration, said Los Alamos National Laboratory is working on a modified version of the B-61 nuclear warhead for the burrowing nuke, while the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is examining a modification of the B-83 warhead for its penetrator.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
NRC Hears Arguments Against Early Site Permits
Eye on Energy:
July 2004
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/articles.cfm?ID=11931
On June 21 and 22, lawyers for Public Citizen, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and several state-based organizations (the "petitioners") argued before the NRC reasons why challenges to the three Early Site Permit applications should be admitted to hearings on those licenses. Three judges heard oral arguments from lawyers Diane Curran, of Harmon, Curran, Spielberg & Eisenberg, and Shannon Fisk, of the Environmental Law and Policy Center, on issues ranging from environmental justice to conversation and water use.
In only limited aspects of one contention-the effects of thermal pollution on the striped bass in Lake Anna, the effects on fisheries downstream of the North Anna dam, and impacts on recreation-did the NRC staff support admission of any of the 10 contentions. Even if any contentions are admitted by the judges, who work for the industry-friendly NRC, the hearing process will be abbreviated under new rules that were applied retroactively to the process. Discovery of evidence will be limited, as may be cross-examination of witnesses. A decision on admission of contentions is expected in mid-July.
Eye on Yucca Mountain
On June 25, the House passed its 2005 Energy and Water Appropriations bill with $131 million allocated to the Yucca Mountain Project, although DOE requested $880 million. The DOE budget request wrongly assumed that the Nuclear Waste Fund (which comes from nuclear power ratepayer fees) would be taken "off-budget" - not subject to budget caps. The House Energy and Commerce Committee passed Rep. Joe Barton's (R-TX) bill (H.R. 3981) that offsets the fees paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund for the next five years. However, thanks to strong opposition from Nevada Reps. Jon Porter (R) and Jim Gibbons (R), supporters of the bill were not able to get approval to offer it as an amendment to the appropriations bill.
Meanwhile, the Senate Energy and Water Development Subcommittee has not yet marked up its version of the 2005 Energy and Water Appropriations bill. Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) has proposed to increase by 60% next year the fees paid by nuclear power ratepayers into the Nuclear Waste Fund. Call your Senators (Capitol Switchboard 202-224-3121) and urge them to oppose this plan and any efforts to offset the Nuclear Waste Fund!
According to NRC regulations, all documents relating to the DOE's forthcoming Yucca Mountain license application must be posted on the Internet six months before DOE can submit its license application to the NRC. [Click here to search for documents.] But the database is incomplete and currently inaccessible because it is extraordinarily difficult to navigate. Many of the documents are only referenced, but not actually posted, or posted in a virtually unreadable format. The NRC has 30 days from June 30 to post its documents; other interested parties (including Public Citizen) have 90 days.
Update on LES petition
On June 14, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board (ASLB), the NRC's judicial arm, held a pre-hearing conference in Hobbs, New Mexico, to hear oral arguments on whether Public Citizen and NIRS' contentions about LES' proposed uranium enrichment plant in southeastern New Mexico would be admitted and given a hearing. Santa Fe-based attorney Lindsay Lovejoy presented our case to the ASLB. Among our contentions: impacts upon groundwater and water supplies in the Eunice/Hobbs area; radioactive and hazardous waste storage and disposal; and the need for the facility, as well as its impact on national security. The ASLB's decision on which contentions will be admitted are expected in mid-July.
On the day of the pre-hearing conference, PC and NIRS delivered a letter signed by more than 60 groups to the governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, urging him to "stand firm" and oppose the project. The ASLB's decision on which contentions will be admitted is expected in mid-July.
Public Citizen Urges Gov't to Revoke Contract With Reliant
Public Citizen is asking the federal government to explain why it awarded a $35.9 million contract to Reliant Energy after the company was indicted for its role in the California energy crisis. In a letter sent to U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) officials, Public Citizen asserted that Reliant should not receive a taxpayer-funded contract to provide electricity to several military establishments while it is under federal indictment.
On April 8, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) obtained a criminal indictment against the company, alleging that Reliant literally turned the lights out in California to make more money in 2000-01. The DOJ's criminal indictment charges the company with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and manipulation of the price of electricity. In addition to the criminal indictment, Reliant Energy agreed to pay $125 million to government authorities in fines, settlements and refunds for intentionally shutting down power plants to create blackouts that drove up profits.
New Economic Analysis: Coalbed Methane Will Cost Billions
Extracting natural gas from coal beds in Montana and Wyomingis a risky venture and it's the public who will bear the costs, not the energy companies who do the drilling, according to a new economic analysis released in June by the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN). The report notes that the largest risk to coalbed methane drilling is depleting groundwater in the semi-arid region of northern Wyoming and southeastern Montana, commonly known as the Powder River Basin - a loss that could cost taxpayers as much as $10.1 billion in current market value. [Click here to read the report.]
Victory For Electricity Consumers In South Korea!
On June 23, Public Citizen made a presentation in Seoul, South Korea, at the International Symposium for Sustainable Development of Electricity. The event was a culmination of a year's worth of collaboration between Public Citizen and the South Korean Tripartite Committee, the commission assembled by the South Korean government to determine whether the country should privatize its state‑owned electricity company and deregulate power markets. The Committee made an official recommendation at the June conference CANCELING the government's plan to introduce "free markets" into the country's electricity system. Because the current government pledged to abide by the Commission's findings, South Korea appears to be the first nation to formally recognize that electricity deregulation and privatization can't and won't work.
DOE Pushes for Nuclear Hydrogen
On May 26, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it is considering administration of a program to promote development of the "Next Generation Nuclear Plant," which would in this case be used to cogenerate both electricity and hydrogen. The U.S. has been a major player on the international scene in promoting the development of Generation IV nuclear technologies, and creation of a hydrogen economy is part of President Bush's Hydrogen Initiative, which he proposed in his 2003 State of the Union address.
Through July 9, DOE is accepting comments and expressions of interest from stakeholders on all aspects of the project, including necessity; the main focus is (of course) on comments from industry. The major DOE involvement is through funding; DOE has pledged to pay up to 50% of the cost of the program over its lifetime, with up to 100% paid in the first years. The project itself will be headed by a lead company, known as the "project integrator," and will be supported by a whole consortium of companies. Upon completion of the project, any of the consortium companies will have rights to take the resultant technologies to market, and the new reactor will likely be purchased by DOE and used as a training and testing facility.
The project, if it goes forward, will likely cost taxpayers billions of dollars, though the requisite annual appropriations are the project's main weakness. It will also spur the creation of a nuclear-based hydrogen economy, which negates the pollution-free potential of hydrogen fuel cells. The U.S. and the world should make development of hydrogen from renewable energy sources a priority, and focus their resources accordingly.
Corporate Corner
$4.6 billion: The amount of fines and settlements levied against energy corporations so far for their roles in manipulating electricity markets in California and natural gas prices nationwide. The estimated costs of companies' manipulation in California ALONE are $70 billion.
Quick Quote
"We aren't required to meet the needs of anybody...We aren't required to do anything, as a matter of fact...All we need to do is generate power and sell it... We don't even need to show need for power in the State of Illinois..."
Mr. Steven Franz, a lawyer for Exelon Generation, during the NRC pre-hearing conference on June 21, on early site permits for new nuclear reactors.
DID YOU KNOW...?
The Power of the Public Utility Holding Company Act
Prior to enactment of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, companies that controlled the stock of public utilities were free to use dependable utility revenues to invest in potentially more profitable (and therefore riskier) ventures. Fifty-three utility holding companies went bankrupt and 23 more defaulted on bank loans. Millions of Americans lost their life savings, which were invested in "safe" utility stocks. This can happen again if PUHCA is repealed, as the current energy bill proposes.
-------- california
Energy secretary signs 'the machine'
Livermore lab's new supercomputer will be capable of 100 trillion calculations per second
By Ian Hoffman,
Tri-Valley Herald STAFF WRITER
Friday, July 09, 2004
http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86~10669~2261962,00.html
LIVERMORE -- As a working H-bomb designer in the mid-1990s, Bruce Goodwin and colleagues figured they one day would need a computer a million times more capable, a machine able to simulate a full thermonuclear explosion, from "button to boom."
On Thursday, Goodwin confessed in a low voice to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham that he never dreamed such a supercomputer would take shape in his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Abraham took a proffered pen and, walking up to a black monolith in an acre of blinding white floorspace, scrawled his name on the first cabinet of Goodwin's grail, a veritable city of interconnected IBM servers known as ASCI Purple.
When its 1,500 cabinets are wired together next spring or summer, Purple will perform
100 trillion calculations per second. Roughly 2.3 million precocious teens stabbing madly at hand calculators would take a year to match Purple's machinations in that second.
"Purple is the machine," said Goodwin, now chief of the weapons program at Livermore.
Yet both Purple and the four-story office built for scientists to operate and serve it, the Terascale Simulation Facility, are verging on obsolescence before they come online. Purple symbolizes a supercomputing architecture carried almost to the end.
It can simulate a full H-bomb -- all the physics of a miniature star in three dimensions, and more -- but it will take almost two months. That's too long for weapons analysts to perform the hundreds of simulations needed to be certain that all seven major warhead and bomb designs in the U.S. arsenal will operate as designed, with a few changes and yet without exploding a single one.
Their findings go to Abraham who with the defense secretary must certify the working order of the entire arsenal every year.
"I don't think I have a more important responsibility in my job," Abraham told lab scientists Thursday.
Weapons scientists say that job ultimately calls for a petaflop -- a thousand trillion operations a second. They talk of a "petaflop imperative."
"We have very strong requirements for the petaflop by the end of the decade, and it won't end there," said Dona L. Crawford, Livermore's associate director of computing.
The "big iron" like Purple -- sprawling stacks of servers woven together, powered by several megawatts of electricity and cooled by thousands of tons of chilled water -- can't pass data fast enough to be worth the extra millions of dollars, power consumed and acreages of floorspace.
So close by Purple will be a chief competitor, a collection of special chips clustered into five different kinds of networks and known as Blue Gene/L. Its 164 trapezoid-shaped cabinets will occupy half a tennis court's worth of computer room, eat a third of Purple's power, cost less and deliver 3.6 times the power.
Together, they will give Livermore about 460 trillion calculations a second, or almost half a petaflop and abundant reason to rename the building that Abraham dedicated Thursday.
Soon after, senior lab executives pulled Abraham into secure offices for a classified computer simulation of a terrorist attack on the lab's plutonium facility, known as Superblock. Security officials said the simulation reprised a live "force-on-force" exercise, when lab security officers faced a mock assault by fewer than a dozen officers from other Energy Department facilities.
Other lab officials said the simulations showed Abraham the different outcomes of adding new defenses, such as the $20 million in barriers and alarms that Livermore is seeking by 2006.
Abraham has shaken the lab's senior management by suggesting last spring the possibility of removing Livermore's entire inventory of plutonium and highly enriched uranium. Critics of security at the nation's nuclear weapons sites say Livermore is too hemmed in by surrounding houses to allow the kind of firepower needed to repel a serious attempt to steal an A-bomb's worth of plutonium or uranium.
The secretary's decision is set for early next year. But Abraham wasn't tipping his hand. "For me to speculate would be unfair," he said. "We're trying to do this evaluation in an objective way."
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com
-------- nevada
Yucca ruling exposes Bush lies
Las Vegas SUN
July 09, 2004
Columnist Jeff German: german@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4067
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/2004/jul/09/517150736.html
If ever there was proof that "sound science" did not play a role in the selection of Yucca Mountain, it was handed to Nevada on a silver platter last week by a federal appeals court in Washington.
The court found that the Environmental Protection Agency deliberately rejected the advice of the scientific community and adopted standards for the high-level nuclear waste dump that weren't safe for Nevadans.
President Bush used those standards when he recommended Yucca Mountain to Congress in 2002, which means there is no way in the world that his decision was based on "sound science," as he promised on the campaign trail here in 2000.
The court's ruling is proof that the president out-and-out lied to us. And it is proof that his nuclear waste policy, which is beholden to the powerful nuclear industry, is rotten to the core.
The heart of the court's opinion is that the EPA unlawfully ignored the research of the National Academy of Sciences when it decided that the radioactive waste only had to be safely stored inside the nearby mountain for 10,000 years. The academy recommended that the safety standard be set for a far longer period, hundreds of thousands of years.
Unless it appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court and prevails, the Bush administration now has two options. It can order the EPA to begin the long and tedious process of formulating tougher safety standards it knows Yucca Mountain probably can't meet. Or, with the help of big energy money, it can try to convince Congress to snub the appeals court and change the law to allow the weaker, unsafe EPA standards.
Neither option can be politically appealing to the administration.
And do you think the president is looking forward to meeting the voters of Nevada in the coming weeks having been exposed as a liar? Do you think he wants to keep hearing that his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, has pledged to kill the dump he's forcing upon us?
I don't think so.
The one person smiling more than the top Nevada officials who fought hard to earn this legal victory is Kerry, who knows the court decision has improved his chances of winning the state's five electoral votes.
"It makes Kerry look better every day," said Sen. Harry Reid, Nevada's Democratic patriarch, who called the court decision a "serious wound" to Yucca Mountain.
Nevadans have an incentive to vote for a president who would use any means available to him to stop the dump -- even vetoing congressional legislation aimed at lessening its safety standards.
The ultimate irony here is that what happens in Nevada, a key battleground state, could easily determine the outcome of the presidential race. That means Bush's flawed and mean-spirited Yucca Mountain policy could end up leading to his political demise.
On Friday the Kerry campaign was quick to capitalize on the appeals court ruling.
"The court decision," the campaign said, "confirms what John Kerry has been saying all along and what everyone in Nevada knows -- that the Bush administration has turned its back on sound science in its rush to build the Yucca Mountain repository."
About the same time, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham issued a statement from Washington furthering the Yucca Mountain lie.
"Our scientific basis for the Yucca Mountain Project is sound," Abraham said. "The project will protect the public health and safety."
The contrasting words illustrated once more the clear choice Nevada voters have in the race for president this November.
We can vote for the candidate who is working to put the deadliest substance known to man in our backyard. Or we can vote for the candidate who is vowing to kill the project.
----
Science Trumps Expediency in Court Decision Concerning Yucca Mountain Safety
Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2004
From: Peggy Maze Johnson <pmj1@citizenalert.org>
July 9, 2004
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Today, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) failed to meet National Academy of Science (NAS) recommendations for radiation release at the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, as required in the Energy Policy Act.
"This is a case of the court upholding an unambiguous law, based on scientific studies," said Clark County attorney Ross Miller, board president of the environmental advocacy group, Citizen Alert. "The NAS said the most dangerous peak radiation levels from nuclear waste isotopes would persist for 300,000 years. But the EPA disregarded NAS studies, establishing a 10,000 year standard, based on Yucca Mountain's geology."
At the same time, the court rejected Nevada's argument that choosing Nevada for the nuclear waste repository had been unconstitutional. As well, it ruled actions by both DOE and President Bush designating Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste site were not subject to review.
"The DOE statement this morning claiming victory is a political maneuver," says, Peggy Maze Johnson, Citizen Alert's Executive Director. "The DOE is trying to spin two of the court's decision in their favor, much as a you would in a campaign. The fact is, the EPA tried to change the Academy's 300,000 year standard and it's a scientific standard. In this decision, science trumps politics. Yucca Mountain will never be a suitable nuclear waste dump until it is proven to be safe for the environment, safe for people - scientifically."
Citizen Alert is a grassroots environmental group based in the State of Nevada, that has been providing education, advocacy, and empowerment to citizens on matters of environmental policy and environmental justice since 1975. For additional information call (702) 796-5662 in Las Vegas or visit http://www.citizenalert.org
CONTACT: Peggy Maze Johnson (702) 807-1884 Ross Miller (702) 492-7360; Cell: (702) 461-3294
Peggy Maze Johnson
Executive Director
Citizen Alert
P.O. Box 17173
Las Vegas, NV 89114
702.796.5662
702.796.4886 (fax)
pmj1@citizenalert.org
http://www.citizenalert.org
----
US court upholds Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site, with tougher protection
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jul 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040709213604.7v8a2mli.html
A US appeals court Friday upheld a federal plan to create the only permanent US nuclear waste storage site at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but said tougher radiation protection standards must be enacted.
The federal appeals court dismissed a challenge from the state of Nevada, local communities, the nuclear energy industry and environmental groups seeking to scuttle the plan.
But in a partial victory for opponents, the court also overturned a plan by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect the public from radiation for 10,000 years, saying the government must protect against radiation leaks for a longer period, following recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences.
Environmentalists and Nevada leaders cheered the partial victory, saying it could kill the Yucca Mountain project.
"On one of the most crucial issues in the Yucca case, the court has sent EPA back to the drawing board to write a radiation protection standard that safeguards public health," said Geoff Fettus, attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council who argued the case for the environmental groups.
"When dealing with a project of the magnitude of a nuclear waste repository, the law requires that EPA do it right rather than rush it through."
Under the best case, the nuclear storage site will not go into use until at least 2010. A workable waste storage site is deemed essential if nuclear power is to expand in the United States.
The Yucca Mountain waste repository is designed to house up to 70,000 tonnes of radioactive waste deep underground.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he was "pleased" with the ruling on the site selection.
As for the ruling on radiation standards, he said, his agency "will be working with the EPA and Congress to determine appropriate steps to address this issue."
The court ruled that the decision by the Department of Energy and the president leading to the selection of the Yucca Mountain site is "unreviewable."
But the court cited a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report saying there was "no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual risk standard to 10,000 years or any other value."
"It would have been one thing had EPA taken the Academy's recommendations into account and then tailored a standard that accommodated the agency's policy concerns," the justices wrote. "But that is not what EPA did. Instead, it unabashedly rejected NAS's findings, and then went on to promulgate a dramatically different standard, one that the academy had expressly rejected."
----
Court Deals Blow to Effort to Bury Nuclear Waste in Nevada
July 9, 2004
New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/national/09CND-NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, July 9 - The government's 17-year effort to bury nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada suffered a significant setback today when a federal appeals court said that the rules on radiation leaks could not be limited to the site's first 10,000 years, as the Environmental Protection Agency had decided.
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, ruling in a case brought by the State of Nevada and environmental groups, did not say what the planning period should be, but it quoted a National Academy of Sciences report that said a million years was possible. A 1992 law that committed the country to burying the waste required the government to follow the advice of the National Academy, the court ruled.
The government has predicted that Yucca Mountain, which is 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, could contain nearly all the radioactivity for the first 100,000 years, but it has also said that by about 300,000 years, the dose to people at the site's boundary would be many times higher than the legal maximum.
A lawyer at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Geoffrey Fettus, said that for the Energy Department to argue now that Yucca would function acceptably for hundreds of thousands of years, "they will have to contradict things they've already said in their earlier dose assessments."
His group, one of the plaintiffs in the case, favors burying the waste, but Mr. Fettus said that it remained to be seen whether Yucca could be scientifically demonstrated to be appropriate.
"We want a repository based on science, not on political weakness in the late 1980's, which is what happened here," he said. Congress picked Yucca as the lead candidate for burying radioactive waste in 1987.
The dose estimates are based on several factors, including how long the metal containers holding the waste would stay intact and how radioactive materials would be carried through the soil by underground water flows.
In a 100-page decision, the three-judge panel rejected other arguments made against Yucca by Nevada and the environmentalists, including that it was unconstitutional for Congress to force a project like Yucca on an unwilling state.
But the decision gave Nevada the right to challenge the site's environmental impact statement done by the Energy Department. Nevada wants to argue that the Energy Department gave insufficient attention to an alternative, leaving the waste where it is, mostly in the spent fuel pools of nuclear reactors, or in concrete casks nearby.
Michael A. Bauser, the associate general counsel of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the trade association of reactor operators, said the decision was a victory for his side because it "validated the overall process that led to the recommendation and selection of Yucca Mountain." He acknowledged, though, that making predictions beyond 10,000 years was harder. "Uncertainties clearly increase with greater periods of time," he said.
Mr. Bauser said that he did not know what the next steps would be, but that they could include asking for a rehearing, asking the Supreme Court to take the case or going to Congress to ask for a change in the law.
The Nuclear Energy Institute had argued in the case that the Environmental Protection Agency rules were too restrictive. The E.P.A. rules set a maximum permissible radiation dose for people outside the boundary of the Yucca project and set a second standard for the maximum dose through contamination of well water. The industry said there was no basis for a separate water standard, but the court disagreed.
Over the long term, rainwater percolating through the mountain and then flowing underground to wells is the most likely way that the public would be exposed. Because nuclear waste breaks down over time, eventually becoming harmless, predicting doses requires calculating the rate at which different radioactive materials will decay and how fast each would flow through the soil, based on its chemical and physical characteristics.
Nuclear materials are measured according to their half-life, or the time it takes for half the radiation to die away. Half-lives for the isotopes reaching Yucca vary from decades to millions of years, periods that the judges called "beyond human comprehension."
At the very least, the decision makes it even less likely that the Energy Department can begin accepting waste at the site, on the edge of the Nevada Test Site, where the Energy Department and predecessor agencies tested nuclear bombs for decades. The department was planning to file an application for a license later this year with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which is supposed to make a licensing decision using standards set by the E.P.A. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission expected to begin hearings next spring, but a major element of the rules has now been thrown out.
A lawyer for Nevada, Joseph Egan, said, "As a practical matter, that means the licensing proceeding is completely on hold."
The Energy Department did not return phone calls seeking comment.
Even before today's decision, the 2010 target date for opening the site was regarded by people in the nuclear industry as highly suspect, because of the unprecedented nature of the legal proceedings that would be required before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could grant a license.
The Energy Department has spent about $8 billion on the Yucca project, most of it collected from nuclear utilities, who signed contracts to pay for waste disposal at the rate of one tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour generated at their reactors. The department faces damage suits that will run at least into the hundreds of millions of dollars for its failure to keep its end of the deal, accepting waste beginning in 1998.
----
Huge Setback For Yucca Mountain
From: "Brendan Hoffman" <bhoffman@c...>
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2004
Subject: [NukeNet] VICTORY in Yucca Mountain lawsuit
hi all,
just wanted to let all of you know the good news (excellent news, really) - the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled, among other things, that the EPA's radiation protection standard of 10,000 years is illegal.
the court said they are required to follow the National Academy of Sciences recommendations, and NAS recommended not 10,000 years but as long as the risk is high, which works out to more like 300,000 years. DOE knows it can't meet this standard.
in theory, this means a complete victory. while the court ruled against us and the State of Nevada on all the other counts (check what all the cases were at http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_enviro_nuclear/nuclear_waste/hi-level/yucca/articles.cfm?ID=10882), this one victory is so major that there's really no way DOE can design a repository and prove it will contain the waste for 300,000 years. what is more likely is that EPA will approach Congress and ask them to change the law so they no longer are required to draft a rule that is "based upon and consistent with" the NAS's recommendations.
if and when this happens, we'll need your help to stop it. there's been enough bending and changing rules to fit the site already, and we don't need any more. we have science on our side, but politics is powerful.
i just wanted to let you know this because you're sure to see articles in the paper that claim this is a defeat for Nevada. they fail to understand that while we only won one case out of 6, that is such an insurmountable ruling that it essentially defeats the Yucca repository. DOE's own analysis shows they can't contain the waste for 300,000 years.
you can read the decision at http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/docs/common/opinions/200407/01-1258a.pdf
- the 10,000 year standard begins on page 20, with the real meat of the ruling starting on page 26. best quote:
"Only in a world where 'based upon' means 'in disregard of' and 'consistent with' means 'inconsistent with' could EPA's adoption of a 10,000-year compliance period by considered a permissible construction" of the Energy Policy Act (p. 29).
Public Citizen's press release is below.
For Immediate Release Contact: Michele Boyd (202) 454-5134 or (202) 494-0785 Erica Hartman (202) 454-5174 July 9, 2004
Victory in Yucca Mountain Lawsuit; Court Overrules Government's Lax Radiation Standards for Nuclear Waste
Statement of Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook
Today's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) illegally set its radiation release standards for groundwater for the proposed high-level radioactive waste dump at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, marks a major victory for citizens of Nevada, for the environment and for science over politics.
The EPA set 10,000 years as the period during which radiation in the groundwater cannot exceed drinking water standards at the site's boundary, but this time frame would not protect the health of future generations. As the court ruled, the Energy Policy Act requires that the EPA determine public health and safety standards for Yucca Mountain "based upon and consistent with" the National Academy of Sciences' recommendations. The Academy's recommendation is that the compliance period should extend through the time of the peak risk for radiation doses from the repository, which studies show are likely to occur in 300,000 years or more. To compensate for Yucca's geologic unsuitability, the EPA ignored the findings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"It would have been one thing had EPA taken the Academy's recommendations into account and then tailored a standard that accommodated the agency's policy concerns. But that is not what EPA did," the Court wrote in its ruling. "Instead, it unabashedly rejected NAS's findings, and then went on to promulgate a dramatically different standard, one that the Academy had expressly rejected."
Given this ruling, the Yucca Mountain Project should be finished. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) must show that it can prevent groundwater contamination above drinking water standards at the compliance boundary for 300,000 years - a standard that the DOE's own analysis shows the Yucca Mountain site cannot meet. The EPA faces the choice of either appealing the decision or revising its standard. The rules have been bent too often to promote Yucca Mountain. We will be watching closely to see if the EPA makes a wise choice and protects future generations, as the court mandated.
keep up the fight,
Brendan Hoffman
Organizer, Nuclear Energy & Waste
Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program
Public Citizen
p: 202.454.5130
f: 202.547.7392
bhoffman@c...
www.citizen.org/cmep
--------
Nevada Loses Yucca Mt. Waste Site Appeal
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Yucca-Mountain.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- An appeals court on Friday upheld the government's decision to single out Nevada as the site of a nuclear waste dump but ruled that the federal plan does not go far enough to protect people from potential radiation beyond 10,000 years in the future.
While the court dismissed virtually all of the arguments raised by Nevada and environmentalists against the Yucca Mountain project, its rejection of the radiation standard raised new questions about whether the waste repository will be built -- or at least meet its target of 2010 to begin operation.
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said he was confident the radiation exposure standard could be resolved. He said Friday's court ruling had ``dismissed all challenges to the site selection of Yucca Mountain'' and the project was moving forward..
But lawyers for Nevada and environmental groups said the court's rejection of the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed radiation exposure limits could doom the project.
``We think we put a stake through the heart of this project,'' said Joe Egan, an attorney for Nevada in the Yucca Mountain litigation.
Antonio Rossmann, who argued the EPA radiation matter before the court on behalf of the state, called it ``the first domino'' on which the project could fall, depending on whether it is resolved.
The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected Nevada's claims that it was unconstitutional to single out the state for a national nuclear waste site, located 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The panel also refused to review how the Bush administration chose the site, although Nevada had argued the process was illegal. Citing these rulings, Abraham said he was pleased the court ruling had removed any question about the legality of the site selection process.
But a senior Energy Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged the court's rejection of the radiation standard -- as well as recent budget problems for the project in Congress -- could cause delays. He said fixing the radiation standard may require more congressional action.
The three-judge panel said the EPA acted illegally when it limited the radiation exposure requirements to 10,000 years into the future when Congress directed the agency to develop a rule ``consistent'' with recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences.
Contrary to EPA's interpretation, a 1995 NAS report found ``no scientific basis for limiting the time period of the individual risk standard to 10,000 years.'' The report said the standard should be designed to protect people whenever the waste is at its highest danger. Scientists agree that some radionuclides to be kept at Yucca Mountain would reach their peak of danger well beyond 10,000 years. But the EPA maintained that computer models for any time beyond that are unreliable and essentially useless.
``The EPA wholly rejected the academy's recommendations,'' the judges wrote. They said the EPA must either issue a revised standard consistent with the NAS findings or get Congress to give it authority to deviate from the NAS recommendations.
Congress by a wide margin approved the Yucca site in 2002 under very restrictive rules laid out by the nuclear waste law. Any attempt to address the radiation standard would be open to no such restrictions and subject to a filibuster in the Senate where Nevada's two senators have vowed to use any measure available to block the project.
``To ask Congress to change the rules because the thing is unsafe is going to be a very heavy burden for them,'' Rossmann said in an interview Friday. He said the Yucca project ``has become dead in the water.''
The government wants to bury 77,000 tons of nuclear waste -- defense waste and used reactor fuel building up at commercial power plants -- in canisters at Yucca Mountain where project planners say it can be safely isolated for tens of thousands of years. Its plan calls for seeking a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over the next three years and having the facility completed and open for business by 2010.
The three-judge appeals court panel was composed of Judges Harry
Edwards, Karen Henderson, David Tatel.
On the Net
Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov
Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
----
Nevada officials declare victory after Yucca Mountain ruling
July 09, 2004
By KEN RITTER
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sun/2004/jul/09/070910345.html?nuclear
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Nevada officials declared victory Friday in their fight to stop the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, saying they don't think the Energy Department can meet a stricter standard to protect the public against radiation releases.
"The people of Nevada should throw up their arms and cheer at this court ruling," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., referring to a federal appeals court decision requiring the Energy Department to contain radiation for longer than 10,000 years at the Yucca Mountain site.
Friday's ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington rejected Nevada's main arguments against the constitutionality of forcing one state to take all the nation's nuclear waste.
But justices did uphold arguments that Environmental Protection Agency radiation standards for the site were inadequate and would have to be strengthened.
Berkley said that by tossing out the EPA radiation standard, the court has said "the Bush Administration's plan for Yucca Mountain will not protect the health and safety of Nevada residents."
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham noted the court dismissed the state's challenges to the selection of the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"Our scientific basis for the Yucca Mountain project is sound," Abraham said in a statement. "The project will protect the public health and safety."
The Energy Department will work with the EPA and Congress to address the ruling on the radiation standard, Abraham said.
Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said it was not immediately known whether the ruling would delay plans to apply by the end of the year for a license with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to operate the Yucca Mountain site. The department had planned to open the repository in 2010.
Joe Egan, a lawyer who argued the state's case, said the Energy Department will not be able to meet a National Academy of Sciences recommendation that the site be made safe for 350,000 years and will not be able to get a license.
"We think we put a stake through the heart of this project," Egan said.
Nevada's congressional leaders called the ruling a "major victory," and citizens' groups were elated.
"I love it. It means they have to go back to square one and do all this refiguring," said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, an anti-nuclear group in Nevada.
"Their whole house of cards is balanced against the fact that they only have to comply for 10,000 years," said Judy Treichel, head of the Nuclear Waste Task Force and a longtime Yucca Mountain opponent. "We said that's ridiculous because the stuff will probably get out before, but certainly after that time and contaminate Nevada."
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said the ruling was a "significant blow to the Department of Energy and the Yucca Mountain project, and I believe enough to effectively kill the project.
"We can't say it's over," Reid said. "These people are bloated with power and have a lobby that just won't stop."
Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., said the ruling "provides Nevada a crucial legal tool to defeat the Yucca Mountain project once and for all."
Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican whose veto of the Yucca Mountain project was overridden by Congress in 2002, said he interpreted the court decision to mean there can be no movement toward licensing in the near future.
"You can't do much more without a license," he said.
The governor said the Energy Department could go to Congress for a change in the law or to seek an EPA rule change, adding that either would take time.
Bob Loux, director of the state nuclear projects office and the state's top administrator against the nuclear dump, said it took nine years for the Environmental Protection Agency to set the radiation standard that the court rejected.
"What's going to happen next. I don't know," Loux said.
-------- new mexico
The Plutonium Pits of New Mexico
by Jo Wilding
Friday July 9, 2004
Wildfire (Progressive Trail)
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/040708Wilding.shtml
There are more than 2000 weapons of mass destruction at Kirtland, near Albuquerque, New Mexico: the world's biggest nuclear weapons stockpile. The University of California, which operates the Los Alamos nuclear research lab and the Lawrence Livermore lab on behalf of the US government, is the biggest nuclear weapons contractor in the world, though the University of Texas is among those bidding to take it over.
Greg Mello is the driving force behind the Los Alamos Study Group [www.lasg.org] which has monitored the base and its accidents, manoeuvrings and dastardly schemes for years. Over beers in Albuquerque, he and Darwin, a University of California student and LASG intern, not the white-bearded evolutionist, told us everything, although some of it I promised not to put on my weblog.
The Los Alamos base is 73% nuclear, the rest being dedicated to CIA - it is the centre of the plan to seize Pakistan's nuclear warheads should a non-US-friendly entity take power in that country, intelligence and non-proliferation. That's non-proliferation in the sense of preventing other countries getting nuclear weapons, in case you were confused, not in the sense of seeking to reduce the US's own nuclear arsenal and looking for other means of security.
On the contrary, a Bill is going through the Senate to decide whether to build new, smaller nuclear weapons which will bury themselves in the earth before detonating. The idea is that they destroy underground targets and the radiation is contained, but the politicians and scientists concerned were forced to admit that the radiation would not be effectively contained and the missiles would not go as deep as first claimed because they can only bury themselves so far before detonating themselves. The maximum possible penetration so far is three metres.
The Nuclear Position Review concluded that smaller nuclear weapons would be taken more seriously because they are more useable. Half the size of the 30 Kiloton warheads built during the cold war, the new petite version would be merely the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima: practically handbag size, if your handbag happens to be massively swollen by all the wealth you've been gathering by mugging the rest of the world at nuke point.
It's true, of course, that a 30KT nuclear warhead is impractical in today's warfare where the 'enemies' are often scattered through sprawling slums which the attacker aims to take control of. A study ordered by the US government on possible nuclear targets in Vietnam concluded that the only viable targets in the country were the US's own bases. The guerrillas were scattered and moveable. Nuking the city of Hanoi would draw China into the conflict and China might respond by nuking the US bases.
The study was carried out by the JASONs, a group of ageing science professors collected up annually by the Department of Defence to study stupid questions related to the infliction of extreme violence. The name is thought to derive from either the legend of the Golden Fleece or the initials of the months from July to November. The group was de-funded in 1999 because it was essentially useless but the Department of Defence stepped in to resuscitate them. The DoD, Greg said, confuses political problems with military ones. "That's why they're losing Iraq, because they try to apply military solutions to political problems."
Los Alamos is the US counterpart to Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire in the UK, which is also planning to build The New Generation of smaller nuclear weapons. [www.aldermaston.net] Los Alamos gave one facility to Aldermaston in exchange for another from the UK lab. The slope at Aldermaston was even bulldozed to make it identical to the one at Los Alamos so they wouldn't have to change any of the internal specifications. If only the world could always be so easily bulldozed to fit the requirements of the military.
Of course the new-fangled nukes likely to come out of Aldermaston and Los Alamos would need to be tested: it's inconceivable that they would be deployed without. That means abandonment of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, with all the disastrous implications that the Treaty was designed to prevent.
Greg explained how grassroots groups are being suppressed: The Clinton people are into big foundations. They want groups to be aligned with the Democratic Party policy. They focus on electability, 'crackpot realism', rather than real moral thought and demands for things the Democrats wouldn't deliver if elected. Groups with no utility or pliability to the Democratic agenda are obstructed and defunded.
"They try to co-opt groups around the Capitol Hill realpolitik du jour by bringing them together around issues involving a third of one per cent of the nuclear budget. Or for example they'd have all the groups promote a small plant as better than a big one, effectively destroying opposition to it, but then a small plant wouldn't be enough so you end up with both."
It's hard to know exactly who's involved, Greg said, which led us onto the science of Social Network Analysis. Darwin explained it: for whatever purpose, business deals, finding a specific individual, destroying an organisation, there is always some key player or players. Identifying that person and affecting them in the requisite way will lead to the goal.
In the search for Saddam, the Key Player Program was used to analyse the web of every person Saddam knew and had contact with. Two people were identified, caught and pressured and, sure enough, they led to Saddam. Yes, they still lied about when they found him, claiming that it happened in December, when their own video footage showed dates on the trees, proving that it was at least a couple of months earlier, but that was how it happened.
The advantage of non-hierarchical organisation is that groups can't be broken in that way. British soldiers in the Second World War were usually not told what their missions were, presumably so if any were captured they couldn't give any information, but if the commander was killed the mission was over. The Germans did the opposite. Yet another reason to abandon hierarchies and re-organise.
The talk was in the Albuquerque Peace and Justice Centre. These, David explained, were what kept the peace movement going between the Vietnam and anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s and early 80s until the recent revival. The trouble is, he said, they can be a bit po-faced and dour. They're like the counterpart to the party-and-politics scene, where a lot of people have got the party side happening but forgotten about the politics.
In fairness there might not be much time for politics. As well as more nuclear weapons than anywhere else in the world, New Mexico also has sweat shops and the death penalty to deal with. As well as clothing factory sweatshops, where low paid, often underage and always non-unionised workers suffer poor and unsafe working conditions for long hours, there are 'sweatshops without walls' such as New Mexico's chilli farms. www.sweatshopfreeabq.org Taco Bell, by the way, use sweat labour and there are calls for boycotts and direct action. [www.ciw-online.org]
The New Mexico Coalition to Repeal the Death Penalty [www.nmrepeal.com] points out that no person has ever been executed who had enough money to hire their own lawyer. Poor, unskilled, mentally ill or retarded and minority defendants are a lot more likely to be sentenced to death than another person for a similar crime. Police chiefs don't believe that the death penalty is effective in reducing crime and New Mexico families of murder victims have set up a local branch of Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation.
From an economic point of view, death penalty trials cost more: repealing the death penalty would save between $1-2.5 million per year just in the New Mexico Public Defender Department, vaguely equivalent to the Legal Aid system in the UK. The Coalition says that since 1972 at least 101 innocent people have been released from death rows in the US.
The trees were dying along the roadside from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. The bark beetles are killing them, Greg explained, because they've got no sap to repair the damage, because of the drought. The drought is made worse by the misuse of water supplies and a lot of the land is on the brink of desertification because of the drought and overgrazing.
The nuclear labs and especially the proposed new 'Modern Pit Facility' are only making the water situation worse: already the Rio Grande is polluted with nuclear waste and the population of Albuquerque will soon have nothing else but that to source drinking water from. The Rocky Flats plant used to make the plutonium 'pits'or cores for nuclear weapons but was shut down because of serious health and environmental problems. If building goes ahead the Department of Energy will have to buy extra water rights, depleting the public supply even further.
The reason the new factory is needed is because the US could suddenly lose half of it's nuclear stockpile overnight to the ageing of the pits. These 10,000 weapons plus 12,000 spare pits are made of plutonium 239, which has a half life of 24,000 years. That means it take s 24,000 years to decay to half its potency. The Department of Energy had to admit in 1996 that ageing effects had never occurred in pits up to 30 years old.
Answers on a postcard please: if you can see the need for another 500 pits per year, let me know. If not, tell Bush, Blair, the University of California, Lockheed Martin, Serco and so on, enough is enough.
-------- texas
Pantex hits the pits in repackaging
Plant reaches 10,000 mark in repacking plutonium cores
By JIM McBRIDE jim.mcbride@amarillo.com
The Amarillo Globe-News
Friday, July 9, 2004
http://www.amarillonet.com/stories/070904/new_pantex.shtml
Pantex Plant should finish repackaging thousands of plutonium pits into safer containers in about two years, a Pantex official said Thursday as the plant announced it repackaged its 10,000th pit this week.
Pantex stores more than 12,000 pits, the radioactive cores of modern nuclear warheads, in a series of heavily guarded underground bunkers. About 30 production technicians are repackaging pits into safer, sealed-insert containers for long-term storage. A recent government report, however, says some Pantex pits eventually may have to be repackaged again before they are shipped elsewhere for recycling.
A.J. Eggenberger, vice chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Board, a government watchdog agency monitoring safety issues at nuclear weapons plants, said the board is encouraged by Pantex's progress.
"They have been very responsive to that effort. We still have a few to go, but generally we think they've done a good job," Eggenberger said Thursday.
According to information from BWXT Pantex, Pantex has averaged more than 200 pit repacks per month since BWXT Pantex took over the Pantex contract in 2001.
Several years ago, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board issued a formal recommendation to Pantex, urging officials to repackage pits into safer containers. Safety studies showed most Pantex storage drums contained packaging that could corrode metal layers sealing the plutonium inside.
Mitch Carry, BWXT Pantex's program director for Campaigns and Special Programs, said Pantex hopes to have remaining Pantex pits repackaged by the end of fiscal year 2005.
"It has gone quite well," Carry said. "Our expectation is that we will continue to be able to produce at our planned rate until we have accomplished packaging the balance."
The contractor also has worked to cut costs and reduce worker radiation exposures from repackaging, Carry said.
"From the beginning, we have been able to reduce our costs associated with doing the work about 21 percent over what they were in FY '02, and we have been able to reduce the radiation exposure to our folks by about 50 percent," he said.
According to a defense board report, Pantex and the National Nuclear Security Administration are reviewing two possible designs for a pit shipping container.
One proposed design would require workers to remove pits now stored in sealed-insert containers and repackage them. A second proposed design would minimize repackaging and significantly reduce worker radiation exposures, but it is not certified as an acceptable shipping container.
Under government proposals, thousands of surplus Pantex pits will be shipped to the Savannah River Site, where they will be recycled into fuel rods for U.S. nuclear reactors. Other pits will remain at Pantex, where they will be stored indefinitely.
Carry said no decisions about a possible pit shipping container have been relayed to Pantex.
-------- washington
Suit Likely if Wash. Nuclear Site Isn't Assessed
By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37647-2004Jul8.html
SEATTLE, July 8 -- The states of Washington and Oregon announced Thursday that they will sue the federal government if it continues to refuse to assess the environmental damage caused by decades of bomb making at the Hanford nuclear site in eastern Washington.
The states say that although the Department of Energy spends $2 billion a year to clean up its leaking plutonium factory beside the Columbia River, it has never done a thorough analysis of the harm that Hanford has done to groundwater, wildlife and fish.
The threat of a lawsuit marks a further deterioration in an already strained relationship between the Bush administration and the state of Washington, where most of the environmental damage from Hanford is centered.
"We find ourselves all too often with this administration being pushed into litigation," said Christine O. Gregoire, the attorney general in Washington and a Democratic candidate for governor. "We want to be a partner and we do not want to spend money on litigation, but we are being forced to."
The Department of Energy's assistant secretary for environmental management said she was "disappointed" by Gregoire's comments. "Frankly, I thought we were working pretty hard with the state," said Jessie Roberson, who oversees the Hanford cleanup and is leaving her position next week. "I can't believe they don't recognize how much progress we are making. Lawsuits don't get the work done."
Washington sued the Department of Energy last year to stop it from importing low-level radioactive material to the Hanford site from around the country.
Most recently, Gregoire said, the state has become alarmed by a federal decision regarding the highly contaminated, 80-square-mile plume of groundwater beneath Hanford.
In a recent administrative ruling, the Department of Energy decided that this plume of radioactive and chemically poisoned groundwater is "irreversible and irretrievable." Under the federal Superfund law, the language relieves the Energy Department of liability, if the contaminated water causes health or environmental damage outside the Hanford site, Gregoire said.
"For them now to propose walking away from their responsibility, we are not going to accept that," Gregoire said. "We are going to contest this record of decision regarding groundwater."
The groundwater plume, which has been slowly drifting toward the Columbia, abuts parts of the river and is threatening the water supply for Richland, where many scientists and bureaucrats employed in the Hanford cleanup live.
Hanford produced about two-thirds of the plutonium used in the Cold War. In the process, it generated the largest haul of high-level nuclear waste in the Western Hemisphere. Much of that is buried in 177 underground tanks, more than a third of which have been leaking for decades.
The Bush administration's stated goal is to keep these agents out of the Columbia River, while speeding up the cleanup, saving money and getting the federal government out of Hanford in three decades, rather than a previously projected seven.
-------- MILITARY
The Horrors of War
lewrockwell.com
by Laurence M. Vance
July 9, 2004
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance14.html
"It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it." ~ Robert E. Lee
"The evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come." ~ Thomas Jefferson
Current Conflicts
At the dawning of the year 2004, there were fifteen major wars in progress, plus twenty more "lesser" conflicts. According to Global Security, there are now conflicts raging in the following places:
- Afghanistan (Taliban and Al Qaida) - Algeria (insurgency by Muslim fundamentalists) - Angola (secessionist conflict in Angola's Cabinda enclave) - Burma (insurgency by ethnic minority groups) - Burundi (civil war between ethnic groups) - China (dispute with other countries over ownership of Spratly Islands) - Colombia (insurgency by various guerilla groups) - Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo War involving nine African nations) - Georgia (conflict with Russia, ethnic group conflict) - India (longstanding conflicts in Assam and Kashmir; Naxalite uprising) - Indonesia (conflicts in Aceh, Kalimantan, Maluku, and Papua) - Iraq (occupation by U.S. forces) - Israel (Intifada) - Ivory Coast (civil war) - Liberia (ritual killings and cannibalism) - Moldova (Transdniester independence movement) - Namibia (Caprivi Strip liberation movement) - Nepal (Maoist insurgency) - Nigeria (religious and ethnic conflicts) - Peru (Shining Path terrorist movement) - Philippines (Moro Islamic Liberation Front uprising) - Russia (Chechen uprising) - Somalia (civil war) - Spain (Basque uprising) - Sri Lanka (Tamil uprising) - Sudan (civil war) - Thailand (Islamic insurgency) - Turkey (Kurdish separatist movement) - Uganda (civil unrest)
Although the United Nations was founded "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind," there have been more conflicts in the world since the founding of the UN than during any previous period in history.
The United States maintains a global empire of troops and bases that would make a Roman emperor look like the mayor of a small town.
War
Too much has been written throughout history that glorifies war and the warrior who is sent by the state to do its bidding. Dying for one's country - regardless of the circumstances that brought on the conflict - is seen as the ultimate sacrifice. To protest the war is to be a traitor. Being a professional soldier is viewed as one of the noblest of occupations. The death of enemy combatants is celebrated. Civilian casualties are written off as "collateral damage."
In the current Iraq war, before the phoney transfer of power on June 28, 855 American troops had died. That is 800 young men (and women) who will never gave their parents any grandchildren or who left behind grieving wives and children. Forgotten are the over 5000 military personnel who were injured, many of whom will endure suffering the rest of their life. And that number is just the "official" figure. The thousands of Iraqi troops killed or injured are not much of a concern to anyone - and neither are the Iraqi civilian casualties.
General descriptions of the horrors of war can be read in any military history by John Keegan or Martin Gilbert. But more and more specific accounts of the horrors of war are beginning to see the light of day. Blood Red Snow: The Memoirs of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front and His Time in Hell: A Texas Marine in France are two recent books that explore the horrors of war from the individual soldier's point of view. Chris Hedges' What Every Person Should Know About War is a stinging indictment of the twin evils of the glorification of war and the concealment of its brutality.
Intimate Voices
The recently published Intimate Voices from the First World War does all of those things and much more. What makes this book so unique is that the authors - twenty eight men, women, and children from thirteen different nations - because they were not writing for publication, had no particular statement to make other than to describe the effects of war on themselves and their surroundings. This is the ultimate in primary source material. From their research into hundreds of first-hand accounts, the editors of the book, Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, selected twenty-eight diaries or collections of letters written by soldiers and civilians who lived (and in some cases died) during World War I. Many of the diaries were found decades after the end of the war, and some in the last few years. A few are published here for the first time.
The horrors of war are described here as no historian writing in the twenty-first century could describe them. But in addition to the accounts of death, destruction, and starvation, Intimate Voices also gives us an insight into the role of the state in warfare, the religious ideas of the combatants, the war's demoralizing effect on women, and the regrets of soldier and civilian.
The War
The conflict we read about in Intimate Voices is the "great war" to "make the world safe for democracy" - the "war to end all wars." The war began when Austria declared war on Serbia after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, during a state visit to Sarajevo, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The archduke had recently given an after-dinner toast in which he advocated peace: "To peace! What would we get out of war with Serbia? We'd lose the lives of young men and we'd spend money better used elsewhere. And what would we gain, for heaven's sake? A few plum trees, some pastures full of goat droppings, and a bunch of rebellious killers." His advice went unheeded, and resulted in the slaughter of over a million soldiers who fought for his empire, plus an untold number of ordinary citizens. Overall, 65 million men donned a miliary uniform, over 9.3 million soldiers died, 21 million soldiers were wounded, 7.8 million soldiers were captured or missing, and 6.7 million civilians died.
The Cast of Characters
The writers of the diaries and letters in Intimate Voices are a diverse lot.
German soldier Paul Hub is a young recruit sent to make up for the heavy losses suffered by his advancing army. He married his sweetheart, whom he wrote to throughout the war, while home on leave in June of 1918. After a few days with his wife he returned to the front - only to die two months later.
Polish widow Helena Jablonska survived the war and died in 1936.
Austrian doctor Josef Tomann tends to the sick and wounded soldiers in a hospital in Przemysl. He contracted disease and died in May 1915, leaving behind a wife and a baby daughter.
German officer Ernst Nopper, an interior decorator from Ludwigsburg, was killed in action on the Western Front, leaving a wife and two children.
Serbian officer Milorad Markovic is the future grandfather of Mirjana Markovic, wife of Slobodan Milosevic. He survived the war, only to be captured by the Nazis in the next one. He made it through that one as well and died in 1967.
Russian soldier Vasily Mishnin was reunited with his wife and two sons after the war. He went back to work at a furniture shop and died in 1955.
Australian corporal George Mitchell finished the war as a captain. He wrote several books about World War I and served again in World War II. He died in 1961.
Turkish second lieutenant Mehmed Fasih was captured by the Allies and released at the end of the war. He married in 1924 and lived until 1964.
German doctor Ludwig Deppe returned to Dresden after the war. His subsequent fate is unknown.
French captain Paul Truffrau returned to Paris after the war, where he became a teacher. He went on to fight and keep another diary in World War II. He died in 1973.
Russian officer Dmitry Oskin joined the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution. He advanced in the Communist Party but died suddenly in 1934, possibly a victim of a Stalinist purge.
American officer John Clark survived the war and married his sweetheart, a Red Cross nurse.
An unnamed Austrian officer wrote a diary that was found on his dead body in July of 1915. He died in mid-sentence.
Russian soldier Alexei Zyikov was captured by the Germans. His diary was found by a Russian solider in Germany during World War II.
German schoolgirl Piete Kuhr lived through the war and became a professional performer and then a writer. She and her family fled to Switzerland during World War II. She died in 1989.
French schoolboy Yves Congar lived to become a priest, serve in World War II, and be made a cardinal. He lived until 1995.
Klara Hess was the mother of the future Nazi Rudolf Hess.
African Kande Kamara was from French Guinea. He fought for the French and returned home to West Africa at the end of the war. Forced to flee his village, he never saw his family again.
British private Robert Cude returned to London after the war. He later appeared as an extra in a James Bond film.
British officer Richard Meinertzhagen became a colonel and attended the Paris Peace Conference. He became an advocate of Zionism and later wrote Middle East Diary, about his experiences in the Middle East after World War I. He died in 1967.
Canadian Winnie McClare was killed in May of 1917, within a month of his arrival at the front line. He was nineteen.
The Horrors of War
There is no better description of the horrors of war than an eyewitness description. German soldier Paul Hub writes to his girlfriend:
I've already seen quite a lot of misery of war. . . . Maria, this sort of a war is so unspeakably miserable. If only you saw a line of stretcher-bearers with their burdens, you'd know what I mean. I haven't had a chance to shoot yet. We're having to deal with an unseen enemy. . . . Every day brings new horrors. . . . Every day the fighting gets fiercer and there is still no end in sight. Our blood is flowing in torrents. . . . That's how it is. All around me, the most gruesome devastation. Dead and wounded soldiers, dead and dying animals, horse cadavers, burnt-out houses, dug-up fields, cars, clothes, weaponry - all this is scattered around me, a real mess. I didn't think war would be like this. We can't sleep for all the noise.
Polish widow Helena Jablonska writes in her diary:
Vast numbers of wounded are being brought in. Many of them die form severe blood loss, but the death toll would not be half as great were it not for cholera. It is spreading so fast that the cases outnumber those wounded and killed in battle. Everything has been infected: carts, stretchers, rooms, wardens, streets, manure, mud, everything. Soldiers fall in battle, where it is impossible to remove the bodies and disinfect them. They don't even bother.
Austrian doctor Josef Tomann writes in his diary:
Starvation is kicking in. Sunken, pale figures wander like corpses through the streets, their ragged clothes hanging from skeletal bodies, their stony faces a picture of utter despair. . . . A terrifying number of people are suffering from malnutrition; the starving arrive in their dozens, frozen soldiers are brought in from the outposts, all of them like walking corpses. They lie silently on their cold hospital beds, make no complaints and drink muddy water they call tea. The next day they are carried away to the morgue. The sight of these pitiful figures, whose wives and children are probably also starving at home, wrings your heart. This is war.
German officer Ernst Nopper writes in his diary:
There are dead bodies everywhere you look. The villages have been completely destroyed. The fields are covered in so many graves it looks like moles have been at work. There are shell holes everywhere.
Serbian officer Milorad Markovic writes in his diary:
I remember things scattered all around; horses and men stumbling and falling into the abyss; Albanian attacks; hosts of women and children. A doctor would not dress an officer's wound; soldiers would not bother to pull out a wounded comrade or officer. Belongings abandoned; starvation; wading across rivers clutching onto horses' tails; old men, women and children climbing up the rocks; dying people on the road; a smashed human skull by the road; a corpse all skin and bones, robbed, stripped naked, mangled; soldiers, police officers, civilians, women, captives. Vlasta's cousin, naked under his overcoat with a collar and cuffs, shattered, gone made. Soldiers like ghosts, skinny, pale, worn out, sunken eyes, their hair and beards long, their clothes in rages, almost naked, barefoot. Ghosts of people begging for bread, walking with sticks, their feet covered in wounds, staggering. Chaos; women in soldiers's clothes; the desperate mothers of those who are too exhausted to go on. A starving soldier who ate too much bread and dropped dead. A soldier selling anything and everything for bread: his gun, clothes, shoes and boots, coats, horses' feedbags, saddlebags, horses.
Russian soldier Vasily Mishnin writes to his pregnant wife:
We go to the depot to get our rifles. Good Lord, what's all this? They're covered in blood, black clotted lumps of it are hanging off them. . . . It is frightening even to sit or lie down here - the rifle is shaking in my hands. My hand comes down on something black: it turns out there are corpses here that haven't been cleared away. My hair stands on end. I have to sit down. There is no point in staring into the distance - it is pitch dark. All I can feel is fear. I am so frightened of the shells that I want the ground to open up and swallow me. . . . Suddenly a screeching noise pierces the air, I feel a pang in my heart, something whistles past and explodes nearby. My dear Lord, I am so frightened - and I hear this buzzing in my ears. I leave my post and climb into my dugout. It is packed, everyone is shaking and asking again and again, "What's going on? What's going on?" One explosion follows another, and another. Two lads are running, shouting our for nurses. They are covered in blood. It is running down their cheeks and hands, and something else is dripping from underneath their bandages. They're soon dead, shot to pieces. There is screaming, yelling, the earth is shaking from artillery fire and our dugout is rocking from side to side like a boat. . . . Our eyes are full of tears, we wipe them away, but they just keep coming because the shells are full of gas. We are terrified. . . . We will probably never see each other again - all it takes is an instant and I will be no more - and perhaps no one will be able to gather the scattered pieces of my body for burial. . . . A zeppelin attacked Ostrow in the night and dropped a few bombs, many killed. One woman and her two kids got blown to pieces that blew away in the wind.
Australian corporal George Mitchell writes in his diary:
And again I heard the sickening thud of a bullet. I looked at him in horror. The bullet had fearfully mashed his face and gone down his throat, rendering him dumb. But his eyes were dreadful to behold. How he squirmed in agony. There was nothing I could do for him, but pray that he might die swiftly. It took him about twenty minutes to accomplish this and by that time he had tangled his legs in pain and stiffened. I saw the waxy colour creep over his cheek and breathed freer.
Turkish second lieutenant Mehmed Fasih writes in his diary:
Though I keep picking off lice, there are plenty more - I just can't get rid of them and am itching all over. My body is covered with red and purple blotches. . . . When I finally reach our trenches I find a large pool of blood. It has coagulated and turned black. Bits of brain, bone and flesh are mixed in with it.
German doctor Ludwig Deppe writes in his diary:
Behind us we have left destroyed fields, ransacked magazines, and, for the immediate future, starvation. We were no longer the agents of culture; our track was marked by death, plundering and evacuated villages.
French captain Paul Truffrau writes in his diary:
We reach the trench, dug out by joining up the shellholes and it stinks of bogs and decaying corpses. Stagnant water. . . . The smell of corpses everywhere.
Russian officer Dmitry Oskin writes in his diary:
The battle became so vicious that our soldiers started using spades to split Austrians' skulls. This hand-to-hand fighting went on for at least two hours. Only nightfall stopped the butchery.
American officer John Clark writes to his sweetheart:
I was only beginning to see what war really is. . . . Outside of the enemy fire, it was a terrific strain on our men, for we were firing night and day - on a couple of occasions, for ten hours without any intermission. We spent our spare time burying the infantry dead which were scattered all around us. It was gruesome work, for the bodies had been lying on the battlefield for two, three or more days. On the crest just before us were light "tanks" which had been shattered by German shellfire. They were the most gruesome of all, for the charred bodies of their crews were still in or scattered about them.
The unnamed Austrian officer writes his last words in his diary:
The wounded groan and cry for their mothers. You have to shut your ears to it. . . . It is enough to drive you insane. Dead, wounded, massive losses. This is the end. Unprecedented slaughter, a horrific bloodbath. There is blood everywhere and the dead and bits of bodies lie scattered about so that
Second only to the horrors on the battlefield are those that one endures in captivity. Russian soldier Alexei Zyikov writes in his diary:
Hunger does not give you a moment's peace and you are always dreaming of bread: good Russian bread! There is consternation in my soul when I watch people hurling themselves after a piece of bread and a spoonful of soup. We have to work pretty hard too, to the shouts and beatings of the guards, the mocking of the German public. We work from dawn till dusk, sweat mingling with blood; we curse the blows of the rifle butts; I find myself thinking about ending it all, such are the torments of my life in captivity! . . . Then there are those of us who eat potato peel: they take it out of the pit, wash it and boil it, eat it and say how delicious it is. Some consider it the greatest happiness to snatch food from the tub where the Germans throw their leftovers.
War and the State
The truth of Randolph Bourne's classic statement, "War is the health of the state," can be seen throughout the excerpts from the diaries and letters in Intimate Voices. To get a war to work - to get men to kill other men that have never aggressed against them and that they don't even know - the state must do two things: convince men to love the state and to hate the members of other states. The first is always cloaked in patriotism, and leads to an acceptance of interventionism. The second is always cloaked in nationalism, and leads to hatred toward foreigners within one's country. German schoolgirl Piete Kuhr writes in her diary:
At school they talk of nothing but the war now. The girls are pleased that Germany is entering the field against its old enemy France. We have to learn new songs about the glory of war. The enthusiasm in our town is growing by the hour. . . . People wander through the streets in groups, shouting "Down with Serbia! Long live Germany!" Crowds of people are milling around in the streets, laughing, wishing each other good luck and joining in singing the national anthem. . . . Dear God, just bring the war to an end! I don't look on it as glorious any more, in spite of "school holidays" and victories. . . . At school everyone is so much in favour of the war. . . . They scream so that the headmaster sees what a patriotic school he has. . . . Everyone talks of shortages. Most people are buying in such massive stocks that their cellars are full to bursting. Grandma refuses to do this. She says she doesn't want to deprive the Fatherland of anything. We're not hoarders. The Fatherland won't let us starve. . . . To them [uncle and mother] "the German nation" is still everything. Fall with a cheer for the Fatherland, and you will die as a hero in their eyes.
German officer Ernst Nopper writes in his diary:
At the border post we strike up "Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles."
French schoolboy Yves Congar writes in his diary:
I can only think about war. I would like to be a soldier and fight. . . . Very well, if they want to starve us then they'll see when, in the next war, the next generation goes to Germany and starves them. They are turning the French people against them and I'm happy about it. I have never hated them so much. . . . The Germans, fiends, thieves, murderers and arsonists that they are, set fire to everything. . . . The Boches' behaviour in France is scandalous. The loot they are taking back to Germany is unbelievable: they'll have enough to refurbish every one of their towns! But one day soon it will be our turn: we will go there and we will steal, burn and ransack! They had better watch out! Over in Germany they are almost as unhappy as we are. There is famine in all the big cities: Berlin, Dresden and Bavaria; I hope they all die!
Russian soldier Alexei Zyikov writes in his diary:
They boast to us that their governments send them bread and parcels from home. But we, Russians, get nothing: our punishment for fighting badly. Or, perhaps, Mother Russia has forgotten about us.
Klara, the mother of Rudolf Hess, writes to her son:
Of course I know that an armistice would mean your safe return, my sons, but your future and that of the Fatherland would be built on shaky foundations. . . . It would be cowardly of us to worry about you. Instead we should be proud that through our sons we are fighting for the salvation of the Fatherland.
Polish widow Helena Jablonska writes in her diary:
The Jews are frightened. The Russians are taking them in hand now and giving them a taste of the whip. They are being forced to clean the streets and remove manure. . . . The Jewish pogrom has been under way since yesterday evening. The Cossacks waited until the Jews set off to the synagogue for their prayers before setting upon them with whips. They were deaf to any pleas for mercy, regardless of age. . . . It pains me to hear the Germans bad-mouth Galicia. Today I overheard two lieutenants asking "Why on earth should the sons of Germany spill blood to defend this swinish country?" We, the Poles, are hated by everyone in this Austrian hotchpotch and are condemned to serve as prey for all of them.
African Kande Kamara writes in his diary:
We black African soldiers were very sorrowful about the white man's war. There was never any soldier in the camp who knew why we were fighting. There was no time to think about it. I didn't really care who was right - whether it was the French or the Germans - I went to fight with the French army and that was all I knew. The reason for war was never disclosed to any soldier. They didn't tell us how they got into the war. We just fought and fought until we got exhausted and died. Day and night, we fought, killed ourselves, the enemies and everybody else.
Australian corporal George Mitchell writes in his diary:
A wounded Turk told us they regard Australians as fiends incarnate.
British private Robert Cude writes in his diary:
I long to be with battalion so that I can do my best to bereave a German family. I hate these swines. . . . It is a wonderful sight and one that I shall not forget. War such as this, on such a beautiful day seems to me to be quite correct and proper! . . . Men are racing to certain death, and jesting and smiling and cursing, yet wonderfully quiet in a sense, for one feels that one must kill, and as often as one can.
The unnamed Austrian officer writes in his diary:
Since yesterday my mind has been troubled by the thought of the many Austrian heroes who have given their lives defending the honour of Austria and the Habsburgs, while I entertained my thoughts of treason, all for the love of an unworthy [Italian] woman. I am disgusted at myself. Habsburg, I live for you and I shall die for you, too! . . . He who gives his life for the Fatherland and the honour of the Habsburgs shall be honoured and remembered for eternity.
Russian officer Dmitry Oskin writes in his diary of his support for the ultimate form of state interventionism. First he records part of a speech he heard given by Lenin in support of Communism: "The main point is that land should be taken immediately from the landowners and given to the peasants without compensation. All ownership of land is to be eliminated." Then he recounts his own comments: "We the soldier-peasants demand that the land be immediately decreed common property. That it is immediately taken from the landowners and given to local land committees."
Religion in War
If there is ever a time when men get religious it is certainly in the midst of a war. The phenomenon of "fox hole religion" is understandable. What is interesting, however, is the religious ideas of some combatants when they go into the war. Men on both sides think that God is on their side. Turkish second lieutenant Mehmed Fasih writes in his diary:
From the rear comes "Allah! Allah!" - the rallying cry of our soldiers. . . . One of his comrades tells us how Nuri said to him when they arrived at the Front together: "I implore God to let me become a martyr!" Oh Nuri! Your prayer was answered. We bury Nuri. It was God's will that I would say the opening verse of the Koran over him.
The African Kande Kamara writes in his diary:
Coming from the background I came from, which was Muslim oriented, the only thing you thought about was Allah, death and life. . . . Whatever we thought was dedicated to the God Almighty alone.
This attitude is not restricted to Muslims. The unnamed Austrian officer writes in his diary:
Dear Lord, come to our aid, for we fight in the name of Justice, the Empire and the Faith. Dear Lord, steer the flight of the double eagle so that these beauteous lands, which had one time belonged to Austria, once again fall under the shadow of its mighty wings. . . . Cases of cholera. This is all we need. Is God no longer on our side? . . . Italy will pay for this, for the Lord sits in judgement up on high and he is wrathful.
German schoolgirl Piete Kuhr writes in her diary:
But we have faith in France and God, and comfort ourselves with the thought that over in Germany they are almost as unhappy as we are.
Klara, the mother of Rudolf Hess writes to her son:
Thank God the German Michael [the patron saint of Germany] has finally had the guts to stand firm until our rights to water and land have been secured.
Women in Wartime
One of the great tragedies of war is its demoralizing effect on women, either through subjugation or whoredom. Austrian doctor Josef Tomann writes in his diary:
And then there are the fat-bellied gents from the commissariat, who stink of fat and go arm in arm with Przemysl's finest ladies, most of who (and this is no exaggeration) have turned into prostitutes of the lowest order. The hospitals have been recruiting teenage girls as nurses, in some places there are up to 50 of them! . . . They are, with very few exceptions, utterly useless. Their main job is to satisfy the lust of the gentlemen officers and, rather shamefully, of a number of doctors, too. . . . New officers are coming in almost daily with cases of syphilis, gonorrhoea, and soft chancre. Some have all three at once! The poor girls and women feel so flattered when they get chatted up by one of these pestilent pigs in their spotless uniforms, with their shiny boots and buttons. . . . . Anything that can't be carted off or used to pay one of the prostitutes for her services is burnt, so that the Germans don't get it when they march in.
British officer Richard Meinertzhagen writes in his diary:
All the blacks are mad on looting, whether it is the Askaris or the porters, man, woman or child. It is also difficult to stop the blacks from raping women, because they see them as property, like cows or huts.
African Kande Kamara writes in his diary:
The only way to get to town was by sneaking out of camp. There were some white women who had mattresses and beds and invited you to their bedrooms. In fact they tried to keep you there. They gave you clothes, money, and everything. When the inspector came, he never saw you, because you were hiding under the bed or under the bed covers of that beautiful lady. That's how some soldiers got left behind. None of them went back to Africa.
Canadian Winnie McClare writes in a letter to his father:
An awfull lot of fellow that go to London come back in bad shape and are sent to the V.D. hospitals. There is one V.D. hospital near here that has six hundred men in it. It is a shame that the fellows can't keep away from it.
Disillusion and Regret
Occasionally, we read in Intimate Voices of the disillusion and regret of soldiers and civilians. The folly of war is sometimes recognized. German officer Ernst Nopper writes in his diary:
And all this time the weather is so beautiful that the shooting seems absurd.
Russian soldier Vasily Mishnin writes to his pregnant wife:
What are we suffering for, what do I achieve by killing someone, even a German? . . . It is quite a peaceful scene when it's quiet and no one is firing. This is our enemy? They look like good, normal people, they all want to live and yet here we are, gathered together to take each other's lives away.
British officer Richard Meinertzhagen writes in his diary:
It seemed so odd that I should be having a meal today with people whom I was trying to kill yesterday. It seemed so wrong and made me wonder whether this really was war or whether we had all made a ghastly mistake.
German officer Ernst Nopper writes in his diary:
I no longer share most people's enthusiasm for war. I think about the dying soldiers, not just Germans, but also French, English, Russian, Italian, Serbian and I don't know who else.
German schoolgirl Piete Kuhr writes in her diary:
I don't want any more soldiers to die. Millions are dead - and for what? For whose benefit? We must just make sure that there is never another war in the future. We must never again fall for the nonsense peddled by the older generation.
And finally, the regret of Russian soldier Alexei Zyikov, who writes in his diary during Easter of 1916:
Why did I lead such a debauched life? Why did I not cherish my family and friends? I don't know. I loved adventure and now I am paying for it. I feel very sad. Must I really die like this, fruitlessly, with nothing worth repenting of?
The argument that modern warfare has changed so much that these descriptions of World War I never happen - modern war really isn't all that bad (unless of course you get killed) - is never made by the soldier who suffers psychological damage or psychiatric disorders the rest of his life, the forgotten civilians injured or disfigured in the conflict, or by those maimed or blown up by land mines years later.
Such are the horrors of war.
Laurence M. Vance [send him mail] teaches Greek at Pensacola Bible Institute in Pensacola, FL. He is also an adjunct instructor in accounting and economics at Pensacola Junior College. Visit his website.
-------- afghanistan
Afghans Allege Three Americans Ran Jail in Kabul
U.S. Says It Has No Ties To Purported Security Agents
By Amir Shah
Associated Press
Friday, July 9, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37955-2004Jul8.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 8 -- Afghan forces arrested three Americans, including a purported former Green Beret, after raiding a jail they were allegedly running in the Afghan capital and finding prisoners hanging from their feet, officials said Thursday.
The U.S. military, facing a widening inquiry into prisoner abuse, quickly distanced itself from the three, who had been posing as American agents before being detained Monday. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Thursday, "The U.S. government does not employ or sponsor these men."
Afghan officials also dismissed claims by the apparent ringleader, Jonathan K. Idema, that he was a special adviser to their security forces, saying the three had posed as military agents on a self-appointed hunt for terrorists.
The Americans and four Afghans who were detained along with them "formed a group and pretended they were fighting terrorism," Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali said. "They arrested eight people from across Kabul and put them in their jail."
Another Afghan security official said that intelligence and police officials who raided the group's house Monday found the prisoners strung up by their feet.
"They were hanging upside down," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said a report showed the men also were beaten.
Jalali said the Americans had no "legal link" to any Afghan or other authorities.
Still, officials said they were seen regularly around Kabul wearing military uniforms and armed with assault rifles.
Idema, described in media reports as an ex-Special Forces operative known as "Jack," first appeared in Afghanistan in late 2001, when U.S. and allied Afghan forces routed the Taliban.
He featured prominently in a top-selling book, "The Hunt for Bin Laden," which says he fought for 10 months alongside the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.
He also offered his services to Western television networks.
On Thursday in Washington, Boucher confirmed that Idema was one of the men in custody and identified another as Brent Bennett. He gave no other details.
Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, said he did not know which service branch Idema had been in. "He has a military background. But I don't know to what extent, how long he was in the service. I don't have those details."
--------
OUTLAWS
Bogus Agents Said to Be Antiterrorist Vigilantes
July 9, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/international/asia/09para.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 8 - Four men arrested for falsely posing as American government officials and illegally detaining Afghans were conducting their own self-styled antiterrorism campaign, Afghan and American officials said Thursday.
The four men, three of them Americans, illegally held eight Afghans for 12 days in the basement of a house where they had set up a fake export company, the officials said.
"Three foreigners made up their own group and pretended they were against those who conduct terrorist operations," Ali Ahmed Jalali, Afghanistan's interior minister, said Thursday at a news conference. "They were actually outlaws."
Three of the Afghans who were detained were brothers who had past ties to the political party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a pro-Taliban commander, but officials said none of them were involved in terrorism and were, in fact, now employees of Afghanistan's new government. One works for the Afghan Supreme Court and another for the Ministry of Education, officials said.
It was not clear how long the four men had been in Kabul or why no one had challenged them sooner. Western officials have said that American forces had the men under surveillance before their arrest on Monday by the Afghan police. Investigators are trying to determine if the group had harmed other Afghans.
In Washington, the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, identified two of the three Americans as Jonathan K. Idema and Brent Bennett, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Boucher said the American government "does not employ or sponsor" any of the men.
In interviews with journalists, Mr. Idema has said he served as a private adviser to Northern Alliance forces during the American invasion of the country in 2001.
Mr. Idema's unconfirmed accounts of his time in Afghanistan were a major feature of a best-selling book, "The Hunt for Bin Laden."
A former Special Operations soldier in the United States who spoke on the condition of anonymity said in a telephone interview that former commandos had questioned Mr. Idema's Afghan claims. "I know a lot of people are challenging his statements," he said.
The former soldier said there were also complaints that Mr. Idema had exaggerated his military experience. A spokesman for the Special Operations command in Fayetteville, N. C., said he could not immediately release Mr. Idema's military records.
A Western diplomat said members of the group were still being questioned and continued to be evasive. "They seem to be behaving in very irrational ways," he said.
--------
VOTE
Afghan Parliamentary Elections May Be Delayed Again
July 9, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/international/asia/09afgh.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, July 8 - Parliamentary elections, a central part of the American-led effort to establish a stable democracy in Afghanistan, are nearly certain to be delayed once again, probably until next spring, Afghan and foreign officials said Thursday.
The officials said that President Hamid Karzai was expected to make a decision on a further delay this weekend. The Afghan commission charged with scheduling the elections voted for the postponement on Thursday after two days of consultations with the cabinet.
Early this year, both the parliamentary and presidential elections, originally scheduled for June, were pushed back to September. The presidential elections, far easier to organize than the balloting to elect a Parliament, are still expected to go ahead on or around Oct. 12. President Karzai is the leading candidate in a field of at least 12 people.
The delay in parliamentary elections represents a setback for the Bush administration, which has strongly backed the Karzai government, and had pushed hard for elections to be held in time to register an important foreign policy success before the American presidential elections in November.
The officials in Kabul pointed to three basic reasons for the latest postponement, the first being the fear that regional warlords would dominate the process and, by winning important posts, distort the democratic process for years to come.
The second is security. The Taliban has stepped up its campaign of violence to disrupt the voting. A female election worker was killed and a second woman was wounded along with the driver of their car when it hit a mine in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday as they drove to register voters, said a provincial official, Dr. Asif Qazizada. The election vehicle appeared to be the target of the attack, Dr. Qazizada said.
The violence has increased in recent weeks, with attacks taking place almost daily somewhere in the country, leading some officials to urge delaying the elections and others arguing that the vote should be held more quickly.
The third concern has been the overwhelming logistical and technical hurdles facing the election organizers, including registration of voters, which has still not begun in 50 districts; the completion of a census to establish accurate population figures from which to divide parliamentary seats; the nomination of hundreds of candidates; and the printing of ballots. The presidential election, with 12 candidates and a single ballot, will be much simpler to organize, officials said.
The United Nations and Afghan election officials recommended to the cabinet on Tuesday that parliamentary balloting should be delayed, the presidential spokesman, Jawed Ludin, said. The officials suggested a postponement of two to six months, taking into account the Muslim month of fasting, which starts in October, and the onset of the Afghan winter, which makes many parts of the country inaccessible.
One official said Thursday that the election commission had recommended a six-month delay.
The new Afghan constitution, approved in January by a grand assembly of 1,500 delegates, called for every effort to be made to hold the presidential and parliamentary elections simultaneously.
President Karzai, whose two-year mandate as head of the transitional administration ran out in June, has resisted another delay in the voting. Mr. Karzai also has felt the pressure of his own commitment to the Bush administration to stick to the timetable laid out at a United Nations conference in Bonn in 2001, one foreign official working as an adviser to the government said.
"He gets extremely anxious when there is talk of not holding the elections as planned," the official said. "There is a sense that he had made a deal and has to stick to it."
Members of the government have said that postponing elections would hand a victory to the Taliban and other insurgents.
Equally intense pressure has come from the warlords and faction leaders who are determined to win control of the Parliament and who have pushed hard to have parliamentary elections held simultaneously with presidential elections, while doing little to disarm and disband their militias.
Pushing the other way is a growing body of civic groups, political parties and some foreign diplomats, who have called for a lengthier postponement of the parliamentary elections to ensure full disarmament and a process free of intimidation and hasty organization.
The United Nations disarmament and demobilization program has disarmed only 10,000 of the 440,000 men it had hoped to disarm by the end of June, and the pace has slowed significantly in the last five months.
Officials said Mr. Karzai seemed to be accepting the need for a delay out of concern that an election viewed as illegitimate would be even more damaging than a late one. Mr. Ludin, the presidential spokesman, said Mr. Karzai believed the need to ensure a free and fair election is the only reason the Afghan people would accept for a delay.
"You might be able to get people to go along by saying we are committed to having elections that are free and fair," Mr. Ludin said. "That is the way people will support a delay."
-------- africa
Inquiry implicates Ethiopian army in killings in southwest Gambella region
ADDIS ABABA (AFP)
Jul 09, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040709153130.anofjkqh.html
Members of the Ethiopian army were involved in the killing of 13 people in the country's southwestern Gambella region in December, according to findings released Friday by an independent panel.
"Based on the evidence gathered, some members of the army had been involved in the killing of 13 people," Kemal Bedri, who chaired the public team set up to probe ethnic violence that rocked Gambella from December 2003 to May this year.
Hundreds of people were killed in a series of ethnic clashes in Gambella, located some 450 kilometers (280 miles) southwest of the capital, Addis Ababa, triggered when gunmen killed eight people on December 13.
In the first month of fighting, 57 people were killed.
The fighting was sparked by a rivalry between the region's two main ethnic groups, the Agnwak and Nuer, both vying for social and political supremacy.
"Maladministration, lack of infrastructure and shortcomings in development..." were also reasons behind the unrest, according to the inquiry chaired by Kemal, who is president of Ethiopia's Federal Supreme Court.
The independent inquiry panel was set up in May.
Throughout the troubles in Gambella, the defence and federal affairs ministries denied allegations that the army was involved.
-------- britain
Blair's Troubles Multiply
(Inter Press Service)
by Sanjay Suri
July 9, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/suri.php?articleid=2968
LONDON - Saddam Hussein looks set to hand over to the British the one thing they love most - a palace coup.
Read for that Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown taking over from Prime Minister Tony Blair. Not immediately, not even very soon perhaps. But there are few who will say any more that this would never happen.
Gordon Brown has for long been considered the alternative to Blair. But this week the whisperings are beginning to have the feel of certainty about them as Blair struggles to hold his ground over Iraq.
After a year of insistence that had appeared to most as more obdurate than wise, Blair admitted in Parliament this week that those supposed weapons of mass destruction "may never be found."
Blair said he had "to accept we haven't found them and we may never find them." He said: "They could have been removed. They could have been hidden. They could have been destroyed."
Blair's confession comes a week before an inquiry report in Britain that is expected to point to serious intelligence failures. And it came just a day or so before a report due on intelligence failure in the United States.
But Blair continues to talk the same language as U.S. President George W. Bush. There was no doubt Saddam was a threat, Blair told BBC in an interview.
"I know that Saddam Hussein was a threat," Bush said later.
For Blair the confession might be too late.
"Tony Blair had tried to justify the war on the grounds that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction," Mustafa Alani, leading expert on Iraq and al-Qaeda with the Royal United Services Institute, a leading think tank told IPS. Now Blair was confessing they may never be found.
"The other reason Blair offered was to remove dictatorship and to bring a stable and democratic Iraq," Alani said. "Now those goals are not achievable either in the foreseeable future."
Tony Blair is "under a lot of political pressure as a result," Alani said. "If the security situation worsens, it could put an end to his political future."
The security situation is not improving as a result of further intelligence failures, Alani said. "They have a well-armed force of 150,000 but they cannot control the place because of lack of intelligence."
The very acts of torture were evidence of continuing intelligence failure, Alani said. "If you are getting good intelligence about people, then there is no need to torture anyone."
Security is now the key word, Alani said. "The U.S. emphasis on democracy has been postponed now," he said. "There can be no election without security. The priority is now a stable Iraq."
Did that mean that Iraq had gone back to where it was under Saddam?
The coalition forces have "reached a point of practicality," Alani said. "If there is a collapse of security it can mean a collapse also of regional security." That would be far more dangerous than the civil war earlier in Lebanon, he said.
Beyond the region the situation will have direct consequences for Blair and for Bush, he said. "This was their initiative, their creation," Alani said. "The security failure in Iraq is creating a political failure and that is leading to economic failure - and they will be held accountable for this."
Security in Iraq means also the security of oil supplies, he said.
Blair's confession this week has also brought out cracks within the government at the top level over the decision to join the United States in invading Iraq.
Blair confessed only after former British ambassador to Iraq Jeremy Greenstock said the British government had been "wrong" to claim that Saddam had large stocks of chemical or biological weapons. The former envoy said in a BBC interview: "We were wrong on the stockpiles; we were right on the intention."
Earlier in the week a senior Foreign Office lawyer who resigned after ministers ignored her advice that the Iraq war would be illegal, came out with a public statement that the abuse of prisoners "could amount to war crimes."
The lawyer Elizabeth Wilmshurst said in a newspaper interview that the war had been launched on the strength of "assertion" rather than "facts." She said "what people are worried about is just assertions that there is an imminent threat."
--------
Butler to single out intelligence chiefs for blame in WMD inquiry
Independent
By Andrew Grice and Colin Brown
09 July 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=539478
Lord Butler of Brockwell is to defy the Government by including personal criticism of Britain's intelligence chiefs in his inquiry into the information they gathered about Saddam Hussein's weapons before last year's war.
The Independent has learnt that the Butler inquiry has sent letters to three crucial witnesses outlining draft sections of next week's report that will criticise them directly.
They are John Scarlett, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) which assessed the evidence published in the Government's dossier on Iraqi weapons in September 2002; Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, which gathered the material, and Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, who is believed to have amended his original legal advice on the eve of the war to give the go-ahead to military action.
Such criticism of Mr Scarlett would be a setback for Tony Blair, who promoted him to head MI6 from August without waiting for the Butler committee. Critics said the appointment was a "pay off" for Mr Scarlett giving his blessing to the dossier, which claimed Saddam could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.
The JIC is bracing itself for criticism that it allowed its work to be used for "political" purposes. Evidence presented to the Butler inquiry suggested the intelligence supporting the 45-minute claim was "too thin" and vague.
Mr Blair has made clear he does not want to the inquiry to "scapegoat" anybody, and was hoping that Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary, would draw general lessons rather than "name and shame" individuals. But the disclosure that the letters have been sent provides the clearest possible sign that the inquiry report, to be published next Wednesday, will include personal criticism. Normally, people to be criticised by such an inquiry are given the chance to make last-minute representations.
Downing Street is said to be "very worried", fearing the report will criticise the intelligence services for not making rigorous checks about its information on Iraq's arsenal before it was included in the dossier, but also that it will criticise ministers' use of the material.
Although ministers have pledged there will be no "witch hunt" when Lord Butler reports, there are signs that a "blame game" may break out between politicians and spymasters. One line of defence Mr Blair is considering is to say he was not shown the raw intelligence on which the claims in the dossier were based. Mr Blair has already said he did not know the "45-minute warning" related to short-range rather than long-range weapons.
Michael Mates, the Tory MP and a member of the Butler committee, hinted at such a "blame game" during a Commons debate on the security services. He said: "It's the misuse of intelligence which undermines trust in the agencies and reduces the authority of their status."
Mr Mates, a former defence minister, said: "In this House, we have to place a certain amount of trust in ministers to conduct themselves honourably and not to misuse the agencies or the intelligence they provide for partisan or other purposes. Trust is at the heart of intelligence work. It is so important that all of us get across to the outside world that intelligence really does have its limitations."
David Davis, the shadow Home Secretary, challenged ministers to say whether Mr Scarlett attached a "caveat" to the information about Saddam's weapons from dissident Iraqis. He said: "The question is: was the public let down, not through inaccuracy but through selective and improper use of information? Did our government subordinate the nationally vital issue of intelligence to the politically convenient demands of propaganda?"
-----
Butler report on war in Iraq printed in secret to avoid leaks
Scotsman.com
ALISON HARDIE
Fri 9 Jul 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=785582004
THE official report into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq is being printed in top secret conditions as the government attempts to stop it leaking.
Tony Blair's official spokesman said yesterday that "all appropriate safeguards" were in place to stop details of Lord Butler's report getting out before its publication on Wednesday.
The government was furious after the main planks of Lord Hutton's inquiry into the death of the scientist Dr David Kelly were revealed in the Sun newspaper a full 24 hours before it was officially published.
While the Hutton report essentially cleared ministers of culpability in Dr Kelly's suicide, the leak served only to reinforce claims that the entire inquiry and subsequent report had been a whitewash.
It is already widely expected that the Butler report will be critical of the intelligence used by Mr Blair as a basis for his case for the war to remove Saddam Hussein.
In particular, it is thought the report will cast severe doubt on the claims the Iraqi dictator could deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes.
The intelligence behind the claim will be described by Butler as "thin" and the credibility of its source - a rebel Iraqi general - called seriously into question.
The claim Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes was deemed so important in the run-up to the war, it was mentioned four times in the government's dossier of evidence against Saddam.
However, Mr Blair said on Wednesday in the Commons he now accepts that those weapons may never be found.
David Davis, the shadow home secretary, said yesterday: "We need to know what the government's position is on this. Is it that the weapons existed and we have not found them? Or is it that they did not exist all along? This issue is unavoidable in the debate addressing the effectiveness and use of our intelligence gathering services."
-------- china
Rice Rebuffs China on Taiwan Arms
Sales National Security Adviser, in Beijing, Offers U.S. Aid in Building Dialogue
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37657-2004Jul8.html
BEIJING, July 8 -- U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice met top Chinese leaders Thursday and rebuffed their demands for an end to U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, a senior U.S. official said. But Rice also told them the Bush administration was willing to help establish a dialogue between Beijing and the self-governing island.
The official, who is traveling with Rice and spoke on condition of anonymity, said Rice was not specific in the offer and told Chinese leaders only that the United States could take steps "to further dialogue if it's helpful."
In the past, the United States has rejected suggestions that it assume a mediator's role in the sensitive dispute between mainland China and Taiwan. But it has repeatedly urged both sides to open talks and settle their differences peacefully. In recent months, U.S. officials have expressed concern about rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait and the risk of U.S. forces being dragged into a conflict there.
The dispute over Taiwan dominated Rice's meetings on the first day of a two-day visit to Beijing. She met with Jiang Zemin, China's military chief and former president, and Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing and was scheduled to see President Hu Jintao and another senior foreign policy official, Tang Jiaxuan, on Friday.
China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and has threatened to seize it by force if necessary, but Taiwan's newly reelected president, Chen Shui-bian, says the island is an independent country. The Chinese military is planning large-scale exercises this month involving joint sea, land and air operations on an island about 150 miles from Taiwan.
Jiang told Rice that the Chinese people are "seriously concerned and dissatisfied about a series of recent U.S. moves on the Taiwan issue, especially sales of advanced weapons to Taiwan," state media reported.
Rice's visit, her first to China since she accompanied President Bush here in 2002, comes during what appears to be an intensifying leadership struggle between Jiang and Hu, which is complicating the ruling Communist Party's decision-making on Taiwan and other issues. Chinese officials have said Jiang was resisting pressure to retire and has taken a hard-line position toward Taiwan to strengthen his grip on power.
In a possible setback for Hu, the party leadership has reportedly scheduled a round of informal meetings at the seaside resort of Beidaihe this month. For years, the party traditionally held the secretive gatherings every summer, but Hu canceled them soon after taking office last year in a move many analysts saw as an attempt to set a different tone for his new government.
The party has not announced if its leaders will be returning to Beidaihe this summer, but Chinese officials have said as much both to U.S. officials and to Hong Kong media organizations that have close ties to Beijing.
The senior U.S. official said Rice wanted to make sure that, going into those meetings, the Chinese leadership was clear on the Bush administration's commitment to strong relations with China, despite differences on Taiwan and other issues, including human rights and trade.
The official said Rice reaffirmed the U.S. position that it did not support independence for Taiwan and opposed unilateral action by either side to change the status quo.
She also urged the Chinese to put pressure on North Korea to accept a U.S. proposal to dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for fuel and other benefits. The Chinese described the U.S. proposal as positive, claimed credit for the North Koreans not rejecting it and suggested that "a breakthrough" might be possible in September, at the next round of six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear program, the U.S. official said.
Rice also pressed the Chinese to improve their record on human rights, and raised the cases of several political prisoners, including Jiang Yanyong, the elderly physician who exposed the government's cover-up of the SARS outbreak last year.
-------- iraq
In Place of Gunfire, a Rain of Rocks
U.S. Troops in Sadr City Struggle to Help an Angry, Defiant Populace
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37660-2004Jul8?language=printer
BAGHDAD, July 8 -- Preparing for a morning patrol, Sgt. Adam Brantley surveyed his perch in the gunner's nest of an armored Humvee. In front of him was a machine gun mounted on a swivel. His M-4 rifle lay on the roof next to it.
Brantley stepped down and stooped in the dust, searching for rocks the size of baseballs. He collected a few handfuls and piled them next to his rifle. His convoy pulled into the smoky streets of Sadr City.
"I don't throw unless thrown upon," said Brantley, 24, who would have cause to do so in the next few hours as rocks thrown from side streets banged against the Humvee.
In the context of Iraq's continuing violence, it is perhaps a measure of progress that U.S. soldiers working in a slum on Baghdad's barren eastern edge are feeling the sting of stones more often than bullets. Only weeks ago, U.S. soldiers were fighting -- and, in some cases, dying -- to put down an armed Shiite uprising on the same streets.
But the daily rock fights between U.S. soldiers and ordinary Iraqis, many of them children, highlight the mutual antipathy that has built up since the handover of political power to an Iraqi government. Although often-intense fighting continues in some regions, the U.S. military occupation of Sadr City, as observed in four days on patrol with a U.S. Army unit, has evolved into a grinding daily confrontation between frustrated American soldiers and a desperate population.
After 15 months of halting progress on U.S.-funded reconstruction projects, many Iraqis who once supported the U.S. invasion are resisting the military occupation, a fight that features gangs of impoverished children as an angry, exasperating vanguard. The strain of the hostility on U.S. soldiers is palpable and poses huge risks to the completion of millions of dollars in reconstruction work designed to help stabilize Iraq.
In heat that hovers near 115 degrees, troops overseeing projects to bring clean water to neighborhoods awash in raw sewage are greeted by jeering mobs. Swarms of teenagers and children pump their fists in praise of Moqtada Sadr, the Shiite cleric whose militia has killed eight soldiers and wounded scores more from the 1st Cavalry Division battalion responsible for Sadr City's security and civic improvement. In April, during an uprising in Sadr City, the division estimated that it killed hundreds of Sadr's militiamen.
Candy, once gleefully accepted in this part of Baghdad, is now thrown back at the soldiers dispensing it.
The military partnership with new Iraqi security forces appears to be foundering on a mutual lack of respect. The Iraqi police occasionally ignore U.S. orders, described as recommendations by U.S. commanders in the days since the handover, to conduct night patrols in troublesome districts and prohibit Sadr's militants from manning traffic checkpoints. The Iraqi National Guard has refused dangerous assignments, even when accompanied by U.S. troops.
Lt. Col. Gary Volesky, commander of the division's 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Brigade in Sadr City, said there was much to be done to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that the Army has come to help them. "We've been here a year and they haven't seen much progress," he said. "That's our challenge."
Volesky, an energetic commander admired by his troops, delivered that assessment one recent morning from the roof of the Karama police station. Bombed by Sadr militants in June, the two-story building appears at the moment to be defying gravity. The facade lies in rubble, and the exposed second-story floor sags like an old mattress.
Volesky was making a keep-your-chin-up visit, and the Iraqi police officers appeared surprised to see him. They escorted him through the wreckage of the building, which has no electricity and which his soldiers once took back from Sadr militants after a fierce firefight. Then he headed to the roof.
Almost at once, rocks began falling around him, skittering across the rooftop. In the distance, a young boy leaned back to throw again. But his stone fell short. "You're going to need more than that," Volesky said to the boy.
"As you can see, this is not the friendliest neighborhood," he said. But he noticed three men on a nearby street corner, gesturing for the rock throwers to leave.
"Thank you," Volesky shouted to them in Arabic. "Thank you very much."
Then he said, "Let's go talk to those guys."
As soon as Volesky left the ruined station, he was confronted by crowds of children and a few men working in a strip of auto repair shops next door. They wanted to know why their electricity was off more often than on, something U.S. soldiers struggle to determine on a daily basis. Electricity in Baghdad's summer heat means air conditioning, and a cooler population is a happier one.
"We've started fixing your sewers," said Volesky, who had just passed a pipeline project that will pump some of the green sludge from the streets. "Soon you'll see it coming this way."
The children gathered in a rowdy scrum around the soldiers. A chubby kid poked at them, then opened his mouth to wiggle a very loose tooth in their faces. A gunshot popped in the near distance, putting the soldiers on alert. A thin, dark child dressed in filthy clothes began to chant, "Moqtada, Moqtada, let's go, let's go, Moqtada." Others joined in, shuffling their feet in a two-step dance.
As the soldiers packed into Humvees and pulled away, stones clattered against the armor.
"That's all you got, just those little pebbles," said a soldier driving one of the Humvees.
Sgt. Timothy Kathol, 24, of Amarillo, Tex., handed a bag of lollipops up to the gunner as the stones continued to rain down. "They throw rocks, we throw candy -- really hard candy," Kathol said. "With sticks in it."
Battle to Provide Basics
Sadr City, home to at least 2 million poor people, has been a miserable place for decades. President Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led government deprived the Shiite neighborhood, once a pocket of political resistance, of most basic services. Reliable electricity, working sewers and clean drinking water have always been scarce.
When U.S. troops toppled Hussein last year, the neighborhood celebrated. But now U.S. troops working to improve basic services appear to be bearing the blame for a grim history. In their view, the people seem unwilling to help themselves.
"I love the smell of sewage in the morning," Kathol said as his Humvee left Camp Eagle, the Army post on Sadr City's northern edge, and was engulfed by the slum's signature stench.
"Smells like victory," replied Pfc. Joseph Crosier, 23, of Syracuse, N.Y., continuing the reference to a speech in the movie "Apocalypse Now."
In the movie, napalm smelled like victory. The smell in the Humvee was coming from a large, swampy pond of sewage where people were bathing in the intensifying morning heat.
In earlier years, roving animals were let loose on large piles of street-side garbage. Today, sheep still graze on median-strip trash, and a hundred fires reduce what remains into black, greasy piles, casting a hazy pall over the streets.
A couple of months ago, during the Sadr uprising, the battalion launched Operation Iron Broom -- a street-cleaning, garbage-collection program that cost several hundred thousand dollars. It was carried out by U.S. soldiers at a time when their colleagues were being wounded in the same streets by Sadr militants. After days of tedious work, many of the streets were as clean as they'd ever been and large steel dumpsters dotted the medians, soldiers recalled.
Within days, the dumpsters had disappeared. Neighborhood residents had cut off the lids for use as garage doors. They sold the rest for scrap in ramshackle stalls piled with mufflers, gas tanks and other debris. Soldiers have since helped build concrete receptacles in the medians, but there is far more trash outside them than in. A public awareness campaign on how to use them is being prepared.
"If they spent half as much time on trash cleanup and these projects as they do trying to blow us up, this would all be fixed by now," said Crosier, who has been hit by three roadside bombs and suffered severe burns.
Taking the Community Pulse
On a recent morning, Lt. Raymie Walters headed out with Alpha Company's 3rd Platoon to take some popular soundings. The soldiers and the military intelligence officers back at the post use a variety of unscientific methods to measure the sentiments and general health of the community. Security, quite literally, has to do with the price of eggs.
Walters, 26, of Longview, Wash., took a column of Humvees to a market to check on food prices, which often fluctuate with insurgent activity. The convoy pulled up to a stall and the soldiers got out. But they had no interpreter. After a few minutes of holding up Iraqi dinars, pointing to produce and flapping like a chicken, Walters had his price list.
The children emerged from nowhere. "Moqtada, Moqtada," they began taunting.
Staff Sgt. Matthew Mercado, 27, of Jonesboro, Ark., shook his head as the Humvees pulled away. "You see what happens when we just ask for the price of a banana?" he said.
The convoy sped down a wide avenue. Down small alleys, scurrying kids came into view with rocks in their hands. A stone bounced short of the Humvee, leaping up to peg the door. Walters told Mercado to radio the rest of the convoy with a warning for the gunners to keep low.
That evening, U.S. commanders drew up plans for a foot patrol, matching a platoon of U.S. soldiers with two squads of Iraqi National Guard troops. The mission entailed setting up ambush positions along the road leading from camp into the center of Sadr City, a route where roadside bombers frequently operate. There they would wait for the men planting the explosives or flush them out by using illumination rounds to draw fire. But the mission was delayed an hour, then canceled. U.S. commanders said the Iraqi troops refused to participate.
"They don't want to work," said Lt. Derek Johnson, 25, of Driggs, Idaho. "But they still want our money."
Johnson, commander of Alpha Company's 1st Platoon, had a long morning ahead of him the next day policing the police. As Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Humvees idled, he and his men waited for 15 Iraqi soldiers to join the patrol, then waited even longer for a "psy ops" team with anti-Sadr pamphlets to hand out.
The Iraqi soldiers piled into two Bradleys, carrying AK-47 assault rifles and wearing new body-armor vests. They took turns tapping each other on the chest plates as they waited to leave.
Johnson's task was to make sure the Iraqi police had set up checkpoints in designated spots and were manning them without help from Sadr's Mahdi Army militia or any other civilians. The first intersection was empty of police, and the second was being worked by a group of men wearing matching blue-and-white soccer jerseys. They had whistles. The drivers obeyed them. But they were not the police -- who sat inside their station a block away -- and were likely Sadr militants.
"We're from the neighborhood," said one sweaty man in a Tommy Gear cap.
"According to their interim government, it's not allowed for any uniformed personnel other than Iraqi police to man these checkpoints," Johnson warned through an interpreter. "I'll be coming back here, and I don't want to see them."
Johnson did return a few hours later. The men had not left.
--------
Five U.S. Soldiers Killed by Mortar Attack in Iraq
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36111-2004Jul8.html
BAGHDAD, July 8 -- A barrage of mortar shells collapsed a building occupied by U.S. soldiers and Iraqi National Guardsmen Thursday in Samarra, 70 miles north of Baghdad, killing five Americans and injuring 20, a military spokesman said.
The attack followed two weeks of sporadic shelling and gunfire in the Sunni Muslim town, according to the spokesman, Maj. Neal O'Brien. A resident of the city, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said "everyone was expecting the attack" after scores of arrests of suspected government opponents a week ago.
O'Brien said two Iraqi guardsmen were also killed and four were wounded. The names of the U.S. dead were withheld pending notification of relatives.
Soon after the attack, U.S. and Iraqi forces patrolling the town were fired on. They then surrounded a building into which four gunmen had fled. A U.S. helicopter launched Hellfire missiles at the building, killing all four men inside, O'Brien said.
"Certainly, the response has been quick and swift," O'Brien said by telephone. "The Iraqi National Guard and 1st Infantry Division soldiers immediately responded. We expect that to continue."
Samarra has long been a hostile zone for U.S. forces. Among its residents are members of two large tribes that remain largely loyal to deposed president Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party.
Another tribe in the city, the Albu Nisan, initially welcomed U.S. forces. But after some members got involved in weapons dealing and were killed by U.S. forces, the tribe turned against the occupation, said a local resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
O'Brien said Samarra had been the scene of a series of recent mortar and gunfire attacks. However, most of the mortar shells have fallen in empty areas and done little damage.
But at about 10:30 a.m. Thursday, a car bomb exploded near the base shared by Iraqi National Guard and U.S. soldiers. O'Brien said the blast was followed by a volley of 38 mortar shells, which destroyed the building.
Radar pinpointed the source of the attack, and U.S. forces responded with 120mm artillery fire. O'Brien said he did not know if any casualties resulted.
Also Thursday, Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered Filipino contract workers to stop going to Iraq, following the broadcast of a videotape in Baghdad purporting to show a Filipino hostage being held by masked gunmen. The gunmen demanded that the Philippines withdraw its citizens from Iraq or the man would be killed.
The Philippines has 51 soldiers and police officers working with U.S. forces in Iraq. In addition, about 4,100 Philippine citizens work at U.S. military bases in Iraq, according to the Associated Press.
The broadcast, on al-Jazeera television, said the hostage worked for a Saudi company that holds a U.S. military contract. It did not name the man, but Philippine officials said he was Angelo dela Cruz, a truck driver apparently abducted near Fallujah.
On Friday, the U.S. military announced that a U.S. soldier died from wounds suffered during an attack on a patrol in Baghdad on Thursday night, according to the Associated Press.
-------- israel / palestine
World Court to rule against Israel
Israel's barrier will trap thousands of Palestinians
Friday 09 July 2004,
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/73E6C68A-108F-4FEB-85E9-6F316542511F.htm
The World Court will on Friday rule against Israel's West Bank barrier and order its demolition, reports Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Quoting documents it had obtained, the daily said the International Court of Justice - better known as the World Court - is set to describe the barrier as an "infringement" on Palestinian rights.
"The construction of such a wall accordingly constitutes breaches by Israel of its various obligations under the applicable international humanitarian law and human rights instruments," Haaretz reported.
The World Court will deliver its ruling on Friday, but Israel has already said it would not accept its verdict.
Israeli pretext
Though Israel claims to build the barrier - a network of fences, ditches and walls across the occupied West Bank - to tighten security and stop bombers from sneaking in, Palestinians say it is a land grab.
Palestinians hope the court, the United Nation's highest legal authority, will say the barrier is illegal for Israel to build on land that it captured in the 1967 war. They hope this might in turn trigger a campaign for sanctions against Israel.
"We put tremendous faith in this court," Palestinian President Yasir Arafat said on Thursday.
Israel has already completed 200km of fences and walls that should eventually stretch for 730km.
The barrier has cut off thousands of Palestinians from farms, schools, relatives and jobs.
The UN General Assembly, where pro-Palestinian sentiment is strong, requested an urgent advisory opinion in December, and the court in The Hague held hearings in February. Its ruling is non-binding.
Last week, Israel's High Court ruled that sections of the barrier should be moved to ease Palestinian hardship and ensure access to farmland, schools and cities. But it also recognized Israel's security need to build inside the West Bank.
--------
7 Palestinians Killed In Intense Gaza Battle
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37584-2004Jul8.html
JERUSALEM, July 8 -- Israeli tanks and helicopters opened fire on Palestinian snipers in the northern Gaza Strip early Thursday in an intense battle that killed at least seven Palestinians and injured one Israeli soldier, according to an Israeli military spokeswoman and Palestinian security officials.
Later, five Israeli soldiers were wounded when their four-wheel-drive vehicle was hit by an explosion near the Jewish settlement of Morag in southern Gaza, the army said. Islamic Jihad, a Palestinian militant group, claimed responsibility for the blast, saying in a statement that it had detonated a roadside bomb in retaliation for "the ugly Zionist massacre" in northern Gaza, the Associated Press reported.
In the battle in northern Gaza, in the village of Beit Hanoun, five Palestinian fighters were killed, according to statements from their organizations. Among them was a local commander of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, Palestinian officials said.
A 35-year-old woman, Jamilah Karana, was shot dead as she dashed out of her house to try to pull a wounded relative to safety during a heavy barrage of tank fire and gunfire, Palestinian witnesses said. The man she was trying to rescue, Naeim Kafarna, died of his wounds, according to Palestinian hospital officials.
It was the most intense fighting in the Gaza Strip since Israeli forces moved additional troops and armored vehicles into the Beit Hanoun area 10 days ago. That invasion began after an Israeli man and a 3-year-old boy were killed by a crude, Palestinian-made Qassam rocket that was fired from Gaza and landed just outside an Israeli nursery school.
Israeli troops have been clearing olive groves and fields on the edge of Beit Hanoun in an effort to destroy potential hiding spots for militants firing the rockets, an Israeli military spokeswoman said.
Palestinian security officials reported that armored bulldozers and Israeli troops began moving into Beit Hanoun from the perimeter just after midnight Thursday.
An Israeli military spokesman said soldiers were taking positions near a spot where militants have been known to launch Qassam missiles. He said soldiers on a foot patrol came under heavy fire at 1:20 a.m. while walking in a field and that one soldier suffered a serious leg wound.
Palestinian witnesses said Israeli troops moved deeper into the village at daybreak and began shooting indiscriminately. An Israeli military spokeswoman said Palestinian fire rained on the armored troops from all directions.
"There were a lot of heavy exchanges of fire," the spokeswoman said.
As the troops advanced, Israeli forces shot at two members of Hamas, killing Nahed Abu Odah, 46, identified in a Hamas statement as a field commander.
As the troops moved farther inside the village, residents of the town said Karana and the relative she was trying to rescue were killed.
"We know there were reports that civilians were hit," an Israeli spokeswoman said. She said she could not confirm any details of the reports.
In a chaotic exchange of gunfire, soldiers shot dead one fighter, then killed another who attempted to assist him, Palestinian witnesses said. A third fighter who tried to help those two men was also gunned down, and another was killed when he moved in to help, witnesses reported. Three of the dead gunmen were from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed group connected with Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, and the fourth was from Islamic Jihad, according to statements from the groups.
--------
World Court Says Israeli Barrier Violates International Law
July 9, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER and GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/international/middleeast/09CND-WALL.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
The International Court of Justice ruled today that it is against international law for Israel to build its barrier in the West Bank and that it should be dismantled.
The advisory ruling by the World Court, in the Hague, is nonbinding. But it contributes to the debate surrounding construction of the network of fencing and ditches on lands that have been the focus of Middle East peace efforts.
Israel says it is building the barrier as self-defense against attackers, but Palestinians call it an attempt to grab land.
A copy of the ruling, posted on the Web site www.electronicintifada.net before the court began its reading of the decision, said that the construction of the wall is "contrary to international law."
"Israel is under an obligation to terminate its breach of international law, and under obligation to cease forthwith the construction of the wall being built in the occupied Palestinian territory," it said.
The Palestinian Authority, in a previous presentation to the court, had argued that the partly built barrier was a violation of international law and an attempt to annex Palestinian land.
"I think this is a historic decision," said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, today. "I think the message to Palestinians is that they should pursue the path of diplomacy, not violence, and that they don't stand alone.
"I really hope tonight that Israel will stop building the wall, and come back to the negotiating table," Mr. Erekat said. "And if they insist on building the wall, they should build it on their border and not in the heart of the West Bank."
Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat called the ruling "a victory for the Palestinian people and for all the free peoples of the world."
Israel, which contends that the court lacks jurisdiction to rule in the matter, had filed a written brief to present its case.
Today Jonathan Peled, the spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry, said the advisory opinion "failed to address the essence of the problem and the very reason for building the fence - Palestinian terror. If there were no terror, there would be no fence."
Thomas Buergenthal, an American, was the only dissenter among the 15 judges, according to the copy of the ruling posted on the Internet.
The court opened a hearing in February on the barrier amid demonstrations by Palestinian supporters and a silent march by pro-Israeli organizations featuring photographs of nearly 1,000 victims of terrorism-related acts.
The United Nations General Assembly had asked the court for an opinion about the legal consequences of the barrier's construction after it voted in October to demand that Israel tear it down.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan on Nov. 28 called its construction "a deeply counterproductive act" that was causing the Palestinian population "serious socio-economic harm."
President Bush, too, has expressed concern about the barrier. But today the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, told reporters that the administration did not believe the World Court was the appropriate forum to address what is a "political issue."
"This is an issue that should be resolved through the process that has been put in place, specifically the road map" peace plan, said Mr. McClellan, speaking aboard Air Force One en route to a campaign event in Pennsylvania.
"We certainly recognize the need for Israel to defend itself and protect the people of Israel. It's also important that they allow the Palestinian people to move freely within that region," he said, according to Reuters.
Today the European Commission again urged Israel to take it down.
The World Court, based in The Hague and created to settle legal disputes between nations, is not obligated to issue an opinion. But Arab nations worked for the resolution in the hope of increasing pressure on Israel over what they consider an illegal land grab.
Last month, Israel's Supreme Court ordered the army to remove a small portion of the barrier and to reroute other sections to reduce the harm imposed on Palestinians who were cut off from lands they need.
The court asserted that Israel has a genuine security reason for building the barrier and can expropriate land in the West Bank for it. But it said the army "has a legal duty to balance properly between security considerations and humanitarian ones."
"We will abide by the ruling of our own High Court and not the panel in The Hague, with judges from the European Union who are not suspected of being particularly disposed toward Israel," Yosef Lapid, Israel's justice minister, told army radio in remarks made before the court ruling was announced.
Palestinian groups and their supporters have held a series of demonstrations in recent days to coincide with the court ruling.
Azmi Bishara, an Arab Israeli who is a member of Israel's parliament, was in the seventh day of a hunger strike today. He has been carrying out his protest in northern Jerusalem, under a tent set up alongside a main road where Israel is building part of the barrier.
"Israel has tried to present the wall as a magic formula they can use to remove Palestinians from their lives," said Mr. Bishara. "This is nonsense, it won't work."The court decision shows that there is an inhuman side to the wall."
Israel says the barrier is intended to prevent suicide bombings and other Palestinian attacks, and that it goes into the West Bank to protect some Jewish settlements.
Israel also argues that Palestinian attacks have dropped dramatically since the wall began going up two years ago. There have been no deadly Palestinian bombings inside Israel's 1967 borders in almost four months, the longest such stretch since the Palestinian uprising began almost four years ago.
However, Palestinians say the barrier separates many West Bank residents from their farmland, schools and workplaces.
The Palestinian leadership says it does not want to see a barrier, regardless of the route, but that it cannot stop Israel from building it on the West Bank boundary.
According to Israeli officials, the route that has been approved by the government would stretch for more than 400 miles. About one-quarter has been completed, including a long stretch in the northern West Bank and sections around Jerusalem.
Part of the barrier runs along the West Bank frontier, though much of it dips inside that territory. According to United Nations calculations, the proposed barrier would put about 15 percent of the West Bank on the western, or Israeli side of the barrier.
The barrier includes a network of electronic fences, walls, barbed wire, trenches, and guard towers. A chain link fence would run along about 95 percent of the proposed route, and concrete walls would make up about 5 percent, according to Israeli officials.
Israel seized the West Bank, including east Jerusalem, from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war. More than 400,000 Israelis now live in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
The Palestinian leadership is seeking all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a future state, with a capital in east Jerusalem.
Gideon Meir, deputy director general of Israel's Foreign Ministry, said that the ruling made no mention of terrorism and that the conflict would not be decided in international court.
"It will be decided in the region, where we have to negotiate and they have to negotiate," Mr. Meir said.
Christine Hauser reported from New York for this article, and Greg Myre reported from Israel.
--------
Palestinian economy chokes from stranglehold of West Bank barrier
By Donald Macintyre in Aram, West Bank
independent.co.uk
09 July 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=539443
A 1,500sq-metre showroom can look awfully empty without a single customer. Said al Jinini, one of 15 employees in the Ghazali furniture business, has not made a single sale for more than a fortnight. He feels like he is on the run from the separation barrier on which the International Court of Justice in The Hague will finally pronounce today.
The company used to own five stores. First, it shut the one in Abu Dis, the suburb of Jerusalem cut in two by the 8.5m slabs of concrete which pepper the 458-mile route of the barrier. Then, as construction proceeded apace, it shut a store in Bethany and two on the Ramallah-Jerusalem highway, where the barrier is planned to run straight down the middle of the road, amputating this West Bank suburb from Israeli territory. Soon, the store where Mr al Jinini works will be closed. Then only one shop in East Jerusalem will remain.
"I don't know whether we are escaping from the wall or being chased by it," says Mr al Jinini.
It was the freedom of movement between Arab East Jerusalem and the metropolitan West Bank that kept many businesses along the Ramallah-Jerusalem highway viable.
"Without the West Bank, East Jerusalem is nothing," says Abdullah Ghazali, the firm's boss. He faces having to close his factory on the Atarot industrial estate - on the Israeli side of the barrier - which employs 42 workers from the West Bank.
In 2002, Mr Ghazali's business made a healthy $300,000. In 2003 he made a loss of $17,000. He is now thinking of moving it to Egypt or Turkey.
And Mr Ghazali's plight is far from unique. Shaer Abu Rajab's furniture store is across the main road. Once the barrier is built, however, it will only be reachable by the same route that many tens of thousand of Palestinians will have to use to cross between the West Bank and Jerusalem, through a terminal at Kalundia, to reach work, hospitals or, in the case of up to 10,000 children, their schools. This could add several hours to the journey.
An editorial in the Israeli daily Haaretz last week said: "The entire life structure of the region's Arabs might disintegrate." Until the judgment is made, there is nothing for Mr Abu Rajab to do. "I read my newspaper and the business sleeps" he says.
Running directly through the territory on the Palestinian side of the "green line" that formed the border between Israel and Jordan until the Six-Day War, this section of the route is one of the most important that today's judgment will consider. It is for this reason that a high profile group of activists, led by the Arab-Israeli Knesset member Azmi Bishara, are conducting a hunger strike in protest against the barrier.
The court was asked by the UN - despite strong US and EU reservations - to adjudicate on the international legality of building sections of the barrier in Palestinian territory. Both Israelis and Palestinians now expect the court to lean towards the Palestinians. If so, whether it is more than a moral victory will depend partly on the quality of the judgment.
It may reinforce the Israeli Supreme's Court ruling last week that the Israeli Army had to take into account the humanitarian impact on Palestinians in deciding the route. But Israeli intelligence figures show that terrorist attacks in the northern West Bank, where the barrier is now entrenched, have reduced from 46 in 2003 to zero in the first six months of 2004. This forms a strong argument that would-be suicide bombers are being caught.
Israel will also point out that last week's judgment did not challenge the idea that security was the reason for the barrier. According to Mr Ghazali, however, as he prepares to lay off two thirds of his workers, the barrier "is strangling the economy to the disadvantage of Arabs and also of Jews. The man who is eating well and feeling good is not a terrorist, but the man who is starving turns to terrorism".
-----
Sharon to meet Peres on Sunday to hold coalition talks
haaretz
By Nathan Lipson and Agencies
09/07/2004
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/449299.html
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced Thursday that he will meet with Labor Party Chairman Shimon Peres to discuss the possible expansion of his government. "I set a meeting for Sunday with Shimon Peres to discuss the possibility of broadening the coalition," Sharon said in a speech at the annual Caesaria Conference in Jerusalem.
The prime minister said the two had agreed to meet while sitting together at the State Memorial service earlier in the day marking the 100th anniversary of the death of Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl.
Addressing the economic conference, Sharon told the audience that he is "very satisfied" with his current government.
"But... if it becomes apparent that [withdrawal] is not possible, then I will have to form a different coalition," he said.
Peres' spokesman, Yoram Dori, would only say that the opposition leader had accepted an invitation to meet with the prime minister.
Government officials said Sharon was serious about the upcoming meeting.
"Everything the prime minister has said he has put into practice. He said he will disengage from Gaza and he is doing it. I suggest you judge by his past actions just how serious this is," said a senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The official noted, however, that Sunday's talks were only preliminary.
Sharon's announcement was received with great surprise by the National Religious Party, which has in the last few weeks provided Sharon with a majority during no-confidence votes in the Knesset.
The chairman of the NRP Knesset faction, MK Nissan Slomiansky, said that he intends to convene the faction in order to discuss a continuation of that support.
"I am surprised that the prime minister is opening negotiations with the Labor Party. Did I have to hear it in an address at a convention? The prime minister cannot expect us to support him on the one hand and on the other conduct negotiations with the Labor Party behind our back".
Sources in the NRP added that, "The prime minister is the one talking about not being able to hold the rope at both ends, but ultimately it turns out that he is the one trying to do it."
Labor MK Amir Peretz said that he objects to the party joining the government.
"I think that the Labor Party must not enter the government," he said. "The party should reach an agreement with the prime minister on promoting the disengagement plan, setting a timetable, reaching an agreement on the budget and setting a date for elections."
Following the announcement, Likud Minister Uzi Landau, a leading opponent of Sharon's disengagement plan, said that he will meet Sunday with 10 MKs from the party, to discuss ways of preventing Labor from joining the coalition, Channel 1 reported.
-------- latin america
Negroponte, Honduras and Iraq
by Peter Watt,
July 09, 2004
Z Magazine
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=15&ItemID=5852
Until the word became unfashionable in the West, Iraq would have been called a colony. The equivalent of the colonial office, the US embassy in Baghdad, will be the biggest embassy in the world and will be headed by John Negroponte, a veteran neo-conservative of the Reagan administration.
Negroponte's specialty, while ambassador to Honduras under Reagan (1981-1985) was to ensure that any resistance to US hegemony in Nicaragua would be utterly crushed. The ambassador carried out his duties with considerable success. A brief look at Negroponte's Central American period gives us a hint at what bodes for US-run Iraq.
When the Sandinista revolution took power in Nicaragua in 1979, alarm bells rang in Washington. Somoza, the brutal US-backed dictator, had been overthrown by revolutionary forces after 43 years in power. US hegemony in Nicaragua, and thus in Central America was under serious threat. Washington's paranoia about Cuba and Bolshevism had thus spread to Central America - any challenge to the US system of control was treated with absolute contempt, as Nicaraguans were to learn right throughout the 1980s. Indeed, any government in Latin America that refused to give in to US domination, regardless of its policies, was decried as Communist - a label which provoked the most vitriolic condemnation in Washington throughout the Cold War.
In 1980 Jimmy Carter put pressure on the Honduran government to act as a "bulwark against Communism" against the Sandinista government. With Somoza gone the US had no internal grip inside Nicaragua and would thus have to control much of its anti-Sandinista operations from outside the country's borders. Some 5000 members of Somoza's hated brutal National Guard fled Nicaragua to Honduras when the Sandinistas took power. It was in consequence that Honduras became the training ground and launching pad for the US-funded Contra war against Nicaragua.
During the Reagan administration, and while Negroponte was ambassador to the country, "Contra" militias were trained in Honduras. The Contras had hitherto made relatively small attacks across the border into Nicaragua until in 1982 thousands of marines arrived with up to 200 military advisers - airstrips were built, arms supplied and radar stations erected, all courtesy of the US taxpayer.
The Contras were trained in some of the most gruesome guerrilla war techniques. Some were trained by military officers from Argentina's dirty war who knew nothing about the jungle but plenty about torture and execution. Others were trained in Florida and California while many others, like Honduras' military dictator, General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez, were educated in torture techniques, execution and combat at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. While it was purported by Reagan that the Contras were fighting the evil scourge of communism, referring to them as "freedom fighters," the Contras raped, tortured and terrorised the civilian population throughout the subsequent decade, leaving the destroying the civilian infrastructure, leaving tens of thousands dead and many more displaced.
Negroponte's role in Honduras was crucial as it meant maintaining US dominance in the region. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Negroponte's predecessor at the UN once declared that "Central America is the most important place in the world for the United States today." Maintaining political control of the region meant controlling its vast and rich natural resources. The Sandinistas were beginning to take matters into their own hands and started to redistribute wealth and land in Nicaragua, thus threatening US dominance in the region. Panic in the Reagan administration reached feverish and sometimes surreal levels, with the president declaring that the Sandinistas were on the verge of invading the United States. The real cause for alarm among Reaganite neo-conservatives (including the virulent anti-communist Negroponte) was that the Sandinista revolution would spread throughout El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. It had nothing to do with communism, just as the invasion of Iraq has nothing to do with preventing terrorism. More, it was that the economic system the US had maintained in Central America since 1945 was falling apart - it was simply untenable for the impoverished masses who barely had enough to eat. Washington's solution, like its present incarnation in the Middle East, was one of force and overwhelming military power in order to maintain US hegemony. Just as Negroponte acted as the strong arm of US imperialism in Central America in the 1980s he will protect US business and political interests in the Middle East, now the "most important place in the world for the United States today."
While the country was used as the launching ground for the war against Nicaragua, US aid to Honduras increased from 5 to almost $100 million with $200 million given in economic aid. Honduras now received more aid than anywhere else in the region, most of the money ultimately being controlled by the military.
Jack Binns, Negroponte's predecessor as ambassador appointed by Jimmy Carter, complained about the blatant human rights abuses in Honduras and briefed him as he took office. He later reported that Salvadoran nuns who fled to Honduras after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero had been tortured by the Honduran secret police and thrown out of helicopters alive - a speciality of the Argentine military officers employed in Honduras during Negroponte's stint. One official, Rick Chidester, claims Negroponte ordered him to remove all mention of torture and execution from his report on human rights in Honduras.
During Negroponte's stay in Honduras, human rights violations peaked. The infamous US trained death squad, Batallion 3-16, was notorious for the torture, rape, kidnapping and killing of Honduran dissidents. Hundreds of people disappeared. By the end of the 1980s at least 10,000 were dead, not to mention the conservative estimate of 200,000 deaths in Central America as a result of US intervention. Negroponte, however, claims no knowledge of the human rights abuses the US carried out and funded despite being ambassador at the time. He told CNN, "I think on balance if you look back at what we did, I think a good case can be made that there was actually less suffering in Central America as a result of the actions the United States took than there would have been if we had just folded our arms and done nothing."
Many other Honduran victims of the US led war in Central America ended up at the El Aguacate airstrip, whose creation was supervised by Negroponte, and where dissidents were detained and tortured - 185 corpses were dug up there in 2001.
When George W. Bush appointed Negroponte as US ambassador to the UN, members of Honduran death squads who had previously been granted asylum in the US were deported. It was feared they testify about Negroponte's role in human rights abuses while ambassador to Honduras.
Interestingly, none of this came up in the US and British mainstream media when career journalists heaped praise on Reagan shortly after his death. Somehow, amidst the fawning in mainstream and elite circles it was forgotten that the Reagan administration carried out in Central America one of the worst campaigns of state terrorism of the late 20th century. All of this in the context of the present situation in Iraq - one might expect that the media would pick up on the fact that many of the present incumbents in Washington are those who were responsible for the terror in Central America in the 1980s. John Negroponte's appointment as ambassador, as if it was not clear enough by now, tells something about what Bush et al have in store for Iraq.
What should we expect now that the US has handed "sovereignty" back to Iraqis? What kind of sovereignty is it? Will it be more sovereign than Honduras, which was effectively controlled by the CIA and the US military?
Of course, it is nothing like sovereignty. Some 250,000 occupation soldiers will stay in the country long after the US has left. Not having allowed any free elections, the US has installed a puppet government that will receive orders from Washington. Should the new government fail to do so, it can expect to be overthrown either by US backed coup organised from the US embassy or outright invasion (again). Iraqi sovereignty does not even allow the courts to prosecute foreign civilians or contractors or mercenaries should they commit a crime. Any mercenary guilty of killing an Iraqi is immune from legal prosecution. The new government has no control of the quarter of a million soldiers that will continue to occupy the country and intimidate the civilian population. The American government will determine how the budget of $18 billion for reconstruction is spent. Iraq's natural resources will be handed over to mostly American private companies - control of oil reserves the most obvious example. Moreover, the Bush administration has ensured that Iraq's public services should be milked for profit for US corporations who will now control much of the country's infrastructure. So much for "sovereignty."
We might consider the reaction of people in the US if a foreign power invaded, killed thousands of civilians, destroyed the country's infrastructure after a ten year bombing campaign and sanctions that left up to a million dead, denied Americans the right to vote while making lofty claims about freedom and democracy, shot people protesting the invasion, shot carloads of people at checkpoints and condemned present and future generations to all kinds of disease and illness and maiming as a result of exposure to depleted uranium and contact with unexploded cluster bombs. How would Americans react when the foreign power supposedly left the country, leaving hundreds of thousands of soldiers and mercenaries in the US, all immune from prosecution in American courts after appointing a puppet government that took its orders from the foreign capital and having given American natural resources and public services over to foreign companies. How would Americans react to being denied the right to vote when the leaders of the occupying power strutted about making asserting this was a victory for democracy?
The anger and outrage Americans would feel is now felt by Iraqis. Resistance to the US occupying forces will increase, and eventually, like all imperial powers, the Americans will be forced to leave - because of the scale of the resistance and because of the chaos wreaked by the occupying forces. Yet before that happens we are likely to see a great deal of violence. The US will attempt to crush all kinds of resistance to their power, which is only likely to become more organized and apparent.
Interestingly, none of this came up in the mainstream media when career journalists heaped praise on Reagan shortly after his death. Somehow, amongst the fawning and whining in mainstream and elite circles it was forgotten that the Reagan administration carried out in Central America one of the worst campaigns of state terrorism of the late 20th century. All of this in the context of the present situation in Iraq - one might expect that the media would pick up on the fact that many of the present incumbents in Washington are those who were responsible for the terror in Central America in the 1980s. John Negroponte's appointment as ambassador, as if it was not clear enough by now, tells something of what Bush et al have in store for Iraq.
Peter Watt is an independent journalist and activist. He presently lives in France.
-------- spies
Embassies restrict spy missions
July 09, 2004
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040709-121015-8207r.htm
The State Department is restricting the roles of some special operations troops who have been assigned secretly to U.S. embassies to gather intelligence on al Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups, defense sources say.
The Pentagon has been placing Green Berets and other special operations forces in embassies, under diplomatic cover, to enhance the United States' ability to locate al Qaeda cells and prepare to attack them. The undercover troops are referred to as operational command elements (OCE).
The mission is generally called "operational preparation of the battle space." It is basic spy work - setting up a network of sources and identifying safe houses and landing zones.
But according to the two defense sources in the special operations community, State Department embassy personnel, in some instances, are placing restrictions on what the undercover commandos can do. In one case, said a source, a Green Beret is not allowed to work outside the embassy.
The source declined to specify the embassy. But another source said the OCE program has run into problems in Africa, where al Qaeda is striving to set up cells and overthrow secular governments.
"There are certain ambassadors who don't want them there," this second source said. The officials described a culture within the State Department's Foreign Service that is opposed to non-State officials working out of embassies.
"It's the 'you're not one of us' kind of thing," the official said.
Traditionally, American ambassadors have a big say in what types of Pentagon operations are allowed in their country.
The restrictions on commando operations has angered senior Pentagon officials, who complain the rules have bogged down their plans in the global war on terrorism. The two sources say the issue has been raised at interagency meetings between State and Pentagon policy-makers.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to comment for this story.
A State Department official provided The Washington Times with a statement.
"As a matter of policy, the State Department does not comment on intelligence matters. That said, each U.S. ambassador has, as his top priority, keeping the United States safe from terrorists. All our ambassadors are dedicated to doing everything in their power to achieve that end.
"The State Department here in Washington and our embassies overseas have tirelessly supported the Department of Defense as it plays its important role in the fight against terrorism."
The insertion of commandos into embassies is part of an aggressive agenda set by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for U.S. Special Operations Command (SoCom) in Tampa, Fla.
On July 22, 2002, Mr. Rumsfeld signed a memo stamped "secret" that greatly empowered SoCom to conduct manhunts against al Qaeda.
"The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise," the signed memo said.
SoCom, Mr. Rumsfeld decreed, "will be responsible for conducting operational preparation of the battle space required in this aspect of the war against terrorism."
It was after this authorization that SoCom began dispatching commandos to embassies overseas.
The defense secretary's goal is to develop the kind of "actionable intelligence" that has led to the killing or capturing of significant al Qaeda figures and of Saddam Hussein and his two sons.
In January 2003, Mr. Rumsfeld announced that he had elevated SoCom from being a "supporting" command to a "supported" command - meaning it can plan and execute its own war plans.
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INTELLIGENCE
C.I.A. Director Again Disputes Hijacker's Iraqi Contact
July 9, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09inte.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, July 8 - George J. Tenet, the departing director of central intelligence, has told Congress that the C.I.A. is "increasingly skeptical" that a Sept. 11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001, an assessment very different in tone from continuing assertions by Vice President Dick Cheney that such a meeting might have taken place.
In a letter, sent to Congress on July 1, Mr. Tenet said Mr. Atta "would have been unlikely to undertake the substantial risk of contacting any Iraqi official" at such a date, when the Sept. 11 plot was well under way.
The statement, the most complete public assessment by the agency on the issue, was sent to the Senate Armed Services Committee in response to a question posed by the committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, at a hearing on March 9. It was made public by Senator Levin on Thursday, as Mr. Tenet bid farewell to his colleagues at a ceremony at the agency's headquarters. He leaves his post this weekend.
Within the Bush administration, Mr. Cheney has been the most vigorous proponent of the theory that Iraq and Al Qaeda had a cooperative relationship before the Sept. 11 attacks. He has cited the assertion that Mr. Atta met with Ahmed al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer, just five months before the attacks as possible evidence of such cooperation.
A staff report released June 16 by the presidential commission investigating the attacks concluded that there was no evidence of such a collaborative relationship. But in a television interview the next day, Mr. Cheney argued that the report of the meeting, from the Czech intelligence service, had "never been proven - it's never been refuted."
Mr. Tenet's statement began, "Although we cannot rule it out, we are increasingly skeptical that such a meeting occurred.''
A spokesman for Mr. Cheney, Kevin Kellems, said the vice president had learned about Mr. Tenet's response on Thursday. Mr. Kellems noted that Mr. Tenet had told Congress on Feb. 24, in reference to a possible meeting between Mr. Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer, "We can't prove that one way or another.''
Mr. Kellems said Mr. Cheney's public statements had "reflected the evolving judgment of the intelligence community, as briefed to him by the Central Intelligence Agency.''
The C.I.A. has long expressed skepticism about the idea that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated to carry out the Sept. 11 attacks. In Congressional testimony in March, Mr. Tenet said he had privately intervened on several occasions to correct public misstatements on intelligence by Mr. Cheney and others, including a claim by the vice president in January that trailers found in Iraq were still believed to be biological weapons factories.
In his June 17 interview, on CNBC, Mr. Cheney described himself as a skeptic about the idea of a meeting. But he did not mention the idea that intelligence officials believed such a meeting would have been unlikely.
"We have never been able to prove that there was a connection there on 9/11," Mr. Cheney said at the time. "The one thing we had is the Iraq - the Czech intelligence service report saying that Mohamed Atta had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official at the embassy on April 9, 2001. That's never been proven - it's never been refuted."
Mr. Tenet's statement was written after the Sept. 11 commission published its staff report, which said there was no evidence that such a meeting had taken place, and pointed to other evidence, including Mr. Atta's cellphone records, to cast doubt on the idea that any meeting had occurred.
In a written statement on Thursday, Senator Levin, a leading critic of the administration's pre-war intelligence, said the C.I.A. statement "demonstrates that it was the administration, not the C.I.A, that exaggerated the relations between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda." Senator Levin and other Democrats plan to reiterate that theme on Friday, when the Senate Intelligence Committee issues a report on prewar intelligence that will include sharp criticism of the C.I.A. but will sidestep the question of how the Bush administration used that intelligence to make the case for war.
Mr. Tenet's farewell on Thursday, at a bittersweet ceremony at C.I.A. headquarters, came seven years to the week after he took over as director of central intelligence. Mr. Tenet, 51, has been a hero to many intelligence officials, who credit him with restoring budgets and morale, but he leaves as his and other intelligence-gathering agencies are facing more criticism than at any time in nearly three decades.
The retirement ceremony was closed to journalists but a transcript of Mr. Tenet's remarks released by the agency included a pre-emptive defense against the critics.
"In the end, the American people will weigh and assess our record where intelligence has done well and where we have fallen short," Mr. Tenet said. "And, aware of the difficulties and limitations we face, they will honor and recognize your service. My only wish is that those whose job it is to help us do better show the same balance and care in recognizing how far we have come, in how bold you have been, in what the full balance sheet says."
Mr. Tenet and his top deputy, John McLaughlin, used their remarks both to call attention to what they regard as the agency's recent successes, including progress in winnowing the ranks of Al Qaeda's senior leadership since the Sept. 11 attacks, and to underscore the magnitude of the challenges at hand.
Mr. McLaughlin is to take over as acting director on Sunday, the day Mr. Tenet's resignation takes effect. President Bush appears to be moving toward appointing a permanent successor this summer, and Mr. Tenet offered a strong endorsement of his deputy, whom he called "a brilliant, caring leader."
Sunday is the seventh anniversary of Mr. Tenet's swearing in, a tenure second in length only to that of Allen Dulles, who held the job under Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. Mr. Tenet has said he is stepping down for personal reasons, and in particular to spend more time with his family, including his only son, who will be a high school senior next year and who was in second grade when his father began work at the C.I.A. in 1995, as deputy director.
--------
In Valedictory, Tenet Defends CIA From Past, Present Critics
By Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37670-2004Jul8.html
A day before the release of a searing congressional report about intelligence failures in Iraq, departing Director George J. Tenet told CIA employees not to be distracted by the criticism.
In a rousing valedictory yesterday before cheering colleagues and friends at CIA headquarters, Tenet defended the embattled organization he has run for seven years. He is at the center of a fierce debate over prewar allegations about Saddam Hussein's forbidden weapons.
"The American people know about your honesty and integrity, of your commitment to truth," Tenet said. Predicting that the public will "recognize and honor" the CIA's overall record, Tenet added, "My only wish is that those whose job it is to help us do better show the same balance and care: in recognizing how far we have come; in recognizing how bold we have been; in recognizing what the full balance sheet says."
This morning, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is to release an extensive report about the intelligence failures preceding the war in Iraq and, according to officials who have seen the report, will portray prewar assertions about Iraq's weapons as almost entirely false. By all accounts, the report will harshly criticize the CIA and its prewar statements -- now largely discredited -- about Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
Tenet said last month that he is resigning for personal reasons, but the timing is broadly seen as related to the intelligence debacle in Iraq and the campaign season debate about whether the Bush administration exaggerated the case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
By agreement between Republicans and Democrats, today's committee report will not deal with the highly charged subject of whether President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top officials distorted the intelligence while building the case for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. This will allow Bush to distance himself from the specious intelligence. Democrats, with the election less than four months away, are determined not to let him off the hook.
Yesterday, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.) released an unclassified version of a statement Tenet made in March at a committee hearing in which he dismissed an allegation that Cheney has promoted tying Iraq to al Qaeda.
Asked about the allegation that Sept.11, 2001, hijack leader Mohamed Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer, Tenet said that "we are increasingly skeptical" and that there is no "credible information" that such a meeting occurred. Cheney originally said the meeting was "pretty well confirmed"; as recently as last month, he said "we just don't know" if the meeting occurred.
A spokesman said Cheney's public statements "have reflected the evolving judgment of the intelligence community."
Today's committee report will fault Tenet and the CIA for relying too heavily on circumstantial, outdated intelligence and for the weakness of its human contacts in Iraq. The nearly 500-page document will also say there is no evidence to support the claim that CIA analysts colored their judgment because of perceived or actual political pressure from White House officials.
Tenet yesterday did not address the specifics of the Iraq intelligence. Instead, he spoke about how CIA analysts work "on complex subjects, against short deadlines, with bits and pieces of information." Near the end of a two-hour ceremony during which his tenure was hailed by senior colleagues for raising the agency from the doldrums when he took over in 1997, Tenet said: "We have rebuilt every aspect of our business."
"If people or leaders want to take you back in a different direction," Tenet told agency officials, "then it is your voices that must be heard to say -- we know better and we're not going to put up with it."
"History," Tenet said, "may bring additional perspective, additional clarity, to the current debate on intelligence. But this much is clear right now: Your work is far too important for distractions."
The agency released a transcript of the remarks at the farewell ceremony.
Although a Tenet successor is not expected to be named today, the White House continues to indicate it may propose a replacement in the next few days, which would give the Senate less than two weeks to act before Congress goes into recess.
Among those said to be under consideration is Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, who, as a friend of Tenet's, attended yesterday's ceremony. Armitage, according to two senior Democrats on the intelligence panel, is probably the only Bush appointee who could win bipartisan support at this late date.
According to a senior Bush official, others being considered are deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), Reps. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) and Christopher Shays (R-Conn.). Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), a former CIA case officer and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, was an early favorite, but Democrats objected to him. Another candidate mentioned in media accounts, former Navy secretary John F. Lehman, is not among those being actively considered, an official said.
At the sendoff, several top agency and administration officials praised Tenet for his work, including his efforts to restore morale at the CIA after the Iran-contra congressional investigations and the Aldrich H. Ames espionage scandal.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made a surprise appearance, telling the audience he wanted to pay his respects to Tenet's "skill, seriousness of purpose" and the job he had done in linking the Defense Department to the intelligence community. Rumsfeld, 72, said if he returns in 25 years to be defense secretary again, as he had done this time, he hopes Tenet "would come back to the CIA."
Staff writer Dana Priest contributed to this report.
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U.S. Spies Accused of Hyping Iraqi Weapons Threat
July 9, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-intelligence.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence agencies overstated the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, relied on dubious sources and ignored contrary evidence in the run-up to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, a Senate committee reported on Friday.
In a harshly critical report, the Senate Intelligence Committee took U.S. spy agencies to task for numerous failures in reporting on alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which President Bush cited in building a case for war. No such weapons have been found.
But the report found no sign that the White House had pressured analysts to reach pre-set conclusions.
``The committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities,'' it said.
The second part of the committee's investigation -- examining how the Bush administration used the intelligence -- was unlikely to be finished before the Nov. 2 presidential election.
The bipartisan report, which ran to more than 500 pages and was partly blacked out for security reasons, said that conclusions in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons programs ``either overstated or were not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting.''
It found that U.S. agencies relied too heavily on Iraqi defectors and foreign intelligence services for information and could not check the reliability of such reports.
'IF WE KNEW WHAT WE KNOW NOW'
U.S. Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said the Senate would not have voted overwhelmingly in 2002 to approve the war if it had known how deeply flawed the intelligence was.
``The administration at all levels, and to some extent us, used bad information to bolster its case for war,'' he said. ``And we in Congress would not have authorized that war ... if we knew what we know now.''
Rockefeller said the Iraq war left the United States less safe and would affect national security for generations.
``Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower,'' he said. ``We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before.''
Some Democrats said it remained an open question whether subtle pressure was applied by the administration to shape the intelligence, and that needed further scrutiny.
Bush cited intelligence suggesting that Iraq was aggressively pursuing unconventional weapons programs as a key justification for his decision to go to war in 2003.
Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said spy agencies suffered from a ``collective group think'' in which the intelligence gathered was viewed with the presumption that Iraq was actively pursuing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
``This 'group think' caused the community to interpret ambiguous evidence, such as the procurement of dual-use technology, as conclusive evidence of the existence of WMD programs,'' said Roberts, a Kansas Republican.
The report blamed managers from the CIA director down for failing to adequately question analysts about their assessments and to recognize when analysts had lost their objectivity.
The report said U.S. intelligence ``did not have a single'' source collecting information about Iraqi weapons programs after 1998, when U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq.
Almost all of the problems with human spying capabilities stemmed from ``a broken corporate culture and poor management,'' the report said.
CIA Director George Tenet announced his resignation last month citing personal reasons, and will step down on Sunday.
John McLaughlin, who will replace Tenet as acting CIA director, said the Senate panel spent nearly a year essentially dissecting one intelligence report.
``It is wrong to exaggerate the flaws or leap to the judgment that our challenges with prewar Iraq weapons intelligence are evidence of sweeping problems across the broad spectrum of issues with which the intelligence community must deal,'' he said at a rare news conference at CIA headquarters.
The committee found that agencies focused on reports that Iraq had developed mobile laboratories to produce biological weapons and ignored information that contradicted this view.
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BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'IMPERIAL HUBRIS'
C.I.A. Officer Critiques Terror Policy
July 9, 2004
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/books/09BOOK.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Imperial Hubris," the scalding new book by a current Central Intelligence Agency officer - who was able to publish the book on the condition that his real name not be revealed - is an assessment of America's war on terror that is bound to provoke large heapings of controversy, on both the right and the left, among hardliners on Iraq and critics of the administration alike. Readers will doubtless contest some or many of the things Anonymous has to say, but he pulls few punches in this book and gives us a fascinating window on America's war with Al Qaeda - at least as framed by one senior analyst, who seems to have put all bureaucratic niceties aside.
It is a book that not only slings all manner of arrows at America's political, military and intelligence establishment (going back to the mid-70's, with the qualified exception of President Ronald Reagan and his C.I.A. director, William J. Casey), but a book that also calls for a complete re-evaluation of the nation's foreign policy toward Muslims and the Middle East.
In its pages, prescient analyses of recent developments in the Persian Gulf and Middle East (informed by the author's experience in the mid-1990's as head of a C.I.A. unit assigned to tracking Osama bin Laden) jostle for space with incendiary calls for a Shermanesque exercise of American military power in a potential war with the Muslim world; maverick assessments of Islamic attitudes toward the United States, with shrill exhortations for America to adopt a neo-isolationist stance based on narrowly defined self-interest.
If the country's foreign policy remains status quo, Anonymous warns, "America's military confrontation with Islam" will broaden "with escalating human and economic expense." He predicts that Al Qaeda "will attack the continental United States again, that its next strike will be more damaging than that of 11 September 2001, and could include use of weapons of mass destruction."
In addition, Anonymous accuses United States leaders, elites and media of being in denial about the nature of the Qaeda threat and the balance sheet on the war on terror: he argues that America must stop using the terrorist paradigm for Al Qaeda and accept "the fact" that the group is "leading a popular, worldwide, and increasingly powerful Islamic insurgency," and he asserts that United States victories against Al Qaeda have thus far been tactical ones that have failed to slow "the shift in strategic advantage toward al Qaeda."
In the course of this book, Anonymous excoriates American leaders for not having had an immediate military response planned for an event like 9/11: "None had been planned in the eleven months since the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, or in the five-plus years since bin Laden declared war" on the United States.
And he assails American generals for passively accepting their civilian leaders' directives for waging light, fast operations (of the sort favored by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld). "Fight and win quickly; do not kill many of the enemy, destroy much of his property, or kill many of his civilians; and, above all, lose the barest minimum of U.S. soldiers because the soft American public will not tolerate high casualties" - this sort of cautious, fastidious war-making, Anonymous contends, is "a recipe for disaster," invariably leaving behind "half-finished or, more accurately, half-started wars that will be refought later."
Anonymous argues that the "high-profile role" of the F.B.I. in America's counter-bin Laden campaign lends it "too much law-enforcement color," promoting an "international version of the saga of the American West, where U.S. intelligence officers and soldiers are sent out, like the storied Texas Rangers" to get their man. This approach, Anonymous says, will never work "against a large and talented insurgent organization like al Qaeda" because "the procedure neither kills nor captures fast enough to outpace al Qaeda's astounding ability to replicate."
When it comes to his own organization, the C.I.A., Anonymous accuses its leaders of "moral cowardice" for "falsely assuring policymakers and congressional overseers that cooperation" with the F.B.I. was "seamless." He also describes the overall intelligence community (the I.C.) as being "risk-averse": senior officers, who are clear, concise and unbiased among staff, he says, become "more selective when deciding what to tell policymakers, including the president."
Although Anonymous does not explicitly deal with intelligence about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (which some C.I.A. analysts questioned, but which the agency's chief, George Tenet, termed a "slam dunk" in Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack"), he adds this biting aside: "Substantive selectivity can exclude subjects in which policy makers are uninterested or those that will stir anger, such as intelligence showing a specific U.S. policy is cocked up. This process also yields the deselection of data that would spur policymaker requests for action that, if taken, might yield an IC failure - and so criticism from Congress, policymakers, or the media - or expose the IC's unaddressed systemic failures."
Anonymous has little to say about the performance of the bin Laden unit he headed from 1996 to 1999 - a unit that the veteran intelligence writer James Bamford criticized in a recent book ("A Pretext for War") for failing to penetrate Al Qaeda's leadership. According to a staff report by the Sept. 11 commission, leaders of the bin Laden station were frustrated when a plan to capture the Qaeda chief in 1998 was not recommended by C.I.A. leadership for approval by the Clinton White House; the following year, Anonymous was transferred to another C.I.A. position.
Drawing upon nearly two decades of experience in national security issues related to Afghanistan and South Asia, Anonymous draws a bleak picture of America's post-9/11 engagements abroad. As he sees it, Afghanistan has become "a classic lose-lose situation" in which an American pullout means that the Taliban and Al Qaeda "will resume control of much of the country," and a decision by America to stay means that "the Islamist insurgency will intensify" and "ultimately triumph whether or not the United States massively increases its occupying force and takes the war to the enemy as did the Russians."
"None of this had to be," Anonymous writes, citing what he sees as a series of crucial missteps, including a failure to attack immediately after 9/11 (before Al Qaeda had a chance to disperse); a failure to close the country's borders; a failure to draw lessons from the British and Soviet experiences in Afghanistan; and a failure to understand the difficulties of trying to transplant an American-style democracy to such a culturally alien land.
Although Anonymous regards Afghanistan as a necessary war, he sees the American invasion of Iraq as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantages." For Osama bin Laden, Anonymous argues, the American invasion and occupation of Iraq were like "a Christmas present you long for but never expected to receive" - a gift from Washington that "will haunt, hurt, and hound Americans for years to come." He sees Iraq becoming another breeding ground for Al Qaeda, and the postwar insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan as magnets for anti-American fighters.
"U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990's," he writes. "As a result, I think it fair to conclude that the United States of America remains bin Laden's only indispensable ally."
In this volume, Anonymous tries - as he did in his last book, "Through Our Enemies' Eyes" - to show how Muslims regard Osama bin Laden. He argues that the Qaeda leader should not be dismissed as an irrational terrorist or an avatar of an Islamic lunatic fringe. Rather, he describes Mr. bin Laden as "the most respected, loved, romantic, charismatic, and perhaps able figure in the last 150 years of Islamic history" - someone seen by many Muslims as waging a heartfelt defense of their faith, "a practical warrior, not an apocalyptic terrorist in search of Armageddon."
Anonymous contests the argument put out by members of the Bush administration that Mr. bin Laden wants to destroy America because he hates our values, freedoms and ideas. In Anonymous's view, the Qaeda leader hates us "because of our policies and actions in the Muslim world" and Al Qaeda's attacks are meant to advance a set of clear, focused and limited foreign policy goals: namely, an end to American aid to Israel: the removal of American forces from the Arabian Peninsula; an end to the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq; an end to American support for repressive, apostate Muslim regimes like Saudi Arabia; an end to Amerian support for Russia, India and China against their Muslim militants; and an end to American pressure on Arab energy producers to keep oil prices low.
If current American policies toward the Muslim world are not changed, Anonymous writes near the end of this harrowing and often deliberately provocative volume, America will be left with only a military option for defending itself - an option he says that should be used not "daintily," as it has been in recent years, but with the sort of bloody-minded ferocity used "in France and on Pacific islands, and from skies over Tokyo and Dresden" during World War II.
The war on terror, he warns, "has the potential to last beyond our children's lifetimes and to be fought mostly on U.S. soil."
-------- un
Ron Paul Continues Fight for US Sovereignty
antiwar.com
July 9, 2004
http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2962
Congressman Ron Paul continued his fight this week against the United Nations and its global government ambitions, authoring two amendments to a State department funding bill that would hobble the UN by cutting off its main source of funding: American taxpayers.
Paul's first amendment would prohibit the use of taxpayer funds for payment of UN dues, an important step toward withdrawing America from the UN altogether (Paul's popular bill, HR 1146, would not only withdraw America from the UN, but also evict the organization from its New York headquarters).
The second amendment directs the administration to withdraw the United States from UNESCO (the United Nation's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), a virulently anti-American and anti-western UN offshoot. UNESCO is nothing more than a propaganda mouthpiece for the usual globalist causes, including international abortion and population control; politically correct UN curriculum for American schools; UN control of federal land in America; cultural relativism; and global taxation, just to name a few.
President Reagan wisely withdrew the U.S. from UNESCO in 1984, citing the organization's financial mismanagement, blatant anti-Americanism, and general hostility to freedom. Unfortunately, America rejoined UNESCO in 2002, promising to pay $60 million annually in dues just for starters - fully one-quarter of the organization's budget. Paul's amendment would put a stop to this.
"It is time to stand up for American sovereignty," Paul stated. "It is time to stop spending taxpayer money to fund an organization that is actively hostile to American laws and ideals. Participation in the United Nations is simply incompatible with our national sovereignty. Participation in UNESCO and its hate-America agenda is nonsensical. More and more Americans are beginning to realize how destructive the UN really is, and those Americans are pressuring Congress to stop giving billions of dollars to the enemies of American sovereignty."
-------- us
U.S. Marine Is Safe, but Still Subject Of Mystery
Man Once Feared Dead Arrives at Beirut Embassy
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36686-2004Jul8?language=printer
BEIRUT, July 8 -- A Lebanese-born U.S. Marine who had been reported captured and beheaded in Iraq was brought alive to the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on Thursday night, but few details about his case were available, U.S. officials said.
Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, 24, a translator with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, arrived at the heavily guarded embassy about 6 p.m., said spokeswoman Elizabeth Wharton. "An embassy vehicle picked him up in Beirut and brought him to the embassy," she said.
The confirmation that Hassoun was at the embassy ended days of uncertainty about his safety and whereabouts, while family members in Lebanon and Utah had refused to confirm or deny reports that he was present in this country.
Hassoun had disappeared from his Marine base near Fallujah on June 19 and later was shown on al-Jazeera satellite television, blindfolded, with a sword hanging over his head. A group calling itself Islamic Response asserted responsibility for his kidnapping and threatened to kill him.
A militant group claiming to be the Ansar al-Sunna Army said on a Web site Saturday that it had beheaded the Marine. But the group said Sunday that it had not issued the statement, and a posting on another Internet site said Hassoun was alive.
On Monday, al-Jazeera reported that it had received a report from Islamic militants saying that Hassoun was in a safe place and had promised to quit the Marines.
On Wednesday, reports surfaced that he was in Lebanon.
At the Pentagon on Thursday, Army Brig. Gen. David Rodriguez, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said officials had little information about Hassoun. "The investigation is ongoing, and we don't know how he got there or what went on between the time that he was reported missing from his unit until he got into Lebanon," Rodriguez said at a media briefing. "He came to the embassy compound, and under our control, of his own accord."
Hassoun's mother and father, one of his brothers and his new Lebanese wife joined him at the embassy in the Awkar neighborhood of Beirut, according to family members.
"I was so excited, but he's always calm and steady," said a brother, Sami Hassoun, 26. "We shook hands and hugged and kissed."
"He's alive now, he's safe and sound -- that's all I want from God," he added.
But in Tripoli, 50 miles north of Beirut, where Hassoun's family lives, a fight broke out and a relative of Hassoun shot and killed two people and injured a third person, Lebanese officials reported. Other Tripoli residents had accused Hassoun of being a traitor because he left Lebanon and fought with the Marines in Iraq, his brother said.
The family member, Mohamad Said Hassoun, was arrested in the killings, according to internal security forces in Tripoli.
"Everybody here is calling us traitors," Sami Hassoun said. "I think somebody pushed those people to this to try to hurt my family and my relatives. There's no background for these things."
Police were deployed to guard the Hassoun family home, an apartment on the second floor of a six-story building in a low-income area of Tripoli, a witness said. The neighborhood is known as one of the most conservative and religious in northern Lebanon.
Hassoun was raised there and attended American schools in Lebanon until moving to the United States in 1999. He lived with his brothers in Utah for two years and joined the Marines in 2001.
The family's appeals for Hassoun's release had included efforts to establish their credibility as devout Muslims. A spokesman for the family in the United States, Tarek Nosseir, issued statements wishing for Hassoun's safety in the name of God.
Family friends in Lebanon had sought help from Lebanon's Jamaa Islamiya, an Islamic group associated with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, according to the group's deputy leader, Ibrahim Masri.
A week ago, Jamaa Islamiya leaders discussed Hassoun with a delegation of Iraqi Sunni Muslim leaders visiting Beirut, Masri said. The Lebanese group asked the Iraqis to pass on a plea for Hassoun's release to groups that might be holding him hostage, he said.
Masri said his group opposed the kidnapping and killing of Americans in Iraq. "He's not a traitor. No one considers him a traitor," Masri said. "This kind of killing is a crime, not a path to justice."
In the Salt Lake City suburb of West Jordan, Utah, family members had no comment.
The Hassoun house is in a new subdivision at the foot of the snowcapped Wasatch Range. Neighbors and a Boy Scout troop had covered the front yard with American flags, and reporters camped out on nearby streets awaiting developments.
The U.S. Navy initially termed Hassoun's disappearance "unauthorized leave," but his status was changed a week later, on June 27, when he was shown on television under threat.
Nosseir expressed the family's gratitude when the Marines officially revoked the initial designation and began calling the corporal a captive.
On Wednesday, two investigators from the FBI arrived at the West Jordan home to question Hassoun's relatives. That sparked renewed questions about his disappearance and motives.
Hassoun was reported not to have returned to Utah since joining the Marines. He had been married to an American, but they divorced. His family said he married his new wife, a cousin, by proxy several months ago. His father signed the marriage contract for him, under Islamic law.
Hassoun attended college part time and held a sales job in Utah. At one point, family friends said, his mother and father also lived in West Jordan, but the father returned to Lebanon.
Pentagon officials said they did not know what happened after Hassoun left his unit or why he ended up in Lebanon, but they said investigations would focus on Hassoun's account of the situation.
Rodriguez said Hassoun was not "picked up" by military officials but instead "came to link up" with embassy personnel.
Lawrence Di Rita, the chief Pentagon spokesman, said officials were being guarded about Hassoun's situation.
"I'm saying we don't know and there's no sense speculating, because most of the speculation to this point has been confused," Di Rita said. "He's at the U.S. Embassy compound. He's alive. And those are two things we're very grateful for. And beyond that, we'll have more to say when we have it to say."
Staff writers Josh White in Washington and T.R. Reid in Denver contributed to this report.
--------
Circumstances Still Murky as U.S. Marine Leaves Beirut
July 9, 2004
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/international/middleeast/09CND-MARI.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
An American marine reported missing in Iraq three weeks ago arrived today at a military hospital at the Ramstein Air Base in Germany, according to several news agencies, a day after he turned up at the American Embassy in Lebanon. But the circumstances surrounding his disappearance continued to be murky.
Wassef Ali Hassoun, 24, the Lebanese-American Marine corporal who vanished from his base on June 20, made his way Thursday night to the embassy in suburban Aukar accompanied by relatives, embassy officials said.
But today, at a news conference at the State Department in Washington, a spokesman, Richard Boucher, said officials still cannot provide more information on his disappearance.
"I don't have any further information for you on how Corporal Hassoun got to Lebanon and the path that he followed, what the circumstances were between his departure from his unit to his arrival at the embassy in Beirut," Mr. Boucher said. "He came voluntarily. He remained at the embassy, while embassy and Department of Defense officials worked out the arrangements for his departure."
Corporal Hassoun was transported by a military plane from Beirut to Germany this morning. At the military hospital there, he is to undergo medical and psychological examinations and be questioned by investigators. Ultimately, he is expected to return to his home base, at Camp Lejeune, N.C., with possibly a brief stopover in Washington.
Contradictory reports about Corporal Hassoun, including reports of his beheading at the hands of his captors, have created a confusing picture of what may or may not have happened to him.
His sudden resurfacing Thursday - and a shootout earlier in the day near his relatives' home in the northern city of Tripoli - only added to the mystery.
In Washington, Defense Department and Marine Corps officials said Thursday that they had scant information about Corporal Hassoun, and declined to comment on most aspects of his case pending the outcome of two parallel military investigations.
The Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency are both conducting inquiries into the events surrounding Corporal Hassoun's disappearance from his unit. Officials said that naval investigators were looking at a range of possibilities, including reports that he was kidnapped, deserted his unit or staged an elaborate hoax with the aid of Iraqi confederates.
Defense officials said they had no details on how he got from his unit in Iraq to Beirut. "The investigation is ongoing, and we don't know how he got there or what went on between the time that he was reported missing from his unit until he got to Lebanon," Brig. Gen. David Rodriguez, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters in Washington.
General Rodriguez said the corporal "came to link up" with personnel at the embassy in Beirut, and had not been picked up by the military.
News reports in Lebanon said members of the extended Hassoun clan had opened fire on the corporal's relatives, accusing them of being American collaborators. Two people died, the reports said, but not members of the clan.
Tripoli is a stronghold of Sunni Muslim fundamentalists, and anti-American feelings have been running high throughout the Middle East because of the invasion of Iraq and American support for Israel.
Sami Hassoun, the corporal's older brother, said, "We have an emergency here," and hung up when reached by telephone. Local reports said members of the 1,000-member clan had blocked the family's street with vehicles.
The Lebanese government refused to comment. Last weekend, it confirmed reports that Corporal Hassoun had been killed.
On Tuesday, three days after Corporal Hassoun was reported beheaded, his family said he had been released from captivity in Iraq. At the time, Sami Hassoun said the family had received a sign that his brother had been released.
On June 27, the Arab television network Al Jazeera broadcast a videotape of the corporal showing him wearing a blindfold and with a sword suspended over his head. A group called Islamic Response said it would behead him if the United States did not release all of its Iraqi prisoners.
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 would soon release pictures of the corporal's beheading. That message also said he was romantically involved with an Arab woman and had been lured from his base.
On Sunday, the same group posted yet another Internet message saying the earlier statement was a fake.
On Monday, Islamic Response issued yet another message through Al Jazeera saying the corporal had been moved to a safe place. The family confirmed the release, but would not give any details about the information it had received.
At a news conference outside Corporal Hassoun's home in West Jordan, Utah, on Thursday, Mohamad Hassoun told reporters that the family had spoken to the corporal on the telephone.
"He sounded O.K.," Mr. Hassoun said of his brother. "I was told he lost some weight, but he is well."
"We are very grateful to Allah that we have our brother Wassef back in safe hands at the U.S. Embassy," he said. "We are very sad to also hear of the news that took place earlier today in Tripoli - for the loss of life there. Those are some of the reasons that we left that country and came to the U.S."
Throughout the day, the house was draped with dozens of American flags, but there were no signs of celebration. The blinds remained shut and the curtains closed.
Neighbors, who have supported the Hassoun family since images of Corporal Hassoun in captivity were first broadcast, said they were overjoyed at the news that he was safe. But that excitement was tempered somewhat by reports of an investigation into why he left his unit.
"I think it is great news that he's safe," said Maury Mingle, 40, who lives across the street from the Hassoun home. "But I've also heard all sorts of speculation about him. I don't think we should be talking about such things until he's had a chance to be checked out and receive some care."
Neil MacFarquhar reported from Cairo and Beirut for this article and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Melissa Sanford contributed reporting from West Jordan, Utah.
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Other Services Eyed by Army for Recruiting
July 9, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09army.html?hp
WASHINGTON, July 8 - The Army is looking for a few good sailors and airmen. Actually, more than just a few.
In what some military experts see as another sign of how the Army's commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan have strained it, the service for the first time will soon begin aggressively recruiting thousands of sailors and airmen who are otherwise scheduled to leave the Navy and Air Force because of cutbacks.
Under a new program called Operation Blue to Green, the Army plans to offer bonuses of up to $10,000, in some cases, and four weeks of extra training to airmen and sailors willing to trade in their dress-blue uniforms for Army green fatigues. The Army is especially interested in men and women who have jobs that are readily transferable to Army positions, like mechanics and logisticians.
Many details must still be worked out and final Pentagon approval is still pending, but Army officials say the new program is a marriage of convenience. The Army is temporarily increasing its ranks by 30,000 soldiers by 2006, and will need to recruit at least 77,000 soldiers this year and 80,000 next year to meet that goal.
Meantime, the Navy and Air Force are shrinking. The Air Force intends to cut its forces by 22,500 next year, the Navy by 7,900.
"This is an opportunity for all the services to work together," said an Army officer who is working on the new program. "It's a way to make sure those men and women who want to serve can continue to serve."
If all goes according to plan, the program will begin around Oct. 1, Army officials said Thursday. While the program has not been formally announced, the Army two weeks ago posted details about the program on its Web Site, www.goarmy.com. So far, officials said, more than 100 people have already expressed interest in switching services.
"Operation Blue to Green will allow you to continue to serve your country, to maintain the benefits of military service, and to expand your horizons by gaining new training and trying new things," said a description of the program on the Web site.
Army officials said transferring enlisted personnel from one service to another would require a change in Pentagon policy, but could also save as much as $10,000 per service member in training and recruiting costs.
On Capitol Hill, senior House and Senate leaders, including Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, endorse the plan. Representative John M. McHugh, a New York Republican who heads the House Armed Services total force subcommittee, said the concept kept valuable service members in the armed forces, although in a different branch.
"Is it wise to just let those folks go with those kind of skills just because they are caught up in downsizing?" Mr. McHugh said in a telephone interview. "This is common sense."
But some military personnel experts said the move was yet another last resort by the Army to fill its ranks. In recent weeks, the Army has said it will call up 5,600 members of the Individual Ready Reserve, former soldiers who have left the Army and not joined the Reserves. The Pentagon has extended the tours of thousands of soldiers bound for Iraq or Afghanistan who had been scheduled to retire or leave the service. And, for the first time, the military deploying combat troops to Iraq from South Korea.
"It's further evidence of the strain the Army is undergoing," said Richard I. Stark Jr., a retired Army colonel who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There is a short-term manpower crunch in the Department of Defense, especially in the Army."
Army officials insist that recruiting and retention for active-duty, Reserve and National Guard forces remain strong and, in some cases, have exceeded goals for the year to date.
But at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Democrats and Republicans assailed the Pentagon's top personnel official, David S. C. Chu, and a panel of senior generals for wearing out active-duty and reservist soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"How do we keep it up, Dr. Chu?" asked Representative Ike Skelton of Missouri, the senior Democrat on the committee. "How do we keep going and meet the rigid requirements?"
The "blue to green" program, was first reported in the current issue of U.S. News & World Report, was conceived by mid-level Army personnel officials in February. But the idea was so novel, it took several weeks for it to catch on with senior Pentagon officials, Army officers said on Thursday. "We're in uncharted waters here," said one officer.
Under the plan, airmen and sailors, typically with fewer than eight years' experience who are leaving the military with honorable discharges, would be eligible for the program. Most applicants would be enlisted personnel, but junior officers could also apply. Applicants who switched services would remain at the same rank. Air Force and Navy personnel would be required to take a modified, four-week Army basic-training course, officials said.
Additional training would depend on how similar the new Army job was to the Navy or Air Force job, officials said. Service members transferring to the Army would be required to serve a minimum of three years, according to an internal Air Force personnel notice that advertised the new program.
Small numbers of officers now switch services - doctors are common, for instance - but Army officials said they were still working out recruiting projections for the new program.
Navy officials said about 3,200 sailors and officers who are leaving or have left the service for various reasons in the past year might be eligible for the program. "The Navy believes this offers a unique opportunity for a departing sailor or officer to continue to serve for his country," said Cmdr. John Kirby, a Navy spokesman.
-------- venezuela
Signing On To Challenge Hugo Chavez
By Nora Boustany
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37649-2004Jul8.html
Hers is a heroic fight. Maria Corina Machado smiles bravely but admits she is terrified. They are after her, she explained; the machinery of the state.
Machado is vice president of Sumate, a Venezuelan civic organization that has helped organize the drive for a recall referendum on President Hugo Chavez. She recently found out that she was under investigation for conspiracy and treason because Sumate accepted $53,400 from the National Endowment for Democracy, which receives funding from the U.S. Congress. Chavez has accused Machado, Alejandro Plaz, the president of Sumate, and two other members of the group of treason.
For the uninitiated, democracy is never simple. But the group's slow, systematic collection of signatures has empowered Venezuelans to hold a referendum next month that could force Chavez to step down.
Chavez, a former army lieutenant colonel who led a coup attempt against the government in 1992, was elected in 1998 on a vow to lift up the country's impoverished majority. Many Venezuelans have rejected his populist programs and rhetoric, and critics say his rule is headed toward authoritarianism.
Machado, 36, was invited to the United States by the Council of the Americas to address members in New York and Washington. She said she also plans to meet with U.S.-based human rights organizations and with officials from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
This week, on a recent bright, sunny day at a coffee shop in Bethesda, she explained how a movement was born.
In 2001, during a hurried conversation in the lobby of a hotel in Caracas, Machado and Plaz fretted about the course that was being shaped for Venezuela as they watched from the sideline.
"Something clicked," Machado said about the encounter with Plaz, a former regional director of an American firm. "I had this unsettling feeling that I could not stay at home and watch the country get polarized and collapse. . . . We had to keep the electoral process but change the course, to give Venezuelans the chance to count ourselves, to dissipate tensions before they built up. It was a choice of ballots over bullets."
Sumate, originally composed of professionals, now has 30,000 volunteers nationwide from all walks of life.
When Chavez came to office, he overhauled the constitution. Machado said: "We realized he established tools giving citizens the power to recall officials in midterm by referendum. If 10 percent of all registered voters signed a petition to have a referendum -- 1.2 million signatures out of 12 million by Aug. 19, 2003 -- it was enough to have a recall of any elected official."
There have been several attempts to collect signatures since 2002. A drive completed last November, with international observers -- the Organization of American States, the Carter Center and the United Nations Development Program -- six months after those organizations brokered an agreement between the government and the opposition that the constitution must be upheld.
"Now we have a referendum," she said. Machado, the eldest of four daughters born to a steel entrepreneur and an accomplished psychologist, had a good education. She graduated as an engineer at the top of her class, later earned a master's degree in finance and worked in the auto-parts industry in Valencia before moving to Caracas in 1993.
Politics had never interested her, and she had been indifferent to the economic and social ills plaguing less fortunate families. But one day, she joined her mother on a tour of a center that housed homeless orphans and abandoned youngsters brought in from the streets. The complex was like a prison, she said, and the children often ran away, scaling walls and leaping into a stream leading out, seeking to return to street life. Machado, who was pregnant with her second child, became physically ill from the stench.
The visit transformed her life.
She quit her job and began lobbying to have the management of the facility privatized, ultimately devoting eight years to its betterment.
She then ran an Internet-based services firm for three years before joining Sumate.
"This is God's work," Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, said of Sumate's drive. He was once Venezuela's minister of finance.
Chavez remains charismatic, in control and calling the shots at each twist and turn of the saga. A week before he finally agreed to the referendum, he signed a law packing the Supreme Court with 12 extra justices and giving his coalition's majority in the legislature authority to nullify the terms of sitting justices.
"Yet another example that democracy is not just about voting -- this is a delusion," Naim said. "It is also about checks and balances, independent arbiters and referees supervising the electoral process. It is not just one man, one vote, one time."
Newspapers have run pictures of Machado with headlines calling her the country's Enemy No. 1. Her children cannot understand her predicament. She has learned to steel herself against Blackberry messages urging her to run away and telephone calls pleading with her to hide.
She is trapped between formidable foes and a sea of sympathizers. "It is scary . . . all public powers of the state are stacked against you, but at the same time, people stop to tell you they are relying on you," she said. "I feel greater responsibility and I'm terrified."
-------- war crimes
Ex-Guard To Face More Charges
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37764-2004Jul8.html
One of seven military police soldiers implicated in the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was issued additional charges yesterday, as Army officials accused Pfc. Lynndie R. England of indecent acts with another soldier and indecent exposure, four days before she is supposed to appear at a preliminary court hearing in North Carolina.
A senior Pentagon official and an Army official confirmed that the charges were filed yesterday, and sources said the five modified counts stem from activity seen on numerous digital photographs seized during the investigation. The Army official said none of the charges involves "detainees or Iraqi nationals" and instead relate to England's alleged personal conduct last year while in Iraq.
A spokeswoman at Fort Bragg, N.C., where England is to go before an Article 32 investigation hearing Monday, said she had no information about the modified charges. The hearing on charges relating to a series of abuses was scheduled for last month but was postponed, in part so authorities could consider additional counts, sources said.
In dozens of images obtained by The Washington Post, England is captured in various stages of nudity and in explicit sexual poses with a male soldier. Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., another soldier with the 372nd MP Company, can be seen in some of the photographs.
Graner, 35, has been charged with abuses and has been described in an Army investigative report as a ringleader in the scandal. He was involved in a romantic relationship with England, 21, and England's attorneys have said that their client is six months pregnant with his child.
Graner's attorney did not return a call to his office yesterday.
England's attorneys said they were disappointed that the photos yielded new charges because the government has had them all along. One attorney said that the additional charges could increase England's potential jail time twofold to nearly 40 years, more than any other soldier charged in the abuse scandal.
"These are very personal photographs and they have absolutely nothing to do with Abu Ghraib," said Richard A. Hernandez, one of England's attorneys. "It's very indicative of her following orders. She's clearly a follower and not a leader."
Hernandez said England told him that the pictures were of her and Graner. He also said England, who is nearly 15 years younger than Graner and of lower rank, was just doing what she was told.
England has been stationed at Fort Bragg, performing cleaning duties, since earlier this year. Her attorneys are expected to call more than 30 witnesses during next week's hearing, and they have said England should not take the blame for the alleged abuses because she was following a senior officer's orders.
But the photographs appear to depict consensual sexual acts between England and at least one man. In some pictures, England gives the camera a thumbs-up sign, one of the trademark characteristics of widely published images of abuses at Abu Ghraib, where female soldiers were seen grinning, giving the same hand signal near naked, hooded detainees.
Many of the photographs appear to be taken in the soldiers' living quarters, where England is seen posing on an inflatable plastic chair wearing lingerie, on the bottom level of a bunk bed, and in what appears to be a bathroom.
In addition to the images appearing to depict personal sexual activity, there are scores of photographs that show military police soldiers throughout Iraq participating in a variety of acts, such as slaughtering a cow and setting up prankish scenes with the skull of a dead cat as the centerpiece.
"This shows some of the major problems that were going on with these soldiers outside of the cellblock," one defense official said. "There was a breadth of depravity."
Some officials point to the images as evidence that the MPs were rogue characters who, when placed in the Abu Ghraib prison, beat and forced detainees into sexually humiliating positions. The soldiers' lawyers say the abuses arose out of official military policies gone haywire -- that the MPs were carrying out orders to set the conditions for interrogation sessions.
So far, only the seven MPs have been charged in the prison abuses. But an Army investigation focusing on the role of military intelligence at the prison -- a report that is overdue and is anxiously sought by members of Congress -- is still underway.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Saddam's case appealed to U.S. high court
ASSOCIATED PRESS
July 09, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040708-113558-9459r.htm
The lone American on Saddam Hussein's legal team said yesterday that he has asked the Supreme Court to declare the detention of the ousted Iraqi president unconstitutional.
The long-shot legal maneuver comes as Saddam's attorneys await the chance to meet with their client and find out what charges he will face in a war crimes trial by Iraq's new government in which he might face the death penalty.
"Even the basic rights of due process, the basic rights of fair trial are being stomped on," said Washington lawyer Curtis Doebbler, who volunteered his services on the 20-member team with lawyers from Belgium, Britain, France, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and Tunisia.
Mr. Doebbler said U.S. authorities have refused to let him or the other lawyers see Saddam, who was arrested in December.
Officials have said Saddam will be held in a U.S.-controlled jail until the Iraqis are ready to take physical custody of him. Iraq's new authorities took legal control of Saddam and 11 key deputies last week.
The filing at the Supreme Court, dated Tuesday and titled "Saddam Hussein v. George W. Bush," asks the court for permission to file an indigent appeal on the ex-dictator's behalf. The court will have to grant special permission, however, because the documents lack Saddam's signature, something required in court filings.
Mr. Doebbler said Saddam is "being held incommunicado," but his wife agreed to the filing.
The Supreme Court is on a three-month summer break and likely will not act on the request until the justices return to work in late September. In paperwork at the high court, Mr. Doebbler said Saddam has sent messages through the Red Cross that "he is in urgent need of legal protection."
The lawyer contended that Saddam's detention violates multiple international laws and his constitutional Fifth Amendment right not to be deprived of "life, liberty or property without due process." Mr. Doebbler also said the war-crimes tribunal planned in Iraq will be neither independent nor impartial.
The Supreme Court will review those arguments only if it grants permission for the filing.
Mr. Doebbler, a 43-year-old international human rights lawyer, filed a brief in the Supreme Court earlier this year encouraging it to rule in favor of legal rights of foreign terror suspects held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Last week, the justices decided that the nearly 600 men from 42 countries held at the prison in Cuba can use American courts to challenge their detentions.
In a dissent to that opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia warned that federal courts will have to deal with lawsuits from "around the world, challenging actions and events far away, and forcing the courts to oversee one aspect of the executive's conduct of a foreign war."
Lewis Katz, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said it is not surprising that Saddam's lawyers tried the appeal after the Guantanamo ruling.
"The question is why would [the justices] want to consider this? I don't think they would," he said.
At a press conference in Washington, Mr. Doebbler said he has received threats because of his work for Saddam, who is accused of multiple killings of religious figures and members of political parties, the gassing of Kurds in Halabja, the killing of the Kurdish Barzani clan in 1983 and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
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Guantanamo Prisoners Must Sue in D.C.
By DAVID KRAVETS
Associated Press Writer
Jul 9, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/G/GUANTANAMO_TRIBUNALS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, challenging their detention must do so in the District of Columbia, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia was the appropriate venue for the 594 detainees given that they are overseas and are suing the federal government.
Thursday's decision was the first time an appeals court had determined where the challenges should be lodged.
The detainees won the right to seek their freedom last month after the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's argument that the men could be kept in military custody indefinitely, without charges or trial, because they were picked up overseas on suspicion of terrorism.
In overruling the administration, the Supreme Court ordered the San Francisco appeals court to determine the proper venue for a Libyan captured in Afghanistan to challenge his two-year detention. Lawyers representing other detainees have said they planned to sue in the nation's capital.
Faren Gherebi filed his case in California well before the Supreme Court ruling.
The San Francisco court's decision came a day after the government announced the military would review the individual cases of the prisoners to determine whether they are being legally held. Officials said the move was in preparation for the flood of litigation from detainees following the Supreme Court's ruling.
The case is Gherebi v. Bush, 03-55785.
-------- homeland security
House GOP Defends Patriot Act
Powers Partisan Rancor High as Plan to Soften Anti-Terror Law Is Defeated
By Dan Morgan and Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37480-2004Jul8.html
House Republicans, under strong pressure from the White House, narrowly defeated an effort yesterday to water down the Bush administration's signature law to combat domestic terrorism.
By a 210 to 210 tie vote that GOP leaders prolonged for 23 tumultuous minutes while they corralled dissident members, the House rejected a proposed change to the USA Patriot Act that would have barred the Justice Department from searching bookstore and library records. White House officials, citing the nearly three-year-old law's importance as an anti-terrorism tool, warned that an attempt to weaken it would be vetoed.
But the victory came only after GOP tactics infuriated Democrats and a number of Republicans. The vote, scheduled to last 15 minutes, dragged on for 38 minutes despite outraged shouts and a unified chant of "shame, shame, shame" from Democrats across the aisle.
The showdown was the latest in a series of bipartisan challenges this week on the House floor to administration positions on trade sanctions against Cuba, budget cuts in a major loan program of the Small Business Administration, and funding for programs promoting democracy abroad. Last month, the House approved a natural resources bill that slashed many of the Bush administration's initiatives in land conservation and the environment.
Last week, Senate negotiators, defying the White House, insisted on pushing for a six-year transportation bill costing $318 billion -- $62 billion above the administration ceiling.
With President Bush's approval rating slipping as a result of setbacks in the Iraq war, lawmakers in both parties appear emboldened to defy the White House and the House GOP leadership.
"The Republican leadership is out of control," said Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.). "Today's vote on the Freedom to Read Protection Act is just the latest example of a growing trend towards abusive, closed-fist partisanship on the part of Republican House leadership."
Rep. C.L. Butch Otter (R-Idaho), a conservative and an advocate of the defeated provision, told reporters after the vote: "You win some, and some get stolen."
At one point the electronic tally board above the visitors' gallery showed the proposal passing, 219 to 201. But as the Republican whip organization went to work to get defectors to switch, the number of those voting for passage dropped steadily.
The final count recorded 18 Republicans joining 191 Democrats and Rep. Bernard Sanders (Vt.), the House's lone Independent and the chief author of the amendment to limit some powers of the Patriot Act. Sanders called the proceedings "an outrage" and "an insult to democracy."
The House has voted in the past to block portions of the Patriot Act, but Congress has never managed to alter any part of it. The law was quickly passed in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It gave the government strong powers and leeway to conduct investigations and detain suspects.
Supporters of the Sanders proposal argued that fighting terrorism did not justify encroachments on basic liberties that are implicit in the broad authority the act gives to law enforcement agencies charged with hunting terrorists.
Addressing the House before the vote, Sanders said: "All of us want to support the law enforcement officials going after terrorists, but we can defeat terrorism without allowing the government to get a secret order from a secret court without any showing of any evidence that the person whose reading records are sought is engaged in any kind of illegal conduct."
His amendment had the support of groups that include the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association and the PEN American Center, representing writers.
Supporters of the Patriot Act say authorities need to track potential al Qaeda members who communicate using Internet facilities in public libraries.
Under the current law, authorities need a special court order to require libraries and other venues to provide records on the sale or borrowing of books and on Internet sites used.
Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who chairs the subcommittee that drafted the underlying spending legislation before the House yesterday, said, "I believe the Patriot Act has helped" safeguard the safety of Americans.
Other Republicans said there were few examples of the act being used to invade the privacy of library users.
Yesterday's battle was over an amendment to a $39.8 billion bill financing the departments of Commerce, Justice and State for next year, which passed 397 to 18. The Senate has not taken up its version of the spending measure. The floor fight was reminiscent of November's vote on a Medicare prescription drug program, when GOP House leaders kept the vote going for nearly three hours while they persuaded reluctant members to support passage of the bill.
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Effort to Curb Scope of Antiterrorism Law Falls Short
July 9, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09patriot.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 8 - An effort to bar the government from demanding records from libraries and booksellers in some terrorism investigations fell one vote short of passage in the House on Thursday after a late burst of lobbying prompted nine Republicans to switch their votes.
The vote, a 210 to 210 deadlock, amounted to a referendum on the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act and reflected deep divisions in Congress over whether the law undercuts civil liberties. Under House rules, the tie vote meant the measure was defeated.
The outcome led to angry recriminations from House Democrats, who accused Republicans of "vote-rigging" by holding the vote open for an extra 23 minutes to get enough colleagues to switch votes. Frustrated Democrats shouted "Shame, shame!" and "Democracy!" as the voting continued, but Republicans defended their right as the majority party to keep the vote open to "educate members" about the dangers of scaling back government counterterrorism powers.
"We're more interested in catching terrorists who are trying to kill Americans than we are in leaving the Capitol in time for happy hour," said Stuart Roy, a spokesman for the majority leader, Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas.
The library proposal, tacked onto a $39.8 billion spending bill, would have barred the federal government from demanding library records, reading lists, book customer lists and other material in terrorism and intelligence investigations. The antiterrorism law expanded the government's authority to secure warrants from a secret intelligence court in Washington to obtain records from libraries and other institutions, using what many legal experts regard as a lesser standard of proof than is needed in traditional criminal investigations.
Federal law enforcement officials say the power to gain access to such records has been used sparingly. Still, the provision granting the government that power has become the most widely attacked element of the law, galvanizing opposition in more than 330 communities that have expressed concern about government abuse. Critics say the law gives the government the ability to pry into people's personal reading habits.
"People are waking up to the fact that the government can walk into their libraries, without probable cause, without any particular information that someone was associated with terrorism, and monitor their reading habits," Representative Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who sponsored the measure, said in an interview.
Republicans lobbied furiously to defeat the amendment. President Bush threatened late Wednesday to veto the spending bill if the provision was included, and the Justice Department on Thursday sent a letter saying that at least twice in recent months "a member of a terrorist group closely affiliated with Al Qaeda used Internet services provided by a public library."
Even so, the measure appeared headed for passage, leading by at least 18 votes as the set time for voting wound down. The House traditionally holds its votes open for 15 minutes to give lawmakers time to get from their offices to cast their votes, but the vote on Mr. Sanders's amendment stayed open for 38 minutes, officials said.
Democrats identified eight of the nine Republicans who switched their votes: Michael Bilirakis of Florida, Rob Bishop of Utah, Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, Jack Kingston of Georgia, Marilyn Musgrave of Colorado, Nick Smith of Michigan, Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Zach Wamp of Tennessee. One Democrat, Brad Sherman of California, also switched his vote to nay, officials said. In all, 18 Republicans joined Democrats in supporting the measure; four Democrats opposed it.
"The timing was well within the rules of the House floor," said Burson Taylor, a spokeswoman for Representative Roy Blunt, the majority whip. "Sometimes that plays to our advantage, sometimes it plays to the Democrats' advantage."
But Democrats accused Republicans leaders of corrupting the voting process and drew comparisons to the dustup last November over a Medicare bill, which squeaked through the House after Republican leaders held the vote open for three hours to get colleagues to switch their votes. The House ethics committee is looking into accusations that one lawmaker, Mr. Smith, was offered a bribe on the House floor for his vote.
Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, said after Thursday's vote: "Republican leaders once again undermined democracy, this time so that the Bush administration can threaten our civil liberties. How thoroughly un-American."
And Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, said: "The Republicans are so desperate to look into bookstore and library records that they violated the very principles of democracy to block an amendment that had already passed. This is an outrage."
The defeat of the library amendment was an important victory for Bush administration officials.
"We're obviously pleased," said William E. Moschella, an assistant attorney general.
Mr. Moschella sent the letter that cited recent efforts by Qaeda associates to use public libraries to communicate over the Internet.
Mr. Bush has made the Patriot Act and its importance in fighting terrorism a theme in his re-election campaign, urging Congress repeatedly to extend provisions in it that are set to expire at the end of next year.
But few members of Congress have rushed to take Mr. Bush up on the idea, and Mr. Bush's Democratic rival for the White House, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, has hit the issue with equal vigor in arguing that parts of the law go too far in prying into the lives of ordinary Americans and risk government abuse.
Debate on the House floor on Thursday revealed deep disagreement over even fundamental questions about what power the government now has to demand library records and how that power has been used since the law was enacted the week after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Last September, Attorney General John Ashcroft accused critics of the government's library powers of fueling "baseless hysteria," and he grudgingly declassified government data showing that the Justice Department had not yet used the power to seize library records.
But the department has refused to say how often the authority has been used since, saying the information remains classified. The American Civil Liberties Union said last month that documents disclosed in court challenges showed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had sought to use that section of the law soon after Mr. Ashcroft's declaration.
Officials with the American Library Association, with more than 64,000 members, said they suspected based on anecdotal evidence that the government had used the antiterrorism law and related powers to demand library records more frequently than it had acknowledged.
But Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the group's Washington office, said it was impossible to know because librarians served with demands for records were barred under the law from talking about it. The library association is planning a survey to get a better accounting of how often libraries have been served with demands for records.
"Libraries have always been subject to legitimate law enforcement - if the government thinks there is some specific criminal activity, they can go to a judge, show probable cause and get a court order," Ms. Sheketoff said. "There doesn't need to be all this secrecy. Librarians are good citizens like everyone else."
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Series of Failures Is Cited in Evacuation of Capitol
July 9, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09plane.html
WASHINGTON, July 8 - Security officials mistook a police plane carrying the governor of Kentucky for a terrorist threat last month and ordered an evacuation of the Capitol, because of a combination of equipment failure on the plane, incompatible computers on the ground and a series of human errors, experts testified Thursday at a House hearing.
The plane, carrying Gov. Ernie Fletcher to President Ronald Reagan's funeral, landed uneventfully at Reagan National Airport in Virginia just across the Potomac from Washington. But the Capitol police, concluding from information on a government hot line that an unidentified aircraft was bearing down on them, hustled hundreds of people out of the Capitol and nearby office buildings.
A result was "people running through the streets, having security people yelling at them, 'Take off your shoes, run, run, run, the plane will hit in two minutes,' " Representative Ellen O. Tauscher, Democrat of California, a member of the House Aviation subcommittee, said at the hearing.
Ms. Tauscher and other members said the integration of information from the Federal Aviation Administration, which manages the nation's civilian air traffic system, and the Department of Defense, begun after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, needed improvement. "We have got to get this right," she said.
But the committee chairman, John L. Mica, Republican of Florida, and several other members, concentrated on a different point, that National Airport remains closed to most traffic besides scheduled airliners, at the insistence of security officials, even though the sequence of events involving the Kentucky State Police plane indicated that the ban on most private planes might not, in fact, preclude an attack on Washington using such a plane.
Mr. Mica released a list of 13 House members and 13 senators who had received permission to land planes at the airport, along with 20 governors and 3 former presidents. The list included New Jersey's senators, Jon Corzine and Frank R. Lautenberg, both Democrats. The House members included Peter T. King, Republican of New York, and John B. Larson, Democrat of Connecticut. Former President George Bush has landed at National 14 times since 9/11, Bill Clinton 3 times and Gerald Ford once.
"If the private sector's going to suffer, then so should everyone else," Mr. Mica said.
Linda Schuessler, a Federal Aviation Administration official, and Jonathan Fleming, the chief operating officer of the Transportation Security Administration, were asked by committee members about a report on Thursday in The Washington Post that said military officials were on the line preparing to shoot down the governor's plane. Both said that that was up to the Defense Department.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command, or Norad, issued a statement saying, "We do not confirm specific information regarding divert procedures or discuss rules of engagement in order to preserve the real-time effectiveness of Norad's response and engagement procedures."
Norad has scrambled planes more than 1,500 times to intercept aircraft in restricted areas, most frequently over Washington and Crawford, Tex., where President Bush has a ranch, since the Sept. 11 attacks; it has not yet fired on any.
Representative Robin Hayes, Republican of North Carolina, a licensed pilot who presided over part of the hearing, said he had visited the air traffic offices and other centers involved in the incident. "It's not my impression, based on several people I talked to, that the governor's aircraft was close to being shot down," he said.
The Kentucky State Police plane, 1972 King Air, was approaching Reagan National Airport with a broken transponder, electronic equipment that listens for queries from the civilian radar system on the ground and responds with the plane's identity and altitude. From the timing of the response, the radar system can deduce the plane's longitude and latitude.
Ms. Schuessler said the pilot was in radio contact with air traffic control, which shares radar data with the Transportation Security Administration, but the fact that the plane was a legitimate flight with a broken transponder was not communicated by the computers of the two agencies or the people tracking flights.
In a post-Sept. 11 innovation, data from F.A.A. radars is fed to a security center in suburban Virginia called the National Capitol Region Coordination Center, where it is observed by people from the Transportation Security Administration. Because their computers were not compatible, the information typed in by the controller was not available to people at the coordination center.
When someone at the coordination center called the F.A.A. to say that there was an "unidentified target," meaning a blip on a radar screen that indicated a flying object with no identification attached, the F.A.A. person assigned to talk to the center looked at the screen "and sees that everyone is present and accounted for," said Greg Martin, a spokesman for the agency, because each radar blip had a data tag attached. The F.A.A. person did not notice a line in the data tag indicating a broken transponder, Mr. Martin said.
According to a chronology from the aviation subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the plane entered a zone with a 15-mile-radius around the capital in which flight is severely restricted at 4:30 p.m. on June 9. A minute later, the Capitol police, monitoring the hot line, ordered the evacuation.
The plane landed at 4:35 p.m. Two F-15's already airborne were told to intercept the police plane, but the King Air landed at National without its pilots ever seeing the interceptors, said a spokesman for the governor, Doug Hogan.
Mr. Hogan said that the pilots were not aware of the fuss until they entered the terminal building and that the governor learned of it when he turned on the television set in his hotel room.
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Senior al-Qaida leaders behind terror threat
Ridge: 'How high up it goes remains to be seen'
NBC, MSNBC and news services
July 09, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5394851
WASHINGTON - Indications are that al-Qaida leadership, not some lower level supporters acting on their own, are behind the suspicions of a large-scale terrorist attack against the United States ahead of the presidential elections, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told NBC News on Friday.
Asked about a New York Times report in which a senior Bush administration source said Osama bin Laden and other "seniormost" al-Qaida leaders seem to be directing the plot, Ridge responded that evidence "does suggest there is some direct link to al-Qaida leadership. How high up it goes remains to be seen."
The administration source told the Times that "we know that this leadership continues to operate along the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan."
And while it does not appear that bin Laden is taking an active planning role in an attack, evidence suggests he is able to communicate with followers, the source said.
No change in threat level Citing "credible" but non-specific intelligence, Ridge on Thursday warned of an increased risk of an attack that aims to "disrupt our democratic process."
"We are very comfortable with the credibility of the sources themselves," he said. "... How credible the information is is something we are trying to corroborate."
Despite the new information, the government is not raising its color-coded terror alert status from "yellow," or elevated, because of the lack of specificity about possible targets, he said, adding that there is no evidence that the Democratic or Republican conventions are in the terrorists' crosshairs.
But the CIA, FBI and other agencies "are actively working to gain that knowledge," Ridge said.
Ridge said that in addition to the information, warning signs have been raised by the pre-election terror attack in Spain earlier this year and recent arrests that disrupted alleged terror plots in England, Jordan and Italy.
U.S. intelligence also believes that plots aimed at attacking large concentrations of people in public places were recently aborted by arrests in Canada and Pakistan, NBC News has learned.
New monitoring capabilities In addition to trying to disrupt the plots through arrests, the government has instituted new monitoring systems - including a national center capable of collecting and disseminating information to local law enforcement agencies -and tightened security on many fronts, Ridge said.
"This is sobering information about those who wish to do us harm," Ridge said. "But every day we strengthen the security of our nation."
Asked about the timing of his announcement - in a week Democrats have captured attention with announcement of presidential candidate John Kerry's running mate and as the campaign begins to heat up before the Nov. 2 election - Ridge denied any political motivation.
"We are basically laying out before the general public the kind of information that we've received," he said. "And it's not us - these are not conjectures or mythical statements we are making. These are pieces of information that we could trace comfortably to sources that we deem to be credible."
Before Ridge's news conference, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said that the Department of Homeland Security is addressing the threat and has efforts under way to "ramp up security."
'No reason for panic' Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist told reporters that Americans should not expect a major announcement on homeland security any time soon, indicating that the nation's threat level could remain at its "elevated" level.
"There's, obviously, no reason for panic, or paralysis," Frist said after a briefing for senators on intelligence matters. "The country is at some increased risk between now and the time of the presidential election. It's important for people to be aware of that."
"What is clear is that law enforcement has generally been notified. ... There are enhanced activities on behalf of law enforcement around the country to engage in deterrence and prevention," he said.
Last April, a working group made up of representatives from agencies that touch on law enforcement, homeland security and intelligence was established to deal with events through the election that may be attractive targets for terrorists, including the presidential nominating conventions.
Senior administration officials and counterterrorism experts view the coming months as a time to increase vigilance out of concern that Islamic militants may try to replicate the political success they had in Spain with coordinated pre-election train bombings.
Nearly 200 died in the March attack, and the prime minister's ruling Popular Party lost to a rival who promised a pullout of Spanish troops from Iraq.
Elaborate plans are already in the works to protect the Republican and Democratic party conventions in New York and Boston, which have been classified as National Security Special Events. With the designation - a concept that evolved from the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta - comes federal funds, increased preparations and heightened security. NBC News' producer Robert Windrem and the Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Pentagon Reportedly Aimed to Hold Detainees in Secret
Los Angeles Times
By John Hendren and Mark Mazzetti
Jul 9, 2000
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=1&u=/latimests/20040709/ts_latimes/pentagonreportedlyaimedtoholddetaineesinsecret
WASHINGTON - Despite pledging yearly reviews for all prisoners held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Pentagon officials tentatively agreed during a high-level meeting last month to deny that process to some detainees and to keep their existence secret "for intelligence reasons," senior defense officials said Thursday.
Under the proposal, some prisoners would in effect be kept off public records and away from the scrutiny of lawyers and judges.
The meeting on the Guantanamo reviews occurred months after U.S. officials came under harsh criticism by investigators and human rights observers for practices involving "ghost" detainees in Iraq who were kept hidden from inspectors for intelligence purposes.
It was unclear Thursday whether the Pentagon had followed through with the proposal, or how it would be affected by last month's Supreme Court ruling that granted detainees access to American courts. It also was not clear how many detainees the proposal would apply to. The Pentagon said there currently were 594 detainees at the camp, nicknamed "Gitmo." A Swedish detainee was released Thursday.
But at the Pentagon meeting called to discuss the annual detainee reviews - which are to be overseen by Navy Secretary Gordon R. England - senior officials said they wanted to keep a small number of prisoners' names out of public records to allow intelligence officials to continue interrogations, a senior defense official said on condition of anonymity.
Such a move would create an exception to the Pentagon promise to review the case of every detainee annually to determine whether he continued to pose a threat to the United States. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld first disclosed plans to provide annual reviews to detainees in February, in response to human rights concerns expressed over open-ended imprisonment.
Two senior defense officials said they believed that the prisoners who would be denied the reviews might be held by the CIA (news - web sites), rather than the Defense Department.
A U.S. intelligence official said Thursday that the CIA was not holding any detainees at Guantanamo, but added that the annual reviews would not apply to CIA prisoners elsewhere.
But another source, a former senior defense official with knowledge of detainee issues, said the Pentagon did not control the interrogations of all Guantanamo detainees. "There are some individuals down there where DOD doesn't have the lead on their interrogation and intelligence exploitation," the former senior defense official said on condition of anonymity.
Another senior defense official said that the wording in a June 23 statement on the promised annual reviews led him to believe that the detainees exempted from the review were being held by the CIA.
In that memo, England described mandatory annual reviews of "Department of Defense" detainees - a designation that would exclude any detainee held by the CIA. One of the senior defense officials said Wednesday that that designation had been inserted deliberately.
"People very, very carefully crafted those words," the official said. "When the draft language was sent around, they were very adamant about keeping the words 'under DOD control' in. It led me to believe that there were non-DOD detainees down there."
When Pentagon officials this week announced a separate, one-time review into whether each prisoner had been properly labeled an "enemy combatant," the order again specified that it applied to "all detainees under the control of the Department of Defense." The proposal to deny some detainees' annual reviews rankled some in the Pentagon, which is trying to recover from international criticism of the abuse scandal at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. In light of the Supreme Court decision granting Guantanamo detainees access to American courts, some internal Pentagon critics said it would be unlikely that detainees held secretly would be allowed to appear in federal courts.
A Pentagon spokesman said he knew of no detainee at Guantanamo who would not receive annual reviews, and did not know of an agreement to deny detainees reviews.
"It's my understanding that everybody under DOD custody will be subject ... to the annual review process that has been outlined previously," said the spokesman, a senior defense official.
Asked if any detainees were not under the Defense Department's control, he said, "Not that I'm aware of."
One of the senior defense officials was skeptical as to whether denying such a review would conform with the Supreme Court ruling giving detainees access to federal courts.
"I don't know how any of this squares with anything. That's been my problem with this thing from the beginning," he said. "Any time you get the dark side involved, human rights tend to be less of an issue."
One critic said he spoke out about the proposal because he felt that holding detainees "off the books" was unnecessary and potentially illegal. He discounted arguments that the secrecy would withhold news of the captures from other terrorists.
"These Al Qaeda guys are smart," one of the senior defense officials who was critical of the policy said on condition of anonymity. "If Mohamed is no longer on the other end of the phone, they're going to know we've got him."
-------- terrorism
U.S. Looks Overseas for Clues on Terror Plans
Recent Arrests in England, Jordan and Italy Aid Intelligence on Al Qaeda
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37621-2004Jul8.html
U.S. intelligence officials are scrutinizing recent arrests in England, Jordan and Italy of three groups of alleged terrorists because of clues the groups might offer to possible al Qaeda plans to attack the United States this summer or fall, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and senior U.S. intelligence officials said yesterday.
The investigation of the alleged rings has added to Western intelligence agencies' understanding of al Qaeda's possible methods of attacking the United States and its practice of embedding "sleeper" operatives into workaday lives with plans to have them facilitate an attack years later, said a senior intelligence official who requested anonymity.
One of the alleged rings was broken up in Britain in March, when eight men of Pakistani origin were arrested with more than 1,000 pounds of fertilizer stuffed into a self-storage container near London's Heathrow Airport. The material can be used as an explosive.
In April, Jordanian officials said they foiled a terrorist plot involving 10 men -- four of them killed in a shootout -- to use trucks loaded with chemicals such as nerve gas and blistering agents to attack U.S. and Israeli sites there.
Last month, authorities in Italy and Belgium arrested 17 Muslim radicals. Officials say one suspect is a former Egyptian army explosives expert who helped plan the March 11 train bombings in Madrid. Officials said the ring was planning another terrorist strike.
"Not only did they have individuals in place, but they had the means to the end that were part of the plot," Ridge said yesterday, referring to the arrests in all three countries. "They had the munitions and the ability to conduct the terrorist attack."
The senior intelligence official, who talked to reporters at Homeland Security's Washington headquarters, said U.S. officials believe the men arrested in Britain also had hatched plans to mount a terrorist attack. The official said some had been "in place for many years and then [had] become facilitators" for an attack, and might have planned to go "into an operational mode" to carry out a strike.
The intelligence official repeated recent warnings that al Qaeda might try to use trucks or cars loaded with fertilizer or chemical weapons in an attack on U.S. soil in the coming months.
Ridge and senior intelligence officials from several U.S. agencies reiterated earlier warnings that they have persuasive intelligence that terrorists want to disrupt the U.S. electoral process. The terrorists would see such an attack as a reprise to what they believe was their success in bringing down the Spanish government in an election days after the March 11 train bombings, which killed 191, Ridge said.
"We are very comfortable with the credibility of the sources" whose information leads officials to fear an attack in coming months, Ridge said. Officials have said the sources include al Qaeda-affiliated people whose communications were picked up by electronic surveillance.
The senior intelligence official said the government's current warnings are based on "a very strong body of intelligence. . . . Every day there are nuggets that come in" to fill out the picture, he added.
Both Ridge and the senior intelligence official used the same language in saying that al Qaeda appears to be operating on the "mistaken belief" that, in Ridge's words, "their attacks [in the United States] will have an impact on America's resolve."
A second senior intelligence official told reporters that U.S. government agencies are worried not only about attacks on the Democratic and Republican political conventions this summer, but also on polling places Nov. 2, Election Day.
"This issue has not escaped us," he said of the danger of attacks on polling places. "It's a very complex one."
Ridge said he will meet soon with officials from the NCAA and the nation's professional sports leagues to strengthen security at sporting events.
Ridge said he and the four senior intelligence officials joined in the briefing in an effort to update the public on the terrorism threats, but the event resembled others by his department lately in that they listed various Bush administration achievements in domestic defense.
Rand Beers, homeland security adviser for the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), said in a statement yesterday that "our homeland security effort at home is underfunded and poorly managed." Beers, who was a counterterrorism official in the Bush White House, was expressing a viewpoint widely shared by Democrats and some homeland security experts.
Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), who heads the House Democratic Task Force on Homeland Security, said Ridge's news conference resembled an "infomercial" for his department, which she said has failed to secure U.S. transit systems.
--------
Bin Laden Is Said to Be Organizing for a U.S. Attack
July 9, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09home.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, July 8 - Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, operating from hideouts suspected to be along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, are directing a Qaeda effort to launch an attack in the United States sometime this year, senior Bush administration officials said on Thursday.
"What we know about this most recent information is that it is being directed from the seniormost levels of the Al Qaeda organization," said a senior official at a briefing for reporters. He added, "We know that this leadership continues to operate along the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan."
Counterterrorism officials have said for weeks that they are increasingly worried by a continuing stream of intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda wanted to carry out a significant terror attack on United States soil this year. But until the comments of the senior administration officials on Thursday, it was not clear that Mr. bin Laden and top deputies like Ayman Zawahiri were responsible for the concern.
Another senior administration official said on Thursday that the intelligence reports - apparently drawn partly from interviews with captured Qaeda members and partly from other intelligence - referred to efforts "to inflict catastrophic effects" before the election.
This official said that the reports did not refer specifically to Mr. bin Laden's instructions or desires, but did make clear that instructions were coming from Qaeda leaders. "It sounds like a corporate effort," the official said.
The new information about Al Qaeda came as Congressional Republicans barely managed to block an effort by Democrats to ban the government from demanding records from libraries and book sellers in some terrorism investigations. Although the Democrats' effort failed by a single vote, it reflected the deep divisions over President Bush's signature antiterrorism legislation, the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which allowed the government access to such records.
In discussing the latest threat information, one of the officials said the intelligence was "cryptic," about both timing and location. There is a widespread assumption in the intelligence community that past targets - New York, Washington, the Los Angeles airport - all still have symbolic value to Al Qaeda. There is no specific reference to the coming political conventions, the official said, but that remains an immediate focus of concern.
Mr. bin Laden's precise role remains somewhat uncertain. It does not appear that he is trying to take an active leadership role in formulating a specific plan, as he did in preparations for the September 2001 attacks, an administration official said. There is evidence, the official said, that he is able to communicate with his followers, urging them to carry out operations in the name of the terror network.
In the past, Mr. bin Laden has used a variety of methods to carry his messages, and he is acutely aware of American efforts to monitor his conversations. He has used couriers to carry private instructions and issued public statements that contained threats and exhortations. In addition, his followers have used cellphones and computer messages to disseminate his directives.
At a news conference on Thursday, Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, said the intelligence about Al Qaeda's intentions was credible, even if it lacked specifics. He said that the chances of heading off an attack were better than ever, and that there was no reason to raise the terrorist threat level for now.
Mr. Ridge said reliable information pointed to an attack in which terrorists would try to "disrupt our democratic process," suggesting an attack designed to disrupt the national political conventions or the elections in November. He added that extra protective measures would be in place at the conventions, even though there was no specific indication that they were targets.
"We lack precise knowledge about time, place and method of attack, but along with the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies, we are actively working to gain that knowledge," Mr. Ridge said. But several other officials said there were "strong indications" that Al Qaeda might strike at targets it had attacked before, "including those that they were able to attack, as well as those that they were unable to attack."
That suggested possible targets would include New York and the Los Angeles airport, which was a target in a millennium-related plot that was foiled by the authorities in December 1999.
Mr. Ridge brushed aside any suggestion that the administration was trying to create a widespread sense of unease that might work to President Bush's advantage less than four months before the election.
"It's a wrong interpretation," he said. "We are basically laying out before the general public the kind of information that we're received." And despite the dearth of hard, specific intelligence, Mr. Ridge said, "These are not conjectures or statements we are making, these are pieces of information that we can trace comfortably to sources that we deem to be credible."
Mr. Ridge said he and others in the intelligence field were evaluating information daily, that security had been enhanced at every level in recent months, and that he would personally inspect the sites of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, where the Secret Service will be the lead agency overseeing security measures. (The Democratic National Convention will be held in Boston at the Fleet Center from July 26 to 29. The Republican National Convention will be held in New York at Madison Square Garden from Aug. 30 to Sept. 2.)
In New York, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said that the city had long ago heightened security, first after 9/11 and again with the American-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
"The notion that terrorists may attack during convention has been part of our planning from the very beginning," Mr. Kelly said in a televised briefing. "Nothing in today's announcement from Homeland Security causes us to change our posture."
Mr. Ridge declined to discuss in detail what circumstance might cause the administration to raise the country's color-coded terror alert level from its current yellow, which indicates a heightened threat, to orange, which would warn of an imminent threat of attack. "We wouldn't want to necessarily broadcast to the terrorists what it would take for us to raise it to orange," he said. "But we know internally that there are a couple of tripwires that might cause us to pull everybody together to begin that whole process."
Before his public briefing for reporters, Mr. Ridge and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, privately briefed senators. Afterward, Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, the majority leader, said he had heard no startling information in the closed session.
"The essence of the briefing is that during this period of elections, this campaign season, that there is increased risk of a terrorist attack in the United States of America," Mr. Frist said. "The nature of that risk is very nonspecific."
-------- POLITICS
-------- investigations
THE WEAPONS
Defectors' Reports on Iraq Arms Were Embellished, Exile Asserts
July 9, 2004
By JIM DWYER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09defe.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Shortly after President Bush declared war on terrorism in the fall of 2001, the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, sent out a simple, urgent message to its network of intelligence agents: find evidence of outlawed weapons that would make Saddam Hussein a prime target for the United States.
Inevitably, that request reached Muhammad al-Zubaidi, himself an Iraqi exile who had been working to undermine Mr. Hussein for 24 years from posts in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and northern Iraq. Under the playful name of Al Deeb - Arabic for The Wolf - Mr. Zubaidi, now 52, served as a field leader for about 75 to 100 people who collected information on the machinations of Iraq's police state.
Over the next three months, Mr. Zubaidi and his associates gathered statements from defectors who said they had knowledge of Mr. Hussein's military facilities and who had fled Iraq for neighboring countries.
In short order, that same group of defectors took their stories to American intelligence agents and journalists. The defectors spoke of a nation pocketed with mobile weapons laboratories, a new secret weapons site beneath a Baghdad hospital, a meeting between a member of Mr. Hussein's government and Osama bin Laden - accounts that ultimately became potent elements in Mr. Bush's case for war.
Those accusations remain unproven. In fact, Mr. Zubaidi said in interviews last week in Lebanon, the ominous claims by the defectors differed significantly from the versions that they had first related to him and his associates. Mr. Zubaidi provided his handwritten diaries from 2001 and 2002, and his existing reports on the statements originally made by the defectors.
According to the documents, the defectors, while speaking with precision about aspects of Iraqi military facilities like its stock of missiles, did not initially make some of the most provocative claims about weapons production or that an Iraqi official had met with Mr. bin Laden.
The precise circumstances under which the stories apparently changed remains unclear. The defectors themselves could not be reached for comment.
Mr. Zubaidi contends that the men altered their stories after they met with senior figures in the Iraqi National Congress. Mr. Zubaidi, who acknowledged that he had a bitter split with the I.N.C. in April 2003, said officials of the group prepped the defectors before allowing them to meet with the American intelligence agents and journalists.
"They intentionally exaggerated all the information so they would drag the United States into war," Mr. Zubaidi said. "We all know the defectors had a little information on which they built big stories."
Yesterday, Nabil Musawi, one of Mr. Chalabi's deputies who met with the defectors, said that Mr. Zubaidi's assertions were "childish," and bore no relation to reality. He said it was not the role of Mr. Zubaidi or his associates to do full debriefings of the defectors. Nor was it the responsibility of the I.N.C. to grade the reliability of each defector, he said.
"Whether the defector failed or succeeded, it meant nothing to us," Mr. Musawi said, speaking by phone from Jordan. "There's no question we wanted to indict the regime, but I wish we had someone clever enough to sit down and come up with stories."
For a short time last year, Mr. Zubaidi was in the spotlight, immediately after the old government was toppled in April 2003. Acting in the power vacuum of those early days, he tried to form a civil administration in Baghdad with himself as the executive, an effort that lasted about two weeks before he was taken into custody by the United States military for 12 days and ordered to desist. He later was arrested again and held for about five months. He said he believed his former colleagues at the Iraqi National Congress were behind his jailing, an assumption Mr. Musawi says is not true.
Since February, Mr. Zubaidi has been living quietly outside Beirut. He said he had not publicly discussed details of his role in locating defectors until he was contacted by The New York Times last month. He agreed to be interviewed at length, and to make available any records that had not been confiscated by the American military forces.
Francis Brooke, an adviser to Mr. Chalabi in Washington, said yesterday that Mr. Zubaidi had been an effective agent but maintained that he had never raised concerns about the credibility of the defectors. "Sounds to me like the guy is a loony," Mr. Brooke said. "Who knows who he is working for now? He was working closely for us. He never indicated anything to me like that. It's completely inconsistent with any other knowledge I have of how things worked."
Mr. Zubaidi said he decided to speak out not because of bad feelings against individuals, but to correct the record. "I'm not trying to defame those people, although they betrayed the cause," Mr. Zubaidi said. "Now they are bearing the consequences. I'm a witness. This is something for history."
Mr. Brooke said the I.N.C.'s quest to obtain information on outlawed weapons in Iraq became more pressing after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. On Sept. 20, 2001, with the Pentagon hallways still reeking of smoke and disaster, Mr. Chalabi met with the Defense Policy Board, a group of private citizens that advises the secretary of defense. The clear consensus was that Mr. Hussein had to be removed from power in Iraq, in the interests of stabilizing the region and thwarting his support for terrorists, according to Mr. Brooke, who accompanied Mr. Chalabi to the Pentagon.
For the Iraqi National Congress, which was created in 1992 with United States financial support, the attacks presented an opportunity to define their cause - overthrowing Saddam Hussein - within the newly redrawn agenda of the United States.
Mr. Brooke, an American citizen who works in Washington, said he moved quickly to seek fresh details from the group's agents on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. "I say to everybody, and that includes everybody in my intelligence network, now is a real good time for information on those two subjects," Mr. Brooke said. He instructed them, he said, to "highlight it, put it in red and send it to me right away."
Mr. Zubaidi said he and his associates got that message. "My role during the process was to bring in the person, to write reports of what he said, and to give my personal information and opinion about what they were saying."
Among the first, and most important, defectors was Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who left Iraq in November 2001 and made his way to Syria. There, Mr. Zubaidi said, he had a chance encounter with one of Mr. Zubaidi's associates in a travel agency, and they struck up a conversation. Mr. Saeed had run into legal problems with Iraqi officials, he said, and was eager to move his family to Australia, where his brother lives.
Over a period of weeks, Mr. Zubaidi said, Mr. Saeed disclosed that he had contracts with the government's Military Industrial Organization that involved building and repairing concrete shelters and wells, which he believed were for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. He provided several hundred pages of documents, and had gone to school with an I.N.C. official who vouched for him.
Mr. Saeed, while financially comfortable, needed logistical help getting out of the Middle East because of problems with his travel documents, Mr. Zubaidi said. Mr. Saeed paid his family's way to Bangkok, according to Mr. Zubaidi.
He was accompanied by Mr. Zubaidi's associate, who was interviewed in Damascus last week but asked that he not be named. After several days in Bangkok, two I.N.C. officials arrived from London and spent about a day with Mr. Saeed. Their purpose, Mr. Brooke said, was to put the defector at ease before interviews with a reporter from The Times and a freelance television journalist who had worked occasionally for the I.N.C. but was filming Mr. Saeed for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
During his sessions with reporters, Mr. Saeed mentioned for the first time the facility underneath the hospital, according to both Mr. Zubaidi and his associate. Like other defectors, Mr. Saeed recounted his story to American intelligence agents. In Mr. Saeed's case, the White House specifically mentioned his account in a background paper that accompanied a speech by Mr. Bush.
Inspectors from the United States government tried to find the facility in the hospital that Mr. Saeed described but could not, according to David Kay, who was appointed by Mr. Bush to lead the search for outlawed weapons.
"It wasn't there, didn't pan out, so people took that to mean that nothing else he said was true," Mr. Kay said yesterday by telephone. He said that the war and uncontrolled looting created a "margin of error" about a number of suspected sites, but the hospital was not disturbed.
Mr. Musawi, one of the I.N.C. officials who prepared Mr. Saeed for his interview, said that he could not have coached Mr. Saeed because his information was far too technical. "What can you coach a chemical engineer who specializes in concrete sealing?" he asked.
Also in November 2001, Mr. Chalabi's group arranged for press interviews with an Iraqi Army lieutenant general to whom Mr. Zubaidi had spoken. A reporter for The Times flew to Beirut to meet with the general, Jamal al-Ghurairy, who said groups of Islamic terrorists were training on an airplane fuselage to simulate hijackings.
"We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States," Mr. Ghurairy said. During the interview, the general acknowledged his own involvement in the execution of thousands of Shiite Muslim rebels after the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Before Mr. Ghurairy met with the reporter, Mr. Zubaidi had tried to get him to write out his account, but the general held out, according to a report provided by Mr. Zubaidi and dated Nov. 11, 2001. In that report, Mr. Zubaidi said that Mr. Ghurairy "played sick. He was being evasive so that he would get guarantees for facilitating his trip" to Europe or the United States.
Mr. Musawi, who had flown from London to Beirut to take part in the session, "assured him that we will secure their trip as soon as possible to any destination they want," the report stated.
Mr. Zubaidi did not have a high opinion of the general's probity. He wrote of Mr. Ghurairy, "He is an opportunist, cheap and manipulative. He has poetic interests and has a vivid imagination in making up stories."
In February 2002, a third defector, Harith Assaf, a major in the Iraqi intelligence service, was filmed by the CBS News program "60 Minutes" speaking about mobile biological weapons laboratories that he said were put into seven refrigerated trucks. Mr. Assaf also described a meeting between a member of the Iraqi government and Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan.
When Mr. Zubaidi objected and tried to stop the interview, Mr. Musawi, who had come with the television crew from London, said he insisted that it continue. "I told him, 'It's not your call. I'm allowing the story to be told,' " Mr. Musawi said.
Mr. Zubaidi said that the major, Mr. Assaf, had not revealed the purported bin Laden meeting and the mobile laboratories during discussions that had begun three months earlier. His diary entry for Feb. 11, 2002, says: "After the interview, an argument with Nabil about their way of working, especially the connection with bin Laden." In a follow-up story in March 2004, "60 Minutes" reported that Mr. Assaf had been deemed unreliable by American intelligence. In addition, the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks has said that while there were reports of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, they did not appear to have "resulted in a collaborative relationship."
Mr. Musawi said the risk to the I.N.C. of coaching defectors was considerable, because it had enemies in Washington. If a story was quickly disproved, he said, "We would look pretty stupid."
Despite this, Mr. Kay said that during the hunt for weapons last year, a number of the defectors admitted they were lying after being put through a polygraph test. "Some of them claimed to have been coached by the I.N.C., and some of them claimed to have been coached on how to pass polygraphs," Mr. Kay said.
Mr. Zubaidi said, "I don't want to criticize U.S. agencies, but it's strange that the U.S. with all its powerful agencies, the C.I.A., could not manage to know the truth from the lies in these people."
Samar Aboul-Fotouh contributed reporting from Syria and Lebanonfor this article.
--------
Report Says Key Assertions Leading to War Were Wrong
July 9, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/national/09CND-INTEL.html
WASHINGTON, July 9 - The Central Intelligence Agency greatly overestimated the danger presented by deadly unconventional weapons in Iraq because of runaway assumptions that were never sufficiently challenged, the Senate Intelligence Committee said today.
In a long-awaited report that goes to the heart of President Bush's rationale for going to war against Iraq, the committee said that prewar assessments of Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and his desire to have nuclear weapons, were wildly off the mark.
"Today, we know these assessments were wrong, and as our inquiry will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the panel, said at a briefing on the 511-page report.
Mr. Roberts said the committee had found no evidence that intelligence analysts were subjected to overt political pressure to tailor their findings. And the senator praised the men and women in the intelligence field as "true and dedicated professionals."
But he said the committee's investigation of many months had also concluded that intelligence analysis and conclusions about Iraq's weapons had been warped by "a collective group-think" that caused ambiguous evidence to be elevated to the level of conclusive evidence.
"It is clear that this group-think also extended to our allies and to the United Nations and several other nations as well, all of whom did believe that Saddam Hussein had active w.m.d. programs," Mr. Roberts said, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction. "This was a global intelligence failure."
Mr. Roberts said the report was harshly critical of the C.I.A., asserting that it had "abused its unique position" by failing to share information with other agencies. That sharing, Mr. Roberts seemed to suggest, might have subjected some overblown C.I.A. findings to a probing analysis.
On one important point, the committee found the C.I.A.'s conclusions reasonable - that there had been no significant ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terrorists.
The chairman said the problems with the C.I.A., whose director, George Tenet, stepped down this week, will not be fixed just by adding more money and more people. The nature of the necessary reforms is not entirely clear, he said, although his remarks implicitly urged a deep cultural change.
Whatever changes are eventually adopted, he said, must be based on sound judgment rather than "expediency or media-generated momentum."
Mr. Roberts and the committee's ranking Democrat, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, praised each other's energy and dedication. But even a cursory examination of Mr. Rockefeller's remarks made it clear that the report will be hotly debated during the presidential campaign.
"There is simply no question that mistakes leading up to the war in Iraq rank among the most devastating losses and intelligence failures in the history of the nation," Mr. Rockefeller said. "The fact is that the administration at all levels, and to some extent us, used bad information to bolster its case for war. And we in Congress would not have authorized that war - we would NOT have authorized that war - with 75 votes if we knew what we know now."
Mr. Rockefeller went on to challenge one of the Bush administration's basic positions: that the war to topple Saddam Hussein had made the United States, the Middle East and the world safer, notwithstanding the failure so far to find the weapons of mass destruction that the administration had said were a growing danger.
"Tragically, the intelligence failure set forth in this report will affect our national security for generations to come," Mr. Rockefeller said. "Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before."
That assertion is sure to be debated at length, as is the committee's finding that intelligence analysts were not subjected to political pressure. It is known, for instance, that Vice President Dick Cheney has been a frequent visitor to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va.
Mr. Rockefeller said the report issued today, coupled with indications that terrorists may be planning an attack in the United States in an attempt to disrupt the nation's political process, convey a disturbing message: "All of this simply is a way of saying time has run out."
-------- propaganda wars
Report: CIA Gave False Info on Iraq
By KATHERINE PFLEGER SHRADER
Associated Press Writer
Jul 9, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SENATE_INTELLIGENCE_REPORT?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq - that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons - were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday.
Intelligence analysts fell victim to "group think" assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, concluded a bipartisan report. Many factors contributing to those failures are ongoing problems within the U.S. intelligence community - which cannot be fixed with more money alone, it said.
Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the committee, told reporters that assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.
"As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence," he said.
"This was a global intelligence failure."
The committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said: "Tragically, the intelligence failures set forth in this report will affect our national security for generations to come. Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before."
The report repeatedly blasts departing CIA Director George Tenet, accusing him of skewing advice to top policy-makers with the CIA's view and elbowing out dissenting views from other intelligence agencies overseen by the State or Defense departments. It faulted Tenet for not personally reviewing Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, which contained since-discredited references to Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium in Africa.
White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, traveling with President Bush on a campaign trip Friday, said the committee's report essentially "agrees with what we have said, which is we need to take steps to continue strengthening and reforming our intelligence capabilities so we are prepared to meet the new threats that we face in this day and age."
Tenet has resigned and leaves office Sunday.
Intelligence analysts worked from the assumption that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to make more, as well as trying to revive a nuclear weapons program. Instead, investigations after the Iraq invasion have shown that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons program and no biological weapons, and only small amounts of chemical weapons have been found.
Analysts ignored or discounted conflicting information because of their assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the report said.
"This 'group think' dynamic led Intelligence Community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs," the report concluded.
Such assumptions also led analysts to inflate snippets of questionable information into broad declarations that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, the report said.
For example, speculation that the presence of one specialized truck could mean an effort to transfer chemical weapons was puffed up into a conclusion that Iraq was actively making chemical weapons, the report said.
Analysts also concluded that Iraq had a mobile biological weapons program based mainly on the since-discredited claims of one Iraqi defector code-named "Curve Ball," it said. American agents did not have direct access to Curve Ball or his debriefers, but the source's information was expanded into the conclusion that Iraq had an advanced and active biological weapons program, the report said.
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Pentagon Says Bush Records of Service Were Destroyed
July 9, 2004
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/campaign/09records.html
HOUSTON, July 8 - Military records that could help establish President Bush's whereabouts during his disputed service in the Texas Air National Guard more than 30 years ago have been inadvertently destroyed, according to the Pentagon.
It said the payroll records of "numerous service members," including former First Lt. Bush, had been ruined in 1996 and 1997 by the Defense Finance and Accounting Service during a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. No back-up paper copies could be found, it added in notices dated June 25.
The destroyed records cover three months of a period in 1972 and 1973 when Mr. Bush's claims of service in Alabama are in question.
The disclosure appeared to catch some experts, both pro-Bush and con, by surprise. Even the retired lieutenant colonel who studied Mr. Bush's records for the White House, Albert C. Lloyd of Austin, said it came as news to him.
The loss was announced by the Defense Department's Office of Freedom of Information and Security Review in letters to The New York Times and other news organizations that for nearly half a year have sought Mr. Bush's complete service file under the open-records law.
There was no mention of the loss, for example, when White House officials released hundreds of pages of the President's military records last February in an effort to stem Democratic accusations that he was "AWOL" for a time during his commitment to fly at home in the Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.
Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director who has said that the released records confirmed the president's fulfillment of his National Guard commitment, did not return two calls for a response.
The disclosure that the payroll records had been destroyed came in a letter signed by C. Y. Talbott, chief of the Pentagon's Freedom of Information Office, who forwarded a CD-Rom of hundreds of records that Mr. Bush has previously released, along with images of punch-card records. Sixty pages of Mr. Bush's medical file and some other records were excluded on privacy grounds, Mr. Talbott wrote.
He said in the letter that he could not provide complete payroll records, explaining, "The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) has advised of the inadvertent destruction of microfilm containing certain National Guard payroll records."
He went on: "In 1996 and 1997, DFAS engaged with limited success in a project to salvage deteriorating microfilm. During this process the microfilm payroll records of numerous service members were damaged, including from the first quarter of 1969 (Jan. 1 to March 31) and the third quarter of 1972 (July 1 to Sept. 30). President Bush's payroll records for these two quarters were among the records destroyed. Searches for backup paper copies of the missing records were unsuccessful."
Mr. Talbott's office would not respond to questions, saying that further information could be provided only through another Freedom of Information application.
But Bryan Hubbard, a spokesman for Defense finance agency in Denver, said the destruction occurred as the office was trying to unspool 2,000-foot rolls of fragile microfilm. Mr. Hubbard said he did not know how many records were lost or why the loss had not been announced before.
For Mr. Bush, the 1969 period when he was training to be a pilot, is not in dispute. But in May 1972, he moved to Alabama to work on a political campaign and, he has said, to perform his Guard service there for a year. But other Guard officers have said they had no recollection of ever seeing him there. The most evidence the White House has been able to find are records showing Mr. Bush was paid for six days in October and November 1972, without saying where, and the record of a dental exam at a Montgomery, Ala., air base on Jan. 6, 1973.
On June 22, The Associated Press filed suit in federal court in New York against the Pentagon and the Air Force to gain access to all the president's military records.
The lost payroll records stored in Denver might have answered some questions about whether he fulfilled his legal commitment, critics who have written about the subject said in interviews.
"Those are records we've all been interested in," said James Moore, author of a recent book, "Bush's War for Re-election," which takes a critical view of Mr. Bush's service record. "I think it's curious that the microfiche could resolve what days Mr. Bush worked and what days he was paid, and suddenly that is gone."
But Mr. Moore said the president could still authorize the release of other withheld records that would shed light on his service record.
Among the issues still disputed is why, according to released records, Mr. Bush was suspended from flying on Aug. 1, 1972. The reason cited in the records is "failure to accomplish annual medical examination."
Mr. Bartlett, the White House spokesman, said in February that Mr. Bush felt he did not need to take the physical as he was no longer flying planes in Alabama. Mr. Lloyd, the retired colonel who studied the records, gave a similar explanation in an interview.
But Mr. Lloyd said he was surprised to be told of the destruction of the pay records that might have resolved some questions.
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Ashcroft's magic act
Retroactively classifying public documents is bureaucracy gone nuts
azcentral.com
Jul. 9, 2004
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0709fri1-09.html
Even the phrase suggests a sort of cognitive dissonance: retroactive classification. Come again?
How does one render government documents that have been in the public realm, in some cases for years - some posted on Web sites, for all the world to see - retroactively classified? How does one put an information genie back into its dark, federal bottle?
The Bush administration, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, is attempting to show us how it is done. Spare us the magic act.
As a long-time, staunch defender of the administration's efforts to improve the nation's defenses against terrorism, as well as an ardent defender of the First Amendment, we at The Republic find ourselves uniquely positioned to say, emphatically and without qualification, that Mr. Ashcroft, this time you truly have gone too far.
Invoking a seldom-used "state secrets" privilege, the nation's chief legal officer has ordered that information provided by a former FBI translator about events leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, should be made classified.
That includes material the translator, Sibel Edmonds, provided to members of Congress two years ago, as well as information that has been posted on Web sites for at least that long.
Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Edmonds - who is fluent in Turkish and Farsi - learned that a number of intercepted documents that had been poorly translated into English would have given solid clues to the imminent attacks had they been properly translated. The information even included references to skyscrapers.
After uncovering still more of what she contends were security lapses within the FBI, Edmonds was fired some months later. She has since sued the government in federal court over what she discovered, but her suit was thrown out earlier this week by a judge who said Edmonds' testimony could expose the now-reclassified government "secrets."
Ashcroft's heavy-handedness strongly smells of a bureaucrat attempting to cover up deficiencies in his own agency.
That suspicion is bolstered by the fact that ongoing investigations into Edmonds' charges appear to be drying up fast, likely because of the retroactive classification of the researcher's claims about the department. The FBI's own investigation into Edmonds' charges has yet to see the light of day, and an investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee is now spinning its wheels since lawmakers now are loathe to discuss now-classified information.
It is nearly always disturbing when government officials act to suppress information about their own actions. Sometimes, especially in times of war, some such actions are justified. But sometimes, too, secrecy-happy officials stretch the public's tolerance too far.
This is a case of secrecy taken too far. Retroactive classification? Rubbish.
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U.S. News obtains all classified annexes to the Taguba report on Abu Ghraib
usnews.com
7/9/04
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/usinfo/press/prison.htm
"My first reaction was, 'Wow, there [are] a lot of nude people here'... I, myself, have never been in a prison... So I had no experience at all as far as a warden or that type of thing."
Army Captain Donald J. Reese, a reservist and salesman in civilian life, installed in October 2003 as warden of the hard site at Abu Ghraib
The most comprehensive view yet of what went wrong at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, based on a review of all 106 classified annexes to the report of Major General Antonio Taguba, shows abuses were facilitated--and likely encouraged--by a chaotic and dangerous environment made worse by constant pressure from Washington to squeeze intelligence from detainees.
Daily life at Abu Ghraib, the documents show, included riots, prisoner escapes, shootings, corrupt Iraqi guards, filthy conditions, sexual misbehavior, bug-infested food, prisoner beatings and humiliations, and almost-daily mortar shellings from Iraqi insurgents. Troubles inside the prison were made worse still by a military command structure that was hopelessly broken.
Taguba focused mostly on the MPs assigned to guard inmates at Abu Ghraib, but the 5,000 pages of classified files in the annexes to his report show that military intelligence officers-?-dispatched to Abu Ghraib by the top commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez-?-were intimately involved in some of the interrogation tactics widely viewed as abusive.
Col. Henry Nelson, an Air Force psychiatrist who prepared a report for Taguba on Abu Ghraib, described it as a "new psychological battlefield," and detailed the nature of the challenge faced by the Americans working in the overcrowded prison. "These detainees are male and female, young and old," Nelson wrote; "they may be innocent, may have high intelligence value, or may be terrorists or criminals. No matter who they are, if they are at Abu Ghraib, they are remanded in deplorable, dangerous living conditions, as are soldiers."
The documents provide new insights, as well as additional compelling details on how Abu Ghraib was spiraling out of control, and how top military commanders battled behind closed doors. General Sanchez and Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, a reservist who commanded the 800th MP Brigade, did not see eye-to-eye. Her brigade was given the assignment to run the prison, but last November Sanchez put military intelligence in charge of the facility.
In her secret testimony, Karpinski, who was criticized for leadership failures in the Taguba report, said Sanchez refused to provide her with the necessary resources to run Abu Ghraib and other prisons. She said that he didn?t "give a flip" about soldiers, and she added this biting criticism: "I think that his ego will not allow him to accept a Reserve Brigade, a Reserve General Officer and certainly not a female succeeding in a combat environment. And I think he looked at the 800th Brigade as the opportunity to find a scapegoat..."
As the top commanders battled it out, soldiers at Abu Ghraib were confused over who was in charge, the documents show. Weak leadership in the prison meant soldiers couldn?t accomplish basic tasks, like feed their detainees, much less find someone to prosecute abuse. And without a clear chain of authority, some soldiers just ran wild. "One of the tower guards was shooting prisoners with lead balls and slingshot," a company commander testified. Soldiers ran around wearing civilian clothes, and covered latrines with so much graffiti that a commander had them painted black, and then threatened to post a guard at each location. An Army captain allegedly secretly photographed female subordinates while they were showering in outside stalls.
The most serious riot, at Camp Vigilant, took place on the night of November 23 when guards shot and killed four detainees. "The prisoners were marching and yelling, 'Down with Bush,' and 'Bush is bad,'" another Army review said. "They became violent and started throwing rocks at the guards, both in the towers and at the rovers around the wire..." Guards feared for their lives "the sky was black with rocks," the report saidand a mass breakout appeared imminent. The review of the November riot cited the failure of guard commanders to post rules of engagement for dealing with insurrections. Soldiers were hesitant to shoot, and when they did shoot, they often didn?t know whether they were using lethal or non-lethal ammunition because they had mixed the ammo in their shotguns.
Another classified annex reported that the prison complex was seriously overcrowded, with detainees often held for months without ever being interrogated. Detainees walked around in knee-deep mud, "defecating and urinating all over the compounds," said Capt. James Jones, commander of the 229th MP Battalion. "I don?t know how there?s not rioting every day," he testified.
Among the more shocking exchanges revealed in the Taguba classified annexes are a series of E-mails sent by Major David Dinenna of the 320th MP Battalion. The E-mails, sent in October and November to Major William Green of the 800th MP Brigade, and copied to the higher chain of command, show a quixotic attempt to simply get the detainees at Abu Graib edible food. Dinenna pressed repeatedly for food that wouldn?t make prisoners vomit. He criticized the private food contractor for shorting the facility on hundreds of meals a day, and for providing food containing bugs, rats, and dirt.
"As each day goes by tension within the prison population increases," Dinenna wrote. "...Simple fixes, food, would help tremendously." Instead of getting help, Major Green scolded him. "Who is making the charges that there is dirt, bugs or what ever in the food?," Major Green replied in an E-mail. "If it is the prisoners I would take it with a grain of salt." Dinenna shot back: "Our MPs, Medics and field surgeon can easily identify bugs, rats, and dirt, and they did." Ultimately, the food contract was not renewed, an Army spokeswoman says, although the contractor holds other contracts with the military.
Some officers told Taguba?s staff that they believed the Abu Ghraib mess had its roots in an earlier case at the Camp Bucca detention center in southern Iraq last summer. The Army developed evidence that MPs viciously attacked prisoners there, including one who had his face smashed in. Four soldiers were given less than honorable discharges, but were not prosecuted. Said one major who worked at Abu Ghraib: "I?m convinced that what happened [at Abu Ghraib] would never have happened if" the Camp Bucca case had been prosecuted.
Media Contact: Richard Folkers, Director of Media Relations: 202-955-2219 or rfolkers@usnews.com
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Scientists Say White House Questioned Their Politics
July 9, 2004
By KENNETH CHANG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09data.html
In a report released yesterday, a scientific advocacy group cited more instances of what it called the Bush administration's manipulation of science to fit its policy goals, including the questioning of nominees to scientific advisory panels about whether they had voted for President Bush.
Administration officials said that the conclusions of the report, issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists, were "wrong and misleading."
Dr. Kurt Gottfried, an emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University and the chairman of the scientists group, said that the administration's actions could cause researchers to leave the government.
"You can destroy that in a matter of years and then it can take another generation or two to get back to where you were in the first place," Dr. Gottfried said during a conference call with reporters yesterday.
Dr. Gerald T. Keusch said that frustration led him to resign last year from the directorship of the Fogarty International Center at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Keusch said the procedure for appointing members of advisory panels changed markedly with the change of administrations in 2001.
Dr. Keusch, who became director in 1998, said that before Mr. Bush took office, he proposed candidates and if the director of the National Institutes of Heath approved, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration invariably signed off on the nomination. But under the Bush administration, he said, Secretary Tommy G. Thompson's office rejected 19 of 26 candidates, including Dr. Torsten Wiesel, a Nobel laureate.
Dr. Keusch said that when he questioned the rejection, he was told that Dr. Wiesel had signed too many statements critical of Mr. Bush.
Bill Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that Dr. Keusch was the only institute director to complain about the process and that Mr. Thompson was the one responsible for the appointments.
"That's what we do and that's how we do it," Mr. Pierce said. "This is the responsibility of governance."
The Union of Concerned Scientists, whose views often run counter to those of the administration, issued a 34-page report describing Dr. Keusch's experience and other instances that it said illustrated the administration's injecting politics into science. The scientists issued an earlier report in February, and 62 prominent scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, signed an accompanying statement.
-------- us politics
Bush Wins; House Leaves Patriot Act As Is
By ALAN FRAM
Associated Press Writer
Jul 9, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CONGRESS_PATRIOT_ACT?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Republicans used an extra-long vote to derail a drive to weaken the USA Patriot Act, handing a campaign-season victory to President Bush and angering Democrats and GOP conservatives who led the unsuccessful effort.
"You win some, and some get stolen," said conservative Rep. C.L. Butch Otter, R-Idaho.
He was a lead sponsor of the provision that would have prevented authorities from using the anti-terrorism law to demand information on book buyers and library users.
The proposal, which had drawn a veto threat from the White House, was defeated 210-210, with a majority needed to prevail. House GOP leaders extended what is normally a 15-minute roll call by 23 additional minutes. That was enough to persuade about 10 Republicans to switch their votes to no, including Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn.
Wamp said he changed his vote after being shown Justice Department documents asserting that terrorists have communicated over the Internet via public library computers.
"This new world we live in is going to force us to have some constraints," Wamp said.
As the amendment's prospects shifted to defeat from an apparent victory, Democrats chanted, "Shame, shame, shame." The tactic was reminiscent of last year's House passage of the Medicare overhaul measure. Then, GOP leaders held the roll call open for an extra three hours until they got the votes they needed.
The House vote came amid Bush administration warnings of an increased risk of attacks this summer and fall because terrorists may try to disrupt the November's elections.
It also came just four months ahead of an election in which the conduct of the fight against terrorism promises to be a central issue.
Besides successfully fending off the effort to weaken the law, the veto threat underscored Bush's determination to strike an aggressive stance on law enforcement and terrorism.
The House has voted before to block portions of the nearly 3-year-old law, but Congress has never succeeded in rolling back any of it. Yet neither has Bush succeeded in his quest to expand some of its powers. Supporters of the law said the Patriot Act has been a valuable tool in anti-terror efforts. The law, enacted in the weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave the government stronger powers to conduct investigations and detain people.
"I would say, in my judgment, that lives have been saved, terrorists have been disrupted, and our country is safer" because of the act, said Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. He is under consideration by Bush to become the next CIA director.
Otter and Rep. Bernard Sanders, I-Vt., led the effort to block one section of the law that lets authorities get special court orders requiring book dealers, libraries and others to surrender records such as purchases and Internet sites visited on a library computer.
The lawmakers contended the provision undermines civil liberties and threatens to let the government snoop into the reading habits of innocent Americans.
"We are all in that together," Sanders, one of Congress' most liberal lawmakers, said of the anti-terror effort. "In the fight against terrorism, we've got to keep our eyes on two prizes: the terrorists and the United States Constitution."
Thursday's showdown was over an amendment to a $39.8 billion measure financing the Justice, Commerce and State departments for next year, which passed, 397-18. The Senate has yet to write its version of the bill.
Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., read a letter from the Justice Department stating that "as recently as this past winter and spring, a member of a terrorist group closely affiliated with al-Qaida" had used Internet services at a public library. The letter mentioned no specifics, Wolf said.
"If we can stop what took place in my area," said Wolf, whose district is near the Pentagon, which was a Sept. 11 target, "then I want to stop that, because we've gone to enough funerals."
Critics of the Patriot Act argued that even without it, investigators can get bookstore, library and other records simply by obtaining subpoenas or search warrants if a judge agrees the items are relevant to a case.
The Justice Department, however, says that it is actually more difficult to get such information in international terrorism or spying cases. Under the Patriot Act, the government must first prove to a special court that the items are needed for one of these specific investigations and that the probe is not based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment.
On the Net:
Information on the bill, H.R. 4754, can be found at http://thomas.loc.gov/
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Edwards Sets Self Apart on Foreign Policy
Terrorism Was Top Focus Before Sept. 11 Attacks
By Robin Wright and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37644-2004Jul8?language=printer
In his Senate years and primary campaign, vice presidential candidate John Edwards has emerged as a politician willing to push beyond conventional foreign policy ideas and introduce imaginative proposals that often do not meet with swift approval.
In one typical case, Edwards in January called for the United States to draw up a "freedom list" that would identify dissidents jailed for political or religious expression in an attempt through "name and shame" to persuade other countries to free political prisoners. He also proposed linking U.S. aid to progress on human rights and democracy -- a practice that, if implemented, would almost certainly disqualify many key U.S. allies, such as Egypt and Pakistan.
In the summer of 2001, when much of the Republican and Democratic policy community was obsessed with missile defense, Edwards urged more attention to terrorism. The North Carolina senator had such limited luck pitching an OpEd article on terrorism to major newspapers that the piece, warning of poor cooperation among federal and local law enforcement, ended up in the weekly Littleton Observer, circulation 2,230 -- four weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Edwards's approach and style are in contrast to those of running mate John F. Kerry, who after years steeped in foreign policy has recently become more of a pragmatist whose positions shy away from bold ideas -- in some cases differing from Bush administration policy only by degrees.
Republicans are hoping to make Edwards's foreign policy positions, which have received little scrutiny until now, a key issue in the fall campaign. They charge that his credentials are relatively thin, with accomplishments limited to his position on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and proposed legislation on counterterrorism.
Even some Democrats concede that he did not flesh out his own broad national security platform until the primaries -- and even then sometimes tried to dodge foreign policy questions or interviews or provide general answers in early debates.
For all the energy and voter appeal he may have added to the campaign, Republicans say Edwards will be particularly vulnerable when he goes head to head with Vice President Cheney, a former defense secretary and White House chief of staff. Some are already salivating over the prospects of the fall debates.
"If you liked the [1988] Quayle-Bentsen debate, you'll love the Cheney-Edwards debate," said Ed Rogers, Republican political consultant, referring to vice presidential candidates Dan Quayle and Lloyd Bentsen. "The contrast with Cheney just couldn't be more stark on this issue. Who's going to be tougher on terrorists who want to kill you and your family? Cheney or Edwards? It is just going to be laughable."
But Democrats are coyly confident that Edwards, who consistently played well among voters during the primary debates, will surprise the electorate. "Bring it on," said Richard C. Holbrooke, U.N. ambassador during the Clinton administration and now a senior foreign policy adviser to the Kerry-Edwards campaign.
"I would say Vice President Cheney is a man of the Cold War generation who still thinks in Cold War terms. He is knowledgeable but rigid. He shows no ability to adjust to new 21st century realities," he said.
Over the past three years, Edwards has scrambled to organize crash tutorials, roundtable discussions with foreign policy analysts at his Georgetown home, trips to hot spots abroad and meetings with foreign leaders to prepare for his presidential campaign, aides and advisers said. Democrats note that Edwards's foreign policy experience matches or exceeds the credentials of Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter when they were nominees.
"He understood in the post-9/11 world his national security credentials would be challenged from the get-go," Holbrooke said, adding that Edwards tried to avoid being pulled too far left during the primaries. "He was very thoughtful in trying to find a balance in national security priorities and how to present them effectively" as former Vermont governor Howard Dean appeared to be running away with the nomination.
To gain first-hand foreign experience, Edwards toured Israel and Egypt in 2001. As part of a tour to South and Central Asia, Edwards traveled to Afghanistan in 2002 shortly after the U.S.-led war to oust the ruling Taliban and destroy Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda camps. He also visited Britain and twice visited NATO headquarters, in 2002 and 2004. He has met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, campaign aides said.
Edwards surprised participants in 2002 meetings with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana and European foreign policy experts, said William Drozdiak, executive director of the Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund who helped organize the Brussels sessions.
"He was hungry for some foreign policy exposure and experience," Drozdiak said. "I was fairly skeptical. I expected a lightweight, but I came away with a favorable impression. He asked a lot of smart questions and actually listened, which is not a noteworthy quality of the Bush people."
On key national security issues, Edwards has increasingly staked out a centrist and occasionally hawkish policy, making terrorism his top focus well before Sept. 11, 2001, and pressing for a global push on democracy before Bush made it a cornerstone of his Middle East policy.
Because he had been working on legislative proposals on counterterrorism, Edwards introduced a broad bill within a week of the Sept. 11 attacks to tighten seaport security, including provisions for special Coast Guard units, the use of sea marshals and inspection of high-interest vessels. A month later, he co-sponsored a bill with Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) to improve preparedness against chemical and biological terrorism. He also proposed legislation to hinder cyberterrorism. None of the three made it to the floor for a vote, but elements were included in subsequent legislation.
In one of his more controversial ideas, Edwards introduced a bill to create a domestic intelligence agency, like Britain's MI5, on grounds that law enforcement and intelligence should not be in the same agency -- an idea that has met stiff resistance from the FBI. Campaign advisers predict Edwards may be ahead of his time, since the Sept. 11 commission report due out this month is certain to criticize the intelligence community -- and may even make recommendations on this issue, said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former CIA general counsel who has advised Edwards.
"If there is another terrorism attack, the question will be brought to the fore: Why don't we have what everyone else like the Brits and Germans have? He's put out a thoughtful bill that should be the basis for discussions," Smith said.
On the world's deadliest weapons, Edwards staked out "the most comprehensive and far-reaching" position of any other Democratic candidate, according to a survey by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
And on Iraq, the North Carolina senator was a staunch supporter of the Bush administration's argument that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, co-sponsoring the resolution authorizing the war against Iraq. "We know he has chemical and biological weapons. . . . We know that he's doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal," Edwards said on the Senate floor on Oct. 10, 2002.
On Capitol Hill, Edwards won particular attention for his role in the Sept. 11 joint inquiry when he used his experience as a trial lawyer to press law enforcement officials to admit that their failure to understand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act prevented them from issuing a warrant that could have gained access to information about two of the Sept. 11 hijackers and the Hamburg cell of al Qaeda that planned the attacks. He came off as a tough questioner who was occasionally hostile when he did not receive clear answers, congressional intelligence staff members said.
In dealing with intelligence matters generally, Edwards brought a "healthy level of skepticism" to the job, a congressional staff member said. "What happens to new members is that they're like kids in a candy store. It's 007 whiz-bang stuff," he added. "But Edwards struck me as a member who's been in a lot of courtrooms and knows when he's being snowed. A lot of the members are lawyers but haven't seen the inside of courtrooms in decades and it shows. He asked tough questions."
On one issue, Edwards and his running mate take strikingly different positions: how to promote democracy. While Edwards outlines ambitious programs and goals, Kerry has stuck largely to promoting free trade, public diplomacy and reinvigorating the Middle East peace process -- steps not far from the Bush administration formula.
In contrast, Edwards outlined a "strategy for freedom" in January that included establishing a "democracy caucus" at the United Nations to punish nations that fail to embrace democratic reforms to exclude them from powerful positions.
He also proposed an "organization for security and cooperation" in the Middle East, modeled on the former Helsinki process that pushed for freedom in Eastern Europe. The Bush administration later promoted a similar idea that was watered down after Arab protests. Edwards also suggested linking Russia's membership in the Group of Eight wealthy nations to improving democratic practices -- a position Kerry rejected during a recent interview with The Washington Post.
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Kerry would keep US troops in Iraq far longer than Bush
The Democrat looks like the one with the long-term imperial agenda
The Guardian
Jonathan Steele
July 9, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1257429,00.html
Here's a dinner-party talking point that can run and run, certainly until November and, if the Democrats win the US presidency, for several months beyond. Would John Kerry, far from quickly bringing US troops home, keep them in Iraq even longer than George Bush?
My answer, regrettably, is yes - which means that the Democratic convention in Boston later this month will be a sad affair for the people of Iraq, where polls consistently show a majority in favour of early withdrawal.
Kerry agrees with most Iraqis on one thing. Until April 10 last year the US invasion was a success. Saddam Hussein's regime was toppled in three weeks with relatively low casualties. The definition of "low" can be challenged, but, setting the war's illegality aside, the toll was less than Iraqis feared.
Since then, however, the failures outweigh the successes, starting with the occupation troops' unreadiness to curb the predicted waves of looting, leading to the massive increase in insecurity. Since Bush declared an end to major combat, 735 US troops have died. Six thousand Iraqis have lost their lives. Tens of thousands have been detained without trial for months.
With the exception of the Kurds, even those Iraqis who were grateful for the invasion have largely changed their minds. They resent the occupation, though it has officially ended. And the sight of foreign troops on the streets maintains that anger.
Whether led by secular nationalists or Iraqi Islamists, the insurgency ebbs and flows. There is no evidence to suggest it is on a clear downward trend. Foreign Islamists using terrorist methods are operating in Iraq in a way that never occurred under Saddam Hussein. The US occupation has been a magnet rather than a deterrent.
The US has had some success in making pluralistic politics possible in Iraq and preparing the ground for genuinely contested elections in January. Public debate in the pages of Iraq's many newspapers and on its radio call-in programmes is unprecedented. It is too early to tell how free the election campaign will be, and whether violence, intimidation and tribal loyalties will be strong factors in controlling people's choices. It is certainly premature to predict the results, even on a crude scale of whether broadly secular or broadly religious groups will do best.
Whichever parties or personalities come out on top, they are likely to want US troops to withdraw, as soon as - and this is the crucial variable - Iraqi forces have been built up. But since the US military presence provokes resistance as well as suppresses some of it, there is infinite elasticity here for any US president to play with. He can argue that Iraqi forces are not ready to handle things and, by declining to start a phased pull-out of US troops, maintain the environment of insecurity that makes timid Iraqi politicians cling to the US presence.
Given this analysis, what would Bush do if he won a second term? The conventional view is that he is one of the most ideologically, even religiously driven, presidents of modern times. He would pursue his pre-emptive war on terror in Iraq and beyond.
But there is another possibility. Iraq has been a millstone for the past year and a half, and he might well choose to declare victory and withdraw. Iraq's January election provides the perfect escape hatch. We have brought Iraq to the first democratic poll in its history and now we move out, he could announce, as he sets a timetable for a three-month withdrawal. Whatever mess follows, he would argue that it was no longer his responsibility. The US gave Iraq its freedom, and that means the freedom to make mistakes.
Kerry, by contrast, looks increasingly like the candidate with the long-term imperial agenda. It would not be as raw as the one pushed by Bush's neoconservative apostles of privatisation, but it would be imperial none the less, dressed in the classic garb of Democratic party multilateral interventionism.
In speech after speech Kerry has laid the ground work for expanding and prolonging the US presence in Iraq. It starts with macho bluster. "Extremists appear to be gaining confidence and have vowed to drive our troops from the country. We cannot - and will not - let that happen," he thundered in a radio address on April 17. Then comes the mission statement: "It would be unthinkable for us to retreat in disarray and leave behind a society deep in strife and dominated by radicals" (from the same broadcast). What happens if Iraqis elect radicals in January? Will they not be allowed to take power?
At Fulton in Missouri, the site of Churchill's Iron Curtain speech, Kerry laid out his vision for extra troops. "If our commanders believe they need more American troops, they should say so and they should get them ... But more and more American soldiers cannot be the only solution ... The coalition should organise an expanded international security forces, preferably with Nato, but clearly under US command," he said on April 30.
In a Washington Post article on Sunday, he attacked Bush for not having "a realistic plan to win the peace and bring our troops home". Did he produce one of his own? No, he made it clear the expanded foreign force would stay for years. "Our goal should be an alliance commitment to deploy a major portion of the peacekeeping force that will be needed in Iraq for a long time to come," he said.
Nato could be mobilised to help stabilise Iraq "and the region", he went on. Does he have his eye on Iran and Syria too? The price of inaction would be heavy, he warned at Fulton. Trying to frighten his allies, he raised the stakes higher than Bush has, saying: "For the Europeans, Iraq's failure could endanger the security of their oil supplies, further radicalise their large Muslim populations, threaten destabilising refugee flows, and seed a huge new source of terrorism."
The notion of Bush as an ideologue and Kerry as a realist is too simple. Each has elements of both, and it may well be that a second-term Bush would recognise the cost of his first term's mistakes. Flushed by victory, Kerry might be less clear-sighted.
One leading Democratic expert, Zbigniew Brzezinski, takes the line that the US should withdraw from Iraq by mid-2005. But most advisers now gathering round Kerry are missionaries who believe not so much in a war on terror as in a war on state failure. Failed states produce terrorism, they argue, so you have to go to the source.
The notion is more dangerous, since the number of target-countries for uninvited nation-building is bigger. The issue is not whether military intervention is unilateral, as with Bush, or multilateral, as with Kerry, but why neither sees that it nearly always makes things worse.
j.steele@guardian.co.uk
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-------- environment
EPA to fine DuPont for withholding data
July 09, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040709-102535-2717r.htm
New York, NY, Jul. 9 -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it will impose a heavy fine against DuPont for withholding potentially dangerous Teflon data.
The problem deals with a chemical used in the making of Teflon and the EPA says penalties will be in the millions of dollars, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The EPA said between 1981 and 2001, DuPont found perflourooctanoic acid, or PFOA, in water supplies near its West Virginia plant at levels that exceeded its own exposure guidelines.
The agency also said DuPont found PFOA in pregnant employees, at least one of whom had transferred the chemical to her fetus.
PFOA isn't yet known to be harmful to humans or the environment, but studies indicate it may present a significant risk.
DuPont could be fined as much as $25,000 a day for violations occurring before Jan. 30, 1997, and as much as $27,500 a day for violations occurring thereafter for each day it failed to report the information.
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EPA to Fine DuPont for Silence on Teflon Chemical
Health Problems Alleged Near W. Va. Plant
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 9, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37628-2004Jul8?language=printer
The Environmental Protection Agency is seeking fines totaling millions of dollars from DuPont on the grounds that the chemical giant failed for two decades to report possible health and environmental problems linked to a key ingredient used in making Teflon, agency officials said yesterday.
The penalty would dwarf any the agency has assessed for toxic contamination and could become the largest environmental levy in U.S. history. Tom Skinner, head of EPA's Office of Enforcement, said the penalty is "intended to send a message to DuPont and everyone else this type of information must be provided" so officials "can make valid assessments of the risks posed by various substances."
The chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid, is a soaplike material used in making stain- and stick-resistant surfaces and materials for a wide array of products, including Gore-Tex and pizza boxes. The substance, also known as C-8 or PFOA, has been linked in industry studies to cancer and birth defects in animals.
The agency had been pressed to act on C-8 by the Environmental Working Group, a private advocacy group, and by Ohio and West Virginia residents who are suing DuPont over claims that it contaminated soil and drinking water around the company's Parkersburg, W.Va., plant. Both welcomed the agency's move but said it could have taken tougher action.
"The good news is, EPA woke up and took notice," said EWG President Ken Cook, whose group filed a petition in 2003 calling on EPA to act. "The bad news is, we have no idea whatsoever what this means for DuPont."
DuPont said yesterday that it plans to fight the complaint, which will be handled through administrative channels but is subject to appeal in federal court.
"DuPont has provided substantial information to EPA supporting our conclusion that we have followed the law," DuPont general counsel Stacey J. Mobley said. "We will . . . vigorously defend our position."
It remains to be seen how big a fine EPA will seek from DuPont, but it could run into the hundreds of millions. The largest fine the agency has imposed under the Toxic Substances Control Act is $2 million, Skinner said. The biggest civil penalty under any federal environmental law was a $30 million fine, plus $5 million in environmental projects, imposed Jan. 13 on Koch Industries Inc. of Wichita for oil spills.
C-8 is not regulated, but under federal law any chemical manufacturer who learns a product presents "a substantial risk" of health or the environmental harm must inform EPA.
EPA is conducting tests to monitor how C-8 degrades in the environment, though Skinner said the agency is not seeking to ban the chemical.
Residents of West Virginia and Ohio who are suing DuPont have alleged they are suffering from health problems -- including respiratory problems and cancer -- they attribute to dumping of C-8.
Howard Varner, a retired pipe fitter from Cutler, Ohio, who has worked on and off in DuPont's facility for the past 20 years, said: "In today's political climate, it surprised me a lot EPA does anything but turns companies loose, but I'm glad they're doing it."
Varner said DuPont knew Ohio drinking water was contaminated more than a dozen years before informing local water officials: "It's just deny, deny, deny, delay, delay, delay. I hope they don't win this time, but they usually do."
Part of EPA's complaint stems from industry studies in 1981 suggesting that C-8 might be linked to birth defects in animals. After two women working in the Parkersburg plant had children with defects that resembled those found in animals, DuPont transferred women of childbearing age away from areas where the chemical was made. The company did not tell EPA about the action, but it did inform the West Virginia Division of Water Resources.
Internal DuPont documents from that time show the company detected C-8 levels exceeding its recommended standard in the blood of childbearing workers and some of their babies' blood. The company sent a letter to female workers saying that it did not know if there was a relationship between human birth defects and the chemical, but "we think this is a matter of sufficient concern that, as a precaution, a female who has [a blood level] above background level should consult with her personal physician prior to contemplating pregnancy."
DuPont spokesman Clif Webb said the company's C-8 supplier later concluded that the chemical did not cause birth defects in animals, and the next year DuPont brought female workers back to areas where C-8 was used.
"We do not reliably ascribe harm to human health and the environment, and therefore it would not be reportable," Webb said.
The company has 30 days to respond to EPA's complaint.
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E.P.A. Says It Will Fine DuPont for Holding Back Test Results
July 9, 2004
By MARK GLASSMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/politics/09pollute.html
WASHINGTON, July 8 - The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday that it would fine the DuPont chemical company for failing to report test results on a chemical related to the manufacturing of Teflon.
DuPont conducted tests that showed that the chemical, known as C-8, was transmitted from a pregnant DuPont worker to her fetus and that traces of it were found in public drinking water in communities near DuPont facilities, but the company did not reveal that it had done the tests, the agency said.
Congress cannot mandate such testing by a chemical company, but if testing is conducted, the results must be made public, according to the Toxic Substance Control Act.
The E.P.A. also found DuPont in violation for failing to provide all of the toxicological data it had gathered on the chemical after a 1997 request from the agency.
DuPont said it would contest the fines. "We believe that we have complied with the guidelines and the reporting requirements," R. Clifton Webb, a company spokesman, said.
A spokesman for the E.P.A. said the agency would impose a multi-million dollar fine, but he declined to be more specific.
It is unclear whether C-8, or perfluorooctanoic acid, is harmful to humans. In one study, researchers concluded that it caused developmental defects in rats, but the results could not be replicated.
In 1981, DuPont had results of blood tests conducted on pregnant workers, which showed that C-8 had been transmitted from a worker to her developing fetus, the E.P.A. said. The child appeared to be normal at birth, but the agency's complaint does not say if the child was monitored thereafter.
In 1991, the agency said, DuPont compiled evidence that C-8 levels in drinking water in communities along the Ohio River, near the company's plant in Washington, W.Va., exceeded an exposure level set by company's internal guidelines.
In March 2001, a lawyer representing residents along the river in a class-action lawsuit against DuPont sent copies of the test results to the agency.
-------- ACTIVISTS
TA Court orders American peace activist expelled
Fri., July 09, 2004
Haaretz
By Relly Sa'ar
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/449340.html
Tel Aviv District Court yesterday ordered the expulsion of an American activist who came to join a protest against the West Bank separation fence. Ann Petter, a 44-year-old graphic designer from New York, has been held in a detention center since arriving in Israel on June 23.
The court rejected her petition to enter Israel and ordered her to leave the country within 24 hours, said her lawyer, Yael Berda.
When Petter arrived in Israel, the defense authorities and population administration refused to let her enter, saying she was involved in "hostile activity" and was a "danger to state security" because of her affiliation with the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-Israeli group that objects to the occupation.
District Court Judge Oded Moderick delayed Petter's expulsion by 24 hours to enable her lawyers, Berda and Shamai Leibovitz, to appeal to the Supreme Court against his ruling.
Moderick accepted the authorities' claim that Petter's real purpose in visiting Israel was "to take part in ISM activity." He conceded it was not proved she belonged to the group, but said her being on the ISM email list was sufficient to show some affiliation.
He said the ISM tries to "disrupt the defense authorities' functioning in the administered territories." The judge noted that ISM activity is non-violent, but said their actions "are really in the way."
The judge said: "They include confrontations with IDF soldiers, entrenching themselves in terrorists' houses to prevent their demolition, taking Palestinians from one place to another during closures, and acting to disrupt the construction of the security barrier."
The judge decided to forbid Petter to enter Israel to prevent her, among other things, from documenting the anti-barrier demonstration of Hedy Epstein, a 79-year old Holocaust survivor, who intended to march along the barrier. He said Petter's film would be used by those acting in Israel and abroad against building the fence.
Petter claimed to be a peace activist who had the right to protest in Israel. She took part in an anti-barrier demonstration in the West Bank in July 2003 but was not arrested, Berda said.
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Norway rejects Israeli brothers' asylum
By Yossi Melman
Fri., July 09, 2004
Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/449361.html
Two Israeli brothers, Sergie and Aleksey Kornev, want political asylum in Norway because they cannot serve as IDF soldiers in the territories for reasons of conscience. "We don't want to kill Palestinians," the two brothers argue. The case has stirred considerable public debate in Norway. The Kornev brothers and their mother Regina moved to Norway in June 2002 before Aleksey's scheduled induction into the army. Israel issued a warrant for his arrest.
Aleksey Kornev's asylum application was rejected this week, and deportation orders have been issued for him and his family. "I don't want to kill innocent women and children who can't defend themselves," Kornev said in a statement issued by the Norwegian news agency NTB. "It's Israel that wants the war, not the Palestinians."
Preben Kloevfjell, a lawyer for Aleksey Kornev, filed an appeal yesterday against the deportation orders. If a local court agrees to hear the appeal, it could take a year or more before the case goes to trial, the attorney said.
"I think this is a decision that violates international refugee law," said Kloevfjell, a specialist on the topic.
Karin Andersen, a member of parliament from the opposition Socialist Left Party, this week demanded that the Norwegian government investigate the treatment Kornev would face if he were deported to Israel and arrested as a draft dodger.
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